I ended up with votes each for burning the soul within, Ghosts of Gehenna, and Illumination. So I asked my boyfriend to be the tie breaker. He chose this one.
Serena’s thoughts are that it is appropriate. One should always illuminate after the darkness.
On that note, my volume Dream Drops is scheduled for release April 4th(link should be available soon …) her Darkness Within is already available in some places for pre-order.
Ars Poetica will be finished being written in April so we will have to see when we can get it on the schedule for publication. Lost Notes is dragging a bit but I am expecting to publish it in 2025 as well .
Of the two children’s books I have planned for kids week 2025 one is written and illustrated.(I just have to put it all together. ) The other one is in the idea stage.
Serena’s Heavens Forgotten Tales was scheduled for release in February but due to a small snafu, I believe it is going to be a delayed to March thing.
I am hoping Serena will be able to get farther into Sea Wytch this year. I would like to see it publishing by 2026 if possible.
So I didn’t know what to post about today. I was just struggling with the reality of this month…
We had one of our chicken, who are pets go missing. Stray dogs scared her out of the yard. She was seen a block away, injured. She was the second one we have lost this month.
The first one was a baby silkie who got into the duck pool and drowned.
This is after our cat died.
So, this was a really rough month for me and my family.
I had posted in the local Facebook group that we were looking for her(the chicken). She has been missing five days today. We are facing the idea that she’s gone. Well Tuesday I got a message saying that a black chicken was wandering loose two blocks in the other direction.
My child is heartbroken at the loss of their baby. So dad and I went to check it out. We found a pair of loose chickens. They were not willing to be in the coop. Their owners were willing to give them to us if we could catch them.
Of the two we brought one home and the other one is supposed to be caught and given to us today.
Now the new one is peanut and is setting in well. I swear she purred the whole way home.
I posted a week ago that I was dealing with the death of the family pet. My kid is still in grief mode… And I don’t blame them. I miss my favorite siren. But I don’t handle death well.
I have been upsetting my kid because I have accidentally started to use the cat to refer to Luna. I find myself trying to separate myself from the pain that she is gone.
We had her for five years. I am still struggling to process that she is gone.
Everyone has been offering condolences and I appreciate the thoughts….
But it feels so hollow because it doesn’t bring the pain to an end. That is why I struggle with what I should say when someone else is grieving. I hate that hollow feeling so I don’t want to give it to anyone.
So, Thank you for the well wishes… But I just don’t know what to do with them.
If you are a facebook friend or follow my Instagram… you have seen me post yesterday that our family cat has passed. That means I am a true mess. My Child is the Intern doing the Fae Corps blog…So I scheduled it for them…because in so many ways Luna was their baby. We are going to be okay…but it will take time. This is probably the only post I am doing for Wednesday & Thursday here. I will schedule my usual Friday post. By Monday I should be back to my routine…but if not then I will try to pick it back up as soon as I can. We are used to a very vocal baby who is now silent. This will be hard.
I found out (thanks to one of my authors there) that the covers are not appearing on the sites for the indie bookstores in Canada. So I am working to get that fixed.
I have several books in the manuscript stage. This is where I am dealing with Formatting, editing and making sure that all the details are right before I publish them. Which is tiring all on it’s own.
I got distracted by a new story. I was doing well writing the Sea Wytch…but I got invited to submit to an anthology Fractured Mind Publishing is Doing…and it is out of my normal genre. And I am scared to death of messing it up…but I am enjoying the writing. It is flowing, and I am trying to make it work.
If I get accepted it will be a February release. I will be sure to post more on here as it is known to me. (of course this is a Serena thing.)
I wrote another Bedtime tales book for release next year. (That is a Patricia thing..)
And the poetry has been happening.
With all of that plus the normal publishing stuff…and the housekeeping that I have to try to keep up with…I am exhausted.
So I know that I have been trying to get back to my usual for this week… and yes… I am scheduling it all on Sunday… but I got as far as Wednesday and I don’t know what to do with it.
