writing and publishing and giving it away

yoshitaka amano

My first post at the Bestseller newsletter went up today. Expect most of my writing related writing to end up over there instead of here. So if you really like what I have to say about writing and publishing, go subscribe over there.

the productivity glide

As I mentioned earlier this week, I’ve decided to change my publishing schedule for the year. I could stick to the six that are already planned and mostly finished, but it’s more fun to just start sprinting and see if you can keep up with yourself.

So I’m going to be publishing a book a month this year. Probably this sounds like a lot and probably also too many, but I have just dozens of novels sitting on my laptop here so I may as well firehose it out into the world.

That’s the right way to think of things, yeah?

The first is coming January 31st!

It’s called At Home Inside You. A YA Romance set in Minneapolis.

It’s the first episode in what will become an ongoing series, and I very much do mean episode. The second episode will likely be here around Valentine’s Day.

In some ways, it’s as influenced by my lifetime love of Beauty and the Beast and an idea for an Evangelion style mech novel I had a decade ago that I never got around to writing.

A quick synopsis of this first episode:

Izzy prematurely ends her date with the boy she’s always wanted because the arthouse movie he brought her to disturbed her. While walking home alone, she discovers a dying monster whose back opens up like an invitation.

She steps inside.

It’s like a spice. It touches first your lips. Hold that moment when this new spice kisses you. It radiates out from that tender touch to sizzle and burn along the whole stretch of your lips. Meanwhile, it has met your tongue, scorched its way along the surface and leapt to the walls and roof of your mouth before diving headlong down your throat. You may cough and sputter and gasp, but the spice is in you. Nose running, eyes watering, your thoughts die on whatever journey they were on. Your whole body collapses into your mouth, into the burn, as you pace and take rapid breaths, like maybe if you breathed just right, there’d be relief, like that’s how to cool this down.

That was how it felt, the first time I was inside you.

Friends, it gets weird, but hopefully you’ll find the beauty inside it as well. It’s written quite a bit differently than Glossolalia or Howl in that it’s a much more internal and emotionally driven narrative.

I’ve always liked that kind of thing. Anyone who’s read my now out of print earlier novels will recognize a throughline here.

These will be digital only releases, but if enough people like it, I’ll release a paperback edition collecting as many episodes as makes sense to fit in one book. It’s possible I’ll write this for years, but the story may finish long before that.

Who knows! I didn’t even know I’d write this until I a few weeks ago when it just kind of poured out of me in a quick sprint.

Now, for all of you fine people who are paying subscribers, below the following paywal is a helpful link to all the books I’ve published since starting this newsletter.

I’m including At Home Inside You, to be published at the end of the month. There may be slight changes to the book over the next twelve days, but likely nothing major. And if there is something major—well, you’ll have what some people think of as a collector’s item, I guess.

You’re getting that one early and before it has a cover, so that’s fun.

I’ll update the files once it has a cover.

The link is below, along with some news which may interest you about those out of print novels.