June 2025

How’s it going?

Starting things has always been awkward for me, or at least when I’m starting something new that involves talking about myself, I feel a huge surge of self-consciousness that probably stems from a bunch of deep-written psychological stuff that my Therapist would lecture me about. That or there’s just an inherent discomfort to experimenting with a new format, especially when that format involves the dreaded act of self-hype. So this is the introductory paragraph, and now it is concluded.

Welcome to my newsletter, Notes from the Scribble-Box. I’ve been promising people something like this for going on five or six years now, and given the stuff I have lined up and the weird ways I intend to play with format in the next few years, it was high time I followed through. So here we are, and here we go. My name is Joseph Brassey, and I’ve got a lot to talk about.

First: The Theme.

I am not a superstitious person by default, but I do believe that life follows certain patterns and seasons, and as in nature, patterns appear in every life over time, and as I was figuring out how to organize this I realized that when I reach the end of a month, which is about when I’m going to be composing these things, looking back usually means assessing the past month and figuring out the theme that’s persisted across every area of life, weaving in and out of things and stopping and starting like a dragonfly.

This month’s theme was returning. Being real, that’s been the theme for the last year or so. I returned to the Drifting Lands and prepared for the launch of book three—Prince of Clay—and I returned to Miniature painting. I learned that I’m actually better at this than I think I am, which at the end of the day is less a matter of pushing myself as hard as I can and more a matter of just letting my hands work. There’s a maxim in art: ‘don’t fight your hand.’ I’ve been trying to apply that to a lot of things, and the results, while not always perfect, have been satisfying:

I had my birthday bear-pit at Grit-City HEMA, and I fought for forty-one one minute rounds, taking at the longest a two-minute break roughly in the middle. This is a tradition I’ve kept up since I was twenty-eight, and while it gets a little harder every year, the act of returning to it around my birthday (big 40 this year) is like a check-in with an old friend. It’s a challenge, like all friends should be. It doesn’t let me off the hook, it reminds me where I am, rather than where I fear I am or where I imagine I am. I think that staying grounded both in this business and in the various areas of life where my efforts are applied is important. I dunno if I’d say that I have a big ego, but I do tend to have big expectations of myself, and remembering that those things can be just as much a form of monster to get to know as an over-inflated ego or a pile of fears is also a big deal.

I also returned to the Wielder Saga.

Second: The Work

Okay, first off, what’s out: As this point the first three books of my Drifting Lands series are available from Falstaff books. The series isn’t over, but the third book is definitely the end of the first Movement in the symphony. I always saw the Drifting Lands as a multi-arc series, comprised of two big ones connected by a central lynchpin. That’s going to be the next thing I work on in the traditional industry, though there’s no news to share about it yet. You’ll know when I have something more involved to talk about. Suffice to say, I know where it is, I know where it’s going.

I specified that it was the next thing up for me in the trad industry, though, which is not the same as it being the next big thing. That thing is Glassblade and the Wielder Saga (or Cycle—I haven’t decided which term to use yet) that it starts.

I’ve been working on Glassblade in some form for twelve years, starting it shortly after the birth of my son, and the characters have existed in some form or another even longer than that. Originally I had planned to take it to New York, but for various reasons that I won’t get into here, that became undesirable, and after waffling and thinking and consulting with several friends and colleagues I decided to try something different.

Starting next January I am going to be serializing the novel via this newsletter, releasing chapters every other week, and posting them simultaneously on Wattpad. There will be the option for paid subscriptions at some point, but I am never going to paywall the chapters. Paid subscribers will probably get early access, when that’s eventually implemented, and there will be additional authors notes for each chapter that will also be available for people who want to pay to support the project, in addition to what I talk about here. There may or may not be tiers, I’m still figuring that out, but my intention is not to paywall things like early access behind a high price.

For the next seven months I’ll be talking about the project and where we are in it. The first book—Glassblade—is finished as I’m writing this, and while it still has to go through copy-edits the bones are solid and the flesh and skin have grown to make what feels like a fully formed person who really just needs some makeup at the end of the day to make them presentable. As to what it is, here’s the pitch: Glassblade is the first novel of the Wielders, detailing a secret magical world existing within and alongside that of Tacoma Washington in the year 2013. A Wielder is a sort of supernaturally empowered human gifted with magic that can be channeled through a sort of magical sword called a glassblade. Their society is ruled by a collection of seven royal houses, and the story principally concerns the struggles between those houses, the rest of Wielder society, and the myriad of spirits and threats both supernatural and mortal arrayed against and alongside it. I am working on the second book at the moment, which is titled Broken Vessels. There’s two more after that, and kinda unusually for me, I know pretty much how this whole series goes. I know the major beats, I know the characters, and importantly, I know how it ends.

That’s what’s next, and that’s the plan.

Third: On Craft.

One of the big reasons why the theme for this month is returning is because I’m constantly coming back to things. I revisit the same themes, characters, archetypes, and concepts over and over. This month though, I’m thinking especially about the act of letting myself cycle back over the things I’ve written before. In the process of working on Broken Vessels I’ve been rereading its original draft, which was written almost eleven years ago. There’s a sort of trope in author-land that reading your older stuff makes you cringe. It’s full not just of mistakes and insensitivities you’ve since unlearned, but also it represents an older version of yourself, and I think no matter how much you’ve grown in the interim, going back and revisiting the old you can be, well, hard.

