I started thinking about keyboards when I started writing novels. And somewhere in my late 20s, my wrists and hands started to hurt, so I began to wonder how to soften the impact of typing. I read about making sure I didn’t have arm rests digging into my forearms or elbows. The proper ergonomics for typing led to me making sure I had a keyboard tray to lower the keyboard so my arms were parallel to the floor, a decent chair, and a chair with low or no arms.

Still, wrist pain plagued me. So I purchased my first ergonomic keyboard, the Microsoft Natural Elite:

The Elite did something that surprised and confused me at first, it split the two halves of the keyboard apart. That took a couple weeks to adjust to, but the benefit of that is that it stops you from twisting your wrists:

In addition, people often ‘tent’ or raise the back of their keyboard up because it has stands there, but that’s horrible for your hands, while the Elite had stands on the front of the board by their wrist, which slopes the board away from you, which allows your fingers to ‘float’ over the keyboard in a more natural angle, with your hand hanging limp, rather than jammed upwards:

The Natural Elite, combined with a good desk chair with low arms, and a keyboard tray, helped my wrist pain a great deal. In addition, the Elite also a sort of shape to it where the TGB and YHN keys were higher than the QAZ and side keys, it rose up in the middle. That meant my hands weren’t flat, they were at a slightly more comfortable angle.

Here’s a test. Hold your wrists out in front of you in the flat, palm down position. Now rotate your hand to a 45 degree angle, now to a handshake, now slowly rotate back to palms down. What feels natural?

Look at what happens to your arm when you rotate it to face palm down:

Your arm bones literally cross over each other to create this position. Holding it for hours on end while tying induces stress, it traps nerves and blood regulation, it just isn’t good for you. By reducing how flat the keyboard is, you reduce the amount of ‘pronation’ in your arms. The Elite has a slight raise, so it offered relief.

The Elite also had very nice ‘clacky’ keys for me, so I remember that after two Elite boards, Microsoft helpfully killed it.

Thankfully they replaced it with the Microsoft Sculpt board:

It didn’t have nice clicky mechanical keys, but small chicklet keys, and for the first time, I realized I didn’t like those kinds of keys, but it was an ergonomic board.

Over time, however, the wrist pain returned, and even the MS Sculpt couldn’t keep it at bay. What to do?

I began to research other ergonomic boards. Expensive boards.

In the 1970s, in the UK, a professional typist named Lily Maltron began to take notes and do some amateur research on optimal keyboard design. She hit upon a few concepts that would, 50 years later, become adopted by online keyboard enthusiasts and cause an almost Cambrian explosion of keyboard design that we’ve seen in the last decade, but was almost the only game in town for rigorous thinking about reducing the impact of ulnar pronation and RSI impact.

Maltron’s idea was to look at ways to separate the two halves of the keyboard to allow a better angle for the arms, and to create a bowl shaped area for the keys to allow your fingers to naturally ‘dip in’ to the key well. This meant placing the keys all the same distance apart, rather than the extra movement you have to do on a flat plane. She also realized that a flat plane makes no sense because your fingers don’t end on a flat plane:

As a result, she created a bowl for the fingers, but staggered the rows, creating a modified ‘ortholinear’ style where each row of the letters is at a different depth for our different fingers. Here it is:

You can see that the keys are in up and down rows, making your fingers reach up, or down, or to the side in some cases, but not diagonally like a modern slab keyboard:

Modern keyboards are staggered because old typewriters needed the keys to be set apart so the mechanical rods that linked your key to the strike didn’t hit each other, you can see the logic of this on this old Olympia:

But there is no reason for keys to remain staggered like this in a modern keyboard, in fact, it creates a lot of issues with accuracy in modern touch typing because on a QWERTY layout, the Y key is further from the home J key than the T key is from the F key. It also makes some of the bottom row hard to feel out on a modern, staggered board.

