Meanwhile… #25 – What’s Happening?

Header 19 Hello there, friends and fans! It’s September 30, 2026– and here are some things that happened in the meantime!

This Is The Current State Of Things:

The past few months have passed without anybody nuking anybody else yet, quite surprisingly. Some people worry that the bloated orange pedophile’s idiotic and pointless war on Iran might lead to WW3 – while the adults in the room are aware that WW3 has already been running since that very same stupid blunder. The only major upside to that whole scenario – as far as I’m concerned – is that it will hasten the collapse of the ailing, decaying American empire. But that’s a subject too somber for this newsletter – let’s look on “the bright side” (the one that isn’t illumined by a “nukeular” mushroom cloud).

General News: The same as before, really! Working on my PhD in Religious Studies, keeping our heads above water, and preparing for two conferences – one in Pretoria next week, and another in India in November. I need to present from my thesis work at both conferences – no pressure – and yes, it’s humbling to think that I as essentially a “nobody” and newcomer to the academic scene get to rub elbows with tenured professors and highly respected scholars, and tell them what I think! In the meantime, two of my articles have been submitted and accepted at two peer-reviewed journals, co-authored with my supervising professor – which is no small thing. So please excuse me from writing fiction for a while – I’m a little busy for the time being!

Because of that preoccupation with scholarly work (and the loss of my social media profiles on Twitter and Fascistbook due to my political activism), I haven’t been promoting my books much at all lately. That doesn’t mean they haven’t been selling or receiving attention – just that I haven’t really had the time to spare to market them. In the past 9 months or so, I’ve been receiving almost daily emails from this website as well as direct to my mailbox regarding my books. Most of this traffic, sadly, is entirely automated bot-driven AI slop proposals to elicit money out of authors for whatever it is they’re peddling – be it “support services” for authors, or what have you. This is in spite of installing a spam filter and “I’m a human” type filter on this website! Very few of it turns out to be from actual people not sending in obviously AI-generated slop messages regurgitating my own book descriptions back at me while pretending they’ve read the book in question! Some even sent me proposals for books that are no longer available or older versions of books that have even been retitled in the last 30 years! Not ‘sus’ at all, right? Anyway, in the midst of that shit-storm of fake spam, the occasional real email gets through and I do my best to respond to them all. Meg sent me a brief list of interview questions and I did my best to answer them. This resulted in the following article being posted on the Speedymetric blog on 29 September, discussing the dynamics of “Lifetime” (If the link stops working, you can view the pdfhere).

20260930 Speedymetric Lifetime

Current Writing Projects: Still unchanged, sorry. I did manage to put in a few hours during a lull between varsity assignments in early September though – specifically into the next, tenth title in Quantum. It’s definitely getting there, but it’s going to be a while yet before that sees the light of day. it was also a refreshing change to write for FUN again, and not have to insert supporting citations in brackets in the text! In the meantime, if you like, you can catch up on books you may have missed (there are over 40 of them – with many also available as audiobooks!) or keep up by bookmarking What’s Brewing?

There we are, all caught up for now!