Dylan Madeley dot com

Tag: the gift-knight’s quest

Thematic groupings of sequels
If your follow-up books aren’t serialized, then it may help to understand how they might otherwise be grouped.

Sure, you may have more understanding than I did in 2008. My first three books tell the same extended story and ought to have been read in their release order (back when they were available for sale). That created a problem, where I wanted to hype and release these sequels but could never find any traction for the first book. I did not have the privilege of a debut doing so well that I could expect a dedicated readership to anticipate sequels.

It’s just as well that I took them off the market pending rewrites.

From the fourth book onward, I paid more attention to how well my releases held up on their own. Some people only wish to start reading a complete series; at book fairs I more commonly encounter cautious buyers who will buy the first book to try before committing to a series. Perhaps they are only prepared to buy one book, yet should they default to release order? If Prince Ewald the Brave is not their cup of tea, I wouldn’t require them to start there.

If I just want people to try out my work without feeling drawn into a broader commitment, I believe it helps to have a variety of offerings: books which may have different moods, themes, aesthetics. If the reader suspects that they face a chore to slog through one book to enjoy the better ones after, then I am in trouble; the same that I found myself in after my debut. I think that people approach my work to enjoy themselves, or have an otherwise rewarding experience that doesn’t feel much like homework. Having already discussed why I’m rewriting my debut, I will put this tangent to rest.

That introduces different questions

I currently have five books for sale, down from eight. I felt more enthusiastic about promoting the five currently available than the strictly serialized three. You don’t need to know who Ewald is to read The Fate of Lenn. The narrative catches you up quickly at the start of The Redemption of Jarek. You are over a century removed from either of these characters in Their Village, Their Fortress. None of these titular characters have met Alathea, nor does any part of their story occur where she is.

Freedom of choice!

But with that freedom comes different questions. Readers may ask:
- Where do you suggest I begin?
- What reading order makes the most sense?
- I would rather not commit to five books. Which one do you recommend for me?
The third question lends itself to this freedom if you can discern what that reader believes they are looking for. If you want a darker themed work about the genesis of a villain, then Alathea. If you want something brighter and more hopeful, Ewald. If you prefer a half-sized sample of what I do before committing to a longer book, then Their Village. If you like redemption arcs for characters, then you might guess which book I would choose, though part of that book is to question how his redemption ought to be defined, whether he achieves it, whether it is a singular or ongoing effort, or even possible, etc.

The first two questions are common and more challenging. This is where we consider shared themes. Fortunately, my “non-serial sequels” are not entirely unrelated. Using what the books have in common, I can suggest pairs or bundles.

Examples from my works

Pair: Jarek and the Village. Part of The Redemption of Jarek is a villager making a journey to Jarek and taking him to task for what has happened to people under his neglectful leadership. Her village is the primary setting for Their Village, Their Fortress. The people who live there are the legacy of decisions made over a century earlier, and these will be much more familiar to you if you have read this pairing in its release order. (Bonus: also the only two books sharing the photographic cover style from the same artist, Justin Minister).

Make it a trilogy: Insert Alathea between them, since it occurs not very long before Their Village, deals with the descendant of Elcimer from Jarek, and bridges a sliver of the gap between them. However, you would also get an abrupt change in scenery to and from the middle book.

Pair: Ewald and Lenn. These characters will never meet and their casts hardly interact, yet timeline-wise their stories overlap in a shared geopolitical drama. You get two sides of the story, well in advance of current work-in-progress rewrite The Gift-Knight’s Quest which even in its original form was the long-term consequence of this drama. (Bonus: also the two covers made by Jenn St-Onge, and in beautiful wraparound form if you get the paperback editions).

Make it a trilogy: Simply follow through in release order to The Redemption of Jarek, since Jarek is introduced as Lenn’s cousin and the inciting incident of his story (which is reintroduced in his book’s prologue) occurred in the later chapters of Lenn’s story. As far as either of their lifetimes go, this is a logical end to the trilogy.

Thematic trilogy: Fate, Redemption, and a Village. These are in release and chronological order, and each is the consequence of the one(s) prior. What happens to Galyna’s village long after she is gone? What happens to Jarek’s land over a century later, a land which got that way in part because of events in The Fate of Lenn? You might then add Alathea as a third book of what would then be a tetralogy, but we’re getting close to “just buy and read all five” which seems like a bold ask.

What happens if the first three books all get re-released?

