I’ll warn you in advance — your tolerance for listening to me complain is about to be tested.

Okay, not complain, exactly, but report on the last six or seven months and why I’m so far behind on everything, including the next book after The Splintered Sun. It’s going to be titled The Crooked Tower, and I’ll talk a bit about it too, so this newsletter won’t be only about me whining and miserating. But mostly it will, I’m afraid.

All of my adult life, dating back to my late twenties, I’ve had a sort of constant, chronic problem with inflammation, and much of it has been heightened — if not actually caused — by typing for a living. It used to mostly show up in my wrists and elbows, and I used to say it felt like having joints full of ground glass. I found ways to deal with it and lessen the effects over the years, of course. I have a special keyboard to keep my arms straight while I write, and am constantly making little changes to my ergonomic set-up — arrangements of things on my desk, basically, — to combat unwanted strain on joints. Generally the flare-ups never last more than a week or two at the most. Ice packs and prescription anti-inflammatory meds keep it at bay most of the time. Until this last January.

What began as a simple, nagging ache in my hands and fingers kept getting worse, and lingered far longer than usual. Then I started to have severe pain in several other joints — knees, hips, shoulders. I began a round of doctor visits to see if I could do something about it, but it kept getting worse. By March I felt as if I had aged twenty or thirty years in a matter of weeks. I’m not exaggerating. I mean, yeah, I’m already old (“No, you’re only old-ish” says Deborah, my ray of sunshine) but suddenly it was really hard simply to descend and ascend the stairs to my office. I couldn’t hold much of anything heavier than a tennis ball for dog Lemon, and had to clutch my morning mug of coffee in two hands just to carry it across the house — and it hurt. Joints hurt badly all the time, day and night. Things that I had done without thinking about for my whole life I suddenly had to plan out like a military operation: how to get things up and down the stairs at the front of our house, or how I could get down on the ground to check something under my car and then get up again without screaming (the really hard part). Because my hands were still the worst and most painful part, I went in and had cortisone shots into both my middle knuckles, which hurt like sin and fire and corruption. I’m usually fairly stoic about shots or stitches or whatever, but the finger-joint shots were something else (through no fault of my doctor). Lotta nerves in those hands. Felt like having boiling but also freezing mercury injected into my fingers.

Anyway, the only thing those shots helped were my actual middle fingers, which improved my abilty to flip people off, but that’s not something I spend a lot of time doing anyway. Everything else stayed bad, and I was literally shuffling like an ancient while walking the dog, creeping up and down the stairs with rest-stops every few steps, and all kinds of other problems. I have always been healthy in most ways — I never took it for granted, believe me. Yes, I’ve had inflammation issues all my adult life, but this was something completely different, at least in magnitude.

But worst of all was that I could not work. I couldn’t type for more than a few minutes at a stretch, and my thinking-time — vital to my process — was severely impacted by the constant pain of inflammation. Not to mention all the other things I should have been doing, piling up and adding to my feeling really helpless, as well as wondering “What if it never gets better again?”

Eventually, in July, I went through a course of systemic cortisone. That means that instead of being injected directly into a joint, something I’ve had done more times than I can count (although seldom as painfully as with my middle fingers), this was prednisone, the stuff you swallow in pill form and which affects the entire system. And it worked. Hallelujah! After about a week, the worst inflammation began to recede.

So, here I am in August, feeling relatively normal for the first time since January. I did my best to keep up with the most basic things during the flare-up, household chores, walking dogs, answering crucial business mail, and I managed to do most of my live readings, but I lost a full half year or more of actual working time. Unbelievably frustrating. But lately I am writing again, typing with minimal discomfort, and walking up and down the stairs like a human instead of like a scoliotic chimpanzee. I can even carry a full coffee mug in one hand! I feel as if I’ve been paroled from prison — sad about the time lost, but determined never again to take freedom for granted.

And so I am also now working in my normal — normal for a Tad, anyway — manner on The Crooked Tower. I’m only about sixty or seventy pages into the new book, but I’ve spent months thinking about it, which was all I could do for most of 2026, and those pages have all come in the last couple of weeks, which is a resumption of my normal pace. The extra time I couldn’t type may actually benefit the book, because as I’ve mentioned before, I hadn’t originally planned on a follow-up to The Splintered Sun being my next story. Enforced idleness meant I had the chance to plan it out properly, and even begin fooling with the final volume which will come afterward, tentatively titled The Holly Ring. I’m also pleased with where the story’s going, although obviously there will be many ins and outs and ups and downs before it finally steams into the station as a completed book. But that’s how it always works. That’s how it’s supposed to work.  And I am unutterably grateful to finally be back to the way things should be (don’t worry, I’m stopping to knock wood as I type this). One day in the future I will probably actually get too old to type, too old to move easily up and down stairs or pick up heavy bags of cat litter and carry them around without thinking about it — but not yet, thank the fates. Not for many years, I hope, and that is a gift I will never take lightly.

I know many of my readers struggle with health problems of their own, so this is not written to inspire sympathy, but since I have alluded to these struggles in public conversations a few times, I wanted to explain why there has been a slowing of my production and why The Crooked Tower may be a little later than one would expect. But I need to write, and I need to tell stories, so I am thrilled to be metaphorically back in the saddle again, doing what I love best and sharing it with readers — some of the people I love best.

Thanks for your patience and your kindness. Here endeth the complaining.

Be well!

Tad