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NEWS AND VIEWS - JANUARY 2025
2025! So what's been going on this month? Not a heck of a lot. Obviously I'm still working on Lillandra, which I'm still hoping to finish around March or April -- I probably have about 40,000-50,000 words left to write. I think I can manage it; the writing seems to be going pretty smoothly. I'm not sure if I'll be serializing any more novels on Royal Road, though. I think this was a worthy experiment, but I put a huge amount of effort into Lillandra and just about killed myself to get ahead of the release schedule, and in the end, it just wasn't as successful as I'd hoped it would be. Maybe it's the title, maybe it's the fact that it's not a LitRPG, I don't know, but whatever the reason, it just didn't take off. Well, it happens, I guess. (I would like to take a moment to thank everyone who's been reading the story and supporting it, though. It really means a lot to me when people take a chance on my work -- I'm a totally unknown writer, after all, and there's plenty of other entertainment options out there.) Anyway, I also started writing a new short story this month, set in the Signalverse, called "Kidding Around", which I'm planning to make available on my Patreon fairly soon. I've actually got several of these stories outlined now: "Ankhara and the Anzu Bird", which is a Paranormals story; "Rat Race" which is a Rat Girl/Rat Fink team-up starring the speedster INB4; and "War Stories", which is a Silver Shot mystery set in the late 1960's. I figured they might be a nice little bonus for my patrons. Apart from that, I don't really have any other writing news to report. As for my day-to-day life...well, there's not really very much going on there, either. It's winter in Minnesota, and although we haven't received all that much snow, it's been very cold and windy lately, so we're all kind of stuck inside. I've been playing Tetris and Trails Through Daybreak, watching a great variety of anime (Dan Da Dan, Sakamoto Days, Kimi wa Houkago Insomnia) and Korean TV (Family Matters, Light Shop, Study Group), and reading a handful of books (a bio of Henry V), but I've been spending most of my free time working out, writing, and puttering around the place like an old man. For fun, here's another AI-generated cover of an imaginary Signalverse comic book: 
This is basically how I imagine the Star Marshal to look. (I don't think I've ever mentioned this, but the inspiration for the Star Marshal came from a couple of old Japanese movies, Prince of Space and Invasion of the Neptune Men, both of which were riffed on by Mystery Science Theater 3000 back in the day. The Star Marshal, a space-faring do-gooder who flies around the galaxy facing down cosmic threats, is basically a combination of Prince of Space and Space Chief/Iron Sharp, the heroes from those movies, only not as lame.) 
And that's all for this month. |