Welcome all, and frigid greetings to you! If you were anywhere in the United States this past month, you probably know that 60% of the population was under a Winter Storm Warning. And oh boy, what a storm it was. My back still aches from shoveling the driveway three times in two days. And the day before it happened, I pulled a muscle in my neck by – checks notes – sneezing too hard. It's official, I'm old.
Apart from the permanent damage I'm sure my body sustained, it was an excellent January! I attended a handful of church group meetings and met some excellent folks, had an incredibly productive month at work and on my coding projects at home, and saw the boys in my old band play in Lancaster, PA.
It was pretty surreal seeing the boys in Gravelord – they're doing so well! There were people at the merch table all night (even a line at one point), they've got almost 6,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, and fans were asking them to sign posters and a Shrek 2 DVD (long story). Wild stuff! Apparently, all it took was for them to replace me as a drummer so I could get out of their way. 🥹
And they have a new album coming out – today! It's called ANESTHETIC. Feast upon it with your ears 🤘
Like I said, an excellent month. But it doesn't stop there, oh no. We've got writing updates too!
Sibling Suns 3
Men and gentleladies, I think we have a chonker on our hands. Sibling Suns 3 has officially crossed the 100-thousand-word mark – and blown past it!
Another seven chapters and 16,000 words down this month! The nice thing about this is since I advanced 10% with 16,000 words, that implies the book will be 160,000 words in the end. Chonky but reasonable. Certainly less grim than last month's prognostication.
Current status is that I'm about halfway through Part III, and only five chapters away from the biggest action set piece in the entire series. My nerves, they do be a'trembling. It's one thing to think about a big climactic clash for months, but a whole 'nother thing to fill in the blank page. There's a lot to get right, and I'll certainly miss the mark for the first draft. But that's why it's a first draft – the book generally only gets good around draft three.
"But Josh", you shout, "isn't there a Part IV? Why is the climax in Part III?"
Ahh, little one, what makes you think Part IV won't have a climax too? Why should a book only have one? It's going to have four epilogues, after all. Why not two climaxes? This is self-publishing, not stinkin' tradpub. We do what we want! The only requirement is that it has to be good. Great, even.
Great Scott!
What an odd phrase. We only remember it nowadays because of Back to the Future, I reckon. But who is this Great Scott, anyway? And what makes him so great? Have you ever wondered? I haven't.
But do you know what else is great?
Taking off the Unhinged Josh Hat for a moment (though it is a really nice hat)...
Last month I talked about how Lorelay's transformation in To Burn All Belief was an early reflection of my own religious path. Lately, I've been reading Carl Jung's Man and His Symbols, which had this passage:
The word "matter" remains a dry, inhuman, and purely intellectual concept, without any psychic significance for us. How different was the former image of matter--the Great Mother--that could encompass and express the profound emotional meaning of Mother Earth?
That really struck me, because I've also been reading a lot about myth and language and how profoundly they shape the way we perceive reality. The word "matter" is derived from the Latin "materia," which itself is derived from "mater", meaning mother – the Great Mother, as Jung says. Even if the etymological lineage is a bit messy, the association is psychologically interesting. "Matter" used to feel like something with a face, something we related to much differently. It feels like so much of the original connotation has been lost – and that goes for many more concepts than this one. Owen Barfield puts it like this in Poetic Diction:
Every modern language, with its thousands of abstract terms and its nuances of meaning and dissociation, is apparently nothing, from beginning to end, but an unconscionable tissue of dead, or petrified, metaphors.
"Dead metaphors." What a beautiful phrase. Chef's kiss. Jung calls them "signs," distinguishing them from "symbols." One is surface-level, the other contains the whole range of associations people might make with the concept. The metaphor dies when a symbol becomes a sign.
Jung says (and I agree with him) that "we have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity; nothing is holy any longer."
Does the world feel a bit dull and hopeless to you right now? If so, maybe this loss of the sacred is one of the reasons why. I think in some ways I was already pulling on this thread while writing An Ocean of Others, years before I'd ever read Jung or Barfield, or understanding the crisis of meaning much of the world faces today. Storytelling has a way of drawing something out of an author before he's even consciously aware of it.
Language is a kind of magic – it doesn't feel like coincidence that we literally spell words (even if, again, it's etymologically messy). A word captures an idea from some ethereal (some might say divine) realm and makes it intelligible to us, allows us to transmit something from one conscious mind to another, however imperfectly. But a dead metaphor can do the opposite; it can anesthesize.
The first chapter of An Ocean of Others opens with an account of the Great Riot. Six thousand people were killed, the city was nearly destroyed, and when anyone asks what started it, everyone gives the same answer: "Nothing."
It's an impossible non-answer, yet everyone just accepts it like they've been programmed. Only Grim pushes back, refusing the easy lie even when everyone around him has already moved on. Even though it has costs – Grim is lonely, struggling, running out of options – he's simply the kind of person who can't bring himself to accept something he knows isn't true.
