This is the one hundred and sixth installment of West Wind, your weekly semi-regular drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.
It’s NOT Friday! In fact, it’s Wednesday, and a super-special Wednesday too! Today is the 28th of January, which is the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas, a major philosopher, thinker, and all-around cool guy. He’s also the patron saint of our family, and who I picked to be my confirmation saint when I came into the church all those (13) years ago.
We’re celebrating around the house by wearing black and white and reading large books, and you can celebrate too by listening and/or reading to my hagiographical fanfiction rendition of the most exciting parts of his life.
Hey, why is the story on World Anvil, and not on Substack or here on Beehiiv like before? Because everything will be on World Anvil eventually! Since it is so flexible and allows me to set things up and format as I please, and people actually read what I put up there. Which is pretty cool. Speaking of what I put up there…
Octave of Stars turns three years old today, and to celebrate… it’s on World Anvil too! It’s been removed from Substack entirely, so don’t go looking for it there anymore. I don’t think anyone actually was, but now you really can’t. The WA version retains all of the jokes, footnotes, and memes from the Substack version, as well as the “inspired by” music tracks. About the only thing that isn’t there is narration, but that is definitely planned. Just as soon as my other voice projects are wrapped up!
Octave is important to me, as it is not only my first published book, but also my top seller! There are more copies of it out in the world than any of my other works, and people have been enjoying it, at least as far as I can tell. There are only a handful of reviews on major review sites, but after hearing that one of the young recipients at the summer camp sale spent the entire car ride home reading it, I knew that I had done exactly what the Holy Spirit had wanted me to do.
See, Octave wasn’t supposed to be my first book. That honor was supposed to go to Paper & Feathers, which was (I thought) rapidly nearing completion, and Octave wasn’t even on my radar as a project. But in 2021, I got the massive inspiration I needed to develop the fragments of the story that I had lying around, and push it to the top of the queue. That turned out to be a good thing, since P&F needed just a bit more time marinating and getting through some tricky parts that I had been holding on to for a while.
And now it’s all done and out there. It’s been three years since this whole self-publishing thing got started, which is kind of unbelievable sometimes. I know there are some of you out there reading this that have been here since the very beginning, three newsletter providers ago, and for that, I am deeply grateful. For those who have just signed on recently, welcome, and I hope you’ll stick around for all the fun that’s coming up.
Stay safe and warm, and remember, all is well.
Photo by the author