Skyla Dawn Cameron

My characters kill people so I don't have to.

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Burnout Recovery

As patrons know from my post last week, or write-in participants from the Saturday before last, I’m rather burnt out. And also aware that the expectations I put on myself are completely unreasonable (like upset that I hadn’t written a rough draft of a book yet “this year”…it’s February lol). I’d worked extra hours the week before last to get a bunch of things done, so I could take off Mon – Wed to write (and celebrate release day, and Shawn’s birthday) and I just…had nothing in the tank. So I reread several books in my favourite series and that seemed to jangle a few things loose.

Tentatively on Saturday, I decided I could at least find something small to work on during the write-in with everyone. The Killing Beach is out in three months and I have to get it formatted, so I pulled that out thinking I’d do another full pass but instead spent the day jumping around, inserting new chapter breaks, working on bits and pieces. There are still lines in there from the very, very first iteration, when it was third person past tense and Waverly was a very, very different character. None of the POV/tense problems are still there, but Waverly as a character changed so much during all the times I tried to write the book, and I know her so well now that I’ve written four and a half books with her, those bits really stood out to me. I’d kept them because I loved them but they belonged to a different girl. My rough drafts are always very lean so I generally have to add rather than cut, but this is I’ve grudgingly killed my darlings. We’re on draft three now, it’s been edited, and there’s no time to be precious.

But then I started having a little flickering thought. Maybe it’s the burnout compromising me, but looking ahead at the series…at some point my brain said, “This is missing someone. You need someone to fill X role going forward. You could introduce them in this one…”

Like I don’t already have enough going on.

Surprisingly, it’s weaving in really quickly and works to give Waverly a nudge at the right time, putting some pieces of the mystery together a little better. Last night I did have a moment of thinking…is this a mistake? Am I out of my mind right now?

Maybe.

But it’s also not the first time. I remember Emperor’s Tomb had been through seven revisions, content editing and copyediting, I was proofreading, but one element wasn’t sitting right with me. In a vacuum, it was fine, but nothing we write exists like that, and taking in consideration what could be extrapolated from it, I considered what else I could do instead. So…something like three weeks or so, before release, I actually changed a small but significant thing that fixed that issue for me.

Emperor has that element in common with TKB, I guess: both were books that went under extensive revisions, that took me a long time to find my way into. I suppose it’s a little more natural, then, to continue to poke at it late in the game.

I’ve added about 3K now to TKB and I’ve got one more scene to write, a little bit more to tweak, then I can review it all and format it for print and then get it out for proofreading. I’ve also decided the hardcovers with the Nancy Drew-esque covers will also have some bonus goodies–at this point, I’ll do a short essay in each one discussing the influences around the main mystery (and possibly each will have a vegan pub recipe for something Waverly eats at the bar during the book). That’s started with this one, but burnout inhibited even that kind of writing.

Anyway, trying to ease some pressure on myself, and you know, if all I do this year is write Hell Fire for serializing at Patreon and then revising Waverly 2 for Nov release and Waverly 3 and 4 for release next year (not the plan, #4 is supposed to slot into 2025, but this is my backup option), I’m still doing okay. I don’t have to write 3-4 books again this year. Relieving that pressure is probably the only way I will get anything done eventually.

Tricking our brains to be productive is very irritating, though apparently necessary.

Release Day: WATCHER OF THE WOODS

It’s release day for my new spooky book, Watcher of the Woods, aka Haunted Vacation Lesbians as I called it while I was writing it.

After eighteen months staying home under rolling pandemic lockdowns with her girlfriend Joy, artist Thea Palmer has decided the strained relationship has run its course and she’s ready to end it—right after the stress of her birthday has passed.

Unfortunately, her surprise party comes with a special gift from Joy that puts the breakup on hold: a week-long cabin rental in the tiny northern Ontario community of Hope Falls, for just the two of them.

No phone.

No internet.

No contact with the outside world.

Joy says it’ll give them the perfect chance to reconnect and maybe restore Thea’s creativity after pandemic stress wearing down her desire to paint. But the cabin creaks at night under invisible steps, and the woods have trees that seem to shift in the corner of her eye. Thea swears she sees a strange white figure on the lake beckoning to her and an empty boat that drifts by in the early morning mist.

And Joy…Joy seems to be someone else entirely.