I couldn’t afford a Maltron at the time, but I found a US company that had basically found, or imitated the same design concepts. Kinesis created a line of Maltron-like keyboards for American typists at a more affordable price point, and I was soon the owner of a Kinesis Advantage keyboard:

By the time I ordered the Kinesis, I was desperate. Typing novels meant pain. I was having to ice my hands in buckets of ice water every night and I was taking anti-inflammatories every night. Within a month, I had relief. The bowl shape was hard to get used to, but within a week or two I felt comfortable on it, and since I had already split the two halves of my keyboard with an Elite, it wasn’t too hard.

I found spreading my hands out, the bowl dipping my fingers in, and the other cool thing, the thumb clusters, really helped. In fact, putting functions on my thumbs was a huge step, because thumbs are pretty strong, and just using them for spacebar is a bit of a waste.

The $400 for a Kinesis was way less than the cost of carpal tunnel surgery that my doctor was starting to suggest I may need to look into, so it became clear it was worth the price in short order.

And then… I went down a rabbit hole.

Because, with my fingers feeling better, I started to realize that the mechanical keys on the Kinesis reminded me of how much I loved the ‘clacky’ keys on my old MS Elite, lost when I got a Sculpt, but now regained. The Kinesis came with something called “Cherry Brown” mechanical keys, and so out of curiosity, I started reading about different ‘key switches’ and ordered some samples to see what I liked. It turns out “Cherry Blue” keys that sound loud and clicky delighted me, but they didn’t come in Kinesis, even though I emailed and asked.

But reading about keys led me to the mechanical keyboard community, which eight years ago had just gotten its hands on 3d printers. Keyboard nerds were designing and making new boards with keys they liked. Some to recapture old, retro boards they liked. Some to do new things. And some to push the ergonomic designs to see if they could do better than Maltron or Kinesis.

3d printing really shifted the whole game. Whole new generations of experimentation, with the ability to print new case designs to test them, allowed a form factor to evolve that contained the orthogonal layout with depth variation so that fingers fit nicely into them, they have tenting, so that the inner column are raised up to reduce pronation, and they’re fully split so you can space them apart, and the thumb clusters sit in a natural sweep area. This is the Dactyl Manuform:

Seven or so years ago, I didn’t have the capability to hand make one of my own. It required hand-soldering the keys to a chip, so I ended up paying to have one made for me by a 3d printing enthusiast, and then eventually got a second one so I could have one at home and one at work.

Back then I had to have one custom made for me, now, people have noticed the success of the form, and now you have manufactured keyboards like the Glove80, clearly inspired by the Dactyl Manuform:

Kinesis has a fully split keyboard now, so between the Glove80 and the Kinesis Advantage, there are some good split, bowl-shaped keyboards out there now that you can buy.

A few months ago, my Dactyl’s started to get finicky, and I realized they were hand-made, and near the end of their lives. In addition, over seven years, the technology had gotten better. Instead of having to use a paperclip to bridge pins on a chip to force the keyboard to reboot and mount up so you can reprogram the keyboard (choose what the thumb keys are, or if you want a different layout, or if you want to use layers). I ordered a new Dactyl from a custom maker, unaware of the Glove80’s existence, that uses a system called Vial to program the board. It’s super easy to reprogram the board, which is neat.

But I had two keyboards dying, and while digging around, I found another development in the keyboard world.

Back in the late 90s, I learned about a keyboard called the “Datahand” keyboard. You’ve likely seen it as a prop in an SF show:

The idea behind it is that each little cluster has the ability to press down, press down southward, flick up northward, or move east or west.

Created by an ergonomic research company that went public, the keys were so light to tap, and required so little effort RSI sufferers praised it so highly it caught my eye. It saved careers. But the company went out of business in the early 00s.

But that 3d printing revolution I mentioned? Tinkerers started playing with recreating the Datahand so that they could repair it, or get its functionality back because when users who depended on the Datahand lost it they were also facing the dilemma of maybe losing their careers. So out of that came something called the “Lalboard” which allowed you to measure your hand and try to print a version of the Datahand.

