Polaris Launch Day
Available Now!
Ten Second Takeaway
After nearly three years in development, Polaris is available for purchase.
Polaris Launch Day
My friends, we’ve made it.
No more promises. No more assurances or encouragements or discouragements (on this one, at least). No more goals and delays and word count targets and running checklists and printed pages sitting in a stack on my desk.
Today’s the real deal. It’s showtime.
Polaris is published. It’s live, it’s out there.
And you can go read it—right now!
Synopsis
Manipulated into committing a reality-warping crime using experimental technology, a romantic young painter searches for a way to stop his ruthless business partner from selling the very monstrosity he helped create—before the people he loves pay the price for his mistakes.
Halfway through his senior year at Crossing University, freshly-dumped Arthur Bland is out of love and out of options. Heartbroken and plagued by strange nightmares, everything changes for Arthur when he is selected to receive a DeepGlass Curio—an experimental brain implant from the most powerful company in the world.
Soon after, Arthur is invited to work on the Polaris project—a secret city hidden in a digital alternate reality, built by a rogue team of developers using Curio technology. At first, everything seems to go well: Arthur is good at the work, his mind is finally off of his ex, and he is quickly swept into a so-called "Starside" courtship with a mysterious young woman named Rebecca.
Yet Arthur's best friend, Alena, begins to suspect that the Polaris project is not what it seems—and that Arthur's new girlfriend may not be who she claims.
After a gruesome incident connected to the project shocks the school, Arthur and Alena find themselves in a race against time with deadly consequences. To survive, they must unravel the riddle of Polaris before it’s too late—and the city's dark secret changes reality as they know it forever.
Available Copies
As of today, Polaris is available in five formats.
eBook (Most vendors) $4.99
Paperback (Amazon) $19.99
Meant to be taken out and about. Coffee spills welcome.
Hardcover (Most vendors) $49.99
Dust jacket + custom interior case.
Hardcover (Lulu) $49.99
Dust jacket only. Slightly higher print quality.
Special Limited Edition (Not Publicly Available)
Dust jacket + custom interior case. Signed. Collectible.
Want one? Join the waitlist.
I’d love to have an Audio Book at some point … but we’re not there just yet. Keep an eye here on the Anecdotal for more information on that.
Hoo-Hoo-Hoo Hoosiers!
Again: if you are in the central Indiana area and want to secure a signed copy of Polaris, your best bet is to join us for the launch party on February 13th. We had to move the date one week out because the storm delayed our shipment.
Again, feel free to RSVP here: it will be at Indie Coffee Roasters, which is one of our very favorite coffee shops in the Indianapolis area.
Join the Polaris Project Today
I wrote in a separate article about ways to help, but I’ll reiterate the BIG ONES here. If you want to support Polaris, here are some things you can do:
Buy a(ny) copy of Polaris.
Read it.
Review it. (With words!)
Rate it. (With stars!)
Talk about it. Post about it. Dream about it.
I so deeply appreciate you all.
A Longer, More Personal Note: “One Year Ago Today”
One year ago today, I was told that my position as a Lead UX Researcher at Salesforce had been eliminated.
I remember the feeling of being in that little room, the way the air pressure inside my ears changed. I stopped listening about halfway through the speech: my mind raced, trying to figure out what I would tell my wife, my mother, my in-laws, my friends.
I wondered what I would tell my children.
In the months since, I’ve been blessed to find another position with another company. Yet the scar tissue is still there, and it’s exacerbated every day I open LinkedIn and see the seemingly unending layoff posts from my colleagues across the tech industry.
This last post is both addressed to—and written about—these exemplary folks.
Being laid off is a unique sort of failure. Coming out of the military, where involuntary separation usually comes as a consequence of medical calamity, psychological break, or committing a crime, the experience felt a bit like I was getting arrested.
The civilian side of my brain hardly fared any better, though the real cost on that side of the house wasn’t as immediately apparent. As time went on, and I saw who got a job quickly/who never lost their job in the first place, I couldn’t help but compare.
Soon, the dark voices began to creep in: the guy who laid me off said it wasn’t related to performance—but what if it was? Maybe I wasn’t good-looking enough. Maybe I had an abrasive laugh, or an off-putting smile. I’d just bought a fancy new pair of glasses: maybe I looked ridiculous in front of the wrong person.
Maybe my work was good, but they found someone better.
This is what getting laid off does to you. It makes you run the meanest, most uncharitable inventory of yourself imaginable.
As time goes on, however, you begin to internalize the failure differently. You begin to wonder if maybe whatever failure happened, happened elsewhere. You start to wonder if perhaps it’s just that you’re the one who was left to pay the price.
Anger comes out of this revelation. What someone does with that anger matters.
Within a week of my layoff news, my anger had turned to kindling. One day, I resolved to try something truly insane: I decided to try to be a writer.
In the year that followed, I worked to get Polaris airborne. It took every minute of that year. Now, one year later to the day after that horrible morning, this story comes to an end. The words are surreal to type, but here they go: I did it.
I’m a writer now, I suppose. A published one.
Polaris is finished.
Not a day too soon, I should add. This one was a long time coming. I finished drafting Polaris at the end of 2022, sent the book through several rounds of early readers in 2023/2024, and in 2025 I worked with professional editors and cover designers to create the best possible product I could.
As I was trying to nail down a release date, Amanda had a great idea:
“Why not release it on February 4th?” she said. “That way, you can take back that awful day, and make it yours again.”
As always, my wife was right. From now until forever, February 4th was the day I stopped dreaming, and decided to live the dream instead.
It’s also the day before my birthday.
What are the odds?
I have learned a tremendous amount on this journey—and have lost a lot of sleep. Dreams take a ton of work, folks, but they’re worth it. Work on them hard enough, and you might end up with an accomplishment that cannot be taken away in a conference room on a sleepy Tuesday morning.
I hope this post helps someone else find their direction after a layoff. It’s a disorienting, awful feeling. But take it from me: it’s not the end of anything.
Not really.
If you’d like to join me on my journey, go grab your very own copy of Polaris and subscribe here on my Substack. No matter what, if you’re reading this and you just had that awful call: know that I’m rooting for you.
You’re not alone. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.
And as for everyone else: thanks for sticking with me this far. Polaris is yours now, perhaps even more than it was ever mine. See you Starside.
I can’t wait for what comes next.
Ries
“We’ll see.”
Glad I got to watch this one unfold.
What a wonderful post, including the story behind the story. Its been that kind of year for so many... turning that type of loss into an opportunity requires great courage.
I am excited to have received Polaris today and to begin reading it( hopefully as soon as this weekend) after finishing a book that's already in progress.