I write, all right?

Someone sent me a very kind message that I want to share (while obscuring their identity).

I just wanted to say you're in my thoughts this holiday season. I know how hard the first of any recurring celebrations can be after the loss of a loved one. You don't know me and we'll probably never meet, but I hope you find some comfort in the loving wishes of friends, fans and tumblr passersby. The one human constant is grief and it is love with no vessel to receive it. I hope you have time to mourn, time to love and time to laugh this holiday season and every day going forward.

Umf. This is so thoughtful of you: thanks so very much.

And it's gonna be a challenge.

Today, as of 7:50 AM local time, it will have been exactly seven months since @petermorwood unexpectedly stopped breathing and moved on to Whatever's Next.

Folks who follow me here will have seen that I've been keeping as busy as feasible and/or possible for me, under the circumstances. A certain amount of travel, much of it work-related: some catching up and getting-grounded with friends in the fannish world who knew and liked Peter. And then, as the year progressed, an attempt to get back to something that feels like "normal" work when the long-time mainstay of all the normalcy in my life is suddenly no longer on the scene.

It's been tough.

Now, admittedly, I'm fairly tough too (which after my life so far is, I guess, to be expected). But right now things are turning out to be unexpectedly difficult...

...especially because I'm in Ireland. And Christmas is coming.

(And here you must imagine the transfixed Wile E. Coyote staring down the tunnel at the light of an oncoming train that abruptly turns out to be [ulp!] real.)

If you haven't ever been on this island at this season, the absolutely godawful quality of this situation is difficult to explain or express. In mass media, in public expectation of What You Ought To Be Wanting, and in life just generally... you will rarely have ever seen a place, or a national gestalt or mindspace, in which the expectation that You Ought To Be With Your Loved Ones And Happy At This Festive Season is so fucking inescapable.

...Peter hated it. After his Mum moved on from mortality in the late 2000s, and family Christmases stopped—because she was the glue that had held those together—the incessant Be With Your Loved Ones stuff really started getting under his skin. (As did the inescapability of the underlying religious context, for both of us whose spiritualities are—let's just say—"differently constructed".*) "You know what? Let's get the hell out of Dodge," Himself said to me at the beginning of December one year, "because if we don't, we'll be stuck here, and this is driving me up the wall."

And so we did. We escaped from Ireland on the 22nd of that December and spent the next seven days split between a pair of small hotels in Germany—where there were much-loved business-friends to visit with over the holidays—and where the cultural management of Christmas is way different from the Irish everything-closes-down, no-escape, either-"be with your relatives"-or-"be at home alone with no way to leave." (Because transport in and out of this country becomes astonishingly difficult until two days or so after December 25, and even local transport becomes tough for carless people [which meant us]: no taxis, almost no buses or trains (or none at all). ...Therefore that getaway was emotional balm to the both of us, and afterwards we repeated it when we could afford to.

So. Over the course of the autumn I’ve been gradually starting to try to pull the business of my daily life and (what ought to be) my daily work back into some kind of working order. Not easy, when your best friend and writing partner and husband and confidant and—yeah, let's use the somewhat overused word, soulmate—is suddenly forever absent. After forty years of not being alone, I'm having to learn to do the being-alone thing again: every day, every hour, every minute. And the process has, I guess, been going as well as it could be expected to. No one gets over (or should get over!) forty years of intimate life- and work-partnership in a matter of months. You just kinda slog through day after weary day and take the challenges as they come, hoping you'll grow through them: or at least, grow around them.

But now, yippee, like that train down the tunnel, blaring its horn: here comes Christmas. The first one without him. And I feel kinda idiotic in, earlier this year, not having seen this coming. (sigh) I may have had some kind of idea that by now I'd be able to manage the pain. ...(eyeroll: bwahahahahaNOPE.) :/

This being the case, over recent days I've found myself thinking more and more often that I'd very, very much like to Get The Hell Out Of Dodge, so as to avoid possibly losing what small ground I’ve gained. And it occurred to me over last weekend that there’s still time to make it happen, if (as the song says) "the Fates allow". And if people are inclined to assist, as I'm currently between royalty periods.