From that, another tinkerer who had a Datahand die on them, looked to the Lalboard and began to iterate on the design to make it fully adjustable to any hand type or shape. That became the Svalboard:

The Svalboard uses magnets in the paddles to snap back into place. They only need 20grams of force to actuate, over the 70-90 grams of regular keyboard keys. The fact that all the paddles are just within a millimeter or so of your fingers, each item can be untightened and moved to fully adjust any part of the keyboard. The palm rest is actually only supporting your palm, not digging into your wrist and causing complications with blood flow or compressed tendons.

It’s pricey not making it yourself, but all the parts can be printed, I have copies of the STL files, and the mechanical parts are off the shelf.

I ordered one of these as my home setup, using savings. Pricey, yes, but two months ago I was starting to get, again, some pain… only in my mousing wrist. I set out to solve this by moving my editing to keyboard only, using the Glyph editing system I mocked up to use keys instead of a mouse. However, I was still having to use the mouse a ton, and when I saw that my dream keyboard since the late 90s was now once again available I noticed that the new inventor had added trackballs right into the design. I wouldn’t ever have to lift my hands off my ‘keyboard’ to mouse about.

This has radically reduced my wrist strain on my mousing hands. And the benefits after six weeks of use are that my hand is healing up really nicely.

So right now, the Kinesis, the Glove80, or the Svalboard seem to be amazing choices for ergonomic keyboards. And as expensive as the Svalboard is, it’s a *fraction* of the cost of my health insurance deductible for the Svalboard.

Six weeks ago, when I got a Svalboard delivered, I started out being able to type a mere 20-30 words per minute. As of today I’m typing in the mid to high 60 words per minute. I type at about 80-90 words per minute on my Dactyl Manuform at work. I’m imagining that in a few weeks I’ll match that speed.

I’ll shortly post more about the Svalboard, learning to use it, what it feels like, but my recommendation is: if you have wrist pain, arm pain, finger pain, carpal tunnel pain, this is way, way cheaper than surgery (which isn’t always guaranteed to solve the carpal inflammation) and it is harder to adjust to than it was to adjust to my first split keyboard, but once adjusted, this is clearly a huge level up.

So here’s a project that I’ve been working on for the last 10 years that I’m going to just put out there for others to see what they think, or maybe use.

I find editing large amounts of text in a modern OS to be painful to my wrists. Using a mouse to select text, move it around, then switching back and forth between the mouse and the keyboard adds to the strain. I’ve been very invested in ergonomic keyboards and even alternate keyboard layouts to help my wrists. But no matter what you do with the keyboard, editing is still often a painful process due to the mouse.

This isn’t a new problem. Before operating systems got graphical user interfaces the keyboard was the only input source, so this problem was attacked by programmers and early writing programs. Early programmers used text-only systems for editing their code. vim, emacs, and spacemacs are common tools (spacemacs is an update to emacs, but some consider its own thing) used still to this day, as programmers editing large amounts of code find keeping their hands on the keyboard is efficient.

Early text editing programs also had that issue as well. With no mouse, how did writers in the early 80s or 70s using their early programs go back and edit their stories or novels or even business reports?

They used the keyboard.

In programs like Wordstar, writers used key combinations to navigate the cursor around the screen, select text, and edit it. Many writers still use this 50-year old program, rigging up DOS environments, or paying programmers to keep it up and running because the keyboard shortcuts are deep habits, and they don’t have to pick their hands off the keyboard over to a mouse and back constantly.

I’ve heard writers in my field praise Wordstar and the ability to move around the text with keys only but when I was editing I began to wonder about helping my wrists out by learning a keyboard navigation system. I began some years ago by looking into emacs and vim, as I didn’t know of any systems for non-programmers. emacs I found tough to master as it required a lot of memorization up front to get into using it right off the bat. It uses a system that is almost grammar like. Powerful, but hard to get started with.

