I may edit this later as I really think that this is a bit of a word salad, but enjoy a text version of a presentation I gave at BSides Vancouver 2026 on June 1, 2026.

I’ll start off with this: my current career choice is all thanks to this man, Clifford Stoll.

In 1986, he found himself at the centre of an espionage story when a US$0.75 discrepancy in used computer time unravelled a hacking ring involving Soviet and East German spies. A computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he was then employed was being used to break into the computers of labs elsewhere in the United States.

A mere rounding error by today’s standards when you consider how much an AWS EC2 instance costs per hour, but it all culminated in a nearly-year-long escapade involving the American military and intelligence agencies.

I was given a copy of his book, The Cuckoo’s Egg as a parting gift when I moved back to British Columbia. At some point earlier in the year, I made mention that I wanted to read the book and a friend of mine saw to it that I didn’t leave without a copy.

Little did she know that this would have a huge impact on my life, but also introduce a burning question that would remain unresolved until I started to look into it late last year.

Before I continue any further: read this book. If you are at all interested in digital forensics, this is what got my mind interested in the whole field and became my job for a number of years.

Anyway,the burning question stemmed from this passage midway through the story:

“The real problem is in German law,” Steve [of the US Navy Research Lab] said. “I don’t think they recognize hacking as a crime.”

“You’re kidding, of course.”

“No,” he said, “a lot of countries have outdated laws. In Canada, a hacker that broke into a computer was convicted of stealing electricity, rather than trespassing. He was prosecuted only because the connection had used a microwatt of power from the computer.”

Our first computer crime story was electricity theft?

To be honest, for years, this is how I believed things were. It made perfect sense since a computer is really just pushing data around using electricity. Numbers go up and down using electricity. Statements that are true or false are made using electricity. Electricity theft even at a microwatt is still theft of some kind.

Now that it is almost two decades since I finished reading Clifford’s book, I am a lot more wise to the law. Last year in a conversation, I almost found myself parroting the statement from the book, but something made me hesitate.

Was it really “electricity theft”? What was this court case? Why did Cliff write it that way?

Finding the case

It took me a few months of it sitting in my head to finally go ask about it on social media. Within an hour, someone had gotten back to me: it was 1980’s Supreme Court of Canada’s decision on R. v. McLaughlin.

Now you can read into that decision and get an answer immediately to what Cliff was on about, skipping this potentially long ramble of mine. However, this brought up an even more important question: how did it land in the Supreme Court? There was also a second question stemming from reading the decision: was Cliff correct at all?

For Americans unfamiliar with the rest of the world

For those who are not in Canada, the United Kingdom, or other places in the Commonwealth, the R in R. v. McLaughlin stood for then regina or “queen”, but would be today, rex as in “king”.

It’s used in legal contexts to imply it is in service of the Crown and if you flip a Canadian or British coin, you’ll see D G Regina if it shows Queen Elizabeth II or Queen Victoria or D G Rex if it shows King Charles III or King George XVI for example. The D G part stands for Dei Gratia or “Grace of God”.

Back on topic: the court decision outlines a lot, but what it does not elaborate much on is what did this man do to get this far in the court system? I simply had to know.

The University of Alberta

Universities across the world rapidly saw the adoption of computers post-Second World War. The first computer built in Canada was at the University of Toronto, dubbed the UTEC. Other universities would follow suit and each new computer would be a big deal.

The University of Alberta, located in the province’s capital city, Edmonton was established in 1906 when the first provincial premier, Alexander Cameron Rutherford promised that with the capital being where it lies today and to appease the residents of Calgary, it would be south of the North Saskatchewan River.

So it was decided that it would be established in Strathcona, Alberta, which was south of the river, but was completely visible from the grounds of the legislature. Six years later, Strathcona would be absorbed into the City of Edmonton

Much of the school’s academia and research were focused on agriculture, medicine, law, and for a time, had a role in the province’s Eugenics Board.

In 1957, the university received its first computer: an LGP-30. Three years later in 1960, computer programming courses were offered by an employee, Bill Adams who would have overseen the introduction of that machine. Four years after, the university removed computing from its mathematics faculty and established an independent Department of Computing Science.

Time sharing and its strife

During all of this time, computers were rapidly evolving but were still expensive. Such machines were reported to be as much as C$240,000 (or C$2,000,000 today) and would only be replaced on a multi-year basis. The university did not have the funds to own a computer outright and were regularly renting machines from IBM with them acquiring an IBM System 360 in 1967.

While computer science students may be studying with the aid of these computers, other departments also wanted to be able to use them. A computer can do mathematics so much faster than a human ever could (sorry, Frank Herbert) and so time on the machine was allocated based on need.

Through time sharing, users could be given a time bank per day. Studying computer science? You’d get four hours per day for access. Studying soil movement via geotechnics? Four hours per week. Majoring in English? Probably not.

These restrictions ultimately led to a lot of strife amongst students and faculty and would become the origin of many early computer hacking stories.

If you look up Allan Scherr on Wikipedia, you will read that he is a Grace Murray Hopper Award winner in 1975. This prize is named in honour of Grace Hopper, a woman you should read about separate from this entry as her story is so, so much more than what I can write in a paragraph.

His contributions to computing science has its origins in modern artificial intelligence research and furthered IBM’s work in the computer industry. His recognition is warranted and deserved.

What is missing from his Wikipedia entry is that he likely is the first person to have committed what we would today refer as computer crime.

In the IEEE’s Computer Society’s Fiftieth Anniversary Commemorative Overview, Allan shares a story about him stealing passwords while as a student at MIT.

This worked well until the spring of 1962. What happened was that someone on the CTSS staff (I think Bob Daley) came to me and said that the space my measurement programs used was needed and, since I was done measuring, they were going to remove my programs from the operating system. At the same time, my privileges to modify the operating system were revoked.

[…]

I finally found a way to do it. All of the passwords for the system were stored in a file called UACCNT.SECRET under user M1416. There was a way to request files to be printed offline by submitting a punched card with the account number and file name. Late one Friday night, I submitted a request to print the password files and very early Saturday morning went to the file cabinet where printouts were placed and took the listing out of the M1416 folder. I could then continue my larceny of machine time.

Time theft on computers was often done out of necessity, but it would later become part of what we’re about to get into here with this legal case.

A new computer

I am aware that this is not a 470. Enjoy a nice ad copy though!

