If I had a FAQ (which I don’t, because I’m not famous), the number one question would be: How do you find time to write blog posts, technical documents for work, and multiple novels simultaneously? Yes, by “number one question,” I mean a co-worker and two people from my writing meetup group have asked me that in the past two weeks. That’s practically a trend in my demographic, however.

The short answer: I don’t. At all. It’s obvious. Work is the constant, because laptops need electricity, I need coffee and beer, and my daughter needs a roof. The novels and the blog fight over whatever brain cells survive the burnout from the day job. If they were siblings, Child Services would’ve stepped in years ago and confiscated my OneDrive.

The truth is, the blog only came back to life because the novels went into hibernation. Let’s call it “refocusing,” which is corporate for “wandering off.” I rebooted the blog in August to keep the part of my brain that converts ideas into sentences from melting into soup. That’s why it swings between self-therapy sessions, literary-critique, and “ooooh, shiny object/thought” like a writer on an unmedicated seesaw. The byline joke about “writing for a fanbase I don’t have yet” is not a joke, just me calmly telling myself to calm down; nobody is going to read this anyway. These posts are just me thinking through what, why, and how the hell I think I’m doing.

Most posts happen around 5 AM, during the first cup of coffee, while KCSM San Francisco bops gently in the background. My self-challenge is to spit 1,000 coherent words in an hour; 90 minutes if I didn’t spend the previous night mentally outlining the post while trying to go to sleep. Then I shower, grab a third cup of coffee, and sit back down at the same desk for the day job. This time Brokenbeats.net sets the mood. I give the draft a quick Grammarly pass, or toss it to Miles if I’m pretending to have a personal assistant, and call that “edited and done.”

So, what went wrong last week? I was working on a post about how I, and presumably other writers, tend to cannibalize and Frankenstein multiple disjoint ideas from what should be unrelated sources — the “Die Hard, but in space,” or “It’s James Bond, only she’s a single mom teaching chemistry by day and secretly trained in Taekwondo” elevator pitch. I used The Halferne Expedition as my main example, my NaNoWriMo project from 2023 that I shelved after crossing the 50,000th word to get the T-shirt, because I thought of a better ending than what was in my outline and needed to think it through.

Expedition is my “hard sci-fi” story, written in the spirit of “Arthur C. Clarke, Jules Verne, and St. Thomas Aquinas have a dinner party and challenge themselves to write a story after the third bottle of brandy.” Imagine Journey to the Center of the Earth, except the “Earth” is Summa Theologica and there’s a buttload of Fermi, Drake, and theoretical physics I got from YouTube University. The main character, Jaysn Katsaros, is a xeno-anthropologist who flirts, drinks, and dresses like he’s auditioning for a 1980s adventure reboot, basically Indiana Jones meets Porthos du Vallon, but “my twist” was that when I write his character, I use Jeff Goldblum’s voice and simply take out his characteristic stammer. (This was the crux of the blog post, so I guess I don’t have to write the rest now.)

Basically, Exhibition was just me, having fun at a resort in the tropics, typing my fingers off in tiki bars and on beaches, and having the time of my life, thinking I was writing something deep, science-smart, and adventurous.

Meanwhile, I’d also announced my upcoming NaNoWriMo “working vacation” next month, preceded by a mini five-day weekend that starts tomorrow, during which I plan to finish both The Halferne Deception (the heist novel) and The Pessimal Refrain (the rockumentary parody). Yes, if you know how my brain works, you know exactly what happened instead. 

In a haze, I did something dangerous and reopened Expedition for the first time in two years. I couldn’t remember where I was when I wrote each chapter, but it’s painfully clear which ones were composed at my homemade “sand desk” on the beach at sunrise, versus Landshark’s Bar over a noon cheeseburger in paradise, or at the Salty Rim Cantina, where a retired couple from Vermont cheered me on and kept me hydrated with margaritas and unsolicited publishing advice every happy hour. Honestly, it wasn’t bad, just long-winded (though, to be fair, analysis software suggests that everything I write should be trimmed by 10-15%). It also needed several extraneous commas (currently sprayed around the page like Sonny Corelone at a tollbooth as if  “close enough” was a thing) moved to their proper locations. 

I ran the first three chapters through Grammarly, cringed, and replaced the old excerpt on my site before anyone could notice. Then I promoted Expedition back up the queue for NaNoWriMo 2025, or whatever corporate rebranding we’re using this year. I usually discourage mutiny, but even I can’t justify starting a 16th work-in-progress when ten others are stalled at 50-70% completion. I’ve promised myself: no new projects until everything has a full zeroth draft. (This promise is subject to sudden and catastrophic failure.)

So, consider this my official “state of the mania” report. Current priorities: finish drafting Expedition, Deception, and Refrain by year’s end, not necessarily in that order. Once done, they’ll get the obligatory Grammarly scrub and go to you, my loyal alpha readers and fanbase I still don’t technically have.

Beyond that, there are a few small, ridiculous side projects, and a Terraform script calling my name in about twenty minutes, so I’ll leave you here. Duty calls, and by “duty,” I mean the glamorous life of debugging YAML files while pretending I’m Hemingway in exile.