Hello, friends!

I've said it before: Publishing is hard. Publishing is hard, and bears very little relation to the act of writing. It's messy, too; things shift this way or that, and entire topographies seem to change in a moment.

That's all a vague way of saying that the latest draft of The Dark Age is not working the way I'd hoped it would. A few months have passed since completing that draft, and the time had finally come to revisit it and assess. And...it's a beast. I sat with that realization overnight recently, feeling a little despondent and unmoored...but by morning, I'd already shifted my own perspective toward practical solutions. (I'm reasonably good at reframing a bad situation so that I can begin tinkering with it.)

The Dark Age was supposed to be a small book. And what did I write? The longest, heaviest book I've ever written. So what have I learned? I definitely was not listening to myself.