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Back to blogging with the RIB (Review of Interesting Books).

I found this book on my e-reader. I can’t tell you how or when I acquired it, but it was likely part of some promotion or special deal. Despite acquiring a small mountain of these books, I curate the books I decide to read. I don’t enjoy a book, or if it fails to grab me after the first few chapters, I move on.

But this book made the cut.

The DeChance Chronicles Omnibus is a set of four books by David Niall Wilson, who I’m not familiar with otherwise but has written many books, including Star Trek tie-ins, and who’s won the Bram Stoker Award for horror writing.

In the introduction, Wilson grabbed my attention with a reference to the old White Wolf roleplaying game company, whose urban fantasy roleplaying games like Vampire: The Masquerade, Mage: The Ascension, and Werewolf: The Apocalypse solidified my love of urban fantasy in the 1990s and 2000s. The DeChance Chronicles are about Donovan DeChance, a wizard in the fictional American city of San Valencez, and some books were initially proposed as World of Darkness tie-ins.

This volume contains the first four books and some short pieces. I really enjoyed these; I wouldn’t say that the books are especially ‘gamey’, but rather solid and well-written urban fantasy adventures. (In some old D&D tie-in novels, you could practically hear the click of dice as the characters did things!)

DeChance is a refined, gentlemanly, academic wizard. He’s not especially snarky or witty like Dresden, but enjoys fine dining and wine, and has a stable, healthy romance with his intriguing wizardly girlfriend, Amethyst. DeChance has a large sanctum filled with books and occult paraphernalia. He’s well connected with the local occult community and has a cat familiar, Cleo, an Egyptian Mau breed. Much to Cleo’s consternation, DeChance later picks up a scruffy raven familiar as well. (Cleo doesn’t talk but communicates with her wizard through mental impressions and cat-like mannerisms.)

The first book, Heart of the Dragon, is about some dragons possessing the members of a local gang. When artist Salvatore paints these dragons, he empowers the gang members and and fuels an occult feud between the different gangs. DeChance’s involvement here is a bit more peripheral than the later books, but he does get involved to stop a powerful summoning. I enjoyed DeChance’s visits to Club Chaos, the typical urban fantasy nightclub where deals are made and many creatures are encountered. (We had a lot of those special nightclubs in our old Vampire games!)

The Vintage Soul is centered on DeChance’s relationship with a group of vampires. In this world, vampires can flavour wine with blood and store it for a long time. At a vampire gathering, a powerful female vampire is kidnapped, and her partner, the city’s vampire ‘prince’, Johndrow, hires DeChance to get her back. This case intersects with the theft of a tome from DeChance’s library. The culprit is a wizard who plants to sacrifice the kidnapped vampire to fuel an immortality spell. Of the four books, this was the closest to the World of Darkness mythos (in fact, this was originally proposed as a World of Darkness novel).

My Soul to Keep explores DeChance’s origin story in the wild west, where as a boy he was apprenticed to the drunken hedge wizard, ‘Dr. Hugo Rathman, Healer, Mystic, and Clairvoyant’ (as painted on the side of his wagon). Rathman moves from town to town, trying to stay ahead of a demon after his soul. Donovan suffers abuse from his mentor, while trying to learn magic from books. One day, the demon finally catches up, and DeChance has a chance to escape. Wilson clearly enjoyed writing the old west setting, and there’s a particular vibrancy that shone through the descriptions.

The last book in the collection, Kali's Tale, is linked to characters from The Vintage Soul, about a vampire, Kali, who wants revenge on the man who made her a vampire. As requested by the vampire prince, DeChance chaperones Kali, and a group of her fellow young vampires on her journey. While the setting around the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina is quite evocative, one moment irked me: when DeChance saved his little vampire charges from the ghost of an old blues musician who was simply protecting his turf from the bloodsuckers!

Other stories are linked to Wilson’s Great Dismal Swamp setting, about a mad preacher, and the eccentric con man and occult investigator Cletus J Diggs, a fun and lively character.

