My first introduction to hopepunk was a link to its inciting Tumblr post, from a friend.  I was intrigued, but by the time I finished reading that post by fellow author Alexandra Rowland, I was not only hooked, but convinced: hopepunk was the elusive genre I had been searching for since I began this journey in 2014.  

So what is hopepunk?  

It encompasses just about every walk of life, and they are all tied together with a silver thread of thought, a belief, a way of looking at the world.  It is a way of thinking that I have personally ascribed to for most of my life, one which I refer to as "pessimisic optimism": the thought that yes, things can be pretty awful, but that will never mean they can't be improved.  I've scoured the internet for others' thoughts on hopepunk and found that it is, as most things are these days, a pretty polarizing concept.  Those who approve of it embrace it wholeheartedly, while others are quick to refer to it as "liberal nonsense" and "a word for something we didn't even need".   (Most of those were comments in comments sections or forum posts, and were taken at face value.  I have yet to find a longform. coherent article which has anything detrimental to say about hopepunk, which seems to say something in itself.  Alexandra Rowland has this to say about it in her essay "One Atom of Justice, One Molecule of Mercy, and The Empire of Unsheathed Knives":

So why are my novels hopepunk. and not urban fantasy, as I previously attributed them?  Simple: hopepunk is the thread that they all share.  ​ From the Desk of Buster Heywood's eponymous and unlikely hero defends his little corner of Aviario from the corrupt forces trying to bend it out of shape, because it is his, and he believes it can be better.  He doesn't have any magic at his disposal, but these decisions will lead him to people who do: people like Troy and Ral from In The Cards, who do their part to solve a string of disappearances, or like The Proper Bearing's Nicholas, who leaves his home behind in pursuit of his own answers, and in hope that he can help stop the people who turned his own world upside down.    The Organization which Ral - and several other characters, omitted for the sake of spoilers - belong to is the very core of hopepunk: they believe in maintaining the balance of magic in the world, that everything has its time and purpose.  They believe that in order to do good, sometimes you have to be a little bad... and no member embodies this philosophy more than the only character who has appeared in every single novel to date. 

I didn't even plan it that way, to be honest.  He sneaks into my outlines, at every chance he gets, whether I like it or not. There just always seems to be a place that he fits.  He showed up to assist Buster under one of his many nicknames: The Spanner.  As Ral's half-hearted mentor, we know him by his favorite name: Crowley.  And we get a bit of a glimpse of his past as a former gallery owner when he helps Nicholas in tracking down his friends' kidnappers.  No matter where and when he shows up, Crowley is quite happy to get his hands dirty if it means trouble for the people who cause trouble.  He is as punk as punk gets, working for a group who is as hopeful as hope can get.  If that isn't hopepunk, I don't know what is.  

When it comes right down to it, hopepunk has been my personal aesthetic for a very long time.  Examples that Rowland gives, such as Sam and Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter series, Star Trek ... all of these are things which I embraced as a book-and-film-loving Younger Me, stitching them into the patchwork quilt which would become my taste.  I liked my fictional friends to be put up against insurmountable odds, to go through terrible things, to live in imperfect worlds.  And I didn't always like it when they found perfect happy endings, either.  As I grew older and learned more about the way the world is, I wanted what I read on the page to still ring true.  Not everything could be put right, but as long as something could still survive and thrive, that was good enough for me.   It's why I'm adamant that people who have defined hopepunk in other articles, such as Vox's piece defining the genre for those who hadn't found it through Tumblr, have missed the biggest hopepunk example of all: Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.  They start out as children's books, but evolve along with their protagonists to teach some important lessons about what "good vs. evil" really amounts to outside the pages of a book or, if you aren't a reader, the easily bingeable confines of a phenomenal, very faithfully created Netflix series.

