The Story Continues

The Summer 2025 Hiatus that I announced in May is drawing to a close. I’m pleased to announce that I’m starting to write and publish again!

This post is an update about why I went on a hiatus and what new writing I’ll be sharing with my readers in the coming months. If you want to stay up to date on my latest works in progress and published writings, please subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on social media and Ko-fi.

Why did I go on a hiatus?

I went on a hiatus this summer because I’m in the process of separating from my partner and moving into a new home.

I lived with my partner for over a decade. For reasons unrelated to me, her feelings for me changed. She ultimately decided that she didn’t want to be in a romantic relationship with me and didn’t want to live together as platonic partners.

Therefore, during the months of May and June, I did some apartment hunting, found an available place that I could afford, and moved the majority of my belongings to my new apartment. I wish my former partner the best in life and hope that we’ll both find joy and success on our separate life paths.

This wasn’t how I hoped the situation would resolve itself, but I’m making the best of it. I’m getting settled into my new home and new routines. Our daughter will be spending half of her time with me and half of her time with her mother. She’s going through a big period of adjustment too.

Needless to say, I needed some time and space to process all of that emotionally and deal with the many logistical challenges of moving into a new home. My writing isn’t my primary source of income, so I needed to set it aside for a month or two while I sorted out the details of my non-author life.

What will I be writing and publishing?

Now that I’ve found a new home for myself and my child, I can start thinking about writing again.

I have so much writing to do! I’m still eager to complete all of the projects that I was working on before the hiatus. And I have a few new ideas for blog posts and other projects that aren’t directly related to my main projects. I’ll share more about those as they come to fruition.

How much I write each week will depend on a combination of what my non-writing work schedule looks like and how many sales and subscriptions I get from my writing projects. It will take some time for me to assess my progress on both of those fronts. In the meantime, here’s a broad overview of all of the writing and community projects that I’ll work on as time and energy permits.

My Two Novels, Burning and Welcome to Solardale

I’m resuming work on my two novels in progress, Burning and Welcome to Solardale.

As I mentioned before the hiatus, I’m going to focus primarily on Burning until I finish my first full draft of the novel. I’m very fond of both of these novels and I’ve heard favorable reader feedback about both of the short stories that they’re based on. However, Burning is probably closer to completion and probably the more marketable of the two. Therefore, I’m focusing more on Burning now.

I still consider Welcome to Solardale to be in active development. I will continue developing the ideas, doing occasional research, and may even write a bit of the text every now and then. But I’ll be focusing more on Burning and sharing draft chapters of it soon.

Since I’ve been through such a major turning point in my life, I also plan to read and reflect on the current draft of both novels before writing any more of either of them. I usually wait until I’ve completed a full draft to do any serious rereading and rewriting of the text. But since so much has happened in my life and the world in the past few months, I’m going to give it all another look with that in mind. 

Climate Change Books

I plan to resume development of my book review site, Climate Change Books. This site features book reviews, reading lists, and other resources to help readers find the climate change books they’re looking for.

In an age of increasing reliance on AI to read and write text for us, I foresee a growing need and demand for human curation of content. Your favorite search engine and AI chatbot can provide you with an overview of popular books about climate change and any subtopic you can imagine. Some of those responses may even be surprisingly helpful. But do you really want an AI chatbot to decide which climate change book you’re going to spend the next few days or weeks of your life reading? Or would you like to find reviews and reading lists created and curated by a living, breathing, human being who has spent countless hours reading and writing about the climate crisis?

My goal is to make Climate Change Books the first place that many readers turn to when they want to find works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry with climate themes. In the process, I also hope to make significant income from this project, either through affiliate links or by developing the site into a full-fledged bookshop where you can order your print books and ebooks directly from my site.

I believe that if I treat this project as a business, it has tremendous potential to provide considerable value to readers and a small but steady stream of income for me as the site creator and editor.

I haven’t done much with this project so far other than build the first draft of the site. I’ve added multiple original book reviews, reading lists, and other content to provide readers with a taste of what’s to come. But I haven’t actually promoted the site yet. Before moving on to that step, I plan to do some more research, including sending out a brief survey to my readers about the site and my other project.

Climate Book Review

The Climate Book Review is a radio show and podcast featuring book reviews and reading lists for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry with climate themes.

In order to make new episodes of this show, I need to read more books about climate change and write reviews of these books that I can share on the air. I essentially stopped all reading and writing during my hiatus, but now I’m getting back on track. I’ve started reading the next book I’m going to review and hope to have a new review and new episode within a few weeks.

All The Climate Feels Audiobook

I’ve started recording audio tracks for the audiobook edition of my first climate poetry collection, All The Climate Feels. So far, I’m about halfway through the book. It shouldn’t take me that long to record the remaining tracks and do some audio editing to clean them up a bit. Once I do that, I’ll set a publication date. This will likely be my next published work.

I considered looking into a professional voice actor for the audiobook. I might do that for my works of fiction. But for the poetry audiobook in particular, I want to capture the tone, cadence, and so on with my own voice.

These poems are very personal for me. I want to be sure that the audiobook embodies my feelings and my energy as I perform these poems.

Climate Gamebook

Gamebooks are works of interactive fiction that empower the reader to participate in the story by making choices.

The Choose Your Own Adventure™ book series was a popular and pioneering example of gamebooks when I was a kid. The company behind that series is currently undergoing a revival. They actively protect their copyright on terms like “Choose Your Own Adventure” and “CYOA.” Therefore, other publishers of fiction that involve some form of reader choice use broader generic terms such as gamebook and interactive fiction to describe their books and products.

I’m in the earliest stages of development of  an interactive climate fiction project under the working title Climate Gamebook. The concept is to develop a website and/or app where multiple authors publish interactive climate fiction stories that the site/app weaves together into a loosely shared world. The stories themselves wouldn’t necessarily have any direct connection to each other. But the site/app would be an immersive world of its own, allowing the reader to explore a fictional setting and choose which door to go through in order to discover and read each story.

The readers would benefit from reading a growing collection of interactive climate fiction. The writers would benefit from a bit of income through ads (or paid subscriptions to remove the ads). It’s an exciting concept that I hope I will have the time and resources to develop fully in the foreseeable future.

Climate Music

I still haven’t forgotten my climate music project! This project uses the magic of climate data sonification to translate real-world climate data directly into music. So far, I’ve published two songs using this music. My next step will be to publish an entire album of such music to go along with my All The Climate Feels audiobook.

Community Involvement

I don’t know yet how much time I’ll have for community involvement. I’d like to have a lot of time for specific types of community involvement. We’ll see how it goes.

My two main goals in terms of community involvement are to continue serving on the Carbondale Sustainability Commission and to participate in local projects that are directly or indirectly connected to municipalism.

I firmly believe that participating in democracy at the local level is always a good idea and especially important at this moment in history. We must meet in our local communities to protect each other, to resist the horrors of oppressive economic and political systems, and to create more liberatory communities and societies together.

Which project do you find most exciting?

As you can see, I have a lot of ideas for creative projects related to the climate crisis and climate justice! I could spend all day working on these projects if I didn’t have a “day job” and other responsibilities. I’ve heard of writer’s block, but so far I haven’t experienced it. Any time I have a moment to focus my attention on my projects, the creative juices flow.

Which of these projects do you find most exciting? I’ll be sending out a survey soon to help me assess what projects my current readers are most excited to see me finish first. If you want to participate in that survey or pass it along to people you know, please subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on social media and Ko-fi. You can also just contact me directly with your ideas.

In the meantime, thank you for reading!