My posting to the blog has become especially sporadic (and maybe even that’s a generous description), but I’m going to make an effort to get back into the habit. A lot has happened in the past year or so, and I expect I’ll set aside some post to address particular events and experiences. But, perhaps, there’s some summarization to do here.

I turned 40 in August. I’m still not sure what that milestone really means, or how I should feel about it, but neither of those things stopped it from happening. Half-jokingly, I started my “mid-life crisis while I was 39–I figured if I were intentional about it and got the jump on it, I could maintain control over all of the stress, weirdness, and sudden confrontations with mortality and human frailties. That’s been mostly true, I suppose.

That decision was, perhaps, two-fold. The first part of it was that I decided to learn how to play guitar. I’ve long wanted to, and I wanted to take on a project that was difficult and out of my typical skillset for the next stage of my life. So, I bought an old Squier electric and inexpensive amp from one friend and traded a bottle of scotch for an old Fender acoustic with another back in March of ’22. More than a year later, and my collection has expanded to four electric guitars, a few more amps, and a rotating collection of pedals and peripheral gear. The picture for this post is of my 40th birthday guitar, a Fender Player Plus HSS strat that I really love.

After about a year of learning, I’m comfortable calling myself a guitar player–so long as I quickly qualify that with the caveat that I’m nowhere near a good guitar player. I’m picking things up relatively quickly, I think, and I tell people that the more I play guitar, the more I want to play guitar. I’m not sure if there’s a better thing to be said for a hobby. I’ve got a great support network for it–a trio of cousins who are or have been professional musicians, a brother-in-law who seems to me a guitar virtuoso (and who will send me bespoke instructional videos when I have questions!), a number of friends who play and can either send me tips, or, as I get a little better, come “jam” with me.

If nothing else, I’ve come to a greater appreciation of music through my experience. Previously, my musical experience was the customary forced-lessons in piano as a young child (the only thing I learned from which was a habit to keep my fingernails very short) and an especially painful year of “playing” French horn in middle school. K’s proved especially patient with me as I geek out over the history of guitar pedals or musical styles and techniques. Before picking up the guitar, I hadn’t spent much time on YouTube, but I’ve found a collection of guitar-related channels (60-Cycle Hum and Josh Scott’s JHS Pedals channel being among my favorites.

Picking up that hobby has taken up a lot of time, and that’s a reason (but not an excuse, mind you), for my silence on the blog. In other events:

In May, we got our third placement of a foster child, a beautiful baby girl who came to us straight from the hospital. As seems to often be the case, we were led to expect a high likelihood that this would go to adoption. But, after a month of holding, feeding and cuddling a newborn, thinking about a future where I’d walk her down the aisle one day, and all of the things that accompany all of that, the Department of Family Services decided to place our baby with someone else–not because of anything we’d done, and under circumstances that seemed neither fair nor to follow the law in considering a child’s best interests. We were powerless to do anything about it–that’s just part of being a foster parent.

It was heartbreaking; soulcrushing. I can’t remember the last time I’ve hurt that badly, nor can I think of a time in decades that I’ve cried that much. On the other hand, that pain means that I did things right–I loved that child with everything I have, and to do otherwise would be failing as a foster parent. I might write more about that experience, but it’s still raw, and I’m honestly just not sure I’m ready to. We’re just about to open up to take our fourth placement, so we may be starting over with a new child or new children in a week or in several months.

And that experience led to the second step I took in preparation for turning 40–I started seing a therapist. As someone who’s suffered from depression for more of my life than I haven’t, it does seem odd, I suppose, that I haven’t seriously seen a therapist before. But, since my depression seems to be linked to my brain chemistry more than cognitive issues, I haven’t really felt the need. As a strong believer in mental health and the value of therapy, as someone who very much values continuing to grow as a person, and as someone who expects that the next phase of my life will introduce new stresses and different kinds of life events to address, I figured it was a good time to jump in. So far, so good–while I wouldn’t say that I’ve had any dramatic breakthroughs in seeing a therapist, it has given me opportunities to think about who I am, why I am the way I am, and how I might become a better person and achieve more of my goals. Overall, it’s been an empowering experience.

K and I spent almost two weeks in Cochabamba, Bolivia in the second half of July on a church trip. Bolivia was not a place I’d ever expected or planned to travel, but it was an eye-opening, humbling and enjoyable experience. I plan to have a full post on this experience soon, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

In other news, perhaps because of turning 40, perhaps because of therapy, or perhaps just because it’s been a long time coming, I’m turning back to writing with a renewed focus and a strong belief that it is the most important thing for me to do as a matter of contributing to the world at large. As part of this focus, I had to pare away some of my hobbies and distractions–things that aren’t bad by any means, things that I enjoy, but things that, at the end of the day, aren’t as important to me as the things I’ve chosen to prioritize. So, I’ve let go of miniatures games, shooting sports, and a long-sitting desire to return to playing airsoft so that I can devote my free time to writing, roleplaying games, guitar and video games (though I intend for that last category to receive less time than it has in the past, but we’ll see).

I’ve recently returned to several writing projects I’m excited about. The first is a dramatic rewrite of my fantasy novel, Things Unseen. The longer it sits, the less satisfied with it I am, and I’ve spend a good deal of time thinking of ways to improve the story. I’ve recently begun to replot the novel and work on more background for characters; with the goal of finishing the planning for the rewrite by the end of November and starting the rewrite in December.

The second project is the expansion and rewriting of a theology book I started to work on quite some time ago. As I’ve read, learned and studied more theology, and worked out more of my own ideas (some of them through writing on this blog), I think it’s time for me to put pedal to the metal and get a full functioning draft written on this. For me, personally, writing theology seems to be an easier task than writing fiction, particularly since these ideas are largely already developed and just need to be organized and written with clarity, so I expect this project to progress at a faster pace than the Things Unseen novel

I’ve also been spending some time building some new settings and genre-rules for the Cortex Prime system, with the intent of streamlining some of my RPG work (and play) by using one system for all games I run, allowing me to focus more on setting-building and storytelling rather than endlessly tinkering with rules (which I’m wont to do). I haven’t seen a commercial license for Cortex yet, so I don’t know whether I’ll be putting these settings and rules hacks out under the non-commercial license or waiting until I can generate some revenue (mostly as an indication of how well-received the work is) with the commercial license. I’m sure I’ll be sharing setting details in future posts on the blog–I’ve been working on a cyberpunk setting called What We Are and a hardish sci-fi setting called Astra Inclinant.

I think the next posts to come will be a review of Starfield (which I’ve finished) and of Phantom Liberty (which I have yet to finish). Regardless, the plan is to get back into a regular schedule of posts to the blog on all the usual sorts of subjects I’ve written about previously.