WIP AND WORK PUBLISHED, FEB-MAR 2024 -

This site is supported by our readers – content may include affiliate links.

Don’t mind me, I’m just eating pears out of a can I found in the back of my cupboard. It looks like something a scrappy teenager in a video game scavenged from a post-apocalyptic shed and the flavor is flat, but they’re pears and I really like pears.

I didn’t check the expiration date. Stanley Kubrick proposed that you stop worrying and love the bomb. I say stop worrying and eat the pears. What this has to do with writing? A surprising amount.

It has been a busy month here on the ship. The Resilience is both real and a metaphor in a way that’s confusing to some, but very simple to writers. We may not have the same grasp on reality as others. After all, we not only hear voices in our heads, we hold whole conversations with them that we proceed to share with you.

The captain has been moving her UK cabin from a river valley to a northern shore, requiring the transport of persons, felines, and various worldly goods. According to my UK For Yanks guide, it’s a ritual sort of like an adult baptism, but in order to support a new football club. I say kind of like because, according to my UK non-writing acquaintances, God is of second import after football over there and a distant one at that.

Meanwhile, I wanted to write, but, on the board of the gods, one with glasses rolled her dice and consulted a chart. My miniature was taken straight off the tabletop and I’m still in some sort of time-out. The metaphor is silly, but the events have not been. And that brings me back to the pears. I have always been a fan of writing, both the product and the craft. I have always admired writers who respect the craft and write through their life and pain. But the truth is that sometimes you just can’t.

Any craft – from writing to blacksmithing – needs both time and focus and certain events can interfere with that. You can no more write effectively while moving house than a cobbler can make a nice pair of boots while moving their workshop. The stuff is packed up and thoughts are elsewhere. Similarly, when life is punching you in the balls like a midget kangaroo on meth, well, working on dialogue is too much to expect.

Something I’ve slowly been learning as I trod towards earning my journeyman stripes is that sometimes the best thing a writer can do is to just let life happen, wait for things to pass and eat the damn post-apocalyptic pears. So, that is our current work in progress, this can of nuclear shelter fruit and the pizza on the way.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t things in progress of course, just not recent progress. We are editing The Chained Lamp, a work in which I steal my brother Liam’s world of Reuel and inject some smut in it. The story features a female pirate who enjoys the company of another female pirate, and a ship that erupts in chaos after the discovery of an abandoned merchant vessel on the high sea.

Also in edits we have the second Neighborly Gestures story in which Adam negotiates something new with his ex’s twin sister and her husband. I am also fleshing out a non-erotica story set in a place I’ve been calling the Umbra Verse, though eventually I would like to find a catchier title for it. This is a follow up to a monster-fucking story and in a world I share with Liam, though my stories involve smut and his do not. The serialized story in this very newsletter, Time is Dying, is also set in this world. This means the trade dress is up for debate and while I respect my brother’s opinion he is an idiot.

So, I’m drinking pear juice out of the can right now, but raise a mug of whatever you have and let’s drink to our health. We’re pirates because we steal our moments of joy from the stream of life and when people say pirates are ugly we smile, because our scars prove we’ve survived all the storms we’ve faced so far.

We keep sailing upon our Resilience, and we’ll keep dropping back into port to trade our stories for pears and rum.

//Leto