Has it really been this long since I wrote a round-up? It would appear so. To be fair to myself, it has been a busy six months. On top of the usual work and family obligations, I have been hard at work with a bunch of different projects.

Some of these have been bigger than others. Despite containing a lot of pre-existing content, my new poetry collection, At the Winding Path's End still involved a fair amount of work. I made tweaks to a variety of my existing poetry, with some revisions being bigger than others. I also wrote several brand new poems from scratch to help flesh out my existing library of "cozy fantasy" content.

In case you missed my last update about this book, it already appears to be doing well. Nat over at Wyngraf won't have actual sales numbers for me until the beginning of July, but the pre-orders alone were enough to make it the #1 New Release in one of its categories for about 4-5 days. It even managed to briefly claim the #20 spot on Amazon's Poetry Anthology list - not bad considering how many of those top spots are held by dead guys read by English majors.

This is pretty much the first time I've been #1 in ANYTHING.

I digress. The new book is available for pre-order as an eBook on Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, and more! Physical editions should be available for order on Amazon beginning July 1st.

On top of that, I also wrote and sold a poem to Whetstone: The Amateur Magazine of Sword & Sorcery. Whetstone has been a rising name in the sword and sorcery niche and I was really pleased to get a spot in the latest issue. I was one of a dozen writers chosen out of around sixty submissions.

The biggest project I've working on, however, is one that I unfortunately can't talk about with a lot of specifics. It will be a book, it will be about video games, and I will be the primary contributor. Saying anything beyond that would be violating my contract, which I'd rather not do.

This fell into my lap very unexpectedly and it's been a bit of a dream project. I can't wait to share more with you all publicly when I'm able to.

This isn't the "Stew talks about his non-Side Quest content" hour, though. It's a Side Quest round-up. Here's what I've written and posted here over the past six months:

It'd be quite the impressive spread if it wasn't six month's worth, right?

In all seriousness, while I am happy with the work I've done for the first half of 2023, I have been mulling over the notion of getting rid of my paid subscriptions and changing them all over to free ones.

I love having this blog/newsletter as a place to post up my work, but a lot of what I've been publishing have been offshoots of other side projects, interviews, etc. More importantly, a lot of my writing time this year has been chewed up by actual paid writing work. I don't feel like that's what my paid subscribers signed on for and I'm more than happy to just have an audience to share with. Thank you all for your continued support!