Gallbladder Summer followed by Children’s Respiratory Illness Autumn

Nenna, smiling in her new pyjamas with pineapples on them.

If you follow me on social media at all, you’ll know that Littlest has been in hospital for a couple of weeks now. She went in with a respiratory infection that necessitated us flying back from our holiday/respite break and she’s having trouble throwing it off. She’s been in and out of the local ICU, swapping between there and the children’s ward HDU. There isn’t a dedicated PICU locally and we are waiting for a bed in the children’s hospital in Bristol. They are snowed however, because the Children’s Respiratory Illness Season ™ has come early this year.

She doesn’t currently need non-invasive ventilation and is on nasal oxygen of either the high-flow or low-flow kind; IV antibiotics; and having a lot of chest physio and suction. Her SATS keep swinging up and down and she is getting very tired. Last week we had a very difficult conversation with her doctors about the pros and cons of invasive ventilation. It needed to be had, but it was emotionally gruesome.

I’m updating every couple of days on tiktok, more for myself than anyone else really–it feels good to talk about it a bit, it releases some of the pressure inside me. She’s a strong-minded little girl–not so little now at fourteen–and we are hopeful she will throw this off. But also, we have been living with the knowledge that she is life-limited since we were first referred to the children’s hospice when she was four.

Every time she is poorly like this, her overall health and wellbeing steps down. Even if she throws it off, it’s probable she won’t ever regain the strength she had before. One of the reasons Bristol want her there is so they can assess her for overnight non-invasive ventilation when she is well enough to come home.

I am swinging between bursts of activity on social media and managing to write as displacement, to not being able to do anything. My own health still isn’t back to normal after my Gallbladder Summer and I’m having to pace myself. Consequently Mr AL is spending most of the time in hospital with Littlest–because of her communication issues and special needs she needs someone who knows here there pretty much all the time. I’m trying to do a few hours in the morning and early afternoon and he’s doing the late afternoon and evening; and when we don’t have help from one of her lovely carers, the night as well. No-one needs me overdoing it and having a seizure on the ward, although they’ve been very nice when I have.

Talking Child is bottling it all up, as are we all I suppose. Every so often they have a meltdown, completely understandably. We are taking it in turns.

That’s the news, anyway. If you’d like to contribute to a crowdfunder to help with additional carer costs and for hospital food when we don’t have enough spoons to take sandwiches and a thermos, I have set one up here. Alternatively if you’d like to support us by buying one of my books, you can find them here. Any help is very gratefully received <3.

#TheWeekThatWas

Right then…it’s been a while and this is a bit of a rambling personal post to get myself back in to the swing of things.

patio table and chair set on a garden
Photo by Deeana Arts on Pexels.com

I stopped blogging over Christmas because I thought I’d have a break—things were a bit tough with the kids and my mental health wasn’t great. And then…my mental health still wasn’t great and there we were in January. And then I got a bit anxious about not having posted…so here we are in February!

I pushed back the release of the third Bradfield village novel to try to take some weight off; instead my March release (on the 26th) will be Out of Focus, a twenty-thousand word contemporary novella set in a theatre community in Wales. I think I might revisit some of the secondary characters at some point, I enjoyed writing it so much.

At the moment I’m working on a project for May with Ofelia Grand, Nell Iris, K. L. Noone and Amy Spector. We are all writing short stories/novellas for World Naked Gardening Day.

The Wingman, Holly Day

It began as a bit of a joke…Ofelia’s other pen name is Holly Day, and she writes stories to celebrate different days all through the year. (Her latest release is The Wingman, a 11,000 word short story to mark National Wingman Day on 13th February!)

She and Nell and I were laughing about there being a day for everything in our early-morning writing session one morning and eventually we decided it would be fun to write something together. We are all writing stories of between fifteen and twenty thousand words that will be released on 7th May. Each one features…you guessed it…naked gardening in some way. I’m about half way through and hope to be finished in the next week or so.

I may revisit Bradfield then; or I may write something else first. I needed a palate-cleanser I think. It all felt very heavy and difficult and once I made the decision to put it down for a while I felt quite a bit better.

