Author Update – I won the thing! And a software update borked the website, but it’s fixed now

(Edited as of 10th Aug, 11pm – it’s all working again! Hooray!)

Hi all,

My life is a neverending torrent of stress, be it good and bad, at the moment, so I will keep this brief:

Thank you SO much to everyone who voted for me and Into the Mire at this year’s Sir Julius Vogel Awards! I am thrilled to announce that we took home the Best Short Story win. I was more than happy to lose the Best Collected Work nod to Marie Hodgkinson’s excellent anthologies, so I don’t consider that a loss in any way. 🙂

Now that we’re award winners… well, nothing much is going to change around here, honestly.

In addition to the happy news, I have been alerted by a reader that the recent WordPress update has broken the site’s hyperlink structure. This is not great. This is in addition to the fact that WordPress somehow altered my group rewrite privileges on my own install directories, which means it’s been impossible to make major changes to the website without accessing the FTP manually, which is a time consuming process compared to WP’s quickie editor. This is why parts of the website look garbage and bad. Unfortunately, been work and WorldCon and some post-WorldCon publicity efforts I’ve been wrapped up in, I haven’t even had a chance to sit down and look at it.

I have implemented a fix for the permalink on the Table of Contents Page for the time being and will manually be fixing hyperlinks on chapters shortly. (Ed note – as above, this is fixed now, leaving the post up for posterity.)

This is all stuff I know how to fix, it’s just that I’ve had approximately 45 minutes of alone time per day since maybe July, and my health hasn’t been great, so I tend to spend any second I’m not working just collapsed in an unconscious pile.

On the bright side, I’ve successfully moved up to the north island of New Zealand, although uh, none of my belongings have arrived yet, which is a little alarming considering the movers said “first week of August.” I am assuming my furniture will return from the war someday.

As an apology for the continual slowness of updates on the Patreon, I’ve put together something really cool, it’s just that the website breaking means I haven’t been able to upload it yet. Typical.

Those who know me have said in the past that my life is basically what would happen if a D&D player rolled a 1 or a 20 on every single roll for every minor event in their lives. I’m in a weird headspace about it but honestly that seems accurate given the current state of affairs.

Because of the way life is, Wednesdays are no longer a good update day for me. I’m going to shift things to the weekend, when hopefully I have a chance to catch up on some sleep and edit with a clear brain before posting. I have a huge backlog of the serial written already, it’s just that I feel uncomfortable posting chapters that haven’t been fully, comprehensibly edited by me at my most awake.

I’m sorry if I sound terse or frustrated–I am stressed out, but trust that I am very happy, and I am still very committed to this work, even if life seems determined to shove me off a series of increasingly taller cliffs.

Thank you for your votes and for your reading and for spending your hard-earned leisure time on, of all things, my web fiction. It means so much that so many of you have been here leaving comments and reading along for multiple years now!

Please be well, please be safe, and pet your cats and dogs for me. (And birds if they’re okay with it, probably not fish.)