Christopher Columbus, Interstellar Explorer – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Planning out the next year of writing

I’ve made some major changes to my writing process recently, mostly having to do with the accountability systems that measure my writing productivity. Instead of tracking daily word count, which I’ve done consistently for the better part of the last decade, I now track my average daily words per hour across all writing sessions.

What I found by tracking word count was that my writing and my family life were consistently coming into conflict, which wasn’t good for either. With three small children and a wife who no longer works from home, I’m currently in a season of life where I simply cannot dedicate as much time to writing.

So instead, I’m striving to do just enough writing each day to keep my writing skills sharp, so that when I do get the opportunity to dedicate a whole day or a whole weekend to writing, I can make the most of it. So instead of measuring the quantity of writing I do each day, I’m measuring how efficiently I can use my writing time, and striving to maximize that.

Over the holiday break, I also did quite a bit of thinking over all my current writing projects and how I should prioritize them in the coming year. Basically, for each WIP, I asked myself two questions: “how would I feel if this was the only book I wrote in 2026?” and “how would I feel if I never made any progress on this book for the rest of the year?” Based on that, I put my current novel WIPs in the following order:

Captive of the Falconstar
The Soulbond and the Sling
The Unknown Sea
Lord of the Falconstar

More than any other book I really want to finish Captive of the Falconstar this year. It’s science fiction, not fantasy, but it’s part of an unfinished trilogy that I’ve been committed to finishing for quite some time now. Even though I want to pivot to writing fantasy, I don’t want to leave a bunch of unfinished series as I do that. Also, it’s a really good book that I think that readers of the first book, Queen of the Falconstar, will find immensely satisfying. So I really want to finish and publish this book this year.

I don’t know exactly how long it will take me to finish it. Hopefully sometime around the spring, at which point I’ll put it up for a 2-3 month preorder. But I’m pretty overwhelmed with my other obligations right now, especially family, and we haven’t yet gotten into a good routine with my wife’s new job. So it might take a lot longer than that. But I am consistently working on it a little each day, and I expect it will be finished and published by the end of the year.

But even though I want to make progress on this series, I actually don’t want to lay everything aside to finish it. Which is why the next two books, in order of priority, are both fantasy. The Soulbond and the Sling is one that I really want to finish writing this year, even if I don’t end up publishing it in 2026. As I’ve said in previous posts, I don’t want to launch this new epic fantasy series until I have the first three books finished and ready to rapid release.

But I already have a complete human-revised AI draft of this book, so all I have to do now is go through and rewrite it in my own words. That’s going to take some time, simply because it’s such a massive book, but I want to get it done and finished and ready to publish, even if I end up holding off on that for the next couple of years.

Of course, while I continue to work on The Soulbond and the Sling, I will also continue to work on book 2, The Soulbond and the Lady. The rough AI draft of that book is already complete, but the final AI draft is going to take a lot of work, so it will probably take me as long to finish that as it takes to write and revise the final human draft of book 1. So I probably won’t finish The Soulbond and the Lady this year.

If I can finish a third book, I would like it to be The Unknown Sea. This would be the fifth installment in the Sea Mage Cycle, and so far, it’s been one of the funnest books to write. If you’ve enjoyed the other books in the series, I think you’re really going to enjoy this one, and I would really love to get it out there for everyone to read. Like all of the Sea Mage books, this one is relatively short, so finishing it shouldn’t be too difficult. It’s just a matter of making the time.

One thing you may notice is that I haven’t included any of the Christopher Columbus books in this lineup. After giving it some serious thought, I’ve decided to put that series on hold for the forseeable future. I just think it’s more important to pivot to pivot to writing fantasy, which means finishing all of the unfinished science fiction trilogies and writing new fantasy books to release in the coming years.

So that’s my writing plan for 2026. I may also start a new WIP at some point, just because I can’t help myself—in fact, I rather expect it. But if and when I do, I’ll probably take it no farther than the rough AI draft before putting it on the back burner. In fact, it might be a good idea to put several such projects together, outlining and prewriting them just enough that I can pick them up and run with them when I’m ready to commit to such a project. That should scratch my creative itch just enough without taking too much time from the WIPs I’m committed to finishing.

