This piece was prompted by a fairly serious trifecta of events I experienced in June of this year. June seems to be a month I need to watch out for, as I was seriously injured in a bike/car accident in June 2018. The trifecta was a pulmonary embolism (actually multiple emboli), being infected by COVID 19 and the death of my 96-year-old father. Ironically, the COVID19 infection brought me into the emergency department here in Edmonton, as the combined symptoms of DVT and COVID infection were too much for me to handle.
I heard death breathing on the other side of the door. In fact, the first symptoms of the pulmonary embolism (which I thought was a heart attack) had me down on the floor thinking I was dying. This threat, and the anxiety and fear it generated, finally pushed me to start writing again, to find some life with a shroud of death all around me. The mysterious first step into my story came from a spelling error in an email from Russell Lockhart. Some background is needed here. Russell and Paco Mitchell had been writing an online series titled The Deathling Crown Lottery. In one episode, a character in a pub named Bumbles was briefly introduced. I liked the name and the character. He reminded me of my state of being at the time. In Russell’s email responding to my request to use the Bumbles character name in my story, Russell’s Bumbles, became Brambles. That fortuitous change was the connection I needed to start writing something new. It also connected to many events around my living in England for a year at a time twice when I was much younger.
A synchronicity perhaps. The subsequent writing was therapeutic for me evoking feelings of play connecting me with something mysterious that spontaneously led me in my writing. I began to feel life again inside myself.
Is my story an example of exceptional writing? No, not at all, but that is not the point of it. Since then I’ve wanted to continue the writing, but couldn’t find the next connection or path leading me on until recently. Then, one day, I remembered a story I had started quite some time ago but stopped writing it because I allowed my inner critic to cut me off from it.
In my next blog, I will present the Bumbles piece I wrote and then connect it to the old story.
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