This is very much counting one’s chickens before the eggs have hatched; however, The Gift-Knight’s Quest is well along in its process and we can cautiously say it will be released. Its two sequels are separate issues.

Alathea and TGKQ have a similar timeline relationship as Ewald and Lenn. Readers will meet the principal descendants of these historical protagonists. Each contends with people who give unreliable advice or aren’t really looking out for their best interests; most critically, they contend with each other.

In its original form, you then got The Crown Princess’ Voyage which first introduced Alathea, who is also the titular character of The Masked Queen’s Lament.

You would then get a reading order choice:
1. Read TGKQ, then Alathea, then TCPV
2. Read TGKQ, then TCPV, skip Alathea if you don’t care for her story
3. Read Alathea because it’s already available, then TGKQ when it’s out, and then anything to follow
I do not see any of these rewrites being intended as standalones, but I would feel all right if people skipped straight to them. If you do not read Ewald or Lenn, then you must rely on how people recount their stories. I believe it would be more rewarding to learn about Ewald from his book, but you will anyway gain information outside the scope of his adventure.

If you rely on Derek from TGKQ to tell you who Lenn is and what he did, though, you ought to find him a most unreliable narrator. You might miss the deliberate gap between who Lenn was and who some people wish him to be. Then again, that might be strongly implied.

Wrapping this up

When the relationship between books gets complicated, consider what other ways they could go together. Texts can still greatly inform each other even when they aren’t serialized, and these can mean much to the reading experience.
September 22, 2025
Travel Log: Dreamers Writing Farm
For my first ever writing retreat, I performed a basic search and chose based on a few criteria. These are included, but not limited to:
- Budget (price per day, transportation cost, food, etc.)
- Transportation (I don’t drive, so how do I get there/back)
- Remoteness (adequately different from my usual space, but where can I go if I run out of food/supplies, and refer back to Transportation)
- Self-directed (no intention of going to workshops/social experience, I just wanted a space such as a cabin to buckle down and work uninterrupted)
- Amenities (wifi, sufficient electricity to charge a laptop and phone and bluetooth ear buds, how do I manage temperature of the cabin)
- Availability (narrow window of ideal time to claim a vacation week from my work while it isn’t freezing cold outside)
Given where I live, all these factors led me to Dreamers Writing Farm in the quiet town of Hepworth, Ontario. If there is a next time, I have one other candidate in mind that posed an immediate transportation challenge; something better cashflow might solve, which I can’t immediately count on.

Described as a glamping experience, Dreamers features a campground of bunkies and tents in addition to one full suite. This time, given my available days and other constraints, I considered the Coupland Bunkie to be the best available option.

Rookie mistake

When you are booking anything like this with constraints similar to my own, it pays to double check that your transportation options are running on the exact days you require them.

A quick search fetched me a website that would find available transit options to and from anywhere of my choosing. It correctly found my route to Dreamers Writing Farm, and it also made immediately clear that the express bus from Toronto to Owen Sound or Sauble Falls (the main leg of the journey) doesn’t run outside of tourist season. I would require the “milk run” route. At least I had one, and affordable to me.

I failed to go one step further and see which days of the week the “milk run” operates. This became a problem when I went ahead and booked the intended days of my stay, not realizing that this bus route didn’t operate on my arrival or departure days.

Fortunately, said bus was scheduled to operate the day prior to my intended arrival, and the day after my intended homeward departure.

This writing retreat had been financed by a generous donation. I anticipated paying for food, transportation, and everything else but the days of accommodation. I considered buying one more day at Dreamers on either end, but I knew I had not purchased/budgeted for that much camping food. I also didn’t know whether I would like my stay, whether the bed would be comfortable, or enough about the place to feel confident staying two additional nights. I booked a hotel in Owen Sound that was inexpensive yet reasonably close to the city bus terminal for the extra days bookending my trip. That added expense has ultimately put my monthly budget out of bounds, but I’m simply relating the solution I went with.

In hindsight, the length of time I stayed at Dreamers was appropriate for my purposes and I would not have wished to stay two more nights. The simple solution is to take appropriate care when booking, to avoid this situation.

FlixBus journey

The route I chose was via FlixBus, heading from Union Station, through a Pearson International Airport stop, then continuing north to Barrie, then sweeping west toward Owen Sound. It took approximately four hours.