Kindle – Kobo – iBooks – Nook – Payhip – Paperback – Hardcover

Hardcover Gift Box @ Etsy – Paperback Gift Box @ Etsy

So it’s not super romantic for Valentine’s Day, although it is about relationships, and how we deal when people aren’t what we want them to be. If you feel left out today with book releases because you like horror, I’ve got you covered.

In my head, the setting of this was very, very loosely based on my favourite place in the entire world: my late aunt Judy’s cottage. In the book, the area is farther north, but in my head it’s Beaver Lake/Catchacoma Lake. And even though it’s the most beautiful place in the world to me, the silence and the darkness are incredibly eerie and the perfect place for a haunted cabin story.

If the cover branding looks familiar, and if you think you heard “Hope Falls, Ontario” before, yes, you’re right! It’s tied to Dweller on the Threshold (50% off for another day for Shawn’s birthday!). But they can be read as totally standalone, as there are hints and easter eggs but that’s it. And although it’s set in the same world, it’s my hope that folks reading Watcher will still be surprised by a lot that they find.

“Standalone haunted pandemic trilogy of childhood trauma with totally safe pets” is kind of a long series title, which is why I don’t use it, but that’s what I’ve called these books in my head (including the third, when I’ve got time eventually [ahahaha] to write it).

Shawn’s FOURTH Birthday

Four years ago, during a particularly cold spell in winter, a young barn cat who was probably little more than a kitten herself had three kittens–an unusual event around here for February, as kitten season tends to start in April. Shortly thereafter, she was killed by a predator, and when some kind folks went to rescue her neonates, one had already passed from hypothermia.

When those two remaining kittens landed with me on a Friday evening, they were just two days old. They were the tiniest kittens I’d ever seen; at that age, kittens are typically 100-120g. These boys were 70g and 57g respectively. That, combined with their delayed milestones, suggests to me they were probably a few days premature, but it’s hard to know for sure.

What I do know is that I fought tooth and nail to keep them alive, and even though we lost Gus to a congenital heart defect at eight weeks old, both were little miracles and taking them on was the best decision I’ve ever made.

Every day I miss Gus. And every day I’m grateful to have Shawn (Shawnie, Shawnifer, Monster, Child, Little Jerk, Belly, Devil, Goose, Mr. Shawn, Little Prince). He is incredibly clever, sweet, silly, and just an absolute joy. A total menace, but the very best kind, and all day every day he is literally never out of sight. He’s the best little companion, particularly with the pandemic.

We always have a big party for his birthday. Of course he got tons of presents. And even though they’re for everyone, he seems to intuitively know everything is “his”.

His favourite thing at the moment, where he is chilling right this second, is a new little MDF house from his “nana” (thank you, Nanci!). Everyone is quite high on catnip and begging me for snacks.

His birthday is coinciding with a little break for me; I’d planned to take a few days off of freelancing to get some writing (mostly for Patreon) done, but at the Saturday night write-in I had a mini breakdown because I just could not form words anymore. So I’m spending the next three days just reading and refilling the tank, and hanging out with this expensive (so, so expensive, like 10% of my gross annual income) little monster.

Last year I released a funny horror book where the heroine has two cats named Spencer (Shawn) and Burton (Gus). Nothing bad happens to them, and I was so glad to memorialize little Gus and share their antics with readers.

I’ve got it 50% off at Payhip for the next couple of days to celebrate the boys’ birthday, coupon code SHAWNANDGUS at checkout.

Happy birthday, little Shawnie. And we miss you terribly, Guster.

So of course I leave you with “his” song. Which he still howls for every night if I don’t put it on at bedtime.

🎵”It’s Cold”🎵

Many many years ago, when I was fifteen, I participated in a program called Encounters with Canada, that gathered something like 100+ students from across Canada and sent them to Ottawa for a week. One of our early activities to get to know one another involved breaking off into groups with those from our provinces or territories and composing a little…skit, I guess? Presentation? I think we did it on the first day.

There were usually several people from each province, and then only one or two from the territories. And I remember this tall, cute boy with blue hair from the Northwest Territories get up there with his guitar, where he sang a song about NWT.

“It’s cold,” he began. “It’s cold. It’s cold. It’s cold. It’s cold. It’s cold. It’s cold. It’s….COLD.”

