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NEWS AND VIEWS - FEBRUARY 2025
It's been kind of a rough month for me here -- as you may or may not know, I have pretty bad insomnia, and it started hitting me a little harder than usual around the middle of the month. As a result, I didn't get quite as much writing done as I would have liked. I did finish a new Signalverse short story, "Kidding Around" (available on my Patreon), but I probably only added about 11,000 words to Lillandra and I've only just begun to work on "Ankhara and the Anzu Bird" and "Life in the Fast Lane" (two more Signalverse shorts I have planned out). If I'm up in the middle of the night and I can't sleep and I can't think of anything else to do I'll sometimes work on The Complete Guide to the Signalverse, my ridiculously detailed world-guide, which I'm always tinkering with. The new edition, if I ever get around to releasing it, will have at least a hundred and twenty new character entries and all kinds of updated info. Here's some of the new entries: 
I'd love to write some actual stories featuring these characters, but there's only so much writing I can do in a day, and I'm not sure how many people would be interested in a "Janella the Jungle Woman" story anyway. All this world-building does add a little bit of flavor to my novels, though, I think. (I've always wanted the Signalverse to seem like it has an actual comic book publishing history, starting in the 1920's-1930's with corny Golden Age-style heroes and villains like Janella and gradually becoming more serious and self-aware as the years go by, sort of similar to what Kurt Busiek did with Astro City.) Anyway, as for Lillandra...well, the end is in sight; I only have a couple of "episodes" left to go. Also, since the first fifty or so chapters of the book are free to read on Royal Road, I figured there wasn't much point in keeping those chapters behind a paywall any longer, so I've made them freely available on my Patreon now as well. And that's pretty much all the writing news I've got this month. Regarding my day-to-day life, well, I've been struggling with the insomnia, like I said, but I did manage to get a little reading in (biographies of Henry V and Vlad the Impaler), and I also discovered a terrific Korean TV series called Light Shop, a sad and haunting story about a group of people trapped somewhere between life and death. Highly recommended. |