Proof of Life and Looking Ahead
Oh hi Mark! Remember me?
Hi reading friends! It’s Jean Marie Bauhaus, your friendly neighborhood dark fiction author. Long time no see.
Let’s see. I believe the last time you heard from me we had just bought ourselves a five-acre wood and were gearing up to begin the journey of clearing it and making it livable. Right around the same time, my freelance writing business picked up — a lot — and those two things pretty much swallowed up all of my time and energy for the remainder of the year.
But things have finally slowed a bit, and I’m coming out of survivor mode and feeling like I’m ready to fit some creative endeavors back into my life.
Since last I communicated, we’ve made a lot of progress on clearing our property. We’ve got our chickens installed and it’s mostly ready for us to move onto, but we’re not quite there yet. We keep running into hitches, many of them weather related. Currently, we’re living in our RV, parked adjacent to our property beside our neighbor’s driveway. Hopefully, we’ll get moved over there next month, but we’ve been saying that for a couple of months now, so we’ll see.
I’ve actually been writing like crazy all year, just not on fiction or blogs. It’s all been pet content for clients. As grateful as I am for the steady flow of income, I’m kind of at a point where I’m desperate to write something — anything — that isn’t related to pet health.
That said, I did start back up recently on my faith and theology publication, Let’s Talk About Truth, where I’m currently combating some myths and misunderstandings about Israel.
All in all, I think this forced break from creative writing and trying to do all the author things has done me a lot of good. It’s helped me get perspective and a lot of clarity on what I actually want, and the kind of writer I want to be.
Oddly enough, it was Kat Von D’s recent interview with Allie Beth Stuckey about her re-discovered faith that helped everything click for me (that’s a great interview — you should click here to check it out if you haven’t already seen it). Since sharing the video of her baptism on her Instagram, she’s gotten a lot of flack from other Christians about continuing to dress goth and enjoy horror and make secular rock music. So many people are questioning her genuineness and her salvation because of these things.
I can definitely relate to that. I’m not a goth, and I’ve never fallen away from my faith and gotten caught up in the occult like she did (although I did have my misguided forays into “Christian” new age practices), but I definitely have some goth sensibilities. My love of horror and fairy tales and fascination with dark themes and the supernatural has gotten me more than just the side eye from my fellow Christians throughout my lifetime. And I think it’s likely that some of the people who follow my Instagram, where I post mainly about Bible prophecy and Biblical truth, would question my salvation if they saw some of the books I’ve written — despite that my stuff is pretty tame and contains a lot of Christian themes.
But KVD stood her ground. She’s learned to block and pray for the pious haters and carry on where she feels called — making art and music that brings her joy and appeals to the people who need Jesus the most, and being a quiet witness to those who notice the changes in her and reach out to her to know more.
Huh. Kind of like how the Apostle Peter said we should.
I think I let myself get influenced by the Christian influencers into thinking that I needed to sanitize my fiction to appeal more to Christians, and that I needed to be more of an overt minister of the gospel through my writing. That led to my detour into sweet Christian romance, and as much as I had fun writing that, it’s not really me. I tried to fit myself into a box that I wasn’t made to fit into.
That thing about being a quiet witness through her art reminded me of where I’ve been coming from all along. I can write stories that thrill and entertain myself as I write them and my readers as they read them, all while sowing seeds of truth that God can use to touch people’s hearts and minds as he sees fit. And I can glorify him simply by doing what I was made to do, joining in the act of creation and being his imager in the process.
So that was a detour I didn’t plan to take, and it’s only part of the equation. I believe I’ve talked before in this here newsletter about feeling burned out on writing and being an author and giving serious thought to retiring to raise goats (if I didn’t talk about it, I sure thought a lot about it).
But I realized, after a lot of prayer and reflection, that the problem is that I’m just fed up with publishing in general, with chasing book sales and all the “tried and true” marketing methods that never work, and with all the wokeness and porn saturating the genre fiction markets and the pressure to fit in.
I don’t want to fit into that.
I also don’t want to be stuck in a certain self-publishing ecosystem and dependent on a giant woke corporation for what little author income I’m getting.
But I still want to write and publish fiction. The kind of fiction I love to write and read.
So I’m going to be stepping off the path that’s been beaten to a pulp and take the road less traveled.
You might not notice if you’re reading this in your e-mail, but I’m writing this letter in Substack. I’m moving my mailing list back to this platform, and I’m going to be blogging from here — hopefully regularly — instead of just sending out monthly updates. I’ll be writing more about the topics that really interest me, which includes exploring the more fantastic and supernatural aspects of the Bible and the impact those unseen forces have on our world.
And I’m also going to be publishing my fiction here.
I’m still going to make books — I love books! And I would really like to become my own publishing company at some point — but all of my work will be published here first. That includes the novel I started in 2019 and am in the process of picking back up, which I’ll be teasing in the coming weeks as I get ready to serialize it here.
I’ll keep it all free for the time being, but seeing as how I would like to be able to do this for a living, I will probably start putting some of my content behind a paywall at some point. But we’ll cross that bridge in due time.
Of course, if you don’t want to get any of this in your e-mail box, you can unsubscribe. If you do, you can always pop in on my publication at jeanmariebauhaus.substack.com whenever you feel like checking up on my work.
And if you’re on Substack, you can also follow my notes (they’re a lot like what used to be known as tweets), and perhaps we can also have the occasional subscribers-only chat.
If you decide to stick around, I’ll be back in your inbox soon as I start this new publishing experiment by posting The Gift, my Restless Spirits short story that’s set on Christmas. You might have read it already, but you can absolutely forward it on to someone you know who might like it.
Until then, wishing you a very merry Christmas!
Jean ♥
