The Monthly Report: May 2025
Resting the writing muscles
Welcome to the Monthly Report feature of the Warthog Report, where I go over what I published here in the past month and plans for the current month.
The Warthog Report will be on hiatus this month, as I am set to deal with personal matters that require my immediate and direct attention after April already had events that also took me away from writing. The upcoming events of this month are a good thing I’m excited for, but it will make me busy and require time. It’s important to take breaks and I fear not taking a break now may lead to burn out.
During the hiatus I will still be working on writing for the newsletter, but with the deadlines further back I’ll have more space to breathe with finishing them. Or time to actually finish them on top of my personal obligations.
Some good news: I will be attending grad school in the fall of this year to study library science, assuming nothing goes wrong between now and then. This shouldn’t change anything for the newsletter, but it might, so I will mention it now.
One last piece of personal news is that I will be at PAX East later this month. Not in any official capacity, though I’d love to reach the point of that, just an ordinary attendee. It will be old news by then, but I’ll likely write something about my experience there.
For Battles Beneath the Stars, the break between stories has gone for quite a while now due to the events of April. I tried to do too much fiction writing in April and it led to nothing to show here, the short story teased last month ended up being too much of a diversion on top of settling some other unfinished writing business. So I’m aiming to refocus my efforts.
Now for a recap of the non-fiction.
Zero Escape is a series that has been influential to me in some ways, so it was nice to write about it here. The willingness of the games to go on tangents is something I like enough to mimic.
I’ve wanted to write about the increasing commonness of experiencing fiction second hand for a while, but it was hard to find a direction for. Using the ‘Mary the color scientist’ thought experiment proved useful for having a strong image to work with. It also links this piece to the Zero Escape one, as one of the many digressions in Zero Escape is about the thought experiment.
That’s all for now. Thank you for being subscribed, and I appreciate your patience for this month.