“Where is ADB?”

More accurately, how is ADB?

In short, he’s great. But more on that in a moment.

Lately, I’ve been asked about a bajillion times where I’ve vanished to, and what made me vanish. Usually it comes with a side order of “I hear you’re struggling with your mental health” along with a genuinely humbling show of support from many, many people.

To get the technical stuff out of the way, we’ve been getting work done on our house, so we’ve been living at Katie’s parents’ house since last July. Which is, I’m sure you’ll agree, a not-insignificant amount of time to be technically homeless.

Also, we had a baby in December. As adorable as Madeleine is, she eats up a lot of everyone’s time, focus, time, energy, time, and time.

Additionally, when we painted eggs for Easter, I got out the Macragge Blue spray and made Mr. Bump. This isn’t really a contributing factor to why I’ve been totally offline, I’m just really happy with him.

Anyway. Where were we?

Probably the most common sentiment I’ve seen is the double-edged blade of how my mental health might affect my writing. This is coupled with a recent delay to Echoes of Eternity, which has my inbox heaving with conjecture about how the novel’s going. Let me set your minds at ease and, if you’re in the market for it, give an answer with slightly broader context.

Firstly, I finished Echoes of Eternity last year, back in September. I did the signing sheets for it back in November 2021, and that’s the last thing an author does in the process. Right now, the book exists somewhere, drenched in delicious secrecy, imprisoned in the metaphorical chains of scheduling. Perhaps this admin-based embrace makes the text all toasty and warm? Perhaps not; perhaps it grows increasingly sour with the resentment of the untouched.

I know not.

I really want to have a cool story here, but release/sales schedule jiggery-pokery is a sadly boring and uncontroversial issue. Things are pretty crazy in the world right now, especially in terms of global supply chains and release schedules. It’s coming out this year, I know that much, and Warhammer Community’s website tends to know this stuff, so check there if and when they announce something.

Secondly, and totally relatedly, there’s been a mountain of “How will his mental health affect his writing?” which is absolutely a fair question. I can offer some context on that, though, which I fear will be another boring answer.

And the answer is: You already know. 

You already know how my mental health affects my writing, because most of you have been reading my work for years. When I went public with my mental health struggles, it wasn’t a sudden snap that came out of nowhere. My suicide attempt was a decision to end twenty years of mental gears grinding and going nowhere. I can point to the peaks and valleys of my mental state over the last twenty-ish years, thirteen-ish of which I’ve been a novelist. The stuff released at my highest ebbs hasn’t been reviewed any differently from the stuff I released at my lowest – and vice versa. Trust me, I’ve checked. Relentlessly. Endlessly. It’s been literally my greatest worry for my entire career. 

So while authors and artists pour a lot of themselves into anything they create, it’s also a notion that wallows in the wilderness of assumption. What I’m saying is, you mostly get to choose what you pour in. The same way you get to choose what face you present to the world.

There’s also a timeline factor here. I didn’t go public with my issues in 2020 until I was well over the hump. To be honest, I was terrified of being accused of talking about it for attention, or being defined by it, so I didn’t want to talk about my mental health until most of the chaos was safely in the rear-view mirror. By the time I started Echoes of Eternity, I was feeling better than I ever had in my life – a state of mind that I’m happy to say still holds true.

If you’re looking for specific insight into how writing Echoes of Eternity went, I can offer some of that, too.

Really slowly. Just like always.

The writing itself went great, with the massive asterisk that I find writing anything to be a stupefying uphill grind, which I confess isn’t a great trait to be found in a writer. But relatively speaking, in terms of my writing process – it went great. 

Like I said in the Reddit post above, I’d been holding out these golden hopes of being mentally healthier suddenly making the writing process into sunshine and rainbows. But, nope, it was the usual spread of staring mystified at nine sentences on a screen for 14 hours a day, desperate to turn them into ten sentences.

I put everything I had into it, and I’m peachy-keen for it to get out into the world. The only difference these days is that after a book launch, I won’t spend weeks in a state of capital-A Anxiety, ignoring thousands of positive comments as mere digital vapour, while taking lone misreadings or occasional negative reviews as a damning indictment of my supposed hackery. I’m sanguine now. (Pun not intended.) I’m finally taking the advice of all those older, smarter writers than me, and doing what they do.

So all of this circles back to the original question: Why have I basically vanished offline?

That summation still holds true, and it’s hard to add anything more substantive on top of it. I haven’t gone offline because things are bad, but because they’re good. I’m enjoying other stuff, trying to hobby more, see more of my kids, more of my friends. All that good stuff. Admittedly, COVID and the chaos of the house move and the baby and oh God OH GOD… ahem, has slowed all of that down a little.

But to make a long story slightly shorter: Thank you for giving a shit about how I’m doing, and all the messages worrying where I’ve been. I’m sorry it’s not much of an exciting development, but the boring truth is that I’m doing great. It’s constant work, but that’s the trick, right? Happiness is a process. It’s maintenance. It’s the journey, not the destination. I hate how cliched that sounds, but it’s absolutely true. Regarding why I don’t talk about it more, I really don’t want to be defined by people online by a specific patch of my life, so you can probably see why I’d rather not discuss it too much. I felt like I’ve said all I can usefully say, especially now I’ve been over the hump for a long while.

Oh, and since it’s ended up being asked a crazy amount, I’ll answer this here, too: Yes, I’m incredibly freaking excited for the Horus Heresy to come out in plastic. My shriek of delight hit such a pitch that condors fell dead from the sky. And yes, I do have plans.

tl;dr — Some useful links covering my withdrawal from online spaces:

• Going public with mental health issues, once I’d recovered (October 2020).
• Why I stopped discussing 40K lore so much online (July 2021).
• Last social media post for a while (October 2021).

Before I vanish, let me just say if you’re struggling with your own mental health – if the gears are slipping in your skull, or your thoughts are going in a hundred directions at once, or you can’t summon, master, or even feel your emotions: You’re not alone. I talked about this in the Twitter thread I linked, including my reluctant offer of advice, but it’s worth restating here: Often the hardest thing to do is getting help in the first place. I was incredibly lucky with not only NHS counselling and therapy, but with an incredible support network of friends and family. Talking about it was its own special agony, as well as frequently humiliating and upsetting, but it was worth it. Someone else getting it and believing you can be the most important step on the right road.

As always, be excellent to each other. We’re all just people. The older you get, the less trite that sounds, and the easier it is to see.