… you haven’t received a link to download it, please drop me an email to let me know. You can use the one in the PayPal screen or the one on my bio page. I will do my best to get you the file you purchased as quickly as I can.
If you celebrate Christmas, I hope you have a wonderful holiday. If you don’t, I hope you have a wonderful weekend.
I sold more than 50 copies of Lord of Reavers over the weekend. Thank you to everyone who purchased and everyone who helped spread the word. If you missed the post, here’s the word on why I’m selling it from my website. Ho ho ho, right?
If you buy one and you don’t receive the download link within half an hour (check your spam trap), ping me. I’ll send you the file directly.
It’s Newtonmass week! All our shopping is done but not the wrapping. I still have cards to send out, but at least the tree and lights are up. Every year my wife and son plan to put the tree up early (like on the 5th or 6th) and I tell them we should decorate it on Christmas Eve. Every year I get voted down (and asked “Why are you doing this? What’s wrong with you?”) but my objections have become formality now. I like having the tree up early; just don’t tell my family.
My son is up and it’s time to start my day. I hope you guys are having a good week.
My email is being cruel cruel to me, so don’t be surprised if it takes me a while to respond.
Also, I’m going to have a S&S story online very soon, hopefully today.
But first I have to go home and attend my son’s birthday party. It’s not his birthday, but it is his party. The little guy has everything planned out.
Also, I met my small goal today, even though it’s a big goal day. It’s weird; I used to thrive in a sleep-deprived trance. I’d come at my writing in a weird exhausted state when everything felt heavy, and that would help me silence my internal editor.
But over the last year I’ve been trying to get enough sleep as part of my plan to live past 50, so today, one of the first trance-days in months, I feel utterly useless. It’s weird.
Let’s start with Empathy. Everyone has been having a laugh at the Forbes writer who put together the “If I was a small black child” column. It was dumb, thoughtless, and actively harmful. Obvs.
But you can rely on Ta Nehisi Coates to talk about this stuff in the best possible way. One, Two. That second link contains links to a pair of Megan McArdle articles that are also invaluable. Excellent reading.
As for me, I was a total goof off in school–smart but continually bored and prone to do stupid stuff to impress my friends (like any teenage boy). There were whole years that went by when pretty much every day I did something that could have gotten me jail time.
And no, I didn’t want to work hard. I wanted to play rpgs, get high, smash stuff, throw a carpet over barbed wire so we could swim at the pool after it closed, etc, etc.
So it’s easy to say: “If I were a…” and then imagine the path you would take to success. It’s much harder to look back at your own self and realize what a lazy screw up you were, and admit that a more difficult environment would have defeated me.
Next is stock art, which is what I need right now. I have a sword and sorcery novelette almost completely ready to publish. All I need at this point is a decent(ish) stock image for the cover. Hard part? Finding something I think is decent.
Anyway, I plan to release this particular story only through my website. Why?
Let’s move on to “Eye glasses.” My son needs them. Not just one pair, either. He needs a reading pair and a non-reading pair. Add to that the sad fact that my landlord mailed me a little something–no, it wasn’t a Christmas card. It was a notice of rent increase.
Yay! Rent increase notice right before the holiday (but not so soon before that we could budget it into our spending.
It’s not a big increase and our rent is already very reasonable. It’s just hard timing and I hope enough people will want to buy this short story that we can cushion this blow. More about the story later.
Next: you know how public school teachers will sometimes show movies in class? Guess what! His homeschool family has found an excuse for the extended editions of LOTR! Starting tonight. More on that later, too.
Finally, booze. I just bought the smallest non-airplane-sized bottle of Jack Daniels I could get. Why? Well, I don’t drink like I used to (what with the kid-having and the belly-reducing and all) but I do love egg nog. LURRRVE egg nog. And it just doesn’t seem right without a little bourbon.
Plus, I couldn’t resist that cheap German spiced wine. I actually bought two bottles of it. You know the one I mean? You warm it on the stove and drink it until you’re loopy? I don’t care if it’s crap. I love it. And did I mention I only bought two bottles? That’s some self-control right there. (Tangentially related, the store only had two bottles left).
And that’s all for today. I was supposed to write 2500 words on A Blessing of Monsters today, but after all those revisions I only managed 1500. Oh well. There’s always tomorrow.
For the last few months, spam has gotten worse and worse on this blog. It’s at the point where I’m spending way too much of my day looking through the spam trap and cancelling out crap that got through.
So I’m turning off comments for a while. You can still talk to me on LiveJournal, Twitter, or on some other site, and my email address is in my bio post (if you really have to).
With luck I’ll be able to turn them back on again in the future. Sorry folks.
I’m going to link to this through the main page on my blog and make it an “evergreen” post, but it’s not going to be what you might think.
One issue I hear from readers (and other writers) is that someone will really enjoy a new series but miss the new books when they come out. (This happens to really well-known writers, too, and I’m talking about big names you might not expect.) Maybe it’s because so many books are released now? Maybe it’s that so many people buy online that they spend less time browsing shelves?
