Sojournal-2026-Spring
Introduction
Hi folks, I decided that I should keep a seasonal journal/blog/newsletter of what’s going on with my writing and publishing activities. This is the first one! I'm going to call it Sojournal (Sojourner+Journal, get it? Sigh). The last two years have been a super busy and personally meaningful journey for me. This is a way for me to reflect on the journey and share it with you, my friends.
First Two Sojourner Saga Novels Published
My biggest news, obviously, is that I published my first two novels this Spring. Helmsman and Pilgrim are the first and second books in a science fiction series that I call the Sojourner Saga (as you may well have heard me talking about endlessly). I worked on writing these novels after I returned from a four-year sojourn working on open science research funding programs and policy in the federal government from 2020-2024 (an experience that you’ve also probably heard me talk about a lot), which had also been an incredibly significant and meaningful accomplishment for me (if you want to know why, just look at my bio website). After completing my federal service, I thought about what I wanted to do next, as I had largely completed most of my career goals as a librarian and an academic. But then I reflected on the fact that I had wanted to write science fiction for my entire adult life, but had set the aim aside while I was busy with my career. It felt to me like this was the time to come back to the personal goal, so I did.
Writing the Novels
For the eighteen months between September 2024 to February 2026, I spent my evenings on this purpose. I honestly had no idea if I could write and finish a novel or not, but I was determined to find out whether I had it in me. I’d written short stories back when I was a teenager, but that was a long time ago, and short stories are not novels. But in my spare time over the years of my career, I had kept up my interest in fiction writing, and had been researching the process of writing fiction. I had also, steadily, slowly, been thinking about and writing down a detailed future history to serve as the backdrop for the novels I wanted to write someday. I made a huge amount of progress on this background research over the years, but I never found the time or (more importantly) the spare mental space to focus on actually writing.
Why Did It Take So Long?
I should have found a way to not put things off so long; that’s a life lesson, I suppose. At times it felt like I would never get around to it, and I admit that I wish I’d done it sooner. But here my father’s favorite saying immediately comes to me, because he also felt like it had taken him far too long to realize a lot of important lessons in life. The quote he always brought up when discussing the rueful feeling of learning something late in the game was from his favorite piece of fiction, the Sherlock Holmes story The Man with the Twisted Lip. In it, Holmes says, “I confess that I have been as blind as a mole, but it is better to learn wisdom late, than never to learn it at all.” I suppose that’s the way I feel about finally sitting down to write a novel. I’d had all sorts of fears about the process. I had been afraid that I’d be too distracted to finish it, that it would feel like drudgery, blah, blah, blah. It turned out I was wrong on all counts. It was energizing, focusing, and something that literally woke me up every day with a joyful sense of purpose. I set out with a modest goal (I thought) of writing (on average) one page a day for a year. Because I kept records about my output, I know what actually happened: I wrote an average of two pages a day for more than a year.
Learning Process
When I finally got to the end of the story I had been wanting to write for so long, I realized that I’d actually written two sequential novels, and laid the groundwork for a series of novels to come that I was also eager to write. I can’t express how grateful I felt at the end of the process. I’d realized a profound life goal. Along the way, I learned a lot more than I’d known before about both conceptual things like plot, theme, and character development, as well as a great deal of practical stuff about independent publishing in the 21st Century. I’ll also share some of my reflections about those topics in subsequent entries here. Who knows, it might be interesting to someone other than me; I can’t say, I’m still “blind as a mole” about a lot of things.
Thank You to Everyone
I published both books in February of this year, both in print and electronically. A lot of my friends and family came to my book launch event at Scuppernong, our favorite independent bookstore here in Greensboro. To everyone who made it to the launch, either physically or virtually, thank you, it meant everything to me to have you there. And to anyone who encounters my books at any point, I hope you like them, and welcome to this sojourn of mine!
Progress on the Next Stages of the Sojourner Saga
I took the months of March and April to celebrate publishing the first two books, but also to a) try to start getting the word out about the novels through a media outreach plan, b) finish plotting and researching the third book, and c) learn about the (for me) new technical expertise of creating audiobooks. So, here’s the progress I’ve made so far, and I would love your feedback and guidance about any of it (contact me at the link below).
