I had a moment of startling clarity this morning.
In the midst of the daily work—the writing, the drawing, the constant, obsessive untangling of the lore of Nhera—you rarely stop to look at the clock. The work is simply what you do; it's the air you breathe. But out of a morbid curiosity, I decided to do a rough tally of the hours I've invested in my upcoming novel, The Reply, over just the last two months.
The number was… immense. A conservative estimate puts it at around 570 hours.
To put that in perspective, a standard 9-to-5 job over that same period is about 320 hours. It was a stark, almost comical realization that the "invisible work" of building a world is a weight far greater than I had ever consciously acknowledged. It's easy to see the finished painting or the polished chapter, but where do those hours actually go?
The Writing (~440 hours): This is the core. The 50,000 words that currently make up the manuscript. It's the daily battle with the blank page, the wrestling of scenes into shape, and the quiet, maddening search for the perfect word.
The Art (~70 hours): This is the visual soul. Every character portrait, every uniform design, every atmospheric sketch is a multi-hour deep dive into the aesthetic of the world. It is the process of giving a face to the ghosts that haunt the prose.
The "Invisible" Work (~60 hours): This is the part no one ever sees. It's the countless hours spent in deep-dive explorations like the ones I'll be sharing here—the "what-if" scenarios, the psychological dissections, the brainstorming that sharpens a character's voice or untangles a knot in the plot. It is the vast, submerged part of the iceberg that gives the visible tip its stability and its meaning.
Seeing that number wasn't a cause for complaint. It was a cause for a profound sense of gratitude. The thought that followed the initial shock was simple: I get to love what I'm doing.
And that gratitude, I think, comes from a place of deep, almost foundational, love. My life, it seems, has always been charted by the sea. I grew up in a house where my mother’s love for the ocean was a constant, tangible presence—old glass buoys hung like captured stars, and the grim, beautiful poetry of sea shanty CDs was the soundtrack to our days. The very first book I ever truly read on my own was In the Heart of the Sea, the harrowing, real-life account of the wreck of the whaleship Essex. The horror and the majesty of it never left me.
Years later, after my own time in the military, I found myself watching the Pirates of the Caribbean films not for the pirates, but for the breathtaking, terrifying majesty of the Royal Navy. This, of course, led me down the inevitable path to Hornblower and Jack Aubrey, the twin pillars of the genre.
To me, the Age of Sail frigate is the single most beautiful and elegant piece of engineering humanity has ever conceived. It is a living thing, a cathedral of wood and canvas powered by a god’s own breath. I am not ashamed to say that the sight of a ship under full sail, catching the wind just so, can move me to tears.
So, to finally tell my own maritime story, even one that sometimes goes ashore, is not just a creative choice. It is a source of tremendous, soulful congruence. It is me, finally, sailing home.
The abyss demands a tithe, it's true. But when you are charting a course into a world that feels this real, this vital, it is a price paid with joy. Thank you for coming along on the voyage.
Fair Winds,
—D.S. Black