Welcome to 2025 Empires of EVE supporters,
I can't thank you all enough for being here. The end of another year is always a celebratory and bittersweet moment as we catalogue what was achieved and what was left undone. This year I'm feeling grateful that in 2024 the Volume 3 project got off the ground. The lion's share of the work remains to be done, but that first push to get it moving is by far the most important and difficult moment of the project. It's a gift to be starting 2025 with a book that's already about 30% done.
This has been a really exciting time for me, and I'm deeply appreciative to you all for making this a viable part of this project. My thanks to everyone who is subscribed and following along, and my deepest gratitude to those of you who became paying subscribers. I'm really excited to share the next few chapters of Volume 3 with you over the coming months, and I hope you'll check out Chapter 1 if you haven't yet.
The winter has been unbelievably busy for me, but I'm happy to say things are finally calming down a bit just in time for our arrival into the new year.
My life more-or-less exploded in October as the warehousing partner I had been using to store and ship my hardcover copies of Empires of EVE informed me they had stopped providing that service just before the announcement of Volume 3. This was a huge problem because I had a sale planned to promote the announcement, and was expecting an influx of orders for the holidays.
I had to quickly negotiate a deal with them to ship most of my remaining books directly to my apartment and develop a shipping system out of my home. So now my warehouse is my kitchen cupboard and my distribution center is my living room. It’s messy, but I’m trying to see it as a positive. I’m saving on warehousing fees.
The whole thing was expensive and disruptive, and if you were one of the people whose packages was delayed by this situation I'm deeply sorry. It's never my wish to let down a supporter who cared enough about my work to put in an order. It was a long grind to get through those months - which were already busy with work and the holidays - and the added task of manually shipping all the holiday orders.
I'm happy to say that things are moving much more smoothly now, and I have worked my way through the shipping backlog that accrued during the disruption. There are still a handful of international orders for me to get in the mail - particularly to Canada which had a postal strike during the holidays - but I'll have those out in the days ahead.
Truthfully the past couple of months have been such a personal trial that I'm just happy to have gotten through it, and I'm looking forward to getting back into something of a routine. Routines are how books get written.
I'm planning for these next few months to be a really critical phase of the production for Volume 3. The whole process of announcing the book and launching the Substack took up a great deal of mindshare during the two months leading up to it, and once it was over I had a bit of a backlog of things that fell by the wayside during that period that I needed to catch up on.
Last month I released the first chapter of Empires of EVE: Volume 3 - an introduction to this era of the story that ties in some of my inspirations with the themes and ideas that I'm hoping the reader will toss over in their mind while they read the story to come.
This month I'm releasing more chapters, and the pace will be slightly different. During revisions I decided to break a large chapter up into four smaller chapters to improve the focus and pace of each one. So now they’re shorter and better, but not necessarily enough on their own to be the monthly chapter release. So during this period I’ll be dropping smaller pieces more often.
I'm happy about this because EOE chapters are typically on the long side, and this means the opening of V3 has a different pace. I’m hoping it helps reinvigorate the reader’s attention, and gives them lots of quick checkpoints to get back into this story after already reading two books.
I'm excited to continue writing because I was able to contact and interview a critical character named Gobbins who led fleets for Pandemic Horde during this time. Gobbins was a character whose name had already shown up in my writing so it was great to get a chance to actually sit down and talk with him for a couple hours.
Writing about EVE Online feels a lot like writing science fiction, but it's not, and it's always a thrill when you remember that you can actually reach into the story and speak to the characters. And when you do meet them, they'll always be able to tell you how the story was actually much deeper and more nuanced than you were yet aware. It's a tremendously enjoyable process. I've got a list of about 4-6 sources I'm looking to contact to get on the record over the next few weeks.
Further interviewing will be a core goal of the next couple of months for me. It's important to not get too deep into the story before you understand as much as possible about where it's going and who the characters are. Otherwise you çan end up confronting information later on which contradicts your previously written version of events.
So my focus in the next few months will be balancing writing progress with continued research and interviews, ensuring I have the full context needed to bring this story to life.
My schedule is particularly stacked because I'm working on a secret project in the evenings when I have spare energy. I won't be able to discuss the details for a while yet so I'm sorry to tease, but it involves working with video which has become a strong interest of mine. I had such a good time working on the Volume 3 trailer that I wanted to keep exploring.
I have extremely, perhaps unrealistically, high hopes for 2025. Finishing Volume 3 comes first on that list. Your support, whether through subscribing or just following along, makes everything possible. As we move into 2025 I’m eager to dive back into the writing process with a clearer mind and fresh insights, and to share it with you as the book continues to take shape.
Thanks again for being part of this adventure—I couldn’t do it without you!
Andrew