All right, it's that time of the week again and I need to put a blog post together.
Have I finished reading a book, so I can review it here? No.
Do I have any important news or updates to give? No.
Do I have anything at all planned for this post? Also no.
I've told you before, this blog is a work in progress, and even if I've figured some of it out, I still run across these weeks where it's like, “Well, guess I ought to put something up.”
This is one of those weeks, if you haven't guessed. So I'll just tell you a little about how the week went.
Whether I Be False or True
I'm getting within spitting distance of the end of my novel in progress. So naturally now I start avoiding it–I've been plugging away dutifully for the last few months, but now I'm getting this horrible performance anxiety about actually finishing it. I will finish it, of course, very likely by the end of this month. I'm just stretching it out because there's all the pressure of working out how all the loose ends tie together (or not). And also because I enjoy torturing myself.
And whenever I'm not writing it's because I've been drinking–I haven't worked out a way to combine the two. Drinking is really wonderfully enjoyable and it opens up a lot of fun opportunities for me to beat myself up. “Now look here, Geof, not only did you not do your writing, but you overslept and now you're gonna be hungover today.”
Which, I mean I know what I'm getting and it's all my method for blocking myself from getting what I say I want. C'est la vie.
Anyway, one day pretty soon I'm gonna wrap up Whether I Be False or True. A few months later I'll get down to editing it, and it ought to be available for purchase sometime in the spring or summer.
And it's not like I'm gonna be scot-free to start a new project once I'm done with this draft, either. For a lot of weird reasons I'm not gonna get into here, I have a half-finished novel waiting for me to complete it. It's called Nothing Collapses and I stopped working on it in December of 2022, around the time I started working on Whether I Be False or True.
Which is not something I'd normally do (haha), interrupting a big project for more than a year and all that. But just take my word for it, it really was an exceptional circumstance and I really did have to put Nothing Collapses on ice for a while.
When you do something like that there's always the risk that you'll come back to the work in progress and find it's dead. You've outgrown it, or the inspiration that gave the book life in the first place has dried up. But that doesn't seem to have happened here–whenever I go back to Nothing Collapses and read what's there I find it still tickles me as much as it did when I was working on it in 2022 and I'm excited to get back to work on it.
So if all goes well (and there's no reason why it shouldn't) you ought to be able to look forward to two new novels from me by the end of the year. And depending on the breaks, there might even be a third by the time December comes around.
One good thing that's happened this week is that I've made some progress in my quest to figure out how to use Twitter. It's still not selling books at anything like the rate I'd like to see, but at least I'm steadily growing a following and gradually figuring out what works.
You do kind of wish you could snap your fingers and suddenly start selling enough books to quit your job, move to Tampa, and get very drunk with a harem of beautiful girls while watching the sunset over the Gulf of Mexico. Or be a TikTok girl getting a million followers by talking about nothing to the camera for a while. But it's a long process, and sheer cussedness wins out in the long term. Something about the obsessive, almost monomaniacal drive to create something bigger than oneself.
It's why we get up and face the day, really.
But what was I talking about? Oh, right: Twitter.
It's not such a bad place. And I am making progress, even if it's not as quick or as easy as I would like. Besides, I know I probably shouldn't say this, but I think it's gotten better ever since Elon started running it. You still can't say anything remotely edgy without some basement-dweller in the comment section willfully misunderstanding you. But that's what the ole mute button is for!
YouTube
Well, after a couple weeks on hiatus, I'm going back to putting an audio version of a short story up on YouTube every Sunday. That's not exactly progressing as quickly or as reliably as I'd like it to, but then again I didn't expect it to go anywhere in less than a year. It's been about four months and I'm picking up a few views and a few followers every month. Nothing huge, but it's a fun little side-project and it's good to exercise the idea-generating muscle by putting out a short story every week.
You'll see the stories on the blog, of course, and by the end of the year that will build up into a decent little hoard of tales that could be made into a new short story collection. So keep an eye out for that when we move into 2025.
Anyway, that about wraps it up for this week. Thanks for reading, all my best to you and yours, and I'll do my best to have something a little more gripping in store for you next week. It's just a few more weeks till springtime!
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