What the devil is going on?

So just what is going on?

A good question.

Like most problems in life it's both simple and complex in equal measure. But like all good stories I should start at the beginning.

So as you know I was struggling with the animation and the file size at the end of March but I'd been offered a ton of solutions and it was really just a case of deciding which one worked best. As I was working on this Chapter Two went out into the wild and the reception from some quarters was apparently not great with problems ranging from the complexity, too much realism, setting and Lord knows what else.

I'll confess this rattled me a tad as I started to wonder whether I was actually making something that had an audience given the hours it takes (in the end I decided I did, and if people didn't like it that was their problem - it's obviously just not a game/story for them. There are other games more suited to their tastes).

So why the delay - and why the silence? Especially given how chatty I usually am. I mean even when I screw up I usually blabber on regardless either here or elsewhere, no?

I've wrestled with how much to tell you about this for the past few days since I came back as I try to balance the need for you to have as full an explanation as possible and the equal need for me to be able to retain my own anonymity should someone who knows me breeze by. I was tempted to play safe and say I'd been abducted by space hamsters or my hard disk had failed or some other reason but that would have been an outright lie and didn't sit easy with me.

Well, I have another job - and this one required me to go overseas for a few days. Nothing terribly exciting but it pays the bills.

Except I fell ill whilst overseas. Actually, I must have already been ill before setting off but the visible symptoms didn't show until day two out there. This is where it gets tricky in how much to tell you.

It's nothing "Icky". Not really. Just a simple childhood disease that when an adult catches it can be far more serious. It's also hugely infectious. This latter part meant I was stuck abroad as the flight carrier refused to have me on board until I had a doctors note stating I was no longer a risk. A quick trip turned into some three weeks of being mostly stuck in a hotel room and trying to deal with an overseas medical service and insurance claims...

To cap it all I then picked up something called Pneumonitis (sp?)  as a side effect which joy of joy I still have. So, I'm signed off work, ill as a dog still and trying to recover from the entire mess. (My God, the kitchen...you should have seen the fridge after being left alone for three weeks. Actually, strike that. You don't want to see, or smell, what an unattended fridge is like. Not at all.)

But why the silence? Well, simply I didn't take my own phone. I just had work kit with me. I'm allowed to make calls on it so why carry my own kit that I wouldn't use. After all, I was only going to be away for a few days...

Of course, just having work kit meant I couldn't let you guys know. Anyone who works in a modern office environment or has to use their employers IT kit will, more than likely, be subject to the usual warnings about inappropriate use etc. In short, they keep an eye on where you visit on the internet - which could have been more than awkward. I did briefly toy with asking my friend who playtests the game to log on and drop a note but having her do a patreon post would have meant she would have access to messages and things - and when you've written to me you weren't expecting someone else to be able to read them so that didn't seem right either (of course in retrospect I could have asked her to make a patreon account and post a message as a follower rather than use my account but this didn't occur to me until about five minutes ago...).

So what now?

Well, you'll have seen I've frozen the page for the moment. I didn't want to take any money for May not with me already being behind and still being ill, so there's that at least. I'll confess it's slightly crushing, although totally understandable, that I've lost so much momentum but not a lot I can do about it sadly. Going forward it's as follows.

• Get better
• Get Chapter Three out (which will go to anyone who should have had it in March or April at the tier they paid for regardless of whether they are still a patreon or not)
• Deal with correspondence and messages
• Do the bulk of Chapter Four bar poll decisions and Bored Pilot etc
• Reactivate the account
• Carry on!