I spent some time looking into vim as well, and began using it while in Obsidian, a text editor that I use to write in that uses it. The power of moving the cursor around with keys was clear, but over and over I found it hard to memorize. I’m adhd, so the instructions that came with vim required me to keep a printout near my screen to look up commands. It felt unintuitive to me, particularly the use of hjkl keys just didn’t map to anything that made sense to me and my fingers, even after several years of trying, would still get tripped up. This doesn’t make sense to me:

But WASD keys for gaming, as that is a paradigm I have instinctively wired into my fingers:

Arrow keys, movement on a keyboard, are 3 keys on the bottom and one on top. It’s just the way it is in my head, and fighting it is counterproductive for me, even after trying years of remapping my brain to the vim style.

So what to do?

Some years ago I paid a programmer to help me code a system that used IJKL keys to move around when I tapped a key, but it was a bit overcomplicated to set up, but it started me down the idea of designing my own layout that worked in a way that didn’t fight my arrow key neuroprogramming. I’ve tested out several variations of it, but decided to spend my Fall Break actually turning it into something I’d use as I’d found myself looking up vim commands again that I’d forgotten during the semester as I hadn’t been editing.

What I wanted was something that I would start using without thinking about.

My first iteration of a mockup that I called ‘vigor’ some years ago:

The core idea was to be able to hit the capslock key and at the very least be able to move around with arrow keys (launch edit mode). But even this required a lot more memorization than I felt was needed.

The next iteration began a few weeks ago when I downloaded an app for my MacBook Air called Karabiner-Elements which allowed key remapping. It had an implementation of vim that worked system-wide, because the little bit of vim I was using only working in Obsidian. If I was going to take on the trouble of memorizing any system, I wanted it to work in as many different writing environments as possible.

Again, though, I found vim to not work in a way my brain liked. So using Karabiner, and using a set of keyboard maps called vim mode plus for guidance to see how to write the json code to remap the keys, I started creating a new setup. The idea was to hit a key (‘d’) using my left index finger to then be able to select text, not just move it around.

This was my first attempt at a keyboard that could fit where my fingers felt more comfortable using that as a guiding idea:

I’ve spent a week fiddling around with it and quickly realized that there was some user interface and user experience issue with it, as it required some memorization. I could use line up or down, and word left or right, and use capslock to pop in and out. But I found some of the logic missing until I rearranged things around:

So hitting capslock pops me into the editing mode, and then the IJKL keys move me around. Hold the ‘d’ key while in this mode, and they get selected.

That felt natural, I was moving text around and editing in minutes. Dropping from paragraph in the upper row, to word, to then character made intuitive sense, even when I forgot the map that knowledge remained. Moving the end of line keys to other side of the arrow keys also made more intuitive sense, and since operating systems don’t think like authors, I don’t use them as much as they jump to the left of the page, not to the beginning of the sentence. A line and a sentence aren’t the same in programmer minds, I don’t yet know how to get around this, so they work there.

I call it ‘Glyph’ and I am sure it can be tweaked, but I’m basically using it in this current incarnation with Karabiner, and I’ve posted the JSON files up on a GitHub page so anyone can download Karabiner-Elements and import 4 JSON files and use it if they’re someone who works with a lot of text, aren’t interested in vim and emacs, and are intrigued by not having to use a mouse.

Here is a link to the GitHub page for Glyph where the JSON files are kept, with some more instructions on how to enable it.

I had trouble sleeping last night, and got curious to see if there’d been any reviews of the story, and rounded them up below because, well, might as well get something positive out of a sleepness night, right? Additionally, I’m trying to enjoy my victories a bit more, as in the past I’d been flying so fast I’d never get a chance to enjoy having a story published.

I put a lot of blood on the page to make this story happen. I am still juggling the fatigue and brain fog of Long Covid, though low dose Naltrexone has gotten me back on the horse, we’re cantering, not galloping. The story was originally written for a very, very gracious invitation to write a story for an anthology that is doing things I wanted to be a part of and was utterly honored to be asked to submit to. But my exhaustion levels meant that although I worked on this for months, and was given extensions, I still missed the deadline.

The editors tried so hard, but I hadn’t gotten on the new meds yet, and it was a challenge.