My goal is to just get out of the country for that week—a few days before Christmas and a few days after: ideally to take refuge in a city aparthotel somewhere over thataway (waves vaguely at continental Europe), where I can be out of other people's hair, not imposing myself and my pain inescapably on friends at a festive time (but absolutely able to see them: that'd be a high point, if this comes together). This would also mean I'd be able to withdraw to do some work (because book work's very much on my mind right now, as it's been hard to get it done on site), or able to go out for a snack or something, and not just be trapped here in—to get a bit Sherlockian about this—the Empty House. (Which is SO empty now: so dreadfully silent, in this deeply rural place, without even any town or city noises to break the sense of isolation. It's amazing how hugely the nature of a space can change when the other person who lived in it has abruptly stopped doing that. What once felt like a shared refuge can start to feel like a prison.)

Anyway. If I can get the finance end of things to work out, the above-described Escape can happen... assuming that stuff happens quickly enough. (As with passing days, transport and lodging will become more difficult to arrange.)

Therefore, hoping to help this happen, I've rolled the prices in the Ebooks Direct store back to Black Friday/Cyber Monday levels: and there they'll stay until it becomes clear, over the next five days or so, whether this effort can be made to work or not. So expect to see a lot of ads in my timeline until it becomes plain whether this can be made to work. If you feel inclined to add to your TBR pile, please let me point our bundles page at you (or vice versa). There's something like two million words of prose there. Surely that'll get you through until after New Year's. 🙂

Also, for those of you who're already up to your ears in ebooks, but want to be a part of this effort (or who are in the UK, as to my continuing annoyance we can't sell there any more): I'd like to point you at my Ko-Fi, and—if you're inclined to assist—ask you to tag whatever you might like to drop into the pot as “Dodge," or something similar. It'll be very much appreciated, believe me.

And also for those of you who feel inclined: please feel free to reblog this, so that others who might be interested in what's going on can see it.

Thanks, friends. 😊

“What do you mean?” he asked. “But there’s a full stop as part of the question mark!”

She nodded gravely. “I know!” she said. “A lot of people find this confusing. But the speech tag belongs to the line of dialogue, it’s still part of the sentence, so it’s wrong to capitalise it.”

For example, your travelers might know that they're near civilization when they start finding trees in the woods that have been tapped, for pitch or for sap. They might find a forester's trap line and trace it back to his hut to get medical care. Maybe they retrace the passage of a peasant and his pig out hunting for truffles. If they're coming along a coast, maybe your travelers come across the pools where sea water is dried down to salt, or the furnaces where bog iron ore is smelted.

Maybe they see a column of smoke and follow it to the house-sized kilns of a potter's yard where men work making bricks or roof tiles. From miles away they could smell the unmistakeable odor of pine sap being rendered down into pitch, and follow that to a village. Or they hear the flute playing of a shepherd boy whiling away the hours in the high pasture.

They could find the clearing where the charcoal burners recently broke down an earth kiln, and follow the hoof prints and drag marks of their horse and sledge as they hauled the charcoal back to civilization. Or follow the sound of metal on stone to a quarry or gravel pit. Maybe they know they're nearly to town when they come across a clay bank with signs of recent clay gathering.

Of course around every town and city there will be farms, more densely packed the closer you are. But don't just think of fields of grains or vegetables. Think of managed woodlands, like maybe trees coppiced-- cut and then regrown--to customize the shape or size of the branches. Cows being grazed in a communal green. Waiting as a huge flock of ducks is driven across the road. Orchards in bloom.

If they're approaching by road, there will be things best done out of town. The threshing floor where grain is beaten with flails or run through crushing wheels to separate the grain from its casing, and then winnowed, using the wind to carry away the chaff. Laundresses working in the river, their linens bleaching on the grass at the drying yard. The stench of the tanners, barred from town for stinking so badly. The rushing wheel-race and great creaking wheel of the flour mill.

If it's a larger town, there might be a livestock market outside the gates, with goats milling in woven willow pens or chickens in wooden cages. Or a line of horses for the wealthier buyer or your desperate travelers. There might be a red light district, escaping the regulations of the city proper, or plain old slums. More industrial yards, like the yards where fabric is dyed (these might also smell quite bad, like rotting plant material, or urine).

It's not a choice, it's been this way since we met.

To bring us sugar and tea and rum

🕯 May you have the 🕯

🕯 absolute thirstiest 🕯

🕯 of thirst dreams of 🕯

🕯 whatever fictional 🕯

🕯 character you’re 🕯

🕯 hyper-fixating on at 🕯

🕯 the moment 🕯

I accept payment in trillion-cut black diamonds.

Wait says the yellow light, twinkling in between.