Loooong Updoots!

First off, I apologize for the lack of updates here on the patreon page. My life has, once again, gone to hell in a handbasket, and while I'm in the discord almost every day, I've been negligent in keeping the rest of yall in the loop on here. We talk so much in the discord chat that it's easy to forget that not all of my patrons hang out there.

So, I got some drama to air out, and some updates on the writing to give. Drama first, and then the good(ish) news...

It started just before thanksgiving. My sister lives on the other side of the country, over in Washington State. We don't talk much, we were never close, as I moved out at 18 and she went and got married while I was off at uni. We see each other a couple times every couple of years, so I'm not exactly updated on her day to day life and don't call her up to shoot the shit like I do with my brother. We've always been on good terms just never all that close as we live so far apart.

So the day before thanksgiving my sister calls my mom and she's definitely having some kind of breakdown. Hallucinations about angels and demons, confessing sins, all sorts of things. Mom starts freaking out, I call my brother to go see wtf is going on. My brother goes over to her house, sis is still freaking out. He looks around but finds no sign of drugs or anything else, and that is concerning with a capital C. Of all the things that would cause her kind of breakdown, drugs are the BEST CASE SCENARIO(at this point we're thinking brain tumor, various cancers or other conditions, etc. Our other brother(adopted) died from a brain tumor 20 years ago, so a sudden drastic behavior change was familiar territory). So we want her to go to the hospital to get checked out. She refused to go with my brother though.

So his ex wife lives like four blocks away. Bro didn't want to be a big bearded hillbilly dragging a screaming woman into his van. That would have ended badly in their town. So he went to get his ex wife. He was gone for less than 5 minutes. In that time, my sister had stripped naked and went running down the street aggressively confessing her sins to everyone she came across, and got picked up by the police and taken to the hospital after several people called it in.

The hospital decided it was drugs, and sent her home with her husband, who was at a job site on a construction contract for the whole day. He was rightly upset, but seemed kinda nonchalant about the whole thing. My sister had admitted to doing drugs before this event, but said that she hadn't been doing them recently. Jury's still out on that one, and at this point it doesn't matter.

The drugs revelation caused a minor implosion in my family. Remember when i said that me and my sister are not close? Well, all that went out the window with the fam. I've always been the black sheep, and I had my own struggles with addiction. I'm going on 8 years clean now, though, and I'm just too old and too crippled up with my own health issues to want anything to do with that lifestyle anymore. I "grew up" for lack of a better way to put it, and had the support of some amazing and awesome people, and for the last few years, all of my supporters on here as well.

My family though? I was getting bombarded with demands to explain how I could have kept the knowledge that my sister was using, and not told the rest of the family. This absolutely blindsided me. I've talked to my sister maybe five times in the past year, and three of those times were perfunctory calls for holidays and birthdays, and the other two were because my mom's phone battery died mid-call so my sis called my phone to resume. 

I was under assault for explanations I didn't have, while the family tried to organize an intervention while being spread across the map. Maybe that's why nobody saw the signs or could have foreseen what happened next. We all thought "drugs" and nobody was thinking safety. There was talk about buying my sister a plane ticket to come down to Tennessee for the holidays to take a break and let her mind settle, and there was a LOT of arguing because different family members knew about the "confessions" she was talking about. A lot of skeletons came out of a lot of closets and a lot of feelins were hurt, and so nobody was paying proper attention.

Snowmageddon came. It was 15 below zero in the town where my sister lived, the night before christmas eve. my sister's husband was at work, and she was at home alone. we're still piecing the sequence of events together. she had a complete and total psychotic break from reality. she turned on all the faucets in the house, opened all the doors and windows, and soaked herself in water. Then she ran outside into the winter storm, and stripped naked. she ran around looking for people to confess her sins to, claiming that she had to confess her sins to be forgiven before the demons dragged her to hell. it took the police longer to find her this time, and they found her in a snowbank praying for god to take her away. 

She was airlifted to sacred heart, who said her frostbite and hypothermia was worse than they could handle, and she was flown to Seattle. her hands and feet were frozen solid and her skin was damaged on the rest of her body to various degrees. I am not sure what all the terms mean. lots of 2nd and 3rd degree burns, or equivalent. They haven't had to amputate yet, but the might. It's still up in the air. they've had to scrape most of the flesh off her hands and feet, and repeat that process as more tissue died. i have learned more about the horrors of severe frostbite in the last few days than I ever wanted to know.

