Warning this is sort of a mini purge I'm writing,

So...I updated my story again today and wrote a note at the bottom saying how I'd been late with the last 2 updates due to "pre- going back to school crap" and that now that I was back in school I going to slow my schedule down to trying to get an update out every other week.    

This is was 70% true.   

What I didn't really say was what I was qualifying as "pre- going back to school crap".  I didn't think people needed to know that, but today I saw a comment one of my subscribers had written somewhere public.  The comment was something along the lines of them wondering why authors post stories and don't update them and how frustrateing it is for readers.   I'm not sure if they were talking about me but...it still made me want to be more open, even if only a few of my subcribers ever actually read this.  So here it goes:   

3 weeks before the start of school my mom visted, or more accuratly came to stay in my apartment so she could visit her doctors.  Most of the year she lives outside the USA but all her specialist are still back here.  She had a lot of appointments this time and had to schedule even more in once the doctors decided there might be something wrong with her neck.   They thought it was the cause of her balance being off, and why she couldn't turn her neck all the way.  I had to drive her to almost all these appointments because of this.  

It was also difficult for her to schedule in the extra appointments because of the fact that a week after arriving at my apartmet she was flying out to a family reunion/ memorial services. This was followed by a trip to new york with her sisters, as gift to one of my aunts for her 50th birthday.  Next she would be coming back to my apartment before she flew to a wedding in Austria.

So here is the break down of everything that went wrong:   

Week 1: My sister called asking for a thousand dollars my Mom didn't have. My Mom's budget for this trip was simply too tight since my father, aparently jealous of the fact my mom was traveling, had annouced a week before she left that he was going to travel to a conference in california, (one he didn't need to be at) and that while there he wanted to get a new computer and tablet.  My sister got nothing and took it out on us with her normal style of nasty texts.  Though perhaps I shouldn't say nothing...she also went to the emergency room one night and was found to have pelvic inflamatory disease, which can very quickly make a woman infertile.

Week 2:  The reunion went very well and  this was about the time I finished up my first of the 2 late updates.  But after the memorial when my mother went to New York things got bad.  My father made a budget mistake for $200 right before he traveled.  It got worse when my mother asked him if he could call his companies travel agent, to see if she could change a flight for her.  Because he was tired from his own flight my dad went ahead and cancelled her first flight, and switched her on to the other, only asking afterwards how much it was going to cost to do that. 

The answer was $2000, and that it was now impossible to undo.   My parents had some nasty phone fights in front of my Mom's sisters and she ended up not going to see Wicked with them just to save herself some money.  Did I mention one of the fights happened as my Mother was being fitted for her vow- renewal wedding dress?   My parents married at a court house, but for their 35 year anniversary the two of them decide a year ago they wanted to finally have the whole ceremony.  My mother was eventually able to smoothe out the airline problem and my father apologized saying, "I'm sorry. I'm just an idiot husband. But how the hell do you always win these things?"   

Week 3:  (yes I changed the color for this one)  This week was right as my classes started.  I emailed some professors ahead asking forgiveness for the fact I would need to miss coming to the first class.  I instead was helping my mom pack up for her trip to Austria, while driving her to more doctors appointments.  The second appointment was for the doctor who had taken some x-ray's of her neck and he had some very bad news.

She has 2 collapsing vertabrae's in her neck and a third is slipping out of place, if it moves much more it could paralyze her from the neck down.  This could happen at any moment, and it could very well be permanent.  To fix this they would fuse two of vertabraes together and replace the third with an artificial disk.  The recovery time would be several months during which time she would not be allowed to fly.   He sent her to a desk to schedule the surgery as soon as possible which is where my mom made a decision.  She was going to have her wedding first.  The recovery time would mean she would have needed to reschedule everything she'd planned for the past year and she really would rather be paralyzed than do that crap again.  And considering how her body seems to get more broken each year she decided the risk was worth it.

That brings me here to this past week. I got 100's on all my assignments so far and was able to sit down this weekend and finish my update.   So when readers get fustrated because an author is a week late with an updat I would like to say that in my case  I really do wish it could have posted it on time, or that I could say for certain I could get back to my one update a week schedule.  But I feel that slowing my schedule down to once every other week will be easier for me to  acheive for now.  

I hope this might help some readers understand that some writers want to update their fictions just as badly as they want to read it.  We just sometimes  don't have the time or we're in a state of mind where it's simply too hard to focus on writing.   

Oh one last thing, I'm not depressed about any of this, I was just stressed out, and my mother is really excited for her wedding. 

- Peachywink :)