I’m great at working, but relaxing is not my thing. Typical workaholic, and typical of a lot of artists from actors, to singers, to painters, to other writers. After three years of some of the most intense writing and editing I’ve ever done, I’m both wildly happy to be done with the last two Merry Gentry novels and bereft. I am literally swinging wildly between giddy joy at being free-free-free! To waves of anxiety and even full-blown panic attacks. That last is a new symptom, by the way. I’m not saying I haven’t had a panic attack before, but never from finishing a writing project. I can’t even remember ever swinging from such joy to panic. I am seriously laughing and so happy, then despair and panic. It’s the weirdest pair of sensations. Yes, I am talking to my therapist about it. So far it seems to be a symptom of the immense relief I feel having finally finished the Merry Gentry series after twelve years of waiting between book nine, A Shiver of Light, and the two books I just delivered to my editor. A Glimmer of Death comes out November 3rd of this year, and A Ghost of Daylight comes out April of 2027.
Okay, it’s not all about the immense relief at finishing the books. It’s also because I can finally grieve. What am I grieving? I blogged about the first one when it happened. We lost Grizzy (Grizelda) our black cat. She was our Dark Empress and the cat that chose my husband and made him realize he was a cat person. We rescued her when she was ten and she was still going strong until a rare fast-growing cancer took all our choices away. Then Mordor, our Japanese Chin who was only twelve, died suddenly of heart failure. I’d been trying to get our veterinarian to do more tests for months. He kept telling me it was allergies. When I finally got him to look at Mordor’s heart in depth it was enlarged. The vet gave us meds and started a course of treatment. I thought we’d saved him, but that night he died. The vet said something like this on the phone, “I’ll know to treat push-faced dogs differently from here on out.” I was so angry that it’s probably better that I don’t repeat what I said to him. We changed where we took our animals after that. And now, I have to stop and think, because that awful vet that I still believe cost us the life of Mordor was not the vet that helped us treat Grizzy. So, does that mean that we lost Mordor first? It must, but in my mind that’s not the order of things. I was able to mourn Grizzy but somehow Mordor stayed frozen in time waiting for me to be able to have the emotional spoons to deal with it. There are details to how he died and how I found him dead that morning that I’m not going to write here. I’m not ready. I handled it all well at the time, very calm except for my rage. I guess I got stuck at anger and couldn’t move on until I had the emotional space to process losing our furry boy. We rescued him when he was only ten months old. Then we lost Keiko, our other Japanese Chin. We adopted her when she was four. She’d been a puppy mill survivor. She was our little dancer, our ballerina, so elegant, so happy once she knew she was home and safe. I had to carry her upstairs to my office for a few weeks because she wasn’t comfortable using the stairs. She was so delicate that it wasn’t a hardship. Both dogs loved the office because we rescued them while I was on deadline and they saw a lot of it. Keiko died of old age, we were expecting it, but Mordor. We should still have him with us. Even the vet admitted that if they’d started the treatment earlier it would have been manageable. He would have turned fifteen this year. I feel so cheated that he isn’t here for that birthday. So angry, but at least I’m starting to be able to cry about it. Healing comes with salt water for me, either crying it or being near it in the ocean. Since I can’t seem to make it to any coast right now, tears will have to do.
We also lost my father-in-law, Art. I blogged about that in more detail when it happened. I’m not up to sharing it again today. I will say only this, Parkinsons is a terrible illness. Just typing that comes with a wave of sorrow.
There were other losses, but for now I’ll end with I caught Covid for the first time in 2023 and got Long Covid from it. I am luckier than a lot that caught it and that’s enough of that. Literally just writing all this has exhausted me. Time to choose another book from my TBR or find another anime to marathon, or a movie that came out in the last three years, because I’ve seen almost none of them. Yes, before someone asks I’ve been talking to family and friends, but writing the blog seems to count as socialization for me so time to choose something more introverted.