The remainder of the trip to Hepworth occurred by rented shuttle. There might be public transit options in-season, but it was unclear from the information I could get whether that bus or any route like it was operating off-season. Apparently, one or more routes had recently been discontinued due to budget cutbacks.

The workspace

This is what I made work for just shy of thirty-five thousand words of rewriting The Gift-Knight’s Quest. Realizing I was unfamiliar with this place and with having a writing retreat at all, I set myself a nice low bar of “getting the project started”. Given the final word count of the draft, I would say that writing 50% of the total can adequately be described as having started. I believe the earliest chapters required the most extensive rewriting compared with the remainder of the book.

In one window, a chapter-by-chapter outline. In another, the draft. In a third, a PDF of the 2019 edition of The Gift-Knight’s Quest. Even when I chose to preserve/copy paragraphs and lines from the original, these rarely went without modification.

My father would hate that high-leg “barstool” type chair for a couple reasons, but I’m not him, so I made it work.

The Grounds

You can get great visuals on the Dreamers Writing Farm website, so few of my photos will be of the grounds. I did take some with my phone to share with family and friends.

Given that working chair, I certainly needed to stretch my legs once in a while. I would also go to the outdoor kitchenette to brew more coffee; however, given the small number of guests on my day of arrival, the owners generously offered that I keep the kettle with me in the bunkie. Most of my dinners were Mountain House brand dehydrated food requiring boiling water to cook. The kitchenette has a Keurig machine, but I brought instant coffee anyway. The ability to boil water kept me fed and caffeinated for most of my experience; just as long as I didn’t run the kettle and and another appliance at once, for example, due to circuit limitations (don’t take my word for it, Dreamers will tell you the more specific parameters and all required information for your stay).

I dialed someone on that phone. I don’t know if they heard me and I didn’t hear back in any way that I could immediately discern, but something interesting happened to me during this trip.

A clear night sky

My phone camera might not adequately capture that this was the best night sky I had seen in years. I live in the Lakeshore West district of Etobicoke. Even on a partly cloudy first night, I believe I saw more stars in the patches of occasionally visible sky than I would in a typically light polluted sky with some other objects in the way. As the week went by, and a storm pattern missed me only to hit my home area instead, clearer skies seemed more guaranteed each night.

But you’re waiting for me to explain what interesting thing happened, so let’s address that.

I used to tell people that when I write, I picture a movie in my head and I’m attempting to describe it. When I said that, I did not really understand that this would be more than a figure of speech: others can close their eyes and hold a mental picture. If I recalled high school Art I should have known better than to claim that I can. When my characters are visualized enough to be depicted in detail on a cover, you can thank my cover artists for challenging me to try and describe people I have never been able to see in any consistent form.

One exception is when I fall into a deep sleep. My dreams are wild and vivid multisensory experiences, some details of which might stay with me for years – and which also seem unscripted and rarely of practical use. When awake, though, I would describe most of my thoughts as dialogue and idea exploration. I once visited a hypnotist whose methods relied a fair deal on me closing my eyes and picturing something, and likewise, my being able to immediately fall into a deep sleep. I struggle with both. If anything they did managed to work, they sure didn’t let on.

But a really odd thing happened at Dreamers that had not happened for years prior, and only once since, suggesting how little conscious control I would have over the phenomenon.

One night I was followed into my bunkie by an unfortunate cloud of midges. The supplied bug zapper in that photo needed replacement (which occurred the next day, and I was all set for the rest of my visit), and I consoled myself with the fact that these didn’t do much but hang around lights, or buzz annoyingly close to my ear; I didn’t notice any bites. I turned off the main lamp, and tried switching on the lantern (a supplied amenity), placing at the farthest point from the bed (by the door) so it would attract them, and I managed to sleep.

The weird part was that upon first closing my eyes, after a second at most and not any time period in which I would expect to have fallen asleep, I automatically visualized the lamp above me and a gigantic swarm of midges descending toward my face. I opened my eyes to find that this wasn’t so.

In a second such weird apparition, “bananas” rendered in the limited graphic detail of an early-2000s gaming console were falling from the sky in clusters on a realistic street and people. It made not a lick of sense, but that’s what my mind produced for me to see.

This was bizarre. The most potent chemical I had ingested during my time there was caffeine, and I kept that no later than early afternoons for fear of being unable to sleep. Exactly once, and on a different day, I had drank a single beer or cooler. I stayed hydrated, and my dinners should not have been able to spoil for many years in their intact packaging. My Clif bar breakfasts and lunches showed no signs of having spoiled; had either of my food sources been compromised, I would have been far more ill and symptomatic than experiencing a couple of random visualizations.

