Welcome to July, 2020.2! Has it seemed to you like a year has already gone by?
Oops, I’m nearly two weeks late. I’ve got excuses, including a semi-major computer foul-up (I’ll talk about that in another post), but you don’t want to hear excuses.
Over the years, the first two weeks of July have been life-changing for me in many ways. July 2, is the fifth anniversary of our adoption of Athena, after seven and a half catless years from the death of Alana. Friends on Facebook were so taken with my account of changing my mind about never having a cat again, to searching on the Internet, one false start, and then finally finding her. Having to fend off competitors who wanted to adopt her too, to my wild ride to Kitty Hill in Santa Cruz, a real place, and absolutely amazing—that I wrote about the experience, one fantasy level removed from reality. “Crazy Chimera Lady,” a delightful fantasy story will be republished in my upcoming second story collection, ODDITIES, due out this fall.
It goes on. On July 4, my parents married many years ago and 480 moons ago I met Tom Robinson—at a Fourth of July party at my own San Francisco apartment. I had a copy of The Dancing Wu Li Masters, which I was excited about reading, on my coffee table. At midnight, in walked Tom, invited by my neighbor—the illustrator of The Dancing Wu Li Masters. Synchronicity! Quantum physics in real life! On July 7, we married and on July 11 we had our first date. Not in the same year! But we’ve been together ever since.
Strangely, July 11 is also the second anniversary of when I was violently attacked by a man. On a blue-sky summer’s day, I was walking around the lake when the man leapt out of the bushes and attacked me, fracturing my hip in three places and breaking my thigh bone. Two years later, I can walk unaided by a walker or a cane but not very well and not very far.
Two years ago, the moment I woke up from the general anesthetic after three hours of surgery, I had a blazing vision of a memoir, what I wanted to say specifically about the Attack (and I didn’t even yet know ninety percent of what would happen) and more broadly about society and our current troubles. Still confined to bed, I wrote on my laptop a detailed outline, did a solid month’s worth of research, and did a lot of writing. I felt that there would be no cosmic reason that the Attack happened to me other than it was just really bad luck. And that was unacceptable to me. Of all the people walking down the sidewalk that day, the Attack happened to me, a writer.
But it’s been difficult to keep up the momentum and I had to touch on several controversial issues, to which I’ve experienced a lot of hostility on the social media. Tom himself actively opposes my publication of it. So as of today, July 1, I’ve put away all my notes and set the memoir aside for the time being.
God knows, I’ve got enough creative work to do, including working on ODDITIES, plus a third book of the Arachne Trilogy, SPYDER, two more books to finish out the CHROME trilogy plus a prequel novella, a screenplay for an interested producer, and uploading my last two backlist books, PANGAEA I and PANGAEA II. There must be a PANGAEA III to finish out that trilogy. Oh! And at least one other ABRACADABRA book, THE LABYRINTH OF ILLUSIONS.
More stories, a brand-new mystery series set in the 1960s—you get the idea.
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