Vow to ignore the world more

The main thing I’m planning to do in 2019 is ignore the noise. Used to, in the dark ages before DVR and streaming, when we watched live TV, commercials (or adverts, if you’re across the pond) would blare into the interstices, wresting our attention and spoiling our groove. Nowadays we can avoid those ads, but the persistent low hum of mental friction may be worse: 24-hour news, push notifications on my phone, Twitter, Facebook, Insta all e-mailing me constantly to tell me I’ve missed something important. (To be fair, updates from that lady on Twitter who raises sled dogs and posts puppy pictures is SUPER IMPORTANT and don’t keep me from the sled puppy pics don’t you dare.)

I was exhausted and overwhelmed and didn’t even realize it.

Until August, when the cosmos reminded me of the melody in all the noise. August 15 my mom was in a car crash and broke her neck. She had to wear a halo device for four months and couldn’t do much for herself, which as you can imagine was frustrating and heartbreaking. I took care of her for a while, and then my mother-in-law moved closer and we both focused on helping Mom. Between that and all the usual family responsibilities, I didn’t have time to listen to the noise. I didn’t read social media. I didn’t listen to TV news. I didn’t read headlines. I just existed. I did the thing, went to sleep, woke up, and did the thing some more.

And you know what? Even with all that stress of health crises and family drama and pet angst (for the duration, I had five dogs living at my house, all with special diets and diva personalities), my life was, well, not stressless but ... content? Focused, definitely.

And man did I get shit done.

So that’s my chief resolution in 2019: to hear the signal, not the noise. To read, to write, to focus on the things that are important to my tiny circle and let the rest of the world be as crazy as it wants. I can’t fix the crazy. But maybe, if I do the things I’m meant to do, I can add to the melody and with enough of us trying, we can lift music out of the noise.

P.s. — Mom got her halo off about a week before Christmas and is doing really well. I am so, so grateful to still have her around.

Release Day: GATES OF THE DEAD #Fantasy by James A. Moore

🎉🍾HAPPY NEW YEAR! 🎉🍾

Jim (James) is ringing in the new year with the third book in his Tides of War epic fantasy series. Raise a glass with us as we celebrate Brogan's latest adventure!

GATES OF THE DEAD
Tides of War, Book 3

The end times have come, but it's not too late for a hero to strike back, in the grimdark fantasy sequel to The Last Sacrifice and Fallen Gods.

Brogan McTyre started a war with the gods, and he's going to end it. Raging gods have laid waste to the Five Kingdoms. Only Torema remains, swollen with millions of refugees. Their last hope lies in fleeing by sea, but as storms tear at the coast, even King Opar can't muster enough ships for them all. Brogan and his warriors must fight the He-Kisshi to reach the Gateway, the sole portal for gods to enter the mortal world - and the only place where they can be killed. But the forces of creation have been unleashed, and they'll destroy the world to reshape it.

BUY IT NOW: Amazon | B&N | IndieBound

New Goals and the final Table of contents for THE TWISTED BOOK OF SHADOWS

First, an announcement. After literally 10 months of  reading, the final Table Of Contents for THE TWISTED BOOK OF SHADOWS is complete. 


Why so long? Because we pushed as hard as we could for diversity in this anthology. We sent the message far and wide, that this would be an OPEN SUBMISSION and asked people to help spread the word to every market imaginable. What that meant at the end of the day was that we got just at seven hundred submissions. 

Guys, that takes a while to read. 

And you'd be amazed at how many of them were just plain excellent stories. I know I was. When we asked people to send their best, apparently they listened. There were a few exceptions, but only a few. 

The submissions, by the way, were also BLIND. No names, no genders no nothing, but the stories and their titles and their word counts. 

We had to gofundme to get the money up, but we got it. Six cents a word, up to 5000 words per story. 

The Twisted Book of Shadows
Here we go, folks. Ten months. 700 stories. Profound thanks to Matt Bechtel for all of his efforts to ensure our blind submission process remained blind. James A. Moore and I could not have done this without Matt, nor would we have wanted to do it without the extraordinary help of our editorial committee, including Herculean efforts from Linda D Addison, Rachel Autumn Deering, and Lee Thomas, as well as the notes and efforts of Nadia Bulkin, KL Pereira, and Lamar Giles.
Thank you to every single author who submitted and waited patiently as we waded through all of the stories, many of them multiple times.
Coming this year from John M. McIlveen and his Twisted Publishing (via Haverhill House Publishing)...
Without further ado, here, in alphabetical order, are the contents of THE TWISTED BOOK OF SHADOWS.

