August 2026: Catching Up

So, yes. New pen name, who dis? It’s been a long time coming, as I identified with Wolff less and less and identified with bees so hard that people started sending me bee posts over Bsky DMs. There are still bits of branding that have yet to be switched over, but I’ve been happily and more comfortably Jax Devora for some time now.

A lot of spring had been taken up by a heavy workload and a health situation, which should probably explain why I fell off with posting. Sorry about that. (The health situation is mostly resolved by now.)

I also added a Saturday morning stream called Tea Writes, which has been weirdly more successful than Night Writes and may be of interest to European folks. (It starts at 8:30 AM ET!)

Beenjamin has his own social media accounts now, where I’m posting archives of pics. It’s mostly for me (so I don’t lose them), but my Bsky buddies usually don’t say no to beautiful Been footage. Follow Beenjamin on Bluesky or Instagram! (Some posts will already give you hints as to what we’ve been up to this year.)

Is still going! We’re still on draft 7 (chapter 20, in fact), but thanks to the second bullet above and a whole lot of uncertainty, it’s been slow. I’ve been on break with it for more than a month, but I’ve promised to get back to it, once I figure a few things out (which we’ll get into in a moment).

I have decided to open it up to a select few readers. As in, chapters have made it to Ellipsus, and there are a few people who have access to it. And I did this mostly because the biggest thing that’s keeping me from finishing it really is just the uncertainty of working on the fourth rewrite of the same story; it was meant to be a way to get a sense of whether or not I was headed in the right direction. I say this part in past-tense because, well. Still on break. But once I get off break, I plan on opening the read up to more folks, so keep an eye out for that, potentially, somewhere down the line.

This book might not be my debut. I’ve realized fairly recently that one big problem with the book as it is is a lot of worldbuilding bloat. Part of that can be resolved with trimming off the fat in an edit, yes, but I’m also considering releasing a book or two ahead of TNS to establish the general universe. Think of it like Maas’s extended ACOTAR universe or Discworld, but with bees.

Speaking of . . .

Surprise! There’s not one but two of these WIBees now!

In late spring, I’d come up with a character concept for a friend’s upcoming DnD campaign: a bee person from a western-themed fantasy realm who’s journeying out to find help for her failing colony. I fell in love with this character, and I fell in love hard—so much that I couldn’t wait for the campaign to start to write something about her.

Hence, I built up an entirely new plot for her to follow: a bee scout whose swarm is under the thumb of a nefarious mining baron after he captures their queen. This time, instead of journeying out to find a new home for her colony before it collapses, she’s looking for a few able guns to take back with her and tell the mining baron what for. With guns. (She does, by the way, and they’re all gay.)

Towards the end of spring, I decided to formally take a break from TNS in order to work on a different project, in an effort to save myself from growing burnout (over pretty much everything, not just TNS). As a result, I’d spent June planning Beeslingers and July Camp NaNo-ing an entire draft 1.

I’ll be real: It wasn’t always smooth. Though I’d clocked in 1k a daily (for all but one day in July), as with all projects, there were absolutely days where I struggled to meet that minimum. Despite this, I’d managed to finish a draft on day 28, and . . . it wasn’t half-bad. Oh, no, the story itself needs to be reworked, for sure, but at no point did I doubt that the bones were good. I’d walked away with ideas on what to change to make things better—even rewrote chapter 1 to round out the 50k word count. (The draft itself clocked in at around 48k altogether, including bits I’d rewritten and cut. About 45k without.)

Most importantly, I fell harder for Honeysuckle (the MC), Peony (her love interest), and the quartet of sapphic gunslingers the former hired. I’m really excited to have you meet them, once the story is reworked and polished.

In short, this is probably going to be the first book out.

I hadn’t forgotten about this, but admittedly, I’m still working out the kinks of the outline. The more I develop it, the more it strays from the original source material, which honestly is a good thing. It’s going to be the project I work on for NaNo proper, so I’m looking forward to talking about it more over the next few months.

It’s also probably going to be finished before TNS. Both Beeslingers and Beehemia cover a lot of ground that I’m hoping to cut out of TNS, so I’m not abandoning TNS for more bees but rather paving the way for it. (That said, TNS is absolutely getting more bees.)

I’m going to juggle Beeslingers and TNS for the foreseeable future. I have notes on where I want to go with Beeslingers, and very likely, we’ll be looking at doubling its word count.

Meanwhile, while I’ve just said that I’d like to build up the other WIBees to establish worldbuilding I want to cut from TNS, I’m still going back into it by revising earlier chapters and going through beta notes I’ve gotten for this draft so far.

Both of these will take up the entirety of August and September. Sort of. I’m also taking a couple weeks off in September for a bit of a holiday around my birthday.

October will be dedicated to planning Beehemia, whose draft 1 will be written for NaNo in November. No plans for December, other than to power on with Beeslingers and TNS. End goal for this year is to have at least two manuscripts ready for betas and editing, so an actual book you can hold might happen in 2027.

In the meantime, if you’d like to follow along with TNS’s progress, you could expect more newsletters over the coming months . . . OR you could sign up here for access to Ellipsus!

Night Writes is now on Wednesdays, starting from 8:30 PM ET, but if you’re a morning person, consider checking out Tea Writes, on Saturdays from 8:30 AM ET. As always, still on YouTube. Next stream will likely be next Wednesday, however.

I’d also like to start talking about all three of my WIPs so far, as folks on Bsky have been curious. We’re talking not just blurbs but character profiles/facts, worldbuilding notes, and stray bits of lore. Problem is, I’m not sure what that will look like, other than that there’s a lot. Right now, the options are as follows:

If you’ve got an opinion on which way we should go—and on anything else we might do with this newsletter—there’s a form for this too.