Writing through the holidays

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, the most magical time of the year—and for parents of three small children, it’s the busiest time as well. This week has been packed with all sorts of things, which means the writing has taken a backseat for the moment. Still, I’ve been managing to get a little work done, mostly in the early mornings.

I’m about 40% done with the rough AI draft of The Soulbond and the Lady, book 2 in the Rise of the Soulbond King Trilogy. I’ve also been working on the human draft of The Soulbond and the Sling, though progress has been slow (which is also why I haven’t been able to update the cover, or make a cover mock-up for The Soulbond and the Lady).

It took me only four days to write the prompts and generate the rough AI draft of The Soulbond and the Sling, which came to about 153k words. That was pretty wild. But the draft turned out to be a little too rough, which is part of the reason why it took so long to revise the AI draft and get it to a state where I was ready to move on to the human draft. So for The Soulbond and the Lady, I’m trying to be more careful. If I can fine tune the prompts to generate a much higher quality rough AI draft, it shouldn’t take nearly as much energy to revise it, which means that I can finish the AI draft of book 2 while I write the human draft of book 1.

I was hoping to finish the rough AI draft of The Soulbond and the Lady before Thanksgiving, but that didn’t happen, so now I’m hoping to finish it before Christmas. But I’ve currently put that WIP on hold so that I can finish the novella version of “Christopher Columbus: Treasure Hunter” in time to publish it in February of next year. I’m currently about 15% done with the AI revisions, and if things go well, I’ll have a finished AI draft by the end of the week, or early next week at the latest.

With the Christopher Columbus series, I’m experimenting with different forms of AI-assisted writing, leaning more into the discovery writing aspect of the creative process. So it might take longer as I figure it out. That’s frustrating, because it means slower writing progress, but by the end of it I’ll hopefully have learned a few more things about AI-assisted writing that will help out with future books. And even with how frustratingly slow it is, I am having quite a bit of fun with this WIP.

After Christmas, when I’ve hopefully finished both of these WIPs (at least through the AI draft phase), I plan to pick up The Unknown Sea again and work on that one until it’s DONE. I’m planning on a release date in March of next year, which might be a bit of a challenge given how crazy it is around here, but I’m really looking forward to finishing this one and getting it out into the world!

…so that was harder than expected

How long has it been since my last blog post? A little over a week? Two weeks? Yikes.

Long story short, it’s been the new baby. For the first week or so, it wasn’t too bad, but then we all came down with a cold, including the baby, so it was touch and go for a little while. And now, we’re all better, but he’s got some sort of colic that makes him cry and cry and cry from about 7pm through 2am, and we’re not sure why. Maybe he’s just not getting enough sleep during the day? It’s difficult to say, but whatever it is, it’s been wrecking us.

One way or another, though, that should start to turn around. And thankfully, I’ve been able to keep writing through all of this, though not as much as I would like. Something is better than nothing, though.

Lately, I’ve been working on the next Christopher Columbus story for J.M. Wight. That’s an old cover, which I plan to update as soon as I get the chance, but it works for now. The first story, “Wildcatter,” will stay more or less as-is, but I’m rewriting the next one, “Treasure Hunter,” to be more of a novella than a short story.

When I originally wrote it, I planned to try and serialize these stories with a magazine or other traditional publication. I got pretty dang close, too: “Wildcatter” got accepted at Interzone, on the understanding that there would be more, but then the chief editor ghosted me, and when I followed up a month later for clarification, I got a form rejection. Maybe they found out I’m a Trump voter? It takes all kinds, seriously.

In any case, my plan now is to turn this into a novella series and to publish the stories myself. I’m using AI to help write them, but I’m doing it a little differently than with my novels. Instead of coming to the AI with a detailed outline, I’m letting the AI run with the story, guiding it with a fairly light hand. I’ll do a few revision passes using the AI tools, then rewrite the whole thing from the beginning in my own words (and maybe add a detail or two). So basically, it’s AI pantsing instead of AI plotting (which is probably how most AI-assisted authors use AI anyway).

It took a couple of days to fill out all the worldbuilding fields and characters, but the rough draft came super fast after that–in fact, it only took a day to generate! What’s more, it was loads of fun. So what I’ll probably do next is do a revision pass, then lay it aside while I work on something else, then pick it up again for another quick revision pass. Each of those shouldn’t take more than a day or two at most, and the human draft shouldn’t take longer than a week.

