Dear Readers,
Welcome to the November newsletter.
I have been trying to write this opening for three days, which is ridiculous, because the news is good.
I think that is precisely the problem. I have had a great deal of practice announcing disasters. I have almost none at announcing the other thing.
So I will simply say it.
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📕 Thornbreaker Is Out
My first self-published book is live on Amazon.
Thornbreaker, Book One of The Apocalypse Is Just Another System.
It is available in paperback, as an eBook, and through Kindle Select.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HRMJ8BKB
This is the project I have been quietly working on in the background for the past year. Not instead of anything. Alongside everything, in the gaps, at hours I would not recommend to anyone.
Book Two is already finished and will follow soon.
I would be enormously grateful if you took a look. And if you read it and have thoughts — including unflattering ones — I would like to hear them. You will see shortly why.
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💛 This Part Is For You
I want to be clear about something, because it matters and I do not want it lost between the announcements.
A year ago, I was not an author who had not yet published.
I was a woman who wanted to write and was too frightened to try.
That is the honest version. I had the stories. I had had them for years. What I did not have was any evidence that anyone would want them, and it is remarkably easy to keep a dream safe by never testing it.
Then I started posting, and you turned up.
You read. You commented. You theorised wildly and occasionally correctly. You told me when something worked. You also told me when something did not — when the pacing sagged, when a scene was missing, when I had confidently written the same word four times in one paragraph and noticed none of them.
I will admit the criticism was not always comfortable. It was, without exception, the most useful thing I received.
I am a better writer than I was twelve months ago, and that is not modesty or marketing. It is simply what happened when several thousand people read my work carefully and refused to be polite about it.
Thornbreaker exists because of that year. I would not have had the nerve otherwise.
I am now one genuine step closer to writing full time, which is a sentence I have wanted to type for a very long while.
Thank you. All of you. The daily commenters and the silent lurkers alike.
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📚 The Webnovel Stories — An Honest Update
Some practical news, delivered plainly, because you have always been given the truth here.
Earnings on Webnovel have dropped drastically. Not gently. Not gradually. They simply fell off a cliff, and no amount of staring at the numbers has made them come back.
So let me say the important part first:
Weaves of Ashes and Rebirth of the Technomage are both being finished.
That is not in question. Those stories have endings; you have waited for them, and you will get them. Money was never the reason I started writing either of them, and it is not going to be the reason I stop.
What has changed is Beastkin Chronicles.
I will be taking The Exiled Princess down.
Not because it failed, and not because I lost faith in it. Quite the opposite. Aeryn's story was always bigger than the shape I gave it, and the more I wrote, the more obvious it became that I had compressed something into one book that wanted to be a series.
Rather than carry on building on a foundation I already know is wrong, I would rather take it apart and do it properly.
So Beastkin Chronicles will return, rebuilt and considerably more ambitious, once The Apocalypse Is Just Another System is finished.
Aeryn is not pleased about the wait. She has made this clear. She will cope.
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🎁 Reader Giveaway
ABDHYLEKWHZNFP3ZB
The code can be redeemed by:
◇ 10 readers ◇ 10 FP per reader
First come, first served. Luck decides, as always.
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🌞 A Brief Seasonal Complaint
In September I told you how delighted I was that spring had arrived.
I would like to formally withdraw that statement.
The thermostat has been located again, and whoever is operating it has no sense of moderation whatsoever. We have gone from "functional" to "surface of a star" in roughly eight weeks.
To my readers in the North, heading into the cold: I was wrong. We were all wrong. There is no correct temperature. There is only a rotating selection of wrong ones.
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🐾 The Cat & Puppy Chaos Report
Yes. The section has been renamed.
No, I did not agree to this.
I am seriously contemplating a sign for the front door. Large. Unambiguous. Possibly illuminated.
NO MORE PETS.
Last month my daughter-in-law went to visit her family.
She came home with a puppy.
I would like to remind you that this is the same woman who, some months ago, arrived with two rescue kittens on the entirely accurate assumption that I am incapable of saying no. She has now tested that assumption twice and gone two for two.
Her name is Akasha. The puppy, not my daughter-in-law.
🖤 Akasha — The Smallest Disaster
We had her for three days before she fell ill.
The diagnosis was parvo.
For anyone who has not encountered it: it is exactly as serious as the vet's face suggested. Akasha spent nearly two weeks in hospital, fighting for her life, and there were several days where we were told quite frankly not to assume anything.
She made it.
She is, it turns out, an extremely tough little cookie, and she has absolutely no idea how close a thing it was.
Our wallets are considerably lighter. I have decided not to think about this too closely, and would ask the same of my bank.
She came home as skin and bones.
She has since corrected this with tremendous enthusiasm and is now a round little black ball with legs, moving at speed, in whichever direction is least convenient.
She has also made a discovery that has reshaped the entire household.
Cat tails are the greatest toy ever invented.
The cats do not share this view.
Siren has responded with the frozen dignity of a woman who has been seated next to someone unsuitable at dinner. Archie has concluded that his territory now requires a far more aggressive patrol schedule. Hades, predictably, has not reacted at all, on the grounds that Akasha is not food and therefore not his department.
Nimbus, naturally, thinks she is wonderful.
Of course she does. Nimbus watched an armed home invasion like it was theatre. A puppy is well within her tolerances.
The house is louder, hairier, and more chaotic than it has ever been.
Hence the sign.
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💭 Final Thoughts
A year ago I was dreaming about this. This month I held a paperback with my name on it.
That happened because people read my work and kept showing up. There is no version of this where I did it alone, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
Six cats, one puppy, two ongoing serials, one published book, one in progress, and a series waiting to be rebuilt properly.
It is far more than I ought to be carrying.
I would not swap any of it.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for commenting, theorising, and continuing to catch the mistakes I remain convinced I no longer make.
The story continues. It always continues.
May your November be filled with good books, warm drinks or cold ones depending on your hemisphere, and significantly fewer veterinary emergencies than mine.
With love,
Tracy