New Anthology Release!

I have a story in this anthology with Anvil Press, a piece of creative non-fiction titled "When Something Awful Happened," about my interaction with death and how my accident changed my views.

This was a labor of love for Elee Kraljii Gardiner ad everyone involved could feel her dedication to creating a special collection that our world needed. Several of the other contributors died before publication. This anthology is amazing and has a lot to say that our culture doesn't talk about. This collection has a lot to teach us.

"Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Essays. AGAINST DEATH is an anthology of creative non-fiction exploring the psychological shifts that occur when we prematurely or unexpectedly confront death. AGAINST DEATH is a natural outgrowth of the editor's experience of surviving a vertebral artery dissection and stroke and the subsequent writing of a long poem memoir about the event. To be "against" something can mean two different things at the same time. "Against" can mean pressed up close to something, yet it can also signify refusal. These texts deal with the affects of this proximity, taking into account any meaning of the word. Rather than showcase only extreme survival stories or difficult biological situations, the pieces in AGAINST DEATH consider the ways we make sense of death on a personal level and how we integrate that thinking as we continue forward. AGAINST DEATH articulates the personal experiences of each author's "near-deathness," utilizing fresh and inventive language to represent what "magical thinking" proposes. These pieces are incisive and articulate, avoiding the usual platitudes, feel-good bromides, and pep talks associated with near-death encounters. The writing moves past the sob story and confronts the tough circumstance of facing death with truth and compassion, no matter how ugly or (in)convenient."

Buy it from Anvil Press (Canada).
Buy it on Amazon.
Buy it at Barnes and Noble.

On the Other Side of Opioids

I posted over a year ago about getting back on my feet with writing after my accident. Soon after that post came the death of a dear friend, the death of my doctor, the loss of recovery services, and then new information about long-term opioid use.

I had thought that because I was taking less than half of the recommended daily dose that I was doing well. I discovered that I was still taking a significant dose. And I learned that a small percentage of patients were experiencing a sensitivity to it that created more physical pain instead of diffusing it.

I was in that category. And thinking I was experiencing more pain-- which I was-- led me to take more oxycodone. I was still under my daily allowance. But it didn't matter. I had been on oxy for three years and it only takes 7-9 days for a patient's body to become dependent upon it.

I may not have been addicted but I was dependent. And without a doctor. And scared.

It took me a while to find a doctor who would see me. I found one. No one wanted to take on a patient who was already taking a narcotic that was now being closely monitored and regulated. I was not treated kindly by everyone. I often felt like I had to point out what should have been obvious from my file-- I was burned badly. I almost lost my legs. I needed the pain meds.

I didn't want to need them.

I spent October through December weaning off them, cutting every dose in half for a few weeks and then cutting it in half again until I was taking the smallest sliver. I was told by my doctor to take those slivers and to call the office if I had any issues.

Which of course I did. Always at 3 a.m. when no one was in the office. And there were a few nights that my heart was swollen in my throat and racing so fast I thought I would die. 

The months that followed have been better and harder. My mind is clearer but physically there was some backsliding. So while I am ready for more mentally I can do less than I could. I was visiting with my mom recently and when I complained about my lack of energy, compared to last year she said something that stopped me cold.

That energy level was drug-induced.

So I'm aware now. I'm awake now. I have more pain than I hoped I would. But the stories are coming out. Editing takes too long still but I have learned to carve out the time I need to get deadlines met. I don't have the energy to write all night anymore. I have lost count have how many times I have fallen asleep mid-blink and wake with my hand on the mouse, hovering over a highlighted section. A couple of times I have discovered I deleted passages I meant to cut and paste.

I'm learning a new routine to make my artistic process possible for these new hands and this new body.

Speaking of new things, I have some things to look forward to, to keep encouraging forward momentum. I have a non-fiction story on my near-death moment coming out in five days in Against Death: 35 Essays on Living edited by Elee Kraljii Gardiner. And I have a supernatural urban fantasy story coming out in the anthology Of Fae and Fate in October.

