Author: aoyebanj

E________, first draft: 56,800 words

For those of you who have visited my home page in the last couple of days, I am well aware that I have some explaining to do. What, I hear you ask, was I thinking? An SF author writing a murder mystery? And in Pittsburgh of all places! Outrageous!

I promise to tell you the creation story behind A Quiet Teacher in due course. I had, in fact, intended to tell it today, but something else came up.

As a brand-new author, publishing continues to be one surprise after another. One of the odder ones (at least if you work for a mega-corp like yours truly, or, say, in retail) is that after Braking Day was published on April 5, no one could tell me how many books had been sold. Publishing is a business, after all, and someone has to know how many units are being shipped, to where, and who is paying for them. But that person is buried in a hole somewhere and not allowed to see the light of day except twice a year in October and April when the royalties are reported. There are surveys that will provide educated guesses (for a fee), but there is no way for me, as an author, to know how many copies of Braking Day you folks have got your hands on so far. For all I know at this point, it could be zero.

Well . . . except for a couple of things. First, some of you have left (mostly very nice – thank you!) reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, which means at least a few people have cracked open the book. Second, I have started to receive readers’ letters, which means that I have, well, readers. These have been, almost without exception, both kind and thoughtful, and it has been my pleasure to reply to each and every one personally.

Which brings me (at last!) to the point of this post. I recently received an interesting email from Rich H., who wrote as follows:

“Almost done with Breaking Day, couple of pages to go.

Enjoyed naming the star ships after physicists, especially Chandrasekhar who was unknown to me until I looked him up on Wikipedia.  I imagine not many Americans have heard of him either.

One thing though.  Clearly in the book water is precious, even to the point that it is used as the medium of exchange.  However I noticed many references to frost growing on surfaces inside and outside of the starship.  Just curious if water was so precious why was there no effort to recover or harvest the water from that frost?  Is there some underlying physical or engineering reason for not harvesting?

Thanks, please publish more!”

I don’t think Rich H. is a bot (though if he is, he’s a very nice one), but when I tried to reply, all I got was a bounce-back email entitled “message undeliverable.” I feel bad that Rich went to all this trouble to write an email to me and he’s never going to get an answer. Because it’s an interesting question, I thought I might share with you what I tried to send by way of a reply – and (hoping that Rich might find his way here) salve my conscience at the same time:

“Rich:

Thanks for the kind words.  They are very much appreciated!

Re your intriguing questions about frost: moisture on interior surfaces isn’t really lost, as it will return to the atmosphere when the relevant compartment warms up (obviously, there needs to be some humidity in the air as people don’t do well when it’s too dry).  As for the exterior, a ship like the Archimedes is certainly large enough to have a gravitational effect, so water that escaped from the hull would undoubtedly settle on exterior surfaces.  My thinking though (totally made up as I have never been on an interstellar voyage!) is that all sorts of other molecules would have an opportunity to land on the ship over the course of 132 years.  A lot of deep space bodies (Pluto, for instance) appear to have a reddish cast because the ices on the surface are laced with tholins.  I figured the same might occur with Archimedes over the course of its journey.  That’s why the exterior frosting is often described as pink. Tholins are poisonous, so cleaning up the ice is a task that, up till now, has not been worth the effort.  The ship still has water, after all, and it has almost arrived.  However, if the Bohr were to continue its journey into deep space with people aboard, there would come a time when the ongoing water losses would justify having drones recover as much ice from the exterior as possible.  It would be a matter of life and death!

Take care and all the best”

Reading this again, I am reminded that, for an author (or, at any rate, for me) worldbuilding is more than what you see on the page. As I’ve explained elsewhere, worldbuilding for me consists of setting a couple of basic ground rules (in this case, “real” physics and no suspended animation) and then asking and answering a bunch of questions (Why would people leave Earth? What would their descendants, who had no say in the matter, feel about colonizing a new world?). Once you’ve done that, you have a framework for your characters to live in, and then all you have to do is make sure that nothing they do or say is inconsistent with it. However, just because you know what the answers to your questions are, it doesn’t mean you can dump those answers on the page. It’s not an exam, after all. If it doesn’t drive the story – and particularly if it’s not something your characters would think about in their day-to-day – extraneous information like the cost-benefits of ice recovery will turn your hoped-for propulsive story into a bad wikipedia entry.

