Let me make it right

For my own peace of mind

First let me explain this post – while all of you who have always been free subscribers are perfectly welcome to follow along (it has some news) – is mostly for those who are now or have been paid subscribers, but dropped it.

Okay. Not even for all of those. A lot of you are subscribers to support my wordpress blog, and who stopped pay-subscribing for whatever personal reason. The post is not for you particularly, except for news portion, though note you’re welcome to avail yourself of the offer, of course.

Now for those of you who subscribed for the serialized fiction…. Oh Lord.

Okay, 2023 was bad, but 2024 was disastrous and I’m only now starting to pull up from “Whatever the heck that was.”

It wasn’t precisely my fault – except for letting the stress spin me up, which makes everything worse – but it certainly wasn’t YOURS and the fact is you didn’t get what you paid me for.

This makes me so guilty and anxious that I just wanted to hide under a rock. But that of course wouldn’t serve the purpose of making you whole. Which I need to, to be able to look at self in mirror.

Money has come in, taxes have been paid (And substack share) so return is not possible, even if I had it.

However, I CAN do something. I promised you a peek into the writing process (and not as it came unglued, which is what happened) and free e-arcs (meaning before it goes to copyeditor or final editor input being used (already did some preliminary. Basically where betas would get it) for two or three books a year, and you will get that. Just late.

How you’ll get it is slightly complicated.

Due to the fact that not all of you are subscribing for the fiction, I am going to ask those who used to paid-subscribe to send me their substack email to scifihoyt at gmail with the following subject line “Substack subscription free renewal” (This is important because otherwise it will get lost in the spam.)

If you do that, I will (after noodling and cursing – not you, my own technical ineptitude) give you a free “paid” subscription for another year (probably two, but it’s by the year.

Those of you who are still paid subscribers but want the same deal, please do it as your subscription expires. I’ll check every week.

NOW, will two free years mean you get the stuff? PROBABLY.

This is the news part, so the rest of the people can tune in again:

I’ve been very ill since last October – how ill? About half of my hair fell out. It’s now coming back. I also swear I aged ten years, but that probably will recover. Well, the hair too – to the point that my husband noted the night before yesterday that it was the FIRST night since then I didn’t cough all night.

This is important for writing, so hold on to the thought.

Ill with what? So far as I can tell a stupid virus that kept coming back and that COMPLETELY flattened me. It first presented as pneumonia, and I kept falling into some form of URI. Bad one. I’d fight my way up the slope and be okay-ish for a week, then go down again for two weeks or a month. And when sick be sicker than I’ve been in years.

I believe this was tied to two things, besides my perennially out of whack immune system and auto immune: the fact my thyroid was not functioning; and my asthma being poorly managed.

We now seem to have the thyroid more or less treated, which has made an unbelievably large difference. And I have an appointment today on getting a new drug to manage the asthma.

Oh, it also relates to traveling internationally on a plane, which always causes issues with my ears and makes the whole thing worse. (I promise to stay off planes.)

Now the big question is yes, I’m getting older, so will the recovery reverse again? I don’t think so, but I surely can’t promise it won’t. I’m going to try not to let it, is the best I can say.

Why not sleeping well due to constant – severe – coughing (I sleep cough, but I still don’t enter deep sleep.) affects Schrodinger’s Path and Chapter House fiction but not my blog or posting at the aggregator blog: Because fiction takes more out of me. I can muddle through a short-ish non fiction post even if I’m fighting for every word.

However, when I’m not fully awake and aware, I can’t engage with the emotions involved in fiction. And since October I’ve been too ill to even REVISE for more than two days at a time.

Of note, because I said this started in 2023, the problem wasn’t just health, but a series of …. Unfortunate events. Also unlikely ones, I want to note. None of them catastrophic as the house is still standing, but they ranged from flooded basement to breaking household appliances to—well, if it can go wrong in a house, it probably went wrong these last two years. And while it doesn’t as a rule cause much damage, it causes much confusion and captures all my effort and attention while it’s happening.

To that, I can assure you we’ve just had the house (and my computer) blessed.

Look, it wasn’t until I was relating the long series of events (and I forgot some, as it turns out) to a family member who doesn’t live with us that I realized how impossible it was. Okay, it happened, so not impossible, but highly improbable. And then the family member said “Have you considered having the house blessed, just in case?”

So we did, just in case. Impossible to tell two weeks out if it worked, just as it’s impossible to tell a week in, if I’ve actually finally recovered.

I can tell you in either case it’s better than it’s been since the issues started. But that’s it.

I’m going to promise you witch’s daughter installment soon, but not today. Thing being I’m trying to pace myself because doubtless part of the “falling back in the soup” has been because I overdo it as soon as I recover, because there’s a growing mountain of things not done and things weighing on my conscience.

And yes, No Man’s Land is progressing towards e-arc offering soon. (And hooo boy, those who read my blog for the typos will be so happy this is pre-copy-edit 😉)

I’ll later post a pre and post revision excerpt to give you an idea what I’ve been doing (when not sick and staring into mid-air.)

I’m furious and disappointed at myself for how late I am on everything. But if you let me make it right with you about your subscription here, at least I won’t feel so guilty it completely blocks me, which, yes, is counterproductive and yes I do realize that.

And now I’m going to attempt to clean the litter boxes, which are unbelievably smelly….

Thank you for your patience, and hopefully I’m now on top of this, and will be functional.