After Thanksgiving Thursday and Black Friday (but before Cyber Monday), we come to the most famous of all this week's American holidays: Sepia Saturday. Where we watch old movies and tell each other stories about our pasts.

As The Body Snatcher (1945) plays in the background, I will tell you of my recent past. We're only going back to this month.

First, we had the Cradle Animatic Premiere in California! It was amazing, thanks to you fans; I can't believe how many of you showed up and how you lined up without any instructions. It was super exciting to see you all reacting to the animatic in real time!

While you were watching the screen, I was watching you. And Sam was watching me. But who was watching Sam? Rebecca.

After that, we released the animatic to our Kickstarter backers, and your response to that has been incredible. It's so much fun when I get to read about your reactions to specific scenes, or voices, or bloopers. Brings a black-and-white tear to my black-and-white eye.

But meanwhile, unbeknownst to most of you, I was not in America! I was actually in another country entirely!

I flew from the Animatic Premiere in Los Angeles, California, United States to Tokyo, Japan. Where I went on a vacation with my friends.

I don't normally do vacation trips with my friends, and certainly not all the way on the other side of the world. But I'll tell you what, that was one of the best vacations I've ever had. Especially because I judge how good a trip is based on how good the food was. And the food was great.

We went to a lot of great, highly rated Japanese restaurants while we were over there, and most of them were amazing. Even the worst one was still good. But you know what I ate the most of?

Convenience store chicken cutlet. Famichiki, Nanachiki, doesn't matter; they're piping-hot fried, seasoned bird thighs for about a buck fifty. Every time I passed a convenience store, which was about every hundred feet, I'd pop in for a Famichiki.

Maybe we were on our way to dinner, or coming straight from lunch. Doesn't matter. It was a pact with myself. If I passed a Family Mart, I had to buy a Famichiki.

We did many other things in Japan--we visited a bunch of temples and saw a five-story Buddha statue and waded through a wet museum and were chased around by some very aggressive bowing deer--but the thing my friends made fun of me for most was my obsession with convenience store fried chicken. It haunts my dreams.

So those are my stories from my recent past. How does your family celebrate Sepia Saturday? Have you watched the animatic yet?

Tell me about it, but do it in sepia tones.

-Will

It's Halloween 2025, and you know what that means! That's right, it's almost time for the CRADLE ANIMATIC PREMIERE!

Tomorrow we get to premiere the Cradle Animatic, the two-hour black-and-white sketched version of a Cradle movie! It covers Unsouled and Soulsmith, with an original score and a STACKED voice cast...all thanks to the backers on our Kickstarter almost two years ago!

I watched through the movie at the final audio mixing just a couple of days ago, and it's crazy to see this product after so long working to make it happen. Truly humbling. Not to mention a bizarre, out-of-body experience for me to see characters and moments I made up years ago coming to life thanks to the work of so many talented Hollywood professionals.

And the part I've been looking forward to the most is the Premiere tomorrow, where the highest-level backers (who could make it out to LA) are going to join us for the first-ever showing!

I'm starting to itch because I haven't made a joke in three paragraphs, but I'm genuinely just grateful and flabbergasted to be here. Let's hope this leads to a fully animated project soon!

As for the vast majority of you who can't make it to the event out in LA, don't worry! The animatic will be sent to you in its entirety as soon as we can get it re-edited for digital distribution, as opposed to the theatrical form it's in now. That should be by the end of November. Or so I'm told.

Video editing is like magic to me, so I'm just trusting the word of the wizards who understand such arcane systems.

Thanks for your support, everybody! You've been awesome, and I can't wait to see what else is on the way!

-Will

I haven’t read Elder Empire, my own second series, since I finished writing it five years ago.

That’s not unusual. Reading my own writing can be painful, so I tend not to re-read until it’s time to write a sequel. Since the series is complete, no need to re-read.

But this time I did, and to my own surprise, I enjoyed it!

I roamed around Disney World (which is only a few minutes from my house), listening to the Elder Empire audiobooks. That’s a lot of why I was able to have fun with it. Emily Woo Zeller and Travis Baldree do an amazing job of bringing the story to life, and that helped me to separate myself from the fact that I’m the author. Plus, you know, it’s been five years.

The downside is that now I want to write more Elder Empire, dangit.

I won’t! At least, not now. I have other things to write. But I want to!

Really I guess this means that I should re-read whatever series I need to get hyped about. It has been a long time since I’ve read Traveler’s Gate too, but uh…I’m not sure I’ll be able to enjoy that one as much. It was some of my earliest writing, after all.

Maybe Travis’ golden voice will soothe me through it.

-Will

P.S. Also I played No Man’s Sky a ton. Way too much. I made it to Galaxy 110 and now we’re searching for the perfect system to make Cradle.

Another thanks to everybody who came out yesterday to see me at DragonCon! Or, as our event is informally known, WillCon! (Short for William's Conspiracy.)

Every time we do an event this size, I use up all my social energy and I have to enter an Introvert Coma. I'm almost done building my cocoon and filling it with snacks and anime. I enter as a weak, drained, colorless caterpillar and I'll emerge from it in a week or two as a pathetic, bedraggled, ugly butterfly.

You know how tired I am? I almost couldn't think of the word "caterpillar."

Anyway, the event was totally worth it! It's cool to meet so many of you and hear all your stories about the books. Plus, I get to see cosplay of characters I made up, which is especially neat.

My part of the event is going to be edited and put on YouTube, so those of you who couldn't make it get to hear me rambling on about lemons. When will it be uploaded? Idk. Depends on how difficult it ends up being to edit my insane blabber into something resembling coherent human speech.

Thanks to all of you who made it, and also to all of you who couldn't make it! You're awesome, and I'm grateful to every one of you.

-Will

Happy 4th of July and 4th book in The Last Horizon series! We have a lot to celebrate this week at the Wight House, but mostly the release of our new book!

The Pilot is the 26th novel I've released, which means the book I'm writing now (What is it? It's a mystery...) will be my 27th. And when I realized that, I recalled a memory I hadn't thought of in probably ten years.

When I first started writing novels, we would sometimes talk about a future when I'd written a bunch of books. We picked a random, super-high number out of thin air to mean "an arbitrarily high but insane number," and the number we used was 27.

"Oh, sure, maybe when you've written twenty-seven books we can talk about it."
"Yeah, I feel that way now, but I might feel differently when I've written twenty-seven books."
"I've written three novels, not twenty-seven."

...and so on. To us at the time, 27 = an impossibly high far-off dream.

At some point along the way, we stopped saying that, because when you get to novels 13, 14, 15, etc. then 27 starts to feel achievable. I honestly forgot about this until I realized that I had started work on the infamous #27.

Thanks for sticking with me for 26 books, everybody! And thanks to the thousands of you who have already checked out The Pilot!

-Will