A bit of a silly post today, but there are these two running jokes about how messed up writers’ search histories are and how chaotic their open internet browser tabs must be. Now, I’ve never been much of a tabs guy myself, since my brain will likely be crushed under the weight of all that chaos, but I did catch myself with an unusually colourful browser tab situation today, so I wanted to share that snapshot with you:
 

• Gmail Account #1 (big grown-up serious email address)
• eBird – 2026 total birding list
• eBird – profile page for the northern shoveler (it’s a duck … that shovels)
• eBird – profile page for the black-capped chickadee (named after the sound it makes when it’s freaking out)
• e-Bird – profile page for the greater white-fronted goose (if they could fit more adjectives, they probably would have)
• Gmail Account #2 (created in high school, not fit for resumes, mostly spam)
• World Population Review – Democracy Dictatorship Index
• Transparency International – Corruption Perceptions Index
• Wikipedia entry for “MMM (Ponzi Scheme)”
• Google search – Uzbek Ministry of Justice
• Google search – Tajik translation for “scales of justice”
• Wikipedia entry for the novel Children of the Arbat

 
The bird entries there shouldn’t be a surprise given my previous post here and my hope is some of the other ones will be contextualized once I’m able to publish my novel. For now, just breathe the chaos in with me.

I have a grave announcement to make – this site will also occasionally be used as a birding journal.

Apparently intent on ticking off as many Millennial stereotypes as possible, this year, I’ve gotten really into birding. It all started last summer when our group of friends picked up Wingspan, the chillest board game we’ve ever played.

The game was then picked up by our kids and the middle one has always had a bit of an obsession for all things animal, so infecting him with the birding bug came naturally. After that, it wasn’t long before I got pulled in as well. I’ve got my own birding journal, which I have committed to procrastinating on, but I think the intro that I wrote in it a few months ago would probably be the best way to summarize my journey so far:

Predictably, I have done very little to pay down my bird debt since I wrote this original entry and its only grown since. I’m still juggling way too many things and while it would be nice to commit full-time to a retirement hobby, it gets a bit challenging with a day job, three kids and a writing career whose ignition is still turning without significant results.
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That said, I have practiced some productive procrastination and instead of updating my journal, I’ve decided to cross-stitch my 2026 bird list instead:

It gives my hands something to do while we watch TV in the evening since I’ve been very jealous of my wife and her knitting for a couple of years now.
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So, I would expect a few more occasional updates on our birding adventures here from now on. We’re heading over to the east coast of Vancouver Island in mid-October, and expect to pick up a few lifers there (“lifer” being birding lingo for a bird you’ve seen and/or identified for the first time in your life).

Recently I’ve been rewatching Ted Lasso, somewhat in preparation for watching Season 4, even though I’m still gutted by Phil Dunster not returning (I enjoyed the first season of Rooster at least, so the scheduling conflict that keeps him away is not all bad). So the last couple of weeks, Apple TV has been trying to convince to watch their new Mayday movie with Kenneth Branagh and Ryan Reynolds. Now, I’m a sucker for Reynolds (I know, I know, it’s a character flaw) but I’m also a sucker for seeing present-day depictions of anything to do with Russia and the Soviet Union.

Thus suckered into the movie, I can’t say it was anything surprising. It’s a tidy piece of propaganda about how great America is with some lip service mixed in about how they’re not perfect and not all Russians are evil monsters – a good reminder, if a little trite in the context of the movie. However, it did have good chemistry between the leads, fun action scenes, some funny moments and I respect Branagh’s decent attempt at Russian. So while its virtues can help me forgive most of its sins, I cannot bring myself to forgive them for their absolute butchering of geography towards the end of the film.

Warning, here be spoilers.
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At the climax of the movie, our protagonists hijack a small commercial plane at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow and try to escape to Finland. Alas, they soon discover that they don’t have enough fuel to take them all the way to Finland so they would have to land the plane onto an American aircraft carrier in international waters in the Baltic Sea. Here’s the glaring problem though:

As you can see from the above, while it’s true that a straight line between Moscow and the Finnish border takes the plane over the Gulf of Finland, which technically is part of the Baltic Sea, you have to consider that a) a slight course correction would have resolved the issue and b) even if their route took them over that stretch of the Gulf of Finland, there was no way an American aircraft career would be casually parked there in 1987.

