I have been afraid my whole life.

Afraid of sharks in the bathtub. Afraid elevator doors would close unexpectedly, crushing me to death. I was afraid that having two Christmas tress meant we would get carpenter ants in the house.

I was–and still am–mocked by my family for that last one. No, I was really afraid I wouldn’t get presents because Santa wouldn’t know which tree to leave them under–or so I was repeatedly told. Despite the fact that I already didn’t believe in him by then; despite my increasingly desperate protestations that my emotion was sincere. My fears were treated as selfish and laughable.

I learned not to tell people I was afraid. I cultivated a tough exterior, cold and unsympathetic.  So the adult fears that supplanted my silly childhood terrors grew in the darkness inside my armour, humid and stifling even to me. I had no key though. Someone else was holding it, waiting.

I grew afraid of the dark which had been my haven, of spiders (that I had loved as a child). I grew afraid of people, of emotion. My family taught me that love meant accepting you were a figure of fun, to be diminished and derided. I was taught never to be anything other than some steel statue.

I was alone, but I could pretend I was not afraid.

In my late twenties, I learned to fight. I’d been in martial arts since I was seventeen but it wasn’t until I found my current school and Sifu that I actually knew what I was doing. Now, I’m a stick fighter, a boxer, a wrestler.

Back then, when I started, I had a good bluff front. I had a reputation as a machine, who never stopped and never gave up until I was forced. My instructor saw differently though. In private lessons, just he and I, he saw me turn tail, turn ‘turtle’ (cover my face and refuse to fight), back down, cower. For over a year he would stop when I did that, reset himself and begin again.

Then one day… he didn’t. I covered my head in my hands and ducked away, looking down to the ground.

He didn’t stop hitting me. Not cruelly. I was not afraid I would be injured. He was calm, controlled and patient.

But he wouldn’t stop.

Until I raised my head and fought back.

Something in the back of my head snapped. I remember the world getting wider, and brighter, but I think that’s just a post-incident construction. A lifetime of fantasy novels has taught me revelation should be accompanied by bright lights and angelic choirs.

Maybe thirty seconds later, he ended that sparring session. We went on to other things.

I left the gym unaware that my whole world had changed.

Until that night, when one of the huge wolf spiders British Columbia specializes in walked across my living room floor. Instead of frantically searching for something to trap her with I picked her up with my bare hand and stuck her out in the garage. Later that night I walked through my apartment without turning on the lights, never thinking something lurked in the shadows to harm me.

It was just a living thing smaller than I, who meant me no harm, not a monster. It was just the absence of light, not a weapon of my enemies.

In time I realized what had been stripped from me in that moment, when I raised my head and legitimately claimed the title I had been fraudulently using before then: fighter.

My fear. Not my caution, or my common sense or my self-control but my fear of the unknown, my fear of my own fears. I could look inside my own head and see the spaces they made, the pits of quicksand formed by anxiety and horror of looking like a fool.

I was not reckless or careless or callous. I was just…unafraid. And in losing that amorphous existential terror I was finally able to lift up head outside the gym, in the quiet battle that is everyone’s day-to-day life.

There is no shame in being afraid of things…until the moment that fear turns you away from the path of happiness because it’s dark and full of spiders.

Because the world did get wider. And brighter. And easier to deal with.

And seriously, spiders are neat.

Lisa Gemino is a martial artist with over twenty five years of experience in many different arts, currently training in Kali, JKD Concepts, boxing, kick boxing and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. She writes sword and sorcery, high fantasy and stuff involving monsters under the name T. G. Shepherd. Her first novel, As A God, will be published in summer 2016 by ETreasures Publishing.

You can find her author self on Twitter @tgshepherdvan

Tonsillitis is hell. The true infection, the one that leaves your four-year-old self screaming, the monster pain in your ears reaching back into your brain, your throat, latching on with needle-like claws, and shredding.

I remember that.

I remember trying to lie still on my side on the couch while Mom administered oil-based ear medication into my ears, one after the other. This would hopefully happen before the screaming started, was intended to pre-empt it. I’d squirm and whine while the medication slowly dripped into my ears, swallowed doses of liquid antibiotics and Tempra.

I remember once heading out in the car with my parents and maternal grandparents. I’m not sure whether it was just for a picnic, or if it was a day trip to a camp site, but it was a ways out of town. Mom hadn’t thought to bring my medication and just to spite her, my tonsillitis decided to act up. Big time.

Mom and Nanny (I had to have a different name for this other older lady who wasn’t the same as Grandma, my paternal grandmother) tried to calm me down in the back seat, but I was howling by the time we reached our destination and we couldn’t stay. I had to be returned home and dosed.

It quickly became apparent that surgery was in order. Though this was the time during which doctors tried not to perform tonsillectomies, my situation was serious enough that everyone felt there was no other choice.

