tl;dr – Carew 7, A Brief, Interminable Peace, is complete, in editing and revisions, and will release in January or February.
Is it some finely-honed piece of literature made great after four years of careful crafting? No. I think it’s a solid Carew story that acts as a good transition from the previous books to the next stage of Alexis’ career and story.
Why did it take so long? I addressed most of it in a previous post — and I’ll catch you up here.
After all that, I had a decent spate of writing, taking me into January 2024, and then it dried up again. The day-job went from the dysfunction it’s been for the last quarter century to full-Simple Jack. Now, again, all things are relative — even at its worst, it was a good job to have. But I realized I was never going to recover either my health or writing if I remained. That’s a me-thing, mostly, not some indication that I had a situation so much worse than most others. I’m still regularly angry with myself for not being able to recognize and get myself out of my problems on my own over the last few years.
Anyway, over the summer I realized something had to give — I either had to make a change, or accept that I was probably done as a writer or maybe just playing at it. I decided on the change and decided to YOLO — at 57, with no discernable other support, and my writing income at the absolute least it’s ever been, even the first month of Into the Dark’s release, I quit the day job and decided to write full-time.
It was the support of the Carew fans — those of you who stuck with me on Patreon for four years, receiving nothing in return but silence, those who emailed me, sent messages on Facebook … looked up my phone number and called me to see if I was okay (sir, I am never going to not mention that – thank you), and the knowledge that every one of those represented many, many other followers of Alexis’ story — that gave me the strength to make that leap of faith.
The change in my mental state since then has been indescribable. I’m writing nearly every day for the last five months, averaging 1000-2000 words a day since I made the change and, though still not my old self, I think, it’s getting there.
Why haven’t been better about posting updates here, Facebook, etc.? Dude, do you have any idea how embarrassing this is?
Anyway, hopefully this will be the last angsty update and they’ll all be better and more frequent going forward.
Carew 7 is coming within the next ninety days and Carew 8, tentatively titled Smoke and Silver is nearly done with plotting (so much plotting as I actually do, anyway) and I hope to have it done in 2025, settling into what I plan as a 1/year schedule for the series.
