regenerate verb
re·gen·er·ate | \ ri-ˈje-nə-ˌrāt
intransitive verb
1: to become formed again
2: to become regenerate : REFORM
3: to undergo regeneration
transitive verb
1a: to subject to spiritual regeneration
b: to change radically and for the better
2a: to generate or produce anew
especially: to replace (a body part) by a new growth of tissue
b: to produce again chemically sometimes in a physically changed form
3: to restore to original strength or properties
For me, the end of 2021 feels like a beginning of sorts, but human beings—at least adult human beings of a certain age—don’t start fresh, so it also feels like an ending. I’m pleased to announce that my fourth novel, Sugarbug, has quality representation and will be headed out on submission to publishing houses in the new year. It’s really not anything to announce yet. It’s like announcing that you have found a seed. It might become something. It has potential. Or maybe it’s like saying your seed has germinated.
However, for some of my readers Sugarbug will feel like a hard turn, so I thought I ought to take a moment here at the precipice to explain what I’m leaving behind and what I’m keeping as I move forward.
The genesis of this change really started in 2015 when I attended Worldcon 74 in Spokane, Washington. I remember four things about that convention. It was smokey from nearby wildfires. Brandon Sanderson was a cool cat. The panel asking “can you have too much violence in fiction?” was so stacked with horror writers and other aficionados that the question was answered was with a resounding “no” within thirty seconds. And I ended up in a coffee with two editors from Orbit books where I felt like a guy speaking Quenya at a convention where everyone else was head butting and yelling “Qapla.” (I see you my people.)
Those last two experiences left me sitting on the lawn staring at blades of grass trying to understand what it was I wanted to write about. What was the thing that kept me going? The genesis of my sortie into writing fiction had been about writing a male coming of age story that included markers familiar to me, including sex, commitment, and children. That fight to see American male culture gain a measure of emotional IQ, value intimacy, and respect diversity felt urgent to me then, and it feels no less urgent to me today. My Pax Imperium space opera universe was the result. By 2015, I had two novels published, a handful of devoted fans, and a good track record of positive reviews. What I didn’t have were sales.
After reminding myself why I wrote, I soldiered on until 2017 when I published the third novel, Gravlander. The book landed with a thud. I got a few sales from fans, and they wrote positive reviews, but the book went nowhere sales-wise. When sent out for a professional review through net-galley, no one seemed to want to touch it, and the one review I did get back was apoplectic about the fact that I dared create a space opera book centered on the trauma recovery of a female character. The one star review was personal and unnecessarily spiteful. The irony of getting red-faced angry about me writing a book about a person learning to manage their emotions seemed very lost on the male reader.
It was after the publishing failure of Gravlander that I decided it was time to change genres, to find an audience more receptive to my interests. The resulting book, Sugarbug, is a “book club” novel set in the present in the midst of an alternative COVID pandemic. The mission is still the same. I tell stories of personal, usually male, transformation and regeneration. I always have, and I always will, and there are many more to come. I almost always have at least three ideas in my head for viable novels and the time to write only one of them. I’m looking forward to the next one down on paper in 2022. It’s going to be a good year.