If all goes well, “Christopher Columbus: Treasure Hunter” (the new one) should be out by December. I’ll be sure to make new cover art, too. And if things go really well, I should be able to put out a new one of these novellas every other month.

I’ve also been working on a screenplay for “What Hard Times Hath Wrought.” Of all my short stories and novelettes, I think this is one of the best ones to adapt to the screen, not because it’s cool or flashy, but because it should be so inexpensive to produce, as most of the story is just three people in a camper, traveling across Wyoming and Nebraska.

I don’t have much experience with screenplay writing yet, but I’m learning quite a bit from this project. So far, everything has been self-taught, from a combination of Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder, The Hollywood Standard by Christopher Riley, and ChatGPT/Sudowrite. There’s a really great plugin on Sudowrite that will convert up to 2k words at a time into screenplay format, which has been super helpful.

Of course, it still needs quite a bit of work, since that only got me to about 45 pages (in screenwriting, 1 page = roughly 1 minute, so a screenplay should be between 90 and 120 pages). I’ve been adding some flashbacks, montages, and scenes from the other characters’ points of view to flesh it out, and so far I’ve been really pleased with how it’s turned out. It’s challenging, yes, but mostly the challenge has been adapting my ideas to a new format, since I already have a pretty good handle on story structure.

My goal is to convert maybe half a dozen of my old short stories into screenplays, and then start shopping them around. Of the 60ish short stories I’ve written over my writing career, perhaps 20 of them are complex enough on a story level to make a decent feature-length film (the rest are either vignettes or idea-pieces). I have no idea if any of them will ever be made into a movie, but I figure it’s worth a shot. And once I’ve gotten a decent enough handle on screenplay writing, I may start converting my novels into screenplays.

But the screenwriting is a side gig for now. The focus is still on novels, since that’s my bread and butter.

Starting next week, I’m hoping to get back in the saddle with this blog. The daily posts are coming back, and you’re going to see a lot of posts about my backlist titles. One of the things I want to do is leverage this blog for AI optimization for my books, so that ChatGPT and the other models start to recommend my books to more people. Toward that end, I plan to write more blog posts not only for my human readers, but for the AI bots and LLMs. Ideally, though, it should be for both.

Back into writing!

So we are more or less moved into our new (old) house, though there is this overdue kid’s book from the library that somehow got lost during the move, and we haven’t been able to find it… but aside from that, we are more or less settled in. Our five year-old has started kindergarten, my wife is starting her new job, and by the time this post goes live, we will have acquired office chairs from the BYU surplus sale, so I won’t have to be standing all the time like I am as I write this.

I’ve already gotten back into writing my epic fantasy, The Soulbond and the Sling, and am making steady progress on it again. The AI draft is about 66% complete, and it’s good enough that if I were writing it under a secret AI-only pen name, I would feel comfortable publishing it as-is. But my personal standard of quality is higher than that, especially for epic fantasy, so after the AI draft is complete, I will rewrite the whole thing without any AI, to put it in my own voice (and will probably add a whole lot of other stuff to it too—you know, the kind of setting and character details you’d expect in a proper epic fantasy, giving it much more depth).

(Also, as a side note, I do not have a secret AI-only pen name… though I must admit, a part of me kind of wants to start one. With a little bit of market research to figure out the pulpiest genres where I could really excel… but no, with two (soon to be three) small kids and a wife who works full-time, there are only so many projects I can work on at a time.)

I’m also working on The Road to New Jerusalem for my J.M. Wight pen name, though that one has been going much more slow. I really have no idea how much market appeal this one is going to have, and doubt it will do much more than help me to flesh out the world for a potential series in the same universe (a post-apocalyptic Mormon polygamist romance, which also probably has limited market appeal). However, I feel impressed that this is a book I need to see through to the end, so my goal is to finish it before October, at which point I will probably focus on The Soulbound King.

Beyond that, I’m also working on two other novels that I hope to finish before the end of the year (or, more realistically, sometime early next year, since I’m sure the new baby will throw things off for a while. The first is The Unknown Sea, a Sea Mage Cycle book, which is going to be a lot of fun. The rough AI draft is already done, and I had a real blast writing it.

