Inside the Mind - Gary Ballard

I've always loved reading from an early age, but it was the getting interested in early tabletop role-playing games that really lit the fire. I adored Dungeons & Dragons and Tolkien, and my first writing on my mom's old typewriter was stories about fantasy adventures with a crew misfit dungeon crawlers.

Hiss Whistle Dead started as a episodic novel using the Kindle Vella formula, which got discontinued halfway through the release of the episodes. I quickly bundled the story into a full novel and released it in December of 2024. It's a cyberpunk murder mystery starring Shel, a freelance hacker specializing in collecting the accounts of the recently deceased. When her gender neutral brother dies of a mysterious stroke, she begins to investigate their life, learning more than she expected about the person she thought she knew. It is an examination of grief, gender identity, AI, mental illness, and relationships.

Sometimes the characters are based very loosely on people I know in real life. Often, they are answers to a question - what if this type of person were put in this situation? Some are twists on a typical archetype, a deliberate subversion of the kind of character one would expect.

I often tend to write on the weekends, so the day starts with some soccer, a little breakfast, and then a good solid few hours of writing until the mood leaves me.

Not having to be concerned with specific deadlines, or trends, just being able to write the kind of stories I want and need to tell, and getting positive feedback from the readers has been the best aspect of indie publishing.

Marketing is a challenge. Talking about oneself is often the hardest thing, and marketing increasingly calls not just for dedication of time, but money as well. Both of these things are at times a challenge to get, much less to give.

My trusty Word, Internet search, and music are my best writing tools.

Don't expect success or fortune right out of the gate, and potentially ever. Write because it's what you love to do, write whether there's an audience of more than one or not.

Badly? Marketing and promotion are difficult to do without time and budget, something I find in short supply.

I'm currently taking a bit of a writing hiatus to deal with some personal issues, but there is historical novel in the works for the last few years that's about 1/3rd of the way through the first draft.