But to add insult to injury, the film established that the good guys reached the aircraft career in about an hour, despite the Baltic coast being 700km away from Moscow, a distance that would be impossible for the tiny little prop plane with an open door and one busted engine to cover.

I will absolutely admit that I should probably be making a more concerted effort to suspend my disbelief here and not descend into borderline pedantry while the geographic discrepancy goes unnoticed by almost every viewer of this movie. I will also probably commit similar errors in my own writing, though the goal is not to use quite this much artistic licence when I write. To me, this experience is about finding that line I have in my own head and hopefully staying on the right side of it with my own craft. Because while I can forgive some random watering hole in the middle of a Russian forest having television reception and a bright neon sign, funky geography is what takes me out.
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But hey, at least they didn’t try to establish that the movie is set in Russia by just slapping some random church cupola on a manor and calling it a day (looking at you, Fate of the Furious).

Well look at me. Actually posting stuff.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do this year was pushing my way further into reading. As for most things in life, my main motivation for this is my wife, who’s had her own record-breaking reading year and who’s trying to get through all the Booker prize longlist novels before the shortlist is even announced. So inspired by her, I’m also trying to make this my most prolific reading year yet.

The book I read most recently was Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. I’d read Yellowface before, which became one of my favourite books that year, so I was really curious about this one, and once a signed copy came up for auction in support of the Vancouver Writers Fest, I couldn’t pass up a chance to grab it.
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At first, I would say I was disappointed. Not because I necessarily expected something similar to Yellowface, but I think I felt the pacing slog in the first third and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the main characters and their motivations. That said, by the halfway mark it really grew on me and then I just zipped through it, hooked on all the various twists and turns and the character development for the protagonists.

Figuring out how to use this site again is a bit like relearning to ride a bicycle – I can do it, but feel extremely wobbly and there’s a good change I end up in the ditch. I believe the last couple of entries have contained some kind of commitment to post more often, so this time I will just skip the trite promises. Whatever comes will come. The point is, I have some time right now to try to get my feet wet again.

I will mention, however, that one of the motivating reasons for me to try to post here again as this is pretty much the only place left on the internet where to find me. I have long abandoned Twitter (as well calling it anything else), Bluesky never caught on for me and a few months ago I decided to leave Instagram, finding that it was sucking up way too much of my time. I try to stay plugged into current events through some feeds where I don’t have an account, and therefore less temptation for interaction, and so far that’s been working well for me. All that I side, I still have ambitions to be a writer who would one day like to connect to his readers, so this is the one thing I would like to keep alive for those purposes.

Specific updates will hopefully come in due time but for now just a few broad strokes about the last couple of years. I’ve never stopped writing – I’ve finished a few projects and queried for agents to no success and currently I’m working on a new novel I’m especially excited about and can’t wait to provide more details. Life has generally been busy with kids and work, but life-long goals of publication die hard.

One thing I did want to note is that yesterday I’m pretty sure they were filming season two of Off Campus outside my office window, if the Massachusetts (no I did not spell that correctly the first time) licence plates were any indication. There was really something in the uncanny valley about watching students walk by knowing they’re not real people, but extras following some carefully crafted cues. I imagine they’ll be filming a bit over the next week or two before the students come back for the fall semester.

There’s a lot to catch up on, so let’s start with one of the most exciting things. For many years I’ve chronicled my journey here to completing my first novel. These would be all the entries on this site mentioning “Wake the Drowned”, though I have since renamed it to the more palatable “Now Leaving Middleton”. In my own real-life plot twist, Now Leaving Middleton did not end up being the first novel I actually completed.

Back in October 2022, around the 19th anniversary of when my wife and I started darting, an insane idea popped into my head. We often mused at the time that our story felt straight out of a teen romcom movie, so I thought, why not make that a reality? And why not make that a gift to her for our 20th anniversary?
I had less than twelve months to plan, outline, write, edit and format for printing an entire novel, even though I’ve never completed one before, nor have I ever written romance. At the end of the day, a perfectly realistic goal, right?

Well apparently it is, when it’s fueled by love and dedication. Pardon the corny. It also didn’t hurt that I knew the subject matter pretty intimately. And though I took many, and sometimes significant, artistic liberties in order to fit our story into a proper romance arc, there are huge chunks of the novel that match nearly one-for-one to true events. The secret mutual crushes, back-stabbing friends and unsupportive bigoted parents that exist within the pages were all based on real life. The resulting book was as much a market-ready teen romance book as it was a true family chronicle.
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The one thing I really wanted out of this project though was an actual physical book, and here it is in all its glory:

Now, let’s be clear, this is not published, but it is printed, with only six copies in existence, all of which are at our house. Formatting this from scratch to look like a real published book when you open it was a tonne of fun, as well as designing my own cover, back cover and spine. Here’s a sample of what it looks like on the inside:

One last note I want to make is on the title. Aside from the obvious reference to my wife and me, it’s also a play on our own song, which played the same important role in our relationship as it did for Aurora and Connor, the heroes of the book. Except in our case, the song was Lifehouse’s “Hanging by a Moment” rather than the titular “You and Me”.

And that’s the story of how a labour of love turned into the first novel that I’ve ever completed. Getting this milestone out of the way and proving to myself that I can do it was immensely important in removing some mental roadblocks for me. I quickly finished my second novel soon after, and have a couple of other projects on the go I’m excited about. It also opened up for me an opportunity to test out the querying world and trying to get an agent to get the book published, and that story is worth its own post.
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The hardest part though was probably working on such a large writing project and not being able to share anything about it with my wife. Though the surprise at the end was completely worth it. And if you think I’ve learned my lesson, think again, because I’m currently working on another inspired by and dedicated to her novel. Good thing she doesn’t check this website.

I’m not sure it bodes well that one of my New Year’s resolutions was to start posting here again and we’re more than halfway through January and here I am with my first entry. That said, I’m refusing to put a lot of stock into omens. Looking back at the last entry here, I also spoke of resolutions and being kind to myself to avoid burnout, and given how that turned out, I think I will be just fine. The (mostly) one-project-at-a-time approach has been suiting this part of my life much better.

Also looking back at that entry, I peppered it with all sorts of announcements and updates, promising to elaborate later, and neglected to do so. Part of me is tempted to do one massive info dump, but perhaps I’ve finally learned my lesson, and I will not be overwhelming myself with a mini-novel about the last two years of my writing life.
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So I’m going to practice leaving well enough alone and ending the update here. My commitment to post more is out in the world now and therefore giving me a bit of external pressure. So if anyone is out there, there will be plenty more to come.

I usually do some big New Year's Review posts but I skipped this completely last year, and not sure I have the bandwidth for it this time around. I guess one of my resolutions would be to be kinder to myself and not spread myself too thin at the risk of burnout. It was one of the reasons I abandoned tracking my daily word counts as I found that I was just putting way too much pressure on myself, even though I had previously sworn up and down that it doesn't happen. So I guess being more self-aware would be a good goal, too.

However, just because I don't track my daily writing goals anymore, doesn't mean I'm not being productive. I reached a very important milestone last year, which is that I finally finished my first novel, and it wasn't even the one I was working on for years. Instead, I leapfrogged it by plotting out, writing, editing, formatting and even printing a new novel project in the span of about 11 months. I'll have more on that later, but for now I just want to say how unbelievably excited I am to have completed this project and to have been able to finish a novel after chasing the goal all these years. And my previous WIP is just 1.5 edited chapters away from being done, so that would make it two novels completed within a few months of each other, and I can definitely live with that.

I've also got a local project I'm working on for a theatre production - something completely off the beaten path for me and still in its preliminary stages, so I will save saying more on that until all the papers are signed. All I can say is that I'm both excited and terrified for it.

All in all there is groundwork here for this to be the most significant year for me in my writing journey, so I'm keeping all my fingers crossed.

I feel like I'm getting on a bicycle for the first time in two years, except instead of a bicycle, it's the Weebly interface.

It was a little sad seeing that my last handful of entries on this site were the automated chapters of The Bloodlet Sun already in the queue, a project I had since abandoned. That said, even though I haven't been blogging these last two years, it doesn't mean I've been idle. Far from it. Just over the last year I've managed to write an entire novel from conception to final edit, as well as just about wrapped up editing on that first novel I was writing, which ended up getting leapfrogged, and will now officially become my second novel.

With two manuscripts I'm proud of under my belt, it's time to take some earnest steps out into the open world of publication and try to cross into that final frontier.

There may be stirrings here and there, though I won't say anything more at the moment, but will catch up here in due time.

In the weeks that followed the deployment of the Human and combined ORC fleets to Krevali, little changed on Earth. It was a planet that was not even on the fringes of any potential war, so any death, should it come, would take place so far away it was almost theoretical. One only needed to know which blocks to avoid in order to keep any reminders out of one’s day-to-day life.

One such problematic block happened to contain the Mraboran consulate, which the authorities ensured would not again become the epicentre for the kind of large protest that Angzal and Rzena were swept up in earlier, but which assurance did not extend to dispersing the small crowd that gathered around its entrance every day, because this was mostly targeted at the Mraboran, and minimally disturbed the Human residents of Malbur. For the Mraboran, there was no coming through the front doors anymore, and even Humans who worked in the building, most of them completely unrelated to the consulate, were eyed with suspicion by the irate protestors.

There were other ways in – such as subterranean passages from adjacent buildings – that made the staff feel closer to vermin than guests of this world, but all they did was shrug it off and view the whole situation as the cost of doing business on Earth, leaving their colourful griping confined to the walls of their office.

They had all taken these back entrances, at offices across the planet. All except one. Not the Ambassador, not even a consul, but an upstart deputy consul from one of the lesser of the major Earth cities who, despite being pulled aside by local police on several occasions, insisted she would continue using the front door.

“Please, Deputy Consul, if there is an unfortunate altercation, it would happen too fast for us to be able to protect you.”

“You did a bang-up job of protecting me the last time. I wouldn’t expect this to be any different.”

“As we’ve said, we’re actively pursuing the suspects in the assault on you and your associate.”

Angzal had been pulled aside by three members of the local police force – not the chief, she’d obviously had more important things to attend to, but one of her sergeants, the one with the droopy mustache who smelled vaguely of some kind of boiled vegetable, and two of his officers. They had been waiting for her that morning, so they could have a chat in full view of the crowd that only grew in its agitation, slinging jeers at Angzal that she couldn’t quite make out.

“Far be it for me to tell you how to do your job,” Angzal said, “But I think it would have been significantly easier to pursue them when they were arm’s length from the officers who’d witnessed the assault with their own eyes.”

This Sergeant always tried to start speaking Trade Thorian with her and it seemed to make him visibly uncomfortable to hear a Mraboran respond in Standard Earth Commercial. Not to mention that he’d start sweating his boiled vegetable sweat more anytime she’d show her teeth, so she made sure that her canines were on display as much as possible.

“As we’ve said before, we are internally investigating the incident.”

“Yes, Sergeant, and I’m sure you have your best people on it. Hopefully the same ones that were able to get our man within a mere two hours of the fight he was involved in, even as he was in the process of trying to get off world.” Before the Human managed to sputter anything in response, Angzal said, “Are we finished here?”

“Of course, Deputy Consul, you’re always free to go.”

Angzal glanced behind her at the crowd and then back to the police officer. “That’s an exaggeration and you know it. Thank you for your concerns, Sergeant, I will take them into advisement.”

With that she turned around and headed back towards the protestors who eyed her with acute interest. Despite what many thought, including some at her office, Angzal did not do this to send some kind of message, or as a gesture of defiance. It had been far more base than that. She did it because it fueled her anger. She submitted to the throngs of screeching Humans every morning before work because she secretly hoped that one day one of them would give her just the right excuse to snap, to wreak havoc on their fragile cowardly little bodies and then enter her office, seek diplomatic immunity and then get shipped off to some faraway Mraboran colony hopefully as equidistant from Earth and Mrabr as possible.

On that morning, she reached the doors largely unmolested, the crowds seemingly at least somewhat skittish about the small police presence that watched her go inside. Fine then, she thought, some other morning, and some other idiot, this planet did not have a shortage of them.

“Sergeant Ram thought he’d have a chat with me this morning,” Angzal said as she opened the door to her office. “Should worry more about that moustache of his. What is it with bald-faced species –”

“Shut the door,” Rzena said and the abruptness of this request made Angzal comply without question, not even registering the audacity of it. “You’re lucky you got in when you did. We’re told this’ll probably hit the local news within the hour.”

“What’s going on?” she asked and Rzena passed her his open tablet.

“This was relayed from the Ambassador a few minutes ago, passed through our own emergency communication channels.”

Angzal picked up the tablet, her eyes scanning the text as the sound of her blood rushing through her ears grew ever louder.

“How did this happen?” she asked, hearing her voice turn gravely.
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The Human fleet sent to Krevali had been destroyed.