Great News, Horrible News

 We'll start with the great news:

Surprise!!!  So I called an audible and have been working on this for not quite 2 months now.  I'm a couple scenes from having the first draft done.  It is an Evelyn Strange POV chunky novella or novel-lite that will probably be about 45k or 160 pages-ish by the time its all nice and edited.

It takes place the same day that "Glassbreaker Goes Home" does and hopefully as you guessed from the title is about the Asylum dealing with Isabel now that she's been captured.  So in that way its a direct sequel to "Assault on Dread Fortress Paine" but is also really a spiritual sequel to "Shadow Running" which was Strange and Eva's story in "King Henry and the Three Little Trips".

Why did I do this?  Well...the Vicky novel and "War to End All Wars" both had a lot of work to be done and I wanted to get something out sooner and I made that joke post a while back about Isabel not being Anima Mad and all of you took it so seriously that I thought maybe I should answer it sooner than I planned.  Plus...I just got the urge and since I've written 40k so quickly I'd say it was a good one!  It's really helping to get the ring rust off for sure!

Now that we're shedding the two timeline structure going forward there's likely to be prologues and epilogues in the books from other characters (especially "villains") and this was on the slate for that as well, but here we go now!  Plus its a lot longer and fuller this way...

No King Henry, obviously, since he's in Visalia with Val and his family, (which I'm sure there will be whining reviews about but hopefully not too many) and it's not earthshattering or anything, but I do think it is very meaningful and some of you world-building nerds will be VERY HAPPY with a few events that take place.

...

SO....

Horrible news...

I've had shoulder pain for a month or two and then last week it became back pain so bad I couldn't even sit in a chair.  It's better than that now, still painful and sore and limited, but obviously I'm typing this blog post so...better!  But...it's not good.  It's going to slow me down.  Plan was to get this out next month and now I'm thinking more before the end of the year with the realization that at any point if the back gets worse who knows where we'll end up?

I finally got into the doctor yesterday and an x-ray showed enough that an MRI is getting ordered, with the expectation of thoracic disc herniation as the most likely diagnostic.  If that is what they find, then more surgery might be in my future.  On one hand, completely shitty adding on top of what has been a shitty number of years in a row.  On the other, at least all the nerve pain I've been having over the last five years has a probable cause now, so I don't feel like a crazy person.  Obviously, very early, could be something else, x-rays don't have the accuracy required and I'm not a doctor, but...I don't think spines are supposed to poke out that much.

So...I'm pretty bummed today...

And the flu shot they stuck me with also isn't helping...

And Hearthstone's Mercenaries Mode is boring as hell...

But...we endure, we write, we edit, we make shitty covers!

AND DUNE COMES OUT THIS WEEK!!!!!!

SQUEEEEEE!!!!