This is a something-and-nothing blog post in a way, just to get back on the horse. Those of you who follow my newsletter or facebook group will know that Littlest has had a mild dose of covid this week. It’s been a bit stressful because she’s clinically extremely vulnerable and we panicked when she got the two lines last Friday. We spent last weekend trying to sort out antibodies for her—we had a letter saying she was eligible for the treatment when it became available a few months ago. However, it turns out that you need to be over forty kilos and she is only thirty four, so we needn’t have wasted our time and everyone else’s. She’s okay now though, a week on. Asymptomatic, just very, very tired.

The rest of us have been testing consistently negative, but both Mr AL and I have had what could be mild symptoms. It’s only the last couple of days that I’ve felt like a human again.

So…to round off! I’ll be blogging regularly from now on (they said, very firmly). AND finally…JMS Books has a 40% Valentine’s Day Sale on ebooks, Friday through to Monday!

Valentine's Day Sale, 40% off all ebooks at JMS Books.

New year, new stories

pexels-photo-3401897.jpeg
Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

I’m not usually the sort of person who celebrates New Year’s Eve and this year it was a bit peculiar anyway, because Mr AL spent it in a hotel near the airport so he could collect Talking Child from her Big American Adventure. I had an early night and woke up to find TC’s flight had landed and they were on their way home. It was the best New Year’s present I could have had, really.

This is the first morning I’ve got up to write in the office for a couple of weeks—I had a horrible cold in the week before Christmas and it knocked me completely off track. I have been having serious problems with the third Bradfield book that my editor and I finally tracked down to the fact I don’t actually like my main character; which is a bit of an issue. I have decided to put it on the backburner for a bit and try and reframe her in my mind whilst I write something else in the interim; but I’m still not sure what.

This year I have in my mind that I am not going to write any series. It’s going to be the year of the stand-alone story. And I want to write something new. I’ve been dealing with monsters and the border and all that for six years now and whilst I love my magical world it’s time to try something different, even if I come back to it in a while. That’s why I wanted to write Bradfield #3 early this year and be able to draw a line under it for a bit.

I want to write the companion novel to The Flowers of Time and expand the mm romance between Edie’s brother Hugh and his friend Carruthers. That involves immersing myself in the 1780s again and is something I’ve been looking forward to for a while. And I have another idea I’m calling Space Gays that I haven’t fleshed out yet…I thought it might be a trilogy though, so that’s a no-no for a while under my current rules!

In my half-started folder I have a post-pandemic dystopia I began well before covid hit. I really want to finish it; but since covid I haven’t been able to even look at it…too close to home. I thought I might try and finish it; but I have serious doubts about anyone wanting to read that sort of thing at the moment. Last week’s newsletter poll more or less confirmed that! And I want to write some more Celtic myths. I’m really enjoying them and people seem to like reading them. They’re very satisfying to write.

In among all these ideas, JMS Books has some interesting submission calls this year; particularly one for time-travel romances. I am now wondering about that…but time. I need a way to fold time.

So. That’s my vague writing plans for the new year. I also have more audiobooks on the backburner—I have a lovely person lined up for The Fog of War and I’d like Callum to voice The Quid Pro Quo for me if he’s available.

I do have a spreadsheet that I’m putting things in to so I don’t overwhelm myself; which is basically what happened toward the end of last year. I tend to fill my coping mechanism up to the top and then when something unexpected happens there’s no room and everything overflows. Leaving myself some headroom is definitely a better strategy.

 Among all that we have been shielding Littlest again against Omicron. She’s had two jabs and hopefully clinically vulnerable children in the UK will be able to have a third soon, which will put my mind at rest.

I wish you all the very best for 2022. Let’s hope it’s a bit less stressful than the last couple of years.

The wheel turns- the sounds of autumn

It’s all gone a bit mists and mellow fruitfulness here at Lester Towers over the last week or so.

Autumn cyclamen

The garden is having a last frantic burst of activity before everything starts to shut down for winter…there are two roses on the white rose bush outside the bedroom window that I have watched come into full bloom over the last few days; and the autumn cyclamen in the scrubby area where we took down the tree are blooming like mad. Every time we go out, Littlest and I collect leaves and ash-helicopters to add to our basket of Things To Sort–swan feathers and shells and interesting stones.