The other one is Captive of the Falconstar, the sequel to Queen of the Falconstar. The rough AI draft is also done for this one, but the revised AI draft is going to take a bit more work. Also, I need to redo the cover and blurb. But I’m really looking forward to getting this one out, and completing the trilogy, which has stood unfinished for nearly a decade now. Yes, I really need to finish these unfinished series, and fully intend to do so—not just with this one, but for all of them.

Over the next year, I hope to transition from being a science fiction writer who occasionally writes fantasy, to a fantasy writer who occasionally writes science fiction. My two big unfinished sci-fi series are the Falconstar Trilogy and the Outworld Trilogy. The plan right now is to finish Falconstar first, knocking out the last two books almost at the same time (the rough AI draft for Lord of the Falconstar is also complete), and then spend a little more time on Return of the Starborn Son to finish that trilogy strong. For a long time, Star Wanderers was my flagship series, so I want to do right by it. But I haven’t even outlined book 3 yet, so it’s going to be a while.

And when Return of the Starborn Son is done, I will probably release another volume of my author’s notes, since hey, why not? But that won’t be for a while—probably not until this time next year, at the absolute soonest. However, Return of the Starborn Son probably will come out before The Soulbond and the Sling, since for marketing reasons I don’t want to release an epic fantasy trilogy until all three books are ready to rapid release. And yes, I fully blame George R.R. Martin for conditioning epic fantasy readers not to try out a new series until it is complete. It is what it is.

So that’s the long-term plan. I will probably start a few new projects as well, including a relaunch of my Christopher Columbus stories, once I figure out what I want to do with that series. But for now, I’m just going to focus on The Road to New Jerusalem and The Soulbond and the Sling, until we are back into a new routine. BYU classes start on September 3rd, so it will probably be a little crazy until then. And the way things are shaping up, I half-expect they will induce my wife at the tail-end of September. So maybe we won’t actually get into a new routine until sometime next year. But either way, I’ll do my best to keep writing.

Rethinking some things

So I had an extremely vivid dream last Friday night where I got cancer and learned that I had only a month to live. Among other things, I found myself asking: “What am I going to do about my writing career? Who is going to finish all these books? Are they going to fade into obscurity, or will someone promote them so that my family will benefit from them after I’m gone?”

The whole thing made me feel like the race was suddenly over, and I hadn’t finished it, but had to hand off the baton to someone else who would. So instead of spending that final month of my life writing, I would have to spend it outlining things in such a way that the person who carried it all after me would be able to do it right.

(And then, hilariously, when I told my friend and cowriter Scott Bascom that I had terminal cancer, his response was: “So what? Get back to writing.” And when I told him IRL about that dream, his reaction was: “Well, was I wrong?”)

Obviously, it was an incredibly sobering and emotional dream, for reasons that had nothing to do with my writing. But it also got me to thinking about some things I’ve taken for granted about my writing process, and how I ought to change them or at least experiment with other ways of doing things.

For example, for the last fifteen years—really, since I started writing professionally—I’ve just sort of assumed that I would 1. work on one novel WIP at a time, and 2. write that novel sequentially from start to finish, rather than hopping around.

In the early years, I experimented with doing things differently and decided that I just wasn’t wired that way. But that was also when I thought I was a 100% discovery writer and didn’t have any sort of outlining process. Basically, I tried to keep the whole novel in my head, a nearly impossible task even for a veteran writer.

Now, I have a much more rigorous outlining process that divides each novel WIP into chapters and scenes, so that instead of trying to keep an entire novel in my head, I can eat the elephant one small bite at a time. So I’ve actually got the infrastructure in place right now to experiment with those things, in a way that I didn’t before.

Another thing that I’ve always taken for granted is that in order to be a working professional, I need to set strict deadlines for each project and schedule those deadlines at least a year in advance. Never mind that I have never kept an original deadline that I’ve made for a project, or kept to those schedules. Instead of finding a better way, however, those deadlines and schedules always just keep getting pushed back.

I’ve also been trying to find a way to write a novel all the way through from start to finish, without getting stuck in the middle and feeling like I need to put it aside for a while (on the “back burner,” as I used to say). In fact, that was one of the main reasons why I developed my outlining process in the first place. But even with a well-developed outline that still has some flexibility to adapt to a changing story, I still can’t write a novel straight through without having to take a break.

