Continuity, and Other Topics

So first, let me preface this post by saying I'm just fine. To the best of my knowledge, I'm in perfect health. That said, last week I had a sort of thought-provoking scare.

One night after a dinner of chicken and fried rice, I was slammed with one of the worst migraines of my life. Easily the worst one I had in a decade. Fortunately, my wife gets migraines more frequently so she has a variety of medications, and an (over the counter, at least in Germany) pill kicked its butt pretty fast. A few hours later I was fine.

That said, the speed of the event scared my wife into looking down a hole of something called thunderous or thunderbolt headaches. I'd never heard of them before, but for a couple of days she was worried that I had one of several different kinds of brain bleeds that might kill me dead on the spot.

Obviously, a week later I'm still fine, but the thought occurred to me, if I died tomorrow, what would happen to my books? I've been posting on RR for three years now (as of last Wednesday) but it never occurred to me before.

Tenebroum is released, and until I release a sequel, finished. Likewise, I just finished the last chapter of Brewing Bad. While it could very easily end up with a sequel at some point, an editor could get that polished up without me. Death After Death and Bloodstained Blade, though? Even as far ahead as I am, those are still books away from being done.

It really makes you think, doesn't it? I expect I will finish writing Bloodstained Blade later this year, but as we all know, Death After Death wants infinity chapters, and don't expect to finish writing it until 2026 (or finish releasing it until 2027.)

But what would happen to it if I just died? I had a conversation with my wife about that, making sure she understood where all my story stuff was, including outlines so that in the event I keeled over she could try to find another author to finish it for me. It's morbid, I know, but we live in crazy times.

Anyway, there's no other shoe waiting to drop here. I'm good, she's good, everything (except our ability to find a more affordable apartment) is good. I'm even making great progress on what will probably be the hardest course of my degree program and hope to finish it next month.

All of this just puts things into perspective, and I thought I would share. Everything is proceeding apace, and all my commitments are moving forward.

In summary:

• Tenebroum - Kindle/Print book releases August 4th, Audiobook 5 releases October 20th.

• Death After Death - Story proceeding great, and I will be starting on book 6 soon.

• Brewing Bad - Finished writing the first draft, 380k words. I would call a sequel trilogy likely, but not soon. I need to focus on editing first.

• Bloodstained Blade - Will be increasing this posting frequency back to 3x/week, maybe as soon as next week. Just want to work on building up a bit more of a buffer.

• Letter of the Law - Editing is ongoing, I don't have a date for re-release yet, but it will be getting an extra day a week of my time until it's done now that Brewing Bad is done.

• New Projects - No new projects until at least November or December. They are forbidden! Too much to do.

That said, I have almost 50k words of various opening arcs and first chapters of stories that might be "next," including a detective thing, a sysapoc, a monster evolution, a cyberpunk death game, and a time looper that I probably won't do anything with until Death After Death is done one day. Lately I really have the urge to write a city builder, too.

If you have any interest in beta reading any of those, then make sure you're on the discord. That's where I post links when I want feedback.