It’s been days since I made an entry. For that, I’m sorry and apologise intensely if you felt you were missing out on my incredibly exciting life, but, if truth be told, I really haven’t felt much like blogging. This is really all because of Saturday.
I went out to see a friend on Saturday during the day. I hadn’t seen him in quite a while so it was nice to have a catch up, plus I think he needed to have a chat and get some things off his chest. Poor little worrier, he is. Anyway, it was nice to have a chat with him. We rarely see each other because we lead such busy lives… apart from me. So really, only he leads a busy life. He has a habit of forgetting to see his friends a lot, though. Most of the time, I don’t think he does it on purpose. He’s just a bit scatty. Anyway, my intentions for the day were to see him for a catch up and then watch Doctor Who followed by writing a piece of flash fiction. The last two things were not achieved, as you may have guessed.
My dog hadn’t been well since the previous day. He was getting really old and his back legs were going through arthritis, but on the Friday.. he just refused to eat. He didn’t want to eat anything. Even stuff he really likes. By about five o’clock on Saturday my mum was getting really upset about it. So she called the vet… And we ended up going to the emergency clinic with him in Bridlington. We had to use a blanket to lift him up into the car because he couldn’t do it with his back legs… and the vet had to help us get him out of the car and across to the surgery. It was horrible. She said he was just old and that it was best just to… well… put him to sleep. So my mum, who was really distressed, agreed. And we both ended up crying. And we stroking him when his heart finally stopped beating. It was horrible, but at the same time it was the best thing we could have done for him.
When we got home, my brother turned around and accused my mum of murdering the dog… which distressed her even more. She asked me if I thought we’d done the right thing. We had. We really had. According to the vet, there seemed to be something wrong with his liver too. Sadly, he was such a big dog that we couldn’t take him home to bury in the garden. Instead we agreed to have him cremated so we can scatter his ashes. I guess it sounds silly wanting to do that for him, but we loved him. He’d been a part of our family for eleven years and now the house seems empty without him. My mum has been rearranging furniture, which is her way of dealing with something that upsets her. Now we just have to wait until we get Ollie’s ashes back so we can put them somewhere nice. I think the cats are missing him.
Anyway, as you can imagine, I really didn’t want to blog about it much and I had nothing else to talk about really.
Other than that, I’ve been revising how to write a proper query letter thanks to reading the Query Shark’s blog. I think I’ve managed it. I damn well hope so. It’s been sent to an agent in the hopes that she decides to say yes. If she does, I’ll be ecstatic. Still, that is only the first step, I realise. After that there’s the fact that the agent needs to be able to get a publisher onside. Still, I’m hopeful. I’ve been getting quite a bit of positive feedback about the excerpts I put up on my site. I linked to them on my facebook recently and there are quite a few people who’ve sent me positive comments on them. If you’ve read the excerpt and you liked them or didn’t like them, as the case may be, please do comment below (you don’t have to log in to post a comment). I really like getting feedback. It helps me to know what I’ve done right and what might need improving.
My plan for the rest of the day is to make some dinner, editing and sending my CV etc for a job, edit Secrets & Ghosts a bit, possibly organise plans for book 4, and then to possibly write a piece of flash fiction to post tomorrow (this latter may or may not get done).
Also, thanks to those people who have given me their condolences over Ollie. I really appreciate it.
(Lyrics in the title are from Here We Go Again by Pixie Lott)