My book published today.
My. book. published. today.
How do I even talk about this occasion without sounding like everyone else who has ever published a book? What sentence can I put up there at the top of this post that captures the weight of this accomplishment?
I can’t. There isn’t one.
So to avoid boring you and to let you get to the important part, I’ve put a write-up of the process after the publication info. If you’re curious, find out below how this book became a real, tangible, published thing.
For now…
Wander a world driven from mundane to magical by a secret hidden at its heart.
A slow apocalypse has corroded a distant planet, with the uncanny living in uneasy commune alongside those remaining. On a forgotten quest from the stars, the Wanderer roams among them, through crumbling societies and vibrant wildernesses, navigating a murky path toward an incredible past.
While helping and receiving help-or hindrance-from strange denizens of unusual destinations, the Wanderer must finish righting a wrong that threatens to extinguish the universe itself. Should memory of the responsibility return at all.
Featuring
- 100 Hopeful Wanderer tales
- 20 new short stories
- 10-episode revelatory ending
- 100% revised and expanded
A far-future science fantasy with sub-tones of soft-apocalypse and climate change, this hopeful adventure combines exploration, eeriness, and wonder across 100 short tales.
Join readers who loved the web series and journey alongside them in discovering the Wanderer’s wondrous past and hopeful mission to save the stars.
Woven through with themes of acceptance, kindness, beauty in difference, and the wonder and strangeness of nature, this story will charm and delight readers of Mushishi by Yuki Urushibara and fans of The CryptoNaturalist and Strange Animals by Jarod K. Anderson.
“I love how varied the experiences were. The heartwarming stories mixed right in with the unsettling and strange is a perfect picture of life. The underlying story for why this is all happening was absolute perfection… Definitely one of the more unique story collections I have read. I really enjoyed it!”
—Amanda K. Collier, ARC Reader, The God of the Backrooms
“This is a whimsical yet potent selection of interwoven short stories about a Wanderer searching for something they once held dear. This book is filled with beauty, sadness, monsters, brilliant deadly things, and hope. You cannot forget the hope. This is a book for those that want to touch the stars.”
—Laci McGee, ARC Reader, McGee Travel Tales
“Every part of S.G. Baker’s collection The Hopeful Wanderer has purpose. Sometimes obvious, other times layered and more hidden… Every vignette deserves mental, cognitive, and emotional scrutiny. The fragmentation we experience shines a bright light — bringing visible things wondrous, frightening, and difficult to explain… This is the type of book that begs you to engage beyond the plot and rewards you with more questions.”
—Jason Brown, ARC Reader, Toastx2
The Making of the Book
You can find the explanation of the Wanderer’s origins in the author’s note of the published book, but I’ve got a little more to share here. Mostly stats that have continually run through my head as we’ve barrelled toward this day.
From start to finish, writing and publishing The Hopeful Wanderer took eight years. Eight years.
What started as a writing-practice project on this very blog in 2018, I hadn’t even the notion I would eventually thread together from the flash fics I wrote every week, let alone publish them as a book. I sort of meant to stop writing them at the “one year” mark (52 stories didn’t land at exactly one year because of one or three missed weeks), but around that point, I got it in my head to manage at least 100 before quitting. A hundred, I started to consider, would make for a publishable number. If I so chose. So I kept going.
In the end, I wound up with 101. Fortunately, I decided to take only 90 of the best and write 10 brand new installments to tie up the Wanderer’s story as an ending, exclusive to the book, because there were, in my humble opinion, some duds. Even of the 90 I chose, I still fully rewrote several from scratch. All the rest got heavy overhauls and expansion from 300 to 500 words.
