Tag: news and updates

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.

Still moving

We’ve moved everything back over to our Orem house, but now we’re in the middle of settling in and unpacking. The kids are still getting used to things, though they’re doing surprisingly well sleeping in the same room. Our oldest daughter has had a couple of melt-downs (she has always been the emotional one), but I think she likes the new home, even if she isn’t quite used to it yet. As for our two year-old son, he’s been doing quite well, especially when we can get him to take a nap.

The yard needs sooo much work. Our sprinklers broke down, so we never watered anything this year. The lawn is quite literally dead. Of course, this presents us with an opportunity to reshape it, which we plan to do. Lots more garden space, a couple of fruit trees, some tree guilds and permaculture—we definitely have plans. But it will start with a heavy watering, once the weather cools down a little, and then a spread of some nitrogen-fixing clover. That should lay a good foundation for all the other things we want to do.

Hopefully things settle into something of a routine this next few weeks. Once they do, I think I’ll get back into writing. But since we’ve moved enough that I’ve got my home computer up and running, I should be able to blog more frequently and keep up with publishing/marketing tasks. My wife also finished the rough draft of her dissertation, so she’s making good progress on that.

So that’s what we’ve been up to. Not much more to say other than that it’s good to be home.

Moving this week

We’re moving this week, so the posts are going to be a bit sparse. I’m not going on hiatus, but I probably won’t post much else for the next week.

We moved from Orem to Provo (the next town over) when my in-laws left for their mission. They were going to be gone for 18 months, and they didn’t want to deal with the hassle of renting out their house, so they let us house-sit for them while we rented out our house.

That was back in 2022. They moved back in 2023, but offered to let us stay while my wife was getting her PhD (though the real reason was probably to spend more time with the grandkids). The arrangement worked out really well for us, but my wife is finishing up her dissertation and starting a new job, so it’s time to move back to our old house.

If all goes well, we should be living in the new house by the end of this week. It will probably take at least another week to move all of our stuff over, and maybe the rest of the month to get settled down, but the big stuff is all going in the next couple of days.

I’ll still try to write a little whenever I can, but the move is going to take priority. And since the writing takes priority over the blog, the blogging will be a bit sporadic for a while. I did my best to schedule some posts over the road trip to Canada, but I wasn’t able to write and schedule them all through the move. But if you leave a comment, I’ll still see it though, and do my best to respond.

Back from the Great White North

We just got back yesterday from our second family road trip this summer, this time to Alberta for a family reunion. My wife’s grandmother passed away in the winter, and it wasn’t a good time for us all to get together (not to mention that we didn’t have passports for the kids yet), so we scheduled a family event for the summer to get together and remember her.

I’ve been to Canada before, but only to Quebec. This was my first time driving through Alberta. It was interesting. About as similar as you can get to the United States while still being a foreign country. Alberta itself feels kind of like a cross between Nebraska and Pennsylvania, with Hutterites instead of Amish, and more rapeseed (for canola oil) and alfalfa than corn and soy. This was especially true up in the northern part of the province where we were going, where there were also lots of little lakes, and all of the trees were high-altitude trees (aspen and pine, mostly). Even though it was summer, the air was pleasantly cool, which makes me wonder what the winters are like. Probably brutal.

At the reunion itself, we had lots of food and outdoor games. Had a big campfire both days and roasted marshmallows for s’mores, which the kids really enjoyed. There was also a LOT of pie, including saskatoon pie, which was a new thing for me. Saskatoon berries are kind of like blueberries, except tart, and they grow in large bushes a little like currants. We picked our own saskatoons for the pies.

Overall, it was a very good trip. About sixteen hours of driving, split across two days, so that wasn’t too bad. There were a couple of times where we had to change poopy diapers on the side of the road. There aren’t really any rest stops in rural Alberta, just roadside pullouts with trash cans for throwing away your garbage. Lots of cows too. We drove up route 36, which feels more like a state highway than a true highway. As far as I can tell, there aren’t any American-style highways in Alberta, except perhaps around the major cities. And the speed limit was 100 km/hr for most of the way (about 65 mph), so it was kind of nice to get back into the States where we could drive faster.

