Solar tyranny is now fully upon us

Happy belated summer solstice! In Central Florida, Sol Invictus reigns supreme, beating us down with stellar fury every morning till late in the evening. Sunset comes most days between eight or nine p.m. here, and the world’s families are staying up quite late to see the beautiful light shows at our numerous theme parks.

A Princess of Mars is here!

It’s been an extremely busy start to summer for me and shows no signs of letting up until Fall. On June 17th, my estate-authorized edition of A Princess of Mars by legendary author Edgar Rice Burroughs went on sale at WordFire Press! Proceeds from this edition will go back into Western’s publishing program fund to allow future students to keep releasing high-quality re-releases public domain books and bring them to new generations of readers.

I’m super proud of the book and how great it came out. I’ve talked about it a lot, both on social media and in previous iterations of our newsletter, so I won’t belabor it here. It was a great honor to be able to bring this legendary classic back to market.

A progress update and a title reveal!

On the writing front, June was a great month for my progress in drafting my novel project. I haven’t really said much about the project itself, but I think its time to peel back the curtain a little bit! I’ve been writing a Bridgerton meets Dungeons and Dragons cozy fantasy that will be titled The Gentleman Necromancer’s Guide to Gardening! The novel would be the first of what I currently envision as a trilogy.

After a couple of false starts earlier in the year, I’m now right around the 35,000 word mark—about halfway through my initial draft! I’ve got a long way to go still, but its great progress after spinning my wheels for so long.

The key to accelerating is: dictation! My mentor, New York Times bestselling author Kevin J. Anderson writes his books this way (and even wrote a book on dictation with Martin Shoemaker and Greg Vose), and sworn by it for years. After getting adjusted to it, I understand why he’s so passionate about it.

I like to walk a few miles in the morning to keep me be healthy, and I’ve taken to dictating out scenes of the novel as I go, and once I drop the manuscript into Word or Scrivener I format it, clean it up, and then I’ve got hundreds and sometimes even thousands of words of my book.

It’s also really helped me get out of my own way. For many writers and newer authors like myself, our ‘inner editor’ can often interrupt the flow of our thoughts, wanting to change a word here, fix a misspelling there. None of this is bad, except when you’re drafting and just getting the rough ideas, story beats, and character dialog out of your head and onto the page. It’s easy to forget that the book you pick up online, at a library, or a bookstore has been through many, many revision passes. Novels rarely, if ever, are perfect in their initial expression!

Dictation isn’t without its own drawbacks. You’ll spend a lot of time cleaning up your formatting and then more time revising, but it’s an amazing tool for a writer’s toolkit. I’m excited to see how much more of the novel I can draft in July.

What I’ve been reading

This month’s recommendation is Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo. It is a very dark and there are some very challenging moments in in, so please, please look up all the trigger warnings before you go out and pick it up. That said, it’s a terrific whodunnit story with strong thriller and horror elements. Bardugo does a masterful job of turning the setting into a very strong and present character throughout the story, and I loved the premise of a magical underbelly at an Ivy League school. I don’t want to give away too much more than that, but it’s a brilliant, dark, gorgeously written novel.

Signal boost: The Requiem Dark series by Claire Winn

Pride Month is over but the celebration never really stops does it? And so this month’s signal boost is The Requiem Dark series by Claire Winn. The series begins in City of Shattered Light and it’s neon-soaked action, themes found family, and myriad of LGBTQ+ folx being awesome were all things I thoroughly enjoyed. For more on Claire and her work, check out her website here.

That’s it for this month’s newsletter! 2025 is somehow halfway over, guys. How did that happen? Anyhow, back to writing!