THEM: "Hey Jon, do you have a website?"
ME: "Oh, sure. It's brasshorsebooks.com. Jonathonburgess.com, technically, but the first one is catchier and search algorithms spell my name wrong."
THEM: *browses to website*
ME: "I should update the banner, but I really like how the artist worked it."
THEM: "Everyone thinks you died of COVID."
ME: "Wait, what?"
So, yeah. That was a hell of a last post for this site. 2020 was A YEAR. We all saw some things, myself included. And the aftermath wasn't exactly fun, either. The economy, politics, and social stuff from the face-2-face level on up had their moments of suck. There were some personal medical issues I'll throw in, too. All of which made it difficult to keep writing fiction, let alone to keep updating my blog. The newsletter kept going for awhile, as well as my Patreon. But these last few years were spent slowly running out of gas, stopping, and then figuring out a path forward. "A path forward" is a big topic. Bigger than this one post. Maybe I'll dig into that a little more, later on.
What have I been up to in six years? Well, everything else aside, I never actually stopped writing. It just got harder. And... there just hasn't been anything worth crowing about. The next Greasetrap novel has been in the works ever since the last one (yes, in 2018). I've written several full drafts of it and several partial ones, and they all just kind of didn't work. I took a break to try my hand at a LitRPG series about dwarves, but ended up kind of missing the mark. There were short stories here and there, which I submitted to online magazines and promptly got rejected from. All the while there's been a growing, gnawing feeling that I was just spinning my wheels.
Which brings us to today. One part of the "path forward" I mentioned above means I keep on writing, regardless of how hard it gets, whether I succeed or fail. That part I've got down. Another part is this very website. There's a whole other blog post somewhere about online presence, how much you need or have or want to do. About social media and the current state of the internet and about being comfortable in your own skin. About having no diary and on not keeping any journals. For now, I'll just say that it's well past time I returned to posting here.
So stay tuned. There will be more dragon reviews and more fiction. More news and more cool stuff I've found out in the world. Maybe even some essays about a few things I've thought about getting off my chest for some time. I've been dabbling in horror and cyberpunk sci-fi lately, so I'm sure there will be a little of that, too.