June 2026 Status Report

Don’t talk about trusting in God, not outcomes.

Photo by Lucas Vasques on Unsplash

There is a lump on my thyroid that is a little bit bigger than a penny. I didn’t know I even had it, and had it not been for a CAT scan on last month’s stroke-like symptoms adventure, I wouldn’t have even known. The radiologist recommended an ultrasound.

The ultrasound showed it was bigger still than they expected. For thyroid nodules of that type, there was only a 5% chance of it being cancer, but it was large enough they recommended a biopsy.

One biopsy later, and that chance has been upgraded. There is a 12% to 30% chance I have cancer right now.

From a purely mathematical perspective, yes, there is a large chance I am cancer-free. But statistics are not the same when you’re in the population. This month has been awful, with a mixture of not knowing and waiting for the next bit of knowledge to come.

Christians often talk about trusting in God, not outcomes. And I can sort of see the advice when it comes to some important thing people usually feel anxiety about, like landing a scholarship or getting that dream job or dating that girl. I probably blithely said it myself. But when one of those outcomes is cancer and one of the outcomes of that is literally DYING then suddenly it’s another one of those trite Christian sayings people should stop saying, because it’s not found in the Bible and it’s not even helpful.

For the moment, though, I wait. I got some writing in, because after a day of depression I realized doing nothing would only make me feel worse and worse. I also went to the Catholic Writers Conference Live held in Chicago, Illinois, one of the annual conferences that the Catholic Writers Guild holds. That brings me to…

What has Matthew P. Schmidt been up to?

CWCL 2026 was a lot of fun. I caught up with friends I only see in person once a year, and went to some good talks. I was also, somewhat unexpectedly, on two panels, one as a panelist, and one as a moderator. Aside from online presentations, these were my first public speaking events.

And apparently I nailed them.

I had heard of an actor who needed a camera watching to perform, and I’ve somehow found this applies to me and an audience. As long as there’s people watching, it energizes me in a strange way and then suddenly I come alive. I’m not sure how. But despite being nervous, people told me they were surprised to hear I was, since I pulled it all off without a trace of anxiety.

I also got some clarity on my next steps with other projects. Including, yes, C&D3.

C&D3

Between the possibility of cancer and general stress, I haven’t worked on C&D3. It wasn’t until I prayed in my hotel room at CWCL 2026 and listened in the silence that I came to a conclusion.

I actually hated the story.

Not due to emotional baggage, which has greatly decreased since relaunching the series. But because the plot itself wasn’t working, and I didn’t realize how little I liked it until I could admit to myself that I truly didn’t.

QUASI-SPOILERS (This is for a doomed plot, so it’s not quite a spoiler? But you can still skip this section to avoid any shadow of a spoiler.)

My original plot was that Our Heroes delve deep into the bottom depths of the Dungeon, and the whole book would be one giga-delve. There’s a lot of stuff they encounter along the way or discover, and that was fun. (That stuff is a spoiler.)

The problem is that it wasn’t really a layered plot. It ended up being Discovery-Dialogue-Fight-Discovery-Dialogue-Fight-Discovery-… for the whole book. And in my experience with The Last Tribune, it’s actually really hard to make a book with repeated fight sequences where each fight is unique, memorable, and actually interesting.

The Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell is that, and he did a much better job at it than I. But if you read the series closely, there’s only 3-4 battles per book, and the nature of space combat means there’s plenty of time for each battle to have twists, turns, punchy dialogue, and puzzles without obvious solutions.

In C&D, based primarily on the ancient MMOG-clone Mordor and roguelike mechanics in general, battles are supposed to last merely seconds. So I couldn’t pull Jack Campbell’s solution off, and even he says that future books in the series are delayed because he needs to think of new problems for his heroes to solve.

Once I realized that I hated the plot, I realized there were more flaws. One of the solutions to the main crises was more or less deus ex machina because I had no other way to make the plot work. In fact, the more I realized I had twisted the story to save the plot, the more I realized I hated the story.

But perhaps the biggest flaw was that it was too much Dungeon. The key to the City and the Dungeon is that there is both City and Dungeon, and when the story is too much City (C&D2 for the most part) or neither City nor Dungeon (C&D2’s America arc) than the story falters. And that was the problem with C&D3 being one giga-delve: it was only Dungeon, and that wasn’t fun.

END QUASI-SPOILERS

So what now?

I talked this over with my friend Nancy Bechel at the conference, who is an editor and book coach and she gave me good advice. The upshot is, I’m going to take a step back from the story and figure out how I can tell it in a way I love, and then y’all will probably love it, too.

What does this mean for the Kickstarter? I don’t know, yet. It’s possible if I fall in love with the story I’ll write in a blaze of creativity like C&D1, which would be awesome. But I’m not going to put pressure on myself to do that. But I do believe many of the words are salvageable. I just don’t know which words yet, so I’m not going to give a word count at the moment.

