I’ve owed this post for a couple of weeks, but there’s been a lot going on.  For obvious reasons.

As of May 23rd, I am officially a full-time author.  I’m stunned by this, and am still having a hard time believing that it’s actually true, even as I *don’t* show up to my day job, day after day, and *do* sit down to pursue things that need to be done for my writing.

The weeks leading up to this were chaotic and overfull, and I fell behind on writing as I wasn’t in the mindspace and had a lot of other things that I needed to close out in time for my last day of work, so my *sincerest* apologies to those of you who read the prognostication that Carbon 8 would be available in April.  The manuscript is finished and going through the editing process now, and we’re shooting for mid-June, now, but that’s the biggest reason *why* I missed my target for that book.  I’ve had a hard time keeping up my normal wordcount pace, and I’m hoping that a lot of it is because I haven’t been able to focus as I’ve been working toward *this*.

I’m done.

I loved my job for a long time, and I loved the people that I worked with more, but I finally got to an intersection where it was time, at work, and it was time, as a writer, and they both surprised me at once.

I kinda got career ambushed.

Which is… distracting.

I’ve been told by *writers who know* that I shouldn’t plan on my productivity going up *a lot*, from here, so I’m not making massive, grand plans, but I do hope to get back to the rate that I found to be normal in previous years.

I am so grateful to have ended up here.  Even as it was always the plan, and even as I always had a two- and five-year plan that was intended to end up at full-time, I’m profoundly aware that basically two people in the history of the world have been able to support themselves and their varied dependents off of fiction, and that it’s meaningful to get to that threshold.

I love it.

I love writing stories and I love *living* stories.  I can’t think of anything I would rather be doing, and while I’m going to shift some things around to accommodate some long-neglected life priorities (I’ve basically been working every waking hour for the last twelve years), this is not a point where I intend to slow down or relax, and I don’t see such a point coming any time in the future.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you for reading my work.  For loving my characters and the worlds they live in.

Thank you for the opportunity to declare a freedom day and launch off into an entirely new life: one that I couldn’t have *conceived* of, 15 years ago.

You are amazing, and I appreciate you more than words have strength to capture.