I've officially watched Twin Peaks!

I recently watched Twin Peaks for the first time. If you're not familiar with it, Twin Peaks is a murder mystery TV show. Unlike most murder-of-the-week mysteries, it follows one murder over 2 seasons.

Artwork by Michael E. Kelly

(If you haven't seen the show, don't search 'who killed Laura Palmer' unless you want spoilers)

Partway through the second season, the murderer was revealed, and the show had to see if it could survive without the unifying mystery.

The fact that everyone I know is excited to see season 3 when it comes out next year proves this show has enduring appeal.

Why am I mentioning Twin Peaks? Three reasons:

1. So I can show off about finally joining this cult phenomenon

25 years late but moving fast.

2. To share my favorite quotation from the show.

3. Because it relates back to my weekly Wattpad serial, Omega Blues.

The premise of the novel so far—you want to be a werewolf and the one werewolf you love the most is the one keeping you from becoming a werewolf, only you don't realize it—has been resolved. Now it's time to see how the novel will stand when it only deals with little things like, you know, becoming a werewolf and having everything go wrong.

Omega Blues: Chapter 15

My free serial novel, Omega Blues, is moving along steadily and is now up to chapter 15.

The story is at just over 30,000 words, with a chapter added every week.

The last few weeks I've been getting behind then catching back up, so we've seen chapters updated within a couple of days of each other instead of once a week. I've been juggling work and band practice with moving house. Unfortunately I've been dealing with work stress by slipping back into depressive sleep patterns, sleeping 12 to 15 hours a night, which leaves very little time for anything else.

But, despite setbacks, we're still up-to-date with Omega Blues and I'm proud of that. I have a completed chapter every week, and I'm confident I wouldn't have gotten this far in the editing of this novel if I'd just had it as a side project.

Since I'm back on track with a new chapter not due until Sunday, I have a couple of days to focus on editing my next novel, Skin and Edge; a story which is dear to my heart as it's a reworking of my first ever romance novel. Stay tuned, because I think you're going to love it!

Upcoming release: Happy Valley

I'm delighted to announce Happy Valley, a new m/m romance short story coming out on the 30th!

Happy Valley is a romance between two ski field employees on the slopes of Mt Ruapehu, New Zealand. It's super cute and sweet, a totally adorable fluff of love with a gorgeous backdrop!

I wrote Happy Valley while I was working at the ski field, as a special request from one of my friends who'd read some of my stories and wanted me to write one for him. Romance meets snowboarding? Yes please! I added in some quad biking, another hobby I developed while working on the ski field, to blend a cocktail of extreme sport and sweet love.

I'll post an announcement when it goes live, so keep an eye out!

Also coming out soon: Coin Tricks - my m/m romance novel in which a security guard catches a cute guy stealing soap.

The release of Coin Tricks is extra exciting for fans of Jagged Rock, because when it's out I'll be able to focus on uploading Omega Blues, the sequel to Jagged Rock (about a werewolf rock band at college). Jagged Rock is free and Omega Blues will be, too: I'll be releasing it as a weekly serial on Wattpad. I've never worked on a serial before and I predict it's going to be an awesomely fun experience!

There are plenty of delicious treats for your eyes and hearts on their way, so stay tuned!

What I learned from living in isolation

A year ago I was so overwhelmed by stress and anxiety that I chucked it all in and moved to the wilderness. I rented a cottage alone in the New Zealand bush with spectacular views, no internet or cell reception, and a five-hour bicycle ride through the mountains to the nearest shop.

It was the best year ever.

Here's what I learned...

I'm exactly who I thought I was.

I've always suspected that I'm the kind of introvert who would flourish in complete isolation, but I never knew for sure. Turns out I am, and living alone is awesome.

My stress is from people.

I can't talk for anyone else at all, but it turns out my stress and anxiety come entirely from social interactions.

When I moved into the wilderness I went abruptly from being an anxious and stressed-out wreck to a sedate blob in a constant state of low-level contentment. Suddenly my only concern in the whole world was whether I cleaned my cottage too much to damage the balance of bacteria in the septic tank.

What I care about.

It was important to me that I didn't force myself to do anything. I told myself that if I wanted then I could just spend my days reading books and looking at trees.

Yet I didn't go a day without writing. Maybe that's force of habit after years of daily writing, but even that's awesome. I needed to write to feel happy.