Some of these hurdles have been hard enough to almost convince me that maybe one of the sacrifices of living was going to be my storytelling. I had to consider that maybe my post-trauma brain was different. And maybe it is. But the stories are there, more than just whispers of birdsong. 

I'm listening. And I'm ready. 

Lag Time

It’s been a while. Since my last post I have had two more Outpatient surgeries with a Carbon Scar Laser to breakdown the thicker scar tissue on my legs limiting my mobility. With that came two weeks of intense recovery, which included pain as well as exhaustion and mental fatigue from the anesthesia.

It made writing practically impossible. That was severely frustrating, coming after two years of trying desperately to regain my form, discipline, and momentum.

Then the day came where I found myself with no submissions out for publication consideration. No one was reading my work. And I panicked.

It’s hard enough, while in recovery, not to feel useless every time I have to set a story aside to be finished later, or let go of a submission deadline I could meet if I only didn’t do any of the self-care I need to do. It feels like failure.

If I want any kind of longevity my self-care has to come first. I know this. It doesn’t mean I don’t push at the edges of what that means to see how much more I can do as I heal.

So I spent two weeks in a half-haze discerning which submission calls were realistic to attempt time-wise. I sent a few out and then had to stop. The quality was lagging. I didn’t want to compromise my writing out of fear. But now there are subs still out, still being considered. Every day that goes by without a rejection is a blessed day.

And I’m starting to have the energy again to work.

Stories are forming from the warming days. Characters are climbing out of the birdsong and their histories poke through the cold earth. There will be time to recover and time to write.

NaNoWriMo & Me & 52,000 words

I finished. I reached 50,000 words. But I'm not done yet.

It was easy to flesh out my coma memories. It was also easy to slip into them. I haven't tried to bring them to the surface since I wrote down my outline after my discharge. The more I wrote the more I remembered.

NaNoWriMo became more of my recovery therapy than I anticipated. I spent my mornings pulling posts from social media during my time in the coma. I split posts up into groups and months. I fleshed out the spaces between. And I fell into my own rabbit hole and wrote down that journey.

All the little shadowed nooks and crannies in my mind got turned upside down and inside out. My coma journey was like my own shamanic-underworld-experience. While I do not endorse the method to anyone I am considering it a gift from this accident and riding it.

As far as the work of writing, I maintained my speed and reached the goal. I will spend the winter finishing the coma experiences and then work on the night terrors over the spring. I am hoping to add in the recovery posts and weed the important ones out of them over the summer. By fall I mean to have a read-worthy draft ready.

NaNoWriMo & Me

This year for National Novel Writing Month I am writing out a manuscript of my coma experiences and subsequent night terrors from my accident.

I am just on track. It is day 15 and I am at 25,600 words. But I am just on track. I need two good days of nothing but writing this week to get a jump ahead.

Writing in recovery is hard. And it's been hard to keep up with it when I keep falling asleep with my hand on the mouse. The want is there but the physical ability is not.

I'm not upset about it. I expected it. The goal is not 50,000 words. It's working on it every day. It's chasing the finish line. But I'm not where I thought I'd be, even after cutting myself some slack.

I feel worse off than last year.

And my wife reminds me that I have been undergoing surgeries this year, which is different from last year.

So there's that.

But I am on the track and plugging along. I hope that by putting these stories to paper, so to speak, they will release some of the hold they have on my every day. I appreciate the tool nanowrimo has been for me in my recovery.

A Book Cover Reveal & What It Means to Me

Not the book cover; just a meaningful image.

This Halloween is the cover reveal date for the anthology my latest short story will appear in! I hope it always feels this exciting. It's an anthology of short speculative fiction stories called On Fire, published with Transmundane Press.

Yes. 

On Fire.

If you know my personal story, you understand why I clarified that they were works of fiction. And lest you don't find it funny, I assure you that gallow's humor is the bread and butter of recovering serious pain and moments of facing one's serious mortality.

