Where, you may be wondering, is the planned short-fiction collection in its progress towards release?\u00a0 Good question, and the answer is, I haven’t done all I’m supposed to do, thanks to a series of things (rethinking a couple of stories,\u00a0 A-Kon,\u00a0 the first Father’s Day after my father’s death, and the eye stuff.\u00a0\u00a0 And now my agent’s got jury duty.\u00a0 )<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Excuses.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The one complication I really did not expect was the effect of the first Father’s Day after my father’s death.\u00a0 We weren’t close; there’d been a lot of difficulty with the relationship for most of my life.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The first nonpainful contact in decades a few years ago did a lot of good, so when he died I wasn’t either consumed with guilt or with grief.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So I didn’t expect anything to happen with Father’s Day, and instead I had a few days of complete internal chaos.\u00a0 Couldn’t think, and certainly couldn’t write.<\/p>\n
It was a good thing, actually…a Father’s Day in which I was freed of the guilt of all those Father’s Days when I had been aware of not being the daughter he wanted, of being at fault because I couldn’t create, on my end, the relationship he thought I should, on his end.\u00a0 This time my not calling, or sending a present or card, was no longer a dereliction of duty (in his eyes) but simply the reality that you don’t phone dead parents or send them cards.\u00a0\u00a0 The struggle was really over.<\/p>\n
Why the chaos hit then and not when he died, or on his birthday (which was close to Father’s Day) I don’t know….but it chose Father’s Day for its emergence, and for a good 3-4 days I thought I was going totally bonkers.\u00a0 Then my head clicked back into the working orientation and I could see what had been going on.\u00a0\u00a0 Humans are infinitely weird, at least this one is, and no doubt something of that will end up in a book in some disguised form.\u00a0\u00a0 It may not be a father\/daughter thing at all…but it will be a delayed reaction to a long stress.<\/p>\n
So anyway…when I can see better with less strain, and my agent is off jury duty,\u00a0 I’ll get back with him about the cover design, the stories to be included, and I’ll let y’all know where it stands when I know where it stands.\u00a0 Thanks for your patience so far.\u00a0 In the meantime I’m writing more online and no fiction, having overdosed on Cherryh’s Foreigner series (as mentioned, I think) in the past 10 days.\u00a0 A book a day of that series pretty much shuts down one’s own creative output in trying to digest it that fast.<\/p>\n
Also:\u00a0 though if I have my new glasses and can drive by then–I might show up at ArmadilloCon just to say hi to people–my next real outing is DragonCon over the Labor Day weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Where, you may be wondering, is the planned short-fiction collection in its progress towards release?\u00a0 Good question, and the answer is, I haven’t done all I’m supposed to do, thanks to a series of things (rethinking a couple of stories,\u00a0 A-Kon,\u00a0 the first Father’s Day after my father’s death, and the eye stuff.\u00a0\u00a0 And now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[31,107],"class_list":["post-2277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-writing-life","tag-the-book-business","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2277"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2277"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2278,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2277\/revisions\/2278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}