When I cracked the draft, though, I was surprised to find that for once, it wasn’t. I’ve done a lot of growing and changing in the last decade, and for sure I’m nowhere near as angry and confused as I was when I wrote the first iteration of Glassblade’s sequel, but I think maybe I’ve actually put that version of myself to rest to the point where I no longer flinch at having to see his ugliness, his confusion, and the anger that I know was driving me while I worked. There’s a lot in the draft that’s worth salvaging, and some of the chapters of one of the major POV’s has been saved almost word for word from its original draft. It’s a pretty great feeling to look at something a decade ago and say “damn, this slaps hard.”

Part of the process of getting better at your craft is learning not just to make peace with your younger self, but also figuring out the ways in which they were onto something, and that they were the seed from which your tree grew. Maybe this is just waxing poetic, but either way there are lessons in the older versions of your work that you may have been hiding from. I certainly was. I’m a firm believer that there’s things to learn and draw off of in every piece of media we encounter, and that when we spend a long time away from something we’ve previously read/watched/listened to the potential for learning is no different. It’s like meeting an old friend for the first time in years and trading stories. Why should your own work from the past be any different?

It shouldn’t, because part of progress is making peace with the past, regardless of what that looks like for you. It doesn’t have to mean forgiveness or reconciliation or acceptance or any of the bright and idealistic words usually associated with that, but I do think it should mean reaching a point where you’re no longer tormented or bothered by the idea of looking at stuff you made a long time ago. The you that made that was on their way to becoming you. Even if you intensely dislike who you were (maybe even especially if) you shouldn’t let them keep bothering you.

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

Watching: 

The Apothecary Diaries. Holy crap, how did this show get made? I’ve been slowly working my way through the first season with my wife and every episode hits harder than the last, but not in the way that’s so often associated with that phrase. The Apothecary Diaries isn’t just a set of gut-punches, one after the other, though it certainly has those. Instead it hits this incredibly difficult balance between cozy mystery, medical drama, and a very serious rumination on sex-work and the nature of power, all while evoking a tone that lets you really sit with each episode at the end without feeling emotionally overwhelmed or beaten flat. It’s a show that has that rarest of qualities: time to breathe. At the same time every episode is so rich that we really can only do one a night so that we can process everything that was just put in front of us after the episode is over. I’d say “I can’t wait to finish this season,” but I’m really enjoying taking my time.

My wife and I also have been following the Murderbot show from the premier and man it’s really good. I know a lot of people had reservations about Alexander Skarsgard’s casting in the lead role, but his physicality in conveying our favorite construct’s emotional state and discomfort in dealing with the humans around it is one of the highlights of the show. There’s also something really interesting in choosing to cast a conventionally attractive white guy as the representation of what a bond company sees as a “stock” security professional and putting them next to a very diverse cast that looks a lot more like ‘ordinary’ people than most Hollywood casts ever do. But beyond this, everything about this show just sings. The acting, the costumes and world that feel lived in and the very believable relationships between the characters who—due to the fact that we’re seeing them through the eyes of a non-human construct that has feelings about humans that are complex at best—are allowed to be messy, fun, bizarre and, well, silly in a way that a lot of SFF doesn’t allow them to be. It’s a breath of fresh air.

Reading:

Guards, Guards! By Terry Pratchett. I’ll admit that this is my first real dive into Pratchett, but its probably the best look at the complexities, problems, and tropes around police in fantasy that I’ve ever seen. For a book that was written in the 80’s, it’s scary just how relevant all the subject material is, and what’s pitched as a story dedicated to the city watch of stock fantasy stories ends up being a nuanced and frankly beautiful take on monarchy, political power, and the relationship society has with the people it delegates use of force and crime-prevention to. Like I said I’ve sort of stepped around Pratchett for years because it mostly wasn’t my thing. That’s probably changing now, because this book is damn good. I understand the hype.

Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher. I’ve had this on my TBR for awhile and it’s taken me awhile to get to it mostly because I am a very slow reader in general, but everyone who said it’s gonna be right up my alley was right. By the end of the prologue I was hooked. Paladins are one of my favorite fantasy archetypes, and the layering of chivalry and devotion over romance and grief and cosmic horror is one hundred percent my bag. I’m only a short way through the book so far but man it’s good. One of those books that has me going “Oh right, you can do that!”

Playing:

Fire Emblem: Three Houses. This is my first FE game and while the story is really good, I’m still not totally old that FE is “for me” as a style. I think Brian David Gilbert put it best when he said that Fire Emblem was “what if chess made you horny” and I’ll totally cop to the ‘lets put these characters together next to each-other in battle in the hopes of building their supports enough to make them smooch’ being the most compelling part for me. I’m not sure that all the hyper-specific details and stats and character-building is sufficient reason for me to keep treating the game as a glorified matchmaking simulator, but it’s kept me playing so far. I’m playing the Black Eagles storyline right now (gotta romance Edelgard, my Queen) and it’s giving me a very specific sort of high fantasy fix that nothing else is right now and that’s definitely keeping me dialed in, when I have the time to play.

In Conclusion, or What’s Next?

Over the next seven months I’m going to be unpacking more about the next steps in the lead-up to Glassblade’s serialization. I’m in the process of commissioning some character art, and am also still figuring out the platform(s) it’ll be hosted on outside this newsletter, as well as what sort of paid tiers I’m going to introduce and when. This is a transitional period for me, when all the irons in the fire are getting hot and the hammer waits beside the forge for the time when I’ll pick it up and make the smithy ring loudly with the sounds of creation.

Stay healthy, stay friendly, stay curious.

-Joe