I don’t remember anything about the surgery itself. I believe it went off without a hitch. After the operation, all seemed well, and I returned home enjoying ice cream, popsicles, and TLC.

In the middle of the night, I woke, coughing, had trouble breathing, the air moving in and out of me with a rattling slurp, the sound of milk bubbling through a straw. The next cough shot a black spatter onto my pyjamas and sheets. I couldn’t summon the breath to call for my mom right away, my first attempt emerged a thready burble.

Each stuttering breath and cough produced a little more noise, until I was shouting, “Mom!”

The light switch flicked on, momentarily blinding me, but one look at the blood and I yelled again, despite the jagged burning in my throat, tried to crawl back from it, but it followed. I was covered in blood.

My stitches had burst.

A frantic ride to the hospital and the doctor ordered me back into surgery and my parents out of the examination room, the male nurse assuring them that he could handle getting the intravenous inserted.

He sent Mom away. It was abandonment, pure and simple. A four-year old doesn’t distinguish between her parents leaving her and her parents being forced to leave her.

Worse, the nurse tried to stab me. I showed him.

Mom and Dad were brought back in, allowed to hold my hand, held my legs down, while the newly bandaged nurse taped my arm to a block of wood and did his worst. In the moment, I hated my parents for that, for letting the nurse hurt me.

I didn’t die, but I came close.

I don’t remember any of the iconic images typical of near-death experiences. No long tunnels.  No doorways of brilliant light. No voices of lost loved ones calling to me. No angels. No voice of God.

The road back from that second surgery was a long one. I’d ingested so much blood, I became incontinent in the most embarrassing way, my family doctor plucked clots of blood out of my ears and nose, and nothing, not even ice cream, tasted good for weeks. More courses of liquid antibiotics followed, which stained my teeth indelibly and made me self-conscious for years.

I have a picture of myself right after the surgery, pale, skinny. It was Christmas, but this was the closest I could come to smiling.

What’s stayed with me the most was the dream.

My first night home after the second surgery, I dreamed of my bed, empty. The cheery yellow and white striped flannel sheets, the blue wool blanket turned down, the dark wood frame with the toy cupboard built in. Just the bed in a kind of spot light, the rest of the room, dark. The image of the bed receded into the darkness and finally disappeared.

The feeling that I woke up with was that I had died, not that I really understood what that meant, but that I had ceased to exist in the world I had grown up in to that point and that the world I woke up in was a new one. I had a new life, too. A second chance.

Now, I’d say that back then I dreamed of one of those moments at which the infinite iterations of parallel universes converge. I turned left at the crossroads. The sensation was profound.

I also think it was the experience that set me on the path of the creative. I might never know for sure, but I feel that it’s true.

Melanie Marttila creates worlds from whole cloth. Ink alchemist, dream singer, and SFF novelist in progress, she lives with her spouse in Sudbury, Ontario, on the street that bears her family name, in the house in which three generations of her family have lived. Her short fiction has been published in Bastion Science Fiction Magazine and On Spec Magazine.

You can find her on Twitter @MelanieMarttila and on her blog, Writerly Goodness

“You go on. You just go on. There’s nothing more to it, and there’s no trick to make it easier. You just go on.” ~ Lois McMaster Bujold, Memory

When we think of loss, we usually think of death—“Sorry for your loss”. But loss can be the end of a friendship, moving away from home, divorce, illness, changing schools, growing older, losing a job, even something as simple as losing our innocence and naivety. Sometimes loss carves a hole in our lives and marks us with the absence of something we love but it can also create a space for growth and enlightenment. Bittersweet, tragic, humorous, loss takes endless and constantly evolving forms.

In one of life’s moments of verisimilitude, about half way through the first draft of the fourth book in the Warpworld series, in which so many of our characters experience loss, I found myself coping first with the deaths of my sister and father, and then moving away from Nelson, BC, my base camp since 2009.  The parallel journey of loss—in real life and on the page—has been surreal and Josh has been along as friend, supporter, and co-worker for the entire crazy ride.

As Josh and I enter the home stretch to publication for the penultimate book in our saga (almost there, I promise!), we decided to once more host a blog series about the overriding theme of this installment. We invited our guests to discuss any aspect of loss that shaped their lives or, in the case of authors, their fiction. The submissions we received are poignant, comical, inspiring, and sometimes heartbreaking.

In a world that at times feels obsessed with having more, more, more, it is intriguing to see how much we gain when something is taken away, pulled from us against our will. The characters in the Warpworld series lose their freedom, their beliefs, their privilege, their homes, their families, and yet somehow, as Lois McMaster Bujold so beautifully expresses in her novel Memory, they “go on”.  In the weeks to come, we’ll introduce you to some amazing real life people who have found their own way through loss, their own way to “go on”.

Our first guest post will be up tomorrow morning, written by SFF author, martial artist, and all around kick-ass human, Setsu Uzume. Should authors use writing as therapy? Tune in and find out!

Blood for water

~ Kristene