But I eventually, weeks later, limped over the finish line of the story and started revising it so that it could be sent out anywhere, and I’d always dreamed about having a story in all three of what were the big magazines when my career started (Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF magazines were the Big 3). It’s a bucket list item, made even more meaningful by the fact that this was a challenging story written during one of the most challenging times. Thankfully I’ve got more pep in my step, I’m working on a novel and a couple of story commissions right now. I’m still not as fast as I’d like, but I’m writing more now, but this felt like a giant, freaking achievement on a number of levels.

Howard at My Reading Life:

“In the Halls of the Makeshift King” by Tobias S. Buckell (4,928 words) — A pilgrim to the Alcove Above is made Makeshift King and has a big decision to make. The shaft is described slowly and in a way I found hard to picture, but the civilization-level decision foisted on one individual is intriguing.

Mina at Tangent Online:

“In The Halls of the Makeshift King” by Tobias S. Buckell follows Yehin on his pilgrimage. He is one of many pushing a huge capstan that will one day open a door. Nobody knows what is behind that door. As the story circles and we share Yehin’s feeling of futility, we move from frustration to Yehin’s final understanding of the pilgrimage. This is not because he has been chosen to become Makeshift King, but because he finally understands the meaning behind his seemingly hopeless pilgrimage. This tale also rewards the reader’s patience in the end.

Rich Horton’s short fiction reviews:

“In the Halls of the Makeshift King”, by Tobias S. Buckell, is a mysterious story, only opening up a bit over time. A large group of what seem to be worshippers are engaged in helping to push a massive capstan, that might in time open the Great Door. Yehin is one of these — and now he is facing a radical change in his status … which might (or might not) be critical to the effort to open this Door. I don’t want to tell more — it’s a purposely weird story, and the affect depends on the slow reveal of Yehin’s fate. It’s a fine story, if a bit too abstract for my taste.

Goodreads (Michael Frasca):

This was one of Asimov’s best issues in a long time.

…

Pointless rituals may not be as pointless as they seem. As the grinding wheel slowly turns over the millennia, a community is held together.

Goodreads (George Kasnic):

In The Halls of the Makeshift King was a near miss in my book, it ended well, but I never felt the environment and the physicality of what was happening, although the philosophical musings were top notch.

From the Routledge page:

Caribbean Futurism and Beyond is a tripartite combination of interviews with writers of the sf (speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and folklore) genre, literary and cultural analysis of those interviews within the context of seven discrete yet overlapping dimensions – folklore, mythology, children’s and young adult literature, science, technology, climate disaster, and identity; and a theoretical basis of Caribbean futurism as an esthetic practice reflecting not just future but also past and present experiences of Caribbean people. The combination of interviews, analysis, and theory contributes to the ongoing questions that have been and will likely remain central to being and belonging to the Caribbean. The authors share their creative processes, inspirations, and the unique ways they address Caribbean experiences through stories that expand the boundaries of the genre.

If you are ordering for a campus or library, you can find out more about the book at Routledge.

I’m always honored to be asked for my thoughts about this topic, so I’m pretty damn psyched to see this in print. I honestly can say I never expected my work to be studied this way when I started out, so as an English major, always delighted by this.

The CSS code to style your text to look like a novel’s is:

/* It's easy in reading mode. */
p {
    text-indent: 35px !important;
}
/* Source mode is harder. */
.cm-line:not(.HyperMD-list-line, .HyperMD-header, .HyperMD-codeblock, .cm-line:has(.cm-hmd-frontmatter), .cm-line:has(.cm-meta), .cm-line:has(.cm-comment)) {
    text-indent: 35px !important;
}

.markdown-preview-view p::first-line {
  text-indent: 35px !important;
}

Just copy that into a text file (like TextEdit, hit Format –> Plain Text and then paste this text in) and save it as whatever.css and put it in your CSS snippets folder in Obsidian and you are good.

But all that time, I was still using an app called Ulysses to write fiction in.

Until the CEO of the app wrote a long blog post admiring Trump and stanning hard for him as a ‘business man’ and I was so disgusted I quit the app and cut the monthly fee.

