2025 Update!
1-12-25
Welcome friends, Shapers, Lightless, and all other people and creatures, thank you for returning once again to these weathered pages. It is a brand new year at the time of my writing this, and I am deep within my newest novel. I had planned to have it finished by now, but I find myself now still toiling away at the final chapters. I can with confidence convey that it has been a huge learning experience and joy to write, and I cannot wait for both the ending to come together, and for your eyes to pour over its pages—should they seek such an action.
There are many other projects that are in my mind for this year both stale and fresh: both finished and in need of my eyes and editing, those that have been started and need rereading and reforging, and then those that have just been turned from thought to document.
While I continue this journey to authorship, I will continue to leave these traces and trails behind for whoever and whatever may one day come across them. This year I will have finally put flesh to the bones that are the Shifting Memory universe, which means my first novel THE LIGHTLESS will be due for another draft, and that more books within that series will begin to manifest. Last year I pitched THE LIGHTLESS at a writing workshop, did another quick edit of it, and since have not opened the document. I believe it may be in need of a significant overhaul if I want it ever to be selected and read from start to finish by anyone other than myself, as hard as that is to admit, I believe it to be true. There are many things I have learned from writing this newest novel, many thoughts that I have had that before just simply weren’t in my head, many blind spots that I think now I may be able to see.
This year marks my fifth year of writing full-time, of writing every day, of believing in myself that I can tell stories that not only I enjoy and cherish, but that one day someone else may as well. And if in the end it is still only I that inhabits these universes that I have created, well I hardly see the harm in that. Queen Redshift, Jace Carver, Asuka Hinode, Pyrna Cautmaug, their lives, their stories, they are what I aim to tell and to complete—along with many others—and I believe I will continue to do so until I find myself unable to. Until I find myself too mortal to encourage my body on, too tired to keep upright my hands, to keep open my eyes, too foggy to pick the stories from my often muddied and crowded mind.
I want to thank you reader if you have come this far, I know that every journey takes something away from the traveler, no matter how small a distance. Your sacrifices are never lost here, however, they are simply deposited into the ever-full and ever empty-sky, teardrops returned to starlight and infinite majesty, shivering discovery everlasting.
—JMB
