Paired Cultivation Book 2 is here! (Plus February update) (Patreon)

Hi everyone!  I hope the new year has been treating you well.  First up, Paul sent me his second book, so any critiques and errors you notice, especially in story continuity and pacing, would be greatly appreciated.  I haven't even read it yet, so you guys get first crack at the book.  For those of you who aren't tracking, I have several other authors writing in the Threads of Fate Universe, and Paul is one of them.  His books should be coming out either late this year, or early next year, so this is just us trying to get an early jump on things.  His first book is posted already, so if you haven't read it, give things a whirl, and let me know what you think.  Keep in mind I will be going through and changing things anyway, so don't hold back.  And having two complete books on here is pretty sweet, right?

Now, for my updates.  

Challenge coins should be here soon.  They are already paid for and I am just waiting for them to finish up making them.  Once again, this is just a thank you from me to you for your support.  Absolutely everyone gets one, as long as they are a Patron when I pull the spreadsheet from Patreon.  They are numbered, so you will receive them in the order of your support.

Junfa April is almost done.  The last 20k words in this book just didn't want to come.  The outline has a lot of stuff crammed in it, and maintaining pacing while including everything just isn't fun.  Also, I had some very bad news hit me like a freight train.  It killed my productivity.  Feeling creative when negative world-changing news hits is really hard.  Writing only five hundred words a day instead of five thousand will ruin a publishing schedule.  I'm a month behind because of it, which only compounds the problem.  More stress and worry to dump on my brain.  Nothing for it besides pushing through, which is exactly what I have to do.  

Bad news comes in threes, and boy was last month a doozy.  One of my Army buddies, a man I deployed to Iraq with for two deployments - over two years - and served with for almost five years, killed himself.  It hit me hard, because I had just talked to him the month before, and everything seemed to be fine.  He had a successful little barbeque restaurant, three sons, a nice house, wife just got a new job making twice as much, and... it just didn't make any sense to me.  At this point, I have lost more friends to suicide than I have combat.  And that really hurts.  Survivor's guilt is supposed to go away, not get worse after you get out of the Army.  

Then, my doctor told me she thinks I had a heart attack.  My Grandpa Head (I know, it's a funny name) died in his late forties from a heart problem, so I was more than a little concerned.  Which is how I found out I am allergic to the radioactive stuff they use to look at your heart for the test-thing the VA did.  Man, was it rough.  Five days of wondering if it might not be so bad to just have a nasty heart attack and die kinda rough.  The reaction was like having the worst flu in history, coupled with eating week-old Taco Bell.  And the tacos were mad at you for eating them.

Then, the worst news hit.  They found a tumor running along my wife's iliac vein near her left hip.  It's bigger than your two thumbs stacked on top of one another, and too wide for them to just take it out and sew the vein back together.  They can't biopsy it to see if it is benign or malignant due to the risk, so that is hanging over our heads as well.  A vascular surgeon is going to have to take it out, and then patch the spot with donor tissue.  The whole thing is extremely high-risk, and my kids are more than a little freaked out.  It also sucks - more than I can describe - that she is down in Texas by herself, and I am up in Kansas, unable to do anything about it.  

Good news is, I didn't have a heart attack.  It turns out I have a heart murmur that went undiagnosed my whole life, and I should be fine.  My wife is also an extremely tough lady, so she is trucking along like a champ.  A benefit of working at Brook Army Medical Center is having a surgical team that is one of the best in the world, and she is going to take full advantage of that before she gets out of the Army.  One of the things I ascribe to is that the trials in life are meant to make you stronger, and this will too, just like everything that has come before.  That's all we really can do in times like this.  Push through, and grow stronger.

Cenotaph of Bones (Threads of Fate Book 4) is my first priority the moment Junfa April gets turned in.  I really wanted to get it on the publishing schedule by the end of February (especially because that would be a huge financial boost), but that ship has sailed.  March is still a possibility, especially if the edits for the second half of the book go quickly.  If you couldn't tell from my work posted on here, I usually write pretty cleanly, so that should happen.  I also STILL don't have cover art for it.  I'm about ready to just give up on the artist entirely and fork over the three grand to get new covers done.  I don't want to do that, but at this point I am losing more money that it would cost to just redo them.  Maybe I could do a marketing campaign or something with the new covers, which potentially could pay for them with the boost in sales it would bring.  That's always a chancy prospect, though, so I don't want to bank on it.  Oh!  Speaking of banking on it, I finally got merchandise out!  Signed books, hoodies, t-shirts, and hats.  Check out the Mountaindale Press website to see what they look like.  I will soon have hardback books for all my Threads of Fate series as well, so that's super exciting too.  Dokeshi March is coming out in March, so that's a good thing.  Everyone in the five dollar tier and above should be getting an email from either Dakota or Danielle Krout with a link to a free copy of Lady February soon, so keep your eyes open.  All those Dokeshi March chapters will finally start making sense!  Yay!

That's all I can think of for updates.  Have a great February, everyone, and once again, thank you for supporting me.  It means more to me than you could ever know.

V/R,
Michael Head