Happy New Year! Allons-y!

Where/When am I headed? SPOILERS, SWEETIE.
In the meantime, though, would you like a jelly baby? 

 

On losing heroes...Anne Rice, 1941-2021

She was one of the first modern fantasy authors I read when I was younger, having discovered "Interview" when the boy who sat in front of me in most of my classes handed a faded copy to me under the desk. "You've got to read this!" And I did...and so on through the early Vampire Chronicles and the Mayfair Witches, the spellbinding Feast of All Saints, and Ramses the Damned, etc. 

She turned the Bela Lugosi Dracula and the silent film Nosferatu that terrified me into the beautiful, haunted, cautionary tale of the vampire as Icarus, ever drawing humanity into a dangerous trap just as Anne herself drew us into her stories. 

I am sad to hear this news as I will forever credit her work for being a masterclass for fantasy writers on sympathetic monsters and protagonists that turn into antagonists and then back again.  

Thank you to our Queen of the Damned for sharing your life and work with us, for keeping us to your exacting standards, and for holding space for us in dark and mystical places. Your impact on the world and especially on other writers cannot be measured. 

Your Regularly Scheduled Hiatus Post

 

Image from Pixabay

Well, I can't think of a better visual representation of me around the holidays, hair on fire and looking like I'm about to fall asleep from fatigue. As a result, the Lettuce will be on hiatus until the new year. This past month's Nano has been a bear from start to finish, and I have a Guardians of Orana novel to put through another round of edits before its release at the end of January.

January, as in two short months from now. Thankfully, the DayJob is in academia so I have a break coming up and when I tell you I will be spending every free moment at the laptop...well, believe me.

Thanks for another year of mostly sharing my weird and wonderful musical taste and for all your support for my writing. It means more than I can tell you, and I'm 100% sincere when I say it takes a village to build a writer. Happy Holidays, and I will see you again in 2022.