Where I’ve Been And What Is Happening

So I’ve been getting a few emails lately, mostly along the lines of “where are you, is everything okay, did John Seavey murder you and is he now wearing your skin as a sort of mask,” that sort of thing. The thing of it is simple: I am fine, and Seavey couldn’t filet a fish let alone cut off a human face for a mask (that’s an art, you know).

I’ve just been very, very busy over the last eight months, and something had to give. Mostly this started in the tail end of 2014, when my parents finally sold the home where I grew up to downsize into a rental apartment. (Not by choice, you understand.) That was moderately traumatic for the entire family and I incurred a lot of expense in the process.

Shortly after that, my girlfriend and I decided that we were going to move in together. (Which has been pretty great, for the record.) But if you don’t live in Toronto, let me tell you: finding a reasonably priced rental property in this city is nearly impossible. We spent two months on that, literally every night and weekend spent either researching new listings or going to see places, and when we weren’t doing that we were selling a whole lot of things ($2000 worth of boardgames and miniatures, $1500 worth of books and DVDs – and trust me, we still have plenty of all of that). It was basically a second full-time job. But, happy ending, we found a place on the waterfront that’s large and well under market price and has tons of amenities. We walk out the front door of our building and Lake Ontario is right there. We moved in on May 1st and at this point we are nearly finished the full move-in process, just a final few boxes to sort through.

Of course, almost immediately after we moved in, I had to do a full trial, which is – again – something that takes up all of one’s free time. This is only the second trial I’ve done in four years, and that’s a track record of which I’m extremely proud because it shows that I’ve been able to keep high-conflict clients from going to trial. Family law is traumatic at the best of times and trial is the absolute worst for clients – both emotionally and financially – so whenever I can get a case to settle, I treat that as a major win for my clients. But this was a super-urgent and super-dramatic affair (it was an international child abduction being litigated under the Hague Convention) and settlement was not possible, so on relatively short notice I ended up conducting a trial which lasted about a week and a half, with about as much time for prep beforehand and an equivalent amount of time on followup work thereafter – plus, you know, being completely exhausted.

(In case you’re wondering: yes, I won. So that was nice.)

So that takes us up to about midway through June. Then my girlfriend and I planned our first real vacation together and my first proper vacation in years – we’re going to Europe together for a couple of weeks, Paris for a week (we have a family friend’s flat on the Right Bank where we can stay for free), then going around Benelux and western Germany for a week and change, including one day’s stop-off in Essen for Essen Spiel. We are going to Luxembourg for a day so we can say that we have been to Luxembourg. A couple days in Brussels, a couple days in Cologne, a couple days in Amsterdam. It should be really good and, honestly, I need it.

While I’ve been doing all of this Davinder and I have finalized the pitch documents for the print collection of Al’Rashad – I won’t say who we’ve pitched so far but people can probably guess – and we’re trying to figure out how to get Ra-Boka: Kingdom of the Bound up and running as that’s our natural next step. It’ll probably involve a Patreon or similar, because Davinder needs to get paid for what is essentially a part-time job. And I’ve been working on a few small comics side projects in the interim, and dusting off the novel again…

All of this is to say that I am not abandoning the blog. But the last six months, in particular, have been one major free time hit after another. I haven’t really even had time to post links to my weekly TV column, which is still a thing. This is simply part of being a grown-up, and it sucks, but there you go. I want and need to get back to posting here on a regular basis, because while Twitter is fun, it’s not really conducive to longer-form writing even with the advent of the numbered Twitter essay and Storify.

So: have patience. I’ll be back on a regularish basis (weekly, if nothing else) sooner rather than later.

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