The blush wears off the excitement of publishing a book fairly quickly, it turns out; which is probably a good thing. I now find myself pressing on, writing new stories, very few of which feel like the ones that came before. As a consequence I feel both liberated and doomed. This new batch seems more playful to me, less weighty. Whereas North American Lake Monsters drew a lot of genetic material from realism and horror, the next one will draw more from my rekindled love affair with weird pulp fiction. We’ll see how that goes.
Mia is a teenager now, and subject to all the high weather that comes with it. While I will be posting here again, I’ll have to be careful in how I choose to write about her. As she gets older, her life becomes more and more her own, and my right to discuss her inner life grows more limited each day. Which is only right and proper.
Meanwhile, the impulse to retreat persists. I’ve let the blog grow dormant while using Facebook more aggressively since the book’s release, which I think was an error in judgement. Facebook is an echo chamber, in which you link the same news over and over to an increasingly wearied audience. The blog will garner fewer eyes, but at least there’s space to be a bit more nuanced.
And maybe there will be room for some humanity to bleed through.
Nathan Ballingrud 
I am for the blog. It is somehow more personal, the way you write here is different. This is where I find the quotes that I write down to pin onto my mirror, the ones that I meditate on daily that feed my soul.
Read marketing tips from the book Write. Publish. Repeat. They say that FB pages–and to some degree even twitter– are not the best bang for your time. Blogs they are on the bubble with–they say if you have an audience growing, your time is best spent writing more stories. More stories = more people will find you. They take the approach Steve Jobs did. He said, he didn’t want everyone in the world to buy a Mac. He wanted one person to buy every single thing he made. Mac fans will rabidly buy anything and wait in line to do so. They advocate e-mail lists, because —and I’m assuming smaller presses have limited budgets, even larger publishers now expect many authors to do a lot of their own marketing if they are not a “big name”—connection with the fans and readers is what gets the job done. Garner 1,000 loyal fans and you stand a good chance of writing fiction full-time.
From my marketing job I can tell you, the number one best tool is loyalty. Nothing replaces that.
You feel liberated and doomed? What’s up with the doom?
Glad you are having fun—I know I don’t need to say this, but please don’t become one of those melancholy writers for whom writing is a horrible, laborious and miserable angst-ridden experience. Yes, good writing is hard and laborious, but if it makes you miserable, and if you feel you have to poke yourself in the eye to write a good story, I’ve always said folks need to do something else. My friends and I are sick of [author name withheld] posting things about how her writing is such a pain and miserable to do because she has to [gasp] finish these books as a part of this $2 million contract.
Children are starving, so cry me a river, lady.
Just my two cents worth. Sorry if it sounded snotty. Love you to pieces and am thankful that you are having success.
I look forward to more bloggish material from you, Nathan.
I’ve grown a wee bit tired of Facebook, to be honest. It’s Groundhog’s Day.
A bit off topic, but I caught your panel at the NC Literary Festival and have since read your book, which I thought was excellent. Just wanted to say thanks, and that I’m looking forward to more stories.
Hey, thanks, Dan!