It's my bativersary!

Content warnings: rabies, health anxiety, existential dread

Roughly a year ago, I woke up in the middle of the night to a bat circling my bedroom ceiling. A superior way to wake up, if you ask me. Works better than an alarm. I named the little intruder Batty Battheson about a second before it was swiftly and efficiently evicted from the house by my partner and a very well-aimed broomstick. We laughed about it and went back to sleep like nothing happened. I thought I was done with the whole thing. Except then I remembered that bats can carry rabies, and I cannot properly weigh risk.

In Canada, between 1-3% of bats test positive for rabies, a virus that is nearly always terminal (read: in 99.99999999% of cases). To transmit the virus, a bat must bite, scratch, or exchange saliva with you (the last bit is still both very intriguing and confusing to me and something I want to explore further in fiction). The risk here is tiny. Bats rarely bite, mostly because they find humans far ickier than humans find bats.

But the messaging around rabies is so aggressive that bat conservationalists are urging folks not to freak out and kill bats if they find them in their house.

Not-so-fun bat fact: when bats are handed in for rabies testing, they are killed.

All of this is to say, rabies is RARE and bats are plentiful (except that their numbers are falling severely because folks freak out and cull entire colonies). Rabies is so rare, in fact, that Ontario hasn’t had a human case of rabies in over 60 years (except for last year when it had three of which I learned as I was walking to my rabies shot #2). Being the first case in 60 years would have been an interesting way to secure my place in history. Being the fourth would have relegated me to a footnote. Glad I got the shots.

The funny thing with rabies (as funny as anything can be with rabies) is that before one gets the shots, one exists in the liminal space of both having rabies and not having rabies. This means that at any given minute, the person in question (me) is both dying and perfectly alright. They (me) are both staring down a very painful, brutal, and impending end and planning out the next fifty years of their life.

Another funny thing about rabies (not funny at all) is that once you start to demonstrate any of the symptoms, it’s already too late to get the vaccine. I was terrified of getting the shots and terrified of dying of rabies. There was surely a reality where I did. There were also many more statistically probable realities where I was chill about the whole thing and never got rabies. Which one was I in? The very disappointing thing about our brains is that they can only perceive one reality at a time, regardless of how many there are.

Which one was I in?

Would I die a terrible death or go on like nothing had ever happened?

A friend of mine, who had received two whole rounds of rabies shots because bats seem to like him more than is healthy (something I want to explore further in fiction), told me to treat the shots as “anxiety shots”. Get the jab, and the anxiety goes away. I learned to see them as locking myself into a path. Getting the shots meant that regardless of whether the rabies was there or not, it would no longer kill me.

By the time I went to the urgent care center for the vaccine, I was convinced that I didn’t have rabies. I told so to the nurse. She agreed and gave me the shots anyway. They floored me. The second and the third rounds were no better.

There are probably an infinite number of realities out there. In some, I get the vaccine. In others, I die, quickly, painfully, regretting my lack of a decision the whole time. In some others, I probably form a weird polycule with my husband and the bat. But I can only perceive one reality. I can only commit to one, and so, I choose this one, where I get painful needles and get to go home and nap off the brain fog. I get to write books and hope that others will read them. I get to run and hike and listen to bats fly above me at night.

We all have an infinite number of choices.

Most of them probably work out fine, and we don’t get rabies.

Only one of them can be yours. So, choose.

Writing Updates

My lovely publisher is giving away 100 printed ARC copies of my debut novel, THE IRON GARDEN SUTRA! Enter by October 10th for a chance to win!

(sorry Canadians et al.,)

I am going to Can*Con! I’ll be there Friday evening and all of Saturday. Come on by and say hi! Last year, I forgot to take any pictures. So, this year, please remind me to take some!

I will also be doing an ARC draw so that Canadian folks can also get their hands on some copies of THE IRON GARDEN SUTRA! Stay tuned for details.

As a fun fact (that just like all my other facts, is not fun at all), I’ve spent the past two months editing four separate books, each at a different stage of production. This has taught me two things 1) I can get a lot of work done when I’m not on social media; 2) I absolutely should not be editing four different books one after another because it has turned my brain to mush.

I’m taking the next month to play with a non-spec project I’ve been mulling over for a while now and hope to have done by November. It’s going to have some truly twisted ladies, doing some truly twisted things in it.

…and that’s it! Thanks for sticking around!

Cheers!