I didn’t get much writing done on the trip, but now that we’re back, that’s hopefully going to change. However, we do have a bunch of stuff going on. My wife is starting her new job at BYU, and also finishing up her dissertation, so that’s the priority right now. I’ll be watching the kids for most of the time, which limits how much I can write (though the family study room on campus is good for working while letting the kids run around). Also, we’re going to move back into our house in Orem over the next couple of weeks, so that’s going to be another big project. But we should hopefully be settled down before the end of the month.

Long story short, things are going to be crazy for a little while, but I should still be able to make at least a little bit of writing progress each day. The two big WIPs I’m working on right now are The Road to New Jerusalem, which I hope to finish before October, and the AI draft of The Soulbond and the Sling, which is more than halfway finished but is still a massive epic fantasy novel. No idea when those WIPs will be done, but for now I’m just going to keep chipping away at them a little at a time, and make more definitive plans later once things are a little more settled.

Independence Day update

Happy 4th of July, everyone! It’s Independence Day here in America, when we celebrate our nation’s birthday by doing all of the most American things possible: fly our flags, eat lots of meat, and blow things up. God bless America!

It’s been a busy month so far, with family visiting from out of town all last week, and lots of kids all over the place. Great for our kids, who got to play with their cousins, but not the best for writing. Oh well. It looks like things are going to settle down for the rest of the month, which is really good, especially for my wife, who is racing to finish her PhD before she starts her new teaching job. So I will definitely be helping her with that.

On the writing and publishing side of things, I am actually going to take advantage of this time to catch up on all of the non-writing things, like publishing tasks, that I’ve fallen behind on. When August rolls around, things are going to get really crazy, with our move back to Orem as my wife starts her new job, so I want things to be set up really well for that.

I will continue writing, though: just at a slower pace. If I plan to do about an hour a day, and make that a consistent thing, I think I can keep that up through the crazy times that are coming. Not only are we moving and starting a new job, but we also have a new baby due to be born very shortly after all of that. So I fully anticipate that it’s going to be a crazy year.

(still not the final cover)

My plan right now is to keep plugging away at The Soulbond and the Sling, slowly but surely, until the AI draft is complete. At the rate that I plan to go, however, it probably won’t be finished until August or September.

I’ll also be working on the human draft of The Road to New Jerusalem, but since my plan is to submit that to the Ark Press contest in October, I’m not too worried about rushing that one. Besides, it’s a much shorter novel, so it shouldn’t be that hard. A part of me wonders if I’ll finish that one before The Soulbond and the Sling.

In the meantime, I plan to publish Bloodfire Legacy in paperback, ebook, and audiobook as soon as I go through the edits and get it formatted! In fact, that’s the next big thing I plan to work on in the next two weeks. With luck, it should be out very soon.

So those are the big things that I’m working on right now. I’m also going to try and finish all the blog posts for Fantasy from A to Z before the end of the month, though they will probably run through the first half of August or so. And once Fantasy from A to Z is done, I will turn that into an ebook exclusive for my newsletter list, and make my current newsletter exclusive, Science Fiction from A to Z, available as a regular ebook (and maybe audiobook and paperback as well).

All of this is part of my plan to pivot toward being more of a fantasy author. Right now, I’m a science fiction author who occasionally writes fantasy. In the future, I want to be known as a fantasy author who occasionally writes science fiction. Most of my science fiction leans heavily into fantasy tropes anyway, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to make the change. Hopefully most of my readers follow me over as I make the transition.

Toward that end, I’m happy to report that Rescuer’s Reward, the first novel in the Sea Mage Cycle, is now available as a permafree book! If you like fun quick fantasy adventures with a touch of romance, I think this will be right up your alley. All of the Sea Mage Cycle books are pretty short, and they all stand alone, though they often have recurring characters. Check it out and give it a read!