Twenty-five years later, I still sing that song when it’s particularly cold, as it was last week. Friday night/Saturday morning, it hit -42C with the windchill (Americans, I’m told that’s also minus forty-something Fahrenheit). We don’t normally get those kinds of temperatures where I’m from, and I not only put on socks but skipped the cotton ankle ones I grudgingly wear sometimes and opted for slipper socks and warm loungewear. But being in an apartment with south-facing windows, it doesn’t get that bad. I’m considering it practice for when I one day retire to the Yukon.

After temperatures plummeted on Christmas Eve, I opted to buy a door blanket, because I could feel the draft coming around the entire door from the hallway, which is probably why this weekend when the temp dropped again, I was mostly pretty toasty in here. I dread my upcoming hydro bill (I’ve got electric heaters) but the blanket should help with that. At least we stayed warm, and I’ve gone on another prepper spree of making detailed plans and window shopping for emergency supplies. It’s about the only thing that calms my anxiety sometimes.

The morning treadmill walk is now a daily thing five days a week, along with full-body stretching and simple strength training. I could happily do a bit more time in the morning with it but it’s a cheaper treadmill and I worry about killing the motor, so I stick to half-hour sessions 2-3 times a day. When the weather improves, I’m looking forward to long walks again (the cold doesn’t bother me, but the potential ice does, considering I walk at night).

I’m doing a final read-through of The Killing Beach before formatting and proofing, and I’m glad I’ve written so many books ahead so I can ensure I’ve woven enough in. Waverly’s POV is more limiting than most others and no matter the angles I look at it from, there are always things that I miss until I’m writing something later. She thinks of things I haven’t, which is great, but she’s so focused that there are things I often need that she hasn’t thought of. If that makes sense; it might not, and I also might sound like a crazy person. (And patrons, tomorrow morning you get another glimpse at her past from before TKB starts!)

I’ve poked a bit at Waverly 5–I’m supposed to be writing Hell Fire but I need to do something a little fun right now, I’m tired–and while I’m fuzzy on working out the main mystery, I know the character beats and where it ends, and I’m looking forward to that.

A week from today Watcher of the Woods is out.

It’s an interesting experience, moving to some standalones, because there seems to be no predicting book to book what kind of readership there’ll be. At least with series, I can expect X retention rate if people are happy and even X retention rate if I piss some off, but standalones is a whole other ballgame. I did some with Pen Name Romance, but as a genre, I found the core readership jumped from book to book even if they weren’t connected, probably because even within a series it was usually one-couple-per-book? I don’t know. I thrive on being able to predict things and prepare–again, it’s how I manage tremendous anxiety–but it’s even harder to do with publishing than it is other areas of life. It’s daunting, and stressful, to be doing so many new things this year with really, really poor preorder numbers, but it’s also been about ten times better for my sanity.

And ultimately sanity is what will keep me going. I guess I’d rather be poor and marginally happier than marginally less poor and much more miserable, although the goal remains of “not poor and moderately content”.

Also six days until Shawn’s birthday! There’ll be a post for the little monster early next week.

Not Today, Skynet

The AI writing discourse is exhausting me and my opinion hasn’t changed one bit in the past year, and everything I’m seeing right now just proves that opinion is correct.

You see, right this second, there are thousands and thousands of books on Kindle Unlimited that are plagiarized.

Because there is a subset of people in every group that are looking for a way to make money and (ahahaha) decided books are a way to do it. Except, generally speaking, it is extremely hard to make a living writing, even if you’re very good at it. What does help you? Rapid releases and Amazon exclusivity. And the easiest way to do that is to outsource “ghostwriters” on Fiverr for very little money–and, surprise, since very little money is involved, they take shortcuts as well and plagiarize books (ghostwriting is a skilled, honest living! but it costs significantly more money than grifters want to pay–“It’s an 80K-word book, Michael, what can it cost to write, ten dollars?”). Books are released once a month, usually in contemp romance or PNR (at least that’s where the scandals pop up), and when eventually the plagiarism is caught, their account is closed, and they open up another one and start the grift again.

That is where you’re going to find AI writing: they’ll fire their “ghostwriters” because it gives them another, cheaper shortcut.

The self-pub gurus who are selling courses on How To Be an Amazon Bestseller and pushing NFTs will start selling How To Use AI To Be a Bestseller.

Last year, a friend told me about a writer she knew who took one of those workshops on being a bestseller–this was run by people who are extremely prominent in the self-publishing community. And one of the instructors said, point blank, that if you have ten books out already, stop writing new books and learn how to market the ones you already have.

