Where do I start? Okay, right, the novel.

You may have heard that White Wolf is "doing something" with its fiction department, and every novel not at the printer has been axed. That meant me, natch, and a bunch of other people. 80,000 words down the pipes, never to see the light of day.

I took this pretty well.

No, really. I finished the email from Justin Achilli and had a sinking feeling in my gut. I wasn't angry. I wasn't upset. Two things hammered into my head in the first seven seconds after I got the news, and neither of them were really about the novel or my work, per se.

The literal first thing I thought about (I have no idea why, exactly) was that Rick Jones was going to be absolutely fucking crushed if Heart of the Hunter wasn't at the printers yet. I didn't know at the time just how many drafts he'd been through (Matt told me later), but the first thing that sprang to my mind was the fact that Rick had responded to all those posts about the novel on RPG.net, the damn thing was being advertised everywhere already, and I recalled with sickening clarity the LJ post where he was so happy about the cover art being done.