( Complying in advance, no. Fretting in advance, yes... ) At first I only heard of people embedding Payhip into their own personal website, which is itself a subscription, but when I looked closer I found you don't have to do it that way; you can just build a storefront right on Payhip's own website.

So I did!

I actually really like how clean and simple the page turned out. And, at least in theory, I pocket more of the royalties than using the D2D --> platform pipeline. The payment processors take $0.30 per transaction, which is 10% of my cheapest books, and then a 3% fee, and then Payhip pockets 5%, for a total cut of 18%. Compared to the platforms taking 30% and D2D taking 10% for a total cut of 40% (85% for print-on-demand), that's pretty good! 

I've updated my sticky posts for Low Dusk (as the most recent release), and the master list of all my ebooks and audiobooks, to put the Payhip link first. In the process I made the blog look a little better on mobile, and made the master list look a lot better. 

I'm not expecting to make a lot of sales this way; most people are very attached to whatever store platform connects directly to their ereader or ereader app. But it feels good to have it set up, as an additional way for folks to buy my books and as a kind of - archive, almost. An archive people can buy copies from. A backup storefront separated from a supply chain that's looking uncomfortably vulnerable these days.

(Don't worry, I also have other backups that aren't stores! 3 devices of my own and a Nextcloud in Denmark. The great thing about text is it's so data-light I can fit tiny stashes anywhere and everywhere. I also have one print-on-demand omnibus and will acquire another when it exists.)

I know this isn't very important or meaningful in the broad scheme of things. Maintaining reader access to 4 (for now) self-published smutty novels is about as impactful as turning a single box of cereal upside-down in the grocery store to signal to other shoppers that it's made in the USA. But it's still something I can do. It has more impact than not turning the box. My own little act of resistance, within my own little scope of power. So, I persist.

I am once again taking part in a D2D/Smashwords sale. This time I've returned to my previous strategy of dropping my price all the way to free, with the code SW100 at checkout. Go here now!




This is part of a much larger holiday sale with many more authors participating, often making their books free as well. Find more free books here!



These prices will be in effect until January 1, 2025. Once again, you can make an indie author's day by providing ratings, reviews, and mentions on your own social accounts.

I'm pleased to announce all my books are 25% off for the whole month of July at Smashwords. There are many other authors taking part in the sale at various discount levels, including all the way down to free, so check it out! My .epub files are DRM-free so it's a simple process to load them into whatever reader app you like to use. And of course, if you prefer to keep things even simpler they're still available at their regular prices on all the other platforms found here.
Every year I take my children to stay with their grandparents and cousins for all of July. They love it, and I love knowing they're watched over and having fun and truly bonding with their cousins. I never spent enough time with my own cousins to get past "friendly guest" status with each other; we were just too far apart geographically and our respective parents couldn't put in the time.

This also enables me to spend a little time rattling around the ancestral home (such as it is; it's only this year that they've lived as long in town as they did on the farm) before I have to go home and get back to work. I love reconnecting with my parents and their dogs, my sister and her kids, and those of my high-school friends who still remain in our hometown and in touch with me.

I wouldn't qualify for an ADHD diagnosis, but I do have a shiny collection of subtraits, and one of them is  lack of "friendship decay:" if someone was a close friend, I will still feel exactly as excited to see them as the last time, even if the last time was years and years ago. (Although I realized the other day that quite a few friendly acquaintances don't make the cut, and now I can just barely summon memories of their faces but not even remotely their names.) This means I can truly enjoy even such limited contact as we can all manage as adults. One of the social skills I benefit greatly from as an adult is being able to jump into Catchup Mode and then let our brief time together end with a modicum of grace.

When I write fanfic I tend to write short stories, most often in the 5-20k word range, with some shorts and a few stories that are quite a bit longer. I got very used to the convenient shorthand of an established canon; when I name a character or a setting or any other canon element, all I have to do is name it and all the readers know what I mean. Not so with original work! I told myself that proper worldbuilding, taking the time to describe elements as my POV characters encountered them, would probably find me hitting respectable novel length without having to do much else to my storytelling. And I was right! Low Dawn and High Dusk both clocked in at just over 60,000 words. Now that I look again, conventional novel spans are 70-90k for romance and 70-120k for sci-fi.

(I got feedback that Low Dawn's ending especially felt a bit abrupt, and looking back I tend to agree. I'm slightly tempted to go back and pad it out a bit, but that way lies madness. Taking advantage of the always-editable digital format to push tiny typo fixes like patches to a game is one thing, but truly changing a book feels like quite another - not just in the "perfect is the enemy of good" sense, but also because making substantial changes to the content of a published work feels like a betrayal of the social contract between storyteller and reader. They can be short, punchy early novels. It's fine. 60k and change isn't that far under 70k. It's fine.)

