Firefly fans are invited to hear that in Nathan Fillion’s voice: here’s how it is.

Two weeks ago I got an email which spelled the end of my current day job. I’ve been there about four times longer than anywhere else I’ve worked as an adult, and I’m not in mourning about it. I’m excited. Day jobs are a hard slog when you spend more time making less money doing the thing you live to do, and it’s been a weight on my chest for a while now.

However–oh, however–I don’t make enough at this gig to fully fund the fabulous life to which the kid and I are accustomed…you know, the life we lead with all the electricity. And groceries.

Then the kid and I came down with a nasty flu, fever the first three or four days, exhaustion, aches, barking cough, the whole nine. You want to know what I only budget for because I’m supposed to, but hardly ever spend money on? Health. Thank god for budget lines I previously ruled ridiculous.

I’ve spent the last two weeks furiously writing short things, a series of short things, that I’ll be publishing in the next week or two on Amazon, available to borrow for KU subscribers, available to buy for non-KU subscribers, though the pricing scheme will be higher than my normal stuff. I’ll put it all out as collections eventually, and when my income is stable, I’ll move it all out to other vendors. This is a how-to-get-by-for-now plan, and it’s generating loads of new words, so I’ll go with it. For now.

[Brief note about my writerly subconscious intrusions: this was supposed to be porn. It’s…not. It’s porny, like most things I write, but it’s not porn. It’s far too dark, coming out of far too twisted a place in my head. Eventually this series will be straight up porn; right now it’s plotty and character-driven, and General Wendy thinks it may need a trigger warning, so I’ll try to scale it back a bit.]

I write to survive. Other kids turned to drugs and alcohol when they were depressed at thirteen and fourteen; this is all I’ve ever done, and it works because it lets me air the deepest fears, turn the sharpest of the blades and bleed words instead of blood. I don’t need proof, but I will say that in the past two weeks, since the email that effectively slashed my income to right around sixty percent of bare-minimum-to-get-by levels, I’ve written 75,000 words. That blows any previous record out of the water, and it does so because the only thing that’s keeping me from sheer panic every time I look at my kid is this story.

Having said all that–I don’t think this is gonna change a single date in my production schedule. At all. Seriously. Apparently I could have taken this month off completely, because when I cringed and re-worked everything to allow for this sudden story…nothing changed. So. The second New Halliday is still on track to come out in September, after Red and Bad 2 completely goes live in August. Extremes is out next week.

OH MY GOD YOU GUYS, EXTREMES IS OUT NEXT WEEK.

Is that true? Did I just make that up? Not next-week-this-week, next-week-next-week. June 4, I think. Ish.

Anyway, regular readers will in no way be inconvenienced by all the crazy, except this is why I’ve been absentee blogparent around here lately; between being sick, parenting a sicko, and writing, oh, all the words, I haven’t even been online.

Hopefully I’ll resume regular service soon. I can’t wait to get back to The Real Life Build, which is what I was in the middle of writing two weeks ago before the world turned upside down like a snow globe full of torn dollar bills. And shit. If you ever find a story sitting in your brain, direct from the eviscerate-yourself-for-art level of your brain, you’ll know what I mean when I say I can’t not-write this story. It wants everything. I gotta go finish part ten now, and then I can give it a rest for a bit.

If you’ve emailed me in the past week or two, I probably haven’t responded. I’m sorry, and I will get back to you soon, I swear.