Hello. Long time, no post. 

Coming back from an unexpected absence always feels weird, especially for spaces like these. Like, do I just pop back in with updates as normal? Do I announce a return when I never announced the disappearance? How much or how little to say? A weird line to walk, but I guess I’m going to try. 

So, hi. I’m back. I’ve been absent from Bindery here since early March because, to make an extremely long story short, my father died. I spent March/April in the hospital caring for him and the rest of April/May picking life back up again when he died. The thirty two days we spent in the hospital was without a doubt the worst month of my life, and we never saw any of it coming. My dad was up and working and living his life on a Friday, went to the ER that Sunday, and he never left that hospital until he died a month later. It was completely unexpected. He was 64 years old. 

Today (as I'm writing this, at least) makes a month and one day since he died, and that still feels like a weird thing to say. That he died. Grief is weird, as we all figure out at various points in our lives, and the grief you carry for everyone you lose is different. So I’ve spent the last month navigating a new form of grief, I guess. There are good days and bad days and in some ways it still feels like we’re deep in it all, so it’s been difficult to manage getting back to things as normal, but it’s getting there. 

To that end, I just wanted to let you all know that I’m back here! And let you know why I fell off the face of the Earth for a bit. 

Things are moving forward on a lot of different fronts here, so subscribers can expect to see updates on both To Bargain With Mortals 2 (title TBD) and The Archaeology of Falling Worlds this week, while I’ll also be posting new YouTube videos for everyone and probably hinting at a new content project I’ve had on the brain for quite some time. I’m also about to go out of town for a week so I’m trying to time things effectively. We’ll see how it works out. 

On the note of our upcoming books though, I do want to put a special thank you out to the team at Bindery, Abi (our project manager on both books), and both R.A. Basu and Megan Chee who have all been outrageously understanding and accommodating of me dropping everything for a month and a half. I’m extremely lucky to be in a position where I could upend my whole life, move out to my dad’s place to be closer to the hospital, and spend every available second there. I have never known soul-deep exhaustion like that in my life and I may unpack that in some way at some point, but it gave me time with him while he was still here and allowed me to take care of him and our family. 

I’m looking forward to being back to you here with all kinds of fun updates for both of our upcoming books. And for those of you in Book Club over on Discord, our mods there are running some fun sequel readalongs and discussions! A huge thank you to all three of them as well - Stryder, Stphn, and Ria - who put that together all on their own to give me space to step away from it for a time without feeling like I was leaving Book Club in the wind. I’m planning for Book Club to be back to business as usual in July, but until then check out some of the sequels they’ve got up for discussion! 

I’m happy to be back. :) Thanks for your patience and I'll see you all with more updates soon.