Welcome, one and all, to the April 2025 edition of the Archefire Newsletter. It's been a busy month for me, so I don't have all that much to report. Paternity leave ended and I'm back full-time at my software engineering job, so this newsletter and most of my other writing occurs once again on the train into the office. Thank goodness for long commutes, eh?
crickets
Ahem... anyway, let's get right to it, shall we?
Sibling Suns 3
Last month, I shared an overly detailed account of how I outline. It's funny, during this past month I re-read my outline for To Burn All Belief, created shortly after I finished An Ocean of Others. (Was that really four years ago? My memory’s worse than Grim's grasp of names!)
Anyway, it's funny because the outline for that book, while it has many of the same major moments, is completely divergent from how the published book ended up. Why even outline, then? I asked myself this a few times in March, and it tempted me greatly to just start writing the dang book. I resisted, however.
While I'm confident the outline I currently have is sufficient to write a book, it's not sufficient to write the book that the Sibling Suns finale must be. I've been reading To Burn All Belief with my book club lately (shoutout to the Sad Cats book club 💚), and there are things I wish I would have written differently in Sibling Suns 1 and 2. Mostly minor, some more significant.
But the conclusion to the series? It needs to be airtight. That means spending more time than usual on the planning phase to make sure things don't diverge significantly from the outline. Because what I've got now, I think it's going to be incredible. Best story of the series by far, as long as I take the time to get it right.
Last month I set the lofty goal of completing 50% of my tasks before this newsletter, and I'm happy to say I achieved it. Every major sequence of the finale is planned. Each battle, each Benefactor encounter, anything vaguely resembling an action scene: it's all planned. But the remaining 50% is even more important.
Now that I know the sequence of events, it's time to put myself into each character's shoes, to experience each planned moment from their perspective. So I really know what's going on in their head (apart from the squirming organisms, that is).
The good news is a lot of this is already done for the main characters. I just need to review it, likely make some adjustments, then formalize it in the outline document. Yes, this means I know how the story is going to end for Grim, for Lorelay, for Inac, for Garret, for Sentyx. Take a guess whose stories have cheery endings.
My new goal for April: finish the character arcs for Grim, Inac, and Sentyx – our 3 main POV characters for AFTS. That'll leave all the side characters and the setting for May, and I'll be done right on time by June!
Sound optimistic? Hey, wait... what's that acronym there? 🧐
Website Update
As promised, each month I'll be shipping a new feature for my website, and this month... well things got a bit out of hand. I was expecting "new feature" to mean something like a more polished landing page for the Sibling Suns series, some technical fixes, a refactor of all the CSS (still working on that one... what a pain...)
What I was not expecting was to ship an entire video game. One that you can play right now!
Yes, it is a little bit crude and unpolished right now. But hey, considering it went from zero to playable in a month, I'm pretty thrilled. Build fast and publicly, that's my motto. If you've been following me on X, you may have seen lots of development posts (way too many) showing off progress.
The Agency is a first-person action RPG that is canon for the Sibling Suns series. That means there will be item descriptions, dialogue, and eventually commands (missions) that will shed more light on what The Agency was up to in the early years of Ulken's reign. I've always wanted to write for a video game! I never expected it would be my own. But that's the fun of being an indie author – we get to try crazy things.
The current gameplay loop is that you equip yourself in the Agency courtyard then fight waves of bandits in Survival mode. You earn experience and gold, which you can use to level up and buy better gear, then try to survive longer and climb the online leaderboards.
The plan is to support this long enough to build out a full story mode including Monster Hunter-style fights against Benefactors. It's currently single player, but I'll be adding multiplayer so you can form Hands and go into Survival or tackle Commands with other Fingers.
It's early days still, but if you have any interest, please go check it out! It plays right in your browser, so it'll work on any device and there's no need to download anything. If you spot any bugs (and there will be many, I'm sure), there's a sign near the door that will take you to a bug report page. You can also request features there, which will be prioritized over my current plans (so long as they're not too difficult to implement).
If you're thinking: "Josh, shouldn't you be working on other things? Don't you have books to write and a son to take care of?" Well then, you sound like my wife. (Love you Rachel 💚) And you're also correct (my wife always is)!
Don't worry, the books are still top priority for Archefire Publishing. I haven't let game dev cut into my writing time. The only thing I've been losing out on is sleep. (And reading, which is a shame since I was in the middle of some really good books I need to resume!)
I get into sort of manic obsessive modes every once in a while, and getting The Agency ready for a game jam and this month's update kept me motivated to work on it for hours every day. But that has passed, so I've returned to a more reasonable schedule and kept the laptop out of the bed. To combat sleep exhaustion, mostly. I think I'm starting to remember what sleep feels like.
Nazgul, Lord of Barkness
Our barky Schnauzer continues living the good life of sleeping in a human bed. No more crate for him, he just won't allow it.
And to be fair, how can we say no to those puppy dog eyes?
After all, he does fine work protecting our land from trespassers.
And after a long day of guard dog duty, he tucks himself under the blankets and cuddles with mom and dad – his loyal servants.
That's all for this month! The weather is warming up here, so I hope spring is kind to you and your allergies don't bother you as much as mine have. (In our house, Benny means Benadryl as often as Benjamin.)
And as always, thanks for reading!
– Josh