State of the Metacosm 4/26: FAFO, the Daystar Debacle, and SciFan Jam!

Yo to my bros, hoes, and those.

So yeah. It’s been a minute since I’ve done one of these.

Firstly in some personal news, we’re prepping to sell our house. So I have no idea how that’s going to affect the rest of 2026, but I do know that said prep ate up a lot of time these last few months. (Christ, the amount of crap a family of four accumulates over a decade.)

When I wasn’t dealing with personal stuff like the house, getting A back into therapy, medication issues, and @*&$#)@ing taxes, I wrote about 15k on a short story that is a prequel to the prequel to Everdark, about a character named Daystar.

Okay, well, 15k is hardly short. And I realized that about halfway through writing it, but I figured I’d soldier through to the end of what I’d planned and send it to my betas and let them sort it out.

Yeah, it wasn’t pretty.

And I’m not gonna lie, the experience of failing to write it, and the utter confusion my poor betas came back to me with, did a great job of dredging up last year’s Burnout Feelings for a bit.

It ended up being mostly positive, though, because it prompted me to shift my attention away from writing and to finally finishing the free VN I’ve been teasing you guys with since last year. So … silver linings.

A lot of the time since the end of Jan has been spent attempting to suss out a new way of organizing my writing. I’m AuDHD and chronically ill with neurological issues, so my brain isn’t the best at the best of times, and it’s looking like I need to put more effort into making writing more accessible for me.

That being said, Daystar has a new outline, but I’ve been balking at doing much actual work on it.

Speaking of avoiding projects with productivity, I joined the SciFan Jam on itch with our next VN project: a prequel for Project:Freqs! Now that everything Nemesis-related is done, I’m excited to start work on it.

I’m also planning on setting up a devlog for it on itch, so I’ll post about that when it happens.

Also! The website got a total overhaul thanks to my wonderful friend Aimee Cozza at Foundation Web Dev, did you notice? (This isn’t its Final Form but we’ve got a few things to complete before we can head in that direction.) And we finally added the pins to the shop! If you missed them during Pintopia 2025, this is your chance to snag one or three or five.

Whew. That was a lot. The beginning of 2026 has been rocky, but we persist, right?

And as always, we end it on some Art from the Metacosm:

This was a silly challenge myself and Aimee came up with: redo a book cover in the “clipart” style that seems to be popular in romance books these days. So I redid The Fractured Balance!

Kinda cursed, huh? 😅