Weekly Update - 10/15/25

Okay then! So, after a complicated last few days, I have come through my colonoscopy and things are looking good to fine. For those of you who just want updates on writing itself, you can tune out here, and I'll see you with a new fiction drop in the next day or two, promise. Those of you who want to keep peering behind the curtain, strap in and I'll walk you through how weird the last week has been for me.

So my colonoscopy was scheduled for 8 a.m. on Tuesday morning, which meant I had to stop eating at 8pm on Sunday, and couldn't eat anything at all for Monday, which sucked by itself. But I'm also not sure how they believe this operation fits into any normal human's sleeping schedule, much less a writer's. But I tried to force myself to crash outside of my normal sleep schedule and sleep at 11pm. I had to be up at 7 am to mix this gallon of liquid they make you drink, so I got up, took my first pair of laxative tablets, put the liquid in the fridge and then I would've loved to get back to sleep, but after about an hour, the tablets have begun doing their work, and your ability to leave a toilet is pretty hampered.

At 7 pm, I drank half of that gallon of 'liquid,' in four glasses every fifteen minutes, and I kid you not, that was some of the hardest I've ever had to work to swallow anything. The viscosity didn't feel like liquid, and every glass, if I tried drinking too much at once, my body wanted to throw it up, which would be bad, so I had to pace myself, hating all of it. Then a couple of hours later, the fluid comes out of you again anyway. This would've been fine, I guess, except that I had to get up at 3 am on Tuesday to do the other half of it. When I got to the hospital at just close to 6 am on Tuesday morning, I was definitely already half through a twilight state, but they went through all the prep work, got me hooked up to everything and then put me into actual twilight sedation and the next thing I know, I'm in a recovery room, being told everything went fine, and they don't think there's anything to worry about, although I should probably increase my fiber intake and my water intake, just generally.

My friend came and picked me up from the hospital (I'd done the same for her exactly two weeks earlier) and I was ravenously hungry, but it's not even 10 am yet, so we stopped by a Burger King and I had a couple of the breakfast croissants before she brought me back to the house. My flatmate was around (he works from home, much like I do) and he described most of the rest of my Tuesday as 'a pleasant fugue state,' where I fell asleep sitting up at my computer desk three times, and this is after taking a 3+ hour 'nap' or so starting at about 11 am until like 2:30 pm. Because I wasn't allowed to drive at all yesterday, I had DoorDash bring me a cheesesteak, some buffalo chicken fries and a couple of sodas for dinner, which I had around 8:30pm. Then about 11pm I told my flatmate I was going to crash for the night (which is basically the opposite of what normally happens - usually I'm up until 2-3 am and around 11pm he tells me he's crashing for the night), then crawled in bed and slept until about 8 am this morning, at which point I looked out the window (it's been raining pretty much on and off for the last three days) and said to myself, "maybe another 15-20 minutes of sleep" and went back to bed, only to wake up at 12:30 pm, feeling fine and refreshed and... basically normal?

I took a shower, read through the notes from my doctor regarding the colonoscopy (they removed a couple of polyps but I'm told that's fairly normal) and then went out to get lunch, and now feel basically like myself once again. What I realized is that yesterday's weirdness wasn't really much to do with the surgery so much as it was the massive disruption to my sleep schedule - I basically went through most of yesterday in a jetlag state, drifting in and out of consciousness, and that's just the result of being told to get up in the middle of the night, when it's pitch black outside (and raining!) and told to drink an awful fluid that makes you nearly want to vomit with every sip.

Oh, and of course, the Sleep Token show on Friday I went to was awesome, but on the trip back, our BART (which is part subway/part elevated train, for those of you not in the Bay) was delayed by almost an hour, so my friend and I were stuck standing outside on an elevated platform for an hour waiting for a train that felt like it would never come. So, great concert, not great trip home.

So, let's get back to work, shall we? I've got a poker game tonight, and my usual MTG commander night on Saturday, but other than my regular weekly scheduled events, I have nothing additional on my radar for the next two weeks, so I'm going to strap myself into the word mines, start blasting hot tunes and get cracking on writing, as well as seeing what I can do to help out all the other folks who are working on QT-related stuff.

