Did the dragon do it?

Jul 22, 2024

Hey.

It’s been a week, hasn’t it? Lots of things happened.

This is Ran, Sarn’s son from the Curse Breaker series as usual, and no, I did not cause the outage on Friday. I know you were wondering.

But I can say with complete honesty, it wasn’t me. I had nothing to do the Crowdstrike update fiasco thing that gave a lot of computers the blue screen of death.

But I can’t tell if my nemesis, a digital dragon who’s supposed to just deliver our email and ebooks and do nothing else, had anything to do with it. Why don’t I know?

Well, I wrote to the nice folks at Crowdstrike to ask if they found any claw marks or anything, but no one replied. Granted, they were really busy trying to fix the problem they caused. But they could have asked an intern to look around. Claw marks are pretty easy to spot. Anyway, they didn’t, and I couldn’t sneak into their office to check for myself, so I did the next best thing.

I helped my scribe instead. Since she works in an IT department, she was really busy checking things after the servers were restarted. Since clicking things is my specialty, I volunteered to click stuff and report back about what happened. An error message is pretty to spot.

I hope the outage didn’t interfere with your plans or your lives too much. I heard planes were grounded and surgeries were cancelled.

In book news, we sent surveys from the Rogue Gods Trilogy kickstarter to gather information like addresses to send physical books to, BookFunnel email addresses so we can send ebooks, and collect backer names for the thank you page.

Once we have all the names, Melinda can finalize the final files and we can order another round of proofs to make sure all the new additions look good.

So if you backed, please check for your survey! We need that information as soon as possible.

We also compiled the final list of unlocked stretched goals and they are as follows:

For all formats:
- Unlocked Stretch Goals for Gateway to Hell:
  - New full page color images
  - New section
  - New backer appreciation page
- Stretch Goals for Summon The Gods:
  - New full page color images
  - New backer appreciation page
- Unlocked Stretch Goals for Storm The Gates:
  - New color images of the characters
  - A new section at the end
  - New backer appreciation page
Unlocked Stretch Goals for Hardcover books only, all the above plus:
- Head & tail bands
- Ribbon bookmarks

If you missed the Rogue Gods Kickstarter, you can still order your copy of the trilogy and get all the unlocked stretch goals too (unless you choose the option without them). You can order them here.

In other books news, Melinda is still writing Rogue Gift, book 5 of the Robin of Larkspur series over on Patreon. And I’m still trying to get her to work on the next Curse Breaker book, Chasing Dragons.

Robin is still investigating the oubliette and the man imprisoned there, but the story took an unexpected turn this week. And now, I’m kind of invested in the story too. I want to know what will happen.

So far, Robin is the only character in all 27 books Melinda has written about our world who’s ever been accused of a crime. Did she do it?

I don’t know! If she didn’t do it, then who did?

I had no idea Robin’s 5th book would involve crime solving. I’m glad Papa isn’t accused of anything yet. But what if these accusations are contagious?

Could the investigating guards accuse Papa too? How do they decide who to accuse? I have so many questions so I might have to let Melinda finish Rogue Gift just so I can find out.

I don’t want Papa accused of anything. He dealt with enough wild accusations in book 3 of the Rogue Gods Trilogy, Storm the Gates, because he couldn’t stay out of the book. What if this time the accusations stick?

I don’t want Papa to go to jail! For the moment, he’s not accused of anything, but I can’t stop worrying that Robin will somehow transfer the suspicion surrounding her to my papa, and I just can’t have that.

Robin has won this round. But I’ll win the next one.

Have a great week! I’ll be back with more book news next week, and maybe some spoilers. Who knows?