I'm doing Science and I'm Still Alive

That’s right, against all odds and suppositions, I’m still alive. Should I be? Should I still attempt to get back up and continue publishing? I don’t know, it’s a question I’ve asked myself many times amidst the circular self-destruction and bad decisions that anxiety and depression will bring about and force you to deal with alone. I should know better, a part of me does, but I still have the feeling that no one will actually care and I’m just writing to the void to please myself, or better yet just being shamelessly melodramatic and no one actually cares for the creator’s bleeding heart they’ve seen time and again.

It’s easy to be left with feelings like that, to convince yourself they’re right, that no one wants to hear it again and just drift further into the safe, lonesome dark. I don’t intend to talk about my situation much more than that, and a lot of people deal with it far more intensely than I have. It’s the biggest barricade to anything emotional or artistic. It’s never easy, but throughout it all, however silent, there has still been support and interest in my works. As easy as it is to dissuade myself, there are people who still know and remember what I’ve done, and even ask about more. 

Readers are still out there, and every one of you, whether you find this or not, have been the single star in a long night that has held me to hope and stopped me from falling apart even further. Whether you just experienced a story or two and passed on, only discovered me now or held to that same hope of a return, thank you for being here and supporting me in your own ways.

I may be stupid. I may have disappointed people as much as myself, but rather than just run from and abandon everything I’ve done, all I can do to make anything right is… write. There are countless things I haven’t completed under my name and as parts of my world. It’s time to brighten the mood.

Tomorrow, Kikimora Courtois will go up for pre-order with a news post here. It’s a full-length standalone novella I struggled on and was unhappy with for a long time. Having come back to it recently, I’m really glad I did step back from it, as I’ve been able to untangle a lot of the tone, direction and feel I wasn’t happy with, while also noticing a lot of little bumps and tonal shifts I don’t like. Suffice to say, what I’d started with didn’t stand the test of time at all and has only been improved since.

I’ll go into more detail in a dedicated release post but its title is a play on Amour Courtois, or “Courtly Love”, a medieval European literary conception of love that emphasized nobility and chivalry and I absolutely did not just copy the Wikipedia definition. Put the new tab down, no one needs to check! I first came across the term researching Valentine’s Day and summarily Saint Valentine. It’s a very grand image, showing devotion and dedication through noble trials, and so I was inspired. 

A Kikimora is, in short, a Slavic house spirit with elements of a bird – solid ground to be written as a fae beastkin. It’s a pretty obscure origin, but as most who already know what it is can attest, Kenkou Cross’ ‘Monster Girl Encyclopedia’ designed a kikimora monster girl, and it's pretty cute. I take some illustrative queues from that in creating the image of our monster girl heroine. Kenkou Cross is a good artist, the theory behind the design is solid and it's a “standardised” design other fans of monster girl media would default to. 

That’s as far as any relations go, however, as I always create from as many sources of inspiration as possible and build things into my own fantasy realm’s lore and vision, as it should be. In Kikimora Courtois, shadows of a darker past linger over our beastkin heroine which events may force her to finally confront. And she is not the only one.

So what comes after that? With Kikimora Courtois, I wanted to return on a solid note, come back with something to show for it, put a good foot first then keep moving forward off the momentum. I have a lot packed away and frankly, as stupid as it sounds, just looking at the list was its own deterrent. It’s being struck by choice paralysis which is bad enough in its own right, but with a little voice that says the fact that this list exists proves I’m a failure and it’ll never work out. Of course there’s no voice to say otherwise when you’re left alone with your feelings, so it was difficult to deal with.

With that said, I’m going to focus through titles to wrap up and give full closure to existing stories before I do anything else. This doesn’t mean anything will be cut short, my list has tallies of 1-3 books per title to complete them. I may have had a lot of starry-eyed ideas for what I wanted to do with serial releases but I certainly had too many titles running, which feels like enough of an honest failure for unnecessary feelings to latch onto. It wasn’t perfect but little ever is, what matters is the passion.

I’m going to tie up the ones that can be resolved in one book first – the Soulflame series and Hide series. Once done, all manuscripts for those titles will go into the editing and binding process to release them as full, single books a month or two after release of the final chapter. In the meantime, I’ll move on to Shoes of Glass and Umbral Coil that will tentatively take two books each. With those done, I’ll make a full return to Wight Snow and Daemonique. 

Dhampyre will return and continue as heavier novella releases, most likely once all or at least most of the others have been handled and I’m back to a clean slate to focus more easily on projects and plans. I still have many untold stories for the world I’ve built for all my fantasy works. I even bought Campaign Cartographer from Humble Bundle recently just so I could begin piecing together maps for sections of the world and eventually link them all together as it grows. It’s been rough and I haven’t been able, but this is still my passion and what feels like the big thing I can really do. Beyond all this is even bigger things that I’ve been working on but can’t even begin to talk about just yet. 

But the real question from anyone that made it this far, was this an elaborate in-season April Fools joke? Well... it was certainly the reason I decided to go ahead with coming back out and making an announcement about plans today. I can only hope people find some mirth and joy in this, whether they consider it or me a joke or otherwise. Only time will really tell, maybe I'll try one more time and through some force of circumstance and poor mental health, just fail again. I'm going to do what I can to prevent it, but an April Fools joke? Yes, the truth is I… I’m not actually doing science.

I’m sorry, but my passion still lies on the high fantasy side of things, and making dumb references to stuff that most readers probably aren't into. Feeling like I was always “different” to the status quo as it were was always a downer I'm not getting into today. Science Fiction also often suffers from toeing the line of becoming Science Fantasy if you don’t respect its processes. That's fine in its own right if you know that’s what you’re doing, but I’m not looking to the stars. 

Not yet.