The Schedule Exploded. The Ship Remains Unbothered.

🏴‍☠️ Linnea Lucifer | In which we discuss a move to Scandiland, a murder that keeps, letters to your actual letterbox, and seven birthdays the captain will miss. Better grab the big cup for this one.

May 21, 2026

Sometimes a detour is not a failure of discipline - it’s where you build the ship.

Hejsan, Tjena, Hello, and Happy Thursday!

It’s been a month since we last sat down for a proper fika and shared our reader sins. That’s when I told you how I’d broken my own rule and allowed Yoana Krakow’s story, Running Weather, to jump the queue.

This month, it would seem, I have some explaining to do…

See, the plan was simple enough. At least in the way most plans tend to be simple before they’re tried and tested in real life. I wrote Yoana’s story when I was supposed to be doing something else, and to tell you the truth - I fell pretty hard for it. So much so I believed it would be out before the end of the month.

Then Freyja looked at me, looked at the calendar and the boxes still waiting to be packed. And she laughed.

Ruddy fleabag.

You’d better grab the big cup for this one, Messmate, because reality decided to kick my backside and break the schedule completely. The Resilience is preparing for her longest voyage yet, and somewhere between the packing tape, the edits, the product files, and the increasingly un-cooperative goal bingo cards, I’ve had to admit something important:

Yoana’s story is still coming. It just isn’t the next thing to leave port.

We are.

The Voyage Ahead

If you haven’t followed every creak and groan from the lower decks, we steered the ship out of London two years ago and planned to stay put up north for the next five years.

We chartered the course for the next voyage, named it Lexit II: The Great Crossing, and set about working on how to make it happen. I even called the five-year preparation period my Radical Resilience Challenge - a way to propel myself into the ultimate version of my dream life:

One where I’d be free to roam on sea and land. To play with the grandpirates on a beach. And where I wouldn’t have to wait a few years between each visit. I’ve never been drawn to fame or fortune, but freedom is important to me. Especially the freedom to spend time with family.

The dream itself is pretty simple and straightforward.

The Great Crossing is not.

We’re not just talking about shuffling furniture from one room to another, or even from London to the north of England. This time we’re talking about an actual crossing that involves boxes, paperwork, decisions, file migrations, business housekeeping, and the emotional labour of sorting through the pieces of a life before packing them into archive boxes with neat little labels.

I am not going to pin a date to the mast just yet as reality has a vexatious habit of overruling them, but the direction is set. Scandiland is no longer a pipe dream we’ll get to some elusive day in the future.

It’s a 2026 thing!

Which means that alongside the writing, the publishing, the editing, the newslettering, and the general Resilience wrangling, we have to make the old lady shipshape for the biggest adventure she’s ever undertaken. She needs to be able to withstand her first Scandi winter and keep functioning so we can feed the crew.

The Ship Nearest Port

There’s a rule of seamanship I forgot to apply to my own writing schedule: you finish the ship that’s closest to port before you launch the next one.

Between Midnights has been waiting longer. The structural pass is done. The second pass is halfway through. And with a crossing on the horizon, leaving a book half-finished in dry dock is not responsible seamanship, so I moved her to the front.

Running Weather hasn’t gone anywhere. Yoana is still at the dock, story intact, waiting her turn with considerably more patience than I deserve. I haven’t forgotten her, and I won’t. She’ll have her moment.

But first, Erin’s story in Between Midnights written under Sir Bear’s Liam Armitage pen name.

Here’s a taste of where we’re going:

In a room of mad people, Joe was the least mad.

...

Me? My name is Erin. In my bacchanalian phase, I slept with over fifty men and thirty women. That was mostly on a single Saturday, the previous week. So long ago, I can’t remember most of them.

...

“Why are we here and not at the diner?”
“We’re here to talk about a murder. One that would keep.”

Things You Can Hold

In all the noise of the digital world we live in, there’s something almost radical about receiving a real letter. On real paper. Something that arrives through a real inbox, lands in your hands and stays there. Because it’s yours now.

Plunder & Prose is the Resilience becoming something you can actually hold in your hands.

The idea is simple. Real letters. Seasonal paper treasures. Little things designed and written with care and sent out into the world by hand. With a proper envelope and a real stamp. A pen friend scheme with a literary twist because we are, after all, a ship full of readers and writers who still believe that words on paper mean something that words on a screen can’t quite replicate.

We planted the first seeds in winter and the first visible shoots are already in the ground. Some of them have even reached our shops already. The Äppelpaj Seasons bundles are coming next and more will follow.

This will grow slowly, which feels right for a project that, by its very nature, is unhurried. But the flag is raised and now you know where we’re headed.

If the idea of getting actual post from us makes you smile even slightly, watch this space.

Seven Birthdays and a Scandi Winter

In between Between Midnights and Scandiland, we have Midsummer and seven birthdays. Seven. All belonging to people I love dearly. All of which I’ll miss, because scheduling a dream is easier said than done, and the crossing will happen when it happens.

This is the part I didn’t think to write into the plan. Not the birthdays specifically, but the weight of having to choose. The things you carry in the reckoning of getting somewhere worth arriving at. I feel it, and it weighs me down. I’m not pretending otherwise.

Alongside that, I feel something else: this is actually happening. In half the time I thought it would take. The Great Crossing was supposed to be five years away. Now it’s a 2026 thing. And the only reason it became a 2026 thing is because the ship kept moving even when it looked like it had turned into box mayhem.

It had. But boxes are how you move.

So….

Between Midnights will leave port.

Running Weather will have her day.

Plunder & Prose will send its first letters out before Midsummer.

And on the other side, a Scandi winter, a life that fits, and grandpirates who won’t have to wait years between Mommo Linn visits await.

The ship is still moving, and we’re rolling with the tides.

Fair winds, Messmate!

~Captain Linn 🏴‍☠️

Would you like to leave feedback on this chapter?

✍️ Use the buttons below, or come see us in the deck chat.

The Resilience 🏴‍☠️

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?