What made these stories work are the evocative, well-detailed characters, and sense of place, especially around the North Carolina scenes, where Wilson lives. Wilson sometimes writes in the character’s head, and sometimes as though we’re behind a camera, watching the character. This is a style taken from some mystery novels, which gives a certain secrecy to the character’s actions; I didn’t find it limiting at all. Other things of interest are the snippets of lore as Wilson slowly builds the mythology of his world, such as that vampire banes are variable, and are based on what they feared when they were alive. For example, the mad alchemist vampire in the fourth book is repelled by dogwood rather than a crucifix.

I enjoyed my time in DeChance’s world and would recommend this volume.

Once a woman told me a terrible story about how she lost everything. I was transfixed, and my heart hammered as she told me how she had to rebuild her life, get special medical care for her daughter, had to rebuild her precious vinyl record collections. I was hooked.

Then she tried to sell me insurance.

A good story can sell something, catch someone’s attention, by making it personal and real. Why do we need to do that?

Well, everything nowadays can be faked easily. Chatbots can churn out novels easily—even this year’s Nanowrimo, something which evokes long hours in cafes after work in me—has allowed writers to use them. So this pushes a load on authors to be more ‘real’ and ‘authentic’, which means being able to tell you stories that a chatbot wouldn’t. A lot of marketing and social media advice is ‘be yourself’. Be real, be authentic!

A new publishing article told me about story-based marketing. It goes: here’s my tragic or meaningful story told entertainingly + buy my thing! Is this the new hotness? Well, salespeople have been around for ages. When I thought back to when I was house hunting, I can’t remember individual realtors, but I remember their stories! See, one house was owned by an old man, who passed away and left to his heirs, who fought in courts for their father’s legacy but they went broke, and now it’s owned by a collection agency who just want to get rid of the thing which is why the price is so good!

How can you tell a story about you to sell your book?

Do you need to?

I’ve spent most of the year working on Book #3 which is now with the line editor. Phew, it’s the best, longest and most complicated thing I’ve written yet! What I want to articulate is that feeling of relief after (mostly) finishing a long project. Focusing on this one project in my spare time, excluding lots of other things I enjoy doing. Getting sad when people talk about how cool Baldur’s Gate 3 because I’ve missed all that getting this novel done. Really wanting to see this book done but always with more work to do on it, and trying to remember why I started this in the first place… And then it reaches a stage gate and I can relax. I know a ‘weight off my shoulders’ is a bit of a metaphor, but that’s what it feels like. It’s nice to have this moment to breathe and relax, a space where there are no pressing commitments.

And what do I want to do? Write something else! Videogaming might have to be put off a bit longer…

What do you feel like when you finish some momentous task? Do you want a break, or want to start the next big thing?

I’ve long been searching for the magic productivity bullet. Diaries, journals, kanban boards. Different configurations of planners and bullet journals. The problem is, these things can be ignored. To manage anxiety, I rely on CBT techniques which involve making lists, except sometimes I get too anxious to make a list, and if the list in a software thing, I can easily ignore it. Also, as you can imagine, this makes things worse!

If it’s a book, less so. I started with a nice paper diary this year, but I’d make a list, and time would march forward, and things wouldn’t be done and I couldn’t bring myself to face that the last list I wrote was two weeks ago.

Usually, I keep stuff in my head, and do full steam ahead on that, with other urgent things lurking in the background like lurking monstrous tentacles.

I’m trying to get a book out this year, in record time, but while I’m focused on editing, there’s other stuff I need to prep for. Covers, promotional bling…. Stuff that should be done as early as possible, but I don’t want to think about. Time to make a list, and yet if I use a diary, I get anxious when I see how few weeks are left. Why is project management easy at work, and yet hard to bring into my personal space?

But since I also have a streak of ruthless pragmatism, so it’s time to bring out the paper diary again. Except, this time, I’ve resurrected one of my old bullet journals. No dates, months, just a list of things that can be crossed off. The journal is a physical artefact, so I’m less likely to ignore it as an app. Got a lot to get done over the next few months, and it’s important I stay on top of things leading up to getting Book 3 done….