It’s still a shame, though. I should at least have found a way to say “tholins.” How cool a word is that?

E________, first draft: 55,000 words

Just back from attending the Cymera SFFH book festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. Awesome, just awesome. It was held in the Pleasance, one of Edinburgh University’s atmospheric stone buildings near the center of town: a rambling rat warren of rooms and stages where, no matter where you turned, there was always something going on. It was fun getting lost in it. And if you were tired of getting lost, there was always a helpful volunteer nearby to put you right. So many panels, so many interesting discussions, I lost track. It was incredible. I’ve never been to a book festival before, so I’ve nothing to compare it with, but I will definitely set aside time next year to just go as a visitor, or maybe even as a volunteer. I am totally hooked! My only regret was that my day job kept intruding (thank you, President Putin), otherwise I would have been there every second it was open.

My own panel “Ad Astra,” with Ken MacLeod (Beyond the Hallowed Sky) and Harry Josephine Giles (Deep Wheel Orcadia) and moderated by Annie Rutherford was a blast. The venue was an actual theater, so it felt like being on stage for the high school play (pretty much the last time I trod the boards!) and, like a play, the stage lights were so strong I only had the faintest sense of the audience, which, for me at least, is a cast-iron shield against stage fright. Just as well because we were required to give a short reading from our books. It was intriguing to hear authors read their own works. Ken, having written 18(!) books, is clearly an old hand at this. If you like SF stories about space exploration, Beyond the Hallowed Sky is definitely one for your to-be-read list. And then there is Harry Josephine. Their book is written in the local dialect of Scotland’s Orkney Islands, with an English translation. I had wimped out and only read the English, so listening to the Orcadian, as it’s called, was fascinating. And not so hard once you hear how the various words on the page are pronounced! We then answered a slew of intriguing questions from Annie and the audience, not one of which was what are you doing here, which I half expected to be fired my way any minute.

After that the three of us did a book signing above a Blackwells pop-up bookstore (I felt like I was in a movie scene rather than real life) and then down to the store itself where (as I did on several occasions) I bought way more books than I intended. My checked bag on the way home barely came in under the weight limit. Twenty pounds of book will do that for you.

The last panel I was able to attend was Sunday afternoon’s “Growing Pains” with Kate Campbell, Judith Crow and S.K. Marlay, on the subject of YA fantasy. On top of the inherent interest of listening to authors talk about their work and why they are attracted to it, I was reminded about how hard people work at this. Stella Marlay, for instance, had to write most of her novel, The Stone Keep, in her car because it was lockdown and there was nowhere else to work. Not something I would have had the fortitude to do. The Stone Keep was my last purchase – and I got it signed!!!

Book festivals. Awesome.

E________ first draft, 51,000 words

Ukraine continues to play havoc with my sense of time. I knew I was a little late with my blog, but it’s been a shock to discover I was last here a month ago. I am definitely losing it!

Anyway, I am super excited to be going to my first live, in person book event as an author. I will also be going home for the first time in three years, so I am super, super excited.

The cause of all this super excitement is Edinburgh, Scotland’s Cymera Festival, which I think is Britain’s only book festival exclusively devoted to SF, Fantasy and Horror. I’m a little vague on the difference between a book festival and a convention, but I think the main one is that you have to pay for a convention by the day, whereas you pay for a festival by the event. If you’re only interested in a couple of panels, for instance, a book festival will save you a ton of money because those are the only ones you need to pay for.

The festival starts on Friday, June 3 and runs through Sunday, June 5. It’s a hybrid event (one of the few positives to come out of our ongoing plague) so, if you can’t physically make it to Edinburgh, you can still attend via Zoom. But it also allows authors who wouldn’t otherwise be able to get there, like the legendary John Scalzi, for instance, to put in an appearance. Totally stoked to watch that one!