I didn’t question it. Derek and Chandra needed me to rewrite their adventure, all was going well, and perhaps I had chosen a most excellent accommodation for reasons beyond my understanding.

Campfires

I built two campfires during my stay, which felt like exactly the number I needed. I have a basic knowledge of fire building, and it feels like one and a half to two decades since I have been involved in camping. I like the basic accomplishment of getting this thing going in a safe pit and determining how to keep it alive. I couldn’t care less if I’m elite at it; the point of this excursion was to strive at writing, not pretty much anything else.

I have camped a shallow ways into Algonquin Park, and with other family members before. I have had very few opportunities in recent years to build a campfire, or no particular reason even if the opportunity presented itself. Firewood on the grounds was half priced compared to what was available in the immediate area, and there was plenty of variety to it: twigs, pieces of thick bark, cut wood, deadwood covered in gobs of pine sap, and sprigs from the bushes that sizzle well with the tinder.

On another day, I also met a nice lady from Texas who felt like building fires and did perfectly well without any of my input. It was nice to have a good conversation with a stranger while I was pretending to “buckle down” and work constantly. In fact, the way I work, there must always be something to ease tension for me for when my attention span has tripped a limit. Such tasks just can’t sidetrack me more than my process requires: listening to playoff hockey in the evening, a small amount of single player gaming, or walking into Hepworth to understand the one restaurant it appeared I could walk to, and to peruse the offerings of the convenience store/post office/LCBO.

Ultimately, if I can get anything done at all, my process has worked. You might think that’s another low bar, but experience tells me it’s fair and practical in my personal context to measure some progress against none at all. I think of all the times that the process didn’t work, especially when I was much younger. I’m sure there’s more to it than I am describing.

Wildlife

Other than bugs, there was plenty of wildlife and nothing too concerning came close. Here we see the bunny that visited, while various birds were all around. Once the weather warmed up, some brown bats were flitting across the sky at dusk.

On one of my campfire nights, around 9:40pm I suddenly heard a cacophony of howls from out beyond the golf course that borders the writing farm. Wolves? Coyotes? Coywolves? I’m sure you get all three in the area, and I’m not expert enough to tell. They were distant, but heard. I’m sure they had themselves an excellent evening.

Summary

I felt that the glamping experience was as advertised. You are not at a likely pricier spot further north being served breakfast and theatre, nor are you completely isolated somewhere in Maine; this was a good entry-level experience for a self-directed writing retreat adequate to my need and very reasonable in price. Crucially, I could get there without needing a car, which is a lingering question with many other accommodations I had seen. I just needed to plan more carefully.

I did what I came to the farm to do. I found the bed very comfortable, the amenities as advertised, and the hosts very accommodating. The grounds workers were also friendly and helpful, able to answer a couple simple questions. It was not difficult to regulate the temperature in my bunkie. I may have done a few things differently:
- Verify transportation before booking. Unless I believe someone is going to book that bunkie within the few minutes it would take to make sure I can get there on my planned arrival day, and get home when I wish to, it pays to make sure (i.e. it cost me not to have made sure).
- Shave two to four days off my total trip (10 days including travel). Again, two of those days are the extras I introduced by mistake. Even without them, I felt that the magic had worn off a day or two before I left the campground; I had gotten started, I had my campfires. This is preferential, as the saying goes: “Your Mileage May Vary”.
- If I were going for a trip four days shorter, I might have considered using that budget on the suite accommodations if available. For full disclosure, I have irritable bowel symptoms and was worried about occupying the main washroom of the grounds when others might need it. However, that experience went surprisingly smooth and conflict-free. They have a couple of options available if you are not in the suite; in a pinch, I was all right with using the secondary/outhouse style washroom.
As for the project, I finished my first rewrite draft late last week and began to edit the manuscript.
May 26, 2025
The Last Gift-Knight

Ten years of work left me right back where I started.

A journey like this doesn’t really begin with the first edition published. Where you could begin it is more nebulous: flashes of ideas in 2006, while I was in third year of my undergraduate degree? 2008, when a first draft was finally written?

For the purposes of this post, I’m more concerned with the attempted career launch of late 2014 and early 2015. It was a time of great excitement and impatience, a decent case study regarding the dangers of getting one’s hopes up.

