It has been a tough week, losing two of our cats eight days apart. I have been spending a lot of time reminiscing about them and all the adventures we have had in the caring for them. I had a good hard cry a few nights ago and have been sleeping poorly for nearly two weeks, Today it all caught up with me and I stayed in bed reading and sleeping until 5:30 P.M.. I am blessed with a wonderful, compassionate and understanding boyfriend who let be have my time to recuperate from all the stress. He took great care of his dad, did the grocery shopping and even made a fantastic lunch and sent me back to bed for several hours.

It is almost eight P.M. now and I am still feeling very tired. I have had a Bagheera on my desk, rubbing under my chin with his head and pawing at the various items on my desk. I finally gave in and served him (and the other cats) his treats. Now he will let me write in peace for a while. I have been neglectful of nearly all my writing since putting Sceadwe down Monday morning. I need to get into the habit of writing so I can finish my novel by the end of this year (my writing goal). I have several others I need to finish up as well, but this particular one has a few people waiting to read it, all eager to give me feedback and let me know what works and what needs changing.

I have also decided that starting next week, I will pull prompts from my writing journal and work on them as well, starting with one per week and writing them up here on my blog. As of now, I have one thousand two hundred and nine prompts. Plenty to keep me busy for a very long time. I may eventually do more than once per week with them, as I am hoping to do one every day to help get the creative juices flowing. Who knows, I might even get to the point where I do more than one per day, but for now I think I will work on one per week.

As for my novel, I am still trying to decide its title. It is basically an epic high fantasy story about a young woman caught up in war and politic in a medieval/fantasy setting. I am planning for it to be the first book of a trilogy, the first being about her late childhood, growing into womanhood and becoming an exile of her homelands. The second novel will be about how she matures and hones herself while in exile; the various adventures she has. The last book will be about her return home, ten years after being exiled, facing up to the actions that got her exiled and atoning for her past. She will have to make peace with her king and the nobles and help them with the war.

There is quite a bit more to the story, but that is the jist of what I am writing. I created the character when I was about fourteen and have been slowly filling in and altering the story of her life ever since. It is time to get it all out on paper and share her story with my friends. Once I finish the first book in the trilogy, I plan to work on something completely different. Last year when I participated in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), I began to write a historic novel about the Lancashire Witch Trials of 1612.

I am hardly the first to write about this topic, but there aren't that many books written about it just yet. Most I have read reviews for focus on either the young woman Alizon Device or her grandmother Elizabeth "Demdike" Southerns. They want to show how innocent people were tired and hung for the crimes of witchcraft and make the magistrates out to be the villains. I have researched much of the history and the trial (it was documented by the court clerk a year after the hangings), about King James I & VI, the laws of witchcraft, etc. and have come to the conclusion that while the people weren't exactly guilty of witchcraft, they weren't all the nicest of people and some of them did believe they had indeed used dark arts to kill others. So I decided to to make these people a bit more human, with good and bad in each of them (just like all the rest of us in the real world).

I will need to finish my fantasy novel before I can go much further in my historic novel. I have five other novels in the works as well, including another epic high fantasy, another historic novel, a modern fantasy, a pirate tale, a steampunk novel, and one set in Arthurian England. Sometimes I wish I wasn't so imaginative! On top of all this, I still work on crafts and digital art as well. Good hing I have the time to work on all of these projects. I just need to discipline myself and get to it.

Until next time, peace and be safe.