I'm going to choose to take comfort in the fact that thus far, the first two books in the Secrets of Sleipnir series have actually been slightly under the typical wordcount for their genre conventions... because I have a feeling that is decidedly not going to be the case for book 3, High Dawn. It's at 43k words so far and I have a LOT more ground I want to cover before I call it done. Truth be told, for both of the last books I had it in my mind that "a good length" to wrap things up at was 60k, and so once I cleared 40k and especially as I approached 50k, I was starting to think about finding an endpoint - and I've been feeling a little bit dismayed that the endpoint I want for book 3 is still quite far away, especially if I write as much banging as I want along the way (which of course I'm going to do!)

At one point I thought Secrets of Sleipnir was going to be a trilogy. Not so! At the rate I seem to enjoy progressing the plot we are definitely in for at least 4 books total, possibly more. I've had to expand my naming scheme to encompass additional Sleipnirian times of day, and while the color-wheel progression of the first two covers' themes was not intentional, I've taken it as my inspiration going forward, so get ready for my favorite fonts in many more pastel tertiary colors! (I enjoy making my own covers so much more than I thought I would. I'll still pay for professional ones someday if I ever sell enough books, but for now I'm absolutely having fun.)

In writing news that isn't about my books, I've gotten into a pretty good groove with journalling - always in cursive, and I finally gave into my growing urge to try fountain pens and let some savvy friends steer me towards a 12-pack of Jinhao Mako "shark pens" which I'm told are, quote, "bafflingly high-quality for the price." They come on a slow boat from China so watch this page for picspam in May!

Happy Read an Ebook Week! I'm taking part in a Smashwords promotion during which all my books are 100% off from March 3 to March 9.

Low Dawn free here
High Dusk free here

The entire Smashworks sale at large

I didn't think I would use the Mastodon account much, but actually I do! I never got into Twitter, but the microblogging simplicity really is kind of fun. I'll see about getting a link onto my Dreamwidth page the next time I'm at a computer. (Did you know there's a mobile-friendly DW posting form? https://www.dreamwidth.org/mobile/post )

But I promised an update! I've COMPLETED the first draft of book 2 of Secrets of Sleipnir: High Dusk! I'm editing it now, and then I have a cover ready to go so there's only (oh god) writing a blurb and it'll be out there in the world! I'm so excited you guys aaahhhhhh

I bet if I asked you to take a wild guess who the oldest character in Low Dawn is, you wouldn't pick Maunat, but it's true: she might be the second-youngest character on the page, but she's the cast member who's been with me the longest. She was born on a night shift in the ER in 2011, when I was taking care of a young person who was Going Through Some Shit, including but far from limited to Gender and Sexuality Shit. She (at least, she went by she at the time) found it deeply, profoundly meaningful that so many ER nurses were women with short hair. Which seems like a low GNC bar to clear, in 2011! But there it was. I found myself thinking about a 'girl prince' of sorts, someone who swam against the current regarding her gender role without necessarily wanting to do anything about her gender identity. Which, again, there are many characters like that... but this was the character who rode the wave of that interaction, knocked on my brain-door, moved in, was joined in short order by her cute femme boyfriend, and never left, so I guess it's fair to say this one is mine.

I guess if I had to sum up Maunat and Bhimmi, I would call them my love letter to kids who've been told they would "mAkE mOrE sEnSe" if they were trans or in some other way queer. Even if that turns out to be true*, what a thing to tell a young person! That the point of who they are is to be easy for other people to understand? To fit neatly into the paradigms of others? What the fuck! Telling every feminine person that they must be a woman and/or fuck men, and every masculine person that they must be a man and/or fuck women, is not the progressive take you think it is.

*I guess, technically, it did turn out to be true for Maunat and Bhimmi: based on their histories they both qualify as bisexual, so now I also get to feel fighty about the fact that even as a cis woman and cis man becoming a monogamous married babymaking couple, they are both still bisexual (and would be members of the queer community if they were real people who existed on Earth in 2023, as opposed to fictional exoplanetary settlers in the 4200s whose main connection to Old Earth is history books).

Ironically, they finally made it onto the page in a novel too explicit to ever, ever find its way to someone as young as the person who first inspired their creation. Whoops! And I feel so protective and parental towards them that they only made it onto the page under the sheltering wings of their surrogate uncle(s). (Yes, I can feel parental towards fictional characters AND write them getting their junk out early and often. All my fanfic OTPs are my sons, including the men twice or twenty times my age. I don't make the rules.) But I'm choosing to roll with the principle that written is better than unwritten. They deserve to be known and enjoyed by more people than me, even if 'more people' is (*checks sales*)... four more people XD

With the Amazon link live, I'd say Low Dawn is now fully launched, to the tiniest amount of fanfare imaginable on two very private Discord servers XD but hey! I wrote and published a whole-ass book! It was actually a ton of fun and I'm hard at work on the next one! Maybe someday there will be enough of them to be worth spending a few bucks to promote them for real!