“The Campaign”

Lacking interest from any publisher, I first thought to publish this on my own, with no mentorship or guidance at the time. For that, I rightly expected to need a budget while having no savings to speak of; I was working inconsistent freelance editing and transcribing, listening to empty promises from one particularly erratic client and bouncing in and out of brief work stints with him, and content to use what I earned for the occasional splurge or short trip, while my middle-class parents kept housing and feeding me as I pursued my dream. Whatever career I thought I would get from my degree never transpired, though that did get me some interesting experiences with a magazine – something better suited to another post.

What a long way to say I didn’t have much money, therefore I went around asking for some. I was familiar with the Kickstarter platform at the time having supported others, and I shopped around about as well as I would when I enter a store already knowing the one item I want.

My promotional activity was an amalgam of everything I perceived other people to be doing. When they did it, I understood and others seemed to understand; people were going all out for their dream and didn’t have the backing of a corporate sales and marketing team, so word of mouth was the best way to go. When I believed I was carrying this out precisely as observed, I seemed to annoy people and even lost some friends.

The money went to a small service provider which promised to do several things I couldn’t, and delivered on the basic and most tangible ones. Wraparound cover art, a press release, formatting of the book, everything I paid for. They couldn’t make people want to purchase or read this book. I wouldn’t work with them again.

What phrasing: “make people…” I like living in a world where we have enough choice for that phrasing to be dubious. If I were able to access a power that would make people read and enjoy my work, there’s no reason why only I would bear this power – and that means anybody else with access could suddenly hijack my choices and yours, mandating our consumption, perhaps altering our perception so we are made to enjoy what we otherwise wouldn’t. Would some detached part of ourselves remain cognizant of our existence as marionettes, helplessly observing in first-person all the things we are made to do? Mentally screaming for the rest of our lives while our mouths are forced to smile? Creepy, dangerous, and wrong no matter who has that power – even if wielded solely by one who promised to use it for good. Therefore, I agree that I would rather live in a world where people arrive at some authentic form of appreciation and enjoyment themselves, and as a consequence, retain the capability to pan and subsequently avoid everything I have ever written if they see fit. Everybody has that lifelong right; you do, which means I do too.

But everyone lives with that. It’s a baseline problem, separate from the only learning method I seem to employ: bumping into every wall of an unlit labyrinth as I hope to turn a welcome corner.

2015: The Release Year

In the background of everything, and not known to most, I had been an anxious wreck for a long time. I had a project to gain a social life that began during my undergrad years, and it was only either euphoria or the brink of collapse. I didn’t have a professional assessment until 2021, to validate exactly why the social realm seemed like such a frustrating place or what I was even doing. Some people seemed pretty insistent that I knew exactly what I was doing while pretending not to, which is the most frustrating reply to hear when you truly have no idea what you are doing.

In my private life, I more often think of 2015 as The Medication Year. I got my prescription while I had yet to bounce out of my second roommate experience, had the dose steadily upped as I hoped for a breakthrough right around the next corner of the unlit labyrinth; something way more accessible and easier to understand. And somewhere along the way, I’m sure I botched my dosage upwards at least once, got into a disagreement about whether I should be taking it at all, and quietly titrated myself off without any guidance for doing so – quickly and improperly.

The time span encompassed by that goes between the end of the Kickstarter campaign, the release, an era where I couldn’t seem to stay conscious for much longer than six hours at a time without needing even more sleep than the ridiculous amount I appeared to require, and coming out the other side.

I feel quite satisfied to be alive after that. Once off the meds, I became capable of staying awake and aware long enough to work even one of the entry level jobs I knew I needed soon. If I were to continue, I decided, there should be no more Kickstarters; no one-stop-shop would deliver quite what I was hoping, and in the long term, soliciting funds hurt more than it helped. Anyway, it was self-evident I needed some form of income to proceed even without the very present external pressure to do so.

That would lead us to 2016 and the boutique cosmetics manufacturing years, but those encompass the direct sequels and a couple other books released with cover art paid out of pocket. That’s another post in itself.

The Gift-Knight’s Quest

My first book is no longer for sale on any platform. If it is, it shouldn’t be. Perhaps someone is trying to sell you a pre-owned first edition at an inflated price; inflated because it’s my earliest work where I had the least knowledge of what to do, and also because I’ve seen eBay listings where people claim it’s from the 19th century or some other era. The author was born in 1985 and never had access to a time machine that he can recall.

