Okay, so this story kind of has two starting points.  Bear with me.

I just finished the launch of The Merchant’s Daughter.  It took a lot longer than I was planning because my summer got trashed by legit personal stuff, and I don’t regret putting my time and energy where it was, but where I’d planned on smashing through the final (for now) book of Verida and moving on to Carbon Chronicles books in time to have them ready to launch (with a Kickstarter) in September… that didn’t happen.  Not even a little bit.

It was also the longest book I’ve ever written.  Literally twice my average length (you’d better believe I have a spreadsheet tracking this) and about twenty-five percent longer than my record-holding novel (Craft, from the Sam and Sam series, for the record), it took another week and another week and another week to get it finished, and then I was launching *it* in September, the month that I also had a writers’ conference.  As a result, as I sit here in the first week of October, I am not squarely and smugly in the middle of my science fiction/space opera phase, but rather… really struggling to get myself in gear again and go write a different genre.

It’s not that I’m grieving over Verida.  I had a season where that was real, but it seems to have passed for now.  And, frankly, the launch exhausted me.  It was spectacular, and I have zero regrets, but it was a lot of executive energy that comes at a really high premium for me.  I can write five-thousand words in an afternoon for less personal cost than it does to write an e-mail or post a couple of sentences to Facebook; it’s just the way I am, and I’m not upset or bothered by it, but it does take some planning to make sure that the fiction doesn’t get back-seated to four posts to Facebook more often than it’s worth doing.

And the launch was worth doing.

It was *so* worth doing.

I just came out of it, and the writers’ conference – and a bunch of other July-August-September stuff – with a lot less energy, and while I’m working on Carbon, and loving the story, and enjoying the characters, who I have missed, it doesn’t feel like I’ve really made the transition.

I’m still in Verida.  I’m just writing science fiction from Verida.

Now.

The second starting point to my story.

I listen to music while I write.  I cannot listen to *new* music any more than I can have the television on, because I don’t know what’s going to come next and my brain just twists away to go listen and I can’t hear the characters in my head.  At all.  But when I *know* the music, the kind of music that the nerves deep down in my spinal cord react to before I’ve even figured out the song, I can have that on, and it just sort of forms a bubble around me, and all of the other noises and the sense of *space* around me is sealed away and I can write in a sensory isolation of a sort.  My favorite way is to put on a really heavy set of wireless headphones that block out all outside noise and close off all of the sound of open space around me and I’m really *just* in my head, and I can do that for hours at a stretch and not be tired.

I’ve had playlists for various books and series.  I’ve had artists who were my flavor-of-the-season to whom I wrote two, three, even six books before my tastes migrated and I started in on something else.  But before this year, I’d never said: this is the artist that goes with these books, and I will only listen to *this music* while I am writing.

But I did.

With Twenty-One Pilots, for the most recent four books of The Queen’s Chair.

I’d written whole novels to Scaled and Icy.  I’ve written characters and settings and moods inspired by various other things they’ve done.

But for these four novels, I was only going to listen to *this* music, from the outset.

So JJ made me a playlist.  Started with all of the albums, took off a couple songs that really make me sad or upset, then added in a bunch of stuff that’s… rather harder to get.  I think everything on this playlist is legal, but I’d have to go through the whole thing carefully to be sure.  It’s fully ten hours long – I just checked – and I would start it on my phone at song one and pick up where I left off, writing session after writing session, looping from the end to the beginning over and over again.  If my phone shut down or my app reset, I’d start from song one again and just… let it loop.

I would sit down with my computer, turn on my music, conjure Tyler Joseph’s voice in my head: C’mon.  Let’s go.  Let’s do this.

And I would be off.  It was a contract with myself.

And it worked.  I pushed and pulled myself through those books in the midst of some of the hardest life stuff I’ve done, and they’re *good*.

Now.  Join the two stories.

I’m lingering about, still in Verida mode.  I asked my reader group on Facebook what I ought to do to celebrate finishing a massive season of Verida, and I got a lot of great answers.  Create a grand Veridan feast and eat it.  Have a fancy-dress zoom party.  Take classes in piracy.

I bought a knife.  It’s spectacular, a dagger as long as my forearm and as wide as my wrist at the hilt, with a corded handle and Damascus steel.  It’s very on-brand for the series and I adore it.

I thought that maybe I’d try to get pictures on horseback at some point, but that wasn’t a this-season thing to try to go do, and maybe it’s passed, now, I don’t know.

But I’ve lingered on and lingered on and finally launched The Merchant’s Daughter on September 28th.  And I have tickets to see Twenty-One Pilots in Columbus, Ohio on October 4th.

Because it’s only common knowledge among a specific subset of TOP fans, Columbus is their hometown, and they kind of have a really passionate relationship with it.  It was going to be full to the brimming with fans wearing colors.  These are the people who know all the words, and I have worn red and yellow gaffer tape on my clothes to concerts there, myself.  It’s spectacularly invested, intensely enthusiastic, and one of the few places in my life where I go in expecting to be ‘one of’.  When I go to their concerts, I get to be a part of the ocean, but when I go to a show in Columbus, the ocean is electric.

And it was.

It was a great show.

A truly great show.

But something really special happened.

They put up a slide before the show started announcing that they were recording a live album that night.  They said that they had forty microphones placed throughout the audience and asked us to give it our all.

Needless to say, that happened.

But it’s more than that.

My voice is going to be on that album.

Tyler Joseph has been a part of my art for the better part of a decade.  Now, though, I am a (very, very) small part of his.

This.

This is how you end an era.

This is how *I* end an era.

Welcome to Verida.  The air is good, the eyes are up, there’s fresh bread on every street corner, and the things that happen here *matter*.

I’m not done, here.  But it’s time for a new chapter.  Even though I don’t do those.  The stories all come back together in the end, anyway.

Onward into Carbon.  Fiction I haven’t begun to imagine awaits.