Hello, friends.
How are you doing right now? Everything is kinda bonkers, right? Just do what you can to get through. Have hope and be the light in the darkness when you can. Some days you won’t feel that way, and that’s okay. Recharge your batteries. But try to be the light when you can.
G’s team won their basketball championship! They played against a team that they lost to all season only to come into the championship series and won both games. Very exciting. Now she’s drama girl and invention club girl.
Teaching is getting harder. I’m treading water but I don’t know for how much longer. Have to keep it up, though.
Welcome to the 112th installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and loving the process.
Supporting creators is so important right now. As such, I would love if you became a paid-Patron on my Patreon.
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Anyway, let’s go!
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Work on Project: Amusement Park continued. I revised 79 pages of the novel and pared down around 1,700 words. As of right now, I’ve excised around 4,400 words from the novel bringing the total to approximately 183,900 words (from 188,300).
On Sunday, I hit the halfway point of the novel so I’ve been working through the second half. I added a very short subchapter to one of the chapters tying together two characters who I got the idea to link during the edits.
It’s a game of give-and-take when you’re revising.
Daily Progress updates continue on Patreon, sometimes the day after I do the work because I forget to put them up that night. I really need to figure out how to manage these things, a way to put it all down easily.
I haven’t recorded a short video today for Patreon yet. I just got an idea for one so might do that after I finish this update.
I did come up with a table to help me keep track of the Patreon tiers. The top thing should read “Gauthic Times Essay Sneak Peek.” Do you think I should post a version of this on the site itself?
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I was talking with my friend, the musician Randy Lee Medeiros, this week or last (it’s hard to know because times is an illusion) and we were talking about our creative lives. Randy records under the name Red Reveal with the band he’s put together and his music is hard rock with lots of guitars, attitude, and skill. He’s good and they’re good and I recommend his work to you.
We talked about writing and music and how our processes are similar. We also have very similar beliefs and thoughts about the act of creating* and it’s not uncommon for us to wax philosophical about creativity. As we spoke, Randy said, “You have to love the process. All of it, man.”
I agreed and we fist-bumped because Randy is my coolest friend and I try to be cool around him. In this regard, I was speaking to him–quite excitedly–about the novel I’m revising right now and how much I’m enjoying. I’m very excited to finish it so he can read it. Well, I’m excited for all my usual beta-readers to read it, but because our reading tastes are so similar.
Randy is an avid reader and we’re always geeking out about the new Stephen King, Paul Tremblay, or whathaveyou. He’s become one of my main beta-readers, looking forward to whatever slop I have to serve up to him. He commented about how pumped up about Project: Amusement Park I am and this got him even more eager to read it. He loved the novel I’m shopping around, Project: Monster, and thinks it’s one of the best things I’ve written. I’m convinced the new one is even better.
But that’s the thing. You have to love the process. The composition. The editing. The revisions. The editing. The revisions. More editing. More revisions. You have to be devoted to the idea of making the work stronger, smoother, tighter, electric, or the work suffers. You also need to know what to stop and walk away, to put it out to the world and then start the whole process over with the next thing.
I’ve always loved the initial composition of the work. When I was younger, I often saw editing/revising as the chore. Now I find I love that process as much as composition. Don’t get me wrong, writing that first draft, where it’s just me and the words and no fuckin’ safety net, will always be the main thrill. But I’ve learned to look at the refining process with as much love. It’s getting to go back in time and fix the thing you wish you could fix. And it’s a balancing act, too, because you don’t want to overdo the changes and lose sight of the initial thing you fell in love with about the project.
Being a creative person is too difficult not to love the work. Why else, but for love, would one suffer the cruelty of the outside world?
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* I have a great idea for a podcast that would feature me, Randy, and another creative friend, the artist Kim Gatesman talking about creativity. Maybe someday I’ll have the time and ability to put this together. It’s been rattling around in my head for two or three years now. I have a title and everything!
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What I’m reading…
I’m almost finished with my re-read of Dangerous Visions, the landmark science fiction/speculative fiction anthology edited by Harlan Ellison. While some of the stories are a little dated having been published in 1967, most of it’s still relevant and, surprisingly, still dangerous.
I’m also still re-reading (or listening to) the audiobook of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands, read by Frank Muller. It’s reminding me of why I love these books so much! I may make a video about that for Patreon. The video may eventually be released wider.
The big news, though, is that I started the new Christopher Golden novel, The Night Birds, which comes out May 6th, 2025.
The publisher okayed me getting a digital copy through NetGalley. Because of the craziness of my schedule this week, I haven’t read as much of the book as I would’ve liked, but I’m about four or five chapters in and it’s typical-Christopher-Golden-fantastic. Golden deftly realizes the characters and makes the reader care about them. Now that basketball is over, I intend to get into it full blast.
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Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 
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