Back from Arkansas

So we’re finally back from our family vacation to Arkansas! My youngest sister manages cabins over at the Buffalo River National Park, which means she’s busy over there all summer, so we all decided to go over to her.

It was a looong drive. Took us three days to get down there, mostly because we stayed with my brother-in-law in Omaha for a couple of nights (just long enough for our five year-old to fall in the shower and bust open her head. Took her to the emergency room, where she got a couple of staples. She’s fine.) On the way back, we busted our butts and did it in two days. We must have listened to the Tarzan and Mulan soundtracks thirty or forty times each.

Arkansas is almost like another world. Very beautiful, but mostly jungle, and full of all sorts of venemous things that want to suck your blood. The first day, I made the mistake of walking around in shorts without any bug spray, and I got nearly a dozen deer ticks on me, including one that had crawled up into my unmentionables. My wife and both our kids also had ticks on them. Needless to say, we did very thorough tick checks every day after that.

Other than that, it wasn’t too bad. I heard from one of the locals that there are copperheads and water mocassins in the river, but we didn’t see any of those. Also, the black widows like to roof in the awning and lower themselves down in the evening, but we didn’t see any of those either (thank goodness). And apparently, there’s an annual tarantula migration, which sounds absolutely terrifying. In fact, it sounds like someone in the Ozarks started a game of Jumanji some 150 years ago, and it’s never been finished.

But the people are all friendly and generous, and there’s a tiny little country church almost every other mile in the back country. Also, driving through Branson and southern Missouri was like driving through the heart of Trump country. The Twelve Days War was raging the whole time, and there were MAGA billboards and billboards saying “we stand with Israel.” Kind of surreal.

It was good to spend some time with family, but it’s good to be home now. We just got the staples out of our daughter’s head, and it’s healed just fine. She’s really glad to be able to swim now (too bad she couldn’t swim while we were at the park). For the next week, my brother-in-law from Couer D’Alene is down here with his wife and eight kids for a family vacation. Our kids are having a blast, though our littlest just came down with a stomach bug… hopefully it ends with him, but I’m not holding my breath.

The plan for now is to finish writing all the blog posts for Fantasy from A to Z, hopefully before the end of next week. I’ll also do my best to finish up the rough AI draft of Lord of the Falconstar (book 3 of the trilogy) by the end of this week. So far, it’s going really well. After that, it’s back to the revised AI draft of The Soulbond and the Sling, which I hope to finish before we go on our next road trip to Canada for my wife’s family. And after Fantasy from A to Z is finished, I’ll work on the rough human draft of The Road to New Jerusalem, hopefully finishing it in time for the Ark Press contest.

That’s the plan, anyway. I have a lot of thoughts on the Twelve Days War and the situation in the Middle East, but I’ll save all that for now. If the ceasefire holds and it truly is the end of the war, I think President Trump will go down as the greatest American president of the 21st century.

Gearing up for another family road trip

We’ve spent the last couple of days getting ready for another cross-country road trip as a family, this time to Arkansas. My side of the family is going down there, mostly because my youngest sister works at a national park, so it’s more convenient for us to come to her (and it should be fun as well).

The plan is to drive to Omaha, spend a couple of nights with my brother-in-law and his wife, then drive down to Arkansas and spend the week with family. Once we’re done, we’ll just drive straight back to Utah, hopefully in two days, but more likely in three. After all, we’ve got a five year-old and a two year-old with us.

This is the first big road trip we have this summer. The second one is at the end of July, and we’ll be going up to northern Alberta for a reunion with my wife’s side of the family. Her grandmother passed away earlier this year, and this was the soonest everyone could get together (getting passports for the kids was a little tricky).

I’ve already schedule blog posts through the next week and a half, so those should be coming up each day. I’ve also been writing more Fantasy from A to Z posts, and I hope to write the rest of them while I’m out there, though I’m not stressing out too much about that. If they get done, great, if not, I’ll just finish them when I get back.