THE TWISTED BOOK OF SHADOWS
(Final Order to be Determined)

Angelmutter by David Surface
At Least the Chickens are All Right by Trisha J. Wooldridge
Beneath Her Skin by KT Wagner
Brother Mine by Rohit Sawant
Cake by MM De Voe
Coyote by Jason A. Wyckoff
Elegy by Sarah Johnson
For Every Sin an Absolution by Kristi DeMeester
Groomed by Liam Hogan
Liza by Jeffrey B. Burton
Lydia by Cindy O'Quinn
Midnight Sun by Andrew Bourelle
Mirror, Mirror by PD Cacek
Records of the Dead by John Linwood Grant
Smeared Star in Your Hands by Sara Tantlinger
The Birthing Pool by Eoin Murphy
The Pale Mouth by Melissa Monks
Underground by George Murray
Unto the Next by Amanda Helms

My New Year's resolutions? 

Lessee: Write more. 

Seriously. I spent a LOT of time doing other things this year, including working too many hours at the day job. Toward November this year I told them I could not keep working quite as many hours as they wanted. Love the job, need the time for my career. Simply because, now and then things go wrong in retail/customer service I wound up getting very behind schedule as I tried to keep up with demand on the work front and the writing front, 

I've now cut back to more reasonable hours and they'll have to stay reasonable, because as a rule I write four novels a year, and sometimes more. 

Also, I just plain have a lot of projects to work on, I have a novel due in a month or so, I really need to write that. Really. Seriously.

So with that in mind: May your New Year bring nothing but joy, prosperity and good health! Happy New Year!

James A. Moore

Added news: Happy BOOK BIRTHDAY to me! GATES OF THE DEAD comes out tomorrow, wrapping up my TIDES OF WAR series. It was a blast!

Anyone interested in meeting the author can find me at PANDEMONIUM BOOKS in Cambridge Massachusetts along with author Craig Shaw Gardner on January 10th from 7PM until 9 PM. You have been warned. 

And on the same front HAPPY BOOK BIRTHDAY to be and by co-author Charles R. Rutledge, for our novella, CALL UP THE DEAD, which is included in the anthology SNAFU: RESURRECTION. This is a novella with the characters GRIFFIN & PRICE, marking their fourth time in a long fiction piece of work. There will be more. :)

Rejuvenation and Goal-Setting

The pattern of frost-filigreed wisteria vines is so lovely. The winter holidays are such a great season for rest and rejuvenation - and our weather in the high desert of New Mexico has obliged with lots of snow and freezing temperatures. All the better to keep me cozied indoors and focusing on both relaxing and giving my mind the room to mull thoughts for the coming year.

I did something a little different this year. Not on purpose, but because in those last few days before guests arrived for the holidays, I just couldn't keep my attention on work.

Instead of fighting that - I let it go.

I spent those couple of days baking, wrapping gifts - and even tandem watching schlocky Christmas movies with a long-distance friend. The upshot is I went into the actual holidays feeling rested and calm, instead of stressed. I'm going to do this every year.

In fact, front-loading rejuvenation time rather than relying on post-effort recovery time is going to be my compass concept for 2019.

The other thing that's happened is that I relaxed and rested enough that I started to get a little bored - which meant I was excited to take on some business tasks, yay! - and my mind wandered quite a bit, of its own accord, to ideas for the coming year. A big part of that is going to be reducing back log and lists.

Some of those things:

Maintain Inbox Zero

Some people can live with full email inboxes. I just can't. I tend to treat my inbox like a To Do list, which means the emails in there weigh on me as tasks that remain unfinished. Worse, emails that are more important, and thus require more effort, tend to languish in there for months, growing hopelessly stale or often forgotten entirely.

To change this up:

• I already emptied all of my email inboxes and will start the new year with Inbox Zero
• I will treat email with the one-touch principle - each email gets touched once and dealt with
• to do this I will either reply immediately or
• file emails and add any reply tasks to my To Do List instead
• I'll also continue to check email only a couple of times each day, and then only after I get wordcount

Revivify To Do List

Related to the above, I'm going to make my running To Do List, which I keep on an Excel spreadsheet, more relevant and active. I have that same syndrome where some tasks tend to linger on it for MUCH too long, sliding from one day to the next, until they build up so much inertia from Dread & Procrastination that they feel like insurmountable obstacles.

