Update: November 2022

November flew by so fast I almost forgot to post this update!

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My focus this month has still been “The Captain and the Crown”, but writing the second scene is like crawling through barbed wire: excruciating. The second main character, Prince Luis Ordóñez, is dealing with a lot of complex emotions as the reality of leaving his old, privileged life behind starts to sink in, and showcasing them in an interesting way has been a tremendous challenge. I’m currently on the fourth version of this scene, and things are finally starting to fall into place. Hopefully I can finish it off by the end of the week.

If everything goes well, I may set aside “The Captain and the Crown” in December in favor of writing a sword and sorcery piece for DMR Books’s Die by the Sword! anthology. I’ve been chewing on an idea for a Watcher story featuring elements of the Pied Piper legend for years now, and pieces of a coherent plot are finally snapping together.

My stay in publishing limbo continues. No word from Worlds Enough or Tannhauser Press on a new release date for Fantastic Detectives, and the anthology featuring “A Helping Hand” still seems to be in the embryonic stage. It Takes Two is probably the farthest out from publication in terms of time, but it’s also been the most active. We went over proofs of the anthology earlier this month, before it heads to print, and Cleis Press had an editing query for me yesterday. “Warden of the Wex Wood” is still in the second-round of consideration over at Savage Realms Monthly.

One good bit of news: “Lightning Between Your Fingers” has also been passed to the second round of consideration for Summer of Sci-Fi & Fantasy: Volume Two. We’ll see whether or not they choose to accept it–I’m supposed to hear back by New Year’s Eve–but if they do, it would be the second time this story has been reprinted!

Aside from my fiction, I’ve also been taking advantage of Canva Pro while I still have my free trial to create haigas and visual poems from my haikus and other works of poetry. I created fifty of them just this week! They all look pretty good, if I do say so myself, but the haiga version of “Easter” might be my most beautiful creation ever.

You might’ve noticed the site has its own icon now, which I also made with a template from Canva. Nothing fancy, and I might tinker with it in the coming days, but taking this step makes me feel even more professional.

Canva also presented me with a great opportunity to create a star map for my military sci-fi setting. Check it out:

This version of the map doesn’t include the hyperbridges linking the star systems, so you don’t get the full picture of how they shape trade, travel, and politics, but their absence simplifies things. Here you can see the member systems of the Eleutherian League–my protagonist star nation–in gold along with a few minor star nations in various colors. Green for the Kingdom of Heiau. Blue for the Republic of Ithaca. Purple for the Principate of Cassowary. White denotes unclaimed star systems, while the two turquoise stars are part of the larger Republic of Nebesa, red the Algonquian Union, and gray the Goídelic Raiders.

The galaxy is slightly different at the time of “The Captain and the Crown” than in 3530 AD, which is when A League of Honor will take place, so I plan on making another version for the borders in 3461.

Halloween aftermath left me with a taste for spooky stories at the start of the month, but I actually ended up reading Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher for most of November. Honestly, it might be the best romance I’ve ever read. The characters, the romance, the humor, the worldbuilding and premise…perfection!

I also picked up The Lost Metal when it released earlier this month.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, I had my best night of stargazing since picking up the hobby way back in elementary school. Not only did I finally nab Uranus, but I discovered you can actually make out the band of the Milky Way despite all the light pollution around here. The guided tour from my go-to telescope was the real treat, though. Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, the double-star Albireo, the Orion Nebula, Messier 2 (my first ever globular cluster), and a long list of open clusters topped by the phenomenal Double Cluster.

Since I’ll be getting a smartphone-to-eyepiece adapter for my birthday, I hope to have some nice astrophotographs to share with you in next month’s update. See you all again soon!