The Night Bulletin

Reading

I finished The Wild Robot Escapes, the second novel in the Wild Robot series by Peter Brown. I listened to this one on audio. While I liked it a lot, it wasn’t as good as the first one. Where the first one took place exclusively on the island, this one took place on a farm, then in a city. I liked the island and its wildlife much better than the animals and people on the farm. We get a lot more worldbuilding and some backstory about Roz the Robot, which I appreciated. I’m hoping to squeeze in the final book in the series later this year.

I also finished another novella, Crypt of the Moon Spider, by Nathan Ballingrud. This one is a Lovecraftian weird tale that takes place in an insane asylum on the moon in the 1920s. Yeah, I’m a bit perplexed by that as well, but decided to run with it. It was a good story, very atmospheric and gory, and since there are spiders involved I was thoroughly nauseated. There’s a sequel novella coming out, so I will try to pick that one up next year. This novella was under 100 pages, so to me it’s really just a long short story, but I’m counting it anyways since it was published on its own.

I’ve started A Memory of Light, the final book in the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. This book is a doozy (the hardcover is almost 1,000 pages and the audiobook is over 40 hours long), so this is the last you’ll be hearing about this book in the weekly updates for a while (aside from maybe a percentage of how far I am). Right now that percentage sits at 15%.

I also started The Last Battle, the final volume in the Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis. I like it so far, and will probably finish it today or tomorrow. I’ll share my thoughts on it next week.

Finally, I dipped into The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu, the first book in the four-volume Dandelion Dynasty. I’m only about 50 pages into this 600 page book, so it may be a while before I can share my final thoughts. So far I’m enjoying it, but since this is a re-read, I’m already well aware of how exposition-heavy the first chunk of the book is. I’ve been told I’ll be rewarded if I continue the series, and I sure hope so. I intend to at least read the second volume, The Wall of Storms.

This weekend is a holiday weekend here in America, so there probably won’t be as much reading time (or writing time, for that matter) than in other weeks. Still, I’m hoping to keep my momentum going for the second half of 2025.

Writing

I’ve always been wary of online writing platforms, not because I think they’ll steal my work, but because I’m always afraid of letting someone else handle the storage of my documents. Now, of course, everyone has to worry about these writing platforms scrubbing your work to train LLMs, but I think I’ve found a website that is the least likely to implement AI in a nefarious manner: Novlr. This is a writing platform that is owned by writers (you can even become a co-owner for a one-time $500 fee), so they are the most likely to protect writers’ work. 

I’ve typed up my notes for my novel and short story into this platform. Its UI is intuitive and my work is easy to access and organize. We’ll see how this works in the long run, but so far so good. I also started a random project that’s mostly intended to be a repository of ideas. I plan on downloading all of my documents and backing them up on a flash drive once a week just to have an extra layer of protection, but I’m a paranoid guy; I don’t trust any computer programs enough to place all my eggs in them.