Which got me thinking, why was I renting my software? Somewhere along the line I just kept going for convenience, and wasn’t paying attention to the bigger picture. And then a writer I follow on BlueSky mentioned using Obsidian to write fiction…

…and it was like a ‘no duh’ moment.

Obsidian keeps notes in Markdown format, so they’re accessible by *any* text reader, and when I switched to Ulysses I got used to Markdown. I was halfway there. And when I showed people Obsidian, I would say “if there’s something you want in the app, there’s probably a community plugin that does it.” So what did I need for a writing app?

This is Obsidian out of the box, and you can see, like Scrivener or Ulysses, it has a left pane with files, and a right hand area you write in. So it could work…

I wanted the source documents to be kept in Markdown. Scivener kept files in a custom format, and even Ulysses had its own modified Markdown, but I wanted my files to be future proofed if a better Markdown program appeared.

I wanted a word counter.

I wanted full screen writing with no distraction via a key combo.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized I could use some of Obsidian’s features to create things for my novel that I usually put in a spreadsheet.

Many, many years ago, Scott Westerfeld posted how he used Scivener to create ‘pace charts’ for his book, something that really resonated with me and that I did then on paper, and then Excel, but moved to imitating using Scrivener the same way Scott did. Here is the picture Scott has on his blog post about this:

In addition to these items, I also generally keep a half sentence of info about how the chapter starts, and how it ends, as that is information I think important to the structure.

Each chapter gets information, which is technically what comp/sci folk call ‘metadata’ (data about data). Each chapter has data associated with it, whether notes on paper, in one’s head, that I keep somewhere, what if I could keep it in Obsidian?

Obsidian notes can have “YAML” code hidden on the page, anything before – – – in Obsidian can be hidden at the top of the page, so at the top of each chapter, it looks like this as I write:

Invisible unless I click (or type a command quick, which is something else cool I’ll get to) is the data about each chapter hidden away for me:

So expanding on Westerfeld’s pace chart idea, I keep track of some things that I like having notes on. Who is the PoV character? Where is this chapter mainly taking place? Who all is in this scene? What timeline? A summary. How the chapter opens. How it closes. Any stakes? And, because this is a complicated, huge rewrite, is the chapter done, partially has pieces from the earlier draft of some years ago, or do I need to write one from scratch?

I tend to keep the info visible in a small pane open that shows me the hidden metadata in a corner of the program:

So the day to day, it looks like this:

That data allows me to quickly write a small piece of code that generates a really neat outline view that is totally within my control (what shows, what I want out of it). Here’s an overview of another pane I often have open when looking at structural issues in the book. I have here links to each chapter, the PoV is color coded to help me spot clumping and patterns of PoV shifts, locations are tagged, progress ont he chapter is also visible, a quick summary, and timeline and other characters involved are all visible at a quick glance.

This has helped me as I created the structure for the new draft, as I totally rearranged everything in the book to be told chronologically from the set of flashbacks the first draft favored (and sadly didn’t work, creating an immense project in the process. I should drop this book as it’s a monster of a project, but, I can’t get the world and these characters to leave me alone):

So pulling it all together, here is my working environment for the novel In Empire’s Shadow:

The glossary is like a wiki, every new fact I add to the book gets put in the glossary. There’s a map in the lower left, I click on the image and a larger map jumps out to look up stuff.

The chapters I’m working on are in the top middle area, I keep 3-4 chapters open in the left, and the current chapter in the right. The panel in the upper right is a word count plugin for Obsidian. The outline is at the bottom, but often I will open another chapter or scratch pad down there while writing.

To the lower right, a chapter word count log that monitors the words per finished chapter and provides an estimate of the book’s final count (I said it was a big book).

I can trigger a plugin called “Zen Mode” that does this:

Most of Obsidian can be navigated by key commands, so I don’t have to use the mouse much when in it. And it also has plugins to emulate VI or eMacs, which allow for mouseless text editing; I can ‘grab’ whole lines and delete, copy, move them around, I can move the cursor without a mouse and select text without a mouse.

All of that makes it a Swiss Army knife for writers, I think.

