Having been away from writing for far too long, I am finally finding myself returning to a place where I am most comfortable; buried up to my neck in a quagmire full of words and bad intentions.

The last three weeks have been a whirlwind of emotions in our home which began with my wife undergoing a rather painful surgical procedure that she is still soldiering through.  My free time, what little of it I have, was redirected towards organizing the troops and getting things done around the house while she recovered.

Barely a week out from under the knife, we lost a beloved member of the family, on her side.  Sadly, we knew that that it was only a matter of time, but in reality there is no preparing for the inevitability of death.  It’s never how you think it will be.  When it happens, you don’t just skip to the burial.  There are an endless parade of arrangements that have to be made before you get to this point, not just for the recently deceased, but in getting the extended family together for the final farewell.

Every breath you take is a struggle against the sadness and despair of realizing that you will have to learn to cope, to live, without the one you lost and it feels as if every second will last an eternity.

Finally, the last calls have been made.  Events have been set into motion and just when you think that you are going to be able to live your trembling chin up once more, you realize that it’s upon you to begin removing the final details of your loved one’s life.  Clothes, pictures, knick-knacks and every little thing that helped define this person must now be sorted, divided, donated and/or thrown away.

Fortunately, this is the point of transition.  This is when you pass the point of “he/she was just talking to me “x” amount of time ago” to “he/she is really gone…”  The pain returns, spreading over your entire being like frozen napalm and once again you lose yourself in the sea of melancholy that has settled around you.

As a horror writer, I was able to look at the whole process a little more objectively than everyone else.  Yes, I was affected by the loss of this person whom I had come to know over the last thirteen years.  I will greatly miss the ribbing and brutal honesty she imparted upon everyone around her.  It was part of her charm, and she will be missed.

But as often as I find myself writing about death, I don’t often think of what happens between the point of being alive and being buried.

With my trilogy, there were a couple of difficult losses to deal with.  But, for the sake of time (not my own, but because the characters were working against it), it has yet to be dealt with.

I have been home for a few days now and my thoughts are abuzz with ideas.  Unfortunately, these ideas involve my recent experiences and incorporating them into my characters during a few moments of their downtime.  I say unfortunate because this means I will have to rewrite some passages in order to give them these traits.

It feels necessary, considering the hell they’ve been through together.

So here I float, in a stinking quagmire of dark emotions and words that need to be sorted, shuffled like a deck of cards and inserted into the final installment of J.R.’s Ballad.  I know not how long this will take.  Compounded with the editing and rewrites I have yet to finish, it certainly looks like a daunting task!

But I am hard at work my friends.  I am home, in spirit and in body and have returned to John’s tale for this final battle of words.

Posts toward my webseries may come a little less frequently, I admit it HAS been awhile since concluding the intro to my latest, but they shall not be forgotten.  I have two posts uploaded that will need some final edits, and I expect to publish them with-in the next few days.

R. Richardsson