If You’re Reading This, I’m Already Dead
Now that I have your undivided attention...
Hello, there. Welcome to the first issue of the newsletter. Issue? First post? First mailing? I don’t know. For most of you, this is the first time it’s showing up in your mailbox, and it’s the first one I’m really... well, putting any work into? Sorry for the three of you who got the Issue #0 newsletter.
I’ll admit, this is all kind of new, so please bear with me as I stumble through this. I’ve been pretty ambivalent about newsletters for most of my professional career, but with Twitter’s new owner trying to plow the site into the ground at record speed... well, I started reconsidering. And here we all are.
This isn’t going to be something that floods your inbox. Like most writers, my real world life is pretty dull on average. You don’t need weekly updates about how many hours I spent sitting in my office each day or some of the mundane business aspects of the writing life. Yeah, some of you might like that, but overall, let’s be honest... pretty dull. Hell, I’ve already edited a few chunks out of this because they got pretty yawn-inducing.
For the most part I think this is going to just be a once-a-month thing, letting you know where various projects are at, what you can expect coming up, that sort of thing. If there’s actually something getting released in the immediate future... maybe there’ll be two newsletters that month. We’ll see.
All that said... let me tell you about some things.
After I finished writing The Broken Room, I spent a couple months writing another novel. Which, yes, is my job. But for reasons that’d take too long to explain (I know this because I wrote them all out and then edited this to just say “that’d take too long to explain”), my agent and I decided it might be best to put that book aside for awhile and work on something else. Which is where I’m at now. I’m almost halfway through the second draft of this new book and also dabbling enough that I can also say I’m about twenty pages into the book after that. Current hope is to have this to my agent at the start of the year, he shops it around, and you all get to read it... well, that’s always where it gets iffy. I’ve had books turned around in a couple months and some that took almost two years.
On the plus side, I think that second project’s going to be fast, so there’s a chance they both may be getting shopped at the same time. So we may have a bit of a lull and then two things fast. Fingers crossed for all of us.
Before that, I’m actually going to have a bunch of short stories in anthologies next year. You may recognize characters in some of them. I think that’s all I can say about them for now—expect more as we get closer and official announcements get made.
And there’s some other stuff going on that might be really cool, but it’s all still in the “let’s see what happens” stage. Hopefully they’ll be worth talking about more in the future. Again, fingers crossed.
Also in semi-writing-related news… the ranty writing blog is coming back, for those of you who’ve missed it. It’s going to be on my own site now— PeterClines.com—which I’ve been sitting on for a decade or so and doing not much of anything with. Which also means next week you’ll be seeing my regular Black Friday offer again to those who might need it, plus a list of books I’ve really enjoyed this year that you might like, too. Or maybe you know somebody who might like them.
What else, what else... how long should one of these things be?
Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching-- The Peripheral, Quantum Leap, ST: Prodigy
Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading-- Fairy Tale (Stephen King). The Toll (Cherie Priest). Wayward (Chuck Wendig).
Cool New Toys-- Future Foundation Spider-Man, Moon Knight, retro The Lizard, Infinity Ultron from What If…?, oh and freakin’ GALACTUS.
And I don’t really have anything that can top that so we should probably end here.
What did you think? Too long? Too much information? Not enough? Just right?
Please be gentle-- it’s my first real newsletter.