last days of gothic summer giveaway (& some reflections)

If you're on Instagram and based in the US or Canada, you can win 24 ebooks, 3 paperbacks, and various trinkets! I'm part of The Last Days of Gothic Summer giveaway hosted by Amelie West, where 26 of us are teaming up to commemorate these dwindling summer days – head to the pinned posts at [duplessis.writes] to see the rules and titles. Or, click through here: I've chosen Kraken as my contribution.

This is the sort of thing I want to do more often, and indeed, imagined I would be doing more often in 2026.

As I've found myself saying about a lot of matters: better late than never. Done is better than perfect. (That one might be more of a malaprop.) I'm not discouraged my August 2026 looks like this. When I think about the pandemonium of the last collective year or so, I'm overwhelmingly proud of not being a shambolic mess, and weirdly, I've been more reflective after a traumatic move than I have been for months. We didn't want to leave where we were, so I was clinging to every last experience I loved as though my life depended on it.

It did, in a sense, but as my grandmother likes to say, "Life goes on." Double-edged sword, that. I'm not fond of how sharp it is.

After a few weeks of being her full-time caregiver alongside N., here are themes I've been meditating upon:

• This is about showing up repeatedly, knowing she doesn't want this care. It's not warm and fuzzy most of the time.
• If you want to do it, you should... and this isn't reserved for epic things like hopping on a plane for that spontaneous trip. (Edit: when I say "it" – I mean whatever it is you want to do in your life, not literally caring for a relative! Despite this following the prior bullet point.)
• Communicate relentlessly.
• Death is coming for us all, but it's not the scariest thing.
• An elderly person with memory issues is not like a toddler (a popular and reductive refrain from people around me who will remain nameless). They're an adult, regardless of whatever their legal status is when it comes to decisions, or their level of disability. They have their years of experience paired with little ability to recall any. It's harder to help them emotionally regulate or tend to their own hygiene, etc, because you're up against old conditioning without the cognition.
• Lying isn't actually kinder. (Another edit: this can vary depending on the severity of symptoms, but on the whole, I don't think it's kinder for my present situation.)
• If I'm being asked hard questions, it's because she considers me a safe person.
• Trauma and temperament will remain despite any diagnosis.
• Responsibilities clarify priorities (I have less free time, but more direction when it comes to things I value).
• You can't fix the shit people broke long before you arrived to help.

Also, as some of you might have seen on my stories, my Gothic romantic horror project took a turn into the modern yesterday! The characters insisted upon being written in the 20th century, not the 19th, so I followed.

Can't wait for you to meet them as things take clearer shape x