Every time I resolve to write on this blog more often, I end up not writing on it for at least a month.
Or, in this case, several months.
At this point I should probably accept the inevitable and stop making promises to myself that I can't keep.
Or maybe I should resolve never to touch the blog again. That would probably result in a post a day*.
This time, though, I have an excuse.
If you've been wondering where I'd gone since Authors At The Armouries, the answer is: nowhere.
Almost literally.
Meet my current best friend:
Where I've been all this time is: right here.
In bed mostly.
Not for any very exciting reason, I'm glad to say. I haven't caught anything fatal**.
In fact I haven't caught anything at all.
What I've got is coeliac disease.
This, in case you didn't know, is an auto-immune disease, the effect of which is that the body's immune system treats the appearance of any gluten at all as a signal to start attacking the body instead of protecting it.
Specifically it attacks the intestines.
I won't go into the symptoms because they are both boring and decidedly unamusing.
What I will say is that untreated coeliac can result in pallor, weakness, lack of growth, and a host of similar symptoms.
I am...let's just say I look like Grima Wormtongue's less attractive older sister, and leave it at that.
In short, I've probably had this wretched disease all along.
I just didn't know it. Ok, I knew I was small, pale, and about as physically impressive as a paper hanky that's just gone through the hot wash.
I just didn't know any of that meant anything.
I assumed that was just me being me.
It seemed reasonable in the circumstances: I knew I wasn't being anyone else.
I just sort of got on with things.
And then it got worse, and, due to what was probably an unhelpful excess of Britishness, I continued to get on with things. Just not very well.
I got on with things until I couldn't get on any further, and then my husband made me go to the doctor.
And, after more blood tests, X-rays, and "have you considered CBT?"s than you can shake a stick*** at, the cause of all my woes was determined to be Coeliac Disease.
Silent Coeliac, to be precise.
And what that means is that back when I was a child, drawing red blood cells with wheelbarrows**** and white blood cells as knights in armour, what I really should have been drawing was those same knights loafing around with their armour off, picking their metaphorical noses and scratching rude pictures on the walls of my intestines.
Doing not enough damage to be noticed, but enough that, as it built up over years, eventually something had to give.
What gave was me.
Fortunately, now that we know what the problem is I'm doing much better.
Mostly better, anyway.
An author is, as I think I have observed before, a machine powered largely by hot drinks (in my case chocolate ones) and the occasional cake or biscuit.
There is gluten in cake.
There is gluten in biscuits.
There is, horrifically, gluten in hot chocolate.
At least there is in my favourite hot chocolate.
As it turns out, there is gluten in almost everything.
It's in vinegar, for goodness' sake.
All of which has, over the last few months, added an exciting frisson of danger to my humdrum every day life; albeit it, admittedly, a rather humdrum every day kind of danger.
But mostly it's stopped me from going much of anywhere, or doing much of anything.
Fortunately, despite the lack of chocolate-dipped delights to spur me on my way, the one thing it hasn't stopped me doing is writing.
Look: you take an author, you take away her ability to go anywhere, and you put her in a room with a laptop, a lot of pens, and paper to scribble on, and, inevitably, at the end of all that you're going to get a book.
And a book — once I've sorted out the cover, and a little issue with some page-numbering — is what there is about to be.
Not the next in the Vicar Man series, though I promise that is on its way; and not What Cecil Did On His Holiday, either, though that one is likewise slowly approaching completion.
This is a completely different book.
And a completely different kind of book.
For, potentially, an at least somewhat different audience.
Exactly what it is I'll tell you in my next blog.
Probably next week.
I'd say "Definitely next week" but we know how that goes.
*That sound you hear is the hollow laugh of an author who knows it absolutely does not work like that.
I have no idea how it does work. But it isn’t like that.
**Touch wood.
This is easy for me at the moment, because the bed table is made out of wood.
***Preferably one topped with a little flag reading "Hooray for the NHS"
****And hammer-and-sickle banners.
"Because they're the Workers."
I was an odd child.
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