I’m hardly the first to say this, but 2016 has been a crappy year in many respects — and October has been the worst for my little circle of gaming/art/writing friends.  On October 8th, we lost Rena Phillips to the cancer she’d been fighting for….I’m not even sure how long, as it stealthily metastasized while we thought she was recovering.

We’ve been gaming together on IRC and elsewhere for years, but only started playing a regular, scheduled game recently — two games actually, one D&D 5th Edition and one post-apocalyptic freeform.  (And looking at the game logs, ‘recently’ is mid-2014 and early 2015, each with generally-weekly game sessions — my Friday and Saturday nights for the past year and a half plus.)

One of the games has only just begun stuttering forward again, and the other we haven’t returned to yet, because she was an integral part of both of them.  And, of course, our storyteller/DM is her sister, D. D. Phillips — also my cover artist — who’s needed time to get all the awful essentials of the situation handled.

That’s what brings this here, to my story blog, because normally I would keep such private things private.  D.D. gave me permission for this, though, and I wanted to say out here that I miss Rena, and that Book 4 will be delayed for this and other smaller reasons.  Delayed how long — I’m not sure, but it might be early 2017.

On my end, I’ll be starting the rough draft of Book 5 shortly, to coincide with NaNoWriMo — which I’ve never been able to do successfully because I always try to do a new project while having a draft of the current book that also needs work.  This time it’s a new book from the ground up, so I’ll see if I can hit the NaNo target.  Teasers etc. for B4 will be coming if/when that side of things picks up.  Otherwise, it will be a quiet holiday season from me.

Thanks for being here.