My own panel is at 4pm BST/11am EDT and is called Ad Astra. Presumably because the focus of the panel is exploration science fiction. I will be appearing with Scottish authors Ken MacLeod and Harry Josephine Giles. I have been a huge fan of Ken MacLeod’s since stumbling across The Cassini Division back in the day. And his latest, Beyond the Hallowed Sky, is partly premised on what might happen if the theory of relativity turns out to be a teeny bit different than we presently think it is. It also sent me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole in search of Cherenkov radiation, but that’s another story – and one far less interesting than Ken’s. I haven’t yet had an opportunity to read Harry Josephine Giles’s Deep Wheel Orcadia yet because obtaining a hard copy here in the States has proved to be difficult. It looks like I will have to get the e-book version, which I have resisted so far. For a sci-fi writer, I am horribly old fashioned. I like books. For some reason (and it may be a sheer lack of practice) I never seem to remember what I read on an e-book, which would be a shame, because Deep Wheel Orcadia is a verse novel, which will be a first for me. Looking forward to it!

Jo Fletcher, my British publisher has also brokered an introduction to Stephen Cox, so I know at least one person who will talk to me! He is the author of Our Child of the Stars and Our Child of Two Worlds, and I am looking forward to his panel Kith and Kin, which takes place on Sunday at 3pm BST/10am EDT.

But first, I have to get to Edinburgh. I’m driving there from Heathrow. Here’s hoping I haven’t forgotten how to use a manual/stick-shift. On the “right” side of the road.

E________, first draft, 41,200 words

As I write this, I am sitting in my local coffee shop. A student at a nearby table is making ferocious underlinings in a book called The Death of Adam. I’ve just looked it up to post the link, and I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the guy is a philosophy student. Or maybe poli-sci. Regardless, although I am a grown man, the title is deeply disturbing to me. I would like him to move on, or at least do his underlining with the book flat on the table like a normal person.

It is also an irresistible lead-in to my explanation as to where I have been the last couple of months. Fortunately (for me, at any rate) I have not died. I have, however, been otherwise occupied.

My last entry here was on February 21. On February 24 the Russians (re)invaded Ukraine. Multifarious sanctions followed. As sanctions are a big part of my day job, I have simply been far too busy to do anything else. On April 5, when Braking Day was finally published, I worked a 16-hour day, had a quick glass of champagne and went straight to bed. I’d like to feel sorry for myself, but no one is trying to drop high explosive through the roof of my house.

Now that the sanctions are bedding in (and I pray they do some good) I can finally come up for air. It’s been weird to go to my local bookstore and see my book front and center in the new fiction display. That said, I can never show my face there again. My wife insisted on telling everyone there that the author of Braking Day was in their midst and they should be super, super excited. I wanted to die.

The critics appear to have been kind. I’ve had positive mentions in, among others, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Publisher’s Weekly. I’m just hoping you folks like it. Fingers crossed!

E________, first draft: 41,200 words

We are only about six weeks away from Braking Day hitting the shelves. Needless to say, I am very excited! D-day (P-day?) is April 5, but my agent, the estimable Brady, let it be known that I could expect my own author copies in the next couple of weeks or so, depending on production. (I get a certain number of books free: it’s in my contract. I can’t remember how many. I guess I should go read my contract.) Obviously (though I had not bothered to think about this) in order to get books released on the same date in bookshops across the country, you have to make them up ahead of time and ship them out so they are sitting in storage ready for the big day. Big is relative here. Big to me.

Anyway, having finally got to thinking about it, I also got to thinking: how on Earth do you make a book anyway? Turns out, the New York Times has the answer. They just did an article on the printing of Marlon James’s Moon Witch, Spider King, which comes out tomorrow. Enjoy!

How a Book Is Made.

E________, first draft: 41,200 words

I have finally finished my winter read, The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Despite its length, and the time it took me to plough through it, winter is still here. I have hopes, though, of warmer days ahead.

Regarding Dostoyevsky’s novel, I’m not quite sure what to make of it. Being Russian and from the 19th Century it was, of course, long, and full of philosophical side trips, and dark, though nowhere near as dark as I was expecting. It was also wryly humorous and, at times, utterly compelling. Not an easy book to describe by any means.

One thing I am sure of, though. There is no way Dostoyevsky could have sold The Brothers Karamazov into the modern market. It is far too long, lacks focus, and rambles all over the place. It does not meet the modern demand for tightly plotted stories told at pace – even allowing for the more relaxed standards of literary fiction – the “classy” genre – which has a higher tolerance for introspection. Insofar as The Brothers Karamazov is about anything, it is about a murder and the subsequent trial. But in the Penguin Classics edition, which is 985 pages long, we don’t even know there’s been a murder until nearly six hundred pages in. A modern editor would have told Dostoyevsky that he’d started his novel too soon and cut out the first two thirds of the book. Then he’d have a story!