The big reason why I’m blogging daily now is because of some major problems I’ve been having with my email list. I used to send out a newsletter approximately every week, but over the last couple of years, my open and click-thru rates have been creeping ever lower, until just last month they suddenly dropped by more than 50%. Turns out there’s a whole lot of backend stuff that changed in the last year, most of which I barely understand.

But ChatGPT has been a huge help in figuring out what’s wrong, and how I need to register DMARC and SPF and all the other stuff that I still don’t understand. My wife has also been a huge help in sorting through it all. I think it’s all set up properly, but I haven’t sent out a newsletter yet, and probably won’t until I get back from Arkansas. I also need to update my newsletter template. ChatGPT should be really good for that.

So the email newsletter is turning into a monthly thing, and the blog is turning into a daily thing, at least for the forseeable future. All of that might get thrown out the window when the new baby comes along, at least temporarily.

In the meantime, I’m working on Fantasy from A to Z and the rough AI draft of Lord of the Falconstar, both of which are coming along quite well. I’m going to experiment with having one human WIP and one AI WIP active at the same time, because ChatGPT suggested that this would be the best way to maximize by writing time and productivity.

I fed ChatGPT my accountability spreadsheet and the daily project journals I’ve been keeping for the past year, and it came back with some fascinating insights into my writing process. It’s amazing how you can feed it a bunch of raw, barely-formatted data, and get a genuinely insightful analysis.

Is this taking away jobs from a data analysis / writing coach? Not really, at least in my case, because I doubt I would have hired one. But the results sure are useful. I’m also experimenting with feeding my entire book into ChatGPT and asking it to write a book description or generate a cover. It’s amazing how it can “read” a whole novel in a fraction of a second, and spit back answers that show (or at least simulate) a genuine understanding of the material.

But one thing ChatGPT can’t do is convert a short story into a screenplay—at least, not without significant human input. I tried uploading “What Hard Times Hath Wrought” and told it to turn it into a screenplay, and the results were hilariously bad. Maybe Sudowrite has a plugin, though…

Summer plans

So summer is practically here, and that means things are about to get crazy. Next week, we’re leaving on a multi-day road trip to Arkansas, where we plan to have a family vacation with the extended family. With a five year-old and a two-year old, that’s going to be quite a ride. Fortunately, we’ll be staying with family from my wife’s side along the way, at least on the way down. Coming back, we’ll just do our best to make a straight shot back to Utah.

After that, things should calm down for the rest of June and most of July. I’m hoping to get a lot of writing work done, especially on The Soulbond and the Sling. With luck, I’ll finish the AI draft of this 200k word epic fantasy before Writer’s Cantina.

I’ll only be at Writer’s Cantina for the first day; we’re leaving on another multi-day family road trip that weekend, this time to Canada, for another extended family vacation with my wife’s side of the family. That’ll only last a couple of days, though, and we should be back pretty soon. But then, things will get really crazy, as we move back to our house in Orem and my wife starts her new job as a professor at BYU.

Oh, and somewhere in the middle of all that, we’ve got to fix the sprinklers at the house up in Orem. They all need to be totally rewired, and the valves in the back should also be replaced. So the yard isn’t going to get much, if any water this season. It’s going to be… interesting… growing a new yard from scratch next year. We’ll probably take advantage of the opportunity to do some xiroscaping and gardening, perhaps even getting a backyard beehive like my wife has wanted to do for some time. But it’s going to take a lot of work.

I’ve decided to scale back my email newsletter, making it a monthly thing instead of a weekly thing. In turn, I plan to blog much more often, roughly daily. I hear that blogging is a great way to optimize for AI, making your work more likely to show up in ChatGPT and other LLMs. So I’m going to blog a lot more about my books from now on. I’m also thinking very seriously about doing some video, I guess with what you’d call “authortube.” I’ll start out with some book readings on YouTube and see where things go from here.

