All fired up and lots of places to go

Book stuff:

• PRICE DROP: On advice from a wise friend, I dropped the price of Persephone in Bloom to 4.99 USD (or the equivalent in your local currency) to better meet the market expectations for indie romance! So if you’ve been hesitating because it sounded fun, but the former price felt like a lot for an ebook, now’s the time to grab it!
• SPEAKING OF Persephone in Bloom, it’s dropping sometime today (probably late tonight, NZ time, but the exact time is a Retail Mystery). This is my first full-length novel to be published in five years, and my first full-length novel without a co-writer in nine. I’m, how do we say, fuckin’ pumped. Should you wish to read the first chapter for free, you may do so here!
• I have the finished cover for Aphrodite Unbound, by series artist Alison Cooley, in my greedy little hands. At the moment there’s a placeholder image up for pre-order purposes (and some excellent soul has already pre-ordered it! Thank you, whoever you are!) but I shall do a cover story reveal post sometime soon.

It’s a busy week, so this is going to be a shortish newsletter. I’m launching a book, I’m speaking at the Canterbury AGM of the New Zealand Society of Authors on Thursday night and on Sunday night I will be participating in the one hundredth, and FINAL episode of The Nerd Degree.

Freedom

I titled my proposed talk for the NZSA meeting as “Freedom, Fanfic, and Leaps of Faith", operating under the assumption that I’d figure out something to say about them later.

I’ve referred to this whole writing venture as a leap of faith more than once. Not the kind of faith where I expect things will all turn out okay because God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world, but faith in myself: faith in my ability to write, and in my ability to learn.

To get the freedom I needed to write the way I wanted to, I had to quit my previous job. People have told me that was brave, and I was flattered, but I don’t actually feel brave. I feel like it was inevitable; it finally got to the point where the only imaginable way forward was for me to veer wildly from the safe path. I have not once in the last six months regretted that choice or thought it was a mistake. I have had money anxiety and process anxiety and general me-being-alive anxiety, but I have never doubted it was the right thing to do.

Do I know if this is sustainable, or financially feasible, or something I can do for years to come? Who knows! I just signed up for a one-term full-time teaching position for July-September, and I am committing to writing only this newsletter over those ten weeks. (I hope to write more! But I won’t beat myself up if I don’t.) If everything else works out, I should still meet my publishing goals this year.

If I hadn’t leapt, I wouldn’t have had the precious six months I’ve already had. I wouldn’t have published a novella and a novel already this year, with two more books on the way. I leapt for freedom, and I found it.

Finales

The Nerd Degree is special. The brainchild of Brendon Bennetts, it’s a quiz panel show/podcast, where two teams compete to show off their knowledge on the topic of the day. It’s recorded in front of a live audience, and it's been running in Christchurch since 2014.

I’ve been appearing on the show since the fourth episode. The Nerd Degree is funny, smart, and occasionally shocking, and I have more than once dissolved into helpless giggles in the middle of a show because of someone else’s perfectly timed joke.

The Nerd Degree was the perfect home for my particular talents, ie, knowing a little bit about a lot of things and being deeply, deeply nerdy about a few. I am incurably curious, my favourite website is Wikipedia, and my discomfort with competition1 was ameliorated by the part where the points really did not matter. I am sad it’s ending, delighted I get to be in the finale, and incredibly proud of all the amazing people who have worked on the show over the last decade.

This hundredth episode is going to be on AI, since the robots will no doubt replace us all after this. It’s going to be awesomely facilitated by the spectacular Dr Erin Harrington, and if you’re in Ōtautahi, you could do a lot worse this Sunday evening than pop down to Little Andromeda at 6pm to see our final hurrah.

I hope you have a splendid week, and that something great happens to you this very hour.