Confusing Swifties on Spotify

in which our hero relates an amusing anecdote

Dear Readers,

Funny story: the other day, I received an update from my audiobook distributor with the latest stats. Among those numbers was an interesting factoid that made me laugh out loud. Over on Spotify, where premium members can listen to up to 15 hours of audiobooks per month as part of their subscription, someone had listened to a few minutes of my short story collection Out of the Woods and the demographics indicated that said listener was female and in their 30s.

Now, it’s possible the person was actually looking for my book—or for an audiobook in general—but my sneaking suspicion, based on how quickly they stopped listening, was that they were looking for the song “Out of the Woods” by Taylor Swift and found my book instead. This is what made me laugh. I was incredibly amused imagining their reaction being something like, “What the…? I knew that the Taylor’s Version of the song was different, but this is just weird.”

At any rate, that ancedote is my sneaky way of letting you know that you can now listen to all of my audiobooks as part of your Spotify subscription, if you have one:

1. The Piano of Death

2. The Boot of Destiny

3. The Chains of Desire

4. The Elixir of Denial

5. The Dance of Dreams

6. Missing Mr. Wingfield (which includes Piano and Boot, plus extras)

7. Under the World

8. and, of course, the aforementioned Out of the Woods

I’m not sure yet what my royalty rates are for these streams, but don’t worry about that right now. Just enjoy the books if your subscription lets you do so, and leave a rating when you’re done to help others find them!

And now, on with the updates on my progress with the next big project: The Blood of Seven Queens

ART
I spent my art time this past fortnight on putting together the sets for issue one of the series. The hardest of these was the set for the Emerald City, which I spent several days on. Eventually, while searching for a brick-lined street to reference for the Yellow Brick Road, I came across a photograph of San Francisco that perfectly captured the vibe I was looking for.

I then set about trying to recreate that, which took a further few days. I don’t have a finished image to show you yet, but rest assured it’s going to look really freaking cool when you see it in the comic.

I also just wrapped up a couple of days of work on re-sculpting my white rabbit, Albus Lepus. As you may remember from my discussions of how the BSQ prologue got made, every illustration of the white rabbit was a downright laborious process. I’ve now got a much better method in place. Again, nothing finished to show here, but soon!

WRITING
Work on the script for issue 2 is progressing nicely. I have an opening I’m really happy with, which puts a neat twist on the story of Sleeping Beauty and gives the girl a lot more agency than she has in most versions of the fairy tale. I have a wonderfully tense scene between our heroine, Red Riding Hood, and two of the witches of Oz. And I have a solid plan for the rest of the issue.

WORLDBUILDING
Worldbuilding has been somewhat slow over the past month, given that I’ve been busy looking for a new job and working on the projects above. That said, I did finally get a chance to knock out some quick projects over the weekend, including writing a summary of what a facsimile city is in my world. I also updated the names of my seven dwarves based on changes I made to their language earlier in the month.

And that’s about that, except to let you know that I may be moving on from Substack to another newsletter situation soon. My friend Lissa drew my attention to the news that Substack’s response to Nazis on their platform has been less than stellar, and since I’m not beholden to Substack for anything right now (all of my paying members are over on Patreon), I think it makes sense to cut ties while it’s still relatively easy to do so.

I’ll let you know more about that soon, though it shouldn’t have all that great an impact on you as readers. At least that’s my hope.

Until next time, thank you for reading and for your continued support.

Yours,

Chris