My secret special ending came about from several instances of sitting on the glider I’d just put together for my back porch and staring up at the canopies of my neighbors’ trees and many, many pages of handwritten notes. When I’d wound down the Wanderer blog posts in February of 2021, I’d done so with zero ceremony because I’d burned out on the Wanderer. More than a year and a house move after that saw me quitting my job and pivoting into editing for a living. But I’d started choosing the stories to publish during the pandemic in 2020, and with such big life changes, I began to once again feel capable of tackling this project. I’d recently committed to finishing “the next thing closest to completion,” which put the Wanderer publication project firmly at the top of my list.
Queue four years of dedicated effort at getting this thing ready. I’ll admit, I also proceeded to launch five of my six published short stories and write three or four more besides during that time, which does not for the most focused production schedule make.
But did I plan to have to fully revise all 90 of the Wanderer stories I chose because it turned out they weren’t actually stories but rather quaint vignettes? No.
Did I expect to rewrite a good 10 of them completely from scratch? Also no.
Did I intend to not only dev edit but also copy edit and proofread the book myself after getting beta feedback? Definitely not. Editors are not wise to edit their own books, and yet, I did. Oh, the hubris of me.
Did I anticipate spending a solid year on designing my own book cover by hand while also learning how to design a book cover alongside all the editing I was doing? Not really. I had genuinely planned to hire a cover designer. But I was so curious as to what a mockup cover could look like… and then I had such a firm vision for the design… and whoops, I designed the cover.
Did I have any idea I would not only format the book myself but do so in Microsoft Word, arguably among the worst programs for document formatting? Absolutely not. But I’d had some training. And I stumbled on a really helpful book at the library. And it took a while for me to get access to Adobe InDesign. And, well, turns out a preformatted document from Microsoft Word does not transfer well to InDesign. Or Atticus. Can you see where this is going? Yeah. I did it myself again. I think I even upset a formatter at a writing conference when I revealed my sin.
Lastly, did I really know I would finish up the final file versions, pick a meaningful publication date only a month and half out, and then have to put together a marketing campaign in that amount of time? Not in the slightest. But a huge inspiration for the Wanderer as a character came from Yuki Urushibara’s Mushishi, and when I happened to look up the original publication date, I found that both the manga and the anime released on October 22. So October 22 it was. Even if that meant designing approximately 1 billion graphics, blog articles, and social media posts in just 45 days.
This is why whole entire publishing teams shepherd books into existence over the course of a couple of years. That doesn’t even take into account however many years the author took to write and pitch the manuscript. Even with all I did myself, there were still plenty of people I thanked for their help in the author’s note of the book (go make a purchase if you want to know if your name appears there *nudge nudge wink wink*). I’m also grateful from the bottom of my heart to the reviewers I approached who immediately said yes to reading my debut book and wrote nice words about this project that has taken all of my creative time for so long. Never underestimate this industry. Writing and publishing a book are easy words to speak but a much harder life to live.
Eight years.
My book published today.
Incredible.
Edited to Add
What I failed to get at in this post as I wrote it last night is the profound sense of relief at finally completing this enormous undertaking of a project. When I committed to making this book a reality, I had to choose at every single creative opportunity to dedicate that time and effort to exactly one goal: publish The Hopeful Wanderer. Now that I’ve done that, I’m free.
Ish.
There are more projects in the pipe, naturally, but I think today I’ll celebrate by just reading a book I’m enjoying. Maybe write words that have no ultimate purpose, like some fan fiction. Do a bit of research for the next short story. Remember to water my plants. Start a revolution.
Who knows? I can do anything now.
Thanks for reading!
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Summer’s Latest
The Hopeful Wanderer
Wander a world driven from mundane to magical by a secret hidden at its heart.
A slow apocalypse has corroded a distant planet, with the uncanny living in uneasy commune alongside those remaining. On a forgotten quest from the stars, the Wanderer roams among them, through crumbling societies and vibrant wildernesses, navigating a murky path toward an incredible past.
While helping and receiving help-or hindrance-from strange denizens of unusual destinations, the Wanderer must finish righting a wrong that threatens to extinguish the universe itself. Should memory of the responsibility return at all.