I have so much going on, and I know that I can use it for telling you about it… but sometimes it’s not stuff that I know how to share.
This month especially is physically busy. It’s also busy with work. Okay let me explain.
Work is not usually physical for me. Work is writing, editing, and publishing. It can be incredibly mentally taxing. But I am often not up and moving around.
Part of the reason why is that I don’t have exactly good mobility. I will get unable to move if I do too much.
Well, in order for me to have an office…we have to clean out a storage room. Plus I have plans for the weekend to be at Milton Flea market with my resin art and jewelry. (Kiddo is doing yard sale stuff at the same time.) And the chickens are going to be getting a new coop from a old building in the yard – that also needed cleaned out to be useable.
So, I think that I am just overwhelmed and stressed out. Hopefully I can do a good post next week about the flea market.
sitting on my porch, watching the chicken that my daughter has…(she’s cleaning up it’s cage) and it is letting her opinion of my porch be known…well if it wasn’t pouring rain we would be walking around the yard…
To start this story I need to explain something. I lived in a two-bedroom trailer with often ten or more people. We did not have running water. We lived a mile back in the woods. There were always animals…dogs, birds, cats…But this story focuses on one cat. The cat that left a lifetime mark on me. B.c. which was short for bad cat. He wasn’t bad. He was amazing. I did not have a bedroom. Mom and Pop had one, and my two stepbrothers had the other. My little brother and I slept on couches in the living room. There was another couch that whoever was staying over slept on. And we had a weird guy in a tent outside for most of my preteen years. Sometimes somebody in a camper outside as well. The people who slept on that couch had a few things in common. Usually, they were male. Often they were seen as trustworthy. They were not always.
We moved in there when I was eleven. I however have had an adult-shaped body since I was 8-9. Many of the men would try to make sure I knew that they wanted more from me than I was willing to give. Well BC was my defender. Those that crossed lines with me would often find that they woke to cat poop on their chests. He did not do it with everyone…and I did not control him. But it felt like He was always taking care of me.
Now anyone who has a cat will tell you that they bring you presents. BC was no exception. I often received dead mice. bird or lizard carcasses. I got very used to just using a paper towel and throwing them away.
I started ninth grade late…it was October when I started school that year because I had my son on the first of September. I was fourteen. So I had a lot of kids who picked on me. I was just as weird in high school as I am now, if not more so. And I had a kid. It was no secret. So one of the freshmen during my sophomore year thought that he could make a name for himself by pranking me. He just choose a poor prank considering my life. He saw a dead mouse laying outside the cafeteria. I had a bad habit of leaving my stuff at the table when I went through the line for breakfast. It wasn’t like I owned anything worth stealing. My purse at the time would have had my nail polish, an electric blue or black color, my wallet which was always empty, my hairbrush, a pen and notepad, and maybe some chapstick. On the rare occasion I would have my prized possession, a mini-cassette recorder my grandmother had bought me. So I would dump that and my backpack on the table and go get in line for my free breakfast.
The boy chose to put the mouse corpse in my purse. I discovered it in first-period Biology class when I went looking for my pen. I just calmly did what I always did with such things, believing it to be a gift from BC. I used a paper towel and disposed of it. The boy had expected a scream. I didn’t. So he approached, apologized, and became a friend. It was decided that I would be called Mouse due to the incident, and it stuck…I am still mouse at 47, the nickname was assigned when I was 15.
Bc left that winter. He never came back. I am aware that cats will go find someplace to die. But we never found him or his body…and I believe in the fae. So I can tell myself that the fae stole him because he was too smart for the human world. And I can enjoy the memories of the cat that got into so much mischief that it became his name.
I am not sure if I will do the proper posts tomorrow or another of my stories from childhood…I will have to decide then. Thank you for your patience with my whims.
Not poetry related, I know. Still my brain is a little bit fried. So instead of trying to fight against the brain fog… I decided to share what we got yesterday. I will return to poetry related posts on Sunday.
Pattimouse 