I am on antibiotics for the first time in nearly thirty years.

I grant that I should have been on something back in 2019 when I’m fairly certain I had strep throat (my fever the first day hit 40.2C aka 104.3F and I was not making good decisions; I am notoriously bad at judging the severity of my own health problems, if it isn’t obvious). But otherwise I just…fight stuff off. An overactive immune system is why I have allergies, why it’s attacking my own body.

That process (at least for the latter) is throttled and, while I intellectually know this, and I know it’s working to keep my body from eating itself, the warnings of “you will be more susceptible to opportunistic infections” didn’t really hit me until Friday, and the walk-in clinic didn’t open until Monday so it was not a fun weekend.

Infections are now going to be a thing, I guess.

I am…not better, and I should be. I don’t know if I need a different antibiotic, if it’s a side effect (I am trying to treat it as such atm), or if it’s some other kind of infection. Every time I think I’m over the worst of *gestures* all this bullshit, something else happens. Finally find out the biosimilar is working? Insurance issues pop up! Get the insurance fixed? Now I’ve got an infection and my box of very expensive cold-chain meds went missing for a goddamn day in transit. I’m exhausted. (And broke; please buy books, I cannot afford the time off to keep going to the walk-in clinic.)

Also, before I get to the book news: please, I am begging you, wear masks. Especially in hospital settings. If you have the slightest tickle in your throat, mask in public. I should not have to be forced to sit in a confined area with coughing children and adults in a medical setting when I need help. There is still a pandemic; there’s an outbreak at my local hospital! You guys are literally killing people.

Anyway.

I hit 100K in fourteen days for November, above is the screenshot from it, and then yesterday I finished the rough barebones draft of the horror book with several more thousand words (this is a lot, even for me, to be doing while working full time but…this is how I manage anxiety and I have a lot of it).

Beneath the Pines (Waverly 7) is nowhere near done yet, despite it currently sitting at 70K, and I’m still going to try to get it done this month. The original plan was to just keep writing words on some other horror books and add to Taiga Ridge’s count because I like getting all the NaNoWriMo badges, and I’m just missing “Write every day on the book in November” and “Hit par every day”.

But I feel like garbage physically, I think mentally I’m crashing, so I don’t know anymore. Even the promise of the dopamine hit of more words is not breaking through the fog.

This does mean, though, that the fall 2024 hole in my schedule is now filled with a new standalone horror book.

It’s been thirteen years since Maya McGlynn set foot in Taiga Ridge Lodge, the twenty-room luxury resort where she grew up. She was simply Maisie, the daughter of the caretakers, and thought of the lodge as her own.

That was when her parents were arrested as serial killers.

It’s been ten years since Maya last had contact with the lodge’s owner, who promised her, upon the conviction of her parents and her whole world forever altering, that she’d always be taken care of.

That was when she changed her name and stopped returning his calls.

It’s been two years since Taiga Ridge Lodge thrived with visitors. Since bookings wavered and rooms were closed off, its halls grew silent, and it never reopened after the pandemic.

That was when she forgot it existed.

Now, Maya has received notice that the owner has passed and, as promised, she is being taken care of: Taiga Ridge Lodge and all its property is hers to dispose of as she sees fit…as soon as she visits her old home to make the final arrangements.

Now, a winter storm approaches, trapping her with restless ghosts, a stray cat, and a single voice on the radio for help.

Now, Taiga Ridge Lodge might not let her go again.

This is a….dark fantasy, slow-burn kind of gothic horror, that is full of rage but also love. It’s kind of like if Dweller was written a little more like The Silent Places but was also a love story, so it’s not super funny. I know some writers are very consistent in their voice from book to book, but I let character dictate that, so sometimes I just will not be funny. My standalone readers tend to be Dweller fans, so…fair warning!

And obviously the cat will be totally fine.

It fits in with what was previously a trio of books that come from the same place in me–Dweller on the Threshold, The Silent Places, and a gothic romance I’m still not done that I will never publish. They’re kind of like fraternal triplets, in that on their own they look very different but all together you can see the same DNA. I wrote a bit about that here at Patreon, writing the same story multiple times. Taiga Ridge makes them quadruplets, I guess.

