For the calendar year 2026, I did something I hadn't done before and, honestly, probably will not do again: I scheduled the entire year's big "comics." That is, the multipage stories in visual format that I put out primarily as PDFs. (I'm still ambivalent about calling them "comics." See the second section of About the Comics for why.)

I did this because of two circumstances I realized at the end of 2025 were going to collide.

First, I had finally figured out how the Coldpoint storyline was going to tie up -- it was always going to be a fixed arc, but until a fit of planning and plotting during the work on "Death By the Clock," the sixth story, I wasn't sure how many more there were going to be or how it was going to go. I'd already been trying to pick up the pace so as to get that project off the books; three years of one-story-a-year wasn't cutting it. I did three in 2025, and realized that to finish it up, I'd need to do three in 2026.

Second, I had several major plot sequences I wanted to finish up in Sleeper Squad, things which were going to take several issues of buildup, and that's the kind of thing that takes advance planning.

This isn't the first time that's happened. All of the issues from 20 through 29 had to be at least roughly plotted at the same time, because there were so many things that had to happen in a certain sequence, including elapsed time in-story, etc. I sat down and did a massive plotting session at the beginning of 2022 and worked up all ten of them (some vaguely, but I needed at least the bones) ... and then delivered all ten of them that year, which is kind of astonishing in hindsight, but it's also worth noting that the stories tended to be shorter then than they are now and I also wasn't quite as careful about putting them together. My work's a lot less sloppy than it was in 2022, but the issues take twice as long to do now.

And I didn't schedule those issues. They happened as they happened, and I didn't have the "take a breather" policy (more on that in a moment). 20-22, as you can see from the dates out on the top page, were done back-to-back, except they weren't. There were two other pieces I did in the interim, and here I am happy to still have my DA comments to check, because they say that I did "The Womanizer" "because I finished 20 a week earlier than expected" and that left me with "a little free time to put together this silly little short," and that "Meet The Woman of Your Dreams," the Valentine's Day story, was because "22 is taking a long time, so I took a break from it today to put this together." But "Womanizer" is eight pages in a non-standard layout that used fewer renders than I'd normally need, and "Meet the Woman of Your Dreams" is three pages with no dialogue that was literally a day's work and isn't even in a PDF because four pages is my usual minimum for those. In other words, neither of those counts as really working on a different long story between Sleeper Squads. The real break was after 22, when I very clearly needed to do anything else but Sleeper Squad for a bit ... and the anything else was "The Acid Test," which is one of my favorite Quitclaim stories since it's one of the few (so far) that really wanders into detective-procedural territory.

Anyway, back to 2026, sorry ... remember, this journal is mostly about me documenting my own history, so sometimes I want to get these things down so I'll have them later.

In years since then, after a couple of cases of nasty burnout, I have adopted a policy of never doing two Sleeper Squads in a row. There's always got to be something else in between. When I loosely plotted what I wanted to happen in 2026, that was six issues ... and they couldn't be six consecutive projects. And I knew I had three Coldpoints I wanted to do. So clearly the thing was to just go ahead and schedule the whole fucking year.

Here is the calendar I came up with for 2026, direct from my notes and recorded for posterity. The titles were filled in later, of course, some earlier than others. I knew most of the Sleeper Squad titles back in January, but I didn't know what "Remorse" was called until the day I began work on it.

January: SS 56 ("Situations")
February: Coldpoint ("Exposed to Death")
March: SS 57 ("Highs and Lows")
April: Easter story (Easter Sunday is 5 April) ("Co-Rabbitation")
May: SS 58 ("Remorse")
June: Quitclaim ("The Hot Box")
July: SS 59 ("Witch Wars")
August: Coldpoint ("The Pit of Death")
September: SS 60 ("A Girl and Her Dog")
October: Hallowe'en story (TITLE REDACTED)
November: SS 61 ("The Indigo Palace")
December: Coldpoint ("A Fight To the Death")

At the time I post this, "The Pit of Death" and "A Girl and Her Dog" have not come out yet, but the titles have been "announced" -- that is, a handful of people who are paying attention to those things know what they are. I've omitted the title of the Hallowe'en story because I feel knowing it in advance spoils the fun (and a good joke). Conversely, I've left in the titles of SS 61 and the final Coldpoint story because they will keep certain people guessing. Heh.

