This is a stopgap.
Hi!
I’m sorry to bring a bit of chaos into your life, but last week Flodesk, my email provider, decided to suspend my account, and I have been trying to jump through hoops since to get it back.
I’ve not been able to get access back as of yet, and while I could go into the nitty-gritty details I won’t because it will either frustrate me or make me cry, and neither of those are where I want to live today.
Instead, I wanted to let you know that this is the last day for the Time is a Flat Circle campaign.
Yes, I love this book so much that I am setting up a stopgap measure while I migrate my account to talk about how right before I took up this book, I nearly died.
I had written 25 books in 26 months and underwent radiation treatment for my thyroid. My body was ravaged physically, and I was mentally spent, which sent me to the hospital with a resting heart rate of 150+.
If I had waited to go, even a few hours, I would be dead.
That shooketh me and convinced me both to take a sabbatical from writing and to write this book so that if the worst happened, I would be able to have this thing out there which might be able to help somebody else.
It’s an exploration of my own mortality and a small book in the grand scheme of things. There are no earth-shattering stakes, alien invasions, or even a murder to solve. Yes, the premise of a multiverse is a big, meaty one, but this is not Loki, or Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. Heck, it’s not even Primer.
It’s something else.
It’s about how one person, caught in the midst of their death, is simultaneously insignificant and the most significant part of the universe……but I don’t want to spoil it for you.
This is a book I’ve tried to write multiple times in my life. In many ways, it is the last thing I feel I need to say in my life, and because of that, it’s jam-packed with philosophical ideals.
I wrote this story as if it were the last book I would ever get to write. I think I injected it as best I could with some pathos and some humor, but this is, at the end of the day, an exploration of my own humanity, told through the eyes of the angel Quieriel and the actions of one Larry Lizer, a typically average kind of human, that is about to go through something extraordinary, as we all will at the end of our lives.
I hope, if nothing else, it gives you comfort in the dark times when all hope is lost.
That is a lofty goal, but then, this is a lofty book. The loftiest I have written in a long while, maybe ever.
I hope you'll check it out, and I look forward to seeing you behind the backer wall.
-Russell