Turns out writing is definitely what I care about and an essential part of my life.

What you do with your day changes how you think.

This sounds obvious but I've never seen it as clearly as I did when I lived in isolation. My mind got slow and relaxed and I'd only think book thoughts.

But when I cycled into town and got phone reception, suddenly I'd be back to thinking about people and social concerns or whatever I read on the internet. It was like a stain that seeped into my way of thinking for hours afterward.

If I know about gigs that I'm not going to, I feel bad for missing out. But when I didn't know anything that was going on I never felt lonely or like I was missing something. You truly can't miss what you don't know you're missing.

You get used to things quickly.

I know plenty of people who say they couldn't live without the internet, but after a few weeks you don't even think about it anymore. Habits are easy to break when there's no opportunity.

Not talking to anyone? Not a problem when it's your choice and you're used to it. Weekly cycle ride to buy supplies? Goes from a big deal to taken for granted.

Who we are and what we care about is shaped so much by what we're exposed to every day. I was incredibly fortunate to get this chance and I found out who I am for real and what's important to me—and I like that person.

Unfortunately it's not financially viable to keep living in the bush and reading books full-time, otherwise I would still be there today. But even though my year's up and I'm returning to the world of social stress and job stress, I'm glad that I got this chance to look at beautiful scenery every day and worry about nothing deeper than cleaning supplies.

Hot Blood Punk and exciting changes

A few years ago I wrote an erotica novella called Exhibitionist Punk. A year or so later, I decided that the pairing had potential that I hadn't fully explored in the novella. Rather than writing a sequel, I took advantage of one of the coolest features of self-published ebooks - the chance to rewrite an existing story.

Like a Chanel suit, novellas love to be reworked

Exhibitionist Punk (16.5k words) became Hot Blood Punk (41.2k words).

It was a great experience and I enjoyed it a lot, and I know that fans of the original story are going to enjoy the rewrite. It has the same characters and core conflict but is much more fleshed-out. Radically more fleshed out, in fact - Hot Blood Punk is 250% the length of Exhibitionist Punk, and uses just under 35% of the original text. If you're super into numbers, those exact figures are 253.63% and 34.63%. Text from Exhibitionist Punk makes up 13.67% of Hot Blood Punk. That sounds like not much - and it isn't, this is a radical rewrite - but the main characters and key intent of the story is the same. What I'm saying is: It's the same story, only way better.

Another exciting change is the new cover to my novella Knockout Andrew. Same great story, awesome new graphic!

Finally, I'm again participating in the M/M Romance Goodreads Group's free story event. My free novella will be out some time between June and September, so stay tuned!

Jack Black and the middle of nowhere

This week I quit my job and moved to the country.

When I was 14 I saw a Jack Black video, which went a little something like this:

I was seized by the idea: If you love something - if you truly love it - quit your job. Just do that thing you love. Quit your job and let yourself rock. And if you can't make it work forever: There it is. So it goes. Now you know, and you tried. And that's better than spending your whole life wondering and talking about could-have-beens.

Perhaps it would be a better story if I'd learned anti-orthodoxy from Black Flag instead of Jack Black. But we can't help what shapes and inspires us in life. Jack Black's ear worm was fully in place, working its way toward my brain.

There's this path we're meant to take in life, and stages at which we're meant to make changes. We live somewhere through school then move away for college, get a job, move in with a monogamous committed partner, have children, progress through higher-paid higher-responsibility jobs, retire. Cultural narrative says those are the broad stages of life.

I followed that narrative and did all the stuff I was meant to. But you know the thing about dominant cultural narratives? They don't fit everyone.

I was miserable. I woke up to go to work, then crawled into bed to sleep as soon as I got home. It wasn't until June of last year that I suddenly realized how deeply unhappy I was. I made some mantras to focus on feeling better:

• Find what makes me happy and do more of that
• Find what make me not happy and do less of that

Simple enough but, like lyrics from Jack Black that seems obvious, sometimes we just need a few simple and clear phrases to remind us what's important.

I was on minimum wage but I lived very small and put aside everything I could, saving for the someday when I would have the courage to chuck away the cultural narrative to follow my own happiness - and Jack Black's advice.

