Hello and welcome back! You probably think I wrote all of these ahead of time, and you’d be partly right. I obviously have some time for editing and such, but the truth is, I’ve been a bit disorganized since hurricane Helene. I’ll make a post in the future more about some of what’s been happening since then, but I won’t let myself digress -you see, today marks just 1 week until the launch of The Legends of Evorath. Book 1, The Shadows of Erathal, is going to really expand the world of Evorath and hearing some of the early reviews from ARC readers and critics has been exciting, to say the least!
But today, as we approach that release, we’re diving into part 12 of my 14-part autobiographical blog series. If you haven’t read the prior ones, start on post 1 here. For now, let’s dive into how life changed when we set up the homestead in late 2020.
Building a Homestead
Look, St. Petersburg might not be New York City, but it was always too big a city for me. See, I always knew I would leave the concrete jungle. With a great love for the outdoors, I was thrilled when my wife and I first drove into the entrance of our current property. With 5.5 acres of mostly forested goodness, I loved the beautiful entrance and the well-maintained home. But we knew from the start that it wouldn’t just be another home. We had our sights set on a homestead.
This started in 2021 when we took the dive and purchased some pullets (baby hens). Well, it turned out one of them wasn’t a pullet; the one that I had to painstakingly take care of clean poop of his butt grew up to be our loud and proud rooster, who we named Butters (a South Park reference). We learned as we went, but our endeavors paid off, our chickens providing us with a steady flow of eggs. By February 2022, we added Goats to the homestead for milk and cheese, and later that year we picked up our livestock guardian dog, Jadzia.
Struggling to Find the Time
While no single homesteading effort took up too much time, adding all of them together was proving to be a challenge. It helped that my wife and I both worked from home, but after working our full-time jobs, spending time gardening and on basic forestry maintenance (the disadvantage of a wooded property, you have a lot more “yard work” to do), taking care of the various animals, and spending many weekends visiting family and friends, I didn’t have much energy to write Evorath. But as the years ticked by and I wrote down new ideas, reviewed old notes, and came up with new characters, I knew I had to make a focused effort to work on Evorath.
As 2022 ended and our homesteading efforts were becoming more predictable and manageable, I made a point to really dive back into writing. It took a while to get back into the groove of things. And it took some time to refresh my website and get everything back in order, but I knew it would be worth the effort. I felt a strong calling to pursue Evorath and to tell the stories I had crafted over the years.
Thanks to this effort, I was able to finish writing book 2 of Evorath, The Rise of Yezurkstal, and launched that in the middle of 2023. Despite some momentum though, it was still slow-moving. I needed more motivation.
The Ultimate Motivation
So there I was with Evorath back underway, but the truth is, there were still competing priorities. My wife had been working in healthcare, and post-COVID, that entire industry got even worse than it was before (which was a bit hard to believe). So, with my day job in data science at an advertising agency, we decided it made sense for her to leave her job. This helped free up her time to focus on some of her homesteading skills and lo and behold, the month after she left her job, we found out she was pregnant!
When it comes to finding motivation, there’s nothing more motivating than finding out you’re going to be a father. And knowing that, my mission became crystal clear: I intended to raise my children to be independent thinkers and driven individuals. How could I do that, encouraging them to pursue their callings in life, if I failed to follow my own? My passion for my art burned brighter than ever before, and so did my passion for truth. But we’ll talk more about that next week.
Until then, thanks for reading along.