Editors matter. If you want an insight into what editors actually do, you could do a lot worse than take a look at Genius, starring Colin Firth, Jude Law, and Nicole Kidman, which looks at the relationship between the early twentieth century American author, Thomas Wolfe (not to be confused with his later namesake) and his editor, Max Perkins. Wolfe’s first draft of his most famous novel, Look Homeward, Angel, was something like eleven hundred pages long. Perkins persuaded him to cut it down considerably and focus on one character rather than spread himself thinly between several. The resulting novel was a sensational (and international) best seller.

When Braking Day, then called Starship Four, was taken on by my first agent (no one was more shocked and surprised than yours truly, by the way) she had a number of editorial suggestions. In addition to gently telling me that my title was … not good, she would say things like, “This particular character is intriguing. I want to know more about her. Where did she come from? Why is she doing this?” When she left the industry and passed me on to the estimable Brady, he had more of the same. “This particular character is intriguing. I want to know more about him. Where did he come from? Why is he doing this?”

The resulting manuscript was significantly improved from the original as a result. The characters were more nuanced, the plot more sophisticated. Then, when DAW agreed to buy it, my editor there, the redoubtable Leah, had more suggestions. “These characters that you barely mention are intriguing. I want to know more about them. Where are they coming from? Why are they doing this? Oh, and could you please change the ending by moving the characters a quarter of a million kilometers from where they presently are? Thanks!”

It was hard but rewarding work. A manuscript that I worried was getting too long at 110,000 words ended up at 130,000. But the result was a much more layered, more sophisticated treatment; way, way better than I had managed on my own.

Braking Day is now close to publication, and earlier this week we got a starred review from Publishers Weekly. I, of course, had no idea what a “starred review” was. Apparently, you get them for works that are “exemplary in their genre.” Wow. Here’s what PW had to say.

“Engineer-in-training Ravi MacLeod unwittingly becomes entangled in a dangerous conspiracy in Oyebanji’s brilliant debut, a vibrant exploration of society aboard a generation starship. One hundred and thirty-two years earlier, a fleet comprising three generation ships left an Earth overtaken by AI to forge a new life for humans on a planet orbiting Tau Ceti, the “Destination Star.” As they approach their final destination, Oyebanji paints a convincing picture of a society molded by unusual circumstance, highlighting its commitment to the mission and a class structure based on one’s status as either officer or crew member. Ravi’s on track to be the first in his family to make officer when he starts having visions of a strange girl outside the ship without a space suit who delivers an urgent warning. Concerned he might be going insane, Ravi turns to his cousin, Boz, for help, and the pair stumble across information that suggests the three-ship fleet is hiding a devastating secret about their departure from Earth. Oyebanji builds intrigue upon intrigue through the novel’s first half and pays off the suspense with a series of jaw-dropping revelations. Innovative worldbuilding, a plot packed with surprises, and Oyebanji’s nuanced exploration of social and cultural shifts make this a must-read for space opera fans.“

Obviously, reading something like this (I would not have read it if it had been bad!) is potentially head swelling. But the honest truth is that I would not have “earned” a review like this – and certainly not the language I have bolded – without the committed input of two agents and an editor. They cared deeply about what I had written and worked above and beyond to make it better.

Writing, it turns out, is a team effort.

I had a whole blog post planned for today around Martian canals, an ocean on Europa, and the TRAPPIST-1 system. But then I came across this sweet story in the Guardian about a young novelist taking his first steps in publishing. So. Enjoy….

Book a prize: Idaho library has wait list for story eight-year-old hid on a shelf.

E________, first draft: 37,000 words.

As Braking Day gets closer and closer to publication, the marketing folks at both DAW in the US and Jo Fletcher in the UK are asking me to pitch in by making myself available for interviews and to write pieces for blogs and websites. This, I am more than happy to do. A lot of people have put in a lot of work to make Braking Day available to the public, so the very least I can do is help make sure the public knows about it.

To that end, Ella at Jo Fletcher suggested that I might want to write a few words for the UK SF websites about how my day job is reflected in my writing. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that one of the reasons I write is to forget about my day job.

