BCL: Aspiring Novelist

 Just a quick life update.  

As some of my readers may know,   I have published short stories here and there over the decades, and have been trying to get a novel into print for some time.  

Earlier this year, a small UK Press called Baynam Books picked up my manuscript for Delicate Creatures, and it is due out in January of next year under my real name, M.J Murphy.

I've been making some efforts at marketing the book, or at getting set to market the book when it appears.  I have a fairly pathetic Instagram page here.  I say pathetic because the last picture I took, by accident, was of my thumb over the camera lens.  I have bit my tongue and paid Elon to get my blue check on Twitter.  After a month of that I am still not popular, so I am assume both Left and Right fear my intellect and have conspired to suppress me.  And my Bluesky profile can be viewed here.

But the thing I am most proud of is my new Substack, called Spoilers Ahead! The Weird Book Blog, which contains a series of short essays on some of the obscure authors I love (think David Lindsay, George Borrow, and so on).  

So far the readership is fairly minimal, and one might perhaps question the wisdom marketing a book by writing about other books nobody has read.  But whatever.

Speaking of Substack, it has its peculiarities.  For example, it is extremely difficult to add one of these:

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... because Substack has no easy method of centering text.  You have to switch to the "poetry" mode and do it by eye.  Also, its metrics don't easily separate visits from unique visits, so most of my traffic is just me checking the site to see how much traffic I'm getting.  Other substackers have noticed this as well.  The "notes" section  is mostly people complaining about lack of visits, so the "network" effects over there are basically zero.