In 1975, the university purchased an Amdahl 470 V/6 computer, the first Amdahl computer in Canada with a serial of P5 implying it was the fifth computer ever built.

If you remember earlier, they had previously been using an IBM System/360. The Amdahl 470 itself was built to be plug and code compatible with the System 360 series. This interoperability meant a person who learnt on IBM could learn on Amdahl.

This machine cost the university C$9 million (C$50 million today) and could support 5,000 users. To help support the expense of the machine, the school split the machine up so 3,500 students and faculty could have access to it, divvied up like I had mentioned before, but the other 1,500 could be shared with local businesses and governments.

Access to the machine was initially set at C$1,440 per hour (C$7,400 today) only because of them sticking to a calculation with the old System 360.

Until the end of this fiscal year, computer time rates will be calculated by multiplying the rates on the old IBM 360/67 by eight since the Amdahl does eight times the work in the same amount of time. This means that the computer time will cost about $1440 per hour.

A student with four hours per day for a whole month would have to cost something approaching C$172,000 if my math is to be believed.

The largest Amazon EC2 instance I have used at work worked out to C$3,500 a month just to put this all into perspective.

With budgets being budgets at any university, time was allocated like before. The Amdahl machine was known for having been used in playing chess in its first year–a popular computer science activity then and even now, but it was about to become the centre of Canada’s first significant computer crime cases.

The only account is hard to follow

I’m relying on Fighting Computer Crime by Donn B. Parker (ISBN 0-684-17796-X) to compile this timeline as there really is no other reliable background story that isn’t full of contradictions.

To add to this, the author replaces the names with pseudonyms, but thanks to him including details about the Supreme Court hearing, we can work it all back.

Name in book	Name in real life
“Lingen”	Arnold Astels
“Osbourne”	Michael McLaughlin
“Devon”	Bruce Christensen

Additionally, he refers to Bruce Christensen as a high school student, but according to the January 9th, 1979 University of Alberta Folio newsletter, he was a former student of of the university.

In the same newsletter, it is revealed that the third person involved is Arnold Astels, a third-year electrical engineering student. However, Parker refers to him as a part-time employee of the university who is still in high school.

However, Michael McLaughlin is also claimed to be a university student in the book, but then like before, the newsletter contradicts this by stating he’s a high school student instead.

Super frustrating for me to figure out here.

In a December 5th, 1978 article in the Edmonton Journal, it refers to them as such:

A computer theft trial — believed to be the first of its kind in Canada — saw three University of Alberta students charged with mischief and theft of computer time on U of A facilities.

I believe that Folio has it wrong on McLaughlin, Parker made changes to the story, and the Edmonton Journal is probably correct.

So for the sake of my sanity and yours, they’re all students of the university. I don’t think that any of them were in high school at the time of the incident considering their ages were 18 to 22.

Everything I am sharing here should be taken with a grain of salt and may only reflect so much in what really occurred.

What I think happened

Let’s go through this mess.

The whiz kids get caught

In Parker’s book, he claims that a professor gave his students in his computer science class an assignment to beat the computer. One of the students in his class submitted an application called Green, which modified the computer and terminal charges.

The Folio newsletter I cited earlier makes reference to this program being developed in the springtime of 1976.

However, sometime around January 1977 or perhaps December 1976, a printout of the application somehow landed in a wastebasket in a terminal room. A part-time employee in the Geology department, Arnold Astels discovered it and realised what it was.

In a Edmonton Journal article after the incident, “MJB Green” code was developed by a graduate student who is now on the university’s payroll.

The student kept the code in his files and a “staff member” asked for copies which were apparently distributed. The unidentified student was never charged and his work was done under the guidance of a professor in a computer sciences course.

I’m going to say that the book is probably incorrect and instead believe that it was just a case of the application being handed over willingly.

Astels, who I believe was the eldest of the three involved, was at the time an electrical engineering student who had been interested in computers since the age of twelve.

I will also add that Astels had the ability to issue key cards, granting access to the Geology building and perhaps elsewhere, but it will be mentioned later that it could have been another person involved.

He was friends with Michael McLaughlin, an 18-year old electrical engineering student. McLaughlin was the first to use Green to circumvent the controls placed on him.

Astels’ shenanigans however did predate the use of Green. He admitted to have been using a Snooper program to access other people’s files.

In then comes in our third person, Bruce Christensen, an 18-year old unemployed former science student, described as a “impulsive mad scientist” type by Parker. He was friends with the other two and was excited at the prospect of getting all sorts of information.

He was described by one of the two as “having a disease” when it came to this discovery. Followed by noting that his programming skills were “haphazard” while theirs were “refined”.

I am uncertain to what language they would have been writing code in, but if a 1976 paper on computer chess is to be believed, then it was possibly a Amdahl variant of Algol. This would line up with Barry J. Mailloux being employed at the university at the time, known for being an authority on the programming language. This is my best guess here as I do not have any technical details on the code being mentioned in the story.

Not long after their mischief began, the director at the computer centre discovered what had been occurring. Discrepancies in the logs led the director to discover the use of Green thousands of times to alter the logs.

All three admitted to their behaviour and summarily their accounts were terminated.

McLaughlin did protest the decision, which led to its reversal on the grounds he needed access for his studies. For the other two, no such reversal was made, but thanks to what I suspect was a combination of the Snooper program and poor hygiene on the part of other students and faculty, they had access to other accounts.

Mischief once again

As time progressed, problems reared their ugly heads again, and by July of that year, the computer centre began to run into problems with its users. Crashes were becoming more frequent going from a weekly occurrence to near daily.

Sometime that same month, the trio plotted to regain a foothold on the computer. However, for some reason, Astels bounced out well before it progressed, a decision which would benefit him later.

The crashes were so bad that at their peak, they had to restart the mainframe three times over the course of two days towards the end of that month. Use of the computer was increasing both legitimately and not.

To determine the fault of the crashes, the centre developed an application called Tracer, which while would consume a tenth of the computing power to keep track of everything, it would give them an edge that they were lacking prior. One of its tasks was to identify the user IDs in use when a crash occurred.

This application would be the trio’s undoing.

Takedown

On August 20th, 1977, the application discovered that the accounts belonging to Syncrude Canada Ltd, a newly-formed company to extract oil in the Athabasca basin, had their usage records destroyed and contents replaced with obscenities.

As an aside: when reading one of the newsletters from the university, passwords had a limit of twelve characters. It would have been nice to have more technical information about what I am about to write about here.

