October was one hell of a month. We successfully moved into a new apartment and checked out of our old one, which in Switzerland is a tense situation. Amongst all the sweat, and fatigue came joy and excitement. RADIO was chosen as a 2020 Self Published Fantasy Blog Off semi-finalist.

While I didn’t make the finals, I’m ecstatic to have my weird tale of opium, jazz, and mind control receive this level or recognition and praise. I’m truly honored and grateful. The judges over at the Fantasy Inn took on an epic task and I thank them for their hard work and time spent. It must have been stressful.

And speaking of stress,I’ve come to learn that the universe has decided that any big event in the life of RADIO must come with a heaping spoonful of stress. Gather ’round and hear the tale of how a calendar year viciously messed with a poor, innocent author.

RADIO was launched this spring and in true 2020 fashion, it’s been dealt some challenges. First, as I was preparing the book to launch, beginning to organize launch events and readings, and researching possible cons to attend, the pandemic set in, throwing all of that out the window. As many other authors who were forced to debut during a global pandemic will tell you, this was definitely stressful. However, one set back does not a trend make.

Fast forward to April and the day RADIO launched. I’d been both prepping for launch and working with Google to sort out some Google Drive issues I was having and all this culminated in discovering, on launch day, that I’d managed to accidentally delete 10+ years of Goggle Docs and Sheets. All of it, gone including most of my writing research. Let’s just say that there was a lot less celebrating that evening than I would have hoped. Luckily, I was able to to get them all back over the next few weeks.

Fast forward again to the launch of the paperback version of RADIO. Time to celebrate? Nah, time to learn that Amazon won’t ship author copies to Switzerland due to customs issues and that Ingram Spark has screwed up a ton of my distribution. A few months go by and it all eventually gets sorted.

Fast forward finally to the end of October where I’m simultaneously moving apartments, trying desperately to navigate shipping, the pandemic, and language barriers to get some stuff for the new place, worrying about how the check out process for our old apartment will go (the Swiss have been known to actually take out white gloves to check for cleanliness) and, on top of it all, stressing about where RADIO will end up in SPFBO. At this point, I can plainly see a clear trend. I’m assuming you can too. The part of that trend I keep reminding myself about is that it always works out in the end.

Did it?

Today, everything is peachy. I’m thrilled with my outcome in the competition, our new place is fantastic, and I have some exciting plans for promotion and interaction coming up. I’m feeling really good about the future of RADIO and my writing.

I just hope the stress+big event combination ends along with this god-forsaken year.

When the virus lets up and it’s safe to do so, I’ll be scheduling those book launch events that I’d planned. I hope to meet a lot of new faces and new readers when that time comes.