a rough day
Today is that day. It’s the sixth anniversary of my dad’s passing. So much happened during the months leading up to his death that overwhelmed me. To the point that I think, at some point, I stopped dealing with a lot of things. It was kind of a whirlwind time for me, too many back-to-back traumatic events. It started with losing my baby Mia when I was seven months pregnant in May of 2013. Then a month or so later, I started having massive health issues when my gallbladder went from 0-60 in a matter of a few weeks, resulting in emergency surgery that same August. Losing Mia turned me inside out and upside down, and it didn’t help that there was some other stuff going on. Then in August 2014, we found out my dad had Stage IV melanoma, and soon after, he was accepted into a trial treatment program for Yervoy, which was his only hope. However, we found out pretty quickly, it was a slim hope at best because his cancer had presented itself abnormally and in the worst possible way.
Then in November, my stepfather had a catastrophic fall in their home that he’s never really recovered from. In January of 2015, my mother collapsed, and we found out she had Stage IV lung, liver, and kidney cancer, on top of a score of other issues that left her a shadow of her former self. And treatment wasn’t an option. So there’s that.
I spent most of 2015 back home in New York, living with my brother, my family in Arizona. And my brother and I cared for our family.
My mom died on April 29, less than two weeks before Mother’s Day. My dad died five weeks later, a week before his birthday.
I was in a dark place for a long time. I’m better than I was, but I’m still not who I once was.
On to brighter things…
in the writing folder
Recently, I got back the rights back for a couple of novellas that had been published as a part of anthologies. One was a thriller I did for A Dark Spring, published by Tangled Tree Publishing. That is the same publisher that put out my full-length thriller, Last Night. I also got back a dystopian/postapocalyptic romance novella I did for Mad Cruel World, published by Cruel Ink Publishing. There are a few other novellas I’ve done over the years, all ones that I have the rights to again. My plan is to take some of them and rework them into full-length novels.
Three of them are already in the “in progress” file, along with a brand-new work. Sandy Toes is a paranormal romance I did a few years ago in the Wicked Nights of Summer anthology, published by Mystic Ink Publishing. Originally, it was roughly 15K words, and I’m planning on expanding it to at least 60K. Hopefully. And the two I just got back are in progress, too. The thriller, Tangled Love, is set in a fictional version of my hometown. It was a little shorter than Sandy Toes, so it’s going to take some time to expand it.
But Saving Wyldewood, the dystopian/postapocalyptic romance, is a little different. That one wanted to be a full novel from the very beginning, rather than than 11K I was allowed. Cutting it down from 17K to 11K was hard. But I saved all the original work and have continued writing it. The plan is to have that one be the first in a series. I used a renn faire site from back home as my inspiration for the setting for this one. There’s a Santa Claus-themed park near my hometown, and a fictionalized version of that is going to be the setting for the second book.
I am so sorry for your losses. The loss of Mia is heartbreaking in itself, then to have your surgery, and then parents’ illnesses to deal with before you were able to grieve her loss properly, that must have been overwhelming.