I’ve also moved a lot of my writing administration out of Excel and into a Writing Admin dashboard. It’s still in progress, but I am keeping track of submissions, tasks, and projects for my career in there. The complexity of tracking 150+ stories, over a dozen novels, and six collections, means I needed something to help me out. Obsidian has been my second brain.

I’ve been showing people this on my laptop for a year now, and they’ve begged me to write about it. So I’ve finally sat down to screenshot the process and write it up.

You can find Obsidian here. It’s not open source, but shares a lot of the values. And the files are kept as text, so you control them. Download it and play around. Play with some pretty themes, check out some plugins. It costs nothing to tinker with.

Out of the box, the themes show Markdown, I use a theme to hide the Markdown as I write and display the text like a printed book. It’s very customizable!

Update:

I updated the word count feature and the theme of my Obsidian lately to better match my needs. Here’s what it looks like:

I created a word count feature that is a small python script that monitors a folder for any changes to my fiction folder, and logs them in the backround to a CSV file. I then use Obsidian plugin ‘Dataview’ to create charts of the data. Above, I have Obsidian set up with 8 open tabs arranged to show me:

upper left: a wiki like index to all my notes about the book

lower left: a clickable minimap of the world that leads to a larger map

middle upper left: the latest 4-5 chapters prior to the latest I’m working on

middle upper right: Chapter 11, my latest

lower middle: a dataview that scrapes the metadata to show me the outline so I can quickly scan ahead for content info

upper right side: properties of the file I am currently in (shows me things like what PoV, who’s in the scene, what day it takes place, where it takes place)

middle right: chart of the progress of the book, how many words are in each chapter, final edit chapters in green

lower right: the new daily words on the project chart, just started last night, so only two days info

That’s my dashboard for the current novel.

I’m using Primary as my theme, as I fould that AnuPuccin was glitching with Kanban 2.0, a plugin I use for to-do management in other areas. It slowed my Obsidian down a lot, and when I changed themes, it was back to snappy with Primary and I could use many of the same light mocha color schemes as I had on AnaPuccin.

The story is The Emperor and His Totally Amazing, Awesome Clothes and can be found at the link, here’s the opening scene. If you enjoy it, spread the link around, consider supporting the website via Patreon here at the link.

I don’t want to say that Hans Christian Anderson didn’t tell the whole story. Hans was a noble collector of tales handed down from generation to generation all throughout the countryside. But one has to understand some of the complications with the narrative as it’s been picked up and remembered.

There are many claims to the truth of this story, and, as a scribe, it is my duty to head out and collect them. After spending several weeks canvassing the countryside, I submit this report to you in earnest.

We begin with the initial core story that you may well be familiar with, and it is this:

Many years ago, there was an emperor so vain and fond of new clothes that he spent all his money being well dressed. One day two swindlers came to town and let it be known that they could weave the greatest fabric in all the world. In fact, it was so fine that only those people who were stupid or unworthy of their positions could not see it.

The emperor, dazzled by the idea of dressing in the finest thread in all the world, allowed the swindlers, who pretended to weave the cloth but were really holding empty air, to trick him into making him a fine new outfit.

Then he paraded himself through town, as his courtiers and officers held empty air, pretending it was the train of his gown.

It was a child that pointed at the emperor—a child cloaked in the innocence of their age—who cried out, “that man has no clothes on!”

That’s roughly what everyone remembers, and to tell the story again, it seems like the spell is broken. The high, unworldly clarion call of the child pierces the entire sham and shatters it. The emperor is shamed, and tries to carry on down the street, but knows the truth of it all.

But that’s not how the real world works, is it?

Things did not go as planned. The utter exhaustion I was working under was not apparent, but as I tried to get back into the things I love to do, it became more apparent. I started therapy when we found out Emily had cancer, because I knew I was running on empty and would need help, and that’s been helpful, but as my friends pointed out, we took a lot of hits this year in health. On top of that, our university underwent some dramatic turns (announcing financial issues, then a merger, and then the ending of the merger and return to independence, the resignation of our university president) and all of that taking place within an atmosphere of oppressive state moves against all education creating more stress about the nature of the job, as well as the fact that I’m not a US citizen and now am living in a hostile state.