I’m surprised at how many decent reviews this book has, which I chalk up mostly to the willingness to be kind to a debut.

I say this because I’m writing The Last Gift-Knight, or as it will be known upon release, The Gift-Knight’s Quest. After more than one quiet tweak and re-release, I am undertaking a deeper and more intensive effort to rewrite this book. To me, it’s The Last Gift-Knight not just because Derek could/will be the last gifted warrior in his tradition (tangent – I perceive a narrative hole in the first edition where the gift-knight tradition is well discussed, but no mention is ever made of the one that would have been sent for Jonnecht the Second, or the ones sent to any new regent in the Eastern Kingdoms, for starters). It’s also the last time I’ll attempt to have this book address the ideas I always had in mind, yet I wasn’t skilled or experienced enough to deliver in the first edition.

My greatest obstacle in the process so far is having to read this book. I have gained a fresh appreciation for why it has been so difficult to persuade anybody else to read it. My chapter-by-chapter outline in advance of a writing retreat is about half way through, but my most recent note warns me to go back to the rather short section for Chapter Seven and actually read it closely this time, not only summarizing what’s there but noting suggested changes, just as I have done for other chapters. I can’t let myself skip steps, even if it’s a slog.

And if it’s a slog for me, that suggests why it got many looks but few sales in any store where it was on consignment.

When I took my first three books off sale, I felt like accepting them mostly as they were; I knew they were earlier works, learning is lifelong, and whether others can forgive the necessities of the journey, I of all people should be able to count on my own forgiveness. I expected to sweep through and immediately improve the reading experience by editing countless unorthodox dialogue tags. Other than that, how different could they read from any of the five books I’ve kept on sale?

So, I opened up The Gift-Knight’s Quest, 2019 re-release edition, in epub and PDF editors to make the changes in parallel. Then I encountered a word choice I would make different, closely followed by a turn of phrase that didn’t mean what I must have thought it meant… an ever expanding list of things from the first couple of pages alone.

No, thought the author, I see no quick fixes. I believe it would be less trouble to rewrite most of this book.

And then I began to consider a host of other things. The series order should change; I should direct people to read Prince Ewald the Brave first. It could be read independently of anything published prior to it, anyway, similar to why I promote it and the books after it as readable on their own. But what of the series order? If the prequels are no longer prequels, and read first, they will already have established historic facts and world-building that The Gift-Knight’s Quest attempted to address with countless flashbacks – hoping to show echoes of the past in parallel with a journey in the present. By the same token, this must render obsolete more than one infodump in dialogue.

If I merely removed flashbacks and brushed up what was left, this would become a short novel like Their Village, Their Fortress. I don’t intend for that. Scenes removed make room for scenes to be added, and I could imagine some that would better develop the present-time of the narrative.

It would need new cover art. As I vaguely recall my agreement with the original cover artist, I was permitted to use her art for that edition. The 2019 revisions didn’t push that boundary much, essentially leaving it the same book. This time, I can’t really pretend it’s the same even if the title carries over.

It’s just as well that I have no new stories in the queue. I’ll have my hands full rewriting this one. So full that even if simple logic dictates the propagation of changes to the sequels, perhaps an equal need to revise them (they rely far less on flashbacks, at least), equal need for new cover art… I write down a note when it comes to me, but beyond that, I refuse to look ahead to the next two projects implied by this one. I work better with one task at a time, so as not to feel overwhelmed. Paying work may mandate multitasking, but my creative work feels like a realm where I should consider my personal experiences and optimize my process accordingly.

The Last Gift-Knight

When I finally accepted that the difficult path for this project was the appropriate one, I created a working folder for it on my desktop named “Right Back Where I Started”. This refers to a long deleted social media message where I once cynically predicted that after a long series of failed efforts promoting all the past releases, and throwing good money after bad, I would find myself right back where I started.

I’m standing at that place now and it’s not what I once feared. There’s a life I was worried I would end up with if I never found enough support for my creative works to wildly succeed: it’s very much my life today. It feels like a good life – good enough. With the wisdom of hindsight, I look back upon the only life I could have led, shaped by decisions based very much on my personality and the boundaries of my knowledge and capabilities at the time.

A dust devil comprised of overwhelming possibilities and things that never came to pass has dispelled, leaving one path ahead that I can recognize. With the other paths stripped away, I might as well.

April 17, 2025