(anti)Social (Me)dia and Other Stumblings

Hi, 2025 Christina here. Apparently I drafted this post in October of 2023. It's unfinished, which is so perfect for me, so I'm going to publish it as is with a few footnotes. Will I post again? Maybe. Probably. I mean, I did log on here to actually post something when I found this, so distractions aside, You'll probably see another post in the near* future.

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 After more than ten years of faffing about, I think it's safe to say that any apology I make for blog silence, as well as any promise to do better going forward ring more hollow than the cheapest of chocolate Easter bunnies. 

So I won't apologize, only acknowledge that January was a while ago and at the very least, I should pick up where I last left off. 

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you feel about such things, A Space Girl from Earth did not make it to the finals of the SPSFC2. But hey, it made it to the semifinals and that's pretty amazing. Not only that, but it got the series in front of a bunch of eyes, and that made it possible for me to start making the series into audio books. 

Speaking of which, The Princess Rebellion is currently in production and The Needs of the Many is open for auditions. I'm excited to have an entire series in audio format soon! If you're new to audiobooks and would like to check it out, I will again invite you to use this link to do so. As I mentioned before, audiobooks are expensive and using this link helps offset those costs for me.**

And in other audio news, I have something HUGE planned for 2024, but that's all I'm going to say about that right now.***

And now, we come to the part that isn't as pleasant. I am now officially gone from Twitter. I deleted my account. I planned to squat on my name indefinitely in hopes that sometime in the future things might change, but instead, it appears that was a bigger security risk than anything, so I'm now gone. 

I can't say that I miss it that much. I've also recently joined Bluesky and while I'm not as active there, it was nice to see a few folk who didn't come over to Mastodon as well as some of the sillier accounts I used to follow. But in truth, I've spent the last year with a significantly reduced social media presence and I can't really say that's a bad thing.****

Yes, I miss a few people who disappeared, and others who won't move to something else, but that's kind of the nature of social relationships, both in the physical world and online. People drift away or disappear. Some of us find that taking a break from the constant stream of information can be great for our mental health. 

Such is life. Change keeps us sharp. And some things remain. I'm still on Goodreads and my books aren't going anywhere.*****

Wait, no, that's not true. 

My books are going places. 

Specifically, they're going back out into the wild. Beginning in November, my books will be migrating out of exclusivity with Amazon and will again be found in markets all over the world, such as Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple books, and Smashwords. 

If you haven't heard of that last one, you're not alone. Smashwords is an online ebook seller that offers DRM free ebooks in all formats, meaning you can buy a book and get it in any format you want, and you can read it on any device you have. While Kindle remains the top ebook format, Amazon is becoming less and less accommodating to indie publishers, and as such, it is likely that when I take my books out of exclusivity, they're not likely to price match my free books.

Oh yeah, once my books are wide, I will make the first in series for every series permanently free in all markets that allow this.

Which is where Smashwords comes in. If you've got a Kindle and Amazon is still charging 99c for the books I've made free elsewhere, you can get the epub from Smashwords and read it on your Kindle.

And it's not just my books going places. I am. Well, rather, I went places. This past year marked my first vacations since the pandemic began, starting with a trip to Santa Fe in January where I learned to ski.

Well, I say I learned to ski, but really, I just learned how to stay upright on skis, use the baby lift, and kind of glide down the gentlest of inclines. Still, I did it! Which is really saying something considering that at the time I was also quite a bit overweight (another remnant of the last three years).  

But even cooler than skiing was Meow Wolf, an interactive art e

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And that's where 2023 Christina left things. She took a couple more trips, saw a few more Meow Wolfs (Meow Wolves?), lost and gained a lot of weight(and is in the process of losing again), went full time at work and realized that was probably a bad idea, and then watched as the worst people in the world started being worse and gained all the power. Which brings us anticlimactically to the present.

The end...of something.  

*Near is a relative term. 

**The whole series is now on audiobook and I absolutely love what all of the narrators did and would absolutely appreciate it if all you audiobook readers out there would check it out. 

***HAHAHAHAHA!!! Yeah, I planned to do a radio drama for Going Green. It's still on the back burner, but the gas has been shut off. 

****I don't actually ever post or really check Bluesky. Sorry, I've grown comfortable with being disengaged from corporate social media.

*****Technically true. If you send me something or mention me I *should* get an email, but if I don't respond, well...