It’s a lot.

So, I’ve written a number of chapters of In Empire’s Shadow, but the other project took up all my free energy.

And I can’t talk about it.

Yet.

What I’m up to will become clear in about 2-3 weeks, and I’ll be able to talk. I’ve been keeping my head down, waiting for clarity and a decision that has to be made by an institution before I can reveal. I can’t talk about it yet, and it is the thing taking up all my waking hours and working time.

That’s hard.

But things could, in just a couple of weeks, become radically different and I’ll be able to share.

In the meantime, every day I wake up feeling the weight of the news that seeps through no matter how I try to filter or keep it carefuly corralled to certain times of day, as we need to get on.

I’m functioning in terms of cooking, cleaning, brushing my teeth, but the levels of dissociation that I hit sometimes are new levels because I have read history, and I suspect there’s so much worse to come before the better.

I’ve turned down a lot of travel and speaking gigs to keep my risk minimal, but that hits the pocket book. Before Covid, I was making decent money from the speaking and teaching workshops circuit, all that money went away. It’s one of the reasons I pivoted to teaching university, but that feels teneous as a career in the US now.

I’ve gone through many of the stages of grief this summer. Grief for a future I thought I was headed toward that no longer seems to exist. Grief for all the human beings I already see suffering, and the ones I know will be suffering once hospitals close, medicare is shut off after the midterms, more pollution is dumped, more public land sold, less science developed, medical miracles dying on the vine as NHS funding lies in limbo.

Unnecessary and cruel suffering that didn’t have to happen.

As a young man, having lived through a chaotic childhood with hardships and political turmoil, I developed a cynical and misanthropic view of the world. I operated on a warm level as a person, but in the privacy of my head, I viewed humanity as idiots who repeatedly punched themselves in the face due illiteracy and ignorance.

I spent my 30s working hard to become empathic, kind, and patient with humanity. It was work I was so proud of, changing how I saw people at their most fundamental because wise people, the people I wanted the world to be full of, grew that within themselves.

But reader, I confess to finding it a struggle when I see the ribs of a child starving to death in Gaza and videos of people smashing food headed for that child.

I find it hard when I see people laughing about the hospitals that will close, or cheering ICE on.

I’m gobsmacked to see Republicans now wavering on whether they’re against pedophila because their golden calf is telling them there’s nothing to see.

And my childhood self rises again, and it says “see? I told you that work in your 30s was a waste. The world is a dark place full of monsters that pretend to be human.”

That isn’t how I want to see the world. I wanted to see it full of promise, potential, and dynamic vigor. I wanted to see it like Dr. Who: humans being humans, flawed, yes, but ultimately, with some help, good and worth saving.

I’m trying.

Not coincidentally we’ve been watching a lot of Dr. Who as a family. And it lands on me that this escapism, the hope, the fun, the vision of a better view of humanity, this is how fiction helps us navigate hard times.

There’s a reason the facists are coming for literature and art again.

I’m just an author. So I’m going to step back into my books and try to write something that maybe will help someone else like me escape for a bit.

And maybe, if I’m lucky, it’ll be this current book.

Maybe.

Right now, it’s something I’m clinging to. A place I can go and get away from it all.

Another world. One where, although the odds are stacked against them, if they can stand together and believe there’s something better on the other side of the journey, we can make it there together.

It’s what I’ve got, right now.

I’m glad to have survived a rough year. The intensity of a schedule where so much work comes home with you combined with so much uncertainty (country, workplace, personal crisis) meant a lot of challenges faced this year.

But as of Tuesday my grades are turned in. I spent yesterday napping. Today is errands. Catching up on two weeks of email. Thinking about the impact of LLMs on college students a lot (for reasons).

Last year I slept for two weeks after. This year with LDN (I talk about My Long Covid brain fog beater: low-dose Naltrexone here) I am no longer so exhausted my hands are shaking like they were after graduation the prior two years, though I am beat.

I figure I will take it easy until after the weekend…