Good news! Shieldrunner Pirates book three cover design has begun! I’ll post a link here if there’s a reveal post. If the publisher gets Martin Deschambault to come back for the third book, it will be gorgeous. Even if they don’t, yay, new space art!

And now, here are some fabulous things I learned about while working on a new project:

Surtshellir is a very cool lava tube cave in Iceland. Some of its mythology figures into A Wolf in Iceland Is the Child of a Lie, a short story by Sonya Taaffe. Unfortunately, jerks found the cave in the 1910s and broke a bunch of the lava formations, so it’s not what it was. I am Library of Alexandria levels of mad about it. It’s still pretty cool and you can visit, but you’d better not break anything in there. Also, those ridges on lava tube walls are called step marks, and they show where the lava paused on its passage through the earth!

Non-equatorial space elevators are totally possible and they have some advantages over the equatorial kind.

SlimWiki lets you create your own wiki and it works like it looks like it will. I’m trying it out as a story bible for the new project. The Shieldrunner Pirates story bible is in Tiddlywiki, which I chose because it allows you to work offline and I used to travel a lot. The card system is kind of novel, but it's unwieldly and tends not to do what I want it to do. Copying the basic wiki structure from an old project to a new one is, so far as I can tell, not possible in Tiddlywiki with my knowledge of coding. I have high hopes for SlimWiki.

If you never visit my website, for which I don’t blame you, you might not know that I’m on Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest as RE_Stearns. I post infrequently, but I hear from y’all on Twitter from to time and that’s… The best part of Twitter.

Late post-audio addition: Support striking Uber and Lyft drivers on Wednesday, May 8 by finding some other way to travel that day, helping your mobility-challenged friends and relations, and flipping off scabs in Los Angeles and other participating cities. The drivers deserve better.

Enjoy the remainder of spring!