It's finally time to get off my arse and try to get my house in order, so to speak. This is more than six months overdue.
Since I first built this site, I've published numerous stories of gradually increasing length, stretched myself as a writer and made several stylistic experiments that needed doing but may not have worked. C'est la vie.
I also, with my partner, bought a house. That became considerably more crucial than I thought it would. Suddenly, all my spare time was house-related. I struggled to maintain writing with full-time work and trying to get the house in order, develop it, fix things, add things, etc.
Then, at one point, I had to make the conscious decision to shelve my writing for a good six months while we went through a demoralising, messy, drawn-out and ridiculous process to get a granny-flat built. The six months stretched out way longer than merely "months". A few things appeared to give me hope and get me writing again, at least one of which has been published and one or two others which might have been if I'd had more self-discipline.
But mostly what I've been doing is writing ridiculous thought-pieces or extremely trashy but personally satisfying pulp that will never - please believe me on this - ever see the light of published day.
Then disaster struck, when the main publisher I had been working with had to wrap up operations.
A basic short timeline: Way back when I began seriously submitting my writing to publishers, one of the first serious attempts I made was with a small LGBTQIA spec-fic romance publisher called Less Than Three Press (LT3. ie, <3). It was a novella of a little more than 20,000 words, the first time I had attempted something that long, written for an anthology on the theme of "message in a bottle".
I went through a lot of ideas and notes before deciding I would finally scratch my love of steampunk. I set it where I lived, around Ipswich and Brisbane, I came up with a couple of characters I love to this day, I pulled out a bunch of ideas and influences that been bubbling around my brain for a while looking for an outlet, and I wrote a piece that probably has more undeclared debts to other authors than I care to acknowledge. But it was immensely enjoyable, and there's a scene in there that still makes me cry to this day when I re-read it.
I drastically cut my rough plan when I realised that time was getting away from me, tidied it up, and submitted it as We Will Make More Mischief Together.
They said yes.
After I got over the shock of that, I submitted many other pieces to LT3 - beginning with Reborn, which ended up being published first, by the strange chronology of publishing - most of which were accepted, one or two of which were rejected for the anthology they were written for but were rewritten, expanded, resubmitted and published as individual novellas or short novels (I realise there's a technical definition of "novella" but to me it's more a matter of feel).
At the same time, the world I had begun in Mischief was expanded and became several other stories submitted to various places, including Her Humble Servants and Ship With Me in the Valves and Vixens erotic steampunk collections. (Links here.)
And then came the same fate that strikes so many small, passionately-run businesses, and LT3 was no longer financially viable. It was handled extremely well: We were alerted in good time, they wrapped things up before everything collapsed, the process of rights reversion and the availability of files was handled promptly and professionally. In fact, they were a pleasure to work with for the entirety of my relationship with them, which is a big reason I had eight progressively longer stories published through them. A ninth was accepted but didn't quite get to the editing stage.
This happened in July 2019. When the news was made public I planned this blog post a few times, but I was never quite in a mental position to write it. By the time I had dealt with the rest of life, I didn't quite have the spell slots left.
What I have done is republished all of my LT3 pieces through Smashwords and, therefore, a range of other ebook retailers. I've been sporadically adding all relevant links to the relevant page.
At the same time, I've been re-editing one last piece accepted by LT3 but not edited, and working out whether I'll self-publish or submit to a publisher. It's a piece I dearly love and includes a snow leopard shifter, so I'm going to get it out there somehow.
If life permits, it'll be somehow sometime soon.
Since I first built this site, I've published numerous stories of gradually increasing length, stretched myself as a writer and made several stylistic experiments that needed doing but may not have worked. C'est la vie.
I also, with my partner, bought a house. That became considerably more crucial than I thought it would. Suddenly, all my spare time was house-related. I struggled to maintain writing with full-time work and trying to get the house in order, develop it, fix things, add things, etc.
Then, at one point, I had to make the conscious decision to shelve my writing for a good six months while we went through a demoralising, messy, drawn-out and ridiculous process to get a granny-flat built. The six months stretched out way longer than merely "months". A few things appeared to give me hope and get me writing again, at least one of which has been published and one or two others which might have been if I'd had more self-discipline.
But mostly what I've been doing is writing ridiculous thought-pieces or extremely trashy but personally satisfying pulp that will never - please believe me on this - ever see the light of published day.
Then disaster struck, when the main publisher I had been working with had to wrap up operations.
A basic short timeline: Way back when I began seriously submitting my writing to publishers, one of the first serious attempts I made was with a small LGBTQIA spec-fic romance publisher called Less Than Three Press (LT3. ie, <3). It was a novella of a little more than 20,000 words, the first time I had attempted something that long, written for an anthology on the theme of "message in a bottle".
I went through a lot of ideas and notes before deciding I would finally scratch my love of steampunk. I set it where I lived, around Ipswich and Brisbane, I came up with a couple of characters I love to this day, I pulled out a bunch of ideas and influences that been bubbling around my brain for a while looking for an outlet, and I wrote a piece that probably has more undeclared debts to other authors than I care to acknowledge. But it was immensely enjoyable, and there's a scene in there that still makes me cry to this day when I re-read it.
I drastically cut my rough plan when I realised that time was getting away from me, tidied it up, and submitted it as We Will Make More Mischief Together.
They said yes.
After I got over the shock of that, I submitted many other pieces to LT3 - beginning with Reborn, which ended up being published first, by the strange chronology of publishing - most of which were accepted, one or two of which were rejected for the anthology they were written for but were rewritten, expanded, resubmitted and published as individual novellas or short novels (I realise there's a technical definition of "novella" but to me it's more a matter of feel).
At the same time, the world I had begun in Mischief was expanded and became several other stories submitted to various places, including Her Humble Servants and Ship With Me in the Valves and Vixens erotic steampunk collections. (Links here.)
And then came the same fate that strikes so many small, passionately-run businesses, and LT3 was no longer financially viable. It was handled extremely well: We were alerted in good time, they wrapped things up before everything collapsed, the process of rights reversion and the availability of files was handled promptly and professionally. In fact, they were a pleasure to work with for the entirety of my relationship with them, which is a big reason I had eight progressively longer stories published through them. A ninth was accepted but didn't quite get to the editing stage.
This happened in July 2019. When the news was made public I planned this blog post a few times, but I was never quite in a mental position to write it. By the time I had dealt with the rest of life, I didn't quite have the spell slots left.
What I have done is republished all of my LT3 pieces through Smashwords and, therefore, a range of other ebook retailers. I've been sporadically adding all relevant links to the relevant page.
At the same time, I've been re-editing one last piece accepted by LT3 but not edited, and working out whether I'll self-publish or submit to a publisher. It's a piece I dearly love and includes a snow leopard shifter, so I'm going to get it out there somehow.
If life permits, it'll be somehow sometime soon.
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