Chaotic Array

I just woke up from a dream where me, a random girl I've never seen irl but somehow know was named Cassandra, and Willow and Xander from Buffy, all survived the zombie apocalypse together. I've only dreamed about the zombie apocalypse once before a couple months ago, and it wasn't as vivid and insane as this. We stole an old riverboat that was like a little tin can, all the others could fit in it but while we sped up the river I sat on top and kept a lookout. The world was already in ruins and it felt like much more time had passed than a few weeks since the world ended, but dreams are weird and messy like that. So anyway. Cassandra's insane aunt who blamed me for her husband's death tried to kill me, and Cassandra killed her and saved me after I lured her to a swamp where my friends were waiting. There was an 'intelligent' zombie who could control others who was after us, on some Game of Thrones shit, but more terrifying than the Night King's icy bitc...

So, in my last post I promised you all that I wouldn't blog again until I had some cool stuff to announce and share. And now I do! My next title, FORCE (Superhero High Book 1) is coming out on January 10th 2020! Force is actually a novella, not a full book. It's the first in a series of five titles following the students of Southaven High, a school for teens with powers, who in this world are listed as C-Class Citizens in the new American social caste system. I had a ton of fun writing this one! I would describe this series as, like, Smallville meets Degrassi? I've never actually seen an episode of Degrassi, but I know it's about teens at a high school and there are a ton of different generations or classes or whatever. Each novella follows a different student at the school, although they're all part of the main roster of characters who will each play a big role as they go on. I mean, not all of them, some of them just die, but I can't talk about that,...

*Title from the song Show Me Yours  by Trisha Paytas. So all I've done for the past two days is work on this new story I don't want to talk about, and play Fortnite. I'm now officially trash. To be fair I also walked to our mailbox today but the only thing inside was a death threat/parking ticket reminder. It was really nice outside, even though it was cold as hell. I wore combat boots instead of sneakers so I wasn't slipping on all the ice for once. It's weirdly beautiful and, I guess, 'fresh' outside when it's winter and there's snow everywhere but it's still sunny. All the white snow and golden light combines and makes things look like some kind of a fantasy world. Anyway, my walk was nice, but I'm sore all over. I'm probably ruining my back by sitting in all the weird positions I sit in. I made a blanket nest on the floor in a corner of my room and I've been retreating there more often than I want to admit even though I kno...

Title from My Name Is Dark  by Grimes. I'm probably not going to win NaNoWriMo this year; I only have like 3000 words left to go, but I'm probably not going to hit it because I'm in a bad place psychologically and probably won't write that much before 12, if I write today at all. I slept all day and played a little Kingdom Hearts 3 and that's it. And if that's it, that's fine, at least I was lazing off instead of getting into more trouble. I really don't trust myself to do much else today. Basically I've been listening to Grimes and enjoying moping around hating myself and life and feeling all defeatist about everything. Obviously I should have loftier goals, but we all have Those Days TM. I picked up a copy of Awakener by Alisha Howard on Kindle because it's free on Amazon.ca right now, and I bought all the paperbacks for the My Blood Approves series by Amanda Hocking. I'm finally going to own one of my favorite self-published serie...

Here's a passage I wrote on this blog way back in 2016 that I found again today and really needed to hear: AT LEAST ONCE in your writing career, but probably way more times than that, you will find yourself sitting on the floor in your underwear, getting drunk and crying, wondering if you're throwing your life away. You may or may not try to ask your dead relatives for advice from beyond the grave. They won't give it to you, though, selfish villains that they are. This is normal. This is the stress of being a living, working artist. But you know why you got into this and you know what it means to you, so don't you fucking let your stress win. We've all felt like we were facing doomsday at one point or another, legacy or self-published, and those storms always pass. It doesn't matter if you're a first-time indie or the next Suzanne Collins with hype and a big six publisher and a movie deal at your back - you have undertaken a huge project, and you are allow...

Obviously I've blogged more in the past couple days than I have in a long time, and that's going to keep happening, because I'm in a much more convenient position to write blog posts now. So, here's some stuff you can except to see me talking about in the next few weeks and months: 1) Spider-Man. This has happened and will happen again. 2) Video games in general. I've got Fallout 4 and inFamous First Light coming in the mail, and inFamous Second Son just arrived today. 3) The short stories I'm working on! 4) Pop music. Always pop music. Although right now I'm weirdly getting back into indie rock. 5) Dropping Like Flies. This is my next new full-length book and it's about a cannibal. Nuff said.