Someone then at the centre noticed a file from a user had been destroyed as well, leading them to restore it from a backup only to have it destroyed once again. After repeat attempts, it was then discovered that their own Tracer program was itself being monitored.

The book describes the occurrence here as a game where they went back and forth trying to take control over the computer. My mind can only wander off to that scene in Hackers, where the protagonists were fighting against the evil security director.

But during this time, the word “Tilt”, which I assume was lifted from pinball, kept filling their display. By 4:30 PM, the computer crashed once more, and despite it taking nearly forty minutes to restore the whole system, they managed to salvage a paper printout of everything key to what had been going on.

This user revealed existence of two programs: Q3H3 and SPACE.

SPACE itself was used to scramble or rather obfuscate programs. Q3H3, however, while scrambled itself, would use the aforementioned Snooper application to then monitor any terminal they wanted.

Computer centre managers were brought in to stay late to observe because it sounds like they expected this to continue. They were correct as after staring at a console for nearly an hour, a user ID of DCGA signed in and made use of the SPACE program.

They quickly identified which terminal it belonged to: a hard-wired DEC Writer III located in the Geology department.

Something I must point out right now: this is a Saturday night. Just let that one sink as I am sure everybody involved is pissed off.

Three managers and three university peace officers entered room 273 (or maybe 2-37, as room numbers today do not reach as high as stated in Parker’s book) of the Geology building, a room that was locked with a pass key, and once in, they caught Christensen red-handed.

He had a piece of paper on him with both Q3H3 and DCGA written down, plus a listing of a program that could access the centre’s registration clerk’s ID and password. He also had the Green program readily available too.

Dead to rights in their eyes, he was escorted to a nearby campus police station and subsequently the Edmonton Police Service was called in. He then spilt the beans and admitted to everything he had been doing.

The police then went looking for Astels at his home, but did not find him there. However, they did discover him staying at Christensen’s home and there they found numerous printouts.

Closing in on McLaughlin, he denied everything at first, but then admitted to his involvement in the whole affair. When the police searched his home, they found printouts as well as data tapes.

The crashes did stop and the Alberta Crown opted to have all three were charged under section 287 of the Canadian Criminal Code.

Now it’s a legal mess.

The cost to the university

This is an aside, but I noticed in the newsletter I got some clarification from, there was this tidbit:

[Bruce Christensen had] very large number of computer runs [performed]. Much of the evidence was destroyed, but analysis showed many runs with total charges exceeding $200; the total amount of computed work was probably worth many times that figure.

If you remember earlier, they had a C$1,440/hour (C$7,400 2025) quote for computer time, meaning that their modifications to the ledger made it seem like they only had to be billed just over a tenth of what they actually had done.

I don’t know what else to make of this, but I did want to bring it up instead of leaving it lying on the table.

The struggle with the Criminal Code

If you were to look up section 287 today, you’d end up with something that absolutely does not make sense. I will explain why in a moment, but as it stood in 1977, this is what it then stated:

”s. 273 Every one commits theft who fraudulently or maliciously

(b) uses a telephone or telegraph line or obtains telephone or telegraph service. S.C. 1953-54, C. 51.”

To expand on the charges further, they were charged under s. 273 (b), which how it became theft of telecommunications services. I am intentionally removing (a) because that will become important later.

They were also all charged with mischief.

On December 4th, 1978, a court ruled on the following:

• Astels despite his involvement was acquitted on both charges
• Christensen was convicted on both charges
• McLaughlin was acquitted on mischief, but convicted on telecommunications theft

It is my understanding that in this hearing, McLaughlin and Astels shared the same lawyer, Dan Haag, who argued that a computer was not a telecommunications facility under the Criminal Code so the students had not used any telecommunications facility. The judge, Justice John Hope of the Albertan Court of Queen’s Bench disagreed and gave his ruling.

In the December 8th, 1978 edition of the Edmonton Journal, the following was stated by Bruce’s lawyer:

Lawyer Nick Feehan, representing Bruce Kevin Christensen, 19, said he agrees his client committed mischief.

But he compared Christensen to Galieo Galilei (the man who was condemned for saving the earth revoled around the sun) and predicted “some day he could easily be one of the top scientists in Canada “

The convictions on Christensen and dismissal of Astels would remain, but this was not going to be the case for McLaughlin.

Appeal to the King’s Court

Up until this point, I’ve had to rely on third-party accounts, newsletters with questionable information, and newspaper articles that contradict everything. This appeal, however, filed by Dan Haag for Michael McLaughlin is fortunately available without much effort.

It’s here we learn about the struggle the Crown and the courts face when discussing computer crime. Here’s the surface-level comment out of the way:

Through these phone facilities the computer can be accessed by single telephone means. He described the terminals as being a ‘Deck Writer’ types, and expanded by comparing them to typewriters. These Deck Writers record the dialogue between the operator and the computer on the computer sheets, which we have heard designated as ‘hard copy’. He described C.R.T., cathode ray tube terminal, as printing on a screen on the terminal itself. He described a ‘buffer’ as being part of the facility and used as the computer memory in one sense.

“Deck Writer” should be “DEC Writer”, but as an aside, you have to explain every single item to the court. What leads up to this part of the statement from the University’s Director of Computer Services, Dr. Dale Bent is more interesting:

Dr. Bent referred to the ‘central processing unit’ as one part, and that there was some two dozen major units connected by electrical cable and that the computer was also connected to telecommunication facilities, and that there was at the time in question over 300 terminals for the unit, that some of the terminals were in the General Service Building wired directly to this Amdahl computer, and there were electromagnetic connections. He said that outside there was connection by telephone, that is, telephone cable and coaxial cables, there was a dial up connection by phone through the facilities of Edmonton Telephones, Alberta Government Telephones, and the Trans Canada Telephones System.

For those unfamiliar, Edmonton Telephones and Alberta Government Telephones are now TELUS and Trans Canada Telephones System is what became the backbone of Rogers’ national mobile phone network. In this statement, the argument is being made that since the terminals connect to the computer no differently than the modems used from off-campus, it constituted a telecommunications facility.

On November 11th, 1979, the court ruled on the appeal, allowing it and setting aside the conviction.

