It seems to be that time of year for me to do a bunch of medical tests to find out what’s wrong since we can’t seem to figure it out from the tests we already did. I have a CT scan tomorrow, and follow up will depend on what is seen. The best possible answer is something awful, and I find myself in a weird place for the first time in my life where I’m wishing for that best possible awful because the other awfuls are, well, much more awful. 2023, so far, is just upping the ante on the things trying to kill me since late 2019, and, well, it can cut that out any day now.

It’s also an unpleasant anniversary. I lost Zigzag a year ago today, and that well and truly sucks. Seamus is an amazing ball of love and destruction and I am grateful we’ll be celebrating our first year together in a couple of weeks. However, I still miss Zig.

My personal website at https://www.tamarasiuda.com got a complete revamp this week, with the addition of a bookstore ( https://www.tamarasiuda.com/shop ). There is also a new book (well, a new edition of an old book!) to be found there, a translation of an important ethical text contained in the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Not bad for also juggling massive numbers of doctors appointments, tests, and hustling up the bills this week. But still behind on a lot of work and needing to hustle harder for the moment.

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!