Update 9-19-25:’

I have finished the second draft of the book! I am super happy with it. I’m going to do another pass over the first third, because I think it starts a little slow, but once that is done, I’m going to send it to some of my readers for feedback.

Guys, I’m just excited to be playing in this world again—to be dealing with Benson and Becky and Maxfield, and some entirely new characters who I adore.

I have had a really terrific writing day, a good day at work, a great session at therapy—I even caught an avocado on its perfect day of ripeness. It was a good day…

And then I looked at the news.

Things can be so disheartening, especially now, especially when you have skin in the game and it just feels like there’s nothing left that you can do. You’ve voted. You’ve written your representatives. You’ve protested. It’s very hard, on days like today, to know what to do….

So for reasons that may or may not (they may) relate to the fact that I am working in a long-awaited book involving aliens, I have been reading a lot of Carl Sagan. Sagan has always fascinated me in a way that few other science communicators do: he presents science as not only fascinating--many science communicators do that--but as something that is intrinsically spiritual and humanizing.

There are other astronomers I find interesting, like Stephen Hawking or Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who talk about the universe in glowing and effusive language, but they don't talk about why the mightiness of the universe makes humanity so magnificent. If anything, many of these scientists make astronomy devalue humanity, rather than the other way around.

Anyway, all of this to say: Carl Sagan is pretty great….

Yesterday was a really great day. Not for the world at large, because—yeesh—but for me, it was a really great day.

You see I'm a writer, but I'm also a person with severe depression, and I fight and fight to get words on a page, but it's SO HARD. I have been scribbling thoughts in a notebook for months, not getting anything close to good. (I even decided last week that I was going to give up on novels and try writing a screenplay instead.) But then something just clicked….

My family came back from a vacation today. We don't take a lot of vacations, what with the cost of everything and work and school schedules. But we're fortunate because we live in Utah, and Utah is amazingly beautiful. So we packed up the kids and drove down to a little Airbnb in Panguitch, a hub that allowed us to visit Bryce Canyon National Park one day and Zion National Park the next. And let me tell you: it was fantastic…