Change, change, change.
It's time to shake things up and pull back the curtain. Or...maybe the other way around.
Don’t Worry!
I am not going anywhere.
This blog is not going anywhere (unintentional self-burn lol… but, really).
I approach change only after months of agonizing, gut-curdling anxiety.
And only if the outcomes are in the best interest of all parties involved.
Which,[checks subscribers lists], has grown from a smattering of about thirty or so people spread across multipl platforms—plus three extremely patient in-house Shultz boys and a Border Shepsky of course—to a whopping 55 Substackers, 216 Twixters, 206 Blueskies, 122 Instagramers, and 65 Medium-ers, all since I started my focus on querying and blog growth in April 2025.
Not bad for nine months of intermittent work.
But.
When I’m in querying mode, I have more room for audience growth activities. This includes things like:
blogging
short form writing (poetry, short story, prose, lit journals)
writing community involvement
and social media/marketing
That is very rapidly not going to be the case as 2025 comes to an end. I’ve even crafted you some handy-dandy graphics to illustrate my point.
The Copper Canary: In Flux
The Copper Canary, or rather the entire Legacy of Dust series, is coming to the end of its first major trench run. Now, if you’ve been following me for a while, you might be thinking. “First trench run? Haven’t you been querying this thing for like ever?”
The answer to that is, yes. Yes, I have been querying this damn book forever. At least it feels that way. In reality, I had agent interest extremely early on in the process of writing the book. Like, not even a third of the way done with my first draft and I had an agent tell me to send it to them when I was done writing it. That was September 2017.
So, if you think my timeline of “querying” canary has been going on since then, it absolutely feels like it has been forever. But things are a bit more nuanced than that. It went something like this:
Sept 2017 - April 2018 - First Draft of Canary Complete
April 2018 - Realize that I have written an entire trilogy…poorly.
April 2018 - March 2019 - Finish second draft, somehow manage to increase the word count of the “first book” I had cut from the original draft to the length of two books. Decide maybe this is just gonna have to be an epic because…
March 2019 - September 2019 - Remodeled house and yard, sold house, and then move states while attempting to polish draft, cut words, and deal with increasing personal health issues and multiple surgeries.
September 2019 - September 2022 - ER visits, multiple operations, covid kindergarten, and then lots of line edits on actual physical paper. Oh, and crying. Lots of crying.
September 2022 - September 2023 - Revise book into standalone and prepare for querying with the help of beta readers, manuscript academy, and critique partners.
October 2023 - I begin to query Canary officially. I start with just a handful of people as I also get some agent feedback through Manuscript Academy. Three months later I have an agent revise and resubmit request on my birthday. One month after that my mom is put on hospice.
January 2024 - Agent interest. And… well. You’ll see below.
Basically, things got complicated.
Here’s a quick reminder of what Canary is via my QueryTracker stats and the last query letter copy I used.
As mentioned in the image, The Copper Canary, et al. isn’t something I am giving up on. It is in professional beta reading right now. I also still haven’t heard back from six agents as of the writing of this post. So, we’ll see what happens. But for now, I am shelving it.
If nothing happens with Canary, I can at least feel good that major agents Emily Van Beek and Natascha Morris both requested the full manuscript for it and that Maria Vicente was interested in it all those years ago. The boost that gave me has been unquestionably helpful in keeping me going over the chaos that has occurred over the last eight years. It also has brought me to a community of people that truly understand me, and given me hope that my journey doesn’t end just because it might need to be shelved.
The agents and agented authors I have met so far have recommended that focus on completing a shorter book as my debut since series are difficult to sell to publishers when it is an unknown author. Which, was originally why I had started this next project. But then it became something entirely its own.
Polly Olly Oxen Free
This book is being written and edited “live” on my Substack blog. It started off with an experiment to see how ChatGPT could handle being a writing coach for a neurodivergent writer if deliberately told NOT to generate text. The goal was to show the problems inherent with the technology while also showing the real benefits and how it can be used without cheapening the creative process in a way that would be comparable to using a writing coach or critique group. As expected, Chat’s performance had an expiration date, and now the series shows how I use a similar “back and forth” mental dynamic when writing in general, no chat needed, and how it helps keep my 2E AuDHD brain from quitting.
