Hello friends!
I just wanted to take the time to give you all a bit of an update on a couple of things. I’ve been a bit quiet for the past six months, and after saying I was going to give everybody monthly updates, that just hasn’t happened.
My bad.
But, you know, COVID-19 came to town, and it kind of fucked everything up for everybody.
Abbie and I were originally going to be married in April 2020, at Binna Burra, which burned down in the Queensland bush fires late last year. Then, we were going to get married at Fraser Island in August 2020, but COVID-19 and lockdowns and all of that bullshit happened. So we’re now in the midst of planning the wedding for a third time, unsure whether or not things will be better by the time the next date rolls around.
We might have to plan a fourth wedding.
My mental health has been down the bloody toilet too. Changes at my day job threw my life into chaos, and suddenly the work/life balance was gone. The long hours meant that I was away from home 13 hours out of the day, and the 3 hours I wasn’t sleeping was spent looking after kids and trying not to stare into the doom rectangle (aka my phone) and watch the global collapse of society in real time.
In short, this year’s been fucked.
But Toby, my little dude, is the light of my fucking life. He’s keeping me going through all of this shit, and knowing that he’s relying on me inspired me to stand up for myself in situations where I normally would have accepted shit being shovelled on top of me.
Wrapped up in all of this, my last book Ashen Legacy was a total fizzer. It’s been out six months now. I’ve sold 64 copies, and have accrued about 84 books’ worth of Kindle Unlimited page reads.
That’s an utterly abysmal result.
It was pretty demoralising after busting my guts to get it done and released for it to end up being one of my worst releases, especially when I consider it the best book I’ve written. The readers seem to agree, because the reviews are super good. There just aren’t enough of them.
But I’ll save the woe is me stuff.
I just wanted to give some context for the radio silence.
I’m hard at work on getting book three written. I’ve got such faith in the book and the series that I’ve already had the cover art completed. So, after all that bluhbluhbluh moaning, here’s some good news. Crematoria Online book 3’s title is Curse of the Coven.
Here’s the cover art!
Depending on the reception of the book, this may be the final volume of Crematoria Online unless there’s a massive swell in interest.
If book three fizzles, I don’t think I’ll have any of choice but to move onto another project.
But as it stands at the moment, who knows what’s going to happen in the world in the next few years? I may need to press pause on this writing thing altogether.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying to teach myself some basics of game development. I made a really rudimentary game about Evil Cubes in Unity last week, and I’m trying to get my head around the Unreal engine right now.
I’ve always wanted to make games, and for the first time in my life it feels like something that’s actually achievable. So the next project after Crematoria Online might be a video game! Who knows.
I have no flippin’ idea what the future holds.
All I know is that above all else I’ll be doing whatever I can to keep my family safe.
I hope you and yours stay safe too. ❤
Matthew J. Barbeler 