As snow began to fall early in January, I stared out my window wondering what I was going to do next.
I’d had a reasonably productive, somewhat successful few months, with the cascading releases of How I Became a Pop Princess, How I Became My Ex’s New GF, and Reveal: The Gender Bending Collection, the latter of which (now on Amazon) is an amazing deal for folks who have sampled some of my work but haven’t had a chance to get more.
But after all that, I was left wondering where I would be putting my energies. I had corresponded with a reader who had enjoyed my collection Beyond Ourselves and suggested that short story collections were the way forward, for the way they let me stretch my muscles and play with form. I happen to agree, but short story ideas aren’t as easy to come by and get interested in writing as you might think.
After many of my releases, I have often thought I’m spent, that I have nothing left to give and the game is over. It’s never true, and I have a long, long list of potential projects to work on, but if I liked them all that much I’d be working on them now. I have a rather large WIP that I am enamored of that I began tinkering again early this month. I’m still on the hook for 15% of a commission story and possibly more beyond that. There were a lot of things that I could do, but what was I going to do?
The answer, as you may know if you follow me on Bluesky, is that I got an idea. A few weeks ago, something occurred to me that I liked very much. I rolled it around my head for a while and began to see a lot of possibilities with it. Then I started writing it and I became very enamored. The characters came into sharp relief, the world felt open, there was a lot to do. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote until I got to 28,000 words in under two weeks. I’m not sure I’ve ever written so much so fast (double NaNoWriMo speed, as if that’s still a thing.)
Eventually, I couldn’t even tell if it was good or if I was just having a really fun time neglecting all my other household tasks to write it. There’s a lot of snow on the ground and I might be undergoing a form of madness.
I won’t tell you what the idea is or what it’s about because I make a habit of keeping my WIPs secret until they’re ready for the world. I think it’s a neat, novel concept, and that only has a little bit to do with the fact that I’ve obviously gone a little crazy writing it (what is writing if not a socially permissible form of madness?) I’m nowhere near done and I think I need to double back and excise a few huge chunks, but a lot of what I got is very enjoyable.
I put a lot of pressure on myself to make sure my writing is “special” in some way. It’s a little foolish — all I ever wanted was to do silly stories that made people tingle, but along the way I started getting praise as if I were doing something interesting and unique (or doing what I do interestingly and uniquely) and started holding myself to a higher standard, which can be tough to live up to. Even my Logan Fournier works, which are supposed to be simple and low-stakes, have started to see signed of this.
With everything I have published as Liam — short stories, collections, novellas, novel — I have tried to make sure there’s something atypical and interesting about them, something you don’t get from other writers. Astute readers have been able to pick up on most of it, which means whatever I’m doing seems to work. I haven’t published a novella as Liam Slade since Both in 2023, marking a shocking near three-year gap that owes a lot to that attempt at quality control. In that time I’ve placed my energies elsewhere, while still looking for ideas that seemed right for Liam, but finding dead ends or avenues I’m not ready to explore. I think that what’s exciting to me is that this is the one that feels most in tune with the other works that bear that name, without exactly retreading the same ground. And if I have to agonize myself to get it right, I will… but I also really want it to be ready sometime in February. 😉
All of this is to say, I’m excited. And I don’t need you to be excited just because I’m excited, because there’s nothing for you to be excited about yet. Things fail to materialize all the time. But I’m happy to be writing with purpose and not just lobbing spitballs against the wall to see what sticks. I really hope that it works out and that you get to enjoy what it is that’s got me so worked up, whenever you see it, if at all.
Until then, be kind
Liam