Hello everyone,
It’s a busy time of the year, and as we pass Halloween and move into the realms of Christmas, creeping slowly backward in time every year like like an advancing tide, it’s only going to get busier for many of us!
Firstly, some news. The Across the Bitter Sea kickstarter was successfully funded, and once again I must express sincere gratitude for all the wonderful contributions that were made to the campaign and for putting up with me blathering on about it so much. The rewards will be going out in the next few weeks: look out for them if you were one of the heroic backers. Paperback and eBook versions of Across the Bitter Sea will follow, but there is currently an interesting discussion happening about the release of the book which is postponing its immediate publication – more news about that when things are certain! Without revealing too much, something very exciting could be happening that will change the nature of the release.
UPDATE! The publication of Four Horsemen has temporarily been put on hold due to the lead editor experiencing serious health issues. I’ll still be working with Dark Hall Press in the future but for now Four Horsemen cannot be placed with them. I wish him a speedy recovery and send our thoughts out to him!
Next, some advice.
It’s been a strange year. Rich, rewarding, testing, difficult, full of the proverbial highs and lows. Stability, both financially and emotionally, has been very far from attainable. In many ways, this chaos is still prevalent. If something has been learned from this year, it’s that your friends are your lifeline (and by this, I extend to family too!). Without them, everything would have proven insurmountable. ‘Think where a man’s glory most begins and ends / My glory is that I had such friends.’ said William Butler Yeats, and how right he was. Please if you do one thing the rest of the year, make sure you reconnect with that someone you’ve been meaning to for a while but never got round to. Take that person you hardly see but who always knows how to give you a belly laugh for that coffee or that pint.
This is my other piece of advice: do not hold back. Do not wait for the day when you can write, or compose music, or paint, or edit movies, or make games. It will never come. You need to start now on that portfolio, you need to prove your passion and that you can do what you dream of doing: an act of ritual incarnation, if you will.
So, do it while you can. Do it every day so you never forget who you are beneath the worries of the modern world. Immerse yourselves in dreams of attack ships on fire over the belt of Orion. At times you will feel ill, sick of waking up at 6:00 in the morning and going to bed at 2:00am. You will be so drained you’ll doubt ever standing again. But one day, one glorious day in which every sound will transmogrify into hallelujah choruses, things will change. The break will happen.
Mine hasn’t happened yet, to tell you the truth. But I’m hopeful. Things are looking up: the current work place is full of lovely people, there’s even small time to write. I hope things are looking up for you too, whoever you are reading this. I believe this world encourages us to forget others just as it encourages us to forget who we are, truly, deep down, beneath what we have to do to survive. So, my prayer is that the days of survival come to an end, so that the days of simply being might roll on forever.
God bless till next time.
@josephwordsmith
Joseph Sale: Graphic-Horror Writer 