The Marshmallow Ranch Gazette - March 28th, 2016 (Patreon)

Hello, patrons!

It's been a pretty hectic time here at the Den and Burrow, the home that my husband (a dragon) and I share together. To "protect his identity," we'll go ahead and call him Rane. He's Japan-bound tomorrow, and with his trip-mates arriving this evening there'll be little time to work on anything before we see him off. Once I take him to the airport tomorrow, I won't see him again for two whole weeks!

It's been a bit of a mad scramble getting prepared for the trip, and this weekend the Den and Burrow is being fumigated -- which means I'll need to prepare the homestead for that without him and vacate the premises by Friday evening. In addition to THAT, I've had to deal with a few issues with my auto insurance due to the fender bender I had the week before. It's nothing bad, but my car is in the shop, I'm driving a rental, and I have to dramatically shift my finances in order to absorb the high deductible I'll need to pay.

On top of THAT, the screen to my laptop is broken; the MacBook I brought out of mothballs to use until I could afford a new one just died; and my desktop computer is starting to make a clicking noise that might indicate the HDD is going. Between the trip, the fumigation, the accident, the computer issues and a still-hectic day job, it's been a constant struggle to keep on top of everything. Unfortunately last week, something had to give and that was the serial.

None of this is to make excuses on why I missed last week, of course -- you've been incredibly generous, enough that I could enter into an agreement to publish a part of the story every week and I genuinely appreciate that! However, in order to do that it's increasingly clear that I need to take some time and build a buffer in order to keep the schedule I want to keep.

So there will not be a new part of THE CULT OF MAXIMUS this week; instead, I'm going to take some time to write ahead a little bit so I can make sure that I keep my promise to all of you in the future. This will also give our Lucky Charms patrons a little extra time to give me their character concepts for the open casting call. Once I have all of the entries, I'll be sure to open up voting right away!

I'll be spending the two weeks I'll be sans-dragon to deep dive into my projects, organize my time a little better and hopefully build better working habits that will pay off with smoother sailing. I'm genuinely sorry that the serial has been as spotty as it has been; this is definitely not the way I wanted to start the JSC. The learning curve and life in general has been a lot more difficult than I anticipated.

See you guys in this space next week; feel free to follow me elsewhere as well!

FurAffinity, SoFurry, Weasyl, Furry Network: jakebe

Twitter: @jakebe (personal)/@serialjackalope (writing)

Email: serial.lope@gmail.com