Greetings from sunny Florida! It is sweltering in the high 80s here, just south of Tampa, where Rachel, Benny, and I are visiting my mom and grandparents. You may expect that traveling with a 5-month-old is a huge logistical challenge, and you'd be right!
Benny's first plane ride was surprisingly uneventful. No screaming baby to embarrass us for the whole flight, thank the Lightmother. The biggest snafu was that we forgot the bag with Benny's clothes, which we didn't realize until we got to the airport and Rachel asked me, "Where's the red duffel bag?"
Luckily, we had diapers and food with us, so we just had to ask my mom to pick up some clothes and extra bottles.
So we made it, and it was basically Christmas for Benny, and now it's time to finish writing this newsletter as I sit poolside, covered in barely enough sunscreen to protect my pasty white skin from turning lobster-red within the next fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, Benny enjoyed lounging in the pool.
Sibling Suns 3 Update
Against all odds, he's done it! The progress bar now sits at 80%, meaning I've finished the outline for all three major POV characters. Let me tell you, it's enough to bring tears to my eyes. Some for joy, that this book is inching closing to fruition, and some for sorrow, because not everyone is getting a happy ending.
Every time I sit down to work on the outline, my urge to open up Scrivener and start drafting the Prologue threatens to overwhelm me. "Just start writing!" my inner monologue screams. But I hold myself back, because while I am very confident about the major characters' trajectories, there's still a bunch to figure out for the side characters. Details, details.
That's what I'll be working on this month. Come June, and our yearly Odyssey of JoshSE feature, the entire book will be thoroughly planned. Then I can finally start writing, and O' what a glorious day it will be!
67 chapters, that's what's currently on the docket, which would make this book just slightly longer than To Burn All Belief. That feels like a good spot, slightly longer. Because when I first started brainstorming, thinking about all the loose threads that need to be tied up, I wasn't even sure I could get it done in one book. Lightmother forbid, Dance of the Sibling Suns would become a quadrilogy – yuck!
Assuming the outline holds (a very shaky assumption) and I keep my chapter lengths around the same as To Burn All Belief (another shaky assumption), then I think it's reasonable to finish the first draft by my 35th birthday in June 2026. That means the book launch is tentatively set for early 2027, which feels really far away, but time will fly by, I'm sure.
This is all a bunch of guesswork, as I'm just figuring this out myself right now, with you here. I'm fantasizing, but can you blame me? I'm a fantasy author.
But I'm also an engineer, something that in recent days is taking up ever more of my time. So let's get on to this month's website updates, shall we?
At long last, the CSS refactor is slain!
The beast is dead! The CSS update is shipped! Sound the bells! Joy! Joy!
For you, dear reader, who is assuredly not such a giant nerd as I am, let me explain what this CSS refactor is in simple terms.
Most of the websites you visit are based on three pieces of technology that all work together: 1) HTML, the content of the site, and how it's all arranged, 2) JavaScript, which is code that changes the site and handles things like logging in and button clicks, and 3) CSS, which controls what everything looks like, the so-called style of the site.
Refactoring the CSS just means that I've taken the giant mess of a file that all of my CSS used to live in (it was like 4000 lines of code, which is quite large for one file) and broken it up into lots of little pieces. Getting those pieces to all play nicely with the existing HTML and JavaScript was the tricky part.
Ideally, this change is invisible. All of the styles should be the same. The only difference is now they're broken up behind the scenes into like 15 different files, each targeting a specific component of the website. One for the homepage, one for post content (like this newsletter), one for the footer at the bottom of every page, and so on.
Before, if I wanted to change everything, it was a huge hassle. Everything was all jumbled together, so I'd have no idea where to look. Now, if I want to update how buttons look, I can go right to the buttons.css file and it's all nicely self-contained.
Alright, nerd rant over. What this means for you is simple: everything should look the same as before. If something doesn't or seems obviously broken, please let me know. I've thoroughly tested the site, but there may be edge cases I've missed.
Future updates should be more fun than this one, but this was a long-needed change that should help accomplish my goal of shipping a new website feature every month.
Alright, time for something slightly less nerdy. Only slightly, mind you.
Join The Agency
If you missed it last month, I released a video game based on the Sibling Suns world. Go try it! So far, no one has been able to beat my top score on the leaderboard, but people have been inching closer and closer. Fun fact: the current 3rd place on the leaderboard is one of the people who created FarmVille – during the halcyon days when Facebook was relevant, likely the biggest game in the world!
The Agency isn't bringing in that FarmVille cash, and it assuredly never will. But it's still a ton of fun to work on, and hey, maybe I'll be able to get a game dev job off of this work. That would be cool! The game remains quite janky, but it becomes ever less janky over time thanks to some great feedback I've gotten from early players.
In April, I completely reworked the new player flow, so you get right into the action as soon as you enter your player name. Once you finish a survival round, your game will be saved and you'll be transported to the Agency courtyard, where Grim himself met Hand Sixty-Four.
In the courtyard, you'll now be able to enter Sandbox mode, which lets you play with all of the items and level up to your heart's content. Go wild! The game is completely broken at high level - you can basically fly at super speed with enough Dexterity.
Need something to fight with your overpowered character? You can now use the Aura Manipulator to spawn enemies and objects to create your own combat encounters.
Next up on the roadmap is integrating a proper physics engine into the game. Something I should have done at the very beginning but foolishly wrote my own physics interactions instead. Big mistake! I'm paying for it now, trying to shoehorn a better system into my hastily scrawled spaghetti code. Lessons learned, I suppose.
I also need to work on authentication so you can login and restore your progress even if you accidentally clear your browser's cache. That will likely involve clearing the current leaderboard, but I'm planning on reworking Survival Mode anyway, so that'll give me a good excuse to do so. Hopefully I can get all three – physics, new auth, and survival overhaul – finished this month!
Many thanks to everyone who has given the game a shot so far. I'm always open to feedback here, so if there's anything you want me to add or change, please do make your voice heard!
It's early days still, but the goal is for all of this to build the entirety of Liwokin exactly as it's depicted in the book. Oh, and it'll be multiplayer so you can see everyone else running around Liwokin, taking on bounties, playing mini-games, and whatever else we add. Is this an overly ambitious goal? Probably, but I'm never one to settle for the easily attainable.
The Lord of Barkness turns 2
April 27 was Nazgul's birthday, and boy, what a day he had! First, he got to spend his time in daycare with his puppy friends, running around like a wild animal, I'm told.
After that, he got to go to the dog park to play with even more friends!
Understandably, he was fairly exhausted after all that activity. So after dinner, when we gave him his gifts, he was excited but only able to play for a few minutes before tuckering out.
To top off the festivities, he got some peanut butter ice cream, which he gobbled up as fast as he could. Maybe we spoiled him a bit, but we love our boy. Even if he is equal parts cute and annoying.
That's all I've got for you this month! I can't believe it's been a year since the last Odyssey of JoshSE, but the day fast approaches. That day being my birthday, of course. I hope you'll tune in next month to celebrate with me!
Until then, thanks for reading!
–Josh