I wasn't happy at my job and had tried to quit several times. Then this year, thinking of those fateful words I'd carried around with me all this time, I finally did it. With no partner or kids or pets or commitments, I took the chance that I'll possibly only ever have once in my life. I quit my job to focus on what made me happy: Writing. I found a place that's low-rent because it's in the middle of nowhere, and gave myself a year to just write.

It's beautiful here. I've lived in the city all my life, and now I wonder why. Amidst bush and pasture it is calm and quiet without the jarring noises and constant rush of city life. Being completely alone means being under no pressure but my own. And it's constantly breathtakingly beautiful.

There are downsides. I'm four hours by car from any of my friends, and I don't have a car. It's an hour and a half walk to (unreliable) internet and phone reception, and a three hour bike ride to the supermarket - so a round trip of six hours for food. My house is affordable because it's isolated, and also because it's uninsulated - which means four months of the year will be spent huddled by the fire while outside there's snow and black ice.

But I found what made me happy, and committed myself to doing more of it.

I might have to upload stories from a library three hours from home, but I will have the luxury of time in which to write those stories. And that's the best gift a writer can have: Time to just do the thing you love.

Time in which to rock.

Come and Read Me Writing too Much!

I did an interview with Ten Minute Interviews and you can read it here.

TMI is a site for interviews with creative people. Also, Too Much Information.

Included in my interview: writers I love, writing love, loving writing, and teasers for upcoming stories.

To avoid an all-words post, here is a tiny wooden elephant by Urban Star:

Pretty show-off tools

I got hooked on showing off about my WIPs. Here are word meters from Critique Circle. Blurbs for most of these stories are here.

















I've grouped them in the rough order that I intend to finish them. Though what I need is a second bar which indicates how much editing I've done - Dictionary, Unillustrated and Exploding Engine Diagram are technically finished in terms of writing and into the revision phase but that takes me much longer than writing the first draft.

I spent the weekend planning out books 3, 4 and 5 in the same series as Vicky's Rules and my excitement over that world* has caused me to nudge Vicky's book higher in my list of priorities.
Let's be honest, though: Before I finished more than 2 of these WIPs I'll be starting something new. I threw out the goal of not starting anything new until older works are done and instead am trying to focus on only starting shorter works before anything older is done.

I hate writing 'The end' but I love writing 'I suppose it all began when'.

*By 'world' I mean a tattoo parlor and all-ages hardcore venue and the scene surrounding them

Seasonal Affective Disorder

Seasonal Affective Disorder (psychologists love their acronyms) is, apparently, the reason I haven't been reaching my goals for the past three to five weeks. It's the reason I've doubled the time I spend sleeping and lost interest in jogging. SAD is the reason I could swear to myself that watching Teen Wolf would make life meaningful again, but then couldn't build up the energy to actually watch it. I even stopped browsing my favorite Tumblr tags.

I got obsessed with picking at scabs on my scalp, a problem I only solved by cutting my fingernails too short to get at the scabs. I don't want to make judgement calls on how people spend their time but I think we can all agree that scab-picking is less important than writing sexy sweet romance novels.

Now that I'm aware of SAD (awww, psychologists, you are cute) I can stop fretting over how it's possible to lose interest in telling stories while those stories are still popping and fizzing in my mind. I can angle my head to see the light between the clouds on my way to work, or possibly put my face in front of a light bulb in an attempt at self-medication. That sentence only makes sense if you've read the SAD link I gave you at the start of this post.

I'm revising two stories but the process is halting. Both stories are the Best Thing Ever so you can appreciate my alarm at my own inability to focus on them or, indeed, on anything but sleeping or scabs. This blog post has taken four and a half days to write, for example.

The first story is called Exploding Engine Diagram and it will be my debut novel - my first published story longer than 50k words. It stars a mechanic and a coder and some cool friends and an asshole ex who is mentioned but never actually seen, which is exactly what you want from an asshole ex.

The second story is called Dictionary, Unillustrated and it features obscure words, chocolate cake, and bonding over an ant nest. It's a novella I'll self-publish and I'm very excited for you to get to read it.

Revision is one step forward, one step back. It is halting and depressing as all hell because you can see your hours disappearing but your writing doesn't seem to have changed. How I let myself get to the revision stage of two drafts at once is amazing to me, but there it is. I want these stories finished so you can read them. But I won't sacrifice the time needed to make them the best I can. Even if that time is increased a lot by my need to stop and stick my face in front of a light bulb.