Stop. Writing. Books.

???

This is not the advice you give writers.

…because writing books is why we’re putting ourselves through publishing in the first place?

Someone claiming to be a writer posited on Twitter the other day that “wouldn’t it be cool if you could train AI on your own writing and use it to write books for you?” and was baffled when people said “…n…no???”

On Reddit another said “I think AI writing is great because it means someone who has a great idea could be able to write a story without having any skills”.

See the pattern here?

The disconnect I witness, over and over, is people genuinely not understanding why anyone writes or publishes in the first place.

I publish because I live in a capitalist hellscape and need to keep a roof over my head, so I have to get paid for some of what I spend my time doing.

And I enjoy writing. The act of creation is my idea of a good time. I’d rather spend my days with with fictional people than real ones.

I love the high of writing 10K words in a night to finish a book, bleary-eyed at 4am and feeling like my brain has been scooped out and replaced with oatmeal.

I love revising something for the fourth time and spending an hour on getting a sentence right.

I love going to sleep every night playing out book scenes in my head, over and over again, even if I won’t write them for years to come.

I love rereading something I wrote and having no memory of it because I was in some kind of fugue state at the time.

This is ALL fun for me! So it’s in my best interest to get paid for it so I can spend more time doing it. If there was universal basic income, I’d still be writing, I just wouldn’t be publishing.

And if I expected to make more than poverty-level wages, I would be doing literally anything other than writing.

With series books, I know the arcs years in advance. The endings of books I haven’t started yet, the growth of the characters, the answers to the mysteries. But still, even then, there are things I don’t know until I’m actually writing. That is not a thing AI can replicate, because I don’t always know I need something until I’ve actually written it, so I couldn’t even direct a program to write it for me.

“Writers write” gets thrown around sometimes to reassure people that if they’re doing any writing at all, they’re still a writer; in other cases, it’s criticized, because if circumstances or health issues prevent you from writing, you feel like you’re no longer a writer. But those nuances aside, if we’re going to accept one single universal thing about writers, it’s that they write (or even, have written).

If you’re editing something AI wrote: congrats, you’re an editor.

If you’re selling plagiarized books: congrats, you’re a grifter.

If you’re doing nothing but teaching others about marketing: congrats, you’re a marketing teacher.

If you have a “great idea” but don’t actually want to write a book: congrats, you do not actually have a great idea. Because great ideas are a dime a dozen; it’s the expression of them that varies, and if you have no interest in expressing them in your unique way then it’s not any better than any of the other million ideas out there.

Storytelling is something humans do. We do it to remember. We do it to memorialize. We do it to process. We do it to transmute reality. We do it to connect. AI cannot do that.

I’m sure AI writing is going to be very good at writing a nice story (eventually; it’s not there yet) after training on other people’s hard work. And it’s going to be used by the same grifters who are already grifting, because it’ll be another shortcut for them.

And they’ll have readers for their AI shit because they already do.

Those aren’t my readers, though. Believe me, the book-a-month primarily-KU crowd dropped me the moment it took over a year to get a new book in a series (I know, as they inform me of this with hatemail about both Demons and Livi). And they won’t touch any of my new books because they’re priced over $2.99. If you treat writing as “content” to be consumed, which is a plague on any industry trading in the written word, sure, you’ll be happy with those AI books just as you’re happily with the heavily plagiarized ones or knowing some ghostwriter in a developing nation was severely underpaid.

That’s not what I want to read. And it’s not what I want to write. And while my readership is very, very small, they’re here for the art I’m making–the memorializing, the processing, the transmutation, the connection. There may not be a lot of money in it, but it’s helping to keep a roof over my head so I can do more of it and not kill myself or others.

Now, today is my writing day, and I’m going to spend it working on my stuff and not yelling at AI bots on Twitter (as enjoyable as it is).

MEET SKYLA DAWN

Writer of horror, mysteries/thrillers, and urban fantasy.
Fifth-generation crazy cat lady. Bitchy feminist.
So tired all the goddamn time.

My characters kill people so I don’t have to.

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What I’m Working On:

Re-proofing/formatting Livi Talbot 5-6 with the new covers.
Writing Waverly 9, an upcoming standalone horror,
and extras for the tenth-anniversary edition of Solomon’s Seal.
Revising The Tree of Life for Patreon.