So...uh...

I'm not dead.

Though I realize it probably looked like it.

It's now been almost a full year since my last devlog, when I said I was soon going to be working on the next draft of book three, with the hopes of a spring release.  And that was true.  I did give book three another draft, and I did hope to release it in the spring.

That obviously didn't happen.  Needless to say.

What did happen was that between that next draft and the final release, I started writing a fanfic.  (Yes, as a middle-aged woman I am suitably ashamed of that.)  The plan was finish the fic, polish and release book three, then taken part in OjiJam, for which I had a really fun (if not terribly original) idea.

Well, then the fanfic took too long to finish, and I couldn't finish polishing book three before OjiJam started.

And during OjiJam I was hit with heart palpitations.  They seemed to be stress-related, as eventually it got to the point that every time I tried to work on the jam game, my heart rate would shoot through the roof or drop terrifyingly low.  (Like down around 40 bpm.  As I said, terrifying.)

I had to drop out of the jam, and I decided I wouldn't do any more dev work until the problem was cleared up.

Only my doctor couldn't find anything wrong with my heart.  Then the cardiologist couldn't find anything wrong with my heart.  After multiple visits to different specialists, no one could figure out what was going on, and I kind of had to self-diagnose and self-treat, and surprisingly that's actually...kind of worked?  I mean, I still get hit with the occasional morning-long heart freak-out, but it's down to once or twice a month instead of where it started, at about five days a week.

So, I am tentatively hoping that I will be able to get back to work on book three soonish.  Though I don't want to be more specific than that because look what happened last time I tried to be specific.

It doesn't need too much more work, though.  I have to finish the glossary, and the summary of book two, and it probably needs some new post-novel mini-essays, but I don't know if anyone reads those anyway, so I may not bother (or might add them in after release), then just needs a couple last sweeps looking for problems in the text.  (Though I will always end up missing things and then having to update after release, because I am me.)  And art.  I need to get a new piece of art for it.  I might be able to cobble something together by tracing over some stuff from later Greek societies and then giving it a Mycenaean facelift (facedrop?), or I might have to hire someone to draw me something in the Mycenaean style.  (Though that would make the rest of the game's art look like crap...)

...so, that's pretty much all I wanted to say:  I'm still alive, and The Martial Maenads will be released eventually, I just don't want to try to try to guess when, due to the same health situation that's delayed it this long already.

I really do want to get it released, though, and the sooner the better.  One of the new characters added when I did the first of the new drafts is really fun.  At least, I really love her.  :D  And I'm hoping other people will like her, too. :)