Friends,

Peter's mother is extremely ill with heart and kidney failure and will not survive more than a short time. With this in mind, my online activitities are going to be severely curtailed until at least the end of July. Please bear with me while we attempt to deal with our loss.

Thanks.

Last night we got back from visiting Peter's mum in the hospital up north...and it's an understatement to say that neither of us were happy to see a woman previously so vital looking so frail, and half the time fighting for every breath.

Now this morning came a message from Peter's sister saying that she'd been called to the hospital because Mum had taken a turn for the worse...and the consultant who's been handling Mum's case has said that there's not much they can do for her now but "keep her comfortable." This is unhappy news. I suspect we may have to go back up North again rather quickly: and if this happens, work and (obviously) blogging will have to take a back seat for a time. Please, everybody understand. I'll do my best to keep you all posted as events transpire, but our internet access up there is spotty.

Any spare prayers would be very welcome right now.

Dear folks,

Just a quick note to let you know that things are about to move into a considerably higher gear on the "Big Meow" project.

For those of you who've been trying to use the upgrade buttons on the Paperback Upgrades or Upgrade To Paperback pages and have been getting an error message from PayPal -- this problem is fixed now: it was a code-formatting glitch. Thanks for your patience.

Now that the new Drupal installation is bedding in, I get to add some neat new stuff here. One new feature: research materials. I keep these on my home machine using Onfolio, which also makes it easy to publish stored material online. So here's a link to where my Big Meow research material can now be found online.

After the outline for The Big Meow was written, its publishers passed on publishing it, citing low sales figures for the first two books. A number of years then passed while the outline sat in DD's file drawer and hard drive, doing nothing. Occasionally she received an inquiry from a fan as to where the third book was. Normally she just wrote back thanking the writer for his or her interest, and telling them that because of the first two books' relatively poor sales figures, there was no chance that a third one would be published.

The two books making up the sequence so far -- The Book of Night with Moon, and its sequel, published in the United Kingdom as On Her Majesty's Wizardly Service and in the US as To Visit the Queen -- are offshoots of the Young Wizards series, taking place in the same universe, and with the occasional crossover of characters from the older, larger series.

In the YW universe, it's understood that wizardry is sometimes offered to Earth-based species besides humanity if they are either intelligent enough, or just high enough up their local food chain. Cats qualify on both counts: any animal smart enough to routinely get humans to give it food for nothing will plainly have no problem mastering wizardry.