A Wee Up-date, Just

Gwabryel's illustration for "Some Distant Baying Sound," which will appear in UNCOMMON PLACES next Spring from Hippocampus Press

Just a wee note.  I am not much online these days because I'm still rather weak and the stairs leading down to the basement, where I have my laptop and Internet access, proves difficult at times.  Going down the stairs is usually okay, but climbing them to get back to the main floor and my bedroom sometimes so exhausts me and gives me such a pain in my chest that I need to take one of my nitroglycerine pills.  I am trying to come down once or twice a week to check email and all of that.  I sometimes think I am feeling better, but then I try to behave in a normal fashion and the result is wretched.  Today I decided to drive to Southcenter Mall to pay my Nordstrom bill, as I am too late to mail it in.  I try to mail it in so that I don't wander to the cosmetic section and become entranced with some new lipstick or eyeshadow.  Honey, I'm a sucker for makeup.  So I parked my car and got out and walked to the store, and I nearly fainted.  The air was so bleedin' cold and I could not breathe.  I had to find a chair to sit in before I paid my bill.  I was gonna pay in the underwear section, but the lure proved too fatal, so I staggered to cosmetics, where at the MAC section Lady Gaga was crooning "Born This Way."  I went to the NARS section -- and O MY GREAT YUGGOTH, what did I see?

The new Arabian Nights shadow trio.  Girlfriend, did I get it?  You bet I did!  Now I need to get healthy so I have the energy to do a FABULOUS drag for some new YouTube frolick.

I stay in bed almost all day, trying to read but usually sleeping or gasping for air.  Just very weak.  We are making big chances and hiring more full-time at-home care for Mother, so that I don't have to lift her any longer.  I think the heavy lifting of taking care of mom may have triggered, in part, this new heart trauma.

I want to return to writing, but I simply have no strength.  If I am bent over this keyboard for more than half an hour I get dizzy and have difficulty breathing.  So I won't be online too often, and there will be long gaps of silence here and at YouTube & Facebook, and I shall get hideously behind in answering email.  I love y'all for your patience.  I have asked a friend, one of the finest fantasy and horror writers of all time, to help me write my next book--I simply cannot do it on my own, and she has agreed.  Whether I can actually work on weird fiction is a question that remains unanswerable.  But one has to try or die.

Kisses, my sweets.

trying to lure Joe Pulver into Pugmire drag, but he was too sane to venture into so unwholesome a realm.

Willy