Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Day 64 - Allowing Emotions

For any that that follows me on Twitter or Facebook you will know I recently said goodbye to the charity series Rescue Me to deal with some issues. I have handed the reigns over to someone I worked with before so she can create her own series and hopefully continue to help animals. The process has been a whirlwind of emotions and that is putting it lightly. There are so many things that have been going through my mind but I was shocked when I got emotional reading a book that I had nothing to do with.

Rescue Me reached beyond its pages to inspire other series and animal charities to benefit from them. I knew that but I hadn't read any of them. The one I know best was created through a group called Writerpunk and is a group of Punk writers, Steampunk, Diesel Punk, Cyber Punk and so on that have a series benefiting PAWS, an organization in Washington State. One of the leaders of this series is my good friend Jeffrey Cook. He and I had discussed Rescue Me before he took on the project and I am thrilled to see what a success his books have become. Rescue Me never had the reach his series does.

The first book in his series is Poe Goes Punk, the second is Shakespeare. I do not own the Poe book but I recently got Shakespeare and intended to begin reading it last week. I found I was unable to even get past the introduction to the book without feeling the tears come on. Of course the Intro mentions the PAWS organization and I am happy to help support them but it unexpectedly brought up more feelings of loss from the Rescue Me books. My heart ached as I did my best to read the biographies of the authors involved but when I reached the beginning of the first story I had to put the book down. It was overwhelming.

I have moved on to a book by Terry Pratchett for the time being until I feel emotionally able to read a book inspired by my now dead project. Rescue Me is a series I was incredibly proud of but had difficulties it could not overcome. Sometimes I just need to step back. I knew I was stepping back from the series and handing over control but I had no idea I would have to step away entirely from anything even remote related to it. Even in the fictional and literary worlds we have loss that as writers we need to deal with. This is one that will apparently take me longer than expected.

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