Thank You

Tales & Treasure Will Be Released on October 1, 2024.

Aug 09, 2024

I'm still in shock, but I'll start by saying thank you—thank you for being here and for reading my story.

My novel Tales & Treasure is finished and available for anyone to read on the internet, and I can't tell you how terrified that makes me. I should be excited, confident, and happy. I mean, it took over four years to get here: four years of drafting, editing, doubting, slacking, critiquing, querying, hiding, sharing, and publishing. But I'm not.

Even as I type this, my hands are getting clammy. I get anxious whenever I tell people I wrote a book. I don't know why. I feel like that kid in school whose legs shake uncontrollably every time I get up in front of the class all over again.

It's not that I'm unprepared. I've been writing in some capacity for most of my life, and I have a degree in journalism. I'm pretty good at this, better than the average bear, anyway. Tales & Treasure is the story I wanted to write, a fun fantasy adventure with interesting/complex characters. I'm proud of how it turned out; it's a story I would want to read if I saw it in a bookstore. However, after all the rejections during the querying process, I still have doubts.

I never thought it would make it this far. Sure, I had dreams of it being published by Tor and making waves in the fantasy world, but I never planned to share it as a serial novel and find an awesome community here. So, once again, thank you for reading my story and for the incredibly positive feedback I have received. It means the world.

With all that said, it's done. There may be a few minor edits (hopefully, I'll catch all the typos) in the formatting process, but the Tales & Treasure you see here on Substack is the finished product. It will take a few weeks to finish formatting, a week or so of proofreading, another week of fiddling with graphics and marketing content, then a couple of weeks of more marketing and promoting, and finally, a week or so of release-day-related work. I'm probably missing something in there so I'll pad it with another week. That puts a release day of the paperback and ebook in early October. Let's be ambitious and call it Tuesday, October 1st. I like the sound of that.