September 2025

First: The Theme.

The theme of September is chasing. This month was buck wild, with so much stuff happening that as I sit here writing this I’m kindof cursing the fact that I don’t take notes over the course of the month for the end when I sit down to write these things. I’ve been running around even when I had time and especially towards the end of the month everything from word-count to professional obligations to parenting has felt like it was trying to be a persistence predator with my own stuff while being out of shape.

Anyway, Worldcon was in August, which was probably the biggest thing, but so were a bunch of other things (the first day of school for example) and the world kept on being what it is. I kept chasing through the whole month and one of the cool things is I’m sitting here late at night writing this newsletter and I actually caught some of them. So that’s cool.

Let’s get into it.

Second: The Work.

Where things are at: Glassblade is still out for edits, I am working on Broken Vessels and an as-yet unannounced third project for my agent, and of course I am doing this as well as getting ready to write authors notes for each of the Glassblade chapters while figuring out how I’m going to structure those. I also got the next piece of PoV character art from Nik, and that means it’s time for both another bust, and another character profile.

Nik really knocked this one out of the park, and I’ll do my best to explain why without spoilers.

So who is Jonathan Heart? Well, first of all he goes by “Heart” through the entire book, and he’s a complicated guy. He’s been in the service of the powerful Vallais family for thirteen years, with his primary job being the tutoring and body guarding of their teenaged daughter, Claire, who you’ll meet next week. At thirty-four years old, the road that led him to this place in life is long and complicated and has involved no shortage of choices that brought both him and those close to him no small amount of pain. Heart sort of serves as a dualistic set of eyes on a specific facet of Wielder Society, being someone who walks through its upper echelons while not being fundamentally of them, and the perspective this gives him on the powerful people he is surrounded by is one of my favorite places to write from.

People who come from very little having eyes on people who have never wanted for anything are some of the most entertaining and fulfilling characters for me to write, and Heart has that in spades. He’s both extremely challenging to get right and just as gratifying when I manage to do it. Like all the best morally gray characters (though that’s probably most of these people) he has secrets that drive him forward with an assertiveness that belies his congenial, academic-seeming politeness. I wont get into those though, since, y’know, spoilers.

The lapel pin is also your first look at the House Vallais heraldry: It’s a fleur-de-lis and a songbird. It’s not obvious in the picture, but the bird is a common nightingale. That’s not important yet, but it will be, and I’ll reveal their motto next week when we get to Claire.

With that, we move on.

Third: On Craft.

So the theme is chasing, and I’ve felt like I was pursuing everything from the mechanical side of the job… basically all month. Whether it was scrambling after word-count or trying to keep up with story-beats faster than I was able to or even just catching up on sleep that I lost because my writing was keeping me awake, that was what I was doing. And honestly the lesson that was in there for me was that sometimes you need to just let yourself be dragged. Being pulled after what you’re doing can be a form of pursuit, and the thing about writing is that being dragged under by a riptide—unlike in real life—wont actually kill you.

Worldcon was kinda nuts. I’m not gonna talk about the bigger community things that happened because other people have covered that better elsewhere, but suffice to say it was eventful and it was a big reminder that while the reunion effect of conventions where you get to see a bunch of people that you ordinarily don’t get to link up with is lovely, I’m much more comfortable with the writing side of writing than the social side of writing. By the end of the weekend I was so gassed that I didn’t recover until mid-week.

Regarding the writing part, I had an old phrase thrown at me by a friend in the martial arts sphere of my life and it reminded me that the same is true of storytelling: “whatever you’re doing, the practicing part is going to be what you spend 90% of your time with that thing doing, so if you’re not enjoying the practice at all, maybe you should be doing something else.” Writing is the part of the job that I actually like. It’s putting words together and smacking them into shape. It’s the feeling of my fingers flying over the keyboard, and it’s the exercise of trying to mentally work through the parts of a story that are giving me trouble. The great thing about this is that all the parts of the writing that fuel the writing but that aren’t writing itself are just as important a part of it. Going for a long walk is part of it. Listening to music is a part of it. Sometimes gardening or cleaning my house is part of it. Storytelling for me is a holistic process, and pretty much everything that contributes to my ability to keep doing it is “part of the job.”

When I feel like I am falling behind in my word-counts or my editing or or or… it usually means its time to do the stuff that’s not actually work but that gives the work the fuel to keep going.

Humans are persistence predators so we catch our prey by walking more than running.

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

Kpop Demonhunters: I’m gonna keep the gushing about this to a minimum because it’s literally the biggest cultural thing happening right now, but I do want to say that the thing that I think is making this movie kick all the ass it’s kicking is that it’s not just unafraid to be unambiguously itself, but it’s also something that makes that a part of every level and facet of the story and the animation and the acting and the genre. The stuff that really sticks with me is the work that knows what it is, fills itself up with its own juice, and feeds you with it. That’s what Kpop Demonhunters does, and that’s why I think it’s landing with as big of a splash as it is.

I wish I could give you a list of stuff I’m playing, but there haven’t been as much time for games this month. I did start reading Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, and while I’m only a little ways in, I’m enjoying the hell out of it. Specifically I’m missing New England in winter, which is stamped onto my childhood memories. I also started reading Ellis Amdur’s book Hidden in Plain Sight which is a meditational on internal strength training in martial arts and which I might have more to say about next month if I get through it. I’m still working my way through Ascendance of a Bookworm and it’s charming as ever.

Oh and literally two days after my last newsletter where I mentioned seeing Ateez live my wife and I saw the Rose in concert and while the former is a big, flashy show, the latter is a much more intimate, soul-healing experience. That was kinda this whole month: back to back experiences crammed together around longer periods of feeling like I was feeling like I was rushing to catch up, never quite getting there, then having a warm-hug of a reminder that 1. This is okay because this is a marathon and not a sprint, and 2. It’s fine to just sit there and stare into space for awhile. You’re not under a grand obligation to handle your exhaustion in any given way.

In Conclusion, or What’s Next?

School has started and autumn is coming. September is always a month of change and reorientation, as the kids are no longer in the house and my time is less structured which means it’s much more on me to make sure that I hold myself to getting everything that needs to get done done. On the one hand that’s always intimidating, but on the other hand autumn is my power season. I get more words written as things get colder than probably any other time of year, and I’ve got my fingers crossed that the pattern repeats this year. I feel like I’ve mostly caught up with where I was supposed to be, and that means I’m prepared to spring forward and experience being out and ahead for however long that lasts. Life is seasons within seasons. I planted in spring. I cultivated all summer. Now it’s time to reap the damn harvest.

Oh and I should have a cover for you soon. I’m super damn excited about that and I hope y’all are too. Four more months till the first chapters drop.

Stay healthy, stay friendly, stay curious.

-Joe