Hello everyone,

this one has been a long time coming. I said I would try to explain my long absence and silence, so here it is.

Just to be clear, this is an explanation. Not an excuse. I’m not trying to excuse it because there is no excuse I could bring. I had every chance to at the very least make a short post and tell everyone what was going on, or write some short updates (or longer ones). I am not and will never try to excuse my failure to do so, only explain it.

Something happens when I’m starting to write, drawing my attention away. By the time it’s resolved I’m too tired to continue. The next day something else happens and I decide to put it off for another day. Then on the day after that some pleasant stuff happens which, nonetheless, takes up too much time for me to get to writing.

Then come exams. Some personal tragedies (five people dead and buried over the last six months, six if we count my grandmother about a year ago), including some really… baffling ones (two of those dead were suicides we didn’t see coming). More exams. Working on the side to pay the bills and support my family a bit.

Stuff keeps happening and at first I put writing – and responding on the blog – off for perfectly good reasons, but it quickly becomes a habit. I look at the comment count going up and I just think “I don’t have the energy to reply to all that today and I don’t want to reply to just some and ignore others”. That happens again the day after. The more often I put it off, the easier it gets to keep putting it off.

That pattern continues until I don’t respond to the blog, nor write anything but some random snippets, for half a year. It’s stupid, it’s laziness in its worst form, the kind of laziness a religious person knows as Sloth, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, perhaps the worst one of the lost – or at least the most ubiquitous one.

So in the end it was just… me being lazy, getting myself used to putting it off over and over until I had to get a reality check and realise just how long I’d ignored what may be my greatest passion and a bunch of loyal fans who’ve stuck with me for way longer than I deserve.

Thus, here I am. I fucked up. Mea culpa. There’s nothing profound to justify it with, but I hope this at least explains it.

Sincerely,

Tieshaunn Tanner

PS: Obviously I will not continue my Patreon as is. I will make a separate post in regards to it and how I intend to continue the blog from here on out once I figure out the details, so I can present a complete – and, I hope, reasonable – plan.

PPS: Rest assured, the serial will continue and will be finished. Only thing that could stop me from that would be death itself.

PPPS: The next chapter is about half-finished and should be up sometime over the weekend.