The state of things
Until The Guilty was released last year, people hadn’t heard from me in a while. I dismissed my agent, withdrew from social media, and stopped blogging. I didn’t even have a website for a bit. Put simply: I dropped out.
I write a lot. I write (almost) every day, and the result of that kind of discipline is piles of manuscripts that will never see publication. Not because they’re no good, but because the industry isn’t built to absorb more than a couple of books a year, and even then it strains to keep up. Never mind that in the self-publishing world, those who succeed release four or more books in the time traditional publishers take to release one.
It’s been eight years since the last Camaro Espinoza novel, and in addition to a final book for that series, I’ve written a ton of stuff. You will read none of it. And while I think that’s something of a tragedy, because writing left unread is time and effort wasted on the part of the author, that’s how it goes. I didn’t want to work with the people I was working with or write the things they wanted me to write. The only way to escape that situation was to make a new way forward. And that meant taking a big step back.
What happens next? Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe we’ll talk about it here now and again. It’s bound to come up.