That’s the plan, anyway. It’s going to be a super busy summer, but I’m looking forward to it! I hope you are too.

Five things I did at work last week

So apparently DOGE’s “what are five things you did at work last week” is now an ongoing weekly task, which I am heartily in favor of, at least until the Trump Administration’s reforms to the executive branch are complete. The best counter-argument for this policy that I’ve heard so far comes from Cal Newport, who points out that this sort of request is typical of an insecure and overbearing manager, but I don’t find that argument very convincing. Given the sheer amount of corruption and outright fraud that Elon Musk’s DOGE has already uncovered, I think there are very good reasons for the Trump Administration to be overbearing. Besides, it really shouldn’t be that hard to come up with five bullet points, as I will demonstrate now.

Last week, I:

  • finished releasing all of my books in audio on Audible, using KDP’s AI narration tools,
  • made a rough outline for a seven book series, of which my current WIP (The Soulbond and the Sling) will be the first,
  • re-released “Lord of the Slaves” as a free short story,
  • wrote up character sheets for all of the viewpoint characters in The Soulbond and the Sling, and
  • outlined twelve separate throughlines in the story bible for The Soulbond and the Sling.

Oh, the trauma. How can I possibly be expected to do this every week? And people say that writing isn’t a “real” job… in any case, I plan to make this a regular thing for as long as DOGE and Elon Musk continue to keep it going. Feel free to add your own five bullets in the comments!

Late February Update

Wow, it’s been a while since I gave an update on what I’ve been up to. Life has been crazy, but not too crazy. I really ought to get back into the habit of blogging more regularly.

Last week was LTUE here in Utah Valley, and while I didn’t attend the convention, I did stop by the launch party for Ark Press. It looks like it’s going to be an interesting publishing venture, with Tony Daniels, Dave Butler, and David AF heading it out. Their goal is basically to be the MAGA of science fiction and fantasy publishing, though they probably wouldn’t put it quite that way. However, they do want to publish more pro-American, pro-conservative, pro-human fiction, and to fill a gap in the current publishing market that has neglected male readers in recent years.

They’re also running a contest, with the winner receiving a $10,000 publishing contract, to be published on July 4th, 2026. The theme for the contest is America 2076, and it can be any genre (though it sounds like they want it to be a pro-American story). Of all the WIPs I currently have floating around, The Road to New Jerusalem might actually be a good fit for that. I haven’t worked on it for a few months, but I’ll probably dust it off pretty soon here and get it ready to submit.

Speaking of my J.M. Wight pen name, I ran the first three chapters of The Fall of the Poet King through my writing group, and I think the best course of action is to rewrite it as a fantasy novel loosely based on the David and Bathsheba story. If I’m going to write it as a straight historical fiction, I need to do a lot more research to firmly ground it in the era, and the trouble with adapting a Bible story (especially a more difficult story like David and Bathsheba) is that everyone brings their own baggage or personal interpretation to it, and is liable to get miffed if your retelling doesn’t exactly match what they’ve got in their own head. Besides, fantasy sells a lot better than religious fiction, so I think this is a much more prudent course to take.

In fact, I’ve recently made an inventory of most of my WIPs, and decided to trunk all of them that don’t explicitly fall in the fantasy genre. I will still finish the Outworld Trilogy and the Falconstar Trilogy, but after that, I’m going to focus a lot more on writing fantasy than on writing science fiction. Also, I’m not going to work on those until after I’ve filled up my writing queue with more fantasy-oriented works. This is a pivot that I’ve been meaning to make for some time now, and I’ve been slowly making that pivot, but now I think I need to speed it up and make it more definitive.

So that’s what I’ve been up to, mostly. I’m currently finishing up the rough AI draft of The Unknown Sea, and plan to pick up the human draft of Bloodfire Legacy, which should be coming out in the Spring. And hopefully I’ll be working on that David and Bathsheba story again soon.