Partly, we just want to let everyone know what we’re up to, but also fair warning that we’re hoping to change the layout of the site quite a bit.

We maybe overextended ourselves with our writing last year, and have been spending a lot of time recharging this year. As part of that, we recently read two of Wildbow’s web serials, Pact and Pale. Pale is still ongoing, but its probably near completion and is very long. It took us two months of reading fourteen to sixteen hours a day to get through both series. And that wasn’t a physically healthy thing for us to do, either. We don’t recommend reading that intensely for that long, unless you can safely read while walking or doing some sort of exercise.

Anyway, that did seem to help give us the psychological nutrients we needed to start writing again. And, also, spending that time navigating a professional writer’s fiction blog was illuminating.

We want to either find a wordpress theme or bang our current theme into shape so that our site works a lot more like the site for Pale.

For the most part, the problem is that the list of books we’ve written is getting longer than the top menu is designed for, and we want to put it in the sidebar, along with a table of contents for the current book you’re reading.

The front page of the site may also get some reworking, as we’re about to have more than three books featured on it.

We don’t know what these changes will get done, but they’re a goal.

Anyway, earlier this year, we wrote Crew, and it’s the first book we’ve written that we haven’t yet read ourselves. Normally, we reread our own stories five or six times before the following month is out, just to proofread and edit. And we’re not really sure why we’re hesitant to do that with this one. But we think it’s mostly readable. It’d be neat to get some feedback on it, at least.

And now we’re writing a book called Blood in the Duff, which is a murder mystery and a romance of sorts. And we’re pretty excited about it, because it’s subject matter and a genre we haven’t tackled yet. And it is really fleshing out what the daily life of the Children of the Sunspot is sometimes like. Also, it should be known that it takes place long enough after the other books that Ni’a (who doesn’t appear in it – yet) is 82 years old. Which is surreal to a lot of us, because the Ni’a in our system (who the character is fashioned after) is still only three and a half (in temporal age – in psychological age, they’re closer to 12).

Covers for Crew and Blood in the Duff may be hard for us to create. We used to be such good visual artists, but we’re running out of ideas and energy to create specific illustrations. We know that with Blood in the Duff, at least, we’d like a top down rendering of a blood stain on the forest floor surrounded by the tip of a curling lizard-like tail. And we’re probably going to make that in Blender. But it’s an intimidating project.

We still haven’t finished the latest book of the Adventures of Molly Rocketcoil. That’s on the docket for this year, and may be next after Blood is done. We’re struggling with it, honestly.

And we’re still planning on writing the Monsters, which is kind of the direct sequel to Outsider. But that may wait until 2024. We’ll see.

And that’s about it at this point. We really just want to get back to writing Blood in the Duff.

We’ve watched Nimona four times, now, and cried every time. So, there’s that.