Cracked Palace has a cover, #content is bad and more!
Can we just move on from #contentification already?
Let me tell you, this has been a busy month around here.
The kids being back in school means a lot more wheels are in motion. We play after school for at least an hour a day at the park, there are swim lessons and a veritable avalanche of birthday parties on weekends. This weekend alone I took the kids to two birthday parties.
All of this punctuated by recurring back injury springing back to life at an inopportune time, although it’s getting somewhat better now. Somewhat. That hindered my writing time, I can’t lie here, but things feel like they’re getting back into alignment well enough (literally and figuratively).
This is also the season of massive budget fantasy series showing up on streaming networks to mixed results. The first episode of House of the Dragon was fine, albeit not worth getting too excited about. Then the Tolkien Rings of Power show debuted on Friday with two episodes that felt positively lifeless and overwrought.
Both are trying to live up to the moment that was Game of Thrones as appointment television by attempting to recapture said moment, although it’s clearly passed by and can’t be bottled up for the future. Instead, both feel like #content being churned out to look and feel a certain way but to have no real longevity because of the inability of anyone in charge of these things allowing art of any sort to breathe.
Frankly, I’m quite tired of everything needing to be curated #content hell bent on virality or important for a brief flicker of time, only to not just fade, but implode into obscurity. It’s exhausting and stifling. I can also feel this weariness with the publishing industry at large right now and I’m not sure how it gets better. My author pal K. Leigh just wrote up a fantastic piece analyzing how we’re fed content and how books feel like they’re on a tipping point. I’d argue in the realm of indie books it’s long past that when authors feel betrothed to Amazon algorithms, but alas.
As you can probably see, there’s a cover for Cracked Palace! Exciting, right? Still using the placeholder release date for now, I want to actually finish writing it before I make any major decisions here. Thank you for being patient.
My pal K. Leigh that I mentioned before has a brand new story out, Empty of Nothing, which serves as a primer into their Constelis Voss universe. It’s LGBT+ cyberpunk goodness that shouldn’t be missed.