… to my 3.6 Loyal Readers, and some Generous Lurkers that I never knew I had.

My Tip Jar has been an astounding success. Thanks to the blessed generosity of my readers, I now have enough money to cover my immediate expenses and pay my overdue bills, with several hundred dollars left over to invest in cover art and other needful things for my forthcoming books. I have sent my thanks to each contributor individually; I want to repeat those thanks here, in public, though out of respect for their privacy I shall not name names. Suffice it to say that I have received help from long-time readers and commenters, some of whom I knew only by their online handles till now, some by their real names; and I have had some really astonishing support from friends whose existence I never suspected before. You all do me more honour than I know how to acknowledge or repay.

If there are any of you who still wish to make contributions, I certainly shall not refuse them; but I want you to know that the immediate crisis is past. I thank God for you all, and hope that I shall one day have the good fortune to be able to pay it forward, as they say, to other people in need.

I am looking into various ways of recognizing and rewarding your donations; perhaps by making a piece of my writing, hitherto unpublished, available exclusively to those who have donated through the tip jar. Watch this blog for details as I evolve a working plan.

My health has continued to be spotty. It is my neck injury that troubles me the most; I cannot sleep long without pain, and there are some days when I cannot work at all. But there have been more days than usual when I could work, and I am finding myself in better spirits when I do, thanks to your support. Here are some of the projects I have taken up again, and hope to bring to fruition in the near future:

• A projected fantasy serial, Where Angels Die. This is the series that I referred to in my letters to Theophilus as ‘the Orchard of Dis-Pear’, for reasons not fully explicable to the public. I am not entirely serious when I describe it as ‘my story about demon-hunting, telepathic brain surgeon Crusaders’, but that description actually bears a pretty fair resemblance to what the stories contain.
• The long-delayed print editions of Lord Talon’s Revenge and Writing Down the Dragon.
• Two new collections of essais previously published on this blog. The first is to be called Death Carries a Camcorder; the second is as yet untitled, but will include my piece called ‘Style is the Rocket’.
• New pieces on Heinlein’s rules of writing, C. S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism, and Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain.
• By popular request, more essays by the ghastly and talented H. Smiggy McStudge. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
• The Grey Death, the painfully long-awaited second volume of The Eye of the Maker. (I have actually got reasonably finished drafts of the first four books out of the projected eight, but they require a lot of niggling revision for continuity; and of course I have to redraw my maps to make them suitable for reproduction. I hope to have The Grey Death out in time for Christmas; not much earlier, I am sorry to say.)

I shall continue working at these projects as my health allows, thanks to your support and encouragement. I cannot hope to repay the unrepayable with nods and smiles and thank-you notes; all I can do is try my best to provide more of the things you have enjoyed in my work to date. I hope that will be a sufficient equivalent for the honour and grace that you have shown me.

Following a suggestion made earlier by several people, I have installed a ‘donate’ widget in the sidebar at right. Through the good offices of Wendy S. Delmater, my friend and boss at Abyss & Apex, the widget has been tested, and I can confirm that money dropped into the tip jar will reach me at the other end.

Any donations will be gratefully received. I hope to be able to send a personal acknowledgement to every donor, but if this is not possible, let me thank you in advance. And thanks also to my 3.6 Loyal Readers for sticking with my humble blog, and reading my books. You have been a lifeline to me through trying times.