Another thing I’ve always failed at is hitting my daily word count goals consistently. Instead, I typically write in starts and fits, especially when I’m in the messy middle of whatever novel WIP I’m working on at the moment. However, I did have some success with those nanowrimo challenges where I worked on short stories—in other words, where I hopped from project to project.

Also, until this year, I could never manage to read very consistently. I’d go through phases where I’d read a lot, followed by long reading droughts where I’d read almost nothing. But then, I discovered some reading hacks that completely changed everything, and now I’m reading between one and two dozen books a month (most of them just the first and last chapters, but about 6-10 of them all the way through).

One of those reading hacks was—wait for it—reading more than a dozen books simultaneously and hopping from book to book. And the thing that made that possible was my reading log, which provides some structure and helps me to see how much I need to read from each book to not just totally drop the ball.

So why don’t I try something similar with my writing? What if, instead of working on one novel WIP at a time, I used these outlines to break them all up into scenes and just skipped around, writing whatever stands out as the most interesting thing to write at the moment? The outlines will help to keep it all straight, so I don’t have to keep an entire novel in my head. And when I inevitably get stuck with one WIP, I don’t have to lay it aside for months on end—instead, I can jump to something else, since I’m already jumping around in the first place.

It sounds kind of crazy, but I’ve found that my ADHD brain actually works better that way, at least when it comes to reading. So why not writing as well? It’s worth a shot, at least. And maybe one of the upsides will be that I won’t have to angst so much about those deadlines. If the focus is on hitting daily word count instead of staying on deadline for my current WIP, then solving the first problem will ultimately solve the second one, once I hit my stride.

So that’s what I’m going to experiment with: hopping from project to project, with a goal of hitting my daily word count goal rather than advancing a single project to an arbitrary deadline.

In order to do that, I need to make some outlines. Here are all of my unfinished novel(ish) WIPs that I haven’t trunked yet:

The Sword Bearer (Twelfth Sword Trilogy #2)
The Sword Mistress (Twelfth Sword Trilogy #3)
Captive of the Falconstar (Falconstar Trilogy #2)
Lord of the Faconstar (Falconstar Trilogy #3)
Children of the Starry Sea (Outworld Trilogy #2)
Untitled (Outworld Trilogy #3)
A Brotherhood of Swords (First Sword Trilogy #1)
Untitled (First Sword Trilogy #2)
Untitled (First Sword Trilogy #3)
The Lifewalker Chronicles (standalone)
Starship Lachoneus (standalone, may be a collection)
The Justice of Zedekiah Wight (collection)
The Mercy of Zedekiah Wight (collection)
Christopher Columbus, Interstellar Explorer (collection)

Of those, only Children of the Starry Sea and Captive of the Falconstar are fully outlined. So I’ve got a lot of work to do.

Instead of taking time off to outline all of these, however, I’m going to prioritize hitting word count, and work on the outlines on the side, in my voluminous spare time </sarc>. It’ll probably take a while, but I’ll eventually get it done—and that will provide some extra motivation to hit word count each day.

Also, I plan to outline all of them, even the book 3s where book 2 still hasn’t been written. The reason for that is so that I’ll have something to hand off to another writer, in case that crazy dream comes true. I don’t think that it will, but I’m gonna go sometime, so it’s better to get into the habit of doing that now. Besides, it may be helpful to skip ahead to the next book and write a few scenes: give me something to write toward.

TL;DR: I’m going to be doing a lot of experimentation in the next couple of months, skipping around in all of my WIPs instead of focusing on one at a time. It’s going to be crazy, but hopefully in a productive way. And a fun way too.

Bowing Out

Back at the end of August, I blogged about how I was going to do a writing challenge in September to produce more short stories to fill out my publishing queue. At the time, I had a couple of stories that looked like they were going to be picked up by one of the major magazines: the editor had expressed interest in buying them, and we were going back and forth with an editorial discussion about the series.

Well, to make a long story short, all of that fell through, and it looks like I’ll be self-publishing those stories after all. I’m not really sure what changed, but to give you an idea of what kind of a short story market this is, it’s been around for decades and regularly gets written up in Locus Magazine’s year-in-review. The editor said that things had gotten crazy on his end, then didn’t respond for about a month, and when I sent a polite followup email asking for an update on the status, he gave me the standard “I’m going to pass on this one, but send me your next story.” Which strikes me as kind of weird, given how our previous correspondence led me to believe that the contract was just a formality and he’d be sending one over soon, but whatever.

