The E-Newsletter of Goldeen Ogawa • Issue 25, December 2019

Originally posted for Patrons on December 6 on Patreon

What have I done?

• Cleanups for “Lightning Does Strike Twice” and “Moonrise Over Hades” (Driving Arcana Wheel 3)
• Edits for Star Walker
• Cover and interior illustrations for Lucena in the House of Madrin and embellished prints

What am I doing?

• Cleanups on “The Hour I First Believed” (Driving Arcana, Wheel 3)
• Edits for Star Walker
• Cover and interior illustrations for Lucena in the House of Madgrin
• Sol Horse

Where am I going?

I’m staying home for the Holidays, but next month I journey down to San Jose for Further Confusion, on January 16–20, 2020. With any luck the roads will be clear and I won’t have any winter driving stories to share afterward!

Changing Years

The season has changed, at last. It was a late fall, coming on in fits and spurts, with frequent relapses into summer, but now winter is coming and with interest. Snow tires are going on the car and the bicycle, vents are blocked, the irrigation winterized. I had my last highland ride of the mountain biking season on November 12, and possibly my last dirt ride on my home trails on the 19th, where I got rained on and my bike got so plastered with mud that when it dried, its rear hub had fused. Which is not as bad as it sounds. It means a trip to the bike shop, and with snow coming this week, the timing is about as good as it could be.

Still, I am not ready. Letting go of summer, and the warmth and sun and light it entails, also means letting go of my last months with my beloved cat, Chaos.

Chaos was diagnosed with untreatable cancer on Halloween, and within a week I had to euthanize him. He was ten years old, and his decline from happy and healthy to thin, sick, and shaky was even faster than the constricting daylight hours.

I take comfort in my dog, Frieda, and Chaos’s brother, Aether, who remains vibrant and alive and is doing his very best to make up for his brother’s absence, but what I notice the most now is how different he is. There was no cat quite like Chaos, and likely never will be again. Surely, there were and will be other good cats (Aether is a very good cat himself) but that unique conflagration that was Chaos has gone out, and will never burn again. 

As we move into the dark days of solstice time I feel his absence in unexpected places. Movement in the corner of my vision that is not his tail, shadows that are not him; the top perch of the cat tree, now empty. (It was his perch. Aether never goes there.)

But the winter solstice is not just about the darkness: it is also the rebirth of the sun. It is the beginning of the waxing year, and more things than the sun may be reborn.

When I launched my Patreon two years ago I envisioned this newsletter as more than a newsletter; I wanted it to be an enjoyable diversion which would also, hopefully, provide some insight into my life and history. So rather than a simple recap of the past month, I’ve endeavored to write little stories about my life. I called it Grimby’s Gratitude because it was my way of showing my gratitude to the people who have gone above and beyond in support of my craft. This will not change. But the stories will.

I am at heart a fiction writer. The best and truest stories I write are the ones that I make up. And in the making of them I feel more satisfaction than I ever do rehashing my lived experiences. I am mortal, and my experiences, though important to me, will eventually fade and fall away. Made up stories are a different matter. Made up stories are imbued with their own lives, and these lives, though not everlasting, are of a different sort than ours. They are not reliant on functioning organs, but contingent upon the reader reading them. A good story will outlast the teller, as long as there are readers to be had.

All of which is a long, maudlin way of saying that this will be the last Grimby’s Gratitude as it exists in this form. I will continue sending a letter of gratitude to my patrons at the beginning of each month, but instead of a story pretending to be a newsletter, it will be an honest little fiction pretending to be nothing but its own best self. It may not say ‘thank you for supporting me’ in so many words, but that is what it means.

I don’t know what they will be about—I haven’t written them yet—or if they will be from existing worlds, or new worlds, funny or sad or both. All I know is that I have a lot of untold stories in me, and an unknown amount of time in which to tell them.

And there is no time, as it is said, like the present.

So let’s get started.

Happy Holidays, and you will see my stories on the other side of the solstice, at the head of the waxing year. Good luck!

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What’s coming in December?

Patrons can look forward to:

• Saturday updates to the Sparks Gallery
• Sunday updates to “Travels in Valdelluna” 
• Progress pics of Sol and a new Planet Equine!

ProTip

Sometimes there is no neat little trick to make a hard thing easy. Sometimes a thing is just hard, and will always be hard, no matter how you do it. But realizing this and respecting the hardness of things can make it… well, it won’t make it not hard. But it can make it possible. And when you’re done you can celebrate having done the hard thing, even if it doesn’t look so hard after you’ve done it.

This post has been generously sponsored by my Fellow Traveler patrons. Come join the party!