March update: new book!
Hi everybody, it's Jess here with a "Halooo" from New Zealand, and an email full o' news from March. New Zealand is definitely moving into autumn now. Nights are getting cooler and it's harder to get up in the morning! But the last week has been still and sunny here in Wellington, and I've been enjoying mornings like this on my daily walks after dropping "the Mooster" off at the bus stop.
Writing updates
The Dark Offering
My big news is that the short story collection I've been working on, The Dark Offering and other stories has been assembled and published to Amazon! At the moment it's just available on Amazon, but in a couple of months I'll be releasing it "wide" to other ebook distributors.
You can get a copy of it here (Book Linker). If you like it, I'd be so happy if you could leave a review, or feel free to reply to this email and get in touch that way.
Other things in progress
Catnip and Brimstone is ready, I think, to be sent out to someone with fresh eyes. I'm still trying to figure out who! Because I'm new to indie publishing my first impulse is to do "all the things" to shore up my confidence in releasing a good story out into the world. That said, I don't think the story needs a developmental edit, but I do want someone else to give me a fresh opinion on the piece. Funds are relatively tight however, so I don't want to splash cash around if it's not needed. I am definitely keen on engaging a copy editor and perhaps with a piece that's so short (19,000 words) I should keep my editing budget for the follow-up book. Then of course there are covers, which you can really go bananas on. I'm tempted to go with something clean and simple yet eye-catching that isn't going to cost an arm and a leg.
Then there's the story that I'm actually writing right now, with the working title Catmage. I honestly didn't think I would be writing a girl-cat-dark-magic series as my first entry into this pond, but here we are. But I love the concept and characters, and I'm having a lot of fun with it. I'm about 25,000 words into the draft, but I've taken a break to bust out the index cards and sharpie. I'm using these to brainstorm future scenes, but also look at the structure and shape of the story and look at emerging patterns and story arcs. It's a lot of fun, and has got my brain moving in some new and surprising directions.
other news
I took the plunge this month and banished Windows from my life. For now it's an experiment to see how long I can last, but already I'm surprised with how well the Mac and Linux (running Pop_OS) are working together. I also am playing around with Obsidian.md, a "second brain" application that uses markdown files and has some great functionality.
I've tried to organise my documents directory using the Johnny.Decimal system, and it's been great to finally organise my 25+ years of writing into a more coherent and useful structure. There were a few bumps along the way (some things just will not be converted to markdown, for example) and I'll have to figure out how to store everything there. But everything is now automagically being backed up to GitHub, and the experience so far has been excellent. (And probably worth a blog post at some point soon.)
Books & music
Books
This month's been mostly taken up with Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. For some reason it was very slow going for most of the month, and then over the last couple of days I've read two hundred pages. Some things that have struck me:
- a big "no duh!" is how hard these people had it. They are literally eating dough fried in bacon grease for weeks on end, scrounging to get enough money to buy coffee and meat and potatoes.
- Steinbeck's examination of the agricultural industry, the "great owners", and banks is both fascinating and heartbreaking. The portrayal of the cannery owners, who try to push down the cost of crops, so that small farmers can't afford to even harvest things, is brutal. The chapter in which the titular "grapes of wrath" comes up depicts the situation where food is having to be dumped because of all the cost-undercutting (even pigs slaughtered and buried), but the great owners cannot bring themselves to give the dumped food to the hundreds of thousands of migrants who were ejected from the midwest, and who are now starving in California. So they do things like pour kerosine on piles of oranges, to make sure no-one can eat them, or stand guards around a river where they are dumping potatoes, to stop people from gathering them up. Brutal. Brutal.
- Also brutal (promise that's the last time I'll use the word) are the jalopies that people drive around in... but fascinating to read about all of the hacked repair-jobs that people are able to pull off on the side of the road. Someone with mechanical skill could mean the difference between making it across the mountains to California, and going bust before you got there.
Music
Not much to speak of really. This continues to be my playlist of choice.
And oh! If you enjoy indie folk, I'd better make a plug for my sister's (Colette Rivers) new album, Memory Lake. (Spotify link)
blog round-up
March's blog posts include:
- A music festival, and a book cover
- The Dark Offering and other stories
- Tech Dilemmas, Sourdough, Writing Stickiness and On Having Published
- Computering
cool links
Things I've enjoyed this month
- The Dark Side of Wonderland
- Hello, Haruki
- Karen Russell on motherhood and money
- "Don't" by Michael Rosen (YouTube)
- The vampire cat of Nabeshima
Thanks again for subscribing! I'd love to hear from you about anything. Just hit reply, or email jess@jessicanickelsen.com
Until next time, Jess
P.S. I've given myself a real headache with web fonts and formatting; apologies to all if this looks strange!