Hello, All!
This is my Substack. I hope you enjoy it. I promise not to inundate you with messages about my work or badger you with various pleadings to read my stuff, though I may try to entice and cajole you into such things and please feel free to ignore me or even tell me to go away.
That said, I thank all of you. You’re here because you signed up for my newsletter at some point (maybe a long time ago), and I’m incredibly flattered you did. It really means a lot. My newsletters were via TinyLetter but they are closing up shop, so here I am at Substack. I hope you’ll stay with me. I follow a handful of Substacks that I find inspirational or meaningful or helpful in some way or simply make my day more interesting.
I will try to do likewise and make this worth our time.
With that in mind, I’m keeping this one short. I’m here. You’re here. I hope we’ll keep meeting like this.
People sometimes ask me if I’m still writing, and I tell them, yes, I’m still getting up at four every morning to write. What they never ask is why. They assume I do it because I hope one day to make a ton of money from it. Money would be great, absolutely. A wider readership would be wonderful. But the answer is much simpler:
I do it for love.
I genuinely mean that.
I spend a lot of time writing and rewriting and rewriting and submitting to agents and publishers and gathering rejections and more rejections, and if I was doing it all solely to make some money there’s no way I could keep doing it. I have to do it for love, same way I spent hours and hours in my childhood playing with action figures. I did that for the love and the joy.
I try to keep that in mind every time I write.
But, yes, I do want readers and I am immensely grateful to anyone who has ever read anything I’ve written. I’m also very grateful to the publishers and editors who have believed in my work.
In 2023, Grindhouse Press published my novella The Hands of Onan, and Dark Dead Things published my short story “Test Time.” I also signed two contracts for my work, won a gross-out contest, and had a wonderful day of connecting with readers and selling books at the Fall Foliage Festival in Port Jervis, NY.
I have high hopes for 2024 with lots of exciting things coming up. This includes the publication of my story that won first place at the 2023 Author Con Gross-Out Contest from Blood Bound Books, and two novellas, What Darkness Waits from D&T Publications and What Ever Happened to Jo Rose? from Grindhouse Press.
I’m really excited about all of these things, and I can’t wait to share more about them. Very soon I will be offering digital Advance Reader Copies of Jo Rose?, so I hope you’ll welcome me back.
Meanwhile, you can find me on various social media platforms as @authordileo. You can check out my website, or peruse my books. You can also email me authordileo1@gmail.com. I love hearing from fellow readers and writers.
I wish you a wonderful holiday season and a happy new year.
Be well, be happy, be kind,
Chris DiLeo
Watched and loved: Godzilla Minus One
Listened and loved: The Choice, Kamasi Washington
Read and loved: The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin