STATUS – 4.22.2025 –

Hello and good morning.

I guess I’m one of those people now who need daily reminders to reflect on where you are.

For anyone not in the know, my mother-in-law is slowly fading due to ALS. This has been our whole life for the last two years. We moved, uprooted our boys, bought a home during a terrible time in the market, and set up close to help take care of not just her mom, but her father in the coming aftermath. She’s a fighter, though, and has held on.

And with this passing time comes a passing fade, a distortion of the truth surrounding my wife and myself: We’re living under the swinging blade of the loss of a loved one. Every day, most decisions we make are directly or indirectly affected by this fact. And it’s starting to crush us.

We fight, we make projects, we take on different challenges (I’m still trying to write books for kids, she’s started to play her violin privately for events and weddings), but, man, some days it gets you.

We thought we were going to lose her last night.

The Featured Image is my own interpretation of the Dashboard Ryder from Bullet Journal uses to check in on himself throughout the day. By the end, each one of those letters should have a line or two connected to it, to allow space to reflect and accept. I think it’s time I start this daily practice because, well, swinging blade.

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PROJECT UPDATE:

#AMQUERYING – BIANCA is still going out. NESS, on the other hand, is going to go through a quick round of edits. “But why?” you might be asking. “Didn’t you finish edits on that book nearly two years ago?” There was a Bluesky post I saw recently that said:

Which just EFFED Project NESS’s pitch all the way up. In a good way. I remolded the pitch to fit this structure, changed the title to hold on to the core of the story but still appear as if it’s a done-in-one book, and altered some dialogue at the end.

THIS simple act gave me a chance to look at some later chapter dialogue and I realized, “Oh, I could polish this up. Oh, I could rewrite this paragraph.” SO I GUESS WE’RE DOING A PROJECT NESS EDIT FROM START TO FINISH TO POLISH IT UP TO BE MORE PRESENTABLE AS A SINGLE BOOK WITH SERIES POTENTIAL HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA *loud ringing noises*

CITY – We’ll get back to this once this whole NESS debacle is done, but I think this is the future of the kinds of books I want to write for kids.

CURRENTLY LISTENING: I don’t know, man, sometimes I just want to feel 25 again. Is that so wrong?