Greetings and salutations, ladies and gentlemen. Your humble tale-telling genre wonk Joshua here once again, just dropping in with a brief look to what comes next for this Substack space. Now that the first of the Kathy Potts novels has been completed in presentation in this format, I will be considering if and when to offer the follow-up novels, ‘The Chained One’ and ‘Kingdom No More’, in the same fashion. These novels are presently available for sale on Amazon and Barnes and Noble’s website, as is ‘A Midwestern Yankee in King Ovin’s Court’.

I’m not entirely certain what long-form offering will be coming to this space next, and as such, can only reasonably see myself putting up some more essays and observational pieces in the meantime. Mayhap a short story or two will find its way here; regardless of what comes next, there will be now a brief sort of quiet, one that I’m sure my friends and colleagues on social media will be quite glad of, since it also means I won’t be clogging up their feeds with links to this Substack.

I’ve quite a bit of reading to catch up on, as well as the imminent arrival of my next child, whom my wife and I are hoping doesn’t decide to stay in the womb past date like his brother Dennis did. My wife was none too pleased with that boy’s ability to hang around inside beyond his expected arrival, and I fear that if our second son does the same, she will curse all Calkins males as inherently stubborn. I mean, she already sort of does, but I’m not the greatest example to the contrary, so that’s much my own fault.

Working full time, handling the kids, working on projects around the house, and trying to make time to enjoy a book here and there can leave one especially squeezed for opportunities to write, though I do make the most of my breaks at work and in the small downtimes my son gives me when he naps. Sure, this means that my video game systems get relatively little use, but this is also why I don’t buy many games. Sorry to ramble and be off-topic, but it’s relevant, I promise.

Having been working on so many projects at once has left me on the verge of being burned out. As such, I will be taking a step back, and producing far less frequently in this space for the next little while. I do hope that you, my fine readers, will understand why this must be so. I encourage you to check back now and then, and keep an eye on your inbox for the newsletter, of course. But in the meantime, I would also request that you try to find some other storytellers here on Substack to follow, and to enjoy. There’s a lot fewer of us in the fiction space than one might hope for now, especially when trying to find someone who provides fiction for free, but they’re out there; it just takes a little bit of searching.

As a matter of fact, perhaps that will be the very next entry here, a kind of short listing of storytellers that I can try to put together for you. It’s certainly an idea worth pursuing, since such a search shouldn’t take too much time! And moreover, it will not only benefit me by giving me some more newsletters to check out, but will benefit the art of narrative by hopefully getting some extra eyeballs on my fellow narrative sorts.

Until I get that listing together, however, and put together the next observational/essay piece, ladies and gents, this space will be left intentionally blank.

Cheers, for now.

-Joshua