Category: Mendaihu universe

Update: Now available for pre-order!

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And it has a cleaner and nicer cover as well! The more I sat with the cover I posted last week, the more I thought I could still do better. While the font I’d used wasn’t all that bad, it didn’t quite sit right with me, so I played around with it for a few days until I came up with something simpler yet classier. I feel this one stands out a lot better, as does the title which stands out a lot more.

So anyway: the new remaster is available for preorder at Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple, and of course Smashwords, and will be available elsewhere hopefully very soon, for only $2.99!

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! I will also be making this book available in physical form via POD on Draft2Digital, most likely within the next few weeks! All I’m waiting on is a copy of the proof so I can see how it looks before I sign off on it. [The physical book price will be somewhere in the area of $22.99, I believe.] I’ll keep y’all posted!

The Matrix and the Mendaihu Universes

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The Matrix Resurrections, the fourth in the series, came out at the height of the pandemic, released both in theaters and streaming on HBO Max at the same time. It was kind of a weird time for all involved, of course, and while the film didn’t come close to being a financial success (mostly due to said dual release), it did feel like the start of a new chapter. And to be honest, it did kind of make me rethink how I was going to approach the fourth book in the Mendaihu Universe if I was going to write it.

We watched all four in order at that time, as A hadn’t seen movies two or three and I hadn’t seen any of them in ages, and one thing that stuck with me is that they were bigger and stronger influences on my trilogy than I’d remembered. It all lines up: the first movie opened in March of 1999, right about the time I’d been thinking about reworking The Phoenix Effect into what would become A Division of Souls. The second and third movies, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, would come out in May and November 2003, right about the time I was working on The Persistence of Memories. I especially appreciated that the side-story anthology The Animatrix came out between those two in June 2003, expanding the universe even more, creating more lore that didn’t exactly tie in with Neo’s story.

I think one of the biggest influences on the Bridgetown Trilogy is in fact the expansion of Neo’s story from the original film to its conclusion. I liked that the second and third movies took what had happened in the first — Neo’s awakening into a rebel fighter against the Matrix and its Agents — and expanded on that. Primarily, asking the question: now that you have the power, what are you going to do with it? That soon became Denni’s personal mantra throughout the Bridgetown Trilogy as well; she was well aware of what she could do, so her own conflict was deciding what she should do.

There are other moments, of course. Not gonna lie, the leather duster and the form-fitting uniform of the Mendaihu Elder is definitely a sly wink at Neo and Trinity’s get-up throughout their own series. Little things like levitation and the ability to wield Light came from direct influence as well. I made them my own by thinking about what this kind of action or ability would look like in my own created universe, and expanding from there.

Back to Resurrections, I would say that movie helped me think more about how to frame the fourth book in the Mendaihu Universe. Again, there’s direct inspiration: Resurrections explores life within the Matrix years later, when Neo has become a distorted myth and its believers have forgotten the true history. While the movie focuses on Neo’s rebirth and Trinity’s reawakening, I plan on having MU4 focus on the myth: what happens when belief in the One of All Sacred evolves and becomes a weapon itself. I had the beginnings of that particular idea after I’d released The Balance of Light, but watching Resurrections helped sharpen that idea into something I could expand upon.

Right now, I’m focusing mostly on Theadia, so this one might not arrive until maybe 2027, but we shall see. I’ve got time and I’ve still got the influences and inspirations to work with.

Almost there…

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I am SO CLOSE to finishing this go-round of the Trilogy Remaster for A Division of Souls! I’m about twenty pages from the last one (this includes the original endnotes and whatnot), so that means I can give it yet one more read-through before prepping it for the planned September release. I’m almost never this ahead of schedule!

Speaking of, I’ve also been thinking of having a bit of fun with the tenth anniversary remaster here at the blog and possibly elsewhere. Sort of like when I celebrated the project’s twentieth anniversary back in March 2017 (for those curious, I started The Phoenix Effect in March 1997 which would become the trilogy a few years later). Posting things like outtakes, maps, drawings, stuff like that. Stay tuned!

