March 2025 - FLARE AND BIND Cover Reveal & Behind the Scenes Update

(Note for new friends: Welcome! If you missed the link to your free ebook of THE STARS PROVIDE novella, you can find it here.)

FLARE AND BIND (Synchronists 2) is off to copy editing and the release date is set for June 6!

The other side of the Outer Rings isn’t far enough to escape Meri’s past…

In the seven years since leaving their scavenger planet homeworld with the synchronists, Meri has made a good life for themself in the merchant corps. They like the work, they’re figuring out a situationship with way-out-of-their-league diplomat Xavia Tane, and they’ve made friends among humans and fai alike. If their next sale—an event collaboration with Xavia— is successful, Meri will finally have proven to themself and everyone else that they are right where they belong.

Then the boss’s shiny new flagship goes missing in a gate storm while carrying Meri’s cargo, station fai start acting strange, and a distant cousin shows up full of resentment and vague threats, throwing Meri off their game.

Everything falls apart.

With the help of the notoriously contrary fai known as the Curator, Meri untangles the connections. Everything leads back to their family and the planet Meri swore never to return to, but no one else–not even Xavia–seems to realize how far Meri’s family will go to get what they want…

The ARC sign up is still open! Preorders will open on my payhip shop next month.

Everything looks different! What is happening?

If you've been on this list a while, you've seen me talk about how I try to run the business side of indie publishing according to my values. We get the world we make, so while it's impossible to fully escape the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, it is possible to make incremental improvements in our own tiny spheres while we also work for necessary systemic changes.

Over the last year, several vendors introduced fake-AI products into their offerings and then increased their prices while making it harder for me to efficiently accomplish tasks. I refuse to pay for products I didn't ask for and do not want, and I try to minimize interactions with large corporate entities in favor of more ethical options, so I've been slowly and methodically moving to new service providers as my subscriptions come up for renewal.

Slowly and methodically, that is, until my last computer finally aged out of usability and I upgraded to a shiny new laptop a few weeks ago. Looking for a clean start, I moved everything at once. (Please send thanks to my spouse and friends who have endured weeks of rants and whining about this whole process. Do not do this like I did this. Slowly and methodically is a much better approach.)

My website, newsletter, and mailing list are now being managed through Ghost. Future posts will be a mix of public, subscriber only, and in the future, maybe some paid content. If all you want is the monthly newsletter, you don't need to do anything! Any additional options will be opt-in only.

I held subscriptions with Squarespace and Adobe for as long as they had had subscriptions (far longer, in Adobe's case), thanks in part to previous careers granting me legacy pricing for a good long time but also because they were reliable and dependable...until they weren't. Their replacements have been working out fine. Ghost and the Affinity Suite meet my needs quite nicely at far lower prices–and with much less aggravation.

My direct sales are now through Payhip using Bookfunnel for delivery. I'm working on building out my shop on Itch.io as well–Spark and Tether is available there now, pay-as-you-wish.

I left MSOffice365 for LibreOffice and changed browsers to something more secure. I am in the process of moving all of LZ out of Google Workspace and into Zoho.

I still do all of my writing except for the very last round of copy edits and proofreading in Scrivener, and if I could figure out cleaner compiles I'd do those and the final formatting there too.

I can't assume that all of these replacements will continue to work, because capitalism ruins everything eventually, but for now, my workflows are more efficient and I'm enjoying the change.

It's all very much in process, and I expect there will be missteps. Nothing is pretty, yet, and some of it is barely functional. Hang in there with me. More posts about research and sources and world-building coming soon.

MARCH PROMOS

Each month I share some promotions from Bookfunnel; if you click the links in the caption, you'll see a list of books currently available. There's a huge variety of genre and theme and vibe in these! Bookfunnel makes it easy to download books and will help you with any technical issues you may have.

This Month's Bit of Joy

A month or so ago, I made an off-hand comment about starting a family DnD campaign and much to my surprise all of my kids and bonus kids and my spouse were extremely onboard and voluntold me to DM.

I have never played before, but I gathered everyone's rule books and accessories and did a deep dive into lore and mechanics. We started a few weeks ago. I am flexing some new storytelling muscles, and it's quickly becoming one of the higlights of my week. I have no idea what I am doing, but I am watching a lot of Dungeons and Drag Queens and all of my fun reading has been rule books.

It is giving me ideas.

I hope all of you are finding moments of rest and joy, too.

yours,

-LZ