The one thing I’ll give to Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series (It has a lot of things going FOR it, also a lot against, mind you. All our works are, after all imperfect) in unalloyed praise, is that she correctly identifies the mechanisms of breaking a writer and of burnout. She called it magic, of course, but she described it in a way that I suspect was learned from her experience as a writer.

And any career writer, with a minimum of introspection will recognize it.

When you force the writing — when you’re tired, sick, walking -dead, or simply the book isn’t in your competence/interest range but baby needs shoes — you might do an excellent job, but you hurt yourself too.

Now, listen, I’m not telling you to be an utter slacker. Sometimes the book has to finished and you’re walking dead, stumbling into walls.

Doing this once or twice and then resting afterwards or — this is very important — writing something you really want to is okay.

It’s like…. taking your codliver oil but then having a treat (After you wash your mouth. Blech. I am of the generation that got codliver oil every spring. At least in Portugal) is okay. But if your entire diet is all codliver oil, every day day in and day out it’s a good way to build an aversion to eating and starve to death.

Just before I utterly broke, I was doing six books a year. Baby needed shoes. Some of them I actually wanted to write (look, no, I’m not going to tell you which. I did the best I could in each of them) but even those I was writing right then not because they were pushing/driving (every artist knows what I mean. It’s like birth pains.) but because the publisher had said they’d buy that right then.

And, this is the worst part, at the same time there were other books/stories/ideas at the back of my head that I told to shut up completely. Because they were unsaleable to trad pub. Just too weird, too bizarre, too strange, too “We don’t know how to market this.”

And before you think I secretly have a mind fool of “the Alien did the girl” yeah, no. One of those was Witchfinder.

You see, before falling through the portal into magical regency world, the young woman worked for a computer firm. Never mind that she’s in the regency world when we meet her. She talks about being a programmer for Bytek (Which really bites.) “We don’t know how to market it. Readers wouldn’t know if it’s fantasy or science fiction.”

(So it became my first indie novel.)

And through it all, back of it all, at the bottom of it all I had my first series. I don’t know about you, but I was tempted into science fiction writing by getting mad at Ursula LeGuinn’s The Left Hand of Darkness. It was mostly on the biological but then also on “What comes from the biology” basis, and it was probably because being a profound Oddling I’d spent the last several years reading every book of biology human and not I could lay hands on. (And I come from a family that runs to doctors as much as to engineers. Weirdly, if I had had my choice, it would be mechanical engineering, but hey.)

And then, in the way my mind works, I woke in the middle of the night with a not-quite-prince (well, he’s an hermaphrodite) running through the hallways of an ancient but weirdly high tech palace in a panic because his birth parent, the king, has died, and he must claim the throne or get killed by one of his parent’s many sirelings.

It’s been there, at the back of my brain all this time. I ran and hid in it when I was wounded or burned out, but you know? I thought I was being weak and scolded myself out of it most of the time.

And I pressed on. And writing became harder. My mind became an arid hellscape where I had to fight hard for each flourish, each grace note. It wasn’t recognizeable block. It was more like…. having all your magic channels burned out and not having anything for free.

I went through periods where I felt like I had to fight for every word, to the point it was like writing by passing out fortune-cooking-like strips through the only slit giving light to a deep and dark dungeon.

And each book pushed the ability to do it again further down. Without some short stories (Dead End Rhodes!) and that first indie novel that wanted to be written and restored a little of the spark, I’d probably have stopped completely.

But the thing still took a toll. (And how.) So I became silent, little by little, as has probably been obvious.

And then two years ago my close-in fan group beat me over the head with a chinchilla (look, the Portuguese equivalent of chancla, the word, is chinelo. And those unmitigated GOONS (and particularly goonettes) decided that it was a chinchilla. Now the chinchilla of hope is a thing) and told me to write the book in the heart, the one I thought no one would want to read.

It was hard. Sometimes I still had to fight for every word, but I set myself a chapter a day. Then I started dreaming it. And if I hadn’t written my chapter (or at least half a chapter) the dreams were so vivid they woke me up.

It took a year. And then revising it took almost another year, though that was partly because I caught the 9-month sinus infection. (My body HATES me.)

But it worked. Well, mostly. I’m still not 100% but whatever part of me had gone missing in the fight for the words that didn’t want to be written is say 80% there.

The magic returns.