Those releases are on the first of the month, e.g. I was actually working on "Situations" in December 2025, and the final Coldpoint story will be worked on in November (ideally leaving me some time in December to do a Christmas story).

What I've learned, as of halfway through this planned-out year, is that planning a schedule this way has its ups and downs. It's great to know what's ahead, and in some cases it's allowed me to make a couple of good decisions -- such as deliberately keeping work on "The Hot Box" short because I strongly suspected "Witch Wars" was going to take more than a month to do. It didn't, but it came very close. Anyway, spare time when a story finishes early can always be utilized. During the time span up to the beginning of July, when I started work on "The Pit of Death," I shoved in seven projects not on that list: The Valentine's short "Cherry Tarts," the badly-needed redo of the first Quitclaim "The Void Eaters," a 2000-watchers reward item for DeviantArt, the short-short "Escape-Proof" and its accompanying image, the Nero Wolfe story "Late Period" ... and, most importantly, "Sweet Eliza," a TFRND story which may end up being my favorite thing I do all year, and "Opposition," another TFRND story which was completely unplanned but is currently filling a number of people's urgent needs, including mine, and has gotten more than 7K views on DA in three days as I write this.

I write to give my brain something to do besides chew its own arm off. I cannot stand still.

But -- to get back to whatever I think the point might have been -- the scheduled year, it turns out, also makes me extremely anxious. I do not like deadlines, and I don't dislike them any less when they're self-imposed. I won't even play a game that has timed or time-sensitive sequences in it.

So while it's been good for planning, and good for productivity, it has not necessarily been good for my mental health. And since, as I just noted, I write primarily to preserve my mental health, adding in stress seems counter-productive.

Next year we're going back to catch-as-catch-can. I already know that somewhere around the beginning of next year, the "comics" are probably going to pause for a little bit. And there, finally, we come to the second topic of this entry.

I don't have many Old Loyalists, but I do have a handful, and most of them are not really fans of the "comics." I think one or two of them might have read a few of them. When the two sets are "folks who've known me online since forever" and "people who read and enjoy Sleeper Squad and actually try to keep up with its whole soap opera," the intersection of the Venn diagram contains one person. I think. I could be wrong. (Hi, Iain!)

The Old Loyalists would really like me to write more prose fiction. I am aware of this. I think it's kind of a shame that the comics don't suit them, because they do seem to be constantly, voraciously looking for big-universe SF with strong female characters, and I've been doing a lot of that for the last few years ... just not in the right format.

What I want to do -- and what, for about two years now, I have actively begun to plan to do -- is translate some of the comics into prose.

Sleeper Squad is extremely unlikely to ever get this treatment, for a number of reasons. First off, Sleeper Squad is more visual than the other "comics" because of all the weird transformations and the action sequences (they're not well-done action sequences, because it's hard to depict action in still images, but it's still easier to do them that way than, say, to describe a fight scene verbally, something I've failed miserably at on several occasions). I'm not sure I'm good enough to describe someone being turned into a giant ice-cream cone using only words in a way that is sufficient to really make the reader feel what's going on. Sleeper Squad has a lot of transformations and mind-control and other free-floating weirdness. It's also got some lovely soap-opera and some great characters, but I think the weirdness parts -- which are load-bearing, I ain't leaving them out -- prevent those other parts from ever succeeding as prose.