Featuring
- 100 Hopeful Wanderer tales
- 20 new short stories
- 10-episode revelatory ending
- 100% revised and expanded
A far-future science fantasy with sub-tones of soft-apocalypse and climate change, this hopeful adventure combines exploration, eeriness, and wonder across 100 short tales.
Join readers who loved the web series and journey alongside them in discovering the Wanderer’s wondrous past and hopeful mission to save the stars.
Woven through with themes of acceptance, kindness, beauty in difference, and the wonder and strangeness of nature, this story will charm and delight readers of Mushishi by Yuki Urushibara and fans of The CryptoNaturalist and Strange Animals by Jarod K. Anderson.
“I love how varied the experiences were. The heartwarming stories mixed right in with the unsettling and strange is a perfect picture of life. The underlying story for why this is all happening was absolute perfection…Definitely one of the more unique story collections I have read. I really enjoyed it!”
—Amanda K. Collier, ARC Reader, The God of the Backrooms
“This is a whimsical yet potent selection of interwoven short stories about a Wanderer searching for something they once held dear. This book is filled with beauty, sadness, monsters, brilliant deadly things, and hope. You cannot forget the hope. This is a book for those that want to touch the stars.”
—Laci McGee, ARC Reader, McGee Travel Tales
“Every part of S.G. Baker’s collection The Hopeful Wanderer has purpose. Sometimes obvious, other times layered and more hidden…Every vignette deserves mental, cognitive, and emotional scrutiny. The fragmentation we experience shines a bright light — bringing visible things wondrous, frightening, and difficult to explain…This is the type of book that begs you to engage beyond the plot and rewards you with more questions.”
—Jason Brown, ARC Reader, Toastx2
Beneath the Bluebonnets: Tales of Terror by Texas Women
Read my eco-horror short “Well Being” in this fabulous new anthology, in which a mother follows strange impulses from tainted water to find her daughter.
From Mary Shelley to Tananarive Due and Mariana Enríquez, women have long shaped horror—often without equal recognition. Living closest to the genre’s edge, women know these fears firsthand: lost autonomy, violence, childbirth, survival.
Set in Texas, a land of haunted histories and increasingly restrictive laws, Beneath the Bluebonnets emerges from the raw intersection of terror and endurance. Written by twelve Texas women writers: R. J. Joseph, Lauren Oertel, L.H. Phillips, Kathleen Kent, Madison Estes, Jess Hagemann, Emma E. Murray, Jae Mazer, Iphigenia Strangeworth, Jacklyn Baker, S.G. Baker and edited by Carmen Gray, this collection is urgent, unflinching, and deeply haunting—stories that refuse to look away.
“A visceral, haunting collection that punches between beauty and terror, gore and catharsis, fury and justice.”
—Leanna Renee Hieber, award-winning, USA Today bestselling author of America’s Most Gothic and A Haunted History of Invisible Women
Writing the Mother Road: Texas High Plains Writers Celebrates Route 66
Route 66 isn’t just a highway—it’s a legend.
In Writing the Mother Road, the Texas High Plains Writers invite you to travel America’s most iconic stretch of pavement through a rich collection of short works inspired by the sights, stories, and spirit of Route 66. Inside these pages, you’ll find essays, memoirs, historical reflections, whimsical adventures, and imaginative tales ranging from science fiction to fantasy—all tied together by the culture and charm of the Mother Road.
For generations, Route 66 has fueled livelihoods, sparked creativity, and shaped the towns and travelers who crossed its path. Now, as the road approaches its centennial, this anthology celebrates the enduring heartbeat of the Texas Panhandle and the unforgettable road that helped define it.
“What a fun adventure! In honor of the centennial Celebration of Route 66, I thought I would grab a copy and wow! Fun stories, each one connected to the Mother Road. Recommend getting a copy and enjoying the history and lore!”
—Amazon Reviewer
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