Entropy infects all systems. Things wear down, and either collapse or shake apart into new configurations.

Fantasy worlds are divided into a series of ages, where myths are split apart from legends and history. They might look like this Middle-Earth inspired history (at least my high school D&D campaign world did):

First Age - Gods walk the earth, or make the world. Evil gods are dealt with or bound.
Second Age - The great civilizations flourish, items of remarkable power of crafted and legendary battles occur. Famous institutions like kingdoms, and bloodlines are established.
Third Age - Not as epic, as the first or second age. The hero grows up on a farm or distant location and learns about the age of magic. Perhaps they’ll inherit a sword or learn lost secrets. There are ruins everywhere. Some dark threat left over from the second age will return and be dealt with. Perhaps the hero will reconnect with one of the elite institutions established in the second age.
Fourth Age - The age of magic ends, and everything changes. Elves sail away, gods leave the world, and hand it over to people, who, live in wisdom and peace and tell stories about the good old days to the kids.

This is also a metaphor for human life. The first age is childhood when you believe impossible things and dragons, the second age is when you’re young, fighting for your passions, the third age is when you get your job and learn how the systems of the world work. And the fourth age is when you’re paying off the mortgage, and you don’t have time to play D&D anymore or read books, but you’ve got fond memories of those days and will tell your bored family members about the good old days.

Let’s cut to 2020, COVID era. I’m in the fourth age of my life. During lockdown, I work through a bunch of intense personal stuff. One of them is that my epic fantasy novel series is doomed not to be finished in its current state—it’s lost in a muddle of endless rewrites. The book had lots of POVs, good character work and world building, but not much of a plot apart from an expedition across a continent. Time to recognize that it would never be done. I’ll never be Brandon Sanderson. (At least with that book.)

I get out my shotgun, place the barrel against the malformed, beating dreams of finishing that series, and pull the trigger.

Time to reboot. Start something else. I need to create I can finish. Shorter, less epic. Except, being one of those eternal gamemaster types, I can’t tell stories without a world.

Yeah, I could build any world I want and—my subconscious wants to design a setting in a fantasy world’s fourth age. When I was younger, the concept of the fourth age horrified me. Who’d want to tell stories in a world where the magic went away, and everything was about modern life, office workers and cars?

Now, I find that interesting. Because the past is a magical one, right? How would that influence the modern day? And how did the magic leave the world? What if something went wrong with the final epic battle between light and darkness? What if losing magic was a last ditch strike? A nuclear option. Not a gentle fading of magic like in Middle-Earth—a planned obsolescence—but a catastrophe mess that broke the world.

And what if magic survived, but became hidden, messy and complicated?

So that’s the key idea I had when designing my world. Modern, yet with a hidden layer of magic.

Now to figure out what that looked like. And what sort of stories would it drive?

How about you—did you build your world by thinking about this sort of thing to start with (themes) or did you start with some other idea? Or even a sense of a character or a vision of a scene? (I love the story by CS Lewis how his initial idea for Narnia was simply a mental picture of Lucy and Mr. Tumnus walking arm-in-arm through a snowy wood…)

So it’s important to reflect and ponder, at least for the first few days of the new year!

In 2022, I became a self-published author, with one book. I started back in 2020, so this is like a two year recap/reflection.

The Dramatic Origin Story

It was 2020. I was re-writing the Epic Fantasy Novel (about five years in development) and got frustrated when I’d finished it and the structure was pudding. It was a bunch of novellas bolted together. COVID was everywhere, and I was trapped in my house. So I joined a year long writing, online course. It was in the UK, I’m in Australia, so lots of getting up at 4am to talk to people or waiting for the replays of courses rather than joining in them.

Anyway, one thing the course guys said was to focus on the bestselling subgenre in your genre. For me, this was urban fantasy rather than epic fantasy. Also, because the genre draws a lot from detective stories, I could do a complete story in one book! And the main character could have another adventure in the next book!

