I know what you’re thinking.
Who the hell is Kathleen Sawisky and why do I follow her? Is she some sort of comical contortionist who once made a viral video about jamming her left big toe into her right ear canal? Is she perhaps a displaced European princess who once scammed me out of several hundreds of dollars? Is she a pale blob, made sentient through the power of a wish made by an orphan?
Truthfully, all those might be accurate.
The very worst part is that this year was the 10th, tenth year anniversary of the release of Between Fire and Pines, so one would hope I might have accomplished a bit more since then aside from, you know, growing and birthing two children who now occupy all of my time.
But here’s the good news.
The Code Book 3: Blood of the Beast is finished. It is. Absolutely and completely. I had an idea to change one thing last night but it is perfectly minor and won’t take long.
Now for the bad news.
I lost my job a while back and made the decision to finally accept that my spine is an utter disaster. I applied for disability. One the one hand, it has given me the chance to raise my kids and be a more present parent. It also means I don’t come home doubled over in agony every night. On the other hand, it means I make less than half the money I made before, and what I do make goes towards my bills and student loans while my long-suffering husband covers the majority of household expenses. That also means that saving up to pay my editor is a much longer process. On top of that, we are going to Japan in November (satisfying my husband’s long-held desire to go back, and my desire to research the ever-loving shit out of it for Book 4.) As you might imagine, that is not an inexpensive experience.
Life is tough for everyone right now, and it wouldn’t be right to start a GoFundMe to help with editing costs as I did with Between Fire and Pines. As such, I am squirreling away every errant dollar and cent I find to ensure that I can pay my editor what she so rightly deserves. It’s slow going. People aren’t dropping pennies on the sidewalk with the same regularity they used to. (The joke is that Canada doesn’t use pennies anymore. Did you catch that?)
I know my friends and family have been patient. Hell, even one of my favorite musicians asked me if I was still writing, which made me both giggle and feel immense embarrassment at the same time.
The words are there. They are on the page. I could, by all accounts, publish it tomorrow, errors and all, and finally feel content that I did something.
But truth be told, there was another reason why Book 3 has taken so long.
I’ve always called The Code a trilogies of trilogies. That is, they are all connected, but the first three stories have always felt compartmentalized as their own story, their own beginning of Natalia. The middle three show her progression. The last three show what happens after that. You can read 1 to 3 and end it without too many loose threads. The same for 4 to 6. 7 to 9.
Book 3, along with being a rip-roaring adventure of Natalia coming into her own, deals with the fallout of the dissolution of her family. When I wrote it originally, the interactions between Natalia and all the parental figures that were present, felt… inaccurate. It was the perspective of a young woman, full of anger and vim for her abandonment. She hated so much, and it felt as if Natalia was going in a direction that I could not pull her back from.
Then I became a parent. And I experienced all the highs and lows of of parenthood. All the love, and anguish, and tears. I left the hospital after my youngest was born because he was in the NICU, and I felt the devastation of walking away without him in my arms. It is indescribable. A mutilation of the inner self, of the core of who you are. And sometime, between all the trials and long nights and utter exhaustion, I realized I wasn’t accurately portraying what Amy and Marcus Artison had been suffering while their child was in the throes of so many traumatic events, I hadn’t given them any grace for their faults, but condemned them in the eyes of this single character, and that felt disingenuous at best. They are characters too, people in their own right, with motivations and regrets that deserved to be explored. Whether or not Natalia, as the protagonist, is ever made completely aware of them, remains to be seen. I have the luxury of also telling some of the story through Jim’s eyes, and lord knows he is complicated in his own way.
The point I suppose I’m trying to make is that the complexities of parenthood and the decisions a parent make to protect their progeny was missing from The Blood of the Beast in a big way, and I really only recognized it when I became a parent myself.
So there you have it. Despite its complete state for a couple years now, it was missing something. That something has now been identified and summarily fixed. I’m just poor. It’s my hope that I’ll be able to have The Blood of the Beast published on December 26th (Natalia’s birthday, because that seems appropriate.) But who knows, maybe I’ll have learned something in the last ten years and the amount of editing required will be significantly less, thereby allowing me to publish it sooner!
Ha. Ha ha. Ah ha ha ha ha.
The Code Series 