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Looks like it’s June again—who could have seen that coming?
The good news is that my mother’s health is almost back to normal. She got well enough that I could come back home (I’d been staying with her since early December, for those who weren’t following). Which means I’ll have more time to write.
Speaking of writing, you might have noticed that Jean-Jack Laroch has taken a raincheck. I’d planned to put out a new story for him last month, but I’ve been struggling with the piece, so ended up posting something else. In fact, I realized I always struggle a lot with Laroch, and I’m not sure why. In contrast, the Varushka stories come much more easily. And so I thought I should stop forcing myself to alternate between the two and focus more on what comes naturally. So you’ll probably be seeing more of the Count—not to mention Reikk and Silius (those two are always a lot of fun to write). I’m also looking forward to doing more Thimmin and Kelle pieces.
I’ve also decided to make some changes on my Substack. My current model is obviously not working (I’m still at zero paid subscribers), so something needs to change. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what—if you have suggestions, I’d love to hear them. In fact, let me ask you this: what type of content might make you want to subscribe? I realize there are many external factors that can affect decisions like that, but in a perfect world what would you want to see?
All I know for sure is that I’m going to stop the serial. I’ve been thinking of doing that for a while. I mean, I’ll still finish writing the story, but after I’m done with Book 3, the final three volumes will be released directly as novels along with the three first (the plan is to fast-release them, one per month—either later this year if I can finalize them in time, or at some point in 2025).
In other news, my “Dragon Dice” short stories (penned as Steffen Larken) are now out as standalone ebooks:
Note that if the first of these can be read on its own, the other two not so much… So for those you might want to wait for the full “Time of the Champions” anthology (it’s due out on July 4)… Or you can buy them all individually, if you can’t wait ;)
Oh! And I almost forgot… If you’re into blues-rock, you might be interested in this cool little album—which I happened to write some of the lyrics for!
I wrote 5 of the 8 songs. My tracks are: “Jim and Julia,” “The monster in me,” “The world outside” (look at that! it gave the album its title too!), “The witch of Wichita,” and “Life on the road.”
The album is available on most streaming platforms—including Deezer and Spotify. And, of course, you can also get it from Amazon… though for some reason only through their French platform.
Coming up this month
This is probably starting to get old, but… I have no idea. Sigh. Now that I’m back home, I hope I can write more stories to build that buffer I still don’t have. I mean, I do have one or two more backup stories, but that’s not much to go by. Ideally, I’d like to finish that “Traveler of a thousand worlds” story I started a couple of years ago (some of you might remember me mentioning it back then). Enough time has passed that I might think of a way to get out of the hole I wrote myself into LOL. I’ll be rereading that in the coming days, so we’ll see what happens.
After that, I’ll probably do a Varushka or a Reikk—though that’ll be for July, unless I manage to write two or more stories in the coming weeks.
And that’s all for now!
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Copyright (c) 2024 by Alex S. Garcia.