From Grathew's Desk

I’m doing this check-in message as an experiment, apparently all great substackers to this. I figure I can pretend to be one until I am one.

In the recent releases we have Character Sheets and Apologies both are doing rather well. I’m most surprised on how well Apologies is doing on Royal Road. For those not in the know I am posting Noah Bannon: Space Ranger to Royal Road as well. I figure Royal Road is a better platform for fiction; I don’t want you to miss out if you’d rather not add another platform to your inbox. I think it had something to do with my desire to do a bit of advertising, in this case posting a link to X. Wish I had half the metrics Substack gives me, but two accounts that aggregate web novels found it so that could be interesting. If you have comments please let me know. While I cannot promise to act on any suggestions or feedback I’d like to see it.

Moving from what was recently put out to what is coming, there’s a lot. I have a short story I’m going to be posting here, The Girl in Green possibly in parts. It’s going to be a jaunt into Slonminma, and a mix of the higher society family drama and “Man gets dragged on an adventure by his kid sister”. I am thinking of doing a single short story a month that gets posted here. Might be tied to Slonminma, or Noah Bannon, or other worlds. I have many things that need short stories, thus one will be posted a month. The upcoming Worldbuild Wednesdays are titled Game Mechanics, and New Game (I’m not happy with that one, but it’s the Video game side of LitRPG). I also have a few that I’m working on revolving around magic systems, industrialization, and space. With a few smaller think pieces, the first having the WIP title Wizards, which is about the differences between wizards and witches and why I think that matters.

Further in the difference I am planning on putting out a second chapter of Noah Bannon a month probably starting Q1 2026, and have a second story that I’d be putting out a chapter every two weeks, or semi-monthly around the same time frame. I’ll figure it out. I’m also working on my first book which is a continuation of Chasing a Letter which you can read the preview/rough draft there. The ‘final’ is in I'm in a River I’ll probably put a revised Chasing a Letter in the upcoming book as it’s the start. I’m thinking the revisions are dropping the notes. While I like them. I don’t think they translated as well as I wanted. I am planning on doing another short story for Christmas this year, and those who need forewarning, New Years New Starts will be returning for 2026. Yes I realized I misnamed last year’s. It will be fixed for this year. I hope to see your entries.

Lastly what do you think of this? I don’t dislike it conceptually. I wonder if it’s something you want to see. Should there be something I add to make this better? I’m open to ideas.