New Danab Cycle Short, farewell to Kindle Vella...

I just completed a new Danab Cycle short over at Sigild V, Soldiers of Ancient Seas, which serves as a prequel to the, um, Earth prequel to the, err, Earth prequel to everything that's going to...

Listen, I know this kind of sounds complicated.  I dreamed up all of this many years ago, and've been further developing and expanding the stories I wanted to tell along the way.  Originally it was what has since been entitled Collider, which is the real winner in finishing Soldiers, since it's fully my intention to make finally writing Collider the major project of the year, only oh some three decades in the making.  But the first book I actually wrote was Seven Thunders, which for years I thought, if there was only going to be one book actually written, that was going to be it, but in the years since, just trying to find a publisher, I really have expanded my ambitions.  I plotted out many books before I really got to thinking about the kinds of stories that needed to be told, and so I plotted a couple of prequels, one that revolves around the war that begins all this, and the other about the events that set all this in motion in the first place...

Soldiers is actually a bridge between them.  It's also the first time I've posted a serialized story (comic book scripting excepted)  at the writing blog in years, having in recent years devoted such efforts to Kindle Vella or entirely offline (what a thought!).  Kindle Vella (and I guess I ought to include Wattpad, where I first used an alternative platform, and I walked away from long ago at this point) closed up shop and is officially winding down and taking down content in a handful of days, I'll forever be grateful for, as it somehow provoked me to write stories that I would never have written, lastly A Most Excellent Fancy last year.

Fancy, in my personal files, now incorporates the footnotes the platform encouraged users to include, in the traditional footnote format (which, honestly, if nothing else I'm certainly happy to have been able to do), which I hope I can figure out how to include in a file Kindle itself will allow me to publish in paperback later.  I still have a backlog of material waiting, including the short story collection I'm including Soldiers.  If I can pull off the footnotes I'll be very happy indeed.  

Anyway, ever onward...

I think Pat Dilloway is dead…

I think Patrick “Pat” “P.T.” “Eric Filler” (etc.) Dilloway is dead.

This will come as a surprise to anyone with a small inkling at how exasperated he made me for a lot of the time I knew him in this blogging community. Don’t worry if you had no clue about that. If he’s dead, it literally can’t possibly matter anymore.

I met Pat during the 2012 Blogging A to Z Challenge. I chose his blog among the listed entrants because he was writing about a superhero book he’d written. For several years afterward I was a regular visitor to his blog, and my biggest blogging claim to fame is arguably successfully participating in his original box office challenge. 

As the opening line suggests, Pat used a lot of aliases, and probably most of the people who knew him online or through his many books had no idea. 

He went radio silent before the new year. His last post on his blog was at the start of December. There are bloggers who take breaks, but usually they’ll post about it. A lot of bloggers became considerably more sporadic over recent years, and many outright walked away. I didn’t expect Pat to do anything like that, or certainly not anytime soon. I thought he was just slowing down.

A post I saw when I tried to look up any possible activity elsewhere, on a Wordpress blog Pat maintained for Eric Filler, suggests he was battling cancer last year. He never mentioned this on his Dilloway blog. 

All considered, if you’re dead, rest in peace, dude.