7 June 2025 * Robert M. Kerns

2:39pm

Wow… it has been a while since I posted.

I don’t usually go too deeply into my personal life, but the short of it is that I hit a pretty low spot around the end of March and spent until very recently (as in yesterday, June 6th) clawing my way back out of it.

What helped the most out of everything was spending about 14 hours across two days helping a friend with a tech project.

I’ve been chipping away at Lynxeen, and for the first time in a little while, I wrote over 4,000 words last night. Granted… it was only 4,099 words, but that’s better than I’ve managed at least since the start of June. In checking my Writing Log, I did manage 4k+ two days in May, which surprised me. I’d forgotten I did that.

So, writing update…

Lynxeen is currently sitting at 88,237 words as of last night’s writing. I’m ready to start writing Chapter 37, and I feel the story needs a total of roughly 40 to 41 chapters to be complete.

All this to say that I will have zero problems meeting the pre-order on July 1st.

Yes… in case you couldn’t tell from the previous section, I started the pre-order for Lynxeen before I had a finished novel.

Also, yes… I don’t like doing that. Setting that pre-order was one of the things I attempted to help pull myself out of the Hell Funk I was deep in, and it taught me that I’m not one of those people who responds favorably to deadlines.

I’ll leave the pre-orders for Vorcalix and Sol active, but I’ll return to my previous modus operandi of not creating pre-orders until I have a finished, ready-to-publish novel.

In other news…

The fiber internet that I had installed at the end of March is incredible. Awesome. Phenomenal. WHEN IT WORKS.

I’ve had two major outages that were storm-related. One of them was from a Friday night to Saturday afternoon, and the most recent one started on a Friday night and ran through the following Monday.

I would love to see the provider get sufficient revenue that they could re-invest it into their fiber network to create a modified mesh, with each major node having multiple pathways to the internet. That design has higher upfront costs than the current implementation (called an extended star topology by us network geeks), but it totally wins in terms of robust reliability.

When I was working at Glenville State College (now Glenville State University), I always wished I could get the funding to implement a two-node mesh network for the main campus. Given that it’s a state institution and that I’m no kind of grant writer, that obviously never happened. 🤣

Well, I think I’ve rambled on for long enough. If you’re reading this, thanks for sticking with me.

I’m glad to be back.

Hope the days treat you and yours well. Stay safe out there.

March Writing Log (03/17 – 03/31):