I don’t know. I talk about this sort of thing on my blog, but I also put all sorts of other stuff there, too, and not everyone is interested in all that shit. So do I rely on readers’ willingness to follow my blog when all they care about is book news? Do I rely on the odd “Whatever happened to…?” moments that prompt someone to look me up?
I don’t think so. Here’s my plan: I’ve set up an email newsletter. It only goes out when I have new work available. It’s not monthly. It’s not quarterly. I won’t put in pictures of cats or recipes or anecdotes about my life. You can get that here (except the cats). This is only to let you know when I have something new out.
Should you sign up, you will receive a confirmation email asking you to confirm that you want to receive the newsletter. If you don’t see it, check your spam folder. If you don’t confirm, you won’t be on the list and won’t get notified of new work.
(UGH! The confirmation process is throwing out error messages to folks who sign up. Don’t worry. I’ve checked several and despite the messages, you will be confirmed. I’ll be updating this bit of software at some point, but not right away. Many apologies, and please ignore the error messages.)
Sign up here:
Have a white list for your email account? The address to add to it is newsletter@harryjconnolly.com
UPDATE
As of today, 9/26/22, five Twenty Palaces novels and one novella have been released. I also have a short fiction collection that contains a Twenty Palaces novelette.
I also offer a grimdark epic crime-fantasy, an epic fantasy trilogy, a pacifist urban fantasy, and a game tie-in novel. More details here. Just click on those book covers.
I’m sure I’ll forget to keep that paragraph updated. Sign up for the newsletter if you want to stay up to date.
By the way, this is my 1,500th post on this blog. Perfect.
1. The plugin I was using to sell Twenty Palaces directly from my website wasn’t working correctly, so I’ve switched to something else. This new thing is quite complicated, almost like getting an iPhone just so you can tell the time, but I hope soon to have more fiction to sell from my site, so here it is.
The only problem is that I can’t make the PayPal Sandbox work so I can’t test drive the whole thing first. It’s annoying, but if someone wants to buy Twenty Palaces through the site, would you let me know how it goes? I assume I’ll hear from people who have problems, but… you know. It’d be nice to be sure all this works. (Added later: It doesn’t.)
2. [Deleted]
3. I have the first eight(ish) chapters of A Blessing of Monsters ready to send to my agent. My wife is reading them first to catch anything deeply stupid (not that… ahem… there’s anything… oh hell). She’s not what you’d call a fan of epic fantasy, but she’s giving it a go anyway.
4. And having the new book is helping me deal with self-publishing Twenty Palaces. I can’t say I’m pleased to be releasing it this way. Yeah, I’m glad readers who love the series get this story, too, but it also makes me mourn a bit more.
Which is why it’s good to have something fun and cool to work on.
5. If I can get decent cover art together, I’m going to add short fiction to my online bookstore. Assuming the bookstore is any good.
6. And yes, I’m up late. My son is having a bit of trouble getting to sleep.
I’m finding that about 15% 20% 24% 50%(!!) of the people who order Twenty Palaces are contacting me afterwards to say they haven’t received an automatic email with a download link. What scares me is that there might be folks who are waiting for me to send it manually.
Guys, if you ordered the books and didn’t receive an email in ten or fifteen minutes (and it’s not in your spam trap) contact me directly. I’ll be happy to send you the files directly.
Added later: Damn. I need to find a new sales plugin for WordPress. I’d tried eShop but it was too complex and had too many screens to click through. That’s annoying. However, the one I chose seems to be TOO simple, and it doesn’t work.
Because this is how I want to be spending my writing days… grumble grumble.
Better yet, when I get the PayPal notifications for the sales, I’ll just email the file to you directly the next time I check email.
Later still: I have some errands I absolutely need to run, but I’ll do my best to find another way to sell these tonight, if I can. Has anyone used http://www.e-junkie.com/ ? A reader over on LJ suggested it as a smart alternative.
are the same as last year. Family, talent, readership, friends I don’t see often enough: all of these things are at the center of my life.
But there are so many little things, too. I’m thankful for the other writers who create books, for the sunsets I get to enjoy on clear mornings, for the hummingbirds outside my window, for our local library systems, and for so much more.
Now I’m off to start my day. I hope you folks have a good one.
1) For folks who are still waiting for the Twenty Palace prequel, I have already self-published a number of short stories and novellas. None of them are in the 20P universe, but one is a historical fantasy set near Seattle in 1879, and the rest are second world fantasies. Some have never been published anywhere else: Kindle | Nook
2) Note for folks who visit that B&N page: I’m not the photographer, and I’ve never published scraped text through Hephaestus Books
3) Today is my tenth anniversary. The traditional gift is an ebook, right?
4) Last night we had our anniversary dinner. We ate steaks from Don and Joe’s, roast beets, green beans, and fingerling potatoes, a fancy cheese that I lost the label for and can’t ID right now, a delicious tiny lemon cheesecake from The Confectional, and a bottle of Beringer Cab from 1997 that we bought for our wedding. Thumbs up to all of it.
5) My son read a D&D comic and now wants to play the game. Do I have time to run a fantasy campaign? Shit to the no.