From: Mr. Justice McClung

It seems to me that the appellant’s argument ignores the very purpose for which the computer proper and its access lines - the facility - were constructed. It was designed as a general purpose time sharing service for the various academic programs at the University and to permit access to the computer from inside as well as outside the University. This could only be done by telecommunication and the appellant, obviously, was aware of it. His asportation of the data provided by the central processing system was made possible by the very telecommunication that he now denounces as ancillary to it. The evidence persuades me that the facility intercepted by the accused was a computer designed to electronically receive and furnish information with speed and convenience to a wide but selective audience of recipients. The electronic transmission of the information was not incidental to its function - it was integral of it.

And from Mr. Justice Morrow:

Turning back to the offence charged I am unable to read “telecommunication facility” along with the statutory definition of “telecommunication” as having application to the unit or device with all its various components under consideration in the present case. The whole accent here is on computing or calculation with the relay or communication aspect as only incidental. It seems to me it would be an improper extrusion of the language to hold that such a device constituted a telecommunication facility.

Reaction from the Crown prosecutors was swift: they wanted further clarity. Within that same month, they submitted an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The final say

This is where we end up with the landmark case, R. v. McLaughlin and where I suspect led to some thinking that this was a case about electricity theft. A decision by the court was reached on July 18th, 1980.

I’m going to skip right to the outcome: McLaughlin won on the Crown’s appeal, so let’s reveal 287 as a whole:

287.(1) Every one commits theft who fraudulently, maliciously, or without colour of right, (a) abstracts, consumes or uses electricity or gas or causes it to be wasted or diverted; or (b) uses any telecommunication facility or obtains any telecommunication service.

Section 287(a) and not (b) mentions electricity theft (or gas), but that is not what McLaughlin was charged with. However, Chief Justice Laskin brings this topic up:

Section 287 has a history which began in simpler times when electricity alone was the protected resource, as expressed in the Electric Lighting Act, 1882 (Imp.), c. 56, s. 23, making it an offence maliciously or fraudulently to, inter alia, abstract or use any electricity. This provision was adopted in Canada by The Electric Light Inspection Act, 1894 (Can.), c. 39, s. 10, and was carried into s. 351 of the Criminal Code, R.S.C. 1906, c. 146.

And I think it is this statement in the judgement that got some folks, including Stoll or the person he was speaking with in the book.

Which is where we were left with: the ask was to Parliament to solve this as the courts cannot.

Other cases

In that newsletter from much earlier, there’s also this quote:

There have been convictions under this section in similar circumstances as a result of guilty pleas. Instances have occurred at Simon Fraser University, University of Toronto, and University of Waterloo.

Here’s the thing: searching for “287” and any of these universities or just the word “computer” nets nothing in CanLii. If someone knows what this is all about, please let me know! It’s entirely possible that these cases may have not been digitised or I am using the wrong section.

Honestly, after reading through law just on this whole matter for this whole piece, I think my brain is not going to get any of this straight.

Media Reaction

Being that this was 1980, news about the story did not make its way to the general public until the morning after. For a case of its importance, it found itself reported many pages deep mixed in with ads from supermarkets and department stores.

Per the Victoria Times Columnist via the Canadian Press, they referred to McLaughlin as a “whiz kid” and summed up the case as follows:

Taken too literally, the law could be applied to using a “simple Xerox machine” to send images from one point to another.

Although today I would consider a photocopier a communication device, the average Xerox machine then likely made mere duplications of paper for the vast majority of offices. Fax machines were likely a separate device.

The July 19th, 1980 edition of The Globe and Mail spelt this out:

There is no doubt the campus computer was used without authority, Judge Estey said, but the law simply didn’t embrace the computer.

Closing

I have two loose ends here, so let’s cover them.

Asking Cliff Stoll himself

The magic of the Internet is you can contact people directly. Cliff maintains a website that sells Klein Bottles, which are really cool and you can just check the place out for yourself.

Hi Cliff!

I love your Klein Bottles and had a chance to see one owned by a friend who lives in the Bay Area. However, admittedly, I am emailing you about your book, The Cuckoo’s Egg. There’s a passage in the book that has bothered me for twenty years and I am going to bring it up in a conference talk (should it be accepted).

If you do not mind, it’s this:

“The real problem is in German law,” Steve [of the US Navy Research Lab] said. “I don’t think they recognize hacking as a crime.”

“You’re kidding, of course.”

“No,” he said, “a lot of countries have outdated laws. In Canada, a hacker that broke into a computer was convicted of stealing electricity, rather than trespassing. He was prosecuted only because the connection had used a microwatt of power from the computer.”

Assuming that this is a real conversation, what did Steve mean here? I went looking for this particular case and could not find it in our country’s legal history. I did however find a Supreme Court of Canada case (R. v. McLaughlin) which did cite the origins of the law that would have been applied to early computer crime cases with it originating in electricity and heating fuel theft.

Was this what he meant?

In any event, no worries if you do not know. I want to say that this book is wonderful and I recommend reading it because it’s genuinely a fun and entertaining story. It had an influence on my career choices in life even though I do wish I went down the astronomer route I had originally planned.

Thanks in advance! Cariad

I had emailed him in the morning and by mid-afternoon that same day, he replied:

Hi Cariad,

Thanks for your kind note - I appreciate your interest in both my Klein bottles and m’old book.

Needless to say, after 40 years, I don’t remember that conversation. However, it was in the early days, just a few years after they discovered mud, and not quite invented the wheel. There were lots of rumors about legalities, and I ididn’t chase any of the cases down.

I do remember postings to the old Usenet, talking about whether “theft of service” and “theft of electricity” applied to theft of computer time. But I didn’t do my homework and chase them down to see if the rumors were founded in caselaw. (remember – no google then. I had to bike over to the law library to look this stuff up.

Not sure if this helps, but it’s about all I know!

Warm wishes, -Cliff (still living in the same ol’ place in north Oakland, California – a 15 minute bike ride south of the Berkeley campus.)

I am so happy he got me quickly. It’s understandable with it being over four decades since everything happening that he’d have forgotten, so his response was understandable. Nonetheless, it was super appreciated that he’d take a response.

The status of the three men

I did not reach out to any of these men, but at least for Arnold and Bruce, they have remained out of the public spotlight.

However, Michael may have unfortunately since passed away. I found an individual matching everything I know about him having died of cancer in late 2020.

This is an entry in relation to the book I am currently writing.

Last month, I wrote about time. This month, I am writing about how I could see a government working across multiple star systems.

This is just going to be a lore post more than anything else. It doesn’t really fit the book in any fashion, but I figure it might be enjoyable for people to read to get a sense for what is to come.