But for now, the next step in my plan is to get it all ready to go early, that way I can get back to working on Theadia. That project needs a lot of attention I haven’t been able to give to it lately, so it’ll feel great to have that on the front burner once again. I admit I have a lot of vague plans for it and a few set-in-stone ones that I’d like to focus on. Most of you have read some of the outtakes here, but for the most part it’s a story I haven’t shared with anyone yet. I hope you enjoy it!

Fly-by: keeping busy and trilogy thoughts

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Hey all! Sorry for the lack of updates this week. I’ve been primarily focusing on the last quarter of the Trilogy Remaster work for A Division of Souls and it’s taking up all my writing time at the moment. However, I’m on the final stretch, a good couple of months ahead of time! Woo! I’m still on track for the September rerelease!

Speaking of which, I assume you’re wondering if I’m going to follow through and remaster the other two books in the trilogy, and I would say I’m 99% certain that I will indeed be working on them sometime in the future! Unlike this one, however, I’m probably not going to stick to the same exact release dates as the originals. Why? Basically because I really do need to get cracking on Theadia, which has sadly fallen by the wayside over the last couple of months!

So yeah, hopefully I’ll have my head on straight come next week and we’ll be back to normal programming! See you soon!

Slowing down and enjoying life

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Okay, so I refuse to say that I’m slowing down because I’m getting old. I mean, I am, and my joints aren’t as flexible and springy as they used to be, but I refuse to use that as an excuse to be lazy.

On the other hand, I’ve been making a concerted effort, especially at the day job, where I’m trying to break a long-standing and terrible habit of trying to do everything at once as fast as I can. It’s fine every now and again, but trying to speed through a very long line of customers will only serve two things: a) I’ll exhaust myself faster, and b) I’m doing at least twice the work all my other coworkers are doing. Do I really need to go through my shift constantly stuck going 70 mph while everyone else is doing a much more sedate 45? Do I have to do it all myself when I can easily ask a coworker to help? I guess what I’m looking for is a bit of a Zen balance here. Do what needs doing when it needs doing, but realize what I don’t have to do everything else as well.

The same thing goes with my writing. I think I’ve finally grown out of the mindset that I must Write All The Things Before It’s Too Late. For the moment I’m adding a little bit at a time to my writing schedule and searching for a comfortable working level. After several weeks off due to moving, I’m back with the blogging, and I’ve been thinking about returning to the 750Words site again. I’ve even switched the notebook in my jacket pocket with a sketch pad, with the idea of just drawing purely for the fun of it when I have a moment. And interestingly enough, I haven’t done any longhand journaling for a couple of months, and I think that’s partly because I just don’t feel like I need to.

That’s one of the key things right there: do it only if you feel the need. Just like the day job, I don’t need to do any daily journaling, or get any specific word count. I just want to focus on the Trilogy Remaster, finish off Theadia, and possibly restart MU4 for the nth time. But I don’t feel an unhealthy need to do it right this second. It’s healthier this way, mentally and physically. Believe me, I know from burnout, and I’m aiming to avoid it from here on in.

And besides, we now live just a block away from one of the most famous city parks in the world, so there is zero reason why I shouldn’t be going outside and enjoying said park every now and again.

A fresh start

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It’s been a couple of days since we settled into our new place, with nearly everything unpacked and put away. We’re still organizing as we go of course, but for the most part it’s all where it needs to be or at least close by. And both cats have been monitoring and supervising every step of the way.

I made the decision early on to keep a lot of my stuff down in the garage storage until further notice so as to not crowd everything in our now-shared office. This means that most of my notebooks, early writings, journals, and so on are down there, still easy to access but locked away. It occurred to me that I don’t need them immediately. Not to worry, they’re in closed plastic bins and out of harm’s way. [And besides, my juvenilia has definitely seen worse storage times.] Whenever I finally get around to restarting the scanning project, they’ll be ready to go.

