Hey, I'm still around. I almost wish that there was some crisis going on, because that would feel more justifiable, but there isn't one. My recent absence started out as me reaching what was, apparently, peak migraine season for me a couple weeks back. At least I think was a couple weeks back. My sense of time recently has been...off. Anyways, I was just getting hammered with migraines pretty much every day. It sucked. It was exhausting. After the first four or five days, I'd mostly checked out mentally.
After that mercifully came to an end, it took several days before i started feeling vaguely human-ish again, but I was already about 50% of the way into a depression spiral. I think I was already headed the way even before Migrainepalooza, but it's hard to know for sure. For anyone unfamiliar with how depression/depression spirals work, you know that you should get up and do things. You tell yourself to get up and do things. But you don't because the very idea of doing things is exhausting. Actually doing things is even more exhausting. I did a little one minute video to promote being at LitRPG con, and I had to lie down for like two hours afterwards.
And, if your brain is especially hellbent on sabotaging you, which mine has been, it whispers sweet lies. It tells you all about how it's okay to just go ahead and sleep for another 12 hours. Or, that it's okay to go over to Crunchyroll, queue up Tsukimichi Moonlit Fantasy, and let it play nonstop all day while you stare blankly at the screen.
So, that's what's been going on. I have been slowly dragging myself out of that particularly gutter, but it's an uneven process at best. On top of which, while all of that was going on, my brain started constructed a shiny new narrative and wouldn't let it go no matter how hard I told my imagination to shut the hell up and let me be a vegetable. But writing that idea has been easing me back into the process of actually, you know, writing stuff.
So, what's going to happen next. Since I've pretty miserably failed to provide you guys with any value for your money recently, I'm going to put billing on hold for the next month. I'm also doing it now because LitRPG Con is coming up, which means I'll basically be traveling and doing con stuff and not doing much writing for a week. I will not be putting chapters on hold for the next month. They'll probably be kinda sporadic and jump around between projects while I try to get my brain back on track, but there will be new content coming. It's my way of trying to make up for being a huge flake recently.
Anyway, if any of you picked "Eric has flown off to some tropical paradise and taken up with a local girl" in the betting pool, you just lost big.