Limitations on travel

In the setting of Reconnect, ships carrying humans will accelerate only up to 1.1g, or approximately 10.8 metres per second per second.

Taking into account the need to stop, the average ship could get from Earth to Mars in 1 day and 16 hours. However, Earth and Mars are not exactly settings in this book, and we have something else to contend with.

There are two principal planets in my story’s universe: Hibernia and Augustia. There are a smattering of other planets too, but all in all, the distance between these planets is on the surface about 13 light years apart.

Ignoring fuel, it would take just over 14 years to travel between the two planets although because of time dilation, the passengers onboard would experience something like five. The idea of being in a tin can for what would be perceived as half a decade is unpleasant even though it would be a third of what it truly would take.

This is of course impractical for the setting of my book, so of course there is a solution: we’ve achieved some sort of faster than light travel.

Humanity’s loss or the “Disconnect”

A few centuries from now, humans figured out how to pinch through spacetime with the use of twinned gates. One half of a gate was sent off from the Solar System to Tau Ceti. This was achieved with a light sail pushed by lasers.

When the gate arrived, it was soon realised that the planet they expected to be habitable was less than ideal. It would require terraforming in order to make it even remotely useful to colonise beyond a smattering of small population centres confined to spaces akin to those found on Mars.

As a consolation, the star system itself was ripe with resources to exploit. These resources were plentiful enough to permit the construction of significant numbers of gate pairs. This was in stark contrast to humanity’s home system, which could not build more than two pairs, one of which had failed to activate upon arrival at Proxima Centauri, less than five light years away.

Four gate pairs were constructed and then sent off towards other nearby stars. This was met with success as habitable planets were discovered orbiting all of them. This led to worlds named Hibernia and Augustia finding themselves colonised.

However, for reasons that remain a mystery, the only gate connecting back to Earth irreparably collapsed. While possible to build a new gate pair, the motivation to be governed from afar was unpopular with most of the colonists. This was further ensured after political order was returned and contact back home was forbidden by those in power.

Earth without the resources available to remedy the situation, within a few centuries did successfully send a probe containing an unspecified message and a few bottles of whiskey. Yet, unauthorised contact back to humanity’s home world was fleeting at best. When discovered, it was swiftly responded to by the colonial governments with punitive measures towards those involved.

After a generation passes, trade and travel between the colonies becomes commonplace and the memories of the “Old World” as it would be referred to become lost, anecdotes, or stories contained within what entertainment survived. The worlds that linked via these still functional gates were the places these humans would now only know.

New gates would be constructed to ensure redundancy and with time provide additional capacity, but nobody would dare allocate resources to build one to a place that would have once been called “home”.

Regular travel

Trips between Augustia and Hibernia take about three weeks, with one week being to one gate, the other traveling through The Hub or Tau Ceti as we know it, and then another week to get from the gate to the destination.

Gates are kept as far away as possible from planets and stars as they do interfere with the gravity of objects around them despite their mass not being all that significant.

The other aspect about the gates is that there’s a speed limit for their use. Gates have a speed limit of 3,342 KM/h. Why? Reasons. Just accept it.

This restriction creates a chokepoint as while the gates themselves can easily handle multiple vessels going in and out and that travel from one side to the other is largely instantaneous, you have to slow down as otherwise you will run into problems that I will not reveal at this time.

Side note about light sails

I made mention of pushing the gates by light sail, which are a real thing, but it’s probably going to be asked: why could humans not travel by this method?

In short, it is discovered that constant relativistic effects on human consciousness can really take their toll. One of the characters describes it as slowly turning you into “just a bag of meat and water”. The closer you approach velocities where time dilation is measurable in days, the more your mind begins to irreversibly fail.

Despite the centuries that have gone by between now and the book’s setting, we still fail to grasp what traps us in the bodies we’re given at birth.

Weak early institutions

Humanity has so far only had to compete with itself in its interstellar expansion. While the planets have not been devoid of flora or fauna, anything resembling sapient such as ourselves has yet to be observed.

One problem the gate collapse did create is stagnation, meaning that the colonies were suddenly removed from competition. While Earth was a huge benefactor from the resources and wealth brought on by the existence of the gate, the colonised worlds were themselves dependent in return.

Medicine, research, education, and even entertainment were all suddenly divorced from a significant portion of humanity. While these colonised worlds were largely self-sufficient for goods such as food or fuel, they all suffered a significant handicap when it came to anything advanced.

With a portion of humanity finding itself orphaned, it struggled to rebuild its expertise and recreate institutions while thwarting off anyone who wanted to take advantage of the situation. Many charlatans found themselves at an advantage with these young and naive governments, as they could gain access to resources by promising more than they could achieve.

However, time would pass and those with the knowhow would eventually push humanity in the right direction. It would not completely ease the pain, but the colonies would within a few centuries find themselves at parity to what was before.

Okay. What about this government?

Weeks of travel between all of humanity’s new worlds meant that no single, omnipresent government could rule. Past history back on Earth had proven that continental and maritime empires were ineffective. Prior to the gate collapse, what had existed was on already shaky ground with constant rebellions requiring dispatches to the fringes.

Additionally, cultural differences between the people who settled there also lent to the need to let these worlds rule as their own. However, Tau Ceti or “The Hub” was a shared space and thus needed to exist under its own entity.

This resulted in the formation of the Collective Commonwealth, a treaty organisation which exists to share the resources and infrastructure amongst all of its members.

Not all colonies signed onto the treaty, but those settlements within the Tau Ceti system as well as Hibernia and Augustia for example became party to it. Those who are not signatories to the treaty have a wide disparity with respect to trade and movement.

This treaty organisation has its own constitution and rules plus provides its own enforcement to ensure that spaces like The Hub could exist without requiring one single member to control any portion of the shared resource. Each member would also pay into upkeep and the organisation itself would have its own legislative body to oversee matters that encompass all members.

Under the treaty, members are provided with rules around freedom of movement, regulation on trade, research and education, construction of infrastructure, and enforcement of conduct. Each member themselves would be responsible for their own domestic affairs, but are also heavily discouraged from engaging in activities which are the business of the CC.

However, all of this is largely seen by the public, many of whom do not ever leave the worlds they reside on, as a system designed to keep member governments occupied by lineages of power. For those outside of the CC, they see it as a multilateral system to harass non-members. While the CC does not have a military on paper, it has an enforcement agency which behaves like one.

Where this all breaks down

Well, this is where the book comes in. Despite centuries passing, the stagnation remains and eventually catches up with those in the Collective Commonwealth.

