Hello everyone,
I suppose I can say with confidence no one will ever need to unsubscribe from this page because I’m bombarding you with too much content.
In all seriousness, I have some updates to share.
First and foremost, if you’re subscribed to this blog, you probably want news about my books. You may recall I abandoned two different projects that were meant to be my sixth novel after a substantial amount of the first drafts were already done. What can I say? The pandemic soured me on writing a murder mystery set during the Black Death, and when I took a real swing at a Roman military historical fiction idea I’ve been kicking around for a couple of decades, I found the people in my life didn’t care for that subject matter enough for me to keep writing it. At the end of the day, I am doing this as a hobby in my free time, and that means my writers group and my family need to be at least a little interested in hearing about it and reading about it, or I will not make progress.
With that said, I’ve just done a sense check of where I am on my third attempt at a sixth novel. Of a planned sixteen chapters and a preface, I have completed four in first-draft form, and have substantial portions of another six done too, so I can call this about the half-way point. I am now prepared to promise this is the sixth novel I will complete, and when I do, I plan to try and get this one traditionally published for a popular audience.
The story is told to us by a man writing from a prison cell in the year 459 CE as the western half of the Roman Empire is coming undone and Christianity is fiercely debating some of the fundamentals underpinning what it means to be Christian, but all that is happening in the background of what is at its heart a very personal story. The narrator is a straight-laced widower who would have been delighted to live a quiet and familiar life in Rome were he not blessed and burdened with an outgoing and vivacious mother. After surviving an unpleasant experience, she persuades him to escort her on a pilgrimage across most of the known world to meet Simeon Stylites, an ascetic living 50 feet up in the air on a small platform atop a pillar in the Syrian wilderness. Food and drink go up to the holy man in buckets, and his waste came down in hopefully different buckets. When mother and son meet him, he has been up on that pillar for 27 years, and over the next decade they build new lives supporting this celebrity hermit, becoming better people along the way.
What happens when he dies? What happens when a living saint who is a major tourist attraction for an otherwise absolutely unremarkable village in the middle of nowhere passes on to his eternal reward?
I am still figuring that out myself, but I intend for it to be a farce where people with the best of intentions also make or are seen to be making terrible decisions, and as happy lives implode under pressure and stress, it all comes to public attention in the worst possible light, culminating in an angry mob clamouring for public executions. You remember I said the story was being written to us from a prison cell? The narrator hopes writing down everything that happened from the beginning will somehow save them.
As you might have gathered from that last paragraph, in between serious bits I am trying to make the book have a lot of humour. I am already delighted in the characters —particularly the mother, who is a real live wire— and I have set myself the challenge that there will never be an act of violence in the book at all. This book is going to be a fun walk through a little-known time in history where ideas and philosophies are being debated that will echo down to us today, but it is also a story about life, and love, and loss, and how people deal with change. It is going to be a book with real heart, wrapped up in interesting stories that connect to the present in a way you have never thought about before. I am writing this for my wife based on her initial input and with every intention of dedicating it to her. She doesn’t really read historical fiction, but I am confident this book will win her over.
Anyway, moving on from that, I do have some other updates. First, I want to say I am restarting my project to turn Inca, Beginning, Middle, and End into audio books. I have built a proper studio space in my new home office to record things little by little at night when it’s quiet and my wife has gone to bed. I am rethinking whether I will publish these through Audible, though. It is entirely my fault, but my Amazon sales have never been supported by real marketing efforts, and I can imagine hundreds of hours of my recording and editing efforts amounting to very little revenue on Audible just for lack of ever finding an audience. Instead, right now I am leaning more towards publishing them a chapter at a time as a long-form storytelling podcast that would be free to the public but supported through either ad revenue and/or a Patreon account. I have looked into podcasts for some time now both personally and professionally, and I do think I could more easily build a listenership there than through Amazon’s audiobook service. I also rather like the idea that I could start after having some of the project recorded, rather than completing the whole thing. I will have updates for you on this, of course.
Another announcement in the same vein? I am planning to start up a TikTok channel all about books I want to bring to people’s attention, many of which I expect have little to no social media presence already. I think the idea of doing short elevator pitches about stuff on my shelves or that I otherwise admire would definitely be of interest to some small fraction of the billion-plus people on TikTok, and some small fraction of those people would click into my account, and some small fraction of those people might one day buy one of my books. I have heard from other authors that TikTok has made a huge difference in their sales. I want to see what it might do for me. When I get that up and running, this will be one of the first places I mention it.
Speaking of social media, I have one final bit of business to mention. More and more I am getting less and less out of Twitter —or I suppose I am supposed to call it X now? I got into it something like a dozen years ago on the recommendation of a dear friend who thought it would be an interesting exercise in condensed writing as a discipline, and I have enjoyed it for that and for many more reasons over the years. That said, my engagement is way down, most of the accounts I enjoy have left, and my newsfeed has become angrier and angrier. I think I will be leaving the channel probably at the end of this year, so I can do one more of my annual ‘Top Tweets’ collections that I enjoy so much. At that point I will be publishing new editions of all five of my current books that will not mention my Twitter information. Perhaps I will replace it with my TikTok account? I will also update my author bio —I am no longer a clean-shaven bachelor thirty-something— and as long as I am doing all that, I have kept a running list of other small typos and the like that I have come across since the last updates in July of 2020. All this is to say, expect new editions of my books at the end of the year, everyone.
And that’s it! I think I said during the last major update on my writing that you would be hearing from me in six months or so, and it ended up being 15, so I will not make specific promises this time around. I do plan to have a TikTok update for you sooner rather than later, and I hope to have enough episodes of an eventual podcast recorded over the next few months to go live with that project too, but we will see where we end up. It has taken me about a year to get this far into my third attempt at a sixth book, so here’s hoping I will have the first draft done in another year. If that estimate proves wildly inaccurate one way or the other, I suppose you will hear about it from me here too.
All my best and happy reading!
–Geoff
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