October 31 will also be the second anniversary of my being on fire. Of when I was on fire. I never quite know how to put it. Words seem to fail the experience.

I'm not big on anniversaries as a rule, but the fact that this accident fell on a holiday makes it a bit more difficult to distance it from the upcoming calendar date. It's not like I'll be like, oh last Tuesday was the anniversary. I forgot. Not ever. But it's a day. It's just a day. It will pass. And someday it will pass and fire will not be the first thing I think about.

And this year there is a happy note to the day. The story in this anthology is the first story I finished after my accident, while I was early in recovery. My latest work, "The Last Seven Tribes of Ketchari", contains a thread related to my journey, the thread of finding courage in a hopeless situation and rising above it to become something more than you imagined possible.

In an original, fantastical world, it's about how we adapt to survive.

And Lo, the Pinkie, It Doth Straighten!

This is my right hand after a skin grafting and almost two years of healing. The thick ridging is mostly smoother out. My new skin is thickening, though it is still thin enough to act as a barometer, changing color in hot or cold. But I want you to look at my crooked little pinkie. I had contraction bands on the underside, which didn't allow me to straighten it at all.

Considering that I almost died, that I almost lost my legs (I didn't), and the months it took me to walk independently again, a crooked little, fire-eaten pinkie seemed a small sacrifice. The most trouble it gave me was that any time I tried to type an apostrophe, a semi-colon came out. My pinkie simply couldn't stretch enough to reach it. That's what 'find and replace' is for.

I can still remember waking in the ICU to my hands bandaged up in tight balls, wondering if I would ever write with my hands again. ::shudder::

My surgeon, Dr. Joan Dolinak, is a miracle worker. Upstate Hospital in Syracuse has a new scar laser for burn treatments. She said she could break up the contraction bands and some of the thicker scar tissue. I just had my first treatment-slash-surgery on Thursday. After all my skin graft surgeries I was nervous about going under again. Dr. Dolinak promised me that I would be able to take the bandages off today and shower.

She was right.

I won't even go into the transformation in my legs except to say it was more than I hoped for and I wept. I sobbed. It was amazing. And when I took the wrap off my hand, my pinkie straightened IMMEDIATELY!!! It pulls from being immobile and I have some physical therapy work to do with it to get it to flex up again. But it is the most beautiful fire-eaten straight-ass pinkie I have ever seen.

My hands are my craft. My hand speak works my lips cannot put form to and for a while I was scared that their ability would be compromised. And it was. But I am doing my work, as well as my Work.

The rewards come. My semi-colons are apostrophes again. I even had to correct the over-reach I had unknowingly adopted because, for an hour tonight, all my lower-case Ls were apostrophes.

Look at that beautiful pinkie finger. Fire doesn't just have to be an ending. It can also clear the way for new beginnings. Imagine all the stories my hands have yet to write.

Can you? I can.

A Post-Accident Milestone

Last week I sent out five stories to answer submission calls. Now I just have to wait and see if they intrigue the editors enough to want to buy them. It's a writing and waiting game.

And sometimes you win.

I just sold the first story I wrote after my accident!

That makes me happy on many levels. It means the work I've been doing to get my hands back in shape and regain discipline around writing every day has begun to harvest results.

I'll post more information about the sale after I sign the contract.

*

I always mean to write on the blog more but I spend all of my free time writing my stories.


Whatever it is you dream of doing, just start doing it. May it consume all of your time until it becomes your vocation.

A Year and a Half Later

May 1st marked a year and a half from the day of my accident. It was just another day of rehab and walking and working and editing and sleeping and resting. A couple weeks on and it hit me emotionally. I could be dramatic and say it was the toll-of-it-all that threw me but I was exhausted muscularly.

I've hit a new level of physical ability. I leveled up. But now I am at a new hard beginning. I'm doing it, but it's whooping me. So I took a month off from writing. I binged on The Handmaid's Tale and American Gods episodes when I would usually be working. For full disclosure I also watched Penny Dreadful, The O.A., Grace and Frankie, Orange is the New Black, and Stranger Things.

