A poetry collection about breaking, blooming, and putting the pieces back together

Content Note: This post discusses grief, trauma, complicated relationships, chronic illness, loss, and emotionally vulnerable writing. The upcoming poetry collection also explores some of these themes.

Welcome back to the Cryptid’s Writing Lair.

This is The Crippled Cryptid, reporting from the back table, Bed Jail™, the couch nest, or whichever soft surface has currently been declared headquarters.

Today, it’s the back table.

There’s smoked butterscotch iced coffee. A candle is lit. We’ve got some gorgeous fall weather, which is frankly suspicious for August, but you know what?

Your ghoul isn’t mad. 🍂

She lives for fall, and you know it.

And today, I have something rather large sitting on the Workbench.

Something I’ve been working toward for a very long time.

🌙 Something Is Blooming

On September 1st, I will be releasing my poetry collection, Night Blooming Flowers.

There.

I said it.

It’s wildly exciting.

It’s exhilarating.

Anxiety inducing.

And, if we’re being completely honest, it’s absolutely terrifying.

Because somehow, in the middle of one hell of a year, I managed to write a book.

In the past six months alone, I’ve gone through a foraminotomy, brought home a puppy, met my father, navigated an absurd number of medical appointments, continued figuring out life with Luna, grieved Bear, and experienced approximately seventeen thousand other things that apparently needed to happen all at once.

And now?

Now it’s time for something special to happen.

I get to release a book.

My book.

Night Blooming Flowers.

And this is only the beginning.

🪴 Welcome to the Workbench

Around here, writing rarely happens alone.

Luna is usually somewhere nearby, keeping one eye on me and one eye on whatever nonsense is happening in the Den.

Binka is learning that “settling while Mama writes” is a skill, although he remains deeply unconvinced that wrestling with his sister is not technically part of the writing process.

There are dog-safe snacks being negotiated.

There is probably somebody asking what I’m doing.

And somewhere in the background, M&M is inevitably asking the question I have learned to expect:

“How’s your writing going?”

Sometimes followed by:

“Do you need anything?”

And then there’s the Yard Yeti.

Years ago, we joked that someday, when I became a famous author, I’d buy him an Impala.

Preferably one that looked suspiciously familiar. You know… like the one from Supernatural?

It can’t be Baby. That one belongs to Jensen but… we can get close.

We’re still waiting on the famous-author part.

The Impala remains pending.

But the dream is still sitting at the table with me.

Because that’s the thing about writing.

It isn’t just the words.

It’s the people who ask about the words.

The dogs who supervise them.

The ridiculous jokes that somehow survive for years.

The dreams that started as:

“Wouldn’t it be funny if…” and slowly became something you actually believe might happen.

And then, somehow, I look down and realize:

I wrote.

Not just blog words.

Not just caption words.

Not just the “please, insurance company, acknowledge that I am a human being” words.

Story words.

Poetry.

The kind of words that make me want to keep going.

The kind that remind me why I started.

The kind that prove the stories are still in here.

So, welcome to the Workbench.

Let’s see what we’re building this week.

Weekly Starting Word Count: __________

Current Word Count: __________

Total Words Written This Week: __________

🌙 On Today’s Writing Table: An Announcement

The blog got a hell of a facelift this past week.

The intro got an upgrade.

The layout got an upgrade.

The schedule is staying the same.

And now we’ve got something else to announce.

Night Blooming Flowers is coming September 1st.

M&M was the first person to hear about it. Naturally.

Part of her birthday gift was a riddle at the bottom of the card, “When does the first moonflower bloom?” It took her a bit to get the answer, and she needed a little help.

But she was thrilled when I finally told her, and now I’m telling all of you.

And you already know she’s going to be the one getting the proof copy when it comes from Amazon.

Because either she’s going to steal it from me… or she’s going to beg me for it until I give in.

Probably both.

Because that’s just who she is. 😂

We all know that I love her for it.

But this one has been a long time coming.

🌧️ Finding My Way Back to the Words

Between the doctor’s appointments.

The puppy raising.

Teaching Luna how to be a dog.

Losing Bear.

The surgeries.

The changes.

The grief.

The chaos.

And everything in between…

For a long time, I felt like I’d lost my writing.

Not literally.

I was still writing.

I was writing blog posts. Captions. Updates. Explanations. The endless collection of words required to navigate a life that sometimes seems determined to generate paperwork faster than I can generate prose.

But I missed something.

I missed creative writing.

I missed the words that weren’t asking anyone for anything.

The words that didn’t need to explain my body.

The words that didn’t need to document what happened.

The words that didn’t need to be useful.

I missed the words that simply existed because something inside me needed to say them.

And for a long time, there were poems, stories, and little pieces of writing sitting quietly in the shadows because I was afraid to let them out.

I wondered how they would affect other people.

How they would make people feel.

Whether they would hurt someone.

Especially people in my life who had hurt me, but whom I still loved.

Because sometimes people are complicated.

Someone can hurt you and still be someone you love.

Someone can have done something painful and still be more than the worst thing they did.

