So my higher-tier New Worlds patrons have the chance to vote in polls on what the topic for a given month will be, right?

Well, right now I’m running the polls well in advance, because getting the yearly collection ready for publication not too long after the year ends (the Patreon year, that is; the project started at the beginning of March 2017, and the books usually come out in April) means I have to write the final few months of essays ahead of time. I’ve been in crunch mode on that for a while now, with only the February essays left to go, but I need to write all of those and then reorganize and revise the whole manuscript before sending it off to my BVC beta reader on December 9th. Not a lot of time, and it’s very common for the polls to be semi-tied among a few options, with a winner not emerging until I remind people to vote a few days later — if then. I woke up this morning with a plan for how to do as much work as I could sans the February essays if there was no clear leader yet in the poll that went up today.

Y’all, one of the topics has a massive lead over the entire rest of the field. Possibly the biggest margin of victory I’ve yet seen in several years of doing these polls.

So I guess my patrons heard my silent prayer for a decisive early vote! There’s zero chance that anything else is going to overtake the leader, which means I can get right to work on writing those essays and revising the manuscript, no delay required. If you’ll pardon me, I should get back to that . . .