The book starts with a society that collectively agrees on a story that isn't true, a shared fiction that has become its own kind of reality. "Nothing" is wrong, and that shapes how the city operates. There's rot beneath the surface.
Language is magic, but it can be a prison. The reflexive answer stops the people of Liwokin from truly understanding what broke their city. It takes a lone bounty hunter to wake them up – an act that contains many perils of its own.
The idea of words losing meaning over time makes me think of the compression of thought. So what if instead of language being the primary means to transmit ideas from one person's head to another, entire experiences could be related. Memory. Sensations. Emotions. The whole of consciousness, uncompressed. What might that feel like, on the receiving end, on the transmitting end? If you could do that, how would you thread the needle between more compassion and empathy versus domination of another mind? I imagine it wouldn't be easy. It certainly isn't for Grim.
That thread runs through the entire Dance of the Sibling Suns series – what it takes for meaning to return to a world in crisis, and the dangers of one person's idea of meaning becoming coercive. "Remember what's real, or your head will be theirs."
Dangling Threads
Philosophical rambling aside, I figured I'd dedicate a small section of this month's newsletter to addressing all the dangling threads I've left open. All the things that have slipped my mind in past months. My spinning plates. Mixed metaphors. You know, stuff like that.
SPSFC 5
Still no word from Team ZAPS about any of their preliminary judging. Really, there hasn't been much about the competition from any team, but I know they're hard at work whittling down a long list of almost 125 books into just 6 finalists. It's a lot of work – I know, I was a judge for SPSFC 2 – and last year it took from October until June to announce the finalists.
So here I'll wait, patiently wondering how the judges are finding Grave of the Waiting. It's a fantastic book, in my humble opinion, but I know the competition is strong. God willing, the judges will look upon it favorably 🙏
Megasale Charity Totals
We got word from the Mary Cariola Center about the r/Fantasy Holiday Megasale's donation numbers, so I wanted to share that with you.
Over the past three years, nearly 250 authors from 18 countries and 40 states have contributed a total of $16,1152.19.
Because of donors like you, individuals who were once non-mobile are now walking, and those who were non-verbal are communicating through eye-gaze technology. Thank you for making this progress possible. To learn more, please visit www.marycariola.org.
Over $16,000 raised for early childhood education! If you bought any books in the sale this year or the prior two, from me or any other author, I sincerely thank you. Your generosity has made a difference in those kids' lives.
Secret Project
How long has it been since I mentioned this? Months! Well, that's about how long it's been since I've worked on it, too. But things are finally moving again, and I owe an edited manuscript in the near future. I'm going to be prioritizing that over Sibling Suns 3, since it shouldn't take too long. The goal is to launch this – whatever it is 👀 – in 2026! I hope to be able to share more soon.
Introducing... the Joshword Mini
Today's website update is a bit of an unusual one, in that it doesn't have anything to do with my books at all. This month, I've added a game to the site!
It's no secret that I'm obsessive about the daily word games (380 day win streak in Wordle and counting). They're a great way to get the blood flowing in the brain in the morning. My friends and I have a Discord channel with a channel called #wordplay. There we share our results for Wordle, Strands, Connections, the Daily Waffle, and sometimes Redactle.
And we used to do the NYT Mini crossword every day...until the New York Times put it behind a paywall.
Our hopes and dreams were dashed! The competitive spirit enkindled by those little cards with your solve time on it... gone! Our Wordplay channel entered a malaise. We searched for something to replace the Mini – that's how the Waffle got added – but it wasn't the same. Nothing was the same.
I could not let this stand. I set to work designing a pipeline that could generate crosswords on par with the New York Times. Did I succeed? No, not at first. There were certainly some wonky and nonsensical clues. But a few days ago, I rewrote the clue scoring system, and I think we're seeing much better results.
I say "I think" because I also designed this game so that even as I create the puzzles, I have no idea what they're going to be. I wanted to participate too! And now, I'd like you to participate. My friends have been graciously beta testing, and there are still some bugs to fix, but the core game loop is stable. And quite fun, I'd say!
Unlike the New York Times, I will never put the Joshword Mini behind a paywall. You don't have to sign up for anything – though if you want to track your stats and get on the leaderboards, there's an option to email you a sign-in link. Totally optional though.
Go give the puzzles a shot! Add the Joshword to your morning routine! I'll see you on the leaderboards – if you can beat my time 😤
Gulius Schneazar
There's not much to say about General Gulius this month, except that he had a lot of fun in the snow!
That was the first snowstorm of the month, nice fluffy snow for him to sink his paws into.
And to roll around in.
But the second snowstorm was a two-inch-thick layer of ice on top of another eight inches of snow, which he did not like. It just made his paws cold.
But I'd take cold paws over all the shoveling I had to do while the boys just watched. One day they'll be old enough to help their old man out.
That's it for me, folks! I'll see you in March – the cusp of spring, can you believe it? I yearn for warmth.
As always, thanks for reading!
— Josh