I’ve been listening to author interviews while I walk to and from my kid’s school every day, and something that’s always struck me as a little frustrating is that in the traditional world of publishing there’s a broadly-accepted allowance for novels (even shorter ones of under 300 pages) to take 2 or 3 years to be written, revised, and published, while in the indie world there’s this expectation that we’re going to be churning books out at least a couple of times a year if not more. Now, I’m not suggesting that any of you have done anything to put this pressure on me, but nonetheless it’s a pressure I’ve felt every time I dip into various indie writing and reading communities. It’s largely because of this pressure that I felt increasingly stressed by my inability to follow-through on my release timeline last year. The deeper into the hole I got, the more stress and anxiety I felt about completing revisions without just rushing something out the door for the sake of getting it published. I’ve done that in the past, and it still pains me to look back on certain books with the knowledge that they could have been better had I felt I had the space to put just a little more time into letting them rest between subsequent revisions. But that’s all on me, and it doesn’t change the fact that I started this newsletter last year with the intention to start building a rapport with all of you as my books came out. It’s kind of weird to think about sending out newsletter updates while the books are still languishing on the back burner, so other than a couple of short stories, things have stayed pretty stagnant around here.
Another big factor in the delays is that royalties from my various pen name backlists have slowed considerably over the last few years, so I essentially had no choice but to redirect my attention to other projects that have a more immediate potential to help me survive the recent cost of living increases. As excited as I am about a book like The Traveling Librarian, it’s more of a niche project that’s probably going to take a while to find its audience and begin earning out the time investment. Much of the latter half of 2022 was consumed by ghostwriting or producing work for my more profitable pen names.
In short, I said I would have books out last year and I feel terrible for not having followed through on those timelines. So I’ve decided to give some stuff away for free.
Saber & Stone Open Beta
Saber & Stone has been out on a first-round beta for a few months, and after getting similar feedback from a few trusted readers, I had to take a step back and reconsider the story I’d hoped to tell. Saber & Stone was drafted after I’d been mired in a prolonged creative funk back in 2017 and 2018, and it was the first novel I’d written from start to finish without any kind of outline. I was exploring themes that are deeply personal, and so the words came easily and quickly. That first draft was written in a matter of weeks and I think it captured a certain something that feels deeply fulfilling to me as both a writer and a reader. After getting some external feedback, however, I’ve had to accept that there are some not-inconsiderable revisions that would make the story significantly better. I think I could publish the book as is and still make a lot of readers happy, but now that I’ve seen where I can improve the work, I can’t bring myself to publish it without another major revision.
Because this is more than just a few little tweaks, I’ve decided to push this back on my schedule to some uncertain future date. I know a few of you were more excited about this project than The Traveling Librarian, but the only reason Saber & Stone was sitting first in the queue is that I thought I could publish it relatively quickly. Given how much work this rewrite needs and that my time is going to be spread thin between my other projects and The Traveling Librarian revisions, I can’t even begin to estimate when I’ll be able to return to this book. It would be nice to get it done this year, but given how difficult it was to maintain a productive writing schedule alongside the obligations of being a stay-at-home dad, I’m just not sure I’ll have time. My bigger priority is publishing The Traveling Librarian as soon as possible and to begin writing the follow-up.
So what I’m going to do is give all of you this current version of Saber & Stone absolutely free.
That’s right, I’m going to just give it away. We'll call it an open beta, but unlike a proper beta read, you won’t be required to provide feedback as a requirement for downloading this version of Saber & Stone. For those of you who do want to share your opinions, there will be an opportunity to do that before this thing eventually gets the editorial attention it deserves so it can be published to a broader audience.
Saber & Stone still needs a cover and a copy edit, so this open beta likely won’t happen for a few weeks yet. Once it goes live there will be a 2 week window in which both free and paid newsletter subscribers can download a digital version of the book for desktop reading or side-loading onto your preferred device.
In the meantime, I have something else for you to read…
The Book of the Seven Stones
A few years ago I began writing a story set in the first iteration of what would become the world of Tellen. Back then I was still struggling to get away from an irrational pressure to write epic fantasy with large-scale conflicts, and so the book sort of fizzled out around the halfway mark as I gradually lost enthusiasm for building the plot towards a confrontation with some sort of Big Bad Evil Entity somewhere along the series. As happens with such things, I chucked the unfinished draft into a virtual drawer alongside other partially-explored projects, and then I moved on to other things. It would still take me a few years to figure out what kinds of stories I wanted to tell in this world, but it’s from the ashes of that old project that The Traveling Librarian eventually sprung to life.
At some point, I plan to return to this story and the larger Book of the Seven Stones arc in a way that better suits my slower-paced adventure fantasy aesthetic, but in the meantime, I thought I’d serialize the first 60,000-word sequence of the novel here on the newsletter. I’ve done a bit of work to make the geography match that of The Traveling Librarian and the other short stories I’ve shared, but there are still a few world-building and story seeds that may no longer be relevant when I eventually rework these chapters to fit into a new long-term plot arc.
New chapters will arrive in your inbox on Thursdays. I’ll be editing these for readability, but it’ll essentially be just a light polish on first-draft material. If the story proves popular, I may well continue writing new chapters to be serialized here as well, but given my earlier grumbling about not having enough hours in the week to get everything done, I’m not making any promises beyond the initial 12 chapters that make up what I call the wilderness survival sequence.
Technical Note: Don’t want to receive these serialized chapters? You can fine-tune which updates you’d like to see by clicking on Among the Stacks on the Substack Manage Subscriptions page. Simply untick Whisper of the Wilding Woods, and you won’t see those updates in your email anymore.
The prologue is already available. Click the link below to start reading now.
Hope you’re all finding ways to stay positive about 2023. Until next time, I’ll see you Among the Stacks!
-mark
Aaaand I just realized I now have two projects with the word stone in the title. That’s not going to bother me forever.