Dear Fairy Godmuther,

Or should I say Godmonster...

Consider this your final warning. You have fallen down on the job. Spiraled out of the sky and splashed a big pile of POO all over me. This is the last straw! Well, or the last one before the next one, so maybe what I should be saying is this is the penultimate straw... penultimate being such a great word and all... but somehow with straw, it loses some of its Mojo, doesn't it?... penultimate straw isn't as powerful as LAST. But never mind.

See. This is what I'm talking about. Do you SEE how jumbled my mind is at the moment? I can't concentrate. Not even a little. And I am laying this on YOU.

See, I was minding my own business, polishing a pretty good book for ABNA, trying to craft my pitch... when... no wait... it started before that...

See, the money problems have been so persistent so long that I almost forget to mention them, but this more recent stuff compounds it all, so I need to have set the stage, yeah? So we're poor. We have a plan, but the plan requires VERY tight belts for a few YEARS into our future. So that's the setting...

[Note, too that ALL THREE of the last three paragraphs start with the same word. How distracted does a person have to be for THAT to happen? A writer, no less.]

NOW we get to minding my own business prepping for ABNA...

When I get the CALL from my agent that EDITS are needed on the book I turned in in September. Not tiny little edits... fairly substantial ones. Damn. Now. DAMN.

But there's no shame in a U-turn, right? (or a U-turn left, actually—a U-turn right might cause an accident, but I digress)... So I U-turn and get to work on the DONE BOOK I ALREADY CROSSED OFF MY DARNED LIST. Setting me back a little, yeah?

Did I mention I am reading an 800 page borrowed book, so my time is slightly reduced? No? Well that's fine... that part isn't really on the Fairy Godmonster's head. So never mind.

But THEN... THEN... grrrrrrrrrr.

Hubby went and had a medical emergency and is having some sort of chronic crisis. The ER visit and ambulance ride were enough, but he is a caretaker and until he gets this resolved he can't work—do you see it? The part where the MONEY trouble is compounded? At least two weeks with no pay at all and potentially a reduced schedule after that because STRESS is part of the root of his problem (3-12 hour days in a row caring for someone is stressful—who knew?). But he is sickly and down and NEEDY at the moment, so wants to talk about EVERYTHING. ALL THE TIME. Which is leaving me both with less time for my stuff, and with a head full of HIS stuff when I get a little time. I know I sound like a bitch there... I should be a goodly caretaker, but HE'S the caretaker in the family. THAT is our arrangement! (and I'm TIRED, which has been known to make me pretty punchy.)

So what I want to know is this.

Why the heck have you not been watching my back? Fairy Godmothers who are NOT frauds can mitigate disasters and make NICE things happen rather than lousy ones. Why couldn't you have just done a spell that would give me a good poke on my sixteenth birthday like everybody else gets? Or better yet, why can't you just am-scray and I will take Meriwether. 

(and for your information, Meriwether is the fierce one in blue (the one who managed to alter YOUR spell to change death to sleep)--Flora is in red and Fauna is in green--fierce is better than nice, but MEAN AND ROTTEN SUCKS ROCKS!)

Dissatisfied in Ann Arbor,

Hart