Hello, friends!

Since I’ve been gone for a while, I wanted to stop in quickly for an update—especially since I won’t be sending out a blog post next week, as I will be camping with family.

With regards to why I disappeared in the first place: my wife is happy and healthy, the newborn is happy and healthy, and watching 2 interact with 0 is a delight. It’s quite clear that my oldest daughter doesn’t quite comprehend what it means to have a sister yet—she mostly treats my youngest like a little doll. It’s very precious, but also requires careful monitoring for the health of the youngest.

My experiment with posting on X more regularly didn’t go very far. I put out a few long threads, but I don’t have the interest in fighting for engagement that many other people have. I’d rather scroll for five minutes then get back to my family, you know? Let thoughts percolate and then share them in a longer format here—and a more carefully revised format. (X is good for my off-the-cuff thinking that I don’t think would develop well into a good blog post, or that I doubt belongs here.)

Progress on Hazel Halfwhisker is good. I’ve edited my way to 195 (out of 219) pages, which frankly baffles me because I didn’t think I’d have any time to write or edit during my paternity leave and first week back to work, but somehow I slipped time in while everyone else was sleeping. Which often meant I was loopy-tired, but at least it happened.

As for general other things, a while ago I read an article about SpaceX’s successful flight and re-entry for a colony-spaceship (not a functional one, just one that size), which was just mind-boggling. (Unfortunately, I am struggling to find the original article.) It made me think about the science fiction I’ve read in recent years, and how well-done fiction can be eerily predictive of the future; that lead me to decide to re-read Theft of Fire and Blindsight and compare their different views of a spacefaring human race. Teaser: I originally went into this expecting wildly different visions of the future and, while this is mostly true, I was still stunned by the many ways these hard science fiction novels ended up in the same places. (One book is still clearly far more hopeful than the other, however.)

As well, have you ever heard of Dorfromantik? Originally a video game, I discovered (and bought) the board game as something for me and my wife to do together in moments where the kids were off with family or asleep, and we’ve been having a wonderful time. I’d highly recommend it. It’s kind of like Carcassonne, except cooperative. Also, the game comes with a (resettable) campaign that provides a lot of motivation to unlock new achievements and tiles, and beat your previous high scores.

And, finally, I’m waiting with a great deal of excitement for the Stormlight Archive RPG. My wife and I are reading through the books together, and I have a lot of family that reads Sanderson books—I bet we could get some pretty good games going once this comes out (next year…). Plus, I’m really interested to see if Brotherwise Games can pull the game off.

(I also admit I love collecting tabletop role-playing games. Even if I probably will never be able to play many of the ones I own, I enjoy examining the rules, seeing what I like, seeing what I don’t, and getting inspiration for my own projects.)

I hope you have an excellent week! I’ll be back into a normal rhythm for things… eventually. Maybe I just need to learn how to write while my daughter is sitting on my lap, making beeping sounds and saying, “Oh no! A bear!”