And that is where I will leave this blog piece for today!

CC: Don Davies, MP Vancouver Kingsway
CC: Taleeb Noormohamed, MP Vancouver Granville

Hon. Prime Minister,

This is a letter urging you and your party to not vote in favour of Bill C-22, an act respecting lawful access.

Section 487 of the Criminal Code of Canada already provides law enforcement with sweeping abilities to request electronic data from service providers without said providers enduring consequences for their voluntary assistance. By mandating that encryption be effectively disabled for any service used by an electronic device, of which this is what it proposes as the introduction of access by a third-party means that there is no privacy.

This sort of legislation will make out every single person into a criminal by default should they choose to not comply with this. Not only that, it will permit a chilling effect on our technology industry, which relies on trust for activities such as transactions and secrecy in communications. Additionally, it removes telecommunication services from being reliant on being common carriers, as this will escalate to them having to inspect messages during interception.

I do not believe that Taleeb Noormohamed, the current Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation has the skill set and expertise to understand what he has brought forward. This is an individual whose technology career has only overseen e-commerce as an executive in luxury goods and vacation accommodation rentals. If he had any idea of the sort of challenges that this Bill creates, he would then understand the serious ramifications of naively permitting a method for other parties to peer into encrypted communications.

What I am trying to say here is basically this: your parliamentary secretary has no clue about what he is talking about.

His statement as follows:

I want to emphasize the word “existing”. The bill would not create new surveillance powers, new intercept authorities or back doors into any one system. It would make the court-authorized processes that we already have, warrants and production orders, which are tools that have always required judicial oversight, functional in a world that has moved online.

This is contrary to what is introduced in Part 2, 5-2 of Bill C-22:

The Governor in Council may make regulations respecting the obligations of core providers, including regulations respecting […] the retention of categories of metadata — including transmission data, as defined in section 487.‍011 of the Criminal Code — for reasonable periods of time not exceeding one year.

Section 487.011, changes the definition of transmission data under part c from the following:

transmission data means data that […] does not reveal the substance, meaning or purpose of the communication

To as such:

subscriber information, in relation to any client of a person who provides services to the public or any subscriber to the services of such a person, means […] information relating to the services provided to the subscriber or client, including […] information that identifies the devices, equipment or things used by the subscriber or client in relation to the services

This radical change in altering definitions from “transmission data” to “subscriber information” plus the change from “not revealing the substance” is the introduction of the backdoor when combined with the following from the Bill:

487.‍0142 (1) On ex parte application made by a peace officer or public officer, a justice or judge may order a person who provides services to the public to prepare and produce a document containing all the subscriber information that relates to any information, including transmission data, that is specified in the order and that is in their possession or control when they receive the order.

In order for a service to comply with this change to Section 487, it would necessitate the creation of a backdoor. Mr. Noormohamed either misunderstands what the bill actually states, has fed it through a third party and is taking the output from it as truth, or is intentionally being misleading. Let it be known that this change to the Criminal Code is a backdoor.

When Bill C-13 was introduced by then Public Safety Minister, Vic Toews, a bill which would have made substantial changes to Section 487, he cited that it was to protect children, citing Amanda Todd and Rehteah Parsons, two teenaged girls both of whom were victimised by predators. These changes did nothing to further protect children, and once again, Mr. Noormohamed is using the same tactics.

Will opposition to this bill label another political columnist as being “with the child pornographers” as Mr. Toews had inspired a response with to a previous version of the Bill? This government and the many that have come before them have not addressed the real harms that affect children. However, they’ve all been more than happy to use them as pawns when law enforcement wishes to seek new opportunities in order to control the lives of the average, hardworking Canadian.

There is no safe way to introduce third party access to encrypted messages between parties and children are not at risk due to encryption thwarting law enforcement.

Canadians have a right to privacy whether from telecommunication providers or the government in their day to day lives. This bill will make Canada less competitive in the technology industry and will have a chilling effect beyond.

One of the things I have been wanting to do in Reconenct is play a bit with how time is kept. Without giving away too much of the story, multiple planets separated by several weeks of travel spanning different star systems would in my mind lead to a situation where the time standards that we all know today have maybe evolved.

Time-keeping is a core component of my day job as I base all of my work on the use of Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC. It’s a relatively simple system where you just need to keep track of one time for the whole planet and then use an offset to determine the local time.

Since I live in Vancouver, my time zone is -7 UTC (which recently changed from -8), this means that I am seven hours behind from what UTC displays.

Here’s an example using a very basic JavaScript clock:

UTC	Your time

You’re not limited to offsets that are whole integers either. Examples include Newfoundland time, where the island of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador has an offset of -03:30, or Central Western Standard Time, which gives it an offset of +8:45. It has its quirks, but translating between these times is fairly painless provided your loved ones are not in either of these trying to call each other.

Imagine the frustration of someone in Cocklebiddy in Western Australia trying to figure out when to call their mother who lives in Dildo, Newfoundland and Labrador.

I hold the belief that this system, while geocentric, works well for humanity even if off-world as if you’re in a spaceship travelling around our star system, it is fine. However, what about calendars? And what about other planets?

This is a silly post that I wanted to do so I could talk a bit about my book. Much of the inspiration for coming up with my own dating scheme originates in both Star Trek and the Wayfinder series by Becky Chambers. I welcome people pointing out any problems with this all, but this post is haphazard and is for certain going to have flaws.

I hate calendars

The importance of calendars should not be understated: knowing where we are in the year is important for ensuring that our agricultural sector knows when to grow crops and for legal and financial systems to keep working. However, I am going to show something that may be frustrating to see for the first time.

The months of September, October, November, and December are not where they should be and the year should really start sometime around March. For those of you familiar with the history of Rome as well as the Roman empire, this something you might know already, but January and February did not exist prior to the latter part of 700 BCE. You’d have ten months or 304 days in the calendar, and then winter.

The names of the aforementioned months mean in Latin the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth month–if you don’t speak Latin but speak French, you’ll catch on to how the months are spelt. However, around 713 BCE, January and February were tacked on at the start of the calendar, only because of the importance of end of year celebrations.

While those months were added on to the calendar, it still didn’t mean that the year started on January 1st as it just meant that the calendar rolled over.

