A Long-Overdue Update

Well it's been like 5 years since I touched this website, but there's a lot to talk about in that time!

First of all, if you go visit the Where to Read section, you will see it has been cleaned up and updated. And first and foremost among that is my very first anthology inclusion!

To save you a click, here is the info:

My short story titled On the Other Side of Sound appears in NineStar Press's Listen: The Sound of Fear anthology, available in both print and ebook from Amazon, or if you don't want to support one of the planet's biggest assholes, the NineStar Press website.

I'm super excited for this inclusion, and the group of writers is a great bunch. There's a huge diversity of approaches in this anthology, despite the relatively tight theme, so be sure to give it all a read!

Next up is an update on WIP. 

I recently finished up a second draft of my current novel-in-progress, Into the Dragon Isles, a kids portal fantasy novel à la The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Mine plays with minor horror themes and overall just has a more nuanced morality than Lewis' masterpiece, and I hope to find a home for it soon. It's about a young girl whose dad commits suicide, leaving her a key to a magical land inhabited by fantastical creatures, but finds a lot more to learn about herself and her dad while she is there.

Mock-up only, I do not own the rights to the art or anything

I also finished reading it aloud to my daughter, who has insisted that I begin work on the sequel, Beneath the Dragon Isles, immediately. So I guess this is my announcement that my next WIP is the first-ever sequel I've begun!

Another mock-up, again no art rights claimed here

As always, I have a lot of other irons in the fire (I think about 3 other novels at varying levels of "in the works", but none of them are ready for unveiling yet.

Nanowrimo

Well kids, it's that time again. The month where all your writer friends complain even more on Facebook than normal, which is a lot. I speak, of course of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which I have decided to participate in again this year.

I've attempted Nanowrimo twice before (sort of). The first time, I had been unemployed which boded well for my success but ultimately began a new job in early November, which pretty much killed any chance of that happening. That story was The Tenth Rune, a Norse fantasy story which was probably not weird enough for me to come back to except for a short story setting.

The second time, 2 years ago, I finished the last 25,000 words of Do Gyndroids Dream of Electric Dicks?, an adult comedy cyberpunk novel. I still haven't gotten around to editing that yet, despite some really great criticism from some beta readers, but I did reach my goal of writing nearly every day during that November to hit 50,000 words on the story.

This year I will be working on a story I plotted out last fall, intending to write it at a writing retreat I put together, which ended up getting canceled. This one is a novella called Cel-Shaded Gods, a sort of cyberpunk/Roger Rabbit/Cthulhu type thing. My goal is to get it to 30,000 words by the end of November. (I've already written about 5,000 so I have to do 1,000/day with a couple miss days for buffer.)

The catch is that I've just started a new position at the company I've been working at since failing to write The Tenth Rune. This change comes with a new schedule (back to 8-5!) and a whole lot of learning. It remains to be seen how much that will affect my ability to write, but dammit I'm going to give it a shot. Don't be afraid to ask me how I'm doing - shame is an excellent motivator.

To get you excited (ok, to get myself excited), here's a cover I've mocked up for it.

Kid Medusa

My first paid fiction publication, Kid Medusa, has been picked up by Theme of Absence magazine. You can read it for free here. Kid Medusa is about a girl with living hair trying to find her place at a private school for monsters.

Accompanying the story is an absolutely adorable illustration by the great Betty Rocksteady (also shared below!).

Additionally, I was interviewed by Theme of Absence for their author interview series. Read that here.

I'll have some more exciting publishing news soon, but I can't say too much about it yet. Whet your whistle with some Kid Medusa while you wait.

Illustration by Betty Rocksteady

Life and Things

Since my blog is like a year overdue for an update, here's some general updates on the happenings in my life.

Early this year I took a new job where I work three 13 hour days a week, and have 4 day weekends every day. While the three days at work are quite long, the extended weekends have proven great for my writing, and I'm even able to set aside about one day each week that I can more or less dedicate to writing.

Through that I've been doing comics reviews at The Outhouse, co-hosting a podcast, I joined a short fiction workshop online, and I've been submitting a number of stories for publication.

Speaking of my podcast, We Write Weird Shit will be picking back up for the second season in a few weeks! This season will take place in Limbo, and as with the first season, each episode will feature an original story inspired by listener suggestions.

I'm also putting together a mini writing retreat for my local writer compatriots! We're going to nab a cabin somewhere nearby and lock ourselves in for a long weekend of productivity. I'm working on coming up with a novella for it.

Do Gyndroids Dream of Electric Dicks? has gotten pretty much nowhere since I finished the first draft. New goal is to have a manuscript ready when Eraserhead Press opens for submissions in April. Once they reject it, I'll start sending it around to more fitting places like New Kink.

No publication announcements yet, but I have 6 submissions out and another 4 in the works, so I hope to have more news on that front soon! I'll update here and on the Projects page when there's more to say.

That's all today. Maybe I'll pick one of my old features back up. What do you want to see here while we wait to hear back from publishers?

New Look and Updates

If you're here, you've probably already noticed that Jon James Writes has a whole new look! Classy! Along with that are a number of updates to the site, including info on my podcast We Write Weird Shit, and some links to my awesome frands. Have a look around. Maybe I'll even start updating it now that I can stand to look at it.

Gyndroids Draft 1 Complete!

Well it only took three years for me to stop being so goddamn lazy and spend ONE FUCKING MONTH doubling the length of my eventual debut novel Do Gyndroids Dream of Electric Dicks? to the point where it is now, finally, through the first draft!

At this point, I won't be posting any more on the site, since I obviously gave that up a long damn time ago, but for now I will leave what is there. You can think of it as a tantalizing sample.

So when can you get a copy in your hands? I don't fucking know! But I do know that I currently have a handful of first draft readers getting me notes and I plan to spend February working on a second draft. After that, I try to see what I can do about publishing, which will probably involve significant heartache and frustration before giving in and self-publishing.