I have long said that I aspire for my own series to be as tightly-woven as Snicket's books (attributing the talent falsely to his literary representative, adult author Daniel Handler), because there are plot points for the final books scattered liberally and cleverly throughout each Unfortunate Event.   While I think I'm doing nicely on that front (wait and see!), I didn't realize that I'd carried along that same spirit.   So while Buster, Ral, Nick, and this year's newcomer, Annick, may not have lives as tumultuous and dire as the Baudelaire orphans. they do share the same indominable spirit: the spirit at the core of hopepunk.    I'll leave you with one final quote of Rowland's, from the Vox article mentioned earlier: 

Standing up and surviving ... in the end, isn't that what the best stories are about?  I like to think so.  If you do, too ... if you haven't already crossed the town lines into Aviario, you might find it worth a visit.    If you have any personal favorite examples of hopepunk, or thoughts on the genre, I'd love to hear them!  Please leave them in the comments below ... I may end up with some things to add to my growing read & watch list!

Until next week, friends....  

Over the last five years, I've tried just about every form of author-to-reader interaction available to me, to see which ones work the best: not just in terms of self-publishing, but for me, personally.  At first, I felt inundated by the amount of options ... and by the price tags which came with some of them.  Out of necessity, I limited myself to those which were free ... and even then, there were a great deal.  Those of you who've been with me for the long haul know the laundry list ranges from Facebook to LinkedIn to Google Plus and back again.   But at the top of them all was the Mount Everest, the Mecca, and dare I say, the albatross of the self-published author: The Newsletter.  

"Every author has to have a mailing list".  It's the author's equivalent of a commandment: we see it everywhere online, in blogs, on websites about How To Self-Publish, emblazoned across colleagues' websites.  Join a mailing list, and be treated to updates, freebies, and exclusive content ... and for a while, I tried it.  Friday at Charlie's was my attempt at a mailing list, and the Friends of Aviario got art, photos, news, and the occasional short story.  Really freakin' good content, if I do say so myself.   But even when I offered a free e-book to subscribers, I never got that Golden Giant List of Subscribers.    And that was a problem.   Everyone touted the usefulness of newletters because of that giant list: in theory, everyone on your mailing list was a guaranteed customer in one way or another.   The trouble was, I only had a handful.  And they started to drop after a few months.   So I signed up for other authors' newsletters in search of a common thread, some magic elixir that might help me crack the code of The Newsletter.  Several subscriptions and newsletters later, I realized the secret keeping me from doing well with my own: 

I didn't like newsletters.  I found them tedious.  I had to open my email to read them, and was confronted by the leagues of spam from other sources - which were often also newsletters, but from retailers that had added me from online purchases and services.  My brain had equated newsletters with unwanted marketing, with the sort of spam you get and tolerate in order to get an occasionally useful benefit (Michaels and JoAnn Fabrics, I am looking at you and your coveted 60% coupons.  You have furnished my creative supply stash more times than I can count).  And most people - at least, the few who'd unsubscribed from Friday At Charlie's - probably were beginning to feel the same way.    So where did I go to find the things I wanted to engage with?

Twitter.  Facebook.  Instagram.  Pinterest.  And those led me to the sites and blogs of people I came to regularly enjoy.  Easy-peasy.  In a world where people want quick impressions before they click, time is an investment, and reading a blog (or a newsletter) takes time.  So ... I realized I need to go to the short-format marketing and look for my readers there.  

Before you say "how dare you accuse people of having no attention spans, is this another rant about millenials or whatever we're calling people nowadays when we don't like them" ... hold up.  Technically, I'm a millenial, myself (though I'm on the VERY VERY tail end of the spectrum, which is so weird, but another ramble entirely).  And I have a theory about creative people online, and how we're starting to view media through the lens of the internet.   

The internet is an amazing place for creative people!  It makes creating and sharing so much more accessible than it was in the 80s and 90s.  Even today's internet is better for creatives than the dial-up, AOL-and-Bravenet-and-ICQ internet of my high school days: which, incidentally, is when I decided that I wanted to write.  Hmmmmm.   But I'm coming dangerously close to veering off topic.  Focus, Ang.  Focus.  And that's the thing about the internet.   People don't have too much focus for it, because there are so many things everywhere.  We have a phrase for it, for Godsakes: FOMO.  Fear Of Missing Out.  So we make our impressions of things as small as possible, so we can devour more.  We call a show that needs our attention for longer than an episode or two a "binge".... but the great thing is, we still do it.   But how do we decide what to binge?   From seeing enough of those bite-sized peeks at a thing to realize that we're interested.   And that is not something that a newsletter can do.   That is the territory of the tweet, of the Facebook post, of the Pin, of the omnipresent hashtag and keyword.

