Matthew P. Schmidt

My Blog

This update has been a long time coming. As one can expect from the phrase “a long time coming” and the radio silence in between, it’s not good news, although more accurately it’s bad olds.

My story begins not in 2022, but in 2020. In late February 2020, I flew to visit a friend. On my flight back, I passed through SFO, wondering if I would by chance catch the Coronavirus. (Remember, this was before the lockdowns.) Skip a week or two, and I come down with really bad pneumonia, so bad it would have killed me without modern medicine. Was it COVID? I don’t know, because they didn’t test me at the time.

Pneumonia is bad enough, but to make a long story short, I never really got better. Afterwards I felt horrible chest pain, which I originally thought was more pneumonia. Then anxiety. Then heart trouble. Then panic attacks. Then this or that, or any of a huge number of hypotheses. Eventually I was diagnosed a chronic pain and fatigue disorder called fibromyalgia.

It’s not really possible to describe a life of chronic pain to someone who doesn’t suffer from it. Although I take medicine for it, I still have days where I can do little more than rest in bed. As that might suggest, I can’t write as much as I used to. Some days I can’t write at all.

I didn’t talk about it at first, at first because I didn’t know what the problem was. Then I hoped it would go away. But now I know it will not. I fell into a bit of a depression for a while, and I am not sure if that’s ended, either. Eventually I told a few people, then I told my mailing list, and now finally I’m telling you all.

Those of you who read my blog carefully will note I finished two novels in 2020. What happened? The first, C&D2, came out in 2020. The second, The World of Wishes, was supposed to come out early in 2021. However, creative differences made my publisher and I split on that book. (Annona Press is still publishing the City and the Dungeon series.) I wasn’t expecting to go back into self-publishing, so I spent a good few months flailing as I tried to straighten things out. By the time I did put it out, 2021 was almost over.

Meanwhile, my life took other turns for the worse. The ones that are public enough are some of the backlash to C&D2, and that WoW1 did not do as well as I hoped. To speak of C&D2, although a lot of people still loved it, there was enough criticism, even very angry criticism, that left a bad taste in my mouth. I regret posting the “apology”, but alas, there is no removing something from the Internet. But still, I felt bad about the whole thing, which sapped my enthusiasm for writing more C&D books. Meanwhile, WoW1 did not go as planned, and was caught by the edge of the anti-NFT backlash. In October, I practically fell apart.

But I got back up, dusted myself off, and tried again. It was around that time that a doctor suggested a certain anti-fibromyalgia drug which was also a mood stabilizer. It worked. Now I can get some work done, if still not as much as I’d like.

So where does that leave things now?

For C&D, I decided I needed to get books in motion again. I’m chipping away at a new C&D book, as I slowly heal from burnout. I’m also planning C&D3. My goal is to make C&D fun again, because honestly, the reason C&D2 turned out the way it did, for better or for worse, was because I stopped having fun while writing it.

I Intended to get those out before the end of the year, but neither is written, so realistically it’s going to be a 2023. But I want to get those two out before I return to the World of Wishes, because y’all have been waiting long enough.

I will also say, for full disclosure, that while I had massive dreams for C&D, I don’t have as much time to write them. So I’m going to try to keep the same epic scope, just more compressed. I’m not sure where exactly I’m going, which is good, because that makes it fun again.

What about the World of Wishes? I’ve spent the last few months putting the book in a better state. I’ve gotten better formatting, actually written the story at the end, and generally polished it up a little more. I am considering serializing it. I also decided to double-down on the NFT part, since whatever you think about crypto the NFT is already made and the book will forever be CC-licensed (at least until the copyright expires.) So I wrote this lengthy article explaining my thoughts.

I’m not entirely sure what I will do for the next book. Depending on whether WoW1’s NFT sells, I may or may not release WoW2 in the same way. But that will probably be some time in the future.

As I mentioned, the story I refer to at the end of WoW1 is now actually written, and you can get it exclusively by signing up for my mailing list. It’s also a good place to be if you want the latest news, since I actually update the mailing list more often these days.

What about other projects? I’ve written a few short stories, so I’m going to try to put them up, and eventually make a collection. One of them is a LitRPG, so you have that to look forwards to. I’ve taken stabs at other projects, just to rebuild the fun part of writing. If one of them takes off you’ll see it soon.

There is one project, however, that you probably won’t be seeing on release. Out of nowhere I started writing a very unconventional paranormal romance, and it’s expanded quite a bit as I’ve written it. However, due to Amazon’s also-bought algorithm, if I release it under my own name, and show it to y’all, Amazon will treat it as a LitRPG and make LitRPG-only readers upset while not showing up for romance readers. So it’s going to be under a pen name, and I reserve the right to delay the announcement until I’ve got the also-boughts solid enough to handle a horde of odd customers. Sorry about that!

TL;DR: C&D3 and another C&D book are in progress, probably not this year/maybe early next year. WoW may be waiting a bit. Other projects in progress, and we’ll see what happens!