August 2025

First: The Theme 

You know when you start a project with grand ambitions, and you plan your execution around ridiculous notions like assuming you’re going to be able to write every day while the kids are home from school and you have a boatload of summer plans and obligations? Yeah there’s a word for that: it’s hubris, but it’s not the theme for the month because I am not going to spend an entire issue of my newsletter flagellating myself. Instead, this month’s theme was Preparation.

Which is a nice sentiment, but also easier to say than it is to do. This past month has been one for preparing things. Worldcon is coming up in August, I had art commissioned of two of the Glassblade POV characters, and I’ve been trying to work out subscription tiers for what’s coming down the road. I’m also in cover conversations and scheduling social media shit and every little other thing that goes along with preparing to launch a book, and in theory somewhere in there I was supposed to find the time to write but I guess one of the plates had to fall and smash on the ground. The good news is that even when that happens, you’re not necessarily back to square one.

So let’s get into it.

Second: The Work.

I didn’t keep a word-count tally for the month, mostly because it was one of many things that got lost in the swirl of things I have going on, but I do have a sense of having gotten something in the realm of close to 10k? That’s close to my minimum so maybe I did better than I thought. That’s often the case because I hold myself to high standards and letting those slip even a little bit gives me a lot of anxiety. So what I’m saying here is that I actually did okay and you shouldn’t worry.

But how about Glassblade?

The book has been sent out for its final line edit, prose-cleanup/copy-edit, and that means my focus has almost entirely been on the sequel, Broken Vessels. The tricky thing about a any sort of series is that by the time I’m talking to you about the first one I’m usually neck deep (or just shy of 70k total) on the next one, which means that naturally that’s the one I want to talk about, even though I can’t because of spoilers. I can say that it’s shaping up to be even better than Glassblade is, which is encouraging because Glassblade is the best thing I’ve ever written. It takes the story threads from the first one and starts branching them off into new ones even as it deepens the original material. I’m a very big fan of the idea that the simplest looking art can sometimes have some of the deepest gradients when you actually take the time to really stare at the way that paint has been used on the canvas and how the artist played with form and style.

But I promised you art, didn’t I? Let’s go:

The artwork was done by Nik, who goes by Data2048 on most platforms and who can be reached here. She and I have collaborated on a number of other things and I really enjoy her work. There really was nobody else I wanted to approach when it came to a first look at these characters that y’all are gonna spend so much time with.

So who’s Gabe? Gabe is one of 5 POV characters whose stories comprise Glassblade and its sequels. At the start of Glassblade he’s a 14 year old boy who has lived in almost total isolation on a farm in Puyallup Washington in the year 2013 with an old woman named Agnes, her husband John, and his paternal uncle, Michael, since he was a year old. He has no memory of his original family and no knowledge of who they are. As far as kids go he’s a neither a total wunderkind nor an everyman, having no knowledge of his birth family, but a pretty rich relationship with the people he does have in his life, isolation aside. He’s contemplative and impulsive at the same time, and he spends a lot of the story getting angrier and angrier as the threads of who he believed he was and who he actually is unwind and begin to turn themselves into the tapestry that comprises the story. I hesitate to call Gabe the Main Character because this series really is an ensemble piece, but he’s definitely the focal one, and the person around whose identity and eventual destiny a lot of the story turns. I kinda cheated commissioning this piece of art because it depicts him closer to how he looks at the end of the book rather than the beginning, but it’s also the start of the “iconic” look he’ll have for the rest of the story. Oh and he used to suffer from chronic migraines as a little kid. That’ll be important later on.

That’s Gabe. The first person we meet and the central spoke around which the wheel turns.

Now, onto other things.

Third: On Craft.

I said that the theme was Preparation, but the alternate for this could easily be getting back on the damn horse. Summer tends to be hard for this since the kids are home and there’s a lot of stuff going on. When these seasons of life hit, it can be really hard to get back in the groove after you’ve fallen off, but I have some tricks for that that I’ll list out here:

1. Rereading your work. Not the whole thing, but specifically your favorite parts. We all obviously have to keep putting words on a page even when we’re not excited about it, that’s part of the job, but getting back up is partly a matter of letting yourself fall in love with your stuff again. If you’re not thrilled with the project than I suggest reading any summary, outlines, or notes that you particularly liked in the past. The point is specifically to let yourself get excited about the project again.