Outreach Plan
It’s no secret that society is awash and overwhelmed with far too much information for any human being to effectively absorb and deal with. How do you get anyone’s attention in an environment that is not just constantly saturated, but hyper-saturated with new content? That’s one of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and for that purpose, I’m going to try a small number of experiments to see what might work.
Sojournal
One experiment is this journal/blog/newsletter/thing-I-don’t-know-what-to-call-other-than-Sojournal. I am mindful of the Attention Economy that constantly demands everyone’s focus, so I’m only planning to put this out three times a year (at max). But it’s a way for me to communicate with you all, my friends!
Another experiment is trying to boldly advance into the social media world of 2010 and learn Instagram. I’ve been resistant, but too many people have now asked to communicate with me using this tool; I guess I have to learn how to use it. Ack, save me! :-)
Conference and Other Public Venue Presentations
I’m going to start seeking opportunities to talk about the novels in public venues. As a start, I got accepted to present at ReaderCon in Boston; wish me luck, and let me know if there’s an event you think I should try to present at.
YouTube Channel?
Finally, I’m going to explore the idea of a YouTube channel (don’t laugh at me!). I’m trying to think through a coherent focus for the channel, something that I could make interesting and unique. Let me know if you have thoughts about what I should consider doing with it; email me at the address down at the bottom.
Third Book in the Sojourner Saga
(Spoilers for those who haven’t finished Pilgrim yet!)
A number of people have asked me about the next book in the series, and when it will come out. I’ve started writing it and am currently on the second chapter. The title of the book is Sylphid, and it focuses on the next phases of the story of (you guessed it) the Sojourner Saga’s favorite Sylphid! The novel will delve much more into the nature and culture of the Sylphid species as the main characters of the novels engage in hijinks to reconnect with one another.
This novel will again be the first part of a duology, Just as Helmsman and Pilgrim comprised the Carinae Duology, Sylphid will be the first book in what I’m calling the Veil Duology. I will have a lot more to say in the Summer Sojournal about the book, which I aim to publish before the end of the year. So, stay tuned!
The New Trends in Audiobook Production
Audiobooks are universally recognized as the fastest growing segment of the fiction market today, and several people have asked me if I’m going to create audiobook versions of the novels in the Sojourner Saga. The answer is definitely yes, but this is an entirely new arena for me. Currently, I am deep in the production process for the audiobook version of Helmsman, and I already find audiobooks to be an absolutely fascinating new genre from my perspective. I have not been a huge user of audiobooks, so I’ve had a bit of a steep learning curve, but I think what I’ve already discovered is frankly incredible. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that we are in the midst of yet another technical revolution in audio creation (as if we didn’t already have enough overlapping technical revolutions piling up on us). Let me share a bit of what I’ve learned.
Brief Recap of How We Got Here
Audiobooks began to be a thing in the 1980’s, marked by the founding of the Audio Publishers Association (APA) in 1986 (APA Mission Statement), but it was mostly tapes and CDs back then (I remember). With the founding of Audible in 1995 three decades ago, digital audiobooks started to started to rapidly take off, and accelerated as everyone started having smartphones circa 2010. But, for context, I’ll point out that for most of the last forty years the traditional model of audiobooks has been Solo Narration, in which one very talented and (justifiably!) highly paid voice actor read the whole book, differentiating voices through their performance. This already expensive model started becoming even more expensive with the inception of Full-Cast Production when a guy named Bruce Coville founded Full Cast Audio in 2002 and pioneered the super-deluxe model of having full casts of audio actors do blockbuster audiobooks like the Harry Potter series of novels. Audiobook afficionados started getting used to the idea of audiobooks using a different human actor (often famous ones) for every role, at least for major novels. This luxury format is obviously such an expensive model that it could typically only be financially feasible for the top one-percent of novels by the Big-Five publishers that gobbled up and consolidated all the small imprints.
The Advent of Generative AI
This landscape changed circa 2023 when generative AI technologies began to be used to implement a new cohort of automated audio narration by companies like ElevenLabs. Whatever else you think of generative AI (see my last section below for my own ambivalent feelings), the effect this had was a dramatic inflection point. All of a sudden, the one-percenters were no longer the only ones that could afford to create full-cast productions. Yes, the downside of this was the proliferation of what is now termed AI-slop (again see below), but I will point out the flip side, that this was also a huge force of democratization. Yes, humans being what they are, they abused this new possibility like humans always do with any new media (look at the history of radio and television), by flooding the Internet with AI-generated audio indiscriminately, but that doesn’t change the fact that (for better or worse) now the little guy had access to what was previously a rarified form of artistic production in this new hybrid form that I’ll call FACIA (Full AI-Audio Casts by Independent Authors).
