Remembering Brick

I was never a dog person.

Seriously, if you divided pet people into teams (don’t do this, it’s stupid) I would have been Team Cat all the way. Then I moved to North Carolina for a relationship that didn’t work out in the end, and met my (now ex-)girlfriend’s dogs, and fell in love. None more than Brick, a massive Aussie lunatic who was made of love and face-slurps. Brick was my cheerleader. That doesn’t make me special, Brick was everybody’s cheerleader. But this was the first time I understood that “nobody will ever love you like a dog loves you” is more than just a pithy bumper-sticker, it’s true to the core. When I was stressed, when I was wounded, when I was bleeding, Brick was always there to say, hey, it’s not that serious. We’ll survive together, okay?

I woke up this morning to find the full edits for Castaways in my in-box. Castaways is a very special story to me, a story about hope and becoming better than you are, and we’ll get into that soon but the thing is, if you’ve never been edited, it’s basically the most painful part of the writing process. You’re essentially hiring a person to tell you all the ways that you suck. All your mistakes, all your failures, laid bare in red ink and demanding correction. Reviewing edits is like getting kicked between the legs for twelve hours straight and while, yes, some people do pay for that kind of thing, I’m not a masochist.

In short, editing is a necessary, absolutely vital part of the storytelling process, and it necessarily absolutely sucks. There’s no way out but through. Nothing to it but to do it. All the cliches. And of course, thirty pages in my brain started flailing and I began compulsively surfing the web to break up the barrage of “look how badly you wrote this line.”

I have a fan account on Facebook where I post new release announcements and updates. It’s tied to a personal account which I never use or even look at; the way the system works, you’ve got to click over and re-log into it, and I just…don’t. Mainly because Zuckerberg fucking sucks and the only reason I even have an official FB account for annoucements is the potential reader outreach. But I fumble-fingered and for the first time in a year, switched over to my old personal account, and the top of my queue was the announcement that Brick had passed on.

Fuck.

This isn’t like losing a pet. The last time I cuddled Brick was two years ago, and there was realistically no chance I was ever going to see her again. But she was there, you know? A presence in the universe. Even if I couldn’t hold her, even if she couldn’t glomp on me and slurp me, we still had that connection, that astral thread. And now she’s gone.

What do I do with this grief? I’ve got this fucking bucket of grief that I didn’t ask for, and just got handed. What do I do with it?

Buckle up, pull my boots on, and work on edits, I guess. Castaways is a story about people seeing the best in each other, and working together, and biting jerks until they stop being jerks, all things that Brick approved of. The editing process is painful, but I can do it for her, and make this book the best story I possibly can.

I will also be taking a nap this afternoon, because Brick firmly believed in the importance of naps.