I work in counterterrorist financing, or what I tend to call financial counterterrorism because I don’t actually finance counter-terrorists. What I do, along with many others, is help the giant bank that I work for do its very best to make sure that money does not travel to or from bad people or countries. It is, after all, a lot harder to build a bomb if you can’t afford the ingredients.

It is an interesting and demanding job. I do not want to bring it home with me. And I most definitely do not want to write about it. After replying to Ella’s request with some breezy assurances, I retreated from my keyboard positively awash in self-loathing. Instead of avoiding the issue by telling her that I’d write something without specifying what (I’m a lawyer, after all), I should have fessed up and told her she was barking up the wrong tree.

But then I started to think about it some more. A lot of my job involves the tracking of resources. Allowing money for a tech start up or new fish and chip shop to get through, while cutting off the wherewithal to move drugs or weapons of mass destruction. Resources are finite. Whether you cut them off or wave them on, consequences follow.

The Braking Day plot is, to steal a word from Dan Moren, twisty. But a lot of it is driven by the fact that, after 132 years in deep space, resources have become constrained. Part of that plot involves terrorists (more or less). And a good chunk of it centers on the fact that the terrorists (more or less) need money – liquid water in this case. Water – and the need for water – drives a good part of the novel. Next time you see a bad guy running through a story, blowing things up with abandon and losing henchmen left and right to good-guy gunfire, think about this: where did he get the resources? Are they really as unlimited as the storyteller would have you believe? Partly because of my job, I have always had trouble with that, and I can’t bring myself to write it. In Braking Day, resources dictate what actions my characters can take, including the bad ones. Resources allow the bad guy to do things, but they can only do so much, and it gives an opening for other characters to track them down. Resources allow the good guys to move around and defend themselves, but they also limit how fast, how far, and how effectively. While it’s true that ISV-01 Archimedes doesn’t carry an expert in financial counterterrorism, she does have one telling her story.

The other thing that occurred to me is that the only way to do my job is to cooperate with other people. The whole counterterrorism enterprise is too vast for a single person to accomplish it on their own. This is not something unique to counterterrorism, of course. Human beings are social animals. We tend to do things in groups. But sometimes (often?) in the fiction game we lose sight of that. Powerfully gifted individuals save the world (or worlds) time and time again because only they can do so. Conditioned as I am by the strictures of corporate behavior, I have trouble writing that. I believe in teamwork. Ravi, my protagonist, is not a superhero. He cannot slay dozens of highly trained adversaries in hand-to-hand combat, or manually pilot a starship through an asteroid field, or put back together things that have been blown up beyond repair. He’s an “ordinary” young man. But he has two things going for him that could help any one of us achieve great things: a moral core, and friends. Although Braking Day is told entirely from Ravi’s point of view, it is very much an ensemble piece. “No man is an island entire of itself.” Ravi gets things done because his moral compass points him in the right direction and because he has friends to help him do it.

So, there you have it. I wrote Braking Day as a soothing antidote to my day job, and yet my day job informs every part of the story. Thanks, Ella, for opening my eyes!

I think.

E________, first draft: 33,300 words

Many years ago, now, my day job took me out to the West Coast. Work done, I found myself in LAX, Terminal Four, waiting for a flight home. While there, like so many travelers before me, I thought it would be a good idea to drop into Starbucks for a cup of coffee.

Turned out, the terminal had a problem with its water supply that day and the Starbucks was unable to serve anything that wasn’t bottled or chewable. Fear not, they said, this is LAX. There is another Starbucks in the terminal and their water supply is just fine.

I located the second Starbucks, swore under my breath, and decided then and there that I was done with it. The reason? The line for service was at least two city blocks long. There were hundreds of people hoping to get served. Clearly, there was a reason Terminal Four had two Starbucks. The sole survivor was simply overwhelmed.

No one in that unbelievably long line looked happy, but no one left. Or rather, they only left after a frantic glance at the watch told them they had run out of time. It was either coffee or the plane. Though I do sometimes wonder if some of them chose the coffee.

To be honest, the sight of a coffee line measured in the hundreds of yards was disturbing. It was, after all, proof positive that coffee is addictive. No one in their right mind should be standing in a two-blocks-long queue jonesing for a cup of Joe they were never going to get. Except for those people who really did have hours to kill, there was no way on God’s Earth they were ever going to get served, and yet there they were.

