Update

CJ just pointed out to me that I haven’t posted on LJ for a year.  Yike!

Just to let everyone know, I’m still alive and in relatively good health despite several health scares, the worst when someone on a zoom workshop stopped my reading to say that she thought I was having a stroke, which proved not to be true.  The worst I can say right now is that I have writer’s block on the last novel and am mildly depressed, the two no doubt being related.  I will probably have to ask for an extension on the spring dead-line (sorry, Toni and Jennifer!). I’m not quite sure why the block.  This novel I started out with a complete summary, so I should know where I am going, but the details are hard to fill in. and my confidence is shaky.   I really want to do a good job here.    So I will keep struggling.

Thank you, all, for keeping faith with me.

A snippet from the prologue to #11:

The room was dark and stiflingly hot.  Sage burned on the hearth, but failed to cover an underlaying stench that caught at the throat and made eyes water, unless those were tears.  Flickering shafts of torchlight edged between the drawn curtains and streaked the walls, almost, but not quite, cutting through the miasma.  From outside rose a muffled chant, one word repeated over and over, punctuated by the clash of weapons, of pots and pans: 
“Wake, wake, wake…”
In the room was a bed.  On it lay two figures, one bending over the other, who did not stir.
“Wake, wake,” the former murmured in the latter’s ear.  “They call to you.  So do I.  Don’t leave me.  Don’t leave.”
And he shook the slumped shoulder.
The second form sunk farther into the disordered covers, emitting gas in a subterranean groan: 
… let … me … go …
“I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.”
“Wake, wake, WAKE!” cried those outside, to a final, cataclysmic crash.