Hello everyone! I'm fully healed from my surgery and back in action. "Action" meaning a lot of dropping Benny and Nazgul off at daycare, taking the train into the city, and playing an unhealthy amount of Crimson Desert. Seriously, an unsustainable amount. That game has way too much to do, and so do I!
But it's been great being able to pick up my son again, and I got a good chunk of writing done this month, to boot! So let's jump in. I'm currently writing this mid-Benny-nap, so who knows how long I have. I expect this will be a short one. (Famous last words.)
Sibling Suns 3
Folks, we're in the home stretch! Part III is a wrap, including the big action setpiece that will go down as the longest in Sibling Suns history. It's not quite The-Last-Battle-from-The-Wheel-of-Time-long, but it is going to be c h u n k y. Most chapters have one or two scenes in them, maybe three if I'm being gratuitous. This chapter has thirteen. It's tentatively titled: The Feast. I'll let your imagination run rampant with that one.
But now it's time for Part IV, the final part, the actual climax of the book, nay – the series! A lot of authors will tell you, "I've had these final scenes in my head for years, and they're finally down on the page!" Well, that's not exactly true for me, because I didn't outline this book until after finishing To Burn All Belief. But I've had these final scenes in my head for...year!
That's still enough to feel some catharsis now that I'm actually at the point of writing them. It's always a bit surreal writing the final act of a book. It always simultaneously feels like "this took forever to get to" and "I'm here already!?" It's a good feeling. Not quite as good as writing "The End," but that will come soon.
Only two months until the deadline! I've got fifteen chapters to write in that time, which is quite a fast pace. But these ending chapters tend to go a bit faster than the early stuff when there's a lot of setup and worldbuilding and promise-making. Now it's all just payoff. One of the main storylines is already complete, the Sentyx chapters will get easier, I expect the overall chapter length will decrease in order to keep the momentum up into the climax, and this will be an easy-breezy-beautiful month of writing. 😎 (Famous last words.)
What did I miss?
This year for Lent, I gave up social media. As a new Christian, it's the first thing I've ever given up for Lent, and it was an excellent decision. For the first week, I noticed my fingers impulsively tapping where the deleted apps used to live, illustrating how habitual checking the feed had become. Anytime I'd get bored, endless scrolling was one tap away. Breaking out of that cycle was very worthwhile.
Fairly often, I'd notice that there was just nothing to do on my phone. I had played all my daily word games (Wordle streak 439 and counting), checked all my emails, caught up on group chats, responded to all my texts...and that was it. My brain still yearned for the dopamine hit of the feed, so I figured I had to replace it with some better use of time. I got into the habit of reading a book on Kindle, or reading the YouVersion app to continue my Bible study, or working on projects with my coding agent. My top apps switched from X and YouTube to Kindle, Bible, and GitHub.
The result was zero regretted time. Compared to doomscrolling mindlessly for sometimes hours a day, the result on my psyche was enormous. I still got email updates from news sites, so I'm still fairly up to date with world affairs and current events. But I don't feel compelled to monitor the situation super closely. There's an endless amount of bad news out there, and you can keep up with all of it. I genuinely think this is bad for our mental health. Humans weren't meant to shoulder all the world's burdens 24 hours a day.
Disconnecting from the culture war frontlines and the political arena won't solve any of the real problems happening out there, but it will probably make you much happier. So what did I miss? A lot, I'm sure. But was knowing every single Current Thing really worth keeping track of anyway?
I'm going to keep all the social media apps off my phone and try only to engage with those sites intentionally, timeboxed and while sitting at my desk. I still want to keep up with the indie author scene – that's the only thing I feel meaningfully behind on. I've got a plan to make sure authors and readers are the only ones whose posts I'm seeing, rather than the endless bad news.
Wish me luck! The algorithm's pull is strong. But if Jesus could resist the devil's temptations, I can resist Silicon Valley's. (Though I may not be able to resist the siren song of Crimson Desert...)
Nazgul turns 3!
This month on April 27, the Schnauzer of Darkness enters his third year of existence on our Earthly plane. I'll be sure to share pictures in the May newsletter! For now, here is our boy enjoying the beautiful weather we've been having.
And also one of him longmaxxing.
Oh and I musn't forget: Behold! The Gulgoyle.
That's it for April. An actually short newsletter, as promised. Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates! I'll be back in May with birthday pup pics and (surely) a ton of progress on the conclusion of Sibling Suns 3.
As always, thanks for reading!
— Josh