A bad week...

It's been the worst week, or rather 7 days, since it began last Monday night with the burglary and theft of my laptop. And then on Saturday night, one of our cats, beautiful Cleo, was hit by a car. We got a message at midnight, we were deeply shocked and upset. She is in the RSPCA clinic - amazingly the person who hit her took her there, which is wonderful, I can't bear to think what might have happened otherwise, we are really grateful to him!




We went to see her on Sunday, poor little thing - her hip is dislocated but the worst thing is that she seemed to have gone blind. It was so hard to see her there, just lying there, not moving. But they are taking good care of her. They X-rayed her yesterday afternoon and, thank goodness, found no internal injuries, but also no damage to the eye so the vet thinks it is nerve damage.

This morning when we called, he said that one of her eyes is now reacting to light, which is an improvement, so we are hoping that it is trauma, or swelling which will go down. She is such an active cat - she'd taken to hanging out in the pub around the corner! - and we didn't want to force her to stay in after she'd spent 6 months in quarantine. But if she's blind, her whole life will change. We will probably be moving her to our local vet tomorrow, round the corner, and then home soon, I hope.

And today, in a sort of unrelated move, I closed my Facebook account. It suddenly dawned on me that I needed to do it. I had been feeling too "exposed", too "out there" for a while, and an unpleasant interchange this week just made me see that quitting Facebook was the right move, and would give me so much more time to write!

So, a retreat, of sorts, back into myself, back into my private space, my writing space. I will miss hearing about what all my online friends are up to, getting links to newly-published stories, sharing good news and seeing pictures. I know I'll miss out on invitations to events and that sort of thing. But I hope that if anyone's interesting, they can pop into my blog, see what I'm up to. I will probably be blogging more now, as I process what I'm up to in something slightly longer than 400 characters!

I look forward to writing. Perhaps, in a while, I might even have another book to promote, and nothing beats Facebook for that sort of thing, but that is a long time off, nothing in the works. Drop me a line, leave me a comment, so I don't miss you all too much!

In other, nicer, news, a lovely review of The White Road and Other Stories by Ilana Teitelbaum on the Huffington Post today. And tomorrow Nik Perring will be here, talking about his lovely new collection of flash stories, Not so Perfect.