I did an editing pass on a few people's upcoming chapters, and I'll try and get through a few more of them while I'm hammering away at my own backlog, but don't worry - there's good stuff coming from most people working in the QT universe. (Hell, 2Charlie's gotten up to the point where he's got a draft of Ch. 20 for us to look at, and for those of you out of the know - the QT tradition is that Ch. 20s are inevitably twice as big as a normal chapter, for no reason we can determine other than tradition and storytelling inertia.)

That said, I regret to inform the audience that we're pretty sure Percheron, who started QT: Aotearoa, has passed away. The last communication any of us had from him was that he'd been diagnosed with cancer, and that was in early 2024. I was hoping to meet up with him during my trip to New Zealand, but never heard back. Still, I took a little comfort in the fact that his subscription to my Patreon was still ongoing, so I was trying to remain as optimistic as possible for as long as I could. Well, his subscription to my Patreon expired in September when the card attached to his subscription was declined - the subscription was never cancelled. We've been trying to be positive, but at this point, I think I'm going to officially consider QT: Aotearoa closed down from the writer's passing. Maybe we'll get some surprise news that he's risen like Lazarus, but at this point, it's been too long without any communication for any of us to feel like that's reasonable. Good knowing you, Percheron, and if there's another life after this, hopefully you're enjoying your time there.

Finally, looks like I'm going to get two boxes of paperback versions of Neon Stonehenge on Sunday and Monday, so this weekend, I'll look into reopening Dev's Signed Books and adding copies of Neon Stonehenge to it. I'll even try and add a little thing where you can leave me a note on WHO you want to sign it - Devin McTaggart, Blake Conrad or Andy Rook. Or some combination of the three! Commit to the bit! I also need to get the free/stripped/reduced .epub/.pdf version up to subscribers, so I'll make that the first thing on tomorrow's agenda, so expect to see it up tomorrow.

Whew! Long winded update, I know, but now you know just about everything that's been going on in the wild and wacky world over here, and why things have been such a mess. Two final things before I go.

One, GO SEE TRON: ARES! This film is so much better than it has any rights to be, and while it's not flawless and I have some quibbles with it here and there, it should've been a huge opening, and a lot more of you should've have seen it that you did. In fact, I'm probably going to go see it a second time in theaters this week, because I want to support it and because I enjoyed it enough that I want them to keep making them. If you like cool things, support cool things! I mean, c'mon, the soundtrack is enough of a banger that it alone is worth price of admission... speaking of music...

Two, holy shit, the band Sugar is back! I was just about to close this off when I was glancing at YouTube and I saw a video for "Sugar - House of Dead Memories" and went, "What the hell is this?" For those of you not in the know, Sugar's 1992 album "Copper Blue" is probably one of my Top Five Most Listened To Albums Of All Time. The song "If I Can't Change Your Mind" might've been on more of my mixtapes in high school and college than any one other track. They never played anywhere near me while I was growing up, and by Jan. 1995, they'd broken up. Now, I have seen Sugar frontman/guitarist Bob Mould live once before, in 2016 at the Independent, where he played 4 Sugar songs as well as 8 Hüsker Dü songs (his band before Sugar) in addition to stuff from his solo catalog (although not "Heartbreak a Stranger" to my great sadness), but I've always wanted to see Sugar live. Currently, they're only playing four shows, two in NYC and two in London, both next year, but they released newly recorded "House of Dead Memories" as a single, and Bob himself has said that how the fans react to all of this will determine what happens going forward. For me, I hope it's a LOT more. Apparently "House of Dead Memories" was recorded in my backyard (up at Oakland's Tiny Telephone Studios), and I can't tell you the amount of joy it's brought me today to know that I might get a chance to see Sugar live at some point. I don't know that I can justify a trip to NYC to see them (that's assuming I could even get tickets, because God knows, if there's any justice in the world, these shows should sell out in the blink of an eye) but if they add more shows, I will definitely make a point to go see them, even if it means, eyyyuuuuccccccccchhhhhh, Los Angeles.

Man, what a WILD week it's been!

As usual, we conclude with the public releases in coming weeks: 10/18 - Pack 17; 10/25 - QT2:38; 11/1 - QTUM 8; 11/8 - QT:PT 24; 11/15 - Ante's End 1; 11/22 - Threadbinders 10.

That's a wrap on my longest news update in a while! Thanks again for everyone's patience while this series of kerfuffles blast through my life and I try and get it all worked out. Life is what happens when you're making other plans, and there's no getting around it sometimes.