So here’s the deal.

I haven’t been blogging much because life has been exceptionally chaotic lately, and not in a good way. (Dad and his bionic brain are doing fine, in case you leap to worrying about that.)

Among very many other things, we were informed about six weeks ago that the company my husband works for has lost its contract and the entire site was being made redundant, so Ted’s out of a job as of the end of next week.

We’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what we’re going to do. We still don’t know for absolute sure.

One potential route is pursuing my career as the breadwinning one, and Ted becoming the House Spouse for a while, giving me 20ish hours a week in which I can write while he takes on full-time parenting duties and takes up some project management stuff for my independent publishing–things I need and want to do but just don’t have time to between parenting and trying every once in a while to get some writing done.

Obviously I would love this. I mean, do you *know* how much writing I can do in 20 hours a week? (Somewhere between 20 and 30,000 words, broadly speaking: about 25-30% of a Walker Papers novel, for reference, or an entire novella, or (theoretically) four or five short stories, although short stories don’t usually actually go that fast)). I have a theory, actually, that given an exhaustive synopsis and 2 solid weeks to write all day every day in, I could write the bulk of most any 100Kish book that I tried my hand at.

I would *dearly* love to test this theory. Ted, actually, would like me to be able to, because Ted is possibly even more confident in my abilities than I am.

Buuuuut of course relying on a writer’s income is an alarmingly deep pit of potential terror. Ted’s getting some severance that will keep the wolf from the door for a bit. I’ve just signed a contract for something that will hopefully bring in some money next year (as soon as I get the countersigned contract back I’ll tell you what it is and you’ll (hopefully) all go SQUEE!), and I’ve just applied for something amazing that I won’t hear back about for months, but–but argh!

The thing is that we’re both pretty damned sure that if I can get enough time to write, I can probably release an independent book QUARTERLY and that we can make this work. But there’s lead time in here, time where I’m writing and getting things edited and cover art and the whole production process where the stuff I’m doing RIGHT NOW obviously can’t make any money YET but if we can just make it far enough to GET to the point where I’m able to release books that frequently then WOW IT COULD WORK.

If we can get to that point.

So this is where I boost the Patreon again!

I’ve just fin…well, almost finished, the most recent Old Races collection, so those stories are there waiting to be read, and in the next couple days I’ll be talking about what I’m going to be doing with it for the next few months.

This is also an excellent time to buy my books! Not that there’s any bad time, but now is definitely good. :) (Actually, I tend to imagine people reading my blog probably have anyway, but it doesn’t hurt to mention it! :))

So, yeah. Potentially exciting things ahead, but a hell of a road to travel to get to them.