Blog Post No. 539
I’m feeling a little disconnected right now. It’s April and for the previous five years in April I had a book come out in the Synthetic Albatross Series. This year I don’t and it’s very strange. Normally, this would be the time when I would be scrambling to get the final copy to the printer, or anxiously waiting for the review copy to come in so I could see what horrible mistake I missed (costing me more money) or what kind of horrible state the printing (or binding, or positioning) would be in. Not that I’m doing any of that in 2023.
I didn’t intend to wait this long to write a 
A friend of mine shared a great concept with me regarding last week’s post about 
I may be milking it a little by now, but this is a short post to announce the official release of
I’m off from the day job again for pandemic reasons and while it’s mostly a good thing (both having time off and not being at risk with omicron running wild) I’m also not making any money. You’d think that with this sudden time off, I’d be writing up a storm or getting way ahead on edits for the new novella, Snow from a Distant Sky. Unfortunately, edits grind to a halt when you have to wait on people to get back to you with their beta reads. As for writing, I’m still struggling with short stories as a whole and I still haven’t cracked the ability to write while in the middle of an edit. 
Most of the artists I know don’t have a ton of extra scratch to pay for things. Sometimes when you’re making, say, a book, you need things like good looking covers. How does an artist pay for a good looking cover when they don’t have enough money to get a kindergartner to finger paint for them? That’s right, they trade for it. I was lucky enough to find someone to trade with in 
My main project at the moment is editing the fifth novella in the 
It may not be a record for the most words written in the shortest amount of time (I’d have to do math to verify it) but it is a record for the fastest first draft I’ve ever written. In 29 days I managed to write just under 40 000 words and somehow managed to stop writing any more. That is to say, the last three installments in this novella series all went longer that I had intended (some much longer than others). But now it’s early September (
It’s hot outside. Like, seriously hot. Some people have no idea what the part of Canada where I live is like. The area used to be a swamp. In the summers we get heat waves that may look quaint to people who live in more southern climates, but our heat is wet. It sticks to you. When we reach 32 degrees Celsius (about 80 Fahrenheit) it feels like 40 degrees with the humidity (104 F). Again, that doesn’t look like much to someone who sees 120 F in Arizona, but the humidity is a killer. 
Surprisingly, the sample copies of my new novella, 
Ben Van Dongen 