The past few days have been an odd time here. Over the weekend I finished Maestra and got it ready for release later this month. I was relieved, happy with the end result, and exhausted. I didn't feel like celebrating, though.
In March our 11 year old Siberian Ragdoll cat was diagnosed with Feline Leukemia. He was losing his battle since the end of last week and it sadly came to an end yesterday.
It's absolutely impossible to celebrate anything right now. The house is sullen, the other cats are roaming and looking for their brother. My four year old is coping the way young children do. My 15 year old is spending time with her mother 70 miles away and I can't be there to comfort her during this.
Between the pandemic and everything associated with it and now the loss of our beloved Coal McPatches my memories of writing Maestra are very mixed. I am incredibly proud of this book and how well it has turned out. I sincerely hope that some people out there connect with it, also. However, I don't think I'm going to be able to read it or revisit my memories of writing it for quite a while. It came from the ashes of a world on fire and my own mental health struggles, which have become more serious of late. Somehow, in the middle of it all, I crafted this diamond that I hope shines long after I am gone from this world. It's a fairly bleak epic. The world around us has undoubtedly influenced the tone of the book.
Arabella's journey will absolutely tear at your heart. It's the story of wrestling control of your own destiny away from those who would control it for us. We all may strive toward an inevitable fate, but the journey there should be on our own terms. Maestra is roughly 600 pages spanning years, dimensions, and emotional highs and lows in the life of one woman who simply wants to know 'why me?' We've all been there and can identify with the concepts of her struggles, if not the specific supernatural details of it.
I will be revisiting the Concentric Worlds in the years ahead but I bid farewell to it, for a little while.
In October I will begin work on my first science fiction novel, The Dreaming Sea.
The first two volumes in The Concentric Worlds are over 200,000 words and nearly 1,000 pages of Lovecraftian influenced paranormal horror/dark fantasy that will satiate the hungriest of horror appetites:
Find The Morbid Fascinations of David Bennett on sale now, and Maestra available for pre-order (releases September 25th) here: https://www.amazon.com/R-M-Smith/e/B07ZGH16ZC/
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