All of my grandparents are gone now, which is a really weird feeling. I never really knew my grandfathers, in fact I only met one of them. But my grandmothers were such a huge part of my life, and it feels weird that I haven't talked about them much here, because it just feels painful and hard. But now I think I am at a place where I can talk about them from a place of happiness and wonder at the fact that I got to meet these beautiful people and share so many moments with them in life. Like a lot of kids, my parents were always busy working, they both had nine-to-five jobs that were physically demanding, and they were overworked and underpaid, so I got left with my grandparents a lot while my brother who was older was allowed to run around with his friends or go to after-school programs. I had no problem with this, because I was antisocial and I liked my grandmothers both better than I liked other kids my age and my friends at school. Even as an eleven year old boy, I had the pe...

All I've been doing for the past few days is play Spider-Man for the PS4 and waiting for my new laptop to come in the mail. It's here now, and it's very fancy, and I'm using it to catch up on NaNoWriMo, and, yes, writing Spider-Man fanfic. I'm only human. I grew up on Spidey. I know most of us did, but still; when my dad was a kid in the seventies and eighties he would dress up as Spider-Man and climb on top of his roof to amuse his friends. When my brother and I were growing up in the late nineties and early two-thousands, we had cool Spider-Man pajamas and toys and gadgets like mini web-shooters that shot silly string all over the house and effectively turned our mother homicidal. We watched the Sam Raimi trilogy all the time. Toby isn't my favorite Spider-Man, or even my favorite movie Spider-Man, but he was still fantastic, even though those movies got corny sometimes. I have a very clear memory of going to a birthday party at some kids house when I was ...

I figured out how to fix the previous posts I mentioned in, well, my previous post; I had to edit their HTML directly for some reason. Changing actual post settings didn't work. Had to manual that shiz. Blogger is glitchy. It has the flu, I guess. That's all I really have to say right now, but I will leave you with the new Harry Styles song because he is a bi icon (bicon) if ever there was one...  

I'm aware my last couple blog posts look really messed up. I have no idea what to do about it because every time I try to edit them, Blogger just doesn't actually update the changes. I can't fix the font to match the rest of the blog (Helvetica is how I roll) and I tried making the fonts larger but it honestly made them smaller. I blame it on the fact that I originally wrote and posted them from my iPad. Ugh. If you can't zoom to read, you can skip 'em, because I didn't say anything too important. A new edition of Iceblood and a new edition of Storm of Masks are both out, they have nice new covers, and that's about it. Iceblood got a new round of editing and I think it's a lot better now. You should go read it... I'm also aware I haven't blogged since August. (Bad author!) I did that because I've been writing/editing other stuff, and I replaced blogging with morning pages for a while there. I'm going to try to balance them out more ...

Today I woke up determined to get something done. I didn't care what as long as I accomplished something with my day. I kept thinking of Storm of Masks and what I could do for it... We have a complicated relationship, since it's my least popular book and totally flopped upon release, but I still have a soft spot for it and want it to find an audience even though I think it's kind of slow-paced and boring. I decided I would revamp the cover yet again. I love the ghostly turquoise cover and I think it fits the mood of the novel really well, but I don't know if it communicates urban fantasy or paranormal romance. It looks like a horror story. I wanted something that would telegraph the genre immediately. I also decided to go ahead and rewrite the entire blurb. The new synopsis is much better so I'm glad I went for it. And the synopsis for book two might be one of the best blurbs/descriptions I've ever written. I'm super excited to share it! Once I...

Earlier tonight I published a new edition of Iceblood, and it should be live in a few hours! I wanted to publish a new edition because I felt like more than any of my books Iceblood deserved an updated, more professional looking cover. I liked the old one but it felt both amateur and very dated. The novella itself has been cleaned up quite a bit and I'm happy with the better round of editing and the few bits and pieces of new material it has. They've made it a much stronger story. And the new cover? Beautiful. However I also decided to write two sequels, rounding it into a trilogy. They'll both be a little longer than Iceblood, but I've got them both outlined and I'm drafting them once I'm done writing Glimpse and a story Deadly Divine. Glimpse has been tricky but I finally figured out what I need to change to make it feel right. Iceblood is book one in the Thief Materials series and will be followed by Inheritance and Scoundrel, a...

