So, Brian, Where Are Those New Editions?

Life, the saying goes, is what happens while you’re making other plans.

Around this time last year, I was in the early stages of designing and doing a complete overhaul of my web site, a project that took a solid 3+ months. The most repetitively time-gobbling part of it was building a separate page for all the books. Each novel, each collection, each novella published as a standalone project.

While most of these works are available in one form or another, a handful have disappeared from the market. Reasons vary, but the result is the same: Readers who want ’em can’t get at ’em. Not at the click of a button, at least.

With some of these works, I’ve fixed a lot of you up in private transactions, and have especially enjoyed the interactions with people who probably would never have otherwise gotten in touch. But, really, I’ve wanted to restore them to availability like any other normal releases, so you don’t have these extra steps in the way.

Hence the intention of doing self-published releases for them. Last winter, this seemed like a good project for 2023, to work on alongside (1) the current novel-in-progress, and (2) the ongoing wait for Cemetery Dance Publications to issue Black Hole Sundown. Thus the sticky-note graphics slapped on the relevant book pages in question: New edition coming in 2023.

Well, shitballs. Time to update the sticky-notes.

Sometimes there are years that we’re grimly happy to see drop off the calendar and land in the mud as we slog on, trample them under, and leave them behind.

For me, it didn’t take long for 2023 to turn into one of them. It’s not been without high points, but my overall summary is that it’s been a year of setbacks, sorrows, and grieving — all the sort of distractions you don’t want. One I covered here, because I really had to get that out of my system. Others remain privately in the background.

Stretches like this are … depleting. They become phases defined by contraction rather than expansion. Priorities realign; non-essentials slough away. Things we cared about earlier, that lit us up from the inside, no longer seem important, or even to matter at all.

They can again. But first you have to get yourself on the other side of the valley.

It’s different for those who have some sort of team around them, delegatees who can pick up the slack and keep the conveyor belt moving. But there’s no team here. It’s just me, same as it’s always been, at this battleship of a desk.