Today came the last possible rejections because I have no more stories floating about for submission. That sat uneasy in me. So I wrote down the ideas in my head I'd been avoiding. I wrote when an old story idea cracked open and became a full novel.

I sent a story out to a reader and their critique was perfect. I love them. I'm keeping them secret. (At least until they get through a dozen or so of my stories.)

I have found my inspiration to write again in the same place I always find it. In nature. I spent the day looking up submission calls and choosing stories to send out and fleshing outlines down for a couple more I want to write. It feels good again. The itch-to-write feels in my body the way it felt before my accident.

I'm going to need that.

I spent the spring writing down things here and there about my coma adventures. I have been writing them out, telling the details, and I have needed more comfort come bedtime. But I am a writer and this is how I process. I write. So in my heart I am writing as a means of healing. It is mostly taking the edge off of the difficult emotions surfacing.

There are still deeper waters left to tread but it doesn't feel like drowning.

It feels like liberation.

NaNoWriMo: Daughter of Margaret

It's National Novel Writing Month and if you are doing it then you are also feverishly pounding words into the keyboard, praying that at the end of fifty thousand words some of them make sense. I started participating years ago for the discipline of it, to train myself to do distance running, rather than a series of sprints.

I've tried a different genre of fiction each year, from science fiction to classic fantasy to urban fantasy to literary fiction to supernatural horror. And this year I went a different route. This year I'm working on non-fiction.

I'm writing out the story of the worlds I crossed while comatose. I'm drawing the ways I was able to maintain a positive outlook after I woke up. I'm being vulnerable and sharing a deep truth I would be a fool to ignore. Why waste a good life-defining experience with denial?

I'm writing a lot. The more I flesh out the more my brain remembers. I think if I wrote out every detail of my coma memories, it would tell a year-long tale, far longer than the three weeks I was under. That's disturbing, but also true. I accept it and move on. And it's why I'm writing it.

Maybe after giving it breath, some of it will fall away.

If you're doing NaNoWriMo, you can find me as Daughter of Margaret. I allowed myself a moment to write this out because I'm totally including it in today's word count. But now it's back to my non-fiction. The title is still a work in progress. It doesn't have a name yet.

Recovery Road

It's been a year since the accident that almost took my life. How could I not be thinking about that tonight? In many ways it's been a very long year. And in another way, I don't feel like I have a lot to show for it.

Except I can walk, talk, write, make myself food in the kitchen, put my shoes on by myself, use the bathroom, wipe myself, check the mailbox, climb stairs, cough, etc. I had to relearn all of it. And I did, like a champ. From the outside now, I move slowly, but you wouldn't necessarily know something so almost-devastating had happened to me. Most days that is enough to make me happy.

My recovery has taken me longer than I expected. The more honest answer is that it has taken a lot more out of me than I expected. When I get most frustrated, my brain sighs heavily and says, "You were a pillar of fire."

I was not in a fire. I was the fire.

I spend most of my time preparing-to-do-things, like getting clothes ready to put on, or getting ready to wash up, or getting ready to make the bed. And then I can do one thing to cross off my list. I keep making plans of five things to do a day, but I forget to start the list with all the things I already have to do before any of the extras can get done.

If I get one extra thing crossed off, one new thing done, I call it a win.

And then, at the end of the day, when my exhaustion-induced-naps are over, I write. But two months ago it would have been, "I try to write," so I will embrace the improvement. And my writing spurts sound more like my old voice, and more easily so on my first try. It's not that I had any damage to my brain. But when your body is still using processing points to remember how to step up on a curb, it doesn't want to divert power to imaginary world-building.

And I learned that even then, it's not about desire. It's not about want. It's about can't.

So you have to ride it out. Or you could fight it, but I'm pretty sure that will just tire you out more, requiring more naps than now, and if now is very frustrating to you, it's probably not the best choice.