Fast forward to six a.m. last Saturday. The outside temperature in Pittsburgh was 17F/-8C and there were a couple of inches of snow on the ground. I planned to drive to my local coffee shop and work on E________ for a couple of hours. Problem was, for reasons I won’t bore you with, my car wouldn’t start.

I don’t have coffee in the house (don’t ask!) but what I do have is a ton of tea and a home office. A normal person would have called AAA, put the kettle on, and started writing. Instead, I trudged a mile and half to the coffee shop with a deep-frozen laptop on my back. I walked home, too. A three-mile round trip through the bitter cold and crunchy snow. And all the while I was thinking, Am I like those folks at LAX? Am I so pathetically addicted to coffee that I’ll crawl over broken icicles to get some?

Okay. That’s not completely true. I was also wondering how long I had until I got frostbite. But still.

Now, seated at a warm, comfortable writing desk and having thought about it, I don’t think I’m addicted to coffee. But I am addicted to writing in coffee shops – or anywhere that isn’t home. Hotel lobbies, airplanes, a doctor’s office, wherever. If I have time and a laptop, I start clicking away. I need the change of scenery. It makes me more creative – or maybe just happier – than if I write at home all the time. If I did that, I’d go mad. Or I wouldn’t write, which is pretty much the same thing. While there is some evidence that travel improves creativity, I don’t think the authors of those particular studies were talking about a short hop to the local barista’s. Nonetheless, and speaking just for myself, I find the act of going to a different place, sitting at a small, anonymous table, and cracking open a laptop immensely stimulating. Even if I have to slog across the urban tundra to make it happen.

Or maybe I like coffee a little too much.

E________, first draft: 27,700 words.

I don’t do new year’s resolutions. As ever, an aversion to hard work lies at the root of this particular failure. List making! Public declarations! Execution! It’s all far too exhausting.

Plus, I can also rationalize my idleness by pointing out there’s a lot of evidence that resolutions don’t actually work. I suspect that if you’re the sort of person for whom resolutions make sense, you’ re also the sort of person who doesn’t actually need them. You would have done whatever it is you resolved to do anyway. And if you are going to do it, why wait to start in the new year? For sure, if I was going to resolve to go to the gym and get fit, I would start that in, say, March, when all those crispy new January resolutions have faded and wrinkled in the dreich days of late winter. There’d be less crowding in the changing rooms and shorter lines at the equipment.

But that’s not to say the long dark nights aren’t a good time for dreaming and reflection. When better? Particularly now that the rush of Christmas is over and the only thing to sustain us through the two coldest months of the year is the thought of what might lie beyond. Unless, of course, you’re a snow sports person. In which case the time for action is now!

Snow sports? Nein danke. As someone who only leaves the house at this time of year because of work or the relentless demands of the dog, dreams and reflections for 2022 are all I have. In my writing life, Braking Day is due out on April 5th, The Wrong Shape to Fly, my contribution to Baen’s Worlds Long Lost anthology will hopefully be published in the fall, and TSW, the novel formerly known as V______ R___, will be going out to market looking for a publisher in the next few weeks. My dream for 2022 is that Braking Day is a great success, The Wrong Shape to Fly leads to opportunities to write more short stories, and that someone agrees to take on TSW. Fingers crossed that the dream comes true!

But then, being the sort of person that I am, I cannot help but reflect on what will happen if the dream does come true. On top of my (not undemanding) day job, I will be committed to writing a SF follow up to Braking Day, a short story or two, editing TSW, and committing to a follow up to that. Dream realization means two novels a year, plus short stories, plus all the marketing and ancillary stuff that goes along with.

Not so long ago, I was whining about how I couldn’t do NaNoWriMo because it was too much work. Plodding along at 600 words a day over maybe a couple of hours was enough to get out a novel a year, I reckoned. The 2,000 daily words required for NaNoWriMo was, in my opinion, nothing less than a recipe for burn out and divorce.

And yet here I am, dreaming of an outcome that will more than double my present workload. Four hours a day, plus my actual, you know, job. Am I nuts?

Probably. But you know what? I don’t care. If a dream coming true leads to problems, those are the sorts of problems everyone should have.

Bring it on.