Apology for hiatus

First and foremost, let me apologize for suddenly disappearing in 2022. I sincerely wish that I could've continued writing, but life often throws curve balls when we least expect them.

I don't know if I have ever mentioned it before, but my mother passed away on March 12th, 2022. I had started writing The Dreamer's Fall a few months before her passing, and she read through each of the chapters I wrote, offering feedback and helping me decide on the path that I wanted the story to follow. 

Her input greatly impacted the story, specifically where it started in the overarching plot I had devised. I had rewritten the first 20-30 of The Dreamer's Fall 3 times before I was happy with it, and she read each iteration despite having close to zero knowledge or interest in the fantasy genre.

I originally believed that I had grieved her passing, but I was greatly mistaken. I turned 30 in November 2022, and that was when it hit me, and it hit hard. I'm not sure if it was because it was the first birthday in my life that I didn't hear her voice or if it just took that long for it to sink in. 

Regardless, the depression affected my writing, and even today, as I reread The Dreamer's Fall from start to finish, the last few chapters available on Patreon feel like such a drop in quality that I'll likely have to rewrite them from scratch in the next few days.

As I reread those chapters today, I vividly remember how frustrated I felt when I wrote them. I wanted to take my mind off things and sink into this world I was creating. Yet, every paragraph I wrote felt rushed and wrong, leaving me anxious and feeling all the more frustrated at my inability to free myself from the situation.

Initially, I planned to take a week or two to cool off and return, but in December, I finally resolved some legal troubles I had been battling for the past 6-7 years. I won't go into any great detail about it, but as a result, I was put on probation for a year.

My probation agreement stated that I couldn't employ myself for work. It not only kept me from writing full-time but also forced me to close down an online business I had created a decade prior—a business that accounted for the vast majority of my income, leaving me with very little wiggle room financially.

The consecutive blows left me with little time or energy to care about much else. Honestly, I was in a pretty dark place, feeling as though my entire world was crumbling around me. I really don't know how else to put it.

I won't lie—the past two years haven't been all that fun for me. That's why, despite having completed my probation six months ago, I'm only now picking up writing again. And while I'm most certainly in a better place mentally after resolving something that had loomed over my head for almost a decade, financially, things aren't all that great.

That is why I can't dedicate too much time to writing at the moment, at least until my writing can substantially supplement my income via Patreon. At the time of this writing, I'm currently doing the editing I had been putting off since before my hiatus(Ch.1-55) and re-uploading each chapter to the various sites I publish The Dreamer's Fall on. After that, I intend to get at least 20-30 chapters ahead on the Patreon before publishing free chapters.

Once all that's done, I'm aiming for three chapters a week(Fri-Sun). So, once again, I apologize for my disappearance, and I hope you all can continue this journey with me as Arthur's story unfolds. Thank you all for the support you've given me before and during my hiatus. I truly do appreciate each and every one of you.