Blawg

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel for the next three days, as she will be traveling to Las Vegas to see Duran Duran in concert. She will endeavor to do what she can, but makes no guarantees.

Please excuse Sheila from working on the trilogy today, as she had many errands to run and was too exhausted to do much after dinner beyond watching YouTube videos on her lobotomized smart TV.

I started out 2026 with three intentions:

• Draw at least 100 flowers for The Ten Thousand Flowers Project,
• Perform a stand-up comedy routine in an actual comedy club,
• Revise Christophina’s Garden into publishable shape.

It’s four months into the year, and I’m way behind on flowers, but I do have an open mike performance scheduled on May 18th at Laughing Skull Lounge. As for Garden, well…

I started the year with the first book of the trilogy, Christophina’s Wings, out in the world for purchase. Then, as I’ve mentioned here, I pulled it back after two sales to revise it into a better book, and refine the entire trilogy at once.

But I still had the Post-it note staring at me that had the word Garden in large and underlined letters. I’d set my course for the year to revise that book, and now I have a whole other book that needs revising first, and, and, and…

So I changed it.

I was never good with New Year’s resolutions, anyway.

Please excuse Sheila from working on her trilogy today, as the time she would have spent was used on road testing a writing app and preparing for an interview tomorrow.

[11:07 PM] Please ignore this excuse note, as Sheila managed to sneak in some notebook work just before going to bed.

Please excuse Sheila from working on her trilogy today, as she overslept due to insomnia and had to make up the hours for her job in the evening.

On December 29th, 2025, I released my debut novel, Christophina’s Wings to the general public. It was the culmination of a twenty-year process that started with my first victory at National Novel Writing Month in 2005 that blossomed into a full trilogy. Christophina’s Wings was the first of that trilogy.

So far, it’s sold two copies.

No, I’m not asking for pity buys. I will be pulling down the listings from the three places it was offered for sale very soon, and they will probably be gone by the time you read this.

I’d made it one of my resolutions for 2025 to put the book out. This was a mistake, because in my haste to put it out there, I released a slightly undercooked result. The opening scene dragged a bit, which is likely why nobody bought it, no matter how many ways I pointed people to the opening chapter via links and QR codes. I reread it and realized that I wasn’t 100% thrilled with it, and if I’m not, who else will be?

I assumed I was stuck with it. While I did reupload it at one point to fix some code glitches that popped up, I otherwise left it as-is. I decided my master plan would be to revise the draft of the first sequel into a truly awesome book that would draw people to buy the first one to learn the origin story of the relationship. Meanwhile, I was running Book Three past my writers group 4,000 words at a time, and making revisions on that one as I went.

Then I had a conversation with my sister that changed everything.

My sister is the widow of the late Peter David, Writer of Stuff. (I linked to his Wikipedia entry if you’re never heard of him.) He wrote, well, lots of stuff. He’s best known for his work in comic books, but he also wrote tie-in books, movie novelizations, original books, screenplays, and even co-created a TV show for Nickelodeon. One of his earliest works, one that he wrote before his career as a comics writer had even started, was a novel called Knight Life, in which King Arthur returns and runs for Mayor of New York city. I have a copy on my shelf which Peter gave me, and to my shame I’ve still haven’t read it.

My sister explained to me that some fifteen years after the book’s release, when it was well out of print, he asked his editor if he could do a rewrite of it, because it was his earliest and weakest work and he wasn’t entirely happy with it. The editor said yes, and so a new edition was released in 2002 (the version I have on my shelf, in fact) and it even ended up leading to two more books beyond it.

“Wait, you can do that?” I blurted. I was murkily aware of the Milo Winter catastrophe, in which a writer built up hype about a book that turned out to be an incoherent mess and dove back in to write a second edition before giving up entirely. But hearing about what Peter had done, and done successfully, made me rethink my plan.

And, thus, my plan is this: I will take Christophina’s Wings back out of circulation and work on making a much better book, while also working on the other two books so I can change things as I go without needing to retcon anything. This was roughly how I was operating before I released the first book. I would tweak details in one book and go back to previous volumes to lay pipe for the changes. My error was kicking the first book out of the nest before it was ready to fly.

When the first book is done to my satisfaction, and the other two are very close to done, I will release it under a new ISBN with a new cover, and have the other two follow as soon as they’re ready. Ideally, I’d have all three locked and loaded and just space out the releases while I work on the next series. (It’s set in the same universe that the trilogy is set in, but decades in the past.)

So this is the mission I’ve chosen to accept. Will I succeed? I won’t know until I’ve tried.

I’ll now be using this bloggy space to post updates of my progress, as well as excuse notes for the days I can’t work on it. The newsletter will be repurposed to talk about the writing process, as well as stories about my past and shameless plugs for things I enjoy in the world of creativity.

If you want to join me on this ride, welcome.