Leaving Wattpad

At the end of June 2018, my fantasy novel Bloodshadow will be unpublished from Wattpad.

The book has been visible on the display site Wattpad since late 2015, and had over 2200 distinct ‘reads’. It received some lovely comments and votes. So why am I removing it?

Wattpad is a sweet, fun place, but it’s not a great platform for hermits like me. I don’t interact that much with the Wattpad community, more my fault than theirs.

At 132K, Bloodshadow is a big, sprawling mess. There’s good reason why over 75 agents rejected it from 2009 to 2015. It needs to be condensed if I’m going to publish it ‘for real’. That might not even happen; in the equally big sprawling 150,000-year mess of the Lonhra Sequence, Tel’s story in Bloodshadow is just one small part. The Purist, the book that’s coming out from NineStar Press this summer, is earlier on the Lonhra timeline than Tel, about a direct ancestor of hers. The changes that I’ll be making in that story will propagate into Tel’s timeline, so I really can’t say how her story will morph.

The new book is more important. It’s better. I’ve learned so much while doing it. Someday, I might post the 6K short story that began it. Could be fun to showcase all the places where editorial and agent feedback made me push my limits and preconceived notions, creating a 103,000-word novel.

As my series writing stands now, I have written or heavily outlined a lot of stories in the Lonhra Sequence. If I were to publish them in chronological story order (not date written), they would be Lonhra, Roessa, The Rubbisher’s Apprentice, The Blue House, Saints and Heroes, A Gift of Gold, The Purist, Deathcache, Baneflower, Bloodshadow, The Shell Queen, Battleground, Hunting Ground, Darksplinter, Damoa’s Banner, Needle and Sword, Moro’s Price, Leopard of Saba, Moro’s Shield, Second Sunrise, and Moro’s Crown.

That’s a lot of stories for an unagented* writer to corral, write, polish, contract or self-publish, and promote. I’ve been telling this big story since the summer of 1983. I may not last long enough to tell all of it, but I’ll have fun doing what I can.

What does this mean to my five or six loyal Bloodshadow readers? Grab a copy while you can. But don’t fret. There’s much better stuff on the way.

*I’m out of the agent-hunting game right now. I’m not saying I won’t ever query or work with an agent on future work. Nor would I dissuade anyone from trying their best to get a literary agent, because most of the time, that opens up more opportunities and money for authors.

With Moro’s Price and now Purist contracted to NineStar Press, the entire Lonhra Sequence is pretty much a non-starter for literary agents, for good reason. They can’t sell the rest of the series to a bigger publisher, and small-press doesn’t offer them enough of a commission to make the effort worthwhile.

As I’ve said before, it’s frankly a relief to be out of the query trenches. I can spend more time on writing, and less on flavor-of-the-month elevator pitches.