Great Sci Fi Books Coming This Year
Peleos update. 2025 in review, writing plans for 2026. Newsletter has moved: Self-hosting journey.
Happy New Year! My brother was socked in with snow over Christmas, so we celebrated a couple weeks later when the weather had cleared. Always great to have the whole family together.
Although I can't call it a New Year's Resolution, I have begun eating healthier (salads) and exercising more regularly, made easier because our new Eureka neighborhood is walkably flat with beautiful redwoods. My goal isn't necessarily to become healthier, rather to maintain my current health as I get older (and older and older). Gotta do what you gotta do.
Meet my newsletter's new home! That drab silver laptop may be old, but it's plenty to run a Ghost website, and the added cost to my monthly electric bill will be a fraction of what I paid the hosting company. More on that fun self-hosting journey below. Here's to reclaiming the internet! ⚔️
On the topic of newsletters, I don't think I've ever mentioned my sponsorship policy. It's easy: I don't take money for placements, and I don't get money when people click on things. The one and only purpose of my newsletter is to stay in touch with you, and I do it purely because I want to. So, yeah, party on.
Unrelated, nefarious forces have been using the magic link function of my newsletter to send unsolicited invite emails to random-ish addresses. I think I've plugged the hole, but the damage is already done. It has unfortunately tanked my sender reputation and may make it difficult for my newsletters to actually land in people's inboxes until my sender rep heals, which may take months. C'est la vie, I suppose.
Peleos (Timeless Keeper Saga Book 3) is still marching along. I had another "this isn't exciting enough" pang last week, so I revised the remaining outline to punch the story up, then dove in head-first. Can't promise it will be the last course change, but hopefully it's all worth it in the end. I want the series to close with a real bang. =]
Shout-out to BBNYA for running a great program. I got feedback today on the Enigma 10k word sample they judged. Wonderful folks there, worth following. Hopefully I'll have something new to submit for their 2027 contest.
Lastly, this month's feature is 2025 in review, and what's ahead in 2026. Onward!
In this newsletter
- Year in Review / What's Ahead
- Newsletter Server Migration
- Currently Reading
Year in Review / What's Ahead
<– 2025
Last year saw huge personal changes, including leaving our home of 29 years, settling into a new town, and moving our entire family up north. In addition to working as Co-Founder at my startup, I took on a VP of IT and Security role at a new satellite company, which has been a familiar yet new adventure. I took my kids to Japan for the first time, traveled all over the US, to Armenia, Rome, and spent a surprising amount of time in my home town of San Francisco.
2025 may also be the only year since Angels in the Mist that I didn't publish a single book. =[ Looking at everything that happened, it's easy to see why. Yet I did keep writing, and I am ~85% finished with the Timeless Keeper Saga series finale.
I had hoped at least one of my pending books in The Z-Tech Chronicles would have made it to the top of my publisher's queue, but that didn't happen, so 2025 ended as a dry publishing year for me. Sad trombone.
2026 –>
What does this mean for the coming year?
Books, of course! Writing is my passion, and I suspect it always will be. Toward the end of last year, I began allocating dedicated writing time (as I used to do when working full time), which resulted in decent progress on Peleos. I plan to continue that through 2026 and not only publish Peleos, but also a new standalone sci fi novel, and maybe even the Lost Colonies Book 2. It may also be time to decide if I want to wait for my publisher for the final two books in The Z-Tech Chronicles, or if I should just publish them myself so they're finally out in the world.
I will also continue publishing monthly newsletters. I don't think I've missed a single month since I started in 2019, and I don't plan to start. Thank you as always for subscribing! You'll be the first to know about everything, including beta opportunities, ARC distributions, launch dates, new cover art, exclusive bonus content, and the odd glimpse behind the writing curtain.
Cheers! 🥂🍻
Books Reviewed in 2025
Ryan Southwick
Ryan Southwick
Ryan Southwick
Ryan Southwick
Newsletter Server Migration
a.k.a. Why Do I Do This To Myself?
It may sound silly, but ever since I moved from dial-up decades ago to a dedicated internet connection, I've dreamed of hosting a website out of my own home. But either I couldn't get a dedicated IP address, it was against provider policy to host, or I just never had a reason to host anything.
Well, my friend, those excuses have finally evaporated. Our new internet provider, Vero Fiber, is fantastic. I asked if I could have a dedicated IP and if they minded me hosting a site, and they said "no problem" to both. Their support staff are incredibly responsive, they provide timely updates and reasons for outages, and external monitoring shows they have rock-steady service.
With that in mind, I turned an eager eye to my newsletter host. Don't get me wrong: DigitalOcean has been great. I've never had a single issue with service or availability. Their user interface and features are top-notch, and their prices are reasonable.
Reasonable, that is, if I had a wildly popular newsletter and/or was making any money from it—neither of which is true. It was cash out of my pocket every month that—finally—I didn't have to pay!
Right, it was time to do the thing. I could fill a novel with everything I did in prep for the migration, but in short: I reformatted an old Intel MacBook Pro with a faulty keyboard to use as a server. I installed VirtualBox, then created an Ubuntu 24.04 Server virtual machine (VM) for easy snapshots and portability. I installed a test instance on the new server and, through that process, discovered a ton of issues. I worked through those, hardened the server and my router / firewall, and let it run for several days to ensure it was stable.
Then, on Jan 18, 2026, I deleted the test virtual machine, recreated the site using the production URL, and switched the DNS record to point from DigitalOcean to my own IP address.
And pOoF! My newsletter was now being served out of my own house. Happy day!
As of this writing, the only lingering issue is the ActivityPub integration, which I wrote about last time. I've submitted a support ticket to Ghost, so hopefully it will be resolved soon.
What's next? Well, this is the first newsletter from the new server. I'll monitor closely for a few days to make sure there are no issues. If everything is okay, I'll delete my DigitalOcean instance and use the money I save to buy books. I also need to setup backups and stuff, but I can largely use the same script I used on my previous server to ensure everything is backed up and safe. Once Ghost's Docker setup comes out of preview, I may migrate to Docker for even better portability and easier site upgrades.
My main author site is on Vercel. I may someday bring it in-house, but right now hosting is free and very stable, so I have little reason to move it.
For now, I will enjoy having crossed an item off my bucket list and doing my small part to help reclaim the internet. Viva le Open Web!
Currently Reading
Nothing. Isn't that sad? I need a new sci fi / fantasy series to obsess over. Maybe I'll move on to Book 2 of Red Rising. Suggestions welcome.
My Books
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