This post is my official announcement I’m writing full time. I decided to come out swinging instead of trying to find a fancy way of dropping that bomb on the end of this paragraph. It’s a scary ass choice and one my wife and I don’t make lightly. The new year is full of many great opportunities and this is my chance to try and see if I can be that writer guy that’s in my mind. It’s time to start laying down our ‘reasonable’ expectations. First, I’m not expected to fund the family’s coffers all by myself this year. Starting a creative career isn’t that easy and even if we get close to having a decent finical flow we’re still going to be playing it safe with any fiscal choices we make for some time. Second, the idea is to do an all-consuming creative approach. Writing for long form fiction and the blog will become my main focus, but podcasting on the regular and producing weekly (and sometimes daily) short fiction will also be a focus. I’m going to be trying this from as many angles as I can reasonably juggle. First short fiction should be up a few hours after this.
This means a number of changes in terms of my online presence:
This place is one of them. The J Samuel Diehl thing is my main announcement channel for works that are out there. I’ll get a category up with those posts and I’ll associate those with the newsletter (yeah, we’re getting one of those). Other posts such as my reviews of books, games, shows, etc. will also show up here, as well as opinion pieces, but those won’t be as flashy on the main page (At least not once we get a theme rolling). Audio fiction will also show up here, but the audio blog is reserved for the Hiddennode. Hiddennode will also mirror that fiction. Free fiction will show up here as well, and my intentions are to get a Patreon up and running in the coming weeks to post the fiction to early (as well as providing full copies of upcoming works before they become site exclusives).
The Hiddennode site has been archived. The old version is available here but except for fiction I’m bringing to J Samuel Diehl, most of the posts will remain in the archive. The site will be my audio blog, which will be daily, baring health and holidays. Many of the comments I make on blog posts here will be expanded on in that format. I don’t think of the podcast as a super strict thing so expect more casual conversation there.
Beyond my sites, we’ve got a few points to reach me. First, the nulloperations twitter thing isn’t changing. That’s my feed for personal posts, opinions, etc. The J Samuel Diehl account, though, that one is reactivating as my official “here’s stuff coming down the pipe” feed. Basically the writing stuff without the ‘Me’ fluff. It won’t be all of the posts here, just the ones that are about writing updates. Same with Facebook. The nulloperations account is me. The writer page is here. The ‘Me’ page gets the fluff. The author page gets the official announcements and such. I think it’s straight forward. No, I don’t really have much more than that. I mean there is a Tumblr thing but I’ll be honest I still don’t get that site. We’ll explore it more later. Anything else we’ll look at as the year passes through.
I don’t pretend to how things will turn out. I think my writing is pretty rad, and I think people will like it, but I don’t know. We’ve got a year to plan, act on, and then review. Unless something incredible happens beforehand I’ll let you know next year if things worked out. For now, let’s get down to business and defeat the huns. I meant write. I’m going to write. Not be in an animated movie. That would be weird.