Here's where things get funky. Seattle said there were no drugs in her system. The current hospital said there aren't even any residual markers or metabolites suggesting drug use in the near to mid past. They don't know why the last hospital called it "drugs" and sent her home. It is most certainly not "lol drugs." They've ruled out brain tumors and cancers and a dozen other things, and it's certainly not drugs. Everyone's confused, but that's also something we'll have to figure out later.

While she was in the hospital, she asked her husband to find her phone and drivers license and overnight it across the state. They have the family iphone plan through their provider, and an icloud account. So he got on there to ping her phone. It also pulled up her text history. 

MULTIPLE affairs. All sorts of shady stuff. they've been together for three years, married for less than a year, and she's been running around on him from the beginning, so he's getting an annulment and he's checking out. She's not going to be able to contest this. So she can't go home to his place, and the hospital is ready to discharge her next week.

So what's happening is, we've got her a plane ticket to come down here in a week or so. She'll be moving into the spare room here at the house, which was my granparents house before me, so she'll basically be getting her old room back. i have to build a wheelchair ramp, and mom will be helping her with changing her bandages and women's issues. We still don't know what caused the psychosis, but it really doesn't matter at the moment. The most important thing is having her safe so she can physically heal up, and we can deal with the mental health issues later. To give respect to my family, the infidelity and possible drug use has taken a back seat given the severity of everything else.

I'm sorry I haven't given more updates sooner, i've been running off minutes-long stretches of sleep as i could get naps in, in between spending hours on the phone constantly with doctors, social workers, an angry soon-to-be-exhusband, my brother, and my sister when she's awake and lucid(well, awake, i don't know that she CAN be lucid right now). 

That being said, I DO have content updates and info for yall. I'm actually kind of hopeful, because once my sister gets here, she'll have all of my mom's attention and i can actually shut my office door unless i'm physically needed to lift something. my role will be driving to appointments and stuff like that, and not the minute-by-minute care. We also have the support of my other sister, and my aunt, and several cousins. I was worried about being stuck in a similar situation as i was with my grandmother, and me being the only person she had, but this side of the family is pulling together in ways my late grandmother's side never did.

SO

Writing HAS continued, both on Skycrowned and on Divinity Engine. The only thing that's "done" is the redone harlot interlude that transitioned into the prologue for book 3. the reason i haven't posted it is because the changes are so minor and small, that it would feel cheap. it's basically the same harlot chapter that's already on royal road, with a couple paragraphs added to give some more context. i feel disgusted by the idea of trying to use it as a "chapter" update.

the first three chapters of Skycrowned after the prologue are actually one continuous chunk. there is a battle, and several other events, that have been planned since book 1. The first pass I did had so many discrepancies and contradictions with previous canon text that I had to scrap most of it and redo the entire dialogue. I have found that the further I take the story, the more time i spend going back over previously written chapters to check details. 

There's also the science and math aspects. I like that mark twaine quote about "get the facts right first, then twist them at your leisure." I know it's not a direct allegory, but it's similar. The System in Anfealt is a framework for the application of energy. That's a rule I try to keep to, even if I don't always succeed. If a character uses magic to move something, or heat something up, it takes as much energy as it would to do it in the real world, just using mana as another state of "energy" like kinetic or electromagnetic, etc. The most recent hiccup I had was consulting the skeleton and another couple of people about how much energy would be needed for Morgan convert a sphere of seawater 100 meters in diameter to steam in an instant.

The answer was "why do you hate this continent so much?" and i promptly received another lesson in thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, blast physics and pressure waves.

The work continues, and I hope to have the opening of book 3 posted for you guys SOON. i can't say when, because i'm also preparing the guest room for my sister and sketching wheelchair ramp designs for my porch, so i can't nail down a specific target date. The Podium Audiobook for Skybound launches the day after tomorrow, so I hope people are lookin forward to that as well. Royal Road chapters are on hold indefinitely until I get a solid value built up for all of you, my patrons.

Thanks again, everyone, for stickin with me this long. When i first started writing, it was an escape from my stressful life, and It's becoming that way again. I literally don't know what i'd do without yall.