2. Your hype-man playlist. I mean it, put the songs that inspire that one character, that one scene, or those story beats on repeat and crank the volume up. Dance like a maniac. Act out the most dramatic sequences in the story like a child playing at fighting pirates with a plastic sword. I mean that too. Use a plastic sword and fight the badges. Give your characters their soliloquies and perform them for yourself. Being cringe means being vulnerable, and vulnerability is the heart of a good story. Do it. DO IT.

3. Go for a freaking walk. This has been the most consistent damn breaker in my arsenal. I know it’s a trope, but if you’re at all like me, you might be the sort of person who literally thinks on their feet, and even a small change of scenery is a huge shifter for my perspective. In addition to getting me out of the house, it also helps remind me that there’s more world than the spaces in which I doomscroll. It helps me remember that the world is full of stories, and you find them out there as much as you do in here.

I did all of these things today, and while the dam hasn’t totally broken, it’s getting close. I’m hype again and that means the work is close to flowing once more. Being excited about what you do is the best feeling in the world, and it’s good to feel that again, even if everything else is chaos.

Fourth: What I’m watching/Reading/Playing.

I’ll try to avoid them but just in case, SPOILERS AHEAD:

My wife and I finished Murderbot season 1 and season 1 of the Apothecary Diaries, and both were excellent. I’ll try to avoid spoilers in talking about them, but I want to spiel a bit about how Murderbot’s treatment of the character of Gurathin is probably one of the best examples I’ve seen in recent media where an antagonistic character’s background is slowly unfurled in a way that both puts their character choices and earlier behavior in its proper context and makes their decisions at the climax of the show hit like a truck. I’m a huge fan of the backwards-looking reveal, and Murderbot does it excellently. The finale was some of the best TV I’ve seen in years.

The Apothecary Diaries ended on a really satisfying note and pulled off something I also love to no end, which is when a character who has hitherto been disturbing and unsettling has their behavior recontextualized and used to fuel a climax that humanizes the hell out of them while also, in no way whatsoever diminishing the things that make them off-putting and unsettling. It’s really really hard to pull off a humanizing arc with a disturbing character without erasing the parts of them that are off-putting or unsettling, and I love it so much when it works because my deepest held literary belief is that people are a messy mixture of terrible and virtuous, and nobody is either a saint or a terror, but rather that we are all a mesh of monster and hero, with our final mark on the world being determined by which of those aspects were pushed, nudged, and deliberately dragged into the light.

Other things: My wife has started reading Ascendance of a Bookworm and I decided to read it alongside her and while it had to grow on me slowly (Isekai isn’t normally my thing), I got hooked. I like it when a story serves as a vehicle for the author’s hyperfocus, and Bookworm is a cozy read that simultaneously has a lot to say about culture, literacy, and the ways people live and survive in a place that’s neither comfortable nor cozy. I recommend.

Playing: I’ve been doing a lot of Pathfinder 2nd edition, and my Kingmaker campaign had its fourth session last Sunday, which was a four-hour fight that somehow managed to not be boring or a slog. I really enjoy the way combat works in this edition, but I’m also a big teamwork guy and rules that incentivize setting your teammates up to do cool stuff after which they’ll set you up for cool stuff in turn is fun as heck. Kingmaker is a dense, political story, and my players are taking to it like a dolphin to water.

Oh! And before I forget, we also saw Ateez in concert last night and holy hell do they put on a good show. Our seats, courtesy of a friend, were awesome, and the night was hype, even though I’m running on fumes and coffee right now.

Don’t mind me, I’m just gonna have The Real stuck in my head for weeks.

In Conclusion, or What’s Next?

So what’s up on the docket? Here we go. Next month you’ll be getting the next piece of character art, which will either be Heart of Claire, depending on which one is done first, and at some point in the next few months there will be a cover dropping for Glassblade. I’m kinda holding out the maybe-too-ambitious hope that I can do some sort of word-count tracking this month just to see what the actual numbers are at the end, but that might be a bit too hopeful. At the end of the day if it’s a choice between the words getting written or the words getting tracked, I know where my priorities lie: one of those things gets story into your hands soon, and the other one gives me a shiny number I can stare at and obsess over. The former will always be priority one, dear reader, I promise. I’m so damn excited for what comes next and I’ll have more to share with you next month. Just gotta get through this one first. Let’s get it done, friends.

Stay healthy, stay friendly, stay curious.

-Joe