I also attended WorldCon 2020 in my bedroom. At the urban fantasy panel, a cool idea for a setting struck me—what if it was a world similar to ours with cars and technology but not our Earth? And what if the past was an epic fantasy setting? And in the modern age, what if people thought that their past was folklore? But magic was still there, if you knew where to look.

Projects

In 2020, I wrote the first novel in the setting. And got it finished, thanks to the online writing course. I had a draft, but it wasn’t ready for release. Lots of getting stuck in the middle, and figuring out to make the main relationship ‘work’ between the two characters. It’s not a romance–it’s more of a thriller, but that relationship needed to click or the main character’s motivations wouldn’t make sense.

So, as a side project, I wrote a novella featuring a side character from the novel, which became ‘Final Night’. I also wrote a short story per month for my mailing list and wrote all of my world building for the setting as a tabletop roleplaying game.

Problems

The novel took longer to develop than expected! In fact, I took it through two more writing courses (I think I got addicted to courses during COVID) and I still think it needs another draft.
Because of the above, I launched the finished novella as an ongoing series, which meant dropping the novel and completing the new series based around Lukie, the undead teen detective from the novella. This was a bit of rework and rescheduling things.
My best short stories (current reader magnet) don’t link into the current series I’m working on.
I’m still working out what comparison authors to use for marketing the series.

Notes for next series

Finish at least the second book in the series, and have an idea for the overall size of the series.
Have the reader magnet that links into the main series ready when the first book is launched.

Business Approach

I realised I’d be a ‘slow’ author, and wouldn’t be able to keep up the book-a-month or rapid release schedule that the 20Books250k group focuses on. That’s all based around the KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited platform on Amazon. So I’d release wide instead. I went direct with Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble and did the rest via Draft2Digital. I’ve only made about $10 from the release so far from vendors (more from hand selling to people at conventions and my book launch). I’m not too fussed, as my plan is to build a backlist and market that when I’ve got the box set ready.

Uploading to all sites was relatively painless. However, because I kept tweaking my backmatter, I’d have to login and reload my book multiple times. Next time, my final upload will be final.

Marketing

I started a mailing list, and wrote a short story a month to entertain people while I worked through things. I decide to have a character host the newsletter, as it makes it more fun for me to write, so I’m still working out a balance between microfiction/and real-life author updates.

Final Feedback

Final Night had a lot of work on it – lots of beta reading, developmental editing by the amazing Angela Slatter, more editing by Nef House Publishing…. And I thought it sparkled and gleamed like a fresh-cut gem!

I entered Final Night in the StoryGraph beta giveaway program. I got lots of reviews! Amazing! However, they were mixed. A few two stars, lots of threes and a few fours. After brooding for long hours on top of a skyscraper like Batman, I read the critical reviews. I thought people would have issues with the world building (It’s a modern world with an epic fantasy past!) but no one’s actually complained about that. Instead, the main takeaways were that readers thought the pace was too fast, and wanted more character development or digging into the side characters. I’ve made notes for Book 2—and I’m juggling the character development with the thriller pacing.

Goals

Long-term goal – build my author backlist. So write more books, and worry about ads and things later.

For 2023 – Finish the next two books in the Revenant Records series.
Complete twelve issues of the monthly newsletter.
When I finish my current series/short fiction backlog for the newsletter, submit at least three stories to magazines.
Write a proper Lukie-focused short as a reader magnet for the current series, and a second short for readers who’ve gone through Book 1.
Streamline my automation sequence for the newsletter.
Social media – Write a blog post at least once a month, besides the newsletter. Crosspost to Dreamwidth and Tumblr for audience reach. Try to find a social media that I can engage with that is fun and not tedious. (Currently enjoying Mastodon.) Write a blog post reviewing social media later on.
Read and review books and log them on Goodreads and/or Storygraph. Do one book review per month.
Engage an artist for some character/concept sketches, starting with the Librarian host of my newsletter.
Learn to draw so I can do my own character/concept sketches. Try to do one sketch every two days.