I know I’ve been quiet. Quieter than usual, anyway. And that’s because the big day is now only 6 months away.
I mentioned this in a post last year. I’m getting married in October, the Saturday before my birthday. I didn’t think I was ready then, and not much has changed on that front. Yes, we’ve made progress in the wedding planning. We’ve got a venue, a caterer, a photographer and minister and all sorts of things like that. She picked out a dress last week. I’ll have to get my brother and cousin (and her brother, because I have a severe lack of potential groomsman candidates) together to pick out the men’s wear. Add in rings, rehearsals, narrowing down our near-infinite playlist into something manageable…well, it’s still a mess. But we’re getting somewhere.
On the other hand, I feel like I’m getting nowhere. I’ve been treading water almost the whole time I’ve been engaged. My applications have about a 3% engagement rate, and that’s not for interviews. No, that’s just the ones that deign to respond with a rejection. The vast majority go into the aether, never to be heard from again.
Within half a year, I have to find an outfit, find a place to live, find a way to build a life. Oh, and I have to juggle that with surviving the looming economic devastation, potential famine, whatever the WEF has cooked up for 2026, and all the other things that aren’t making the news. The world is a very grim place.
But it has a few bright spots. One is Leslie, obviously. She’s the only reason I keep going, and the person who best understands who I am. I’m a dreamer, an escapist. I always have been, and I always will be. It’s why I write fantasy and sci-fi novels, instead of something that a straight white man might be able to turn into a career as an author. It’s why I play RPGs and city-builders and civilization-builders. It’s why I want to look to the stars.
The Artemis 2 mission splashes down today, and that has been another bright spot in the darkness of 2026. While NASA tried its best to extinguish the flame of exploration with the cold water of diversity—the crew includes a black man, a woman, and a Canadian—human ingenuity and the American pioneer spirit cannot be so easily destroyed or harnessed. The pictures from the Integrity capsule’s windows reminded me why I love space, why I watched From the Earth to the Moon until the tapes wore out, then turned to read A Man on the Moon, Apollo 13, and so many others.
In the last week, I’ve put in more time playing Kerbal Space Program than in the 10 years before that. I’ve changed my desktop wallpaper to the iconic "Earthset" photo. I’ve picked back up on the final chapter of On the Stellar Sea, something I’ve been putting off for months. Why? Because I was inspired.
Leslie inspires me, too, but in a different way. She’s the result of my explorer’s spirit: she lives halfway across the state, farther than I’d ever gone from home by myself, and we met on a dating site, which is a place that doesn’t fit me at all. Being with her gives me outlets for that spirit, whether finding a new restaurant or driving on back roads because we got lost or just looking for new ways to share our time together. She didn’t make me an explorer, but she did help me remember why I love it.
Six months from now, I’ll be exploring something else I’d long since discarded any hope of ever seeing. I’ll probably never go to space, except maybe as a suborbital tourist in 20 years. Magic and the paranormal don’t exist, so half of my books must always live in the realm of the impossible. Becoming a husband and head of household is a much smaller, much more intimate sort of dream, but it’s another dream I stopped believing would come true long ago.
It won’t be easy. I know that. It certainly isn’t right now, and this is supposed to be the easy part. But I’m used to adversity. It’s been my life for as long as I can remember. Nothing I’ve ever tried has come without hardship, often so unbearable that I break down. Even having someone else to lean on for this part might not be enough, but I have to try. Like our intrepid voyagers coming home from the Moon, my course is set. I can’t change the trajectory or the date of splashdown. All I can do is hope I don’t burn up.
