Issue 2, Issues Several

For one, this should be Issue 3.

Greetings again, my small by loyal band of newsletter subscribers. My goal is to still do these every other Friday even though you may have noticed I missed two weeks ago. Or, maybe you didn’t and are just saying you did to make me feel better. Either works.

Big top news: A Christmas for Arbor Day is competing in this month’s All Authors cover contest. If you could spare a moment and vote for it here, I’d appreciate it. The goal isn’t to win, just to stick around and get some eyeballs as the book approaches its one year publication anniversary. The field of books will be trimmed each week, and you can vote once per round. I’m sitting pretty comfortable for this cut, but keep an eye on it as we go into Round Two.

I’ll also be in another cover contest later in the month, but that can wait until Issue 3.

Writerly Thoughts

It’s been four weeks of forward progress. Maybe less forward progress than I might typically have liked, but compared to the past few months, any forward progress is good. It’s been about 2000 words on the WIP in that time. Getting out of habits sucks because you need to recreate them all over again, largely from scratch with the additional frustration of having let yourself go.

But I’m not here to beat myself up. I’m here for accountability and to let folks know how things are going.

The current WIP is called some combination of “Magicicada” and “Love Bug”. Which goes before the other depends on how I’m feeling on a given day. Much like A Christmas for Arbor Day, this is building on the typical holiday rom com formula that I love oh so dearly. My goal in my books isn’t to make fun of these tropes. Why would I? That’s mean and boring and writing in bad faith. Instead, my goal is to make the one big joke the setup (what if a town loved Arbor Day as much as Hallmark movies love Christmas? What if a town had a huge festival every 17 years when the cicadas emerged?) and the rest takes that seriously.

Or. At least romcom seriously.

The rough draft is closing in on 40,000 words, and I’m hoping for 80-90,000 by the end, given the plotlines that still need to be resolved.

Stay tuned! I’m really excited not only about this one, but also the books lined up after it.

Techerly Thoughts

I started in on the last issue talking about Large Language Models (which frequently get called “AI”). I don’t want to bog down too much all at once, instead I’m pulling on some threads to show the threat that I think these are going to pose long-term to the publishing industry if steps aren’t taken to pull them in.

To that extent, I’d like to share a favorite long-form Youtube video on what may, at first, appear to be an unrelated topic. It’s called Contrepreneurs and is by the excellent Youtube documentarian Dan Olson, aka Folding Ideas. Maybe you’ve seen his video Line Goes Up about NFTs. If you haven’t, you should. Though it’s not going to be germane to the topic at hand.

So. Yeah. Watch Contrepreneurs. Yes, I know it’s 75 minutes long. But if folks can watch nearly four hours about a theme park in Utah, devoting a third of that to the rise of an insidious three-level publishing scam built around Amazon’s content creation methods isn’t asking too much.

I’ll wait.

You back?

I kid, I kid. I’m not expecting you to watch it right now. That’s why I’m throwing the link into this newsletter, and we’ll discuss in two weeks when we reconvene.

Thoughterly Thoughts

Hey, know what I learned this week that I’d never thought about but makes all the sense in the world. Creatives who are in a position where they might end up personalizing their works for fans should consider developing separate autographs and signatures. In this sense, the autograph is your public-facing way of scribbling down your name, either on a piece of art or the inside cover of your book. Your signature is a legal thing meant for personal use on documents and forms, the kind of thing you wouldn’t want people to copy if, say, they got your book and learned it.

Don’t worry, I haven’t learned this in any hard way. Just a conversation I stumbled across in social media.

Speaking of the socials, I’m now on both Bluesky and Threads. Both as thurstonromance. Right now I’m using Threads more, mostly because I haven’t taken the time to really sit down and fully familiarize myself with bsky. So find me there. Last time I posted on Twitter it was still called Twitter.

That’s it. Another newsletter over and out. Catch everyone in two weeks.

Buttons are fun, aren’t they?