It’s releasing November 12, 2024

Preorder is now available for eBook: Kindle | Kobo | Nook | iBooks

I am going back to editing now, which at least I can do from bed. Please buy some books and wear a mask.

Good news, finally: my autoimmune disease is finally in remission. Bloodwork came back excellent, so all of the frustration this summer (some of which is ongoing) was worth it and the drugs are working.

I thought it might relieve some of my stress but I was not prepared for how much. It’s that stress cup analogy–I’m already carrying so much, there’s barely any room for anything else, and my health worries were taking up a considerable amount of space in the cup. (As I was only semi-joking about on Bsky: now there’s just the crushing weight of capitalism, career death spiral, and laundry.)

We’re checking in six months to see if it’s still working, and I’m still navigating some tax stuff as well as how the insurance stuff will work (I have other medications I buy, so I don’t know for sure what deductible I’ll be paying when the provincial coverage starts), but for now, I can shift my focus to the million other things worrying me.

As it’s the first of the month with a new release, patrons can download the first eight chapters of A Wild Kind of Darkness today. The book releases next Tuesday (The Killing Beach is currently part of Kobo’s November BOGO mystery sale).

Hell Fire continues next month, then in January and February to conclude the book. On Monday, patrons got a Zara short story set at Halloween with an event from young Elis’s past that’s been referenced a few times (the time she threw a fireball at someone she should not have).

I’m really having trouble with the cognitive dissonance right now of having to be like “rah rah, support me on Patreon! rah rah, I have a new book coming out!” given the state of the world.

That’s not to say it’s not always bad; it is. But the front row seat, in real time, as everything is happening is unprecendented.

I wrote about it for patrons, how I am actively promoting my own stuff out of obliviousness, but out of obligation, because I have to hustle to make a living. It’s hard to pause and celebrate good news, like remission. But it’s difficult, and I grapple with it, and that’s the goddamn point: it’s not supposed to be easy to witness terrible things and then carry on as if it’s business as usual.

I was talking about this with a friend the other night, who was also doomscrolling and amplifying and dealing with the same frustration and powerlessness of knowing you need to keep functioning when you very much want to scream and rage at everything. How petty and insignificant everything else feels. I know a lot of people who believe that you act if you can and then otherwise don’t let it bother you, because the world at large is out of our hands and there’s no sense crippling ourselves with its horror.

But what I think about is if that was me.

If I watched three generations of my family wiped out.

If I was working in a hospital with preemies in incubators who I knew I would watch die because the power’s been cut.

If I was pulling body after body out of the rubble, praying to find one–just one–alive.

If I was going through hell and I knew there were people on the other side of the world in what is comparative comfort, who had their own problems but none of them were actual genocide and war crimes committed against them, what would I want from those people? The people who had no money left to give, who had already contacted their leaders?

I would want them to bear witness.

I would want them to ache for just a fraction of what I feel. I would want that to radicalize them. I would want that to change their outlook. I would want them to keep the pressure on and to not look away. I would want them to find a way to deal with their feelings of powerless, their own pain, to hold a light up to what I am going through.

That is, indeed, half of the reason I write the things I do, the dark moments where I am exorcising my own demons: I want to be seen. I want a light shone on that pain and trauma. I want a witness where there was none before.

When others are suffering, I think the very least we can do is not look away. To bear the pain of witnessing, to accept that it’s a struggle to function when facing the world’s horrors. To ache for what you cannot do and find all the things you can–marching and protesting, writing to our elected leaders (who work for us), educating ourselves and educating others. To know that bearing witness will change us, irrevocably, but that is better than remaining stagnant.

And to the people who immediately chirp “you shouldn’t talk about ‘politics’–shut up and write stories”, you obviously have not been paying attention to who I am. Human rights are not “politics”, and what are people going to do–read my books even less? Lol, child, good luck with that.