Witch-Queen 2

I’m inspired to work on it again, and I have been. With a couple of days’ exceptions, I’ve worked on it a little bit each day, but now I want to commit to working on it more. I don’t know when it will be out—that’s up to God. But I am still working on it.

WoW

One of the panels I was on was a marketing panel, and I talked about live versus dead books. Several people came up to me afterwards and asked me about it, so here is a short explanation:

A live book, in this sense, means a book that will sell copies even if you are not actively marketing it, or if you are actively marketing it, it is selling more copies than directly marketed. A dead book, however, doesn’t: it only sells copies when you push it on the market, and when you stop, the market doesn’t care any more.

What is WoW1? I don’t know. I’m not ready to give up on it due to the complicated circumstances around it, but even when I have advertised it, it hasn’t succeeded. Maybe with a different cover, or maybe it if wasn’t freely available, or maybe if some other things were different, it would be alive. But it might not live even with those changes.

The World of Wishes, however, is close to my heart. It was going to be my masterpiece, and I was so concerned I might not have the chance to finish it before my death that it is the one and only story I have written with a complete story bible. So even if it is dead, I don’t want to kill it.

So I don’t know. Maybe a relaunch would fix its issues. Maybe not. But in my present circumstances, it’s hard to justify taking away time and money from other projects to feed it. I still want to finish it. I just don’t know how or when.

Refugeverse

Prince Anak the Immortal is the reverse: it is a book that I sometimes wince at, but, despite the odds, is flourishing. And I never want to tell people that a book they like isn’t good if it’s a book I’ve written. It’s got around a 4 star rating on Amazon, and I’m satisfied with that—it’s not perfect, but it’s still good.

But I’m still uncertain what to do about the remaining entries in the series. However, without the time to work on it, it’s remained a question to deal with later.

Secret Project F and Transmission

I have a bit of a confession to make.

I used to post my future projects publicly, back when no one really cared, but then I felt guilt when I worked on other things. Furthermore, sometimes those future projects simply died and never came back. The Last Gatekeeper was the Serious and Important YA Literature that so seriously burned me out that I wrote C&D instead. Now, I don’t believe in the story any more, and if I was going to write it, it would be vastly different.

So for a long time, and even up until now, I would be quiet about a project and work on it in secret, with the hopes of a Brandon Sanderson-esque reveal sometime later when it was complete. It did mean I was vague in status updates, which I always felt a little bit uncomfortable with.

But the possibility of cancer has had a kind of clarifying effect on my life. I was already seeing an inconsistency with who I was and who I said I was, or what I told others and what the full truth was. And I’ve decided I don’t want to do that any longer.

So, full disclosure: In 2024 and 2025 I was not idle. I completed two novels of a secret project, which I will call Secret Project F.

The reason I had not mentioned it immediately was twofold: first, the reasons already mentioned. But second, I have noticed that I will obsess about a project for years, work really really hard on it, then burn out spectacularly and be unable to work on it. I didn’t want to release these books, then suddenly burn out and be unable to finish them, and have yet another half-finished series that I’m not working on, and either have fans pounding on my door or poor sales that discourage me from working on it again.

In addition, as long as I had not released the books, I could make sure they were all complete and consistent with each other without having to reach for painful retcons or writing myself into a corner. Once a book’s out, though, there’s only so much I can do.

Similarly, both of these books presently end on cliffhangers, and they all might, so I wanted to at worst rapid-release them. I can feel good about a cliffhanger where the reader can at least preorder the next book. Not one where the next book might come years later.

“But!” you may ask. “When will we see these books?” I don’t know, because as I had suspected, I burned out on the whole project.

Because of that, I ended up starting a new LitRPG project, which I am calling Transmission. This one has been flowing like crazy, and I’m already 24k words in. I am hoping to make this a standalone, or at least a very short series, but we will see. No ETA on this to be clear, but I wanted to be upfront about where my writing actually is.

Short Stories

I am very, very close to releasing a new short story collection. There’s a mix of old and new stories in it, and once it’s released I’m going to take the old titles off Amazon. So if for whatever crazy reason you really wanted them as separate stories, now’s your final chance!

Specifically, I’m taking down:

• We who Live by the Death of Stars

• Silence (probably)

• The API of the Gods

This new collection will have an previously unpublished C&D story, so stayed tuned.

I also sold a short story to Mysterion Online! You’ll be able to read it for free around October, but if you want early access, you can subscribe to their Patreon and get it a bit earlier (and also meet me in digital at their monthly Discord chats)

In closing

Life has been rough, and some of the reasons it’s been rough I can’t talk about. But writing isn’t about “I’ll work while it’s fun and I enjoy it.” Or at least that’s not what it’s about if you want to make a living at it.

I don’t seriously think I will die of this thyroid nodule, even if it is cancer. Thyroid cancers are some of the least worst. But surgeries are intrinsically risky, and even if it’s “just” a surgery there’s a chance of serious complications—yes, including even death.

God willing, next status update I’ll have better news. But even if not, I’ll keep on writing.