Hi guys! It's been a while.
As many of you know, I haven't been posting anything lately. I get about two or three PM's a week asking what I'm up to and if I'm going to continue updating my various stories. Well, I'm going to answer that question, and explain why as well.
To the short, the answer is yes, I'm still writing my stories.
The long answer however is that I'm not likely to be posting them here on RRL anymore. Or rather post them online at all. Which will no doubt cause quite a few to break down and cry, but that's the way life works.
Now for the explanation. Back in August my mother started getting sick. Those of you who've read my previous announcements will know that. She ended up losing a kidney, and those was basically bedridden and out of work for a while. In October, she got married to the guy she'd been dating a little over a year.
Thing's were going okay after that, but at the start of December things wen't down hill again. My mom suffered a heart attack, and had to have a stint put in. Missing a kidney does all sorts of things to a persons blood pressure, at least for a while. So she was out of more work and bedridden again. She finally was allowed to go back to work the week before Christmas.
However, she had arranged for an appointment at the local OBGYN because of excessive bleeding on the 26th. We had assumed it was because of the blood thinners. The news, however, really messed everything up.
To put it shortly, my mom has Stage 4 cervical cancer. She has a life expectancy of less than 15% for five years. That's the average, with full chemo and radiation therapies. For those of you who know what I'm talkin' about, then you know how bad that is. For those of you who don't... It's a bad situation.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
The doctors cannot remove the cancer with surgery, nor can they kill it with radiation or chemo. All they can hope to do is control the spread of it. My mother can never be cancer free again, and even if the cancer responds to the treatment, it will still kill her as it slowly spreads.
The fact that she already has a tumor large enough to be seen with the naked eye pressing against her bladder is just the icing on the cake. She cannot hardly sit up straight anymore. We had to move a bed into the livingroom for her, which is all kinds of ghetto, yo. XD
So no, I don't really have enough time to write and whatnot at the moment. Well, I am still writing a bit, but it's all going towards getting my stories published as quickly as possible. At the moment, my royalty payments are roughly minimum wage, but that rises and falls as sales go up and down. That's nowhere near enough to supplement what my mom was making before. Just paying for her medical insurance alone is 125 USD a week.
So in all likihood, you guys will be seeing volumes of UO, Master of Dungeons, and others appearing on Amazon within the next couple of months. I'm sorry I'm no longer able to push forward with my original plan, and post those chapters here on RRL as I write them.
No plan survives contact with a battlefield, and life is one big battlefield we all have to struggle on. Thank you all though for listening to me rant for a bit, and for your continued support. You guys are great, and once more I apologize for not being able to continue as we previously had wanted.
- Ryan 'Viken' Henning, Author-sama.