I suppose the title I chose for this article may sound excluding, as I would hope you still find value in what I’m what about to say even if this is the first of my writing you’ve ever encountered. But speaking truthfully, this is something I most want to say to those of you who have stuck by me over the years, as things have changed (myself especially), as my goals for what I want to accomplish with this website have shifted, as I try to adapt to circumstances that largely are beyond my control.

What you now see as afterterra.com started as my personal blog, named initially not for my books, but after a music project that I had been periodically revisiting and adding to from 2006 to 2014. For a time it has also been named after one of my old Xbox Live gamertags. The common theme was that, up until I began the After Terra series proper, I never used the name given to me at birth in association with my website. Even when my series was underway, I only used part of what is on my birth certificate; that too chafed me and I was all too glad to dispose of it once I was brave enough to do so. Point of bringing all that up being, at various points this site has been rebranded and relaunched, if you will, and at more than one instance in my history of blogging, I’ve made promises or commitments that I ultimately failed to meet in most cases.

Does this matter? Am I spitting into the digital winds, as it were? When I ask myself such questions, it comes back to two things: it matters to me, and for anyone, even if it turned out to be just one loyal reader, listening to what I have to say, I feel that I owe them something… making some grandiose promise like I have in the past seems disingenuous, but I’m also not going to apologize for having a life and for taking care of some seriously important damage control. So what I have to say here is in the spirit of an apology, because I am grateful for the readers I do have and I am humbled that anyone wants to check out what I have when there are millions, billions even, other potential options for entertainment and exploration of the human condition. It’s in the spirit of a promise, because I do intend to get back into a healthy writing habit of putting words to the page every day, to being as or close to as productive as I was when I wrote a full half of After Terra: Lunacy in one month.

Somewhere between an apology and a promise, here I am, and here I am to stay. The website isn’t going anywhere, and I still want it to be a codex hub for the universe, much like the one accessible to players in the Mass Effect games. My plans for the future of my work needed adjustment based on the drastic changes in my life, but now I know the way this must go in the future. The start of the new year may be an arbitrary benchmark, but it so happens that we are almost in the year 2022 C.E., and with that comes the anticipation that After Terra and all of my other creative universes will finally find their footing, as their creator finds her true voice at last.

FIN