I’m late to the beginning of the year by a few weeks, which hopefully is not a sign of things to come!
I’ll try to keep this brief, though there are a lot of things coming your way this year in the realm of my Fiction.
Back in 2024, I planned on releasing one new novel per month. That got sidelined by waiting for book covers and things in my personal life that really threw my plans out of whack. 2025 was, to put it simply, the worst year of my adult life. I’m hoping 2026 is a much better year and to try to sort of grease the wheels and force it, I’m just shotgunning out books.
Let’s just go about it in order.
Books
Now that fulfilment is complete for Horus & Motherfucker, people who did not back the campaign can now order a copy for themselves on Amazon.
I’ve begun serializing Ash Cinema over on my substack.
You can read the lovely introduction by the original publisher of this novel, Pablo D’Stair. Or you can read my introduction to the novel, what it is, and why you should read it.
Before Howl, it was my most popular novel by a significant margin. It’s somber and romantic and very much about being young. Happy to finally put it back in print with the new cover by Christopher Olson.
Beginning on January 26th, I’ll be serializing my novel Songs of my Mother over on Royal Road. You can follow me over there to get updates for when each new chapter goes live. New chapters will be published daily for nine months until we come to the conclusion.
Patrick Rothfuss meets Steven Erikson in an evocative epic fantasy about growing up and fighting gods.
When I was a child, I watched my mother kill a dragon only to have her own body burnt and mutilated beyond recognition. Mourning the loss of my fathers, my brothers, we survived on the flesh of that dead dragon while my mother clung to life, deaf and dumb and blind to the world. I defied the gods who tried to take her. I’ve since devoted my life to murdering your gods and their servants, watching them scream for mercy. I have butchered their priests and now wage war against an empire. You know me. You traveled a lifetime to find me.
My name is Luna.
Come, hear the story of my mother. Dragonslayer, savior, and, finally, goddess to my people. Hear how I watched them flay the humanity from her, how they twisted her every action into prophecy, into ritual. Hear my howling loss, and I will tell you how nations and gods descended upon my mother to claim her, rip her away from me, make her avatar of their own desires, talisman of their own power. Make her anything but my mother.
I’ve also started a Patreon account for people who want to read ahead of where the free chapters are. Along with that, patrons will be getting physical zines sent to them, which is the same thing as paying substack subscribers get. Speaking of, if you are a paying subscriber to my substack, let me know and I’ll comp your access to the Patreon. No need to pay at two separate sites. But if you sign up for the Patreon right now, you can read the first 20 chapters for $5 or the first 40 for $10.
Once the serialization is complete, I’ll be releasing this as either a trilogy or as one gigantic single volume, assuming I’m able to do such a thing (the manuscript is 1,500 pages long).
Then I’ll be releasing a variety of novels all at once. They will be first available at the conventions I list down below.
Labyrinth and A Quiet Night in Uhaku are companion novels taking place on the same night. One is a romance, a vengeance tale, and the other is a drunken sword & sorcery adventure.
Hosting a podcast where I discuss short stories has inspired me to finally release a short story collection. Of course, I can’t just simply release a collection so I’ll be releasing four this year, with the first two available at conventions.
Why four?
Well, I have literally thousands of pages of short stories and so I’ve decided to make the collections themed. There will be a horror, a literary, a fantasy, and a science fiction collection coming this year, all under the Broken River Classics name. The real joke of releasing four this year is that I’ll be releasing four more in 2027. These will also be themed, though themed differently.
I’ve been writing short stories since 2006 and I was writing a story every week or even more rapidly for years, until I finally wrote a novel. Even then, during the year I lived in South Korea, I wrote roughly 150 short stories. Now, most of these were bad, but if you write that many stories, some of them are going to work out and some fraction will even be quite good.
You can read the title story of Dusk Country Blues right here. Or you can wait for it to be in a nice physical edition.
I’m very excited about these.
Cover art and title subject to change, but I’m releasing a collection of my reviews on the films of Wong Kar Wai. These were some of my most popular reviews I’ve ever written on substack and I can’t wait to have this volume in print, so keep an eye out for this one too! Will also be released at the conventions.
Once the conventions are over, I’ll be running my second crowdfunding campaign: Broken Katana! You can sign up to be notified when this goes live in March.
This is an omnibus edition of the Howl series, with the exception that it is more than the three that are currently published. The fourth and concluding volume will be included inside this omnibus edition! And there may be a few surprises along the way as well.
So if you loved Howl and have been waiting to see how this all comes together, well, the wait is almost over!
Please sign up to be notified. It will really help give this campaign a boost when it launches!
My weird, grotesque far future science fiction horror novel is coming out later this year. I’ll have more to say about this after the Broken Katana campaign. It is, in many ways, sort of a combination of Horus & Motherfucker and Glossolalia. Which is to say that it is a bonkers novel, an oral history, and a wild ride.
Will there be more books coming out this year? Maybe another essay collection? Maybe a book length essay? Maybe a poetry collection?
Maybe!
Who can say?
Conventions
I’ll be doing a few different conventions this year. Some of them for the first time, most of them local to the Twin Cities.
I’ll be here with most of the Broken River crew selling books. We were last at AWP in 2024, so we’re roaring back this year. In 2024, we were able to sell over 300 books. My goal this time is to hit 400.
This will be the first place that a lot of the books above will be available, so stop by the Broken River table if you’re in the area or already attending. We’ll also be doing some events in the evening around Baltimore. More on our schedule as we get closer to that first weekend of March.
This is a one day event the week after AWP so I’ll be selling whatever inventory I have leftover from AWP. It’s a single day bookfair that I’ve never done before, so I’ll see how the turnout is. But it should be fun!
Another first time event for me, and this one isn’t until October so there’ll be lots of time to plan and so on. It’s in Mankato, which is about an hour south of the Twin Cities. Another all day, single day bookfair that I’m excited to table.
I’ve done this a few years and it’s always a good event. Though it is possible I won’t be able to attend due to the way that their vendor sign up works. My plan is to attend though. Last year, I sold 70 books, which was everything I brought with me, and there were still two hours left of the bookfair.
My goal this year is to sell 100 books and I think it’s going to be doable. It’ll be right here in Saint Paul in either October or November.
There are a few other conventions and events I’m applying for, so you may see more of me around the Twin Cities, Iowa, and Wisconsin if you live up in the frozen north.
I have consistently found that selling in person is far more successful than trying to sell online, so this is where I’m going to throw a decent amount of energy this year. It is funny, though, how certain books just don’t sell for me online but then consistently sell out whenever I’m at a bookfair. Glossolalia is the best example, but Sing Behemoth Sing is another one. Something about seeing them in person makes people open up their wallets.
Anyway, I’ll have more to say about all these things soon, but this email is already getting long.
Do sign up for the Kickstarter and follow me on Royal Road and if you’re local to Minnesota, come find me at one of these bookfairs this year.
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