From Hurricanes to Heroics: Progress Amid the Chaos

This week, Hurricane Milton swept through Florida, bringing devastation to many areas, including my town. Tragically, twenty lives were lost due to collapsing buildings. I’m grateful my home was spared, though the aftermath has been difficult for the community.

In the midst of all this, I managed to finish the layout for The Bjornlinga Saga just before the power went out. Now, with the proofs on their way, I’m excited about how everything is coming together. This will be my first released work from Archaios, and I’ve decided to take a slightly different approach by serializing the story into mini-books. These will be priced at $5.99—not much profit, but I want to make the work as accessible as possible. The format will be somewhere between a comic book and a novella, with illustrations on nearly every page, though they won’t be set up in panels like traditional graphic novels.

With the power out and little else to do, I decided to dive into some reading. I finished Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, a book I’d been meaning to get to for a while. It’s a popular series, but to me, it felt like quick entertainment compared to the depth of Tolkien. I gave it a 3/5 on Goodreads—well-plotted, but not something I’d return to, unlike The Lord of the Rings, which I re-read every year. I respect Sanderson for what he does, as he definitely delivers a type of storytelling that people enjoy, and I don’t spite that. He seems like a good guy. But I am a very different sort of author than him. I spend a very long time on every single sentence, striving to achieve a high level of craft and poetic language with every word. My writing is much denser, like reading Beowulf or a Norse Saga. And I am not quite as prolific as Sanderson (although I am getting faster!). I suppose I am more like Tolkien in the end, and I am okay with that.

So, I continue to press forward with my work, with my vision of Archaios. I have so very much I have created and while I am very eager to share it with the world, it has to be just right.