INTO OBLIVION

(On Self-Injury Awareness, Garage Kitty Socialization, BOOKS, and Fiction For SPRING!)

YOUR DOSE OF HOPE! (She had the right idea! =)

Hello beautiful friends…

March is Self-Injury Awareness month and since I am going to talk about this a little bit, I just want anyone who needs to hear this that the following may be TRIGGERING. With that said… I want to let anyone who doesn’t know me that well, or that still doesn’t know this about me, this month means a lot to me, for the awareness of self-injury and what it can do to a person, and how it can scar (literally) and subsequently wreck your self-esteem and destroy your sense of identity. Along with the reasons for doing it, I know this all personally in my own life.

I suffered from a debilitating addiction to self-injury from 1998- 2016. The day when I met my kitty HOPE that changed. I promised HOPE that I wouldn’t ruin her chance of having a loving home and I kept that promise. And as she passed quietly in my arms, 18 weeks ago today, I promised her that I would do my best to continue to fulfill that promise, especially as she passed the torch onto the next kitty or kitties in my life. These 18 weeks have not necessarily been easy, I will admit, without her here. Especially with the loss and the grief plaguing me daily with pain that I thought couldn’t even exist in this world. Deep emotional pain that takes my breath away and other times feels like I am missing a limb. I have been managing most of it through my writing and through reading and exercising and I hate to say this, but a lot of isolating.

(Aside: I want to shout out to Craig right now because without his class I don’t think I would have gotten as far as I have with these writing projects I’m deeply rooted in now. Much investment has been placed and there’s no turning back now (I’ve come too far!). Tomorrow is our last week of Write On 4 where our writing group meets up and I am sad it will be over, but I love how much I have learned).

Anyways, I was a cutter and yes, I bear quite a lot of scars on my body… I would count probably a million if I could as I was a strange cutter in design and excessive, but I am not going to talk about that here. I just want you to know that if you are struggling with this, there is HOPE. Please don’t give up. There are setbacks in any addiction, and yes, it’s hard when those happen. But there’s always tomorrow. Please, remember people DO care and want you to heal. I know I do. I don’t think anyone deserves to go through this nasty addiction. So, I want you to heal too. 😊 Another side note: Though I joke about my red strawberry skull being my red badge of courage, it was NOT related to self-injury whatsoever. I don’t know why I feel I need to point that out, but I do. My red badge of courage to face the demons that were hiding and very much appeared when Chino died. The same demons did not appear when Hope died, but the sadness and depression ones did. Very much so. I still wish the demons would stop sleeping on my shoulders.

With that, HAPPY MARCH! Happy SPRING month! It will be here before we know it, and there are plenty of signs of Spring upon us. The weather has been off and on beautiful as usual in March for the burbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

Not much has been going on as of late with my life. Just been seeing movies here and there with the hubs. We are seeing a new horror movie tomorrow night called ‘Undertone’ which is a psychological horror style movie. Looking forward to it! Also, we saw Scream 7 which was fun and corny and bloody and gross in spots, but oh goodness not scary at all. LOL. We saw that with some friends of mine, who mainly went to see it for the new Ice Nine Kills song that appears at the end of the movie. I forget what it’s called, or I’d mention the title of the song. In the past, they haven’t been my favorite band, but to be honest, they’re growing on me, and a few years ago, the night before Turkey Day, Brian (the hubs) and I saw them with In This Moment up in Reading, Pennsylvania.

The hubs and I have been working on the socializing project of some “garage kitties” as they have come to be known—they are 7 cats, who came from a hoarding situation, that are now living in an apartment above a garage. They have COME SO FAR! Oh, my goodness, I can’t tell you how much progress they have made. I guess they went from virtually unadoptable, too feral and terrified, to now… friendly, loving up on treats (which cats don’t love treats? -- I swear that was the secret there, haha!), loving to play, and just HAPPY. They have SMILES on their faces now. I mean, look at BEELZEBUB here!

Such a difference. I got to name the 7 and I named them after angels: Beelzebub (Bee), Michael, Gabriel, Seraphina, Lorna, Lila and Tyler (named after a former kitty of mine, not an angel per say, but also a former president if you like that!) … so that’s been a lot of my RESCUE work as of late (www.hart2heartanimalrescue.com) … and then the INTAKES and I was featured as the VOLUNTEER SPOTLIGHT for the March newsletter.

