I dont know how to start here, so I’ll copy-paste most of what I said for my patrons. However, before that, I want to address something else as well. As you know, my releases before this break were becoming sporadic and inconsistent timing. I said it was my hectic schedule at school, but there was another main reason for that.
Most of you at Wuxiaworld might not know about it, but things had been pretty tough for me nearly a year ago. I made a post about it on reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/noveltranslations/comments/5sfc71/living_under_terrorism_and_the_reason_for_long/
On New Year’s eve, exactly when the clock struck 12 on that night, a mass shooting by a psycho at a club killed one of my friends. As December was drawing closer and closer, my thoughts kept returning back there, how his family was doing, what he’d be doing now, and generally just stuck in those past memories and feeling out of place as everyone prepared for the holidays.
And with distraction, I continued on with my hectic classes, midterms and finishing TDE chapters. However, it looks like this year won’t leave me alone as well. One evening, I get a call from my sister saying something was urgent and to check one of my friend’s facebook profile. I guess even she didnt know how to tell me this news over the phone.
Four of my friends studying abroad were in a car accident.
One of them was instantly dead just by the sheer blunt force of the collision against the other car, and she was gone. Two of the others were flung out the windows, with their bodies mangled but still signs of life in them. The driver miraculously survived with few injuries. As the two who were flung were gasping for breath, help on the scene arrived and they were immediately taken to the nearest hospital. It was not looking good for either of them. I’ll not go into the details, but not only were their bones and ribs fractured, their internal organs were in critical condition. After many hours, the doctors couldnt save one of them and she died in the hospital. The remaining friend still had hope, but his family was not well off so his mother and family couldnt afford the plane tickets to visit their son at a foreign country. He and the others were all students and were there as exchange students.
So, the rest of us started a gofundme for their family so at least his mother could be with him and also to cover some of the medical expenses. During this whole time, I immediately applied for an emergency visa and to visit my friend. I was there for a while. I don’t want to talk much about what happened there, but it crushed me to see the parents and families of my friends who passed away. It choked me as it was something I had seen too much around me. While I was there, I couldnt visit my other friend as he was still in critical condition. Part of his spine was compromised and his lungs were not functioning properly. After a few days, he woke up and I said my first words to him. Now, what I will say after this will be deleted in 24 hours as I dont want it to stay on the internet: [deleted]. Hearing that shook me. It makes me uncomfortable talking about what happened after that in detail here so publically, but I did talk about what happened on my patreon post and preventing him from going down that path.
It’s hard to talk about personal matters on the internet, and I wouldnt have revealed it to the patrons if not for the fact that they support me financially and I have an obligation to let them know exactly why I had to stay there for this long. This accident was covered by the news and the woman who was in the opposing car was arrested by the police for manslaughter. The entire university was very supportive during this entire ordeal as it was a great shock to the entire community.
I’ll leave matters at that, and if you want to know more about this or read in more detail about the accident, then message me privately and I’ll forward the news articles that covered it to you. Just dont share it publically, as my friends’ real names are on there and I’d like for their families to have their privacy.
Now on to the good news. I will be releasing the entire 4th book of TDE on this friday as it’s already been finished a month back and fully edited (I just didnt feel like releasing any chapters with the current atmosphere), and the ebook will be published the next monday.
Also, since my semester is coming to an end, I will be going full time into writing and increasing the weekly chapters to 4 starting from the 5th book 🙂 I might increase it to more as I get settled in to my new place and get some other matters finalized. I guess that’s that for now, I’ll see you guys tmr. I havent read all the comments or messages as there are quite a lot and I’ll get to reading them slowly. Thanks to all my readers for their continued support, you mean the world. On a side note, the TDE posters I got printed for the patrons came out amazing and I’m attaching a pic here. I might do an event later and ship 1-2 posters for free to the winners. I wish I could do more, but these are really expensive lol. Anyways, more details on that later.