ElevenLabs and Audacity
With all this said, what I’m calling the new FACIA model has become the fastest growing model for audio production overnight, and not even primarily for audiobooks, but rather, for the myriad new forms of Internet generated AI content. Okay, I acknowledge all the bad! But let me just humbly put out one tiny little bit of good in this situation: Speaking very much as a “little guy” here, I’m enjoying the artistic freedom and creativity of the FACIA model. I would never have imagined in a million years that I would, within my lifetime, have the capability to create full-cast audiobook forms of my novels. But that is what the new technology has enabled. So, my main tools here are ElevenLabs for creating voiced audio narrative, and Audacity (the most prominent open source sound editing tool) for sound editing.
More to Come
ElevenLabs is the market leader in custom AI voice audio (and increasingly video) production now. It has affordable subscription tiers, and gives Creatives not just one tool but an entire studio environment for crafting digital content. I’ve been using it for just over a month now, and I find it staggeringly powerful. It opens up huge creative possibilities for individuals. So, I’ve only just begun this particular new journey but, speaking as someone whose Ph.D. dissertation was largely on the topic of Transmediation, this is an incredible time to be alive. Yeah, frightening too, but it’s where we find ourselves. I will undoubtedly have a lot more to say about this in future Sojournals.
Ongoing Relational Ambivalence with AI
Unfortunately, this topic is inevitably a part of everything and everyone’s world at this point, so I feel compelled to say something about it. And I’m not going to be telling you anything you don’t already know, either; everyone is going to be talking about this from now on. This is a topic for not just a paragraph or two, but an entire library of new dissertations (and I have no doubt whatsoever that this will be the focus of endless dissertations from this point onwards). Again, for context, I worked for four years in the biggest federal funder of AI research, and arguably in the specific unit (OAC) that funded a lot of this new technology. While I wasn’t one of the program officers that made awards in this area, I worked closely with those that did. I had a deeply ambivalent view of generative AI at that point and still do, but not because of the technology itself. I feel ambivalent about it because of the inescapable nature of human beings that I pointed out before: some portion of human society will inevitably seek to use new technologies for selfish, divisive, and eventually evil ends.
If humans were uniformly well-intentioned, this technology would be unambiguously a good thing. I think it is as foundational a technology as computers, mathematics, or the wheel. But humans can use the wheel to make an incredibly constructive crane or an incredibly destructive tank. Everyone (including me) is (rightly) freaking out about all of the negative phenomena associated with AI, ranging from the environmental impacts from energy used to train AI systems to the trampling of individual human rights, and quite possibly the destruction of the Anthroposphere (aka humanity). yes, I’ll echo the most common statement on this: Did nobody else watch the Terminator movies (or series!)? Humans can be so incredibly greedy and fearful that they can (unbelievably) intentionally want to create a weapon that will kill everyone just have a weapon that will kill “the other side”. We’ve already been through this same drill when we “harnessed the atom”, remember?
But here’s the thing: you can’t pack everything that came out back into Pandora’s box. We are stuck with trying to understand this new category of technology and how to best go about putting guardrails around it. Let’s be honest, we may very well not succeed, but that’s the only option we’ve got at this point. So, yeah, I am going to continue to try to figure out how to use generative AI for creative purposes to degree that it can be used ethically. It is counterproductive to try to pretend it doesn’t exist or even just not use it. It’s like the monsters that came out of Pandora’s Box, they’re here and they’re staying. Humans let them out of the box, and now we have to either understand how to reconcile with them and live with them, or they’ll eat us. I’m sorry, but it seems that simple to me. And, to end this unexpected rant on a positive note, I do think that’s possible. The glass is always half empty... but it’s also half full. Two opposed things can be true at the same time (and usually are). There are wondrous discoveries that AI makes possible, we just need to slow down a little and pick those instead of rushing toward our own destruction.
Wrap-up
Okay, wow, this went on way, way longer than I planned, and way, way beyond just me updates on my two little novels. But if you read to end here, let me just say thank you! And I’ll aim to provide more updates here over time. Sojourn through life with courage!
Martin Halbert
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