I have returned! With the conclusion of the spring semester, and the onset of summer fast approaching, I have some super exciting news. For today, I have two big things to share, and my blog’s weekly schedule will resume this Monday, starting off with a May update. Fun stuff.

First things first, I’ve self published my first book. It’s a short story anthology titled Nacre Then’s Beginnings. You can find it on Amazon for $7.99! “Why did this happen so suddenly when I’ve been working on other projects?” you may ask. Well, I was going through the writers group edits for my stuff, incorporating changes and setting aside copies that had no notes on them. I don’t go through this process often, mind you. This was several hundred sheets of paper I was going through looking for notes, and some stories were given to my group several months ago. By the time I went through everything, I had lots of copies that were left blank, and it seemed a shame to throw them away.

I made a post on Facebook about it, asking if anyone wanted some hard copies of my stuff. I was met with way more requests than I had anticipated, so it got me thinking. A lot of the people that wanted to read my things don’t use the computer very often, or simply wouldn’t know where to look if they did want to read my work. I thought it would be a great idea to make an easy way to access my work physically, and this meant self-publishing.

Putting this all together wasn’t really a big task. In fact I decided to put a lot of my older works into this anthology in case I decide to make this a more regular thing. After throwing in a preface, some author notes, and cleaning up the stories a bit, I went to CreateSpace, an online formatting service, and got it officially published for free. Easy peasy. I won’t get into how long it actually took, though. Start to finish, formatting the manuscript and making small edits took me almost ten hours of work. I partially blame the free service for that, but I can’t complain about free things.

My plans for this book are pretty simple. This isn’t my “debut” novel. A lot of it contains very dated and non-canon works. As a result, I’m not advertising it (much). I’m just going to inform friends and family (and interested parties) that it exists, and anyone that’s interested will be satisfied. As for future publications, that’s probably a long way’s off. I do want my first real work to be a novel, after all, and I haven’t even written anything suitable just yet. Maybe someday sooner than later, though.

In other news, I had plans to move to San Fransisco for the summer. I thought I had a job opportunity over there, and I thought it would be cool to get out of the house for a while. I planned on getting some quality reading and writing in, being away from my computer and video games, so while I would have had a full time job, my intent was that my free time would be spent much more productively.

But as it turns out, the job I thought I was applicable for wasn’t. So if you’re one of the people who I told this to, it turns out I’m staying. I’m not upset about it. Technically, it lends itself to the possibility of me being more productive, since I’ll have all day to work on reading and writing more. In practice though, we’ll see how that turns out.

I’ll outline my plans for this summer more thoroughly Monday, when I give my May update. I’ll give you a hint, though: I’ve got a cool idea for a book that involves a board game and gods.