They can still be family.

They can still be friends.

They can still occupy a place in your history that isn’t easily reduced to hero or villain.

And that made writing some of these things incredibly difficult.

Because putting something honest onto a page can feel a little like opening a locked door and realizing you don’t get to control who walks through it.

Eventually, though, I had to ask myself:

What happens if I keep hiding the words because I’m afraid of what they might mean?

And I realized that I couldn’t keep doing that.

🌸 Night Blooming Flowers

So that’s what Night Blooming Flowers is.

It’s me, in poetry form.

The good.

The bad.

The ugly.

The tender.

The furious.

The grieving.

The healing.

The broken.

And everything that somehow got put back together again.

Not perfectly.

Not neatly.

Not without scars.

There is an art called kintsugi, in which broken pottery is repaired with lacquer and precious metal, often gold. The cracks aren’t hidden. They’re incorporated into the finished piece.

The damage becomes part of the history of the object.

And that’s the image that kept coming back to me.

Because maybe healing isn’t about becoming the person you were before something broke you.

Maybe it’s about learning how to become someone new while carrying the evidence of what you’ve survived.

Maybe the cracks don’t have to disappear.

Maybe they can become part of the story.

That’s Night Blooming Flowers.

It isn’t a book about pretending everything is beautiful.

It’s about finding beauty without pretending the ugly parts never happened.

It’s about what grows in the dark.

It’s about what survives.

It’s about what blooms when nobody expected it to.

📖 Coming September 1st

I’m hoping to have the preorder link available later this week.

Which is honestly a sentence I never thought I’d get to say.

The plan is to release Night Blooming Flowers in both ebook and paperback, and yes, it will also be available through Kindle Unlimited.

Because things are hard.

Life is hard.

And I don’t want this book to become one more expense for someone who is already trying to keep their head above water.

I love writing.

I love making things.

I love sharing stories.

And while becoming a famous author and buying the Yard Yeti an Impala remains an extremely important long-term financial strategy…

I’m not doing this because I expect it to become some enormous money-making machine.

I’m doing this because I love it.

Because I have stories in me.

Because I have poems in me.

Because apparently the words weren’t dead.

They were just waiting.

And now they’re ready to come outside.

As much as I loved joking with the Yard Yeti about becoming a famous author, getting to say “I’m releasing a poetry collection” feels like something much bigger than the joke ever was.

It’s real.

It’s happening.

And I’m still trying to wrap my head around that.

🥤 Cryptid Hydration Department

Okay.

Before you go.

Drink some water.

Yes, I know how that sounds coming from the ghoul drinking iced coffee out of a Halloween-themed Stanley knock-off.

But in my defense… there are also apple-juice-flavored electrolytes in my actual Stanley sitting to the right.

So.

Balance.

I have provided evidence.

Please hydrate accordingly. 🎃🥤

✨ Until Next Time

And that’s what’s currently sitting on the Wyrm Workbench.

Some weeks, there are thousands of words.

Some weeks, there are revisions, research rabbit holes, stubborn characters, questionable plot decisions, and approximately seventeen tabs open that I swear are all important.

Some weeks, the biggest victory is simply opening the document.

It all counts.

Because I’m learning that a writing life doesn’t have to look like the writing life I imagined when I was younger.

Sometimes it happens at a back table while a puppy learns how to settle.

Sometimes Luna is keeping watch.

Sometimes M&M asks how the writing is going before I even realize I needed someone to ask.

Sometimes the Yard Yeti is still waiting on that future Impala.

And sometimes I’m just sitting here, writing anyway.

That’s the work.

Not always glamorous.

Not always productive.

Not always easy.

But still mine.

And now, somehow, that work has become a book.

So, if you’re creating something while your life looks nothing like the picture you once had in your head, I hope you remember this:

You don’t have to build it perfectly for it to be real.

A sentence counts.

A paragraph counts.

A terrible first draft counts.

Opening the document counts.

Starting again counts.

And sometimes, after everything your body, your brain, or the world has thrown at you, getting to say:

“I wrote today.” is its own kind of magic.

And sometimes… you look up one day and realize you’ve written a book.

Thank you for sitting with me at the Workbench.

Thank you for letting me bring you along for the weird little journey of making things.

And thank you for being here when the work is messy, unfinished, terrifying, ridiculous, and occasionally very, very real.

Now go make something weird.

I’ll see you next week.

Love you.

Now say it back. 🖤

– Sky

© The Crippled Cryptid

Still writing. Still weird. Still supervised.

🐾 Writing supervised by Luna, Medical Alert Service Dog & Full-Time Cryptid Perimeter Security

🐄 Additional supervision provided by Binka, Professional Puppy Distraction & Snack Negotiator

🔗 Linktree: https://linktr.ee/skylanarissa

No pressure to donate.

Reading, sharing, and existing alongside me is already enough.

If you want to support the long, unglamorous work of survival, mobility, and making things anyway:

💜 Support Sky’s journey to health and mobility: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-skys-journey-to-health-and-mobility