Mom, if you are watching, and I know you are—I hope you’re proud of ME! <3

BOOKS

SAVAGE ART Danielle Girard – I just finished this, and it was excellent. Andrea Bartz an author I have come to adore, had Danielle Girard as a guest writer on her Substack this week, so I looked up her books. I decided on this title because it was a standalone crime thriller and it didn’t pull any stops. I thoroughly enjoyed it and read all of it’s 422 pages in 24 hours. The story is about a serial killer who has quite the history (of course) and it moves. I will confess, I had the killer figured out quite far ahead into the story, but I wasn’t positive. Still, the story was excellent. FIVE STARS.

THE VANISHING OF CLASS 3B Jackie Kabler- This book was good. I have had it on my TBR for a while now and I decided to finally read it before it gets lost in the pile of Kindle reads I have again. It was an interesting story and reminded me a lot of a Noelle Ihli book I read last year about a group of kids who disappear on a bus. This was twisty and had a lot of “Say whattttt?” whiplash moments. FIVE STARS.

HER LAST BREATH Taylor Adams- Taylor has not disappointed me yet with their stories that they have released. I thoroughly enjoyed this one. This book had a lot of twists and turns and I had questions. But my main question is, who the hell goes cave diving? In this economy? It just sounds so unsafe, so unsanitary and just overall UNENJOYABLE. I was like wtf, why would you willing be putting yourself in this situation? The ending though was good, and Taylor Adams always has some choice make- you- think phrases that I really love and even sometimes brings a tear to my eye. FIVE STARS.

THOSE GIRLS Chevy Stevens- This book was my second of hers, and it took me 10 or so years to get to this one too. It was available on Kindle Unlimited, so I decided to read it when I was trying to decide what to read next, as I have been wanting to read another Stevens book. This was about girls who run away from their horrible situation only to end up in an even worse predicament. It deals a lot with trauma, and isn’t for the faint of heart, I’ll tell you that much. The story was good, of course, and I enjoyed reading it. FIVE STARS.

WHERE THE DEAD SLEEP Joshua Moehling - Mr. Moehling does it again. Can’t wait to read the 3^rd and soon to be a 4^th installment this summer. I like the detective’s personality and perspective in this story, and I enjoyed this book very much. FIVE STARS.

IT’S NOT HER Mary Kubica- Is there anything Mary Kubica cannot touch and make golden? One of the best crime fiction/ thriller writers of this day and age, I promise you that. This touched on so many different topics, but each was discussed to the degree it needed to be for the story. Social media and young people, as well as the rebelliousness of teenagers were topics. The dual point of view was great and the generational gap in the two views was really helpful in moving the story along. As per usual… GREAT BOOK! Now I must wait for the next! FIVE STARS.

SHE THOUGHT SHE WAS SAFE Terri Parlato- This was a good story, but I thought it could have had more detail. This is about a girl who gets somehow twisted up in her past life and I didn’t like the fact that there were so many names to keep track of and not enough description to know who the author was discussing. I was like “wait, who?” about 4 or 5 times in the book, and to be honest, that isn’t like me at all. Either I wasn’t paying attention because I was bored, which I don’t think was the case, or she needed more detail. Just my thoughts on it. Overall, the story was good—and that’s the key element I look for. I think I wanted to give it THREE, but I ended up giving it… FOUR STARS.

As always, thank you for reading my Substack blog posts. I appreciate all my readers. Look for the release of the next part of the Abbie and Ryan saga on March 20^th, the first day of SPRING or next Friday! I will roll out a couple of pages starting then but I have no set schedule for them. I have been working with my awesome editor Kenneth Gray and have been making progress on self-edits along with his comments.

I also learned recently that fiction writing should not have a double space between sentences (thanks Craig! HA!) and I want to thank my old creative writing instructors at Widener for teaching me to do that, as I didn’t until I met them and now, I can’t seem to STAHHHHHHP! Yikes. It’s a tough habit to break. Wish me luck.

Have a great weekend ahead and again—thanks for reading!

-xoxo-

LWB*

AURORA IS SO BEAUTIFUL!