In the midst of all this, I realized that this gives me the opportunity for a completely fresh start here in the new office. When you’re living in the same place for over fifteen years, it’s kind of hard to go cold turkey on some of the habits and processes you’ve become so used to. So instead of trying to find where I left off with all of that journaling and longhand writing and so on, I’m just going to start a new moleskine notebook. Spend a little more time just enjoying listening to music instead of obsessively collecting and organizing it. Pick up those art supplies and have some fun during downtime. And most importantly, instead of finding a place to put up my whiteboard schedule (and not wanting to damage these pristine walls on day one), I’m just going to try my hand at working without one.

This doesn’t mean abandoning my two current projects, of course. I’ll need to pick up where I left off with the Trilogy Remaster, and I still need to finish off Theadia and start in on its revision and eventual publication. Those two have been at the front of my mind ever since we started this whole moving house chaos two months ago. Give me a day or so and I should be back on track!

Do I know where I’m going to go from here? Not entirely…but I’d like to think that’s a good thing. I’ve given myself a clean slate as it were, and I definitely need to allow myself to experience those more often.

Editing and tidying up

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I’m just shy of the halfway point in the Great Trilogy Remaster for A Division of Souls, which is a very good thing. That should leave me quite a lot of time on the back end to give it one more ‘bedtime reread’ (where my mistakes seem to make themselves the most visible) before releasing it out into the world come September.

It’s been ages since I’ve allowed myself to get this close to the Mendaihu Universe to the point where all the right things resonate. I’m using this to my advantage, because this means I know exactly what I was trying to do with the book. This also means that I know exactly where I didn’t quite pull that off. Anytime I find a moment that feels a bit rushed or confusing, too repetitive, or a potential continuity problem, I’m fixing it right there and then.

It’s also a different process than I’ve been used to since I first completed and released the third book in 2017. Whether it’s due to the writing styles or the shorter lengths, my later standalones went through a somewhat different process. I didn’t feel I had to immerse myself that deeply. Not that that was a bad thing, but over the years I began to miss that. Over the next few years I proved to myself that I could write econo, and enjoyed it just as much…but I missed the intensity of the deep dive. The full immersion.

I know, I know…I’ve brought this up a few times here already, but it constantly weighs on my mind while I work on this remaster. Writing the trilogy was such a powerful and life-changing event for me in that my writing chops escalated considerably within the span of just a few years, and it only got better once I started the original revision and self-publication process. Coming back to it again at this time feels like picking up where I left off, and hopefully I’ll be moving ever forward.

Deep dive

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That’s what I’ve been calling it lately: the process I used when originally writing the Bridgetown Trilogy. And it all started because I felt I hadn’t gone far enough with The Phoenix Effect.

By the time I was writing True Faith in 1995, I felt I at least had gotten the hang of the science fiction genre, and had gotten even further two years later with TPE, but at the same time I knew there was something wrong. There didn’t seem to be any issue with the universe I was creating, and I definitely felt that writing dialogue was one of my stronger creative traits…but it still felt off.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that it was the prose itself.

The problem was that my novel didn’t sound like one. It sounded more like an extremely detailed outline. And that had always been a problem with my work then…I thought I had some really neat ideas, but I was definitely failing in the execution of them. There was plenty of action, but my novel read more like a descriptive ‘A happens, B reacts, C happens, D causes a shift, etc.’ and less of an actual story. I resonated deeply with this tale about underground hackers, spiritual magic and otherworldly kinship…but none of that resonance was coming through at all.

So by 2001 or so, while working on TPE‘s revision and slogging my way through its sequel and getting nowhere, I realized that I needed to do something about it. I wanted to do better. I needed to do better. So one afternoon I decided I was going to completely rewrite it. I mean, start from scratch. Tell the whole dang story from Nehalé’s awakening ritual to the end, and do it right.

The only way I knew how to do this at the time was to do a deep dive. Instead of writing in that old outline style, I was going to make damn sure that every single scene resonated with me. It was a bit like method acting, to be honest: become the novel. Figure out why Nehalé did what he did. Understand the actions and reactions of Caren and Poe and everyone else. And don’t just be flippant about it; those actions and reactions were also part of the story, because it was who they were, and the consequences of their actions were also part of it.