Blood Cursed & Book Bound
This book. This book right here is the ONE.
It is the “standalone” debut that my writerly friends and agent-y friends have all encouraged me to get cracking on. Some have even pushed extremely hard for me to get going on it specifically because they can see a future for it.
Very exciting. Very nerve wracking.
So far though? It has been a blast to get back to “just writing.”
I forgot how quickly a book can come together when you aren’t “writing about writing” or having to show your work like I’m doing with Polly Olly. It also helps that this book has been sitting in my brain for a. long. long. time.
I’ve had this one outlined for over a year.
It even had a bland book cover mock-up and a horrendously long title previously:
I’m sure I’ll be gushing about it soon enough. I expect to have draft one done in the next month. Which means I will be in book writing mode. NOT query mode.
#amwriting Mode
What does book writing mode mean?
Well, you can pretty much take that bullet point list from the “Don’t Worry” section above and anticipate that for the next month or so all of it will drop down to about zero.
No blog posts, no social media, no poems, nada.
Any “free” time I have in between dealing with my chronic illnesses, dogcare side job, and main job of caring for three Shultz boys and the people and place we call home on this planet is all going to be reserved for writing Blood Cursed & Book Bound.
This also means that all those other projects you saw on that schmancy chart?
Those are going on hiatus for now, too.
It’s the chaotic writing cycle I live in. But it’s the only one that I’ve found that works for my brain: structured flexibility.
I will return to my normally scheduled chaos of “edit/querying mode” after I have finished BCBB’s first draft. So, don’t worry Polly Olly fans. I’m not leaving Pol hanging. For long.
The Pen Name
You have undoubtedly noted by now that the one thing all of these glorious custom-crafted images have in common is that each features some version of an author name. It varies however. Sometimes I use CM Shultz, sometimes Cayse M. Shultz. More often lately, I use, Cayse M. Harum-Shultz.
Moving forward you are going to see a change. After much him-hawing around it, wrestling my demons, and weighing my options I have settled on the following pen name: Cayse Shale.
Why?
Well, for a multitude of reasons. But here are the ones I’m willing to share:
My maiden and legal name are both tied to family. Although I intended that to be a way to honor them, it has quickly become apparent that it complicates matters a great deal. Don’t worry. Everyone is very supportive, but autonomy is often extremely important to neurodiverse individuals and I for one can completely understand and respect that.
I wrote under a pen name for a DECADE. There are downsides, sure, but the only thing I have done to “come out of my shell” is slap my actual name on top of the handles I had already developed under those pen names. If ever I was going to start using a pen name, now is the time.
I just want a buffer. As you can tell, I am not hiding the fact that I am using a pen name. I am lucky that I don’t need to. This just gives me one step of separation from being directly associated with my former and current last name.
My first name is already hard to spell. It was bad enough when my last name was “Hair-em”. I thought things would get better with the last name of “Sch-oltz.” Boy, was I wrong. I have to correct the spelling of it more often than I did for my maiden name. Did NOT see that coming when I took my vows. Spelling matters in publishing when it comes author names. Readers need to find you. My name has always been so crazy-pants that it is hard to NOT screw it up. Personally, I love this. But algorithmically and googling-ly, it isn’t ideal.
I want to keep my first name because that is the name most important to me when it comes to seeing it on anything I write. “Cayse” has always been more of my identity than my last names ever have been. Even my middle name has more resonance for me. But “Michelle” doesn’t work great as a last name.
There are personal reasons for why I picked “Shale.” Some of which I’m sure you can already guess. But the best one in my opinion is that I don’t have to change my signature lol. Someday I’m sure I’ll share the rest.
You’ll slowly start to see changes to the name of the website and logo sometime over the next couple of months. After I finish BCBB of course. :)
And that’s it!
That’s all the change I have in store for you this next year! Everything else stays the same. In so much as anything stays the same when you follow a 2E AuDHD author. Who has four blogs. And is holding multiple books in her mind while raising 2E kids and chasing dogs in her yard while her body tries to kill her.
So.
You know.
Keep the bar low, just in case.
;)
Happiest of Holiday Seasons to you all my dearest of readers!
Cayse