Real quick, in case you are new here, I once wrote some short-form stuff back in my early 30s in the early 2000s. Gave up on it entirely, conceding that I’d never be a writer. Fine. No big deal. I got on YouTube and started to express myself that way. Then October 2025 rolls around and I decide I’m going to self-publish all those older writings. But then something unexpected happened: I started to write. Like my channel, stuff just came pouring out. I continued to add stuff all the way up until around July of 2026, with sprinklings here and there after, though the bulk of it was pretty much done.
The reason this first book of mine it’s taking so long isn’t just because it’s my first book, isn’t just because it went from a 15k word collection of short form writings to over 100k words (and not far from 200k), isn’t just because I had to learn to do my own proofreading and editing during the course of writing as well as the 2nd and 3rd drafts (with the help of AI yelling at me about dangling modifiers and improper homophones that I needed to manually correct myself), isn’t just because this evolved from an anthology to an unprecedented, avant-garde mashup of 2nd person, meta-fictional, new weird, comedy, horror, and more, and isn’t just because I have my YouTube channel which is my primary source of income so I’ve had to juggle writing and that, though YouTube has taken a backseat to my writing for at least until this first book is done.
But as the title states, the primary reason for the delay is due to the massive amount of worldbuilding and all the internal logic that goes along with it. Meaning, despite how absurd things get, they still have to make sense.
For example, and this isn’t in my book, but say there are flying hippos that talk and shoot lasers out of their nostrils. Okay, fine. But just that one addition introduces a host of questions: How big are they? How fast can they fly? Did they learn to fly, evolve, or have jet packs? How high can they go? What kind of wings do they have? What kind of lasers? What material can the lasers penetrate? What language do the hippos talk? Who can understand them? Do they poop? Do they have personalities? Their own cultures, politics, and entertainment?
So because my book is fictional, and 2nd person, and meta-fictional, and a shit ton of lore and worldbuilding, there’s all these little things like the hippos that I’ve created and introduced that have to be accounted for, and subsequently spiral out into the narrative that one has to be aware of in earlier or later chapters. It’s a butterfly effect, for real! It’s no joke. Meaning, you can’t have that flying hippo reappear in a later chapter doing something a flying laser-shooting hippo shouldn’t do, like walk. Or shoot bullets.
And over the last couple of months, I’ve actually been waking up with my mind reminding me of “hey, remember such and such you wrote in that one chapter? well did you think about this aspect?” And so there’s been all these little continuity things I’ve needed to tweak or add (sometimes cut but rarely) so that the internal logic holds up across 100k+ words and 500+ pages!
That’s why it’s taking 13 months now as of the date of this post. I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s grueling, but at 55 years old (well starting at 54) it’s the one job I truly and finally love more than making videos because videos cannot compete to the absolute and infinite amount of freedom that one has with writing, especially with fiction.
So if you’ve been patiently waiting for this book of mine to come out, trust me when I say it’ll be worth it if you like books with lots of lore, not to mention comedy, horror, etc.,etc.
But yeah, today November 11, 2026 I came across yet another thing that I introduced months ago that has an implication I never thought of, so I needed to come up with a solution in order for the internal logic to hold up. And I did, without having to rewrite or cut anything.
So there you go. While writing fictional is an absolute blast, writing 2nd person meta-fictional, new weird, absurdist stuff is a challenge, but it’s fun and rewarding as all get out.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my 3rd draft or my 4th draft where I’m now tweaking things and making sure everything is copacetic.
Cheers!