The new books are live, so it's time for a cover reveal and release announcement! These are always my favourite posts to write. They make me feel productive and like stuff is happening. Which is cool.  Cause it is. Without further ado, here's the new stories: Ian's Fetish:  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RCBGCNX/ A Twink in The Woods: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07RBC2SNJ/ Ian's Fetish is about two best friends and is more romantic, while A Twink in The Woods is about cruising and is more overtly sexual. I have two more stories on the way as well, which are shorter than these but still pretty fun. I may write more erotica soon, but I'm focused on a couple other stories. I want to put out three or four novels this year and I obviously don't have much time to do it, but I tend to write a lot in quick bursts and then sit on stuff and publish it all at once later. I had a really cool novella halfway done set in the world of Iceblood...

Troll reviews are one of the weirdest parts of being an author. I'm a gay guy. I'm specifically a gay guy who talks about homophobia when I see it, and who gets in arguments with anti-SJWs and incels and idiotic Trump supporters sometimes, because I can't help myself. I'm learning to engage less and less, but sometimes someone just needs to call them on their stupidity or hypocrisy. The problem with that is the red-pill weirdos have no lives, so they then stalk my social media, find my books and author info, and leave troll reviews of my work on Amazon. The last time it happened was around the time my novella Wolves came out, and a bunch of awesome people helped me by reporting those reviews. A few are still up, but most are gone, as they should be. Last night I checked my Amazon page and noticed that a couple months ago someone threw more up. One of them is for Shadows of Ourselves and the other is for Wolves. The one for Wolves Is actually hilarious b...

Today was a little hellish. The power went out around 4am and was out for hours. Someone hit a power line with her car nearby, but from what I heard she was fine. Anyway my computer wouldn't turn back on after the outage, and I was afraid I'd lost everything, but I opened it up and shorted it with a screwdriver, so it's fine now, but the power button is done for good. The tower looks like this right now: I need a new computer really bad but I have no money, which is why it's so important for me to edit these stories and get them out already. I've been getting a lot of work done but it doesn't feel like it because I haven't shared any. I'm quitting pot because it freaks me out so I'll have the mind to write more, too. Tonight I'm going to finish editing the second novella, pen a new short story, write a new chapter of the current book, and then edit more of Shadows New Edition. That sounds like a lot but it's not. Editing Shad...

Today I got in a huge fight with my parents, and now my head is pounding. My best friend Kuma cheered me up a bit and comforted me, because they're awesome. And I've been listening to all the good new pop music to make myself feel better. Olivia O'Brien's new album is crazy. I also like the new Ashnikko song, and of course, Taylor Swift finally dropped her new single. I didn't like it at first but it's growing on me. She always picks bad lead singles anyway, then her albums have amazing deep cuts. I made some beats in BandLab tonight that I really enjoy. I made like six songs and of those I think four have potential, so I wrote some lyrics for those to record later today once the sun is up and I'm home alone. I want to move out really bad but I'm not sure I want to leave the country, I'm kind of too used to it even though it's inconvenient and spooky sometimes. I think cities are scarier because of inevitable societal collapse. I mean, I...

I was rereading old blog posts, and I realized I talked a lot about books that never materialized in the early days of this blog, and I want to clarify what's going on with those books and projects, so you all know, and so I can direct people with questions here in the future. So, here it is: The Dark Divinity Trilogy/A Darkness So Divine:  pending. Originally a novella trilogy, then it morphed into a novel. These stories will be published as Shine & Hex, the two new Lilac Jones novellas, once I finish them. Those will close out Lilac's story for good. Mirror, I Am: cancelled. It was a paranormal novel I was meant to write with my cousin, but it fell through. She's not serious about writing or publishing and thinks of it as more of a hobby for now. I'm sure she'll do something with it someday, though. She wants to go back to school and she just had her first kid so for now her hands are tied. The Indigo Horde: cancelled. I may cannibalize ideas from ...