Now, look, yeah, I’ll give you a link to the thing, but I haven’t yet told you about the most bizarre phenomenon of this. And it might, to be honest, be a synergy of this and mom’s death (Eternal Rest grant onto her, Lord) a week and two days ago.

But the last week, I couldn’t write or do anything sane to promote, but by gum, I could write lyrics and use suno to set them to music and have them sung. Yes, yes, I know, AI evil. But younger son was playing with it and I was grieving, and brain snapped or something. (We will talk about that AI evil when I’m functioning better. I mean, the writing is back, and yes, I’m working through grief, but wouldn’t you know it? I caught cold from heck. AI might be evil, but it’s also a tool. Like computers. And you and I, my friends, are idea people.)

So…. with the understanding I will ask the Good Lord for forgiveness (but not confess it, because my priest already thinks Twitter Hooliganism MIGHT be the sin of pride, but it’s too hilarious for me to confess in that way. (No, he didn’t tell me, but his lips twitched.)) COFF… The songs of No Man’s Land. (The songs of Elly are different, as they are the songs THEY sing. Yes. I’m doing those too. WHY DO YOU ASK?)

First…. heaven help me, the KPop version:

Skip Hayden goes K-pop!

A Medieval Bard’s Song:

The ballad of Skip Hayden.

DID you say Celtic Power Metal? Why? I don’t know. If I told you I went running down the street naked with ducks drawn on me in soap would you ask why?

This is officially The Ballad of Skip Hayden 3, but I meant for it to be Skip Hayden in the Deep Ice, but haven’t figured out how to change the title yet.

This one is perhaps the most accurate plot-wise to the story, but while I like the style, I know it’s my favorite, not necessary anyone else, and also that I’m dating myself which is illegal in forty nine states and iffy in California.

Skip Hayden’s No Man’s Land.

Is there more? Oh, dear Lord, what do you think? I told you I went insane, didn’t I. (At least it wasn’t nudity and ducks drawn in soap. At my age, no one wants to see that. And drawing ducks ain’t my forte.)

But I’m going to try to upload them to youtube and share a couple a day.

I mean among other things there are the songs of Elly which given the culture will puzzle the living daylights out of everyone who hasn’t read it. (And some who have.) Take Missa’s Confession/Lament. It’s a suicide song, really but they sing it at their equivalent of their weddings, and inscribe it on their swearing belts (the equivalent of wedding rings, really. With some differences, like they’re not worn every day, except maybe symbolically.) There are reasons for that, but explaining those is its own story. For now you’ll have to take my word for it.

Anyway, before you think that naked and ducks would be a better option, I’ll finish this.

If you haven’t given No Man’s Land a try, you might wish to.

…. and yes, it’s volume one, because the d*mn thing weighs in at close to 900 pages. That’s why it took a year to write.

The entire book is written. The second volume is being typeset, and the third is on my copyeditor’s desk (And I should have it back ready to go over and upload next week.) They’re spaced two weeks apart for release for stupid algorythm games. Is what is.

I’m now launched on the second story which is carried I think entirely (unless a third voice insists on being heard. It’s possible) by Skip Hayden and his mother. Her view of Elly is… head twisting for me. I’d… not thought of so much of this. Which is hilarious, since I suspect people will think she’s a self insert. (Now, trust me, NO.)

Any-vay. I’ll go study how to draw some ducks with soap, shall I. Or write Elly, the Musical!

No Man’s Land: Volume 1 (Chronicles of Lost Elly)

Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.

On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.
Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.

Volume 1
The Ambassador Corps has rules: you cannot know everything, don’t get horizontal with the natives, don’t make promises you can’t keep.
They’re a lot harder to follow when assassins are hunting you, your barbarian allies could kill you for the wrong word, and death lurks around every corner.
The unwritten rule? Never identify with the natives.
Skip’s already broken that one.
Now he’s racing against time to save his new friends from slavery—or worse—while dodging energy blasts and political intrigue. One crash-landed diplomat. A world of deadly secrets. And absolutely no backup.

Some rules are meant to be broken. Others will get you killed.

UPDATE: It’s five o’clock, do you know how crazy your writer is?

This crazy:

Be aware that no, the beat is not synced yet, nor the lips. It will come, but not today. Look, I never used a video editor before and I’m in phase one of my normal learning curve: Scream at it and pound your head on the desk. In a week or two it will all click together and I can do the difficult.