Month: May 2023

It’s been a rather hectic time, readers. Even the past week was jam-packed with crisis after crisis, coupled with the exhaustion brought on by working 10-11 hours days.

But I’m taking a few moments this Sunday, after wishing a Happy Mother’s Day to every mom around me, to write up a brief report.

First and foremost, to those readers I have here that are mothers: my heart goes out to you. You are appreciated and loved, folks.

The past week started off the best way a crisis-leaden should: with two new tires.

My wife’s career is travel-heavy, but the distances are mostly within the state, or maybe just over the border occasionally. Instead of putting miles on the Pilot, which we need for family travel or as a backup, we got a used car meant for work-travel. While I do my best to keep up on its maintenance, I’m afraid I hadn’t looked at the tires in a few weeks.

…yeah, in hindsight that was a bad idea. Sometimes, it doesn’t occur to me just how much travel that little car goes through. But we got two new tires installed, and I’m lining up the next two to come in soon, so I don’t have to worry about that problem for a while. That way, any new problem can get its proper amount of attention. We like to be thoughtful around here.

Along with that, I’ve had the wonderful distraction of a new riding mower! You might be saying that something to handle another chore should be a distraction I would want to avoid, but the riding mower had been updated enough to zoom across the yard, and we have four acres out here.

The redneck in me will always win out, eventually. That mower can drift, folks.

Work had its own crisis, but a beneficial one, at least. We held the NALC Food Drive this week, which if you’re on a city route in the United States, you might have noticed via a brown paper bag in your mailbox. They were for postal customers to fill with canned/dry goods so us letter carriers could collect and deliver to the local food banks.

That is a really good cause to get behind, and I’m proud to do it, but damn does it involve a lot of legwork. On a 12-mile walking route, extra legwork is…disliked, to put it mildly.

We had a family crisis as well! My son was hit with croup in the middle of the night a couple days ago, and we discovered that croup can still infect children all the way up to six years old, so it’s not just a baby worry. Neither of the kids had croup as babies, so we didn’t know what we were looking at.

We just had our 4yr old son suddenly unable to breathe at 1AM. Understandably, we panicked. I put him in the Pilot and we hit 90mph on the highway to the hospital. He was treated and the croup was knocked out, but we had to stay and monitor him the rest of the night. By the time Saturday (05/13) rolled around, I was clocking in for work on less than two hours of sleep, and I had to collect all of those bags.

The week ended on a high note, as it was also a Main Arc session! As it was also the first session to have a bunch of players attending (adulting sucks, sometimes, but I’m not begrudging them for that), I gave them my full attention and as good a story as I possibly could. They enjoyed the session, and learned plenty of things that will affect their choices in the next session.

Finally, writing! I’ve been hard at work with my sci-fi novel, as well as writing up the next Sidewinder Stories chapter (expect that one ‘soon’) but I’ve been hitting a snag on the sci-fi. I’ve written that first chapter four different times, trying to see what was wrong. Now that I’m on the fifth rewrite, I’ve realized the possible problem: point-of-view.

The sci-fi chapter was originally written from the POV of Mahima Varma, the Empress of the United Stars Empire. The most powerful woman in the Empire, and one perspective I’ve enjoyed writing from, but for the first chapter, she knows too much about what’s going on. That’s not good for the readers to get their world-building details from, so I’ve decided to try a different POV: Ishim Valwa, the Empress’ aide and confidante. His perspective is an interesting one, as I can relay information about interstellar colonization and its drawbacks (Ishim is a human, but is considered an outsider from Imperial society and called a ‘Lost Soul’), as well as show the audience what Mahima Varma is like outside of Imperial trappings. Along with that, a key note I’ve been working on is the ‘space elevator’ idea. It has significance for the Varma dynasty, and will be important in later stories, but I’ve had to work on different locations to write it into.

The best one I’ve found is also the most difficult: Mount Kenya.

This is because for that story, the home of the Empire is in the African continent. Our species started in Ethiopia, so that’s where the Empire’s home is. But a space elevator needs to be at the equator, and Mount Kenya is the best location that is also closest to where the Empire would be based at.

It’s also an actual holy mountain, so I’m reluctant to put a giant facility in it. I’ve written two different versions for that part of the story, but with this fifth rewrite, I think I’ve figured out the best approach. I’ll have to see what the beta readers say about it.

With that, it’s time I got to my chores and visited my mother with flowers. Happy Mother’s Day, folks.

Stay safe out there, readers!

-JB Swift

PS~ For everyone who sat through this whole spiel, a cat picture!