I Lose! (Hiatus Notice)

Greetings from the author!

When I started this web novel for the MALxHF ‘26 Heroic Fantasy Contest, still deployed and fresh from working on MGIASS, I was confident that it would be a snap writing for this one, even (and especially) if I were allowed back home from Sunny [country somewhere in the vicinity of CENTOM]. After all, deployment life is extremely unpredictable for a multitude of reasons, the very least of which being ‘how busy am I going to be tomorrow’ and it only gets more dramatic from there.

I was ultimately blessed with the rare opportunity to return home to see my two beautiful children in time to celebrate their first birthday. I had been deployed longer than I had been able to know them myself though and the pair of infants who occasionally let me do a raid or two of Escape From Tarkov had grown into the baby from ‘Who's Your Daddy?’, with computer cables as their favorite object to pull on and bite. More-so, I quickly found it entirely impossible to author a serious, and deeply meditative work to the backdrop of Disney Junior Nursery Rhymes while simultaneously caring for children who want nothing more than to commit 'Christmas Vacation Cat' from the comfort of my living room.

As you can see by my post Sept. 27th deadline uploads and 28,000-word count, it's safe to say I have quite thoroughly failed the contest. 😅

But that is fine by me. I wouldn't change it for the world, even if I'd had gone on to somehow win the thing. Because, unlike when I stepped off the bird at my duty station, my children now smile when they see me and they even bounce up and down at the prospect of me holding them now. I'll take the feelings that I get singing ‘Sleep Song’—of love and angels to keep them—for when they're crying at 0-dark-hundred over anything in the world. 

But what does that mean for Te Deum Laudamus?

I intend to continue writing for it. I originally set out to writing this for the love of my life—my loving wife—and I do fully intend to make good on that. However, in the interest of actually being able to write, I am going to return back to my production of MGIASS, as I believe I should have a considerably easier time writing for a Marine Lance Corporal than I do a noblewoman from the Late Medieval Period…imagine that. But I spent $250 on commissioning a cover for this damn novel—you bet I'm not taking THAT as a loss.

It also means that, when production on Te Deum resumes, I will be entirely free of word counts and other constraints for this story, so I'm excited that I no longer have to consider possibly fashioning a padded tempo for this story. Come the end of MGIASS publishing, I will be excited to continue writing this tale as it had always intended to be and I know it will be worth reading all the way through.

So, don't consider this over. I may have lost but I haven't been beaten. Side quest failed, we'll get ‘em next time. 

I'm hoping to finish MGIASS for a contest that's deadlined by the end of December. Hopefully I'll see all…three-four(?) of you then when I can torch this friggin’ notice and get the show back on the road.

…Doesn't exactly hurt that the war's still going on and people still need able bodies to swap them back out for life events back home so let's just say I'm not worried about further opportunities for writing this kind of story. 

Thank you all. Until then. ❤️🙂

—Sabella

https://ibb.co/hRRvLWgv