End of an Era
First off everyone, thank you so much for three absolutely incredible years. The people in this quest are mature, intelligent, funny, and an absolute pleasure to work with. I'm flattered that you've spent so much time reading, discussing, and participating.
With the sweet served up, let me offer the bitter: I need to leave the quest, and it's probably going to end soon. Specifically, I've written my last update (Chapter 170), and the other two have commitments, so there won't be a chapter out tomorrow.
@Velorien and
@OliWhail have committed to writing at least one more each in order to provide closure before deciding whether or not to put the whole thing to bed. It's possible that it may continue but probably not.
There are multiple reasons for this. I'm sure that everyone has noticed that all three of the QMs have been running low on spoons lately and communicating less often. Part of this is the rebalance and rules modification that we've been working on, which has taken a lot of energy but is now done and will be posted later today once
@Velorien wakes up. (To be honest, I should have left two weeks ago, but I really wanted to make sure that the rebalancing was done before I left.) The rest is that
@Velorien has been juggling sleep issues (bad!) and a sudden surfeit of contract work (good, but exhausting!) while
@OliWhail is running two other quests, working on neuroprosthetics research and, most aggravating of all (to me, anyway), has recently added another brilliant and beautiful young lady to his
harem life. (Seriously, dude...leave some for the rest of us. *glares*)
My reasons for stepping back are health-related, but not my health. I probably shouldn't share this stuff, but I really need to vent and you guys have always been supportive. Buckle up, because it's bonkers.
In 2017 my father needed not one but two separate spinal surgeries...yeah, that's one more way in which 2017 sucked. This kind of surgery is pretty hairy, and there's always a risk of secondary infection.
Well, guess what? Dad got a secondary infection. Specifically, he got a secondary infection (actually an infestation) from the
scalpel blade that the doctor left inside his spine. Yes, there are times when you're supposed to leave metal inside a patient's body--for example, hip replacements or support pins through a broken bone. You are not, however, supposed to have the blade fall off your scalpel while rooting around inside someone's C-3 vertebra. If that happens, you are most definitely not supposed to spend 90 seconds looking for it and then say "eh, fuck it, my tee time is in 40 minutes. I'm sure it'll be fine." Seriously, according to the PI we hired, the surgeon walked out of the OR and went straight to the damn golf course. He didn't even play well -- shot 193 over 18 holes. Worst of all, he was playing on the Ferry Links course in New Jersey and guess who his opponent was? You guessed it: the course owner, Donald f'ing Trump. I'm sure that has nothing to do with why someone with a 6 handicap for that course was suddenly shooting like a complete noob. Or with why the hospital got fast-tracked for a federal grant from the NIH that was announced last December and is scheduled to come through next month. I'm trying to focus on the positive and tell myself that the grant will let the hospital serve more people. Doesn't quite make up for my father's pain or the fact that there are tentacles growing out of the back of his neck from the...nematoads? I forget the name...that were apparently on the scalpel blade. (Okay, not literally
out of his neck, more like
inside his neck.) Oh, and don't forget the random muscle spasms that occur whenever the scalpel blade rubs up against his spinal cord the wrong way. He's involuntarily thrown four mugs of hot chocolate through a window. (Well, technically through four different windows. We keep replacing them, obviously.)
Anyway, turns out that insurance companies don't cover infestation by space aliens or whatever the hell this thing is. Not only that, but they consider it a suspicious claim deserving of freezing your insurance and conducting a full audit plus lawsuit seeking clawbacks against prior payouts. This, of course, is problematic when you need regular doses of expensive immunosuppresant medication (he had a heart transplant a few years ago) that Pfizer announced on March 24, 2018 would be going up in price by 932% starting on April 10, 2018 because they suck. I guess they saw that debacle with Epi-Pens going from $57 dollars to ~$500 dollars and instead of thinking "wow, that's evil" they thought "hold my beer!"
Mom and Dad, of course, are from the Greatest Generation and therefore refuse to ever ask for help. First I knew of this clustergrope was two months ago; we were having breakfast together and a guy from the bank showed up to foreclose on their damn house, because Mom and Dad had taken a second mortgage to pay the medical bills and not been able to keep up the payments. Mom and Dad are now living with me in my studio apartment. This, of course, renders things a little awkward when you want to have super special sexy times, so my girlfriend left me. She even took my Great Dane, Blue, and my Pekineses (Pekinese? Pekini? whatever), Bob, Marley, Alice, and Cooper. She claimed that, given Dad's weakened immune system, it was not safe for the dogs to be around, and I can't really argue. Granted, we had an expiration date anyway; I'm an atheist rationalist and she works part-time for an astrologer and is the High Priestess of a pagan religion that she and some friends copy/pasted together from a bunch of New Age books with shaky historical references. Still, she was cute, funny, and *ahem, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, woohoo*.
There is one piece of good news to balance all this misery: Our financial troubles have probably been solved, or at least they will be once the money comes through in June.
As I think I've mentioned at some point, I write romance on the side for pin money. Well, after six years of publishing an average of 15,000 words per week on Amazon, I finally made it: my latest book just got optioned for a movie. The original book title was "Billionaire BDSM that Doesn't Suck". (I was going to call it "Two Score and Ten Monochromatic Hues" but my editor told me that the general population wouldn't get it, and also it wouldn't fit on the cover.) As you might guess, it's a sendup of 50 Shades. Since it was published on January 10 it has sold 68,971 copies on Amazon, as well as getting more than 200,000 page views via Kindle Unlimited, which is great money but not fixing-all-these-issues money. What IS fixing-all-these-issues money is that MGM is paying me $62M for the rights to "Billionaire BDSM That Doesn't Suck". They're insisting on changing the title to something less pointed and removing some of the snottier jabs, but I honestly don't care. They're talking with Matt Damon about playing the billionaire (Moslem White) and for the protagonist (Stacey Silver) I've heard names like Scarlett, Mila, and Charlize.
Anyway, between looking after Dad, EPing the movie, and learning to fly my new helicopter, I'm pretty much going to be living on Nodoze for the next 12 months, so I'm afraid I don't have time for writing anymore. Also, it's $62M. Once the movie is done I'm going to move to Bora Bora and live on the beach until I can finally buy myself a Matrix capsule or a ticket to Mars, whichever comes first.
Anyway, time for me to wrap this up and go fall into bed. I'm not sure how much I'll be around from now on, but however much or little that is, let me say: It's been a real pleasure. Thank you all.