To change this up:

• I will minimize tasks that float for a long time by
• distributing tasks instead of clumping (i.e., if I have a list of things to do for SFWA, I'll put them over several days or weeks instead of all on one day, then moving them as I don't finish them.
• And if I do move a task, I'll break it up into smaller tasks, then distribute over several days
• I'll give larger, longterm tasks a category (I already have these, like Finances, Business, Errands, etc.) and subtasks until complete
• Everything gets this treatment, rather than having very large tasks on my list that float with no progress

Reduce TBR List

Back in 2015, I made a spreadsheet (of course I did!) of all the books in my possession that I hadn't yet read. It lists the format (digital or paper), date acquired, reason to read, etc. I add to it as I acquire new books. All the books that I had at the time I made the spreadsheet got a date of October 27-29, 2015, which were the dates I entered them. When I made the list, I had something like 280 books on it. Today I have 316 and 233 of those are from October of 2015. (To be fair, those represent YEARS, possibly DECADES of unread residency in my life.) This list can feel like a crushing unfinished task, however, so I'm resolved to deal with this backlog.

To change this up:

• I will read one of these 233 books for every newer book I read, alternating them.
• I'm reducing my 25% commitment (reading at least the first 25% of every book) to 10%. If I'm not wanting to continue by then, off it goes.
• In fact, I'm going to get ruthless about this decision-making. If the book isn't making me glow with delight and LONG to keep going, then it goes. 

I've got a few other goal sets on my list - on a spreadsheet, OF COURSE! - but they feel more personal. What about you all - anything you're looking to change up this year?

Finest Holidy Cocktail: Joy

On December 15, eight panicked phone calls and two text messages told me my father had suffered a stroke and was in the hospital. Without surgery, he wouldn't survive, yet the surgeon had to wait 48 hours past the stroke before operating, or Dad would die on the operating table. Then, the day before surgery was scheduled, Dad suffered a much bigger stroke. One that brought the entire ward staff at a sprint.

At 9PM that night, they said, 'emergency surgery.' Dad's vascular surgeon raced to the hospital and shouted down that notion. We had to wait another 48 hours for the most recent stroke lesion to heal a bit. Finally, late Friday night, 12/21, Dad had his life-saving surgery.

When Mom and I went to see him in recovery, afterwards, it was very clear from his reaction that he had not expected to wake up from this one. Not ever.

On Christmas Day, ten days after the first stroke, my father walked (because the hospital couldn't find a wheelchair) out of the hospital under his own power and went home with no appreciable deficit from either stroke event.

So here's the recipe for joy:

1 part relief
2 parts gratitude
1 store bought frozen lasagna put in the oven at the parents' house because all their food went bad over the 10 day roller coaster
1 part getting to say 'I love you'

It's been a strange and miraculous season for us. No matter whether you drink alcohol, or prefer tea (call Miro Tea in Seattle and order up a few ounces of Phoenix Dan Cong), I hope your celebrations have been filled with light and love and second (or third) chances.

Holiday toast

Folks, 2018 has been quite a time.  A crazy, disheartening year in many ways, but I've made the best of it. 

So, we made it!  Raise a glass.

(For me, said glass will have a whiskey sour.  I go very simple: three parts whiskey, two parts lemon juice, one part simple syrup.  There are plenty of variations, but I don't mess with that when I make it at home.)

So keep doing good work, hold your head up, and keep your powder dry.

Ye olde holiday boozy chat

Happy happy, everybody! My family contains many Catholic people plus some Jewish, Baptist, pagan, and agnostic folk as well, so winter holidays are a mishmash of we-all-like-each-other-ness, which makes for a heckuva celebration. It does not require adult beverages, but they aren't discouraged either.

Sadly, it hasn't been cold enough here in Austin for my favorite winter cocktail -- hot cocoa, Bailey's, and mini marshmallows -- but we have made do despite. Last year we didn't cocktail but instead drank a ... well, rather a lot of this South American red wine with llamas on the label, but I couldn't find that stuff this year. (Sadness.) We tried this as an alternative:

...which turned out not to be a complete abomination. I mean, if you accept the fact that you're drinking berry juice that's just a touch bitter, it's really okay.

My preferred cocktailish drink is always whiskey sour made with Makers Mark (I'm a cheap date) or Deep Eddy Ruby Red Vodka with something fizzy like Topo Chico. When accomplished bartenders or trusted friends are in charge, I love me a good Old Fashioned.

But you know what the best holiday mix is? A cozy fire, a good board game, some people who respect each other and can behave like adults despite any differences they may have, and time set aside just for each other. Snuggled, not stirred, and served warm with a side of giggles.

Perfect.

Merry, Merry Christmas!

Dear Readers,

Merry Christmas!