Christmas day, which has remained consistent as December 25 for much of Europe, was for a long time the start of the year, whereas some adhered to March 1st due to Roman empire influences, and also March 25th, in honour of conception of Jesus. Adoption of January 1st as the start of the year started with the Germans in 1544 and then finally with the American colonies under British control in 1752, two hundred and eight years later.

American exceptionalism predates their revolution I swear.

I know there are other calendars out there such as the Chinese or Hindu ones rife with similar problems I am sure. However, the internationally-accepted calendar we have today is the Gregorian, which in October 1582, was adopted after it was realised that Europe was using a calendar, the Julian, that was off by over a week due to a miscalculation of leap year handling.

The error made with the Julian calendar was that the year was 325.25 days, lending the thought that exactly every four years, we tack on an extra day. However, the year is actually 365.2425 days, so tacking on that extra day like before may seem okay, but it starts to become a problem as centuries become millenniums. At the start of this section, I made a remark about knowing when to grow crops, well eventually the growing season is not going to align with the equinox and that was a problem if we’re going to find ourselves relying on this calendar.

So when the day of Thursday, October 4th, 1582 came to an end, the next day jumped ahead ten whole days to Friday, October 15th. This is why we now have a complicated rule of a leap year being on every year divisible by four, except where it is divisible by 100 unless it itself is divisible by 400. This is why the year 2000 was a leap year, but the year 2100 will not be.

Are we out of the woods with this calendar? Nope. There is a something called a leap second, which gets added periodically based on all sorts of arbitrary variables that our calendar cannot cope with.. It has been since 2016 that we’ve come to witness some, and that is only because they’ve opted to accept that we can ignore them until the mid-2100s in the hopes we figure out how to get computer programmers to deal with it better or some technology comes around to solve it all together.

Let me close off this section by saying this: our geocentric calendar is going to suck in space but we’re also probably going to be stuck with it because of how we focus on human biology.

We do not have to have 24 hours

Before I proceed: I am going to talk about solar days and solar days only.

If you do the basic equation of 24x60x60, you end up with 86,400, which is the number of seconds the a solar day occupies. The definition of a second originally was based off the rotation of the Earth, but it was then defined based off of the frequency if caesium, which unlike our home, does not deviate from our measurements.

The Earth is actually slowing down. Six hundred million years ago, a solar day would have been 21 hours, but due to influences from the Moon and the Sun or other influences including filling giant hydroelectric dam basins, the Earth itself is not reliable to measure the passage of time. So technically speaking, you could say that a solar day on Earth is 86,400.0025 seconds based on current measurements..

But we don’t need to care about that so 86,400 is good enough for what I am talking about.

While “good enough”, there are only so many factors for that number. There are 96 divisors that could fit into that value.

So why not just abolish it? Why don’t we use a thousand minutes to define a day? There’s 1,440 minutes in a day and it would not be that far fetched to consider something different. Let’s talk about Beat Time.

UTC	Beat time

My friend, Jessica made me enamoured with the use of .beats, a scheme developed by Swatch in the 1990s. It isn’t metric time, which was adopted by the French Republic post-revolution, but it is a scheme that permits the existing calendar but adopts its own method that is intended to be used without time zones.

The abolishment of time zones has been proposed by numerous people in the past, including science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. I did say earlier that the use of offsets was a good idea, but I think that .beats is objectively better.

The idea of saying “I will meet you at 800” works real well in my mind.

Time dilation

Back to our friend Mars, trying to keep clocks in sync will require you to contend with general relativity. This late-2025 paper in The Astronomical Journal brought this to light:

This study estimates clock rates on Mars and compares them to those on the Moon and Earth. We find that, on average, clocks on Mars tick faster than those on the Earth’s geoid by 477 μs day, with a variation of 226 μs day over a Martian year. Additionally, there is an amplitude modulation of approximately 40 μs day over seven synodic cycles.

Our good ol’ friend relativity means that time keeping between multiple planets not only has to consider rotation and orbit, but the velocity and tidal forces too. 226-477 μs does not seem that significant, but given that you’re dealing with about a quarter to almost half of a a millisecond, it is not immeasurable.

However, it is insignificant for the purposes of the book, so I don’t really care. I just wanted to bring this all up because I thought this part was neat.

Let’s talk about my worlds

In Reconnect, there are four mentioned worlds. They are not Earth, but we still rely on its time despite the setting for reasons I will not get into. Since they’re not Earth, this means that they all have different orbits and rotations.

	Galactic	Hibernia	Augustia	Xiadi	Procula
Local day (mins)	1,440	1,457.28	1,440	1,334.88	1,873.44
Local day (M)	1,000	1,012	1,000	927	1,301
Local year (local day)	365.24	360.91	98	327.1	653.9

To clarify the units, minutes are the ones we know and love, and M is basically a variation of the Internet time I wrote about earlier. A year for each planet is defined by the number of its local days.

As you can see, there are some things we’re familiar with and peculiarities so let’s talk about each planet individually.

Galactic

And right off the bat, we’re not speaking about a planet but the galaxy itself. One of the things I have some level of confidence in is that we’re probably never going to say goodbye to the idea of UTC or a similar successor for as long as our species exists and makes use of technology.

As such, I decided that in order to keep things working smoothly between the multiple planets, space stations, and whatnot that they themselves would rely on a calendar and clock that is the same no matter where you are.

This is in my mind important because while it may be morning in some city on any of these worlds, morning is a concept that exists provided you have a star and rotation.

When it comes to the International Space Station, they use UTC themselves. About every 90 minutes, the station makes a complete orbit around our planet, meaning that the concept of “morning” based on sunrise would be impractical due to the sun appearing and disappearing about sixteen times every standard Earth day.

Hibernia, Xiadi, and Procula

These are all planets with fairly normal rotations and orbits.

Procula is the odd duck in all of this because its short year and long day–its day is 31 hours and 13 minutes whereas Hibernia is Earth-like at 24 hours and 17 minutes and Xiadi being close at 22 hours and 15 minutes.

Despite being habitable, it is in my mind probably a bit shit to live on Procula considering you have effectively an extra quarter of a day added.

A Martian solar day for example is 24 hours and 39 minutes, which might be just fine from a circadium rhythm standpoint. This is not baseless, as this story from the Harvard Gazette writes:

By recording the daily rhythms of hormones and body temperatures in 24 healthy young and old men and women over a one-month period, the researchers conclude that our internal clocks run on a daily cycle of 24 hours, 11 minutes.

