And He Took With Him The Sun

This has been one of the saddest days of my life. My husband and I were awakened at 4:21 AM by a phone call from our dear friend Linda Paddon, wife of my publisher Peter Paddon. Peter passed away sometime during the night.

We had enjoyed dinner with both of them just hours before at the same restaurant we usually frequent on Wednesday evenings. He had seemed fine then, happy with the buttons and key chains and postcards for "Raven's Daughter" promotion which I would be taking with me to the World Fantasy Convention early next month, chatting excitedly about some new projects in the works, and discussing last week's episode of Doctor Who. We never realised we would not see each other gain.

His passing is hard to deal with. He was a relatively young man, 50, filled with life and love and enthusiasm, bright, cheerful, creative, a fine writer as well as a fine publisher. He was a man I had known for over 20 years and never known him to be other than kind and generous.

Jay and I met Peter in England at a retreat in 1991, a few years before he went into publishing. We became friends and I visited him when I went over again in 1994 and invited him to visit us should he ever get a chance. The following year he took me up on the invitation and stayed with us for a couple of weeks, met our house mate Linda and fell in love with her. He moved over here the following year, married Linda and opened Pendraig Publishing.

I was by no means the first author he published. He began by publishing a whole raft of nonfiction books, and when he was ready to start doing fiction he asked me if I still had the manuscript for the book I had been working on when I had visited him in 1994. I told him yes, and in 2010 the first of my 10 novels, "Uneasy Lies The Head" was published by Pendraig. It has been a long and happy relationship.

The new novel, "Raven's Daughter" is the impossible novel. Begun in 1995, it was lost in a computer crash until last May when my husband found 50,000 words of it backed up on one of his old computers in Word 95. He was able to translate it to a current version and I completed it and handed it off to Peter in August of this year. The paper and ink version is up on Amazon; the Kindle version  is up for pre-order and will be out 31 October.

Peter, I wish you could have stuck around for the on line launch party. I hope it does you justice.

I will miss you forever.

And as the Gods have willed it, a few moments ago a partial solar eclipse began in the skies above California.  When Peter left, he took with him the sun.