Today marked the end of the significant changes my editor asked for on the encyclopedia. All that’s left now is to clean up all the small bits, like making sure certain words are italicized and others aren’t, double checking an appendix, inserting the foreword, etc.

I started this project with a Kickstarter five years ago this month. It does not feel like it’s been that long - probably at least a little bit because it’s been March 2020 for shy of three years now - but still. The work has been going directly for five years now, and indirectly for much longer as it is essentially based on everything I’ve been studying for about 35 years.

There’s a little bit of fear about this book coming into the world. Part of me wonders if there’ll be anything left of me once I finally get it all out there, but I’ve had some variation on that feeling with every book I’ve written. I suppose it’s just bigger with this one since the work is bigger, and touches so much of my history for so long.

At the same time I am incredibly excited. I cannot wait for you to see it.

So yes, we are going to reboot this thing for Gregorian 2023. I’ve signed up with the Bring Back Blogs! Project to get some encouragement as well:

https://bringback.blog/

Join us, it’ll be fun to talk about things again, right? And it won’t be 2022 anymore….

I posted a snippet of a story related to June 7 on my Patreon this afternoon. My intention was to share a meaningful event as part of my writing warmup today. June 7 has a specific meaning to me related to something that happened to me when I was 15 years old, and subsequent revisiting of the things and people which that event made me think about each year afterward. In sharing it, it was just a little sight into a life I keep mostly pretty private and a way to prime the pump for me to do some more writing/editing work today on the project due on June 30.

Currently I’m having that moment where you share a traumatic event with other people - one you’ve fully processed and are at peace with - and then realize they’re all staring at you because they can’t figure out why you don’t seem to realize how horrible the event was from the way you nonchalantly talk about it. Really, I’m 52 now and I’ve had many, many years to sit with those events and turn them into a positive thing in my life, in this case a day when I remember people who died unjustly and offer peace to their memories. But I’m also sorry that I upset some of my readers. Upon reflection yes, I seem to have written a story about some pretty cruel bullying.

I think the part that I’m personally sitting with most this evening is that of all the bullying stories I could share coming from my childhood, this one is a minor incident. Maybe this is why I don’t usually write memoir. Sorry!

Yesterday I moved furniture (gently!) so I can install the portable air conditioner in the office. Seamus, my new feline companion who arrived in March after Zigzag left me in February, is absolutely livid that the room layout has changed. He has spent most of the afternoon running around the house at full speed meowing about how wrong it is. I have no idea if it’s making him feel better, but can’t say I’ve not considered doing the same thing around all the wrongness in the larger world right now.

Today I managed an early breakfast meeting followed by a day full of appointments and catching up on work. I’m hopeful it can continue in this direction though I’m also trying not to get ahead of myself. It can be easy to work hard when I feel well and then get discouraged if I don’t feel well enough to keep that pace the next day. Grateful for the things that go right so I’m not also just running around screaming.

Small bit of exploratory surgery on the 20th. Nothing was found. This is both good news (who needs more problems?) but frustrating news because it means I still have no answers for some health issues we’ve been checking into for a while now that I mentioned in my previous post. Mixed Feelings in general about this and so many other things going on in the world right now. Worrying about family who are ill as well.

Since I am having trouble keeping up with my blog I think I’m going back to the “micro blog” plan from the beginning. Maybe only a paragraph will appear, maybe some days I’ll have more to say. But it is good to try to keep some sort of record of what a day was like, somehow. Perhaps this is more important when all the days bleed into each other. Or it’ll prove to be too boring and I’ll have to give myself topics. Time will tell.

I’ve not posted here in an age, although thanks to the extraordinary time bend which has been the Years of Our Pandemic it simultaneously feels like yesterday when I was angsting about my manuscript. I did not make that deadline, in fact, nor did I make the one afterward. 100 Gods of Egypt finally made it to the editors in October, not June. It is even now still in edits, though now it’s in edits. We have 20 pages of bullet point lists of things to add, subtract, change, and make better. We have lists of illustrations that are being pared so we can hire someone to draw them. Color photographs are being chosen. Maps are being plotted. The book is getting done, slowly but surely.

This afternoon I recorded a podcast interview for a university professor who’s teaching a religion course, and I got to talk at length about Hathor and Sekhmet. We got so into what we were talking about that 2.5 hours flew by without even noticing. Time continues to bend: ever so short for the enjoyable things, stuck or stopped or even seeming to be sliding backwards in the not so enjoyable ones. I’ve been doing medical tests, yet again, since February to try to track down what’s going on now. It isn’t cancer this time, for which I’m grateful, but workable answers with a plan to solve them elude for now. Hopeful that bit of time bending might bend a little less a little sooner.

So much is happening and yet it feels like nothing is moving, or that I am suspended in a glass box moving at a different rate than everything outside it - and both rates of movement keep changing. Doing my best to continue to move, as that seems prudent, but also to find a way to synchronize movements. Existential motion sickness is not much fun.