So, Brian, About Those New Editions You Keep Promising…?

Lately I’ve started to feel as though I’m channeling some sort of inner George R.R. Martin. That might have once been a good thing. Now, though? Just the opposite.

The loop has always been highly public, but in case you’re out of it: For years, observers and pundits and everyday fans haven’t been shy about expressing their doubts that GRRM will ever deliver the final two books of his vast, and increasingly unwieldy, seven-volume saga, A Song of Ice and Fire. You might only know it as Game of Thrones, wearing its TV clothes. However unsatisfying you might have found the ending, the HBO series at least got a definitive one.

But where the books are concerned, expectations continue to dwindle that we’ll ever see The Winds of Winter, much less A Dream of Spring. Martin has been promising the former for years — it’s been 13.5 trips around the sun since the series’ last book came out — but each nebulous timeframe evaporates, leaving nobody particularly surprised.

Martin’s sporadic messaging has never come off sounding more mixed than it has in recent weeks. He states that Winds is still a priority … but sure sounds like someone trying hard to avoid coming out and admitting that he’s turtled up and rolled over in capitulation. That, while much has been written — he began it in 2010 — he just can’t bring it all together and finish the thing.

That’s as far into the weeds of this situation as I want to go, because it’s served its purpose here, and it’s making me glum.

Remember, Life Is What Happens When You’re Making Other Plans

What it does is bring us, also glumly, to my own shattered forecasts.

And, by way of comparison, point out that mine could be worse…?

For a couple of years now, I’ve intended to bring out new, self-published editions of several works that went off the market due to various publisher issues, and whose rights reverted back to me: The Immaculate Void and Skidding Into Oblivion, the ones I hear the most about, along with some others.

A well-intentioned 2023 came and then went, after it turned into a year characterized by, as I put it, setbacks, sorrows, and grieving, which … well, pick your favorite air-based metaphor: took the wind out of my sails; sucked up all the oxygen in the room.

Turns out I’m not like Stephen King, who I remember claiming to have put on headphones and kept working while the Twin Towers were burning from the 9/11 attacks.

OK then, make it 2024. Except we’ve entirely run out of 2024, which was an altogether better year, I’m glad to say. But that’s kind of the issue, too.

After a productive spring, getting after the mostly invisible but necessary, behind-the-scenes, groundwork these sorts of endeavors require if you really want to do them up right, we had ourselves a genuine, out-of-nowhere, plot twist.

In the summer, I was hired to do some story consulting for a South American filmmaker. After this went swimmingly — compatible wavelengths and all that — I was hired to write the screenplay.

For most of us, an opportunity like this doesn’t come along on demand. So of course I said hell yes.

The Delusional Optimism Before the Spinout

Which brings us — not so much glum now as frustrated — to the limitations of the 24-hour day and other inconveniences.

I tried. For several weeks, I really tried to do everything, everywhere, all at once … working on four multi-headed projects at the same time. Eventually this proved unsustainable, in part because of the lesson that some of us thickheads have to keep relearning time and again: that when you spread yourself too thin, everything suffers for it.

One of the starkest limitations was this: I’m leaning toward doing a Kickstarter campaign for sweet new editions of The Immaculate Void and Skidding Into Oblivion. I continue to hear from people from around the world on these, and think it would work. But, from everything I’ve looked into and heard about doing a Kickstarter, it’s not something to half-ass. Go all-in, or stay out. For a campaign to be worth doing, it pretty much has to become your life for a month or two.

But these months had, however unexpectedly, acquired a prior commitment.

Sooner or later, though, commitments get fulfilled. I should be turning in the screenplay sometime in January. There may be further polishing still to be done, if requested. We’ll see. Either way, before too terribly much longer — 2025 or die tryin’ — I’ll be able to pick this venture back up again.

The Garden of Lunar Delights

And if I’m not the one picking something up, it doesn’t get picked up at all. That’s another stark reality.

I regard myself as someone who shot for the stars and made it only as far as the moon. No complaints — the moon is still pretty good, and most don’t even get that far. The moon has made for a rewarding journey unto itself. The moon has been good to me.

But the moon is a more solitary place than the stars. There are no assistants here. There’s no team. No one to whom I can delegate tasks, and move along while trusting they’ll get done. Doli has her own stuff going on, and for as much as it’s always amused me to bestow job titles on the resident critters, there isn’t a lot of slack they actually pick up.

The moon. One outpost, one guy, one workstation. Fuzzy shearling moccasins: can verify.

So it all comes down to what I can manage, and when, while enjoying the process. That’s crucial: enjoying life. I want to make stuff, and, to the greatest extent possible — because some part of it is always going to generate suckage — enjoy the process. Enjoying the process is a part of playing the long game.

One of the sadder things I see, now and then, is when someone grinds so hard, for so long, with diminishing levels of satisfaction, that they end up taking something they used to love and turning it into something they hate.

In the early days, writing, and everything around it, was for me an all-consuming ambition and obsession. That usually served what I wanted to accomplish, but many times this outlook broad-jumped over the line between what was healthy and what wasn’t. If I couldn’t make it work, couldn’t keep making this the focal point of my life, then my life would have no point at all, and I didn’t want to exist any other way.

These days, writing, and everything around it, is just one slice of a pie. There’s a lot to do on the moon.

So that’s where things currently stand.

In the meantime, 2025 will also be bringing Black Hole Sundown, my sixth full-length collection, and easily the biggest, weighing in at 600 pages. But the details there are a rundown for another day.

To err is human; to share, divine:

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