This is the one hundred and fourth installment of West Wind, your weekly drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. It’s also the beginning of 2026, which is pretty neat!
The beginning of the new year is a common time for authors to reflect on everything they did over the last 365 days, and I will not disappoint in that regard. But I also like to look ahead to the future, and what we have in store. Let’s start from the top!
January
To celebrate the 800th anniversary of St. Thomas Aquinas’ death, I recorded a narrated version of The Bellowing of the Ox, my unstuck-in-time fanfiction take on his life.
February
It snowed a lot, and I mean a LOT, at the beginning of the year. We got stranded at home for a little while, but everything got sorted out in the end.
Fellow author Allison Ramirez and I sat down for a chat about lots of things, like Catholicism, creativity, and of course gardening. You can find it below.
March
When I first started this whole author newsletter thing, I began by using Mailerlite, but stopped after only a few posts and moved to Zoho Campaigns instead. I kept up a bi-monthly schedule with the usual topics being life outside at our wild property, the indoor writing life, and the group author promotions that became the staple of my new subscribers for quite a while. I didn’t really post much on my Substack site, using it instead for stories and collaborating with other authors. Around this time last year, I got the crazy idea of posting something new on Substack every single day. And I did, naming it West Wind, after myself, and by extension the hope that I have been tasked to bring into the world. And it went well! We’re now 104 posts in, so very close now! I’m still working on a way to get the content from the old newsletter in a form for new readers to peruse through, so stay tuned for that if you’re interested.
April
End Quote Save Lives earned itself an audio version too, letting fans who weren’t there at the LegendHaven reading find out how to pronounce the names of the characters!
The Avalon Lost audiobook was released! This was a fun project to work on, and I came away with a great appreciation for the Welsh dialect, and Northern Scottish too.
May
The wild world of Frontier Flora got a new installment, the first to be enhanced with not only narration, but also music and sounds too! A wacky little tale about borrowed cocoa and spoiled food, Salty & Sweet Don’t Mix joined the rodeo last Spring.
June
The West Wind changed direction, as it is like to do, and the publication moved from Substack to right here, part of the Beehiiv newsletter service. While there are benefits and drawbacks to both platforms, so far the change has been a beneficial one.
Despite the accordion being my favorite instrument, I never knew that June is actually Accordion Awareness month! In order to raise more awareness about the fabulous squeezebox, I featured one of my favorite tracks most of the days in the month. You can check out all of them below, too.
July
ZMT Books had its first private sales event! It wasn’t public, since it was the summer camp for my son’s school, and it was really just ZT books since Michelle wasn’t there. But it was still wildly successful, as I sold every single copy I carried across the country to Kansas with me, and even a few more that I didn’t even exist yet and had to be printed and mailed. Wow!
We also moved away from our wild patch of grass and trees and into a different patch of grass and trees, but one much closer to the places we need to be, like church and town. Our family put in three years of our lives there, which made it hard to leave, but ultimately it was for the best.
August, September, October
These months were a bit slower. Creatively, I focused on getting Florabeasts regularly posted every week, along with a West Wind article of some kind. The daily posts from earlier in the year just weren’t working out, so things got a bit more relaxed.
November
Then they ramped back up again! In November I took a month-long vacation from work and focused almost exclusively on writing and recording, which was a lot of fun. I participated in the November writing challenges for ProWritingAid, World Anvil, and Inkwells & Anvils, which sounds like it would be overwhelming, but the goals largely overlapped.
Counterbalance had a strong showing this month, with 15,000 words written. I attempted to lure readers to my fledgling supporter membership by promising early access to those who signed up, but that just doesn’t seem to be what my readers want. So, I’ll need to come up with a different way to get it to my devoted readers. Stay tuned to find out what that is!
Frontier Flora closed out the year with a new short story, not to mention seventy total articles in the Floradex! Nearly all of those wacky little critters have been revealed, which is just fabulous.
December
ZMT Books had its first public sales event! Everyone was in attendance this time, including the cover artist of Vivi and the All-Lands Tournament, and we sold seven books and one CD. Quite the accomplishment.
Let’s go over the numbers next! That’s always fun.
zmthomas.com enjoyed 1,432 views, among 861 unique visitors. I hope you enjoyed your stay while you were there!
store.zmthomas.com had 5,236 window shoppers. Thanks for taking the time to look around!
zmthomas.substack.com, the old Extraordinary Seasons, was viewed 12,958 times. That’s significantly more than the main website!
World Anvil doesn’t give my tier of user very good stats, and since there are WAY more articles now than there were at the end of last year, I can only confidently say that I am blown away by the 27,000 pageviews that my author profile reports. That seems to be the place to be!
Beehiiv also doesn’t give me very good reporting info, but I can say that if you’re reading this, you’re one of the 718 amazing people who have shown your interest in our work as of this day, and for that I am incredibly grateful.
This year, 21 paperback copies of Octave of Stars found their way into the hands of readers across the country. Paper & Feathers made a strong showing with 13 hardcover volumes redistributed, and we can’t forget our 9 younger readers who are now proud owners of Vivi & the All-Lands Tournament.
In a strange twist, absolutely zero ebook copies of any of those three were sold this year. Readers seem to want hard copies, and I am more than ready to provide those. At least 246 ebook copies were distributed through BookFunnel author promotions, and since I didn’t record any data after August of this year and have already shut down my account with the service, there were probably a few more.
I would also like to point out that absolutely none of these books were sold on or through Amazon. 11 were sold through the Payhip storefront, and 3 were through catholiclights.com. While that certainly isn’t the same volume as a new Amazon release, keep in mind that all three books are now entering their third year of publication, so that’s pretty darn good!
That’s the year behind, so what about the year ahead? Some big changes are coming, let me tell you. First of all, the old Substack site has been shut down as far as I can without removing it entirely. The only things still on there are the old serial releases of Octave and V-ALT. And, to commemorate Octave’s third birthday this month, it’s going to be re-published on World Anvil, in the same format with embedded music and memes! V-ALT will follow shortly afterwards. But they aren’t set in the same world, are they?
World Anvil organizes content into different worlds, which makes perfect sense. Right now, Frontier Flora is the only world under my profile, but the Torchmouth Saga is going to go live very soon. That will bring Octave to the fore, along with Dreadful Evening. The Euphony of Seasons world will appear shortly afterwards, with Paper & Feathers finally getting a web release again since it was taken down from Campfire last year.
So where does V-ALT end up? I could do a Girl and Her Griffon world, but there aren’t really enough stories in the Raryverse to warrant such a thing. Not to mention, where would I put EQSL, Nestled, and any other one-off tale I come up with?
The fourth world to round out the balance of my World Anvil presence will be called Extraordinary Seasons. Wait, isn’t that the name of this newsletter, inherited from Substack? Not any more. With stories actually being posted to World Anvil instead of on this site, the only things I’ve been posting here are the weekly West Wind entries and the monthly ZMT Dispatch summaries. So, it makes sense to just call this publication West Wind from now on, and do away with the monthly summary newsletters. I’ll still post cool books and soundtrack albums as I encounter them, but the flow of the newsletter will change somewhat as we move actual story content to a different platform.
As always, there’s even more that I want to share, but this is plenty for today. If you’ve read this far, what are some of your plans or goals for this next year?
Enjoy the weekend, and remember that all is well.