Time for some honesty

Hello, gentle reader.

All right, I've been putting off posting about this until it was all over, but now it basically IS over, so here goes.

I'm not known as being a prolific writer. I'd love to be one of those hyper-productive sorts, believe me, but I've several personal issues that get in the way of that. That doesn't keep me from trying to do better, and sometimes I manage to put together a pretty good string of chapters in a sort of reasonable timeframe.

...Only that hasn't happened for around three years, and there's a reason why.

My father died last week, but before that he'd been living with me since the end of 2015. He'd suffered from a slowly advancing form of dementia for some time, and even though he tried his best to remain independant and live on his own for many years (helped by the fact that his house was just a few hundred yards down the street from mine), eventually it became time for him to move in so that I could take care of him.

It was... rough.

Not so much at the very beginning, but he was steadily getting worse, and the situation was complicated by the fact that I've never gotten along with my father. It's safe to say that we disagreed on very nearly everything, and the stress factor of trying to give him his space while also trying my best to give him all the help he needed was... well, it was what it was.

Because there wasn't anyone else. I don't have brothers or sisters, and the rest of his family have their own problems, and weren't interested in helping. So... it was just me.

And that's most of why I've only posted one story section since, nearly two years ago.

I tried to do the thing where the writer can escape the not-so-great real world and lose themselves in their storytelling, but apparently I'm not that sort of writer; I have to be in a better place than that, emotionally, before I can find my daydreams and write them down.

Several times I thought I'd found a groove, and promised new chapters were just around the corner, but inevitably the stress and daily drama of the situation would derail me, and I'd find myself shutting down and groping for words and stories that refused to come.

Anyway, at the end of May my father took a sharp turn for the worse, and it got very, very bad. All the stuff you see in an Oscar-bait film, where a person suffering from a disease like this loses the pieces of themselves one by one, till all that's left is confusion and fear and despair... it was very much like that, and you don't want to hear those details any more than I want to describe them.

So, three months of that, and doing the best I could to be there for him, and try to deal with the bureaucratic details involved (I'm terrible at that stuff, but I tried) and then last week he got even worse, and then he died, and just like that, his story was over.

I've been taking some time to process this, since then. My father didn't just die, he died badly, suffering horribly, trapped in a failing body and a broken mind, and it's left me shaken.

That said, I feel like I'm starting to find my balance now. These last few days, I've discovered my daydreams again. I've started turning those various stories over in my mind, dusting them off and imagining scenes, and dialog, and it's started to seem like there are things those characters want to say, and hidden corners of their worlds that I want to discover and share with you all.

So look for some things to be posted soon.

They might be small at first, as I dip my toes back into the water after a long while away, and there might even be some random snippets of other stories in there. I'm basically just going to open myself up and see what happens.

It's been a long time, and everything has been awful, but now it's time to take a breath, pick a fresh path, and start moving forward again.

I hope you'll come along with me.

---Alan