I have managed to write a few new stories and submit some of my pre-accident ones. Within the last month the story muse has been singing faster than my healing hands can type, so I'm getting better at choosing what to work on and catch-in-the-moment. Better discernment is a good skill to have.

I like to note my silver linings. They make the pain worth something.

I even found a story I sent out the morning of my accident. I couldn't recall the storyline. Once I read it I remembered having the idea for it and drafting it, but I couldn't remember how I ended it at all. How many writers get to say they read one of their own finished stories for the first time and didn't know what was going to happen?

Three of my recent submission responses were we-really-liked-your-story-and-held-it-for-further-consideration-but-it-didn't-fit-with-our-other-selections, and two of my responses were sales. That feels really good. I am not back to where I was, but I am back on track. I lost momentum for a while but I didn't lose my creative mojo.

A year ago I was on fire and they thought I was going to die. Today I am putting pen to paper and birthing a new world. These are good things.

The Fingers Work!

For the last two months, I have been working more steadily, using it as a form of Occupational Therapy for my still-healing hands. The worst damage to my hands was my right index finger, and the meaty spot between that and the thumb. It was an open hole that required a skin graft (before that, I could see the bones of my right index finger).

Each week I can work longer before I need to stop and stretch my hands out. I still make myself write out my notes by hand. I think from the outside, my handwriting looks fine, but it's not quite where it used to be. I am working my way back towards my sloping, beautiful cursive.

I have to be honest though... those first days in the hospital ICU, I was afraid I would never be able to use my hand again. So I have gratitude for how much I *can* use it, and everything else that comes will be an added bonus.

Still, there's a truth to the notion that you don't know what you really care about until you almost lose it. The things that I love flipped through my heart, and I spent one night, unbeknownst to me until months later, regaling my hospital appointed babysitter- I had taken a nosedive out of bed high on the coma drugs- with all the stories I still had in me that I wanted to write. She told me I said it was what I needed to live for.

"I'm not done yet," I said. Nothing else has been more true.

It Only Takes a Moment

Altar by my friend Rahdne, sending prayers for my healing.

Well, I didn't see that coming.

Halloween night, I had four published anthologies on my shelf with stories I wrote in them, two more acceptance letters for other anthologies, and a string of submissions out. I had finally found my momentum after two years of hard work. The rhythm of my work felt right and I was excited about what the next year would offer.

By midnight that night, I was being airlifted to Syracuse Upstate Hospital's burn unit. It was a freak no-fault accident. I had multiple graft surgeries to harvest and replace skin to my damaged legs and hand. I was transferred to rehab to relearn things like walking and washing myself.

I spent Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years in the care of an amazing group of doctors and nurses. I mostly kept my chin up, looking ahead to what needed to happen next, and then next, and then next, so that I could go home. And I did. Which is a larger story that will be told.

I'm still in recovery. I have physical therapy to work my knee flex, so that I can do normal things like climb stairs, step over obstacles, and step into my tub. My grafts are healing well, but it will still be a year, they say, before this part of this journey is done.

I am grateful for my life. For the health I have, and for the care I need to get better.

But my heart hurts. Every day feels like another week off-track. I feel like all the momentum I built up with my writing is slipping away. It's just a feeling, just a worry. I am a writer. It's what I know and what I do and every day I can feel my healing fingers itching to type away. The damage to my right hand was serious enough that writing more than a couple hours a day is still difficult. So I've been taking notes and organizing projects and letting go of the stories I was working on whose submission deadlines have past.

There will be stories from me. That will never be a problem. For the time being, my personal story is the one that needs my attention. Healing muscles and tissue first. Working words and fingers second.

Review for One Thousand Words for War!

I had a wonderful experience working with CBAY books- they were very understanding of my limitations in correspondence from my hospital bed. For this YA anthology, I wrote a short called "Jar of Pickles" in a style called kishōtenketsu, which is a story without a Western conflict.

One of the toughest review publications has looked at the anthology and here is what they say.

Kirkus Reviews the newest anthology I am included in!

But don't take their word for it. Check it out for yourselves!