TLDR: Shuffle of Fate is not abandoned. I was really really sick for most of the year, which kept me from doing... basically anything. I'm getting back on the wagon and writing a fun, low-stakes story for the writathon.

Hello my small readership, I'm sorry to spam you with a notification that is not a direct content update, but I think you folks deserve a general update of where things are at. Basically, the last year was comically bad. I've hinted/referenced this in a few comments but most folks aren't going to see those, so here's the scoop. In 2024 I have had:

1. An internal antibiotic resistant infection that left me in chronic pain for 3 months, until it was finally properly treated. Still need to do physical therapy from being basically bedridden that entire time.

2. A concussion that left me sleeping like 18 hours a day for a couple weeks.

3. A close friend had a bout of paranoid delusions and needed to be hospitalized after a major crisis at my apartment. While I was, uhh, 'keeping him safe', I injured my ankle quite badly and was left with very limited mobility and more chronic pain. While he was institutionalized I worked a lot with his family to keep his life from falling apart, which involved a lot of time commitments.

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4. Covid, like, a week and a half ago?

Those are the major events! There's of course dozens of small secondary things that occurred as consequences of those 'big issues', and the usual roil of regular life events as well. Basically, I haven't had time or energy to do anything but tread water, or as the case may be, hack up a bunch of water after drowning for a bit.

BUT EVERYTHING IS OVER NOW AND CAN ONLY GET BETTER!

Repeat it with me: nothing bad will ever happen again. I did my time, it's only fair.

So that's the context. Shuffle is still going to be edited/rewritten/published/sequel-ed, it just has been temporarily taking second fiddle to all the life stuff. Thanks for understanding. In the meantime I'm trying to get back into writing with something low stress and fun, so I decided to take part in the writathon.

The title is "Badly Optimized Hero", it's on my profile. I'll link it as well. The premise is an algorithmically generated hero is forced to navigate through a fairly insane dungeon in the hopes of being able to live? Revenge? He's working that out. It's pretty different in tone from Shuffle, but I'm sure you'll all recognize my style coming through in some capacity. It's got major comedy vibes, and I'm planning on doing some homages/parodies of a lot of classic progression fiction/gamelit tropes.

If you want to hangout and go on the weird romp that my covid-addled brain has been generating, please come and check it out, I genuinely think it's going to be really fun.

Cheers,

Your Author, sixfootshuffle