It’s Saturday and I’ve had a couple drinks. Seems like a good time to update all three of you on my life and work.

Sophistication

Sophistication is out pretty much everywhere. It should also be available on Audible, but the book keeps failing the company’s volume checks. My voice artist also mixes the audiobooks and the poor guy has remixed and re-uploaded it back to me three times now. Whenever it fails, I have to log back into Audible and re-upload 90-something files one at a time. I’ve done this so much now that I go to bed dreaming about Audible’s upload directories.

Hot.

Anyway, the audiobook really is so damned fun and I can’t wait to get it out so that a few people can experience it.

Meanwhile, the readable book seems to be earning lots of praise from both critics and readers alike, which is wonderful because you just never know how this shit is gonna go. I half expected people to despise every word and there may yet be people who do. Sales are slow, but steady, and I haven’t done any marketing beyond some social media posts. I’ll start in on that soon.

Dead Weight

Remember my first book? It was all dystopian and shit. Well, first off, it’s sold well thus far. Several thousand copies, which may not seem like a lot outside of the books industry, but I’m told that’s pretty good for self-published authors. I’ve been trying to get the site Bookbub to feature Dead Weight for more than a year, but they kept rejecting it. A couple weeks ago, however, Bookbub finally accepted it for featuring later this month. Pretty cool because the site reaches millions of folks.

Degenerate

It’s cooking. I’m 10,000 words in now, which, based on the length of my previous two works, means I’m about one-twelfth through. I’m going at a faster pace than I usually do, though. I think I’ve written about this, but Dead Weight took a half decade to write and Sophistication took about two years. Lots of procrastination involved in both of these works, of course. I started Degenerate for real a couple weeks ago and I hope to be done in a few months. Six months at the longest. I really think it’s manageable. If so, that’ll be dramatic progress for me.

(Fast forward to the end of this year and I’ll probably be 20,000 words through.)

The other bit is that I really like where the story is going. Mason Alexander is black man in a racist world. He’s plagued by general anxiety disorder and crushed by the stresses of day-to-day life in Silicon Valley. And he’s starting to see things that shouldn’t be there.

When I first started writing this, I said to myself, now Matt, you just wrote a pretty raunchy book so maybe take it down a notch for this one. But turns out I’m just a sick asshole, I guess, because if it stays on track, Degenerate is going to make Sophistication feel tame.

Next update, I’ll show off two book covers for Degenerate, both fantastic in my opinion. Obviously, much more to come on this one in the coming weeks and months.

SFWA

All sci-fi authors want into the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America organization, but gaining admission is particularly challenging for new authors because you have to sell a fair amount of books before they’ll even consider you. I’m delighted then that Dead Weight cleared the hurdle and I’m now a member. It’s a little surreal to be in private message boards carrying on convos with some of my all-time favorite authors. Super humbling. Incredibly cool. Ridiculously useful. And another achievement unlocked as I try to break into this weird, fickle industry.