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************* WARNING... thoughts about death and dying. ************** To be honest, the thought of dying was terrifying to me. i thought about it all the time. First thought in the morning and the last at night. For years. Today, maybe i'm more accepting that, frankly, there is no damn choice in the matter. Now maybe how i die is what i dwell on. If given a choice, i'd rather just go to sleep and not wake up. That's why surgery really doesn't scare me. If i die there, i'll never know about it. Lingering scares me. i watched my mum die a slow death when i was a kid. She was brave but in pain and it was horrible to see her suffer and leave me more and more each day. I don't want to die that way. I know she didn't either. Leaving people behind scares me too. i don't want them to hurt. i guess as well, i don't want to be forgotten. But, realistically, most of us will be. i don't have children to carry on the family or anything, either. People who knew me will remember, until their time comes too. And i wonder, likes lots of us, is this it? Is there more (i really don't think so) but it would be cool if there was. But in the cold light of day, i think this is it. We are a fluke in this universe. We are bits of flotsam and we will just join all those who came before and are now gone. We each of us are here for only a brief, shining moment in time. i guess we need to do our best with it.

Writer's die a lot. Death, that thing that cannot be known beforehand: writers can be said to experience it often. They are often little deaths, small hard moments of pain which pass soon, but in the moment they are with us, they are all to real. We die when he kill off a character, we die softly and quietly inside when they say goodbye to us, we ache with pain when our muses refuse to release them to our waiting fingertips. Depending on how much one writes, and on how long those stories last, a writers can die several times a year. Fans of Direct Confusion will know just what I am speaking off, for many of you died along with Greg several chapters ago. For me, that pain was written a long time ago now, but even though I was in charge of the words as they came (for a certain value of the phrase 'in charge') it was like getting punched through the chest. And now there is a different death. Those who know me or have read interviews will know my general claim of not knowing my plot until it happens: the work is character driven, and boy are my characters often driven. But the end of this particular novella snuck up on me unexpectedly. I finished writing a chapter of A Wolf and His Man, and as i opened the next word document, I knew with an awful clarity, that the next chapter would be the last. So, I did the mature and sensible thing, and procrastinated as much as possible to avoid having to say goodbye. But say goodbye I did. Last night I wrote those closing words, and felt a combination of two emotions. A high bright burning joy that I was finished, done, complete; and a deep mourning for the friends that I had lost. Oli and Boris will go on with their lives, but I won't be there. I believe that this parting is a very sad one particularly, because I first penned the story concept of A Wolf and His Man something like 6 or 7 years ago. I am glad I waited, because it is a better story now than it would have been if I had written it just out of my teen years. It is a little death, one that will not hurt for long, and the shouting of other characters in my brain will help to wear down the sharp edges of the loss until visiting Oli and Boris again will not be so painful. And Kieran Tristan Toyne does shout very loudly.