Second, though it didn't begin that way, somewhere around issue 12 I gave up on the "these stories are from Ruby's POV" once and for all, and now Sleeper Squad is a highly segmented place where we do a scene with Leyna in Serenity and then an unrelated scene with Cres in the Yards and then we go check in on how the Jumpers are doing with their new business and then ... in prose, this becomes a multi-POV story with a lot of narrative discontinuities and it'd really have to be in third-person ("Meanwhile, in one of the less interesting forests of the Yards, Cres was wondering what kind of creature could possibly leave these footprints ...") and it might not be nearly as compelling.

Third, the content of Sleeper Squad automatically gives it a more limited appeal than some of the other stuff I've been doing. There will be people who cannot and will not see it as anything but kink, and honestly, I recognize that transformation and mind-control kink have a niche audience. I, personally, think it's possible to read around those bits and still come out with a good story, but others probably wouldn't agree. Anyway, as I say, they're load-bearing and I'm not taking them out.

I go to that length about why Sleeper Squad is likely to never get "novelized" because it's disappointing. Sleeper Squad is the major project of my last few years, and will likely continue to be the major project for a few years to come (the current plan is to see if I can go to issue 100), and yet a substantial number of my friends and family will never get to enjoy it. That's a shame.

But I have other projects that are more suited. Quitclaim can be "novelized" relatively well, I think. The stories are all always from Randa's POV, and she has a defiinite and established voice that I think will work well in prose. The biggest challenges are adding character descriptions (because you can't just see what the characters look like), and especially, finding a way to put in a description of herself; Randa is not a look-in-the-mirror-contemplatively kind of person, she's the kind of person who picks a hairstyle she doesn't have to do anything to in the morning. There are a few scenes where Randa has to gloss how she knows they took place at all because she wasn't there, but that's already something I've had to solve when those scenes occurred in the comics.

But Quitclaim won't be first. The first thing I'm going to try to do a "novelization" of is Coldpoint. And here "novelization" can legitimately lose its scare-quotes; if each of the nine Coldpoint comics turns into a five-thousand-word short story, that's forty-five thousand words. That's a fucking book.

No, this doesn't intimidate me; I've written novels, y'know. (And "published" three, I might add, each of which got about fifty readers -- my consistent hard core, it's always about fifty people. Sometimes I think it's always the same fifty people. Ah, well, it's better than zero.) But it does mean this is a project which will require setting aside some time.

Anyway, operating under the assumption that a chunk of 2027 will be set aside for this undertaking, I find there's one of the back burners of my brain which has been quietly setting this pot to boil for a while now. It's really become clear as I work on "The Pit of Death," where I find myself putting aside words to add to a scene later when it becomes prose. I've done this several times now -- "I'd really like to say this but I can't here, I'll add it for the prose readers later."

Throughout what I laughably call my writing career, I have been taking shit (and occasional rejection letters) from people who think my short stories are sketchy. Good plots, interesting stories, but you don't explain enough and, especially, you don't show us any of your characters is the usual reaction.

Sometimes I think this is a fair cop and sometimes I don't. In the two Detective Green stories, I resisted the charge but later decided it was correct. For "Codependence" and "The Lamia in the Penthouse" (the former is of much higher quality than the latter), I have never entertained the question -- no, those stories are exactly what they're supposed to be, adding any more to them would make them worse, read them again if you didn't get it the first time. For the recently-re-unearthed "Persistence of Vision," I'm a little more iffy and won't fight as hard, but on balance I think it's probably better left as it is.

There's not being unnecessarily cryptic, and then there's an audience that needs and demands everything spelled out for them. I have no patience with the latter, and it's on the increase these days since we apparently no longer teach or value reading comprehension.

But as just-the-bones as my short stories always have been, they are nothing compared to what I had to face -- what I had no idea I would have to face -- when I began to make "comics." I mean, I didn't think my short stories were wordy until I started making comics. As it is -- I discuss this in About the Comics a little bit -- there are probably plenty of people who won't go near my comics because they've just got too many damned words in them. An awful lot of my panels are just two people having a conversation, and often the panel is all-but-filled with dialogue bubbles. All I can say in my defense is that I am gradually improving, but it's slow and painful.

