Hi there, any readers who might happen by this blog. If you’re going, “Hey, Angela’s books seem interesting, has she written anything new lately?”, I have an answer for you: not so much.

This is not exactly by choice. My current day job is very demanding, both in terms of time and in terms of how much mental energy I have to put into it. For those of you who may not know, I’m an SDET, which stands for Software Development Engineer in Test.

Which means, short form, I’m a software tester. Slightly longer form, what differentiates me from a Quality Assurance level software tester is that when I do my testing, it is often done via automation scripts I write to handle a lot of complex scenarios, and which are meant to do the testing faster than could be done manually.

Additionally, I’m on a team with a very high-pressure work culture, frequent important releases, and a strong expectation of working extra hours, on evenings and weekends, to meet our release schedules.

The pandemic hasn’t helped matters much either. I am very grateful and cognizant of my privilege of being able to work in tech, which allows me to work from home safely. And at least for the immediate future, there is no expectation that I have to be back in an office. (Which is good, just because a lot of my teammates aren’t even local right now, so it’d be kind of silly for me to be in an office even if we didn’t have a pandemic going on.)

But because we’re all working from home, this has exacerbated the pressure for online presence. I frequently have days where I spend the entire day on various bridges, diagnosing various problems, or helping out other testers. And even if you’re doing this from home, if you’re an introvert like me, that’s still a pretty damned big hit on your energy.

And that doesn’t leave me much in the way of mental bandwidth for creating new fiction. By the time I finish a workday, right now I don’t have much energy for anything else besides gaming. (By way of a pandemic coping mechanism, and just because it’s also a helluva game, I’ve been playing a metric boatload of Skyrim lately. And documenting that over at Anna Plays Skyrim, check it out.)

Which, unfortunately, leaves me in a position where the words just aren’t coming right now.

Those of you who signed onto my Patreon: I’ve started putting it on monthly pause so you won’t get dinged for pledges for work I’m not currently able to deliver. I will be doing this until further notice. And I apologize for that, and thank you very, very much for your patience and support.

I do still have the six chapters of Daughter of the Hammer in progress, and have revisited it over the last few days, just to remind myself where I left off. I am beginning to creep back to a point where I may be able to try to throw tiny amounts of words at it. But I am not making any promises on that, and I will not be dinging Patreon further for any pledges until I know for damn sure I have enough new content to sustain waking the Patreon up again.

Anyway, just wanted to put an update out onto this blog just because this is my official writer site, and I wanted everybody to know I haven’t abandoned it entirely. I hope I’ll be back at it once the pandemic finally settles down again, and maybe dials down enough of my ambient stress that I can actually write something new.

I’ll post again here with updates when I have them. Thanks everybody. Take care.