On Monday night, my mother passed away.

I mentioned earlier this month that she caught a very nasty flu at the end of December. After twenty years of fighting metastatic breast cancer, the complications from the flu finally pushed her body too far. After a brief period where I thought things were turning around again, everything collapsed very, very fast and very, very suddenly.

You can find the obituary I wrote for her here.

Between the flu and my mother’s illness and her death, I have simply dropped the ball on these updates. I have also, behind the scenes, been fumbling and delaying my interactions with the artists trying to finish up the last of the work for the book.

I’m sure many of you will say that this is “perfectly understandable” (because I’ve had several people already say that to me). But this is a project which is radically overdue and this is the first time that I feel like I, personally, have been screwing it up instead of just trying to stay on top of a bad situation. I’m also not really clear of this situation. The memorial service was yesterday, but next week will bring its own challenges as my brother and I work out way through her estate.

This is all combined with the fact that I really thought I would have a substantive update for contributors by December 1st or, at the latest, December 31st. And those dates (which I was treating in my own head as deadlines of a sort) have, obviously fallen by the wayside even before the added shittiness of the last month happened.

So here’s the deal: Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be taking an honest stock of where I’m at and where this project is at. At that point I’ll be making a serious decision about whether to start refunding money or not. (My hope, obviously, is that I can get things pulled back together.)

NOTE: If you’re one of my artists reading this, please continue working. You’ll be getting paid regardless of what happens with the project.

Also: Apparently the comments on the site collapsed again during my absence. They’ll be reopened within the next 10-15 minutes.