Onward and Upward

Dear Readers,

It is with heavy heart that I announce that as of now, I will be indefinitely suspending my efforts to pursue representation for Deathless, my novel.

I began working on Deathless on July 22, 2013, more than six years ago. Back then, I never imagined that I would still be working on it six years down the road, but I never imagined how much I would change as a writer in that time either.

Letting go of something that I’ve spent so much time on is very hard for me, which is why it’s taken me so long to realize that this is necessary. Despite how much I believe in the story and its characters, I need to accept that this book, the beginning of a series, is not yet ready to be published. In some sense, it is because of my continued belief in, and passion for this story that I need to take a break from it. The constant process of editing and revising it for years has caused me to lose focus on what the writing process means to me. I need to regroup, and recenter myself around the writer I am now, and not the writer that I was six years ago. When I’ve done that, I find it likely that I’ll revisit Deathless, and rewrite it the way it deserves to be written.

This brings me to the second difficult decision that I’ve decided to make regarding my life as a writer.

This blog, The Cluttered Desk, will no longer be a priority for me. Blogging is time consuming, and with my new goal in mind, the limited amount of writing time available to me will be better spent writing fiction than adhering to a rigorous blogging schedule.

I’ll still maintain this website, and I’ll occasionally write posts about technology, the environment, space, writing, and my own projects, but these will be less frequent moving forward. I can’t thank you, my readers, enough for the support you have shown for this blog since I started it a few years ago, but for now, it is imperative to my career as a novelist that I unburden myself from the workload that maintaining a consistent blog has presented me with.

Now if any of you are as saddened by this as I am, here’s the good news (made possible by these changes, I might add):

Today, I started work on another novel. It’s a project that I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I’m extremely excited to begin. I won’t go into detail about it just yet, but know that I proceed with the lessons I learned from Deathless in mind.

Until next time,

Salvatore A. Gulino