The most noticeable thing about the change of season though, is the way the soundscape has changed. I’m not sure whether it’s just because it’s getting dark earlier and I’m still awake when they wake up…but the Tawny Owls are busy in the hedgerow.

There’s a family of them and they work their way down the field border every evening having long conversations to-and-fro, getting closer and close, then fading away. And the little birds are back on the feeders in a steady sort of way–early in the year when they had babies to feed, the mealworm feeder needed refilling every couple of days. Then in the high and late summer they didn’t much fuss with it at all; and now I’m refilling it once a week or so. We still have goldfinches and siskins on the seeds as well as our usual varieties of tits and the robins. They’re quieter than they were in the spring and summer, more chatter than song.

The sound that really heralds autumn though, is the bellowing of the red deer.

There are a lot of them wild on the Quantocks and they come right down to the village edge here, and sleep against the edge of the woods in the parkland around the manor house. When we lived in the old gardener’s cottage up there they were literally in our back garden. It’s a haunting noise, very eerie when you hear it drifting across the hill as the dusk comes down. I associate it with being curled up on the sofa with a book, curtains pulled shut and the fire lit.

The time of year always makes me feel as if I need to lay in stocks for the winter. It’s a primal sort of response, I think, gathering in the last of the harvest to see us through the cold. These days I mostly confine myself to making gin or vodka or brandy with hedgerow fruit and Mr AL and Talking Child are collecting the windfalls apples and we’re eating a lot of crumble. In more enthusiastic times I’d be processing everything I could and freezing or drying it; and we used to make elderberry and rosehip syrup and all sorts of wine and chutney and jam. I’ve got spinach I need to plant out in the greenhouse and the perennial kale in the garden; but other than that, my gardening is sadly lacking these last few years.

Life turns as the wheel of the seasons does I suppose, and I’m doing other things now. I regret it…but I can’t worry about it. I just tell myself that the wheel will come round again and to enjoy what we have.

#TheWeekThatWas

The Week That Was

I’ve ground to a halt. Those of you who read my newsletter will have seen on Tuesday that Morris the Dachsund was very unwell. He injured his back a fortnight ago, we think jumping off the compost heap after a rabbit or a rat. He was improving, with rest. And then on Monday, he jumped off the sofa rather than using his steps and he damaged his back so severely he paralysed his hind legs.

Morris.

We took the decision to have him put to sleep on Wednesday morning. He was four.

Also on Wednesday, Littlest had an appointment about her tendon-transfer. We have been talking about this for two years now…she needs it to hopefully correct the posture of her feet and get her standing again. COVID has meant everything has been on pause, but now we’re looking at the procedure happening in the spring. It involves a general anaesthetic, which is tricky for her, given her condition. However, although this is so-say ‘elective’ surgery, if it’s not done and she doesn’t resume standing transfers etc, it means she’s more likely to develop lung problems and scoliosis later on. So ‘elective’ is a matter of gradient, really.

And then, finally, for reasons, Talking Child has been in trouble at school and been excluded for a day. The reasons are completely reasonable and Mr AL and I are mortified and furious. We have to do the Parent Walk of Shame on Monday morning to discuss what happens next with her head of year. We’ll obviously also be addressing the atmosphere of identity-based harassment she’s dealing with as well–school are tackling it and we’re all working as a team; so in a way it’s positive to have this opportunity to talk things through. TC is mortified she’s let herself down and is currently cracking on with the work school have assigned her. She’s grounded for a month.

I’m done with this week. Just, completely and utterly done. I was going to write a Halloween short story and have it out before the end of the month…in time for Halloween in fact, quelle surprise. However, that’s gone by the board and in between crying about the dog, managing Littlest’s birthday yesterday–she was thirteen and god knows, we never thought she’d get this far when she was born with pneumonia–managing hospital appointment and vaccination bookings and dealing with Talking Child’s misdemeanours I’m not doing author-things at all.

That’s it. That’s where I am.