February 1st, 2026

First: The Theme.

Oh crap I’m late.

This month was full of… a lot of unexpected things, let’s just say that. I launched Glassblade and commissioned art and went through the weird balancing act of trying to figure out how the discord was going to work and a bunch of other stuff, and… some other stuff happened too. Some of it bad, some of it good. The theme for this month is resilience. This can apply to good problems and bad, and mine fell into both categories in January. Here’s hoping February will be better.

Let’s get to it.

Second: The Work

As of the writing of this it is Sunday February 1st, and I am acutely aware of the fact that it’s going to be arriving several-hours-to-a-day late. I always intend to get my Newsletter done in the latter half of the month, and I always seem to end up doing it in a mad dash the night before it’s due, but some fairly serious personal stuff has happened in the last week that I wont get into, so my schedule got jostled around and I’m only now sorting through what got forgotten or abdicated and all that stuff.

Glassblade chapter 3 went out to subscribers at the early-access-and-above tiers last monday, and will drop for Basic and free subscribers tomorrow at midnight. It’s a doozy of a chapter, so if you’ve gotten it I hope you enjoyed, and if you’re about to get it, well, I hope you enjoy it too. It will go up on Wattpad on Friday the 6th. I’m currently looking into other platforms to host it, but haven’t made any decisions yet as I need to consider work schedule and posting schedule and the amount of time I have available for formatting on top of things like actually getting my writing done.

In the meantime, Broken Vessels continues apace. The draft just crossed the 100k line, and that’s great! Except for the fact that the book hasn’t hit the halfway point yet, which means it’s going to be longer than I expected. My original assumption was that Broken Vessels would be about 10-15k longer than Glassblade, but the current projection is that it will be almost 50k longer. That is… a lot. I tend to breathe in long-form prose so it’s not a problem by itself (ask me about the final word counts for Mongoliad sometime) but it does mean that editing it is going to be an absolute beast and that I’m going to have a lot to keep track of. One of the things I am going to have to devote my time to in the next year is working up a proper series bible and a place for keeping track of all the things like everyone’s eye-color and hair-color and ethnicity and the Aspects of their magic and and and and.

Don’t even get me started on the timeline problems when your book has a ton of flashbacks that aren’t presented in chronological order.

Anyway on top of this my main project has been shuffling my social media around. I left TikTok this past week, which was… difficult. I did a whole video on it which you can find on my Instagram but the long and short of it is that as bad as the ToS were and as bad as the new owners were, it wasn’t those specifically that put the final nail in the platform’s coffin for me, it was that when I had to face down stepping away from a 33.4k audience because I wasn’t comfortable with the risks associated with the platform specifically, I hesitated. I hesitated to walk away even when I knew my family wasn’t comfortable with me being there or the risks it exposed us to, and that by itself was enough to push me to cut the cord. I never, ever want to become someone who cares more about keeping an audience than his own morals and the safety and comfort of the people in his life. So if you want to find my video content elsewhere, the best bet is my Instagram linked above.

Okay, let’s move on.

Third: On Craft

A million writers have said that the secret to a successful career is ass-glue. The determination to just sit your ass in the chair every single day and bang out words, and to an extent, they’re right, though maybe not in exactly the way the statement sounds. At base level yes, the platonic ideal of successfully writing is to simply write a set amount of time or number of words every single day, but in reality it’s a bit more nuanced. My experience has been that far more important than frequency or length of time, the real magic is just in consistency. This does not mean writing every day, or even every other day, it means that when you have decided you are going to write, you do so, every time. Is your set time mid-afternoon on Tuesdays and Wednesdays? Is it on your lunch break at work? Protect that time.

The main thing I am getting at here, though, is not about protecting your writing from stuff like temporary distractions or irritations of a lunch-break meeting, it is about continuing to work through difficult times. Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ve seen the news and you know the horrible stuff the US government is doing in places like Minneapolis. You’re aware of the manifold horrors unfolding in so many places in the world, and if you’re as plugged in to all of this as I am, and you’re a creative, you’ve probably struggled with the question of ‘what is the point?’ Why would we keep writing stories when it feels as if the world is coming apart? Why oh why would we continue typing our silly little words and writing our silly little stories when so many people in so many places are suffering so profoundly, especially if we’re some of the lucky few who are not?

Here is why: stories matter. That sounds trite, but it is true. Art is the universal language of the human experience. And art that is created during times of turmoil and widespread unrest and suffering is, in my opinion, even more important. Even if your work is not about these times, and much of what is being made is not, it is still fundamentally of this time. It is a living record of what people who were living in these times thought and cared about. What we thought was important enough to be worth telling a story about, and that is an invaluable lesson for future generations who want to know about us. I firmly believe that to know a person’s heart you must look at what they found moving, even if that doesn’t give you the full picture. Stories of a time are messages in a bottle, and even the ones that don’t gain great traction now still continue to drift on the saves until they find someone who needs them at some point far in the future. I have long maintained that if even a single person is moved or helped by my work, that is enough motivation for me to keep going. I remain unwavering in this belief.

Keep going. Your work, your art, matters. That is the resilience I am talking about.

Moving on.

Fourth: What I’m Doing

Let’s be real, I just don’t watch enough, read enough, or play enough in the media space to make a consistent section out of this. Oh I am still reading, watching, and playing, and that’s definitely going to keep being something I talk about, but my interests span a pretty broad array of things that doesn’t neatly slot into those categories, so I’m gonna cast a wider net and make this section more meditational.

1st: here is what I am regularly consuming, in bullet point form.
-Watching: Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Ascendance of a Bookworm (lapsed), Kaguya Sama, Love is War (completed), the Apothecary Diaries (finished).
-Playing: Fire Emblem, 3 Houses (lapsed).
-Reading: Ninth House, Ascendance of a Bookworm, the Apothecary Diaries.
-Listening: Fated Mates, the History of Japan, Reading Glasses

2nd: here’s all the other stuff I’m doing.
I’ve been really diving into crafting stuff for the last few weeks, assembling Warhammer miniatures and figuring out new ways to work up a paint-scheme as well as the delicate lines of brush-work. I have a hobby-drill now, and am starting to mess around with magnetizing parts that would ordinarily be plastic-bonded together. I’m also learning to sew, which is a project I haven’t been able to dig as much into, but is going to be my next big thing. On top of this I’ve launched into a new curriculum path at the HEMA club. We’re going through the entirety of Ringeck’s fight book from start to finish, to give everybody as deep as possible taste of the texts as we can. This means I’m doing a lot of interpretive work every week, which is a nice place for my head to go when I don’t want to think of stuff that’s either connected to work-stress or current events stress.

In Conclusion, or What’s Next?

With launch out of the way and a full month of releases under my belt, February is shaping up to be a very “normal” month, which should mean I am able to find my rhythm in both releases, writing, and every other area. That’s what resilience gets you at the end of the day: the energy to keep going and to keep doing the things you need to do. The biggest victory is often just continuing, getting to still do the stuff that brings you joy even amidst the chaos, or at baser level just being able to continue to function. I will take that over a bed of dirt and the cessation of sensation any day of the week. I am hoping to have some cool new art for everyone soon, and of course Glassblade releases will continue. I hope you enjoy, and if you do, make sure to tell your friends and refer them to this periodical. I love new people, new people are the best people.

Oh, and as a last note: I am given to understand that some subscribers at the Basic-tier and above have not received their email invite codes to the discord server. If this is you, let me know, and I will send you one.

Stay healthy, stay friendly, stay curious.

~Joe