Why yes, it has been forever — or maybe half of forever, which is close enough. I hope you weren’t worried. I needed to step away from this space for a while. I may do it again at some point, with or without warning. Well, THIS is your warning, I guess.

I think it’s fair to blame the sequel for pretty much everything. The way it ate my brain, the way it had me so stressed out in April that I would freeze up when I sat down to write. This sequel has, on occasion, been very very mean to me.

Or I’ve been very mean to myself. Or a lot of both.

I’m afraid I had to spend some time untangling myself and figuring out how to love writing again. The weird thing is that in the course of doing that, I found answers to a few problems in the sequel. That’s right: without all the suffering, I couldn’t have written those things. I’d spent months prior to that, trying to write a book I couldn’t write because I hadn’t been through April (the cruellest month! ™) yet.

Clearly, what we have here is some kind of timeline issue that could be solved quite easily if I had a time machine. I could go forward in time to my Future Self and say, “So, Future Self, what hard-won wisdom have you gleaned, so I can put it in this here book I’m writing. Don’t worry, I’ll mention you in the acknowledgements.”

At which point my Future Self would probably steal my time machine and blast herself back to ancient Greece. For all I know, she’s already done this. Time machines are tricky that way.

In any case, this is a terribly tedious and roundabout way of saying I’m feeling better. I’m writing better. I’ve taught myself overtone singing. We’re all gonna be OK.