In a short story, I don't usually stop to describe a character or their internal feelings because I feel that's superfluous. I rarely write mood pieces, and my goal is to get in and get out quickly, punch you in the face with my point, and run away while you're still trying to figure out what hit you. In a comic, there's that but also there is literally no space to do any of that characterization or internals, even if you wanted to.

The characterization in comics has to come slowly by example. If you look at superhero comics you find that they are always weak on direct characterization -- no room for it amid the fight scenes -- but you don't notice because you spend enough time with Tony Stark over the years to learn that he's an asshole and an alcoholic; it gets spelled out gradually through his actions and situations, but you never get told it directly. That's how you have to work, in comics. You need time to get to know Ruby, because I don't really have any other way to tell you about her than for you to watch her in action for a while.

(This is a problem with short-timers; minor characters and such whom I have to tell you about but who won't be around long enough for me to show you much. They need to have at least one striking activity -- something they do in the story which tells you enough about them to work with. It may turn out to be the only thing you know about them. That usually suffices.)

The good side of the comic format is that there are some things you don't have to tell the reader, because they can see them. I hate doing physical description of a character, especially with race being such a fucking pitfall. I have a lot of characters of color, including every single one of my main protagonists in both of my large continuing universes. I don't know if you realize that describing them in prose is a minefield. Trust me, it is. I am already not looking forward to describing Randa verbally, even if I can figure out how I'm going to sneak it in at all.

I'm also very bad at it. If the police ever called upon me to describe a criminal, I would probably get sent to jail for my ineptitude at it. "Uh, it was a guy. I think. His hair was brown and short and straight. No, I don't know how tall he was. He wasn't taller than me, and everyone who isn't taller than me is the same height to me, unless they're very short. What do you mean, 'describe his face'? He had two eyes, a nose and a mouth."

I am very much not a visual thinker. This is no surprise to anyone who's known me any length of time, but it may startle some people that under the circumstances I've spent most of the last five years working in a medium that is so relentlessly visual. Well, the thing there is, I don't actually have to draw the panels, you know. I operate like a director. I cast certain characters in certain roles and decide what I want the set and lighting and costumes to look like in that scene, and pick camera angles, and so on ... but I don't actually have to make sure I'm drawing a nose recognizably, or come up with language to tell one shape of nose from another. I mean, I do sometimes want a character who has a particular shape of nose, but I don't have to describe it, I just have to rummage through my resources and find somebody who has the nose I want. See the difference?

So, when I convert to prose, I will have to figure out a way to describe a lot of things I don't have to describe now -- not just people but places and things -- and I will have to make characterization a lot more explicit (and have it happen faster) than the slow-burn-via-action in the comics. This is going to be a real pain in the ass for Randa, who, again, is not the kind of person given to talking about herself, and wouldn't have any reason to put other people talking about her character in her narratives. We can still get to know her via deeds, of course, but Randa is an extremely slow burn that way; we've had twelve stories from her so far, and we still don't know much about her as a person. In fact, I've got a couple of plots in the plot file which cover parts of Randa's backstory -- and I have been reluctant to do those because the reader doesn't know Randa well enough that Randa would be willing to unlock those yet. Randa would really prefer it if you knew nothing at all about her, which is fine for her, but a challenge for me and for the reader.

Meanwhile, in the Coldpoint universe, putting the extra words back in will probably help make the stories better -- which is another reason why they'll happen first. Wendy Barlowe is not very well characterized in the comics, and I am the first to admit it. In her case, it's not because she's particularly private or non-introspective; in fact she does a lot of woolgathering about herself and her situation and her job satisfaction and so on. We just don't have the space to see any of it in the comics.

It's going to be very interesting to see what comes out the other end of that pipeline. I'll be just as interested to see it as everyone else will. Maybe more so.

(But be patient. We're talking about something that is probably a year into the future, as I type this.)