By the time I’d gotten about five or six chapters in on this new version, I’d realized I’d only gotten through maybe two chapters of The Phoenix Effect, and this was EXACTLY what I’d been aiming for. So I just kept going, and eventually wrote myself an almost complete trilogy by the spring of 2005.

*

I bring this up now for two reasons:

One, after completing and self-publishing the Bridgetown Trilogy, I knew I had more to learn. I could definitely write doorstop epic novels at that point, now I wanted to prove to myself that I could ‘write econo’ (hat tip to The Minutemen, heh), so I started writing much shorter standalones. I’m quite proud of them all, especially Diwa & Kaffi, which I still feel is my best book to date. Even despite the urge to write the fourth book in the Mendaihu Universe, I wanted to stick with shorter works until I felt confident enough.

Two, it was the writing of the still-unfinished Theadia that made me realize that perhaps I was ready to do another one of those deep dives. This is another book I resonate deeply with…and like the trilogy, another book I feel isn’t quite there yet because it too needs a deep dive. Over the course of 2024 I tried the rewrite method, but somehow it still doesn’t feel complete yet. I still haven’t gone deep enough.

Fast forward to January 2025 and I’m focusing on the Trilogy Remaster and also revisiting the several sounds and words that surrounded its original writing, and I’m struck by another resonance that I’d almost forgotten about: this was how deep I’d gone with the trilogy! It had become a part of my life then, socially and creatively, and I loved every minute of it, and that was something that had been missing from my writing life for far too long, even before the revival of the trilogy in 2009.

As I’d mentioned briefly in last week’s blog entry, I feel I’ve come full circle, having learned several things along the way, and now I’m ready to cast the anchor and say this is where I belong. This is the style I love the most, yet it’s a style I haven’t allowed myself to return to. Or more to the point, I’d almost completely forgotten how to get back there in the first place, and it took several things falling perfectly into place for it to return.

Does this mean that my future novels are going to be epic in length? I can’t answer that because other than MU4 and Theadia, I don’t know where my next ideas might come from. But I can safely say that those two projects, at least, will be a return to the deep dive.

Searching for words

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I’ve finally gotten myself into the daily habit of playing a round of playing Squaredle, an online word search game. I’ve always been a sucker for a good word search (I have a few issues of Penny’s Finest Word Seeks on my desk here in Spare Oom) as I find it both distracting in a positive way, and a good use of brain focus, something I’ve been trying to fix for some time.

I’ll be honest, one of the main reasons is because otherwise I find myself doomscrolling on social media during my break times at the day job. I’ll completely admit that I fall way too easily into that trap, and I’ve been needing to escape it for a while now. I tend to hyperfocus on various things and this game is at least something that gets my mind moving and not my blood pressure. I used to do the same thing back during my college years, buying those same word search magazines from the local CVS as a way to dial back the stress of academia. And now that I think about it, those pre-writing session games of FreeCell did the same job of calming my head and helping me properly shift focus.

Whatever works, yeah?

And speaking of searching for words, while working on the Trilogy Remaster I found myself dusting off my copy of Barbara Ann Kipfer’s Flip Dictionary for the first time in ages, a reference book I’d used several times during the writing of the three books. It was an amusing and pleasant reminder of how much I enjoyed going that extra step of trying to find that perfect word that made my prose just that little bit more exciting. I think I used it during the writing of my other books, but not nearly as much as I did the trilogy, and I’m curious as to why. Perhaps I knew what words I needed, but maybe it was also part of my “writing econo” idea I’d had, keeping the prose a bit more simple and less flowery.

I think what I’m trying to get at is that I feel like I’ve been coming full circle lately in terms of writing. I’ve tried all sorts of different formats, lengths, styles and even reference material, and now I feel it’s time for me to return to the ways I love the most.

It’s part of the learning process, I suppose, and I do love the idea of constantly evolving, but I think I’m also at the point where I can safely put down an anchor and say this is where I belong.