You’d still be exceeding it, but being that nobody really has precise sleep schedules, adding an extra 39 minutes to each day probably would not have any long-lasting health effects. I do have to wonder what losing an hour and 45 minutes would do however as is the case with Xiadi.

Augustia

How would you keep time on a tidally-locked planet? If you’re un familiar, a tidally locked orbit is where one side of an object never changes its face towards its parent. This is the situation with the Moon, where we always see its face no matter what due to how it orbits around our planet.

This situation has been observed with exo-planets and while it does not negate the possibility for habitability, it does introduce a question: what is the local time?

My solution was simply to use the galactic time to define what the local time is and define a local day as how long it takes to go around its parent star. It takes 98 galactic days to go around its parent star.

Earth time is not compatible with local time

As you are probably reading, there’s local and galactic time to contend with. Functionally, time is time if you’re ignoring relativity, as the measurement of a second here on Earth is going to be no different than anywhere else in the universe. However, nobody is going to find it practical to have a Martian day be the same as an Earth day when having any sort of conversation.

The reason why I think a local time works just fine is because there’s no real practical way to have any sort of instantaneous conversation once you get a dozen kilometres away from each other.

In The Expanse TV series, a video call between Chrisjen Avasarala on Earth and her husband, Arjun Avasarala-Rao who was on the Moon had them talking over each other due to the approximately two and a half second round trip delay caused by the speed of light. It’s less of a big deal to contend with as the delay is acceptable, but what about Mars?

With a delay of anywhere between three and twenty two minutes dependent on the position of Earth and Mars in relation to the Sun, you’re not going to have this problem simply because it is not practical to do anything real-time. At best, all communication will be instant messages or email.

This is something I tap into with the book albeit it is a background problem. Physics will dictate the size of your empire even if you achieve fast interstellar travel.

As an aside, I’d love to know if anyone has ever explored what undersea telegraph wires would have done were they to have existed before the American revolution of 1776. I have the belief that it would have been merely delayed although the outcome of it all is indeterminable.

If you’re expecting transport between planets to work well, then you’ll have a universal time, but for anything local, time can just be based on whatever the planet is doing in relation to its parent star. The average person is not going to care about what time it is on Xiadi if they’re on Hibernia because nothing is going to arriving in time anyway.

Colloquialisms will survive

Since I touched on the “average person”, while I think the definition of how we track time will change, even if we adopt a clock much like the .beats scheme, it’s likely that we’ll still use terms like “minutes” or “hours” to describe something with only “days” actually sticking to its original definition in some form.

If I tell a friend that I’ll be arriving “in a few minutes”, it’s intended to not be specific as it is intended to just say you’ll be arriving “soon”, which itself is not specific.

Just spill the beans

Okay. So humans are full of bad habits and compromises. I doubt we’re going to ditch our current, internationally-accepted calendar even if we find ourselves spanning multiple star systems. So, I chose to do something down the middle: I got rid of months–sort of.

Reconnect time (simple)	Reconnect time (expanded)

The format is quite simple: you have an era (defined as BCC or CC), the date itself, and then the time.

The date can be expressed as the number of days in the form of an integer since the start of the year or it can be broken into its traditional month and day in the expanded format.

In space, harvest times don’t really matter unless you’re on Earth, so we can express the time of year in whatever format we want. The local calendar may do whatever it wants, but the galactic calendar can go about in a neutral manner.

As for the year, it is expressed with an era beforehand which is optional, but it is based on an event that dictates the origin of the universe I am working within. There is no actual year per se, but we need one for the sake of this post so this is what we’re getting.

Leap years are kept and follow the same rule although it is offset based off of when the era rolls over.

As for the time itself, you may have noticed that the .beat time of does not correspond with the universe time of . This is because the Internet time is based on whatever it is in Switzerland, whereas the time used in the story is based on UTC.

That’s how I have chosen to do time in this book: just simplify it and don’t refer to months by their names any longer.

Closing

I’ve been sitting on this entry for a week and decided to push it out, errors and all. I’m enjoying my time spent writing this book and hope that the small sliver of insight into what is the world building is looking like earns some excitement.

In my 2025 year-end entry, I announced that I have been working on a science fiction novel, which really is my first-ever book. Its present working-title is “Reconnect” and I’d like to let you all in what it is about.

A quick summary of the story is as follows:

Keira Carroll is the Chief Security Officer aboard The Robyn, a passenger ship travelling its usual route between the planets Hibernia and Augustia.

After a mostly typical transit through a gate leading into The Hub, she and the crew encounter an unusual distress signal and are obliged to investigate.

Boarding a vessel of an unusual design, they find themselves with a crew and passengers seeking refuge claiming to be from somewhere long unreachable. However, doubts about the improbability of their origin are dashed when they witness technology far more advanced than seen before.

This discovery thrusts Keira and her compatriots into a multi-system conflict that had been brewing unbeknowst to the public for decades, with her becoming public enemy number one merely due to her helping those in need.

The summary really is the reason why I have been putting off this blog entry as nothing I wrote was approaching perfect. It has stressed me out to no end and so I have decided that since perfect is the enemy of good, I will post something that is good enough as it is unlikely to be whatever is on the back cover or some listing.

Earlier last year, I started to spend a lot more time compiling my thoughts and notes into a universe of my own creation. It takes place about eight hundred years into the future and its setting involves a period where much of humanity is no longer able to make its way back to its home world. I am trying to adhere to physics to a certain degree although I take some liberties with how things might transpire over the next near-millennia.

Naturally, this book is being written without the aide of any sort of large language models, meaning that if the book is terrible, you can blame me and me alone. So that should be exciting! Much of the book is inspired by Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer series, Andy Weir’s Artemis, James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse series, and Dan Simmons’ Hyperion. The Expanse in particular is a fun one for me because as I built much of the core universe for the book, I began reading the series only to discover that much of what I had in mind was similar to theirs.

Although I have no plans for a protomolecule-like McGuffin I must lament.

I have no idea on how I will publish this book, but I will do my best to keep folks abreast of how things are coming along on my Bsky account. I tend to allocate up to three nights a week to working on this novel.

I’ll close off this post with two drawings from one of the pages of notes I’ve been keeping while putting this all together.

These probably make no sense on the surface, but that is okay! They’re for me to know what is going on and where things are! I can think of things in my head, but it’s easier to draw it all out so I am not later altering what I saw in my memory.

If you’re looking to help me out or offer any advice, my contact details are available on this site, but note that I do have a group of other writers to lean on so I am not doing this without the aide of wonderful people.