So now that these stories are back in the publishing queue, I no longer need to write a bunch more to fill it out. In fact, I’ve actually got enough stories to publish one a month through next April, and after I finish the third Christopher Columbus story, I’ll have enough to get through June (one of my older stories comes out of exclusivity in May 2023). Here is the schedule as of right now:

OCT 2022: “Blight of Empire”
NOV 2022: “Christopher Columbus, Wildcatter”
DEC 2022: “The Freedom of Second Chances”
JAN 2023: “The Body Tax” (needs to be revised, but it’s already been workshopped)
FEB 2023: “Christopher Columbus, Treasure Hunter”
MAR 2023: “The Library of Fate”
APR 2023: “Hunter, Lover, Cyborg, Slave” (needs to be workshopped and revised)
MAY 2023: “Christopher Columbus, Wormhole Mechanic” (partially written, needs to be finished)
JUN 2023: “In the Beginning” (still under exclusivity, though I got a special exception to publish it in my third short story collection, The Stars Our Destination.)

Given that I have enough stories to fill out the next nine months, I’m going to bow out of the September Shorts challenge. This is really good for two reasons: first, it allows me to focus more attention on my current novel WIP, the sequel to Star Wanderers; and second, because I’ve fallen really behind on the Zedekiah Wight stories for my J.M. Wight pen name, and this should give me some space to work on the next few of those.

So that’s the plan: refocus on Children of the Starry Sea and work on Zedekiah Wight stuff on the side.

New Short Story Writing Challenge

I self-publish a new short story every month, and I try to keep at least six in the hole so that I have some time to send each one to the magazines and anthologies. Right now, I’ve only got three, soon to be two, so I need to write some short stories. Sounds like it’s time for a writing challenge!

So for the month of September, in addition to working on Children of the Starry Sea (though at a slower pace), I plan to write 40k words of short stories—enough for a small collection, which should fill out the buffer for a while. That comes to between 1,500 and 1,800 words a day, which honestly shouldn’t be that hard, since once I tend to get going on a short story, I’ll write it to the end, whether that’s 2k words or 4k words. I’ll spend the next few months workshopping them through my writing group and cleaning them up, then put them out on submission.

For purposes of this challenge, I’m going to include some of the short story fragments I have lying around, since those need to be cleaned up and turned into something useful. Also, I’ll definitely be working on some Zedekiah Wight stories, since I desperately need more of those to put out into the world. Also some Christopher Columbus stories, though it looks like those are going to get picked up by one of the magazines soon, so look out for that.

As an incentive, if I manage to accomplish this writing challenge, I’ll buy myself a couple of things on my Amazon wish list. I tend to put things on that list and forget about them, or else decide that it’s not worth spending the money, so it should be a good incentive. And I’ll post about each story as I write them. One of the things I want to do is to go through the whole Mythulu deck and write at least one story with each card. This would be a great time to do that.

So get ready! This should be a lot of fun!

Short Story: Christopher Columbus, Treasure Hunter

So I finished this one a couple of days ago, but I forgot to write about it then, so I’m writing about it now. Hard to say much when this is the second in a series and the first one hasn’t come out yet, but I’m actually quite pleased with how this one turned out.

The first draft of “Christopher Columbus, Wildcatter” was honestly a bit of a mess. I think the main problem was that I was trying to cram too much into it, and when you look at all the Mythulu cards that I tried to use, it’s not hard to see how that could be the case.

When I workshopped it through my writing group, they suggested that I break it into two stories, and that’s exactly what I did—except that over the course of rewriting them, both stories took on a life of their own. The first one, “Christopher Columbus, Wildcatter,” more or less followed the original draft up to about the 2/3rds mark, but this story was only loosely based on the second half, and I ended up rewriting most of it from scratch.

I’m really happy with how it turned out, though, and I was even able to keep it under 7k words, which I didn’t think I was going to be able to do. These Christopher Columbus stories definitely follow a formula, though, so I don’t think I’m in danger of finding myself writing a novel when I think I’m writing a short story. Though taken all together, these stories probably will turn into something of a novel, which is fine.

I’d post an excerpt, but this story is out on submission, so I don’t want to void the first publication rights. You’ll just have to bear with me until the first story is out!