Sorry It’s Been A While

Hey, all.

I know it’s been a long time since I’ve been in touch.  In addition to some life issues that have taken up a great deal of my time and a job that’s taking up an ever-increasing amount of my energy, I’ve been deeply focused on my latest writing project, City of Dreams.

City of Dreams is a fantasy novel, which I intend to be the first in a four-book fantasy series.  It’s set in the same setting as my novella Dreams of the Boardwalk, and it has the same central concept: the cities (and towns…and mountains…and the ocean) have dreams of their own, and those dreams are worlds in themselves: the Dream and the Nightmare.  The Dream represents everything a place should be, everything it aspires to become, its hope and nostalgia.

The Nightmare is fear.  Everything a place should never – or never should have – become.

People who have the power to enter the Dream and the Nightmare are called Dreamwalkers; those who align themselves with the Dream are called the Oneiros, those who align with the Nightmare are called the Mara.

The story follows Aislin Rourke, a young woman fresh out of college, who’s come to New York – perhaps the greatest City of Dreams in the world – to pursue her own dream: a Broadway career.  Along the way, she discovers that she’s a powerful Dreamwalker, with rare abilities that make her crucially important to a Mara plot that’s unfolding in the streets of New York during a long hot summer: abilities that could save New York, or drag it into Nightmare.

I hope that sounds exciting.  I’m about 150 pages in and making good-ish progress, taking the issues in the first paragraph into account.  The problem is, I have no idea what to do with it.  This is my first book that looks to be a reasonable novel length, as opposed to a novella (The Truth of Rock and Roll, Dreams of the Boardwalk) or huge (Hometown).  Do I try to find an agent and get it published traditionally?  That’s the dream, of course.  But with the publishing industry slowly withering, and publishing houses all looking for the next big hit in this week’s popular genre, that could be a long and uncertain road.  Do I publish online?  I must admit, I haven’t exactly been making a killing so far.  Frankly, I’ve never been great at self-promotion, and you need to be to make it in self-publishing, especially considering: 1) The huge amount of competition; and 2) the fact that Amazon – like Youtube – is doing whatever it can to make publishing on its platform less lucrative.

And suppose I do publish online?  Do I stick to Amazon only?  Does what I gain in terms of Amazon’s promotional options and alternative revenue streams make up for what I lose in terms of other venues?  Do I lose anything by staying out of other venues?  Amazon seems to have established an all-but-monopoly on ebooks, with their competitors well on their way to fading to nothing.  Should I post the first draft here, for the sake of promotion and commentary?

Any advice on these subjects would be appreciated.

In the meantime, I’m planning to resurrect this website.  As soon as the issues mentioned in the first paragraph permit, I’m going to resume transferring reviews and essays from my old blog.

The other thing I’m going to start posting, because I’ve been tinkering on it for years now and I want to share it with someone before I die is my tabletop roleplaying game, Midnight Theatre.  The idea here is that I’m trying to create a game that includes rules and options for every kind of horror – though of course, being who I am, there’s liable to be an extra focus on the Monster Hunter style action horror.  My original plan was to assemble it into a book, but not only was it getting longer than I had any right to expect anyone would buy in a tabletop RPG (that at least could be solved by creating multiple books), but I didn’t know how to make any of the other elements come together, either.  I didn’t know how to market a tabletop RPG, I didn’t know how to assemble or format it, I didn’t know how to get it illustrated without going broke.  And frankly, tabletop RPG’s weren’t exactly a hugely lucrative business even in the heyday of the Nineties, before the current glut.

Maybe someday.

I welcome all commentary on this, too.  I’m not always that great at working out game mechanics, and pointing out any obvious brokenness in the game would be a big help.