QUARTERLY UPDATE - AUTUMN 2026
What do you mean it’s already April? How long have I been asleep for!?
And by that I mean, hello and welcome back to another quarterly update newsletter.
The southern hemisphere summer has sadly come to end, though thankfully I was able to get out and enjoy all 20 minutes of it! Now all we have are grey skies, freezing Antarctic winds and endless horizontal rain—no wait, that was the summer. The arrival of autumn means we can look forward to more of the same, but even colder and darker.
Someone remind me why I still live on this godforsaken island?
Anyway, it’s time for me to waste several paragraphs rambling, trying to act like I’ve been productive and pretend I’ve done anything other than stare forlornly out the window for the last three months.
Enough stalling. Let’s begin...
WHAT IS ALEX WORKING ON?
The answer to that question is a bit complicated this quarter.
I’ve been working on a lot of projects over the last three or four months... but few of them are writing related, and the ones that are cannot be discussed publicly. They’re top secret and my handlers at Area 51 will be very displeased if I share them. They're still annoyed at me for crashing my spaceship in the New Mexico desert that time but, you know, whatever...
Here are the progress bars on my website, which remained virtually unchanged since December 31st:
The only thing to note is that I’m now 5% of the way through the 2.0 Draft of The Monadic Broadcast, which in practical terms means I’ve finally read the first draft (after leaving it in a drawer to marinade over the summer) and written one or two vague entries in my notebook about how some things in the book need to be made less bad before I publish it.
Actually, I’m gonna be honest, though I risk jinxing myself terribly by doing so: I’m pretty happy with how the first draft turned out. Usually my first drafts are incomprehensible, unreadable messes. This one mainly just has some sloppy writing and a shit tonne of typos to sort out, but it's not nearly the stillborn mutant that my other books were at this stage.
Hopefully I’ll be able to finish the 2.0 Draft by the end of April—I am a little behind schedule this year (actually I’m a lot behind schedule) because of all the other crazy things going on that can’t be talked about, but I’m feeling moderately confident in my ability to get things back on track once again.
And if you want to read the second draft before anyone else does, and offer me feedback on it...
BECOME ONE OF MY BETA READERS!
I have a whole section on my website where you can apply to be a Beta Reader, so if you know over 80% of the alphabet, are of a generally opinionated variety and want to see me publish something that isn’t total crap... why not sign up?
It’s free and the worst thing I can do is ignore your suggestions—and if I do ignore your feedback and the book turns out to be terrible, you’ll win “I told you so” rights!
The book I’m currently working on is a pretty stock standard sci fi/time travel story and is considerably lighter in tone than Joie de Vivre so... relax. I’ve got all the gory, depressing horror out of my system... for now.
Speaking of which...
THANKS FOR SUPPORTING JOIE DE VIVRE!
(Unless you didn’t, in which case you should ignore this section and just imagine me staring at you disapprovingly, with my arms folded)
But to those who did, thank you very much!
I wasn’t expecting the book to be much of a commercial success, given that it’s a book by an unknown author in a very niche genre, but the book has done orders of magnitude better than I ever expected it would and I am for the first time in my life feeling like this whole writing thing might in fact not be giant waste of my time and energy.
(I might have mentioned this in my last newsletter, but for some reason the book did really well in Germany. No idea how or why, but dankeschön nonetheless!)
WHAT'S NEXT?
Warning: I’m gonna ramble for a bit here. And I might accidentally say something sincere too.
Well actually no, first I’d better answer the damn question: What’s next is finishing the second draft of The Monadic Broadcast and trying to navigate all the other crazy stuff that’s going on in my life right now.
But I feel like if you’re subscribed to this newsletter then there’s an at least 38% chance of you being genuinely interested in what’s going on inside my head. So buckle up, here we go...
In my last newsletter I mentioned, in a slightly circumspect way, that I was feeling burned out and needed a rest. Well, I’d like to upgrade that from “feeling a bit burned out” to “yeah, no question about it, I’m 100% burned out right now”.
I haven’t experienced burnout this acutely since 2017, and that was a year when I was regularly working 80 hours a week in a very high stress position.
I haven’t really been thinking about literature or writing much lately, as the joy of writing has mostly been replaced by resentment and exhaustion. I’m also in a bad reading slump too: I’ve only read maybe four or five books this year, as opposed to the nearly 20 I’d read by this time last year, because nothing seems interesting to me and my brain wants nothing to do with the pretentious literary slop I so often feed it.
If I didn’t have two novels currently in near-publication, I might have quit by now, as I’ve thought about that a lot lately. And over the summer I spent a lot of time doing fun creative things that were just for me, where I didn’t have to worry about audiences, editors, publishers or marketing.
But here’s the twist: I actually have still been writing! In fact, in terms of actual words written, I've written just as much over the last three months as I did over the previous three months during which time I was actually writing a novel.
So it’s not writing that’s the problem. Clearly, I still enjoy it.
I think what I’m sick of is seeking external validation and constantly having to filter myself through the endless opinions of others. I know that’s probably a strange thing to read, given that the first book I published was a giant middle finger to the concept of external validation, though perhaps that's why it ended up published, while my previous four novels didn’t.
And in this age of AI slop and endless distraction, I don’t think it’s really worth my time to be chasing trends, or trying to please others or agonising over whether what I'm doing is commercially viable. Why? Because I’m working in a dead medium, in an age wherein the number of people who read books is equal to or smaller than the number of people who write them. In all likelihood, the only person who will ever read my writing or give a shit about it... is probably me.
As the Vedic proverb goes, “Man can control only his actions, not the fruit of his actions”. It would be foolish for me to seek joy outside of myself, because by doing so I'm leaving my happiness to the mercy of circumstances outside my control. Instead, I should be writing for myself in order to ensure that the act of writing is itself joyous on its own merits, without worrying about how it will be perceived or if anyone will throw a coin or two my way in exchange for it.
And so... I think that’s going to be my attitude going forward.
Something needs to change. I’ll still be writing, but maybe not in the same way. Maybe I need to slow down, or maybe I need be less of a perfectionist. And I definitely need to stop worrying about the outcome and worrying instead about what I can control, based on the simple question: "Does doing this action bring me joy?"
I’m not sure exactly what this will mean in the immediate future. Probably not a lot. Things are already in motion and I have obligations I need to fulfil, so it’ll be business as usual for at least the next 18 months.
But after that? Who knows what I'll do!
Anyway, sorry about the long incoherent rant, hopefully I’ll be in a better mood on June 30th, when my next quarterly update comes out.
Until then, be bad, stay dangerous and thanks for reading!
- AEW