this one's a quick sign of life

Hi, all!

It's been a bit, largely because my spouse and I have been navigating some enormous life changes. Without unpacking years' worth of lore and ruining a few people's privacy, we're now living with my grandmother who has dementia. More or less, she's not able to live independently, but didn't need to be in a proper memory care facility at this stage, so it was decided to move her out of the latter and in with us.

The story is long and stranger than fiction (bits of it transmuted into Threads of Wyrd), but we were pleased to do it. We were under no illusions that it would be easy, but we wanted to help her. She's moved several times since her husband died and she was diagnosed with her illness; the trauma of having to do so repeatedly and under stressful circumstances has, in my opinion, not helped her flourish.

Unfortunately, we're also in a financial position where we need to depend on family help purely to survive, so part of the decision-making process was more of a necessity.

My gran, though, is not the problematic element of this tale. I refuse to take any of my own frustrations out upon her. In some ways, I feel charged by my ancestors in this present moment?

Burdened with glorious purpose?

That one is for my fellow Loki fans.

In all seriousness, many of the changes we've faced in the last month have been good. We discovered that the home we were renting before we moved in with Gran was riddled with mould, and it was particularly bad in the floor and back wall of our bedroom. Where we slept every night. No big deal. There were other problems that we'd given up trying to get the landlord to fix – there was, mysteriously, never money for such superfluous issues as bad windows, doors with literal holes in them, old toilets that constantly backed up, an electrical box that was not up to code, or rats that had invaded the crawlspaces. The mould, though not precisely surprising, hadn't been as obvious until we removed the larger pieces of furniture.

My spouse, however, did battle mysterious full-body hives for almost two months this past spring, and now we very likely know the biggest contributing factor apart from a specific stressor that set them off. Maybe inevitably, it's also become clearer that other nagging health issues were being caused by the continuous and then-unknown exposure. We're still Covid-cautious and run some serious filters indoors... I think that actually helped us more than we quite knew.

Our house now is a new build and it's lovely. We don't own it, just to be clear, but it's nice to be in a place that isn't actively making us vaguely, or not-so-vaguely in N.'s case, ill. It isn't anywhere close to where we'd prefer to be living, and that loss is omnipresent, but I'm grateful for small (big?) improvements.

Understandably, I've been a bit remiss in my writing schedule since last autumn because

/gestures vaguely and weakly/

all of this was taking shape, and I was trying to work out a less convoluted solution than where we landed. But I promise I'm still in the ring. I'm really invested in my next ideas, and I'm excited to continue throwing my weight behind getting Threads of Wyrd to its best readers. To those ends, please keep an eye on my newsletter (this) and especially my Instagram, where I'll be participating in a summer SFF challenge and an end-of-summer Gothic giveaway hosted by the lovely Amelie West.

I hope you're all as well as can be expected x