So, to make a long story short (too late!), I'm not writing a newsletter, because I'm not writing you a circular ad.  I'm writing you postcards, hoping that they'll intrigue you enough that you'll want to take this journey, yourselves. 

Happy travels, and I'll see you next time...

Last week, I shared an exciting piece of news to kick off 2019: that my novels will be getting new covers this year!  (If you missed it, you still have until the end of the month to help me with their design, and enter to win an e-book bundle! Click here!)

The good news doesn't stop there.  2019 has a lot in store for the little town of Aviario:   including a new series name, a fresh new genre to call home, and most importantly, a new novel!  
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This is all a very, very big endeavor for me.  When I started this blog back in 2014, I had no idea the amount of work I would have to put in beyond writing.  At first, self-publishing was overwhelming: so much marketing, design, graphic work, and networking needed to be done on top of doing the actual novel writing that I was worried I had bitten off more than I could chew.   For a little while, when life outside the pages and screens got particularly rough, it seemed like I had.  But looking at my characters, and hearing the stories they still want me to tell, I know that I still have a lot more work ahead of me.   More importantly, I know that it is work that I want to do, work which excites me and makes me come alive more than any I could do for a "living wage" paycheck at a cookie-cutter desk job.  

So as soon as I finish cutting cookies, at the end of the day, I'm going to come home and keep up the real work.  More than ever, the last few months have taught me the importance of creativity and imagination in surviving when the going gets tough: whether it is through enjoying the creative works of others as a reader, or through adding to that creative ocean so that others can find the room to dive in and immerse themselves in something that brings them joy of their own.  

But in order to make sure that my creations get the best mileage possible, I need to really get a grip on the steering wheel that is marketing.  Most of what I have done up to this point has been shaky and self-taught, but over the last year and a half, I've done a lot of reading, a lot of research, and had some long, wonderful conversations with women who run their own businesses or pursued their dream careers, and love what they do for a living.  They've taught me so much, and this is the year I'm putting it all into action.  My work is going to get what the folks in "the biz" call a brand refresh.  Some might call it a fresh coat of paint.  I think of it a bit like that one scene in The Mask, when Jim Carrey's titular character bursts into the garage of some swindling mechanics, holding an oversized muffler in each hand:  "Hold on to yer lug nuts, it's tiiiiime for an overhaul!"   Why?   Well, mostly because I'm a child of the 90s, a self-proclaimed dork, and my brain goes to the closest available pop culture reference as often as possible.  But there's another reason, too, and that reason is road metaphors.

As always, I welcome your thoughts!  Tell me about a journey you hope to take this year ... it can be a convention you're looking forward to, or a more abstract journey to be more compassionate, or even a journey of the imagination.  Where's your personal passport taking you? 

I will be the first to admit it: not a lot happened on this website, or in Aviario, during 2018.  But I will  also be the first to say that I have plans for 2019 to be the polar opposite!  I have a lot of work to do ahead of me, and a lot of exciting developments to share with you all ... so please make sure that you are following me on your social media of choice!  I'll be making regular posts here, as well as on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest as things develop!   

I've even brought this blog into the modern age and enabled Disqus commenting on all entries going forward.  Don't worry, the RSS feed is still over on the right sidebar for those of you who prefer to go "internet old school"!  To test out this brand new commenting system, I have a blog post hat trick: a piece of news, a survey, and an associated giveaway!  

In the coming year, I will be creating new covers and layouts for all 3 novels, and giving the series a new, cohesive name!   I already have a design and scheme in mind, but I need your help choosing the secondary font!   I've done a mock-up of my longest title, as a test of how it will look.   Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to let me know which of my prospective font choices looks best to you!  

Comment with your choice using the brand-new comment system below, and I will choose a random commenter in February to win a set of all three books as e-books, in their preferred format (ePub, mobi, or PDF)! *

Thanks in advance for your help, and I'll see you all here next week!