The Speed of Dark

October 5  (today as I write this; I may not finish it by midnight) is the 21st anniversary of my mother’s death, so naturally I’m remembering details of that day.

One of the memories is of someone who arrived about half an hour after she died–unaware of that fact–to visit her.  When I told this woman, she was of course shocked, and then blurted out the least suitable thing she could have said:  “You should know that although everyone in town thinks you’re a bad mother, I think you’re doing the best you can.”  That would be rude (and unanswerable) any time, but right after my mother died?   I was speechless with shock.  She went on to detail why people thought I was a bad mother (my kid was autistic: proof enough, 25+ years ago, that I was a bad mother, but she was full of specific things I was supposed to have done or not done.)

This is definitely something not to say to parents of disabled children.

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So…apologies first, excuses next.   I have shamefully neglected this blog for far too long.   The excuses include having a publishing schedule for fiction that meant writing books half-again longer in the same period of time, the need to keep up the blog for those books and increase the posts to it with the publishing schedule, and some serious health issues in the family (multiple hospitalizations, tests, and surgeries for one family member in the past 18 months.)   But still.  This blog deserves at least a weekly something, and yet…I can’t promise it’s going to get it.   I’ll do my best.

Topics keep coming up, and I make note of them and sometimes even start blog posts over on the writing side of the computer (drafts of posts are in the vaults of the data drive.)    But they haven’t made it through editing and over here.   I’ll be using up these first, in hopes of having time to do some others later.    They’ll be in order of  how finished they are.   (Yes, that sounds lazy.  Yes, it probably is.  But I have a fiction book on deadline and that fiction buys the groceries and keeps power to the computer.)