I owe you folks an explanation. It’s been six years since my last post. A lot has happened. A lot. Most of it not so good.

I lost my writing partner, Stella. If you followed me on social media, then you may remember how I used to post photos of my golden retriever, and how I wrote about her from time to time. She was always with me, even when I wasn’t in my office writing. She died with her head in my hands, and the weight of it as life left her will forever be etched in my heart. It has been a few years and I am still not over her. I can’t even look at photos of her without feeling the scar pulling apart. Sadly, I still can’t muster the willingness to adopt another dog.

Stella’s passing, though, wasn’t the reason I stopped writing, but she was the confirmation. Shortly before I lost her, I had a heart attack. It happened on the second day of a new job as Legal Researcher for the New Zealand Dispute Resolution Centre. Ironically enough, it happened early in the morning after I’d finished at the gym and while I was sitting in my car talking to my kids on the phone. The new job was in Takapuna and we were still living in Hawke’s Bay, 428 km away. I didn’t know it was a heart attack. Both my arms became heavy and it felt like I had air stuck in my sternum. It hurt and was uncomfortable. After I ended my call, I walked to my office. I thought I could walk it off. I somehow managed to get to my desk, but something was really off. The heaviness in my chest had become worse, and then my colleagues noticed. They called an ambulance and I was carted off to hospital, where I found out I’d had a heart attack. A small one. But still, a heart attack. When they left me alone in the curtained enclosure, I cried. I was lying on the hospital bed attached to machines that monitored my heart rate and blood oxygen levels, and I missed my wife and kids, who, at that moment, felt like they were on the other side of the world.

This event stopped my writing in its tracks. I lost my love of writing and reading that day. Not consciously. It wasn’t an immediate awareness. I was so obsessed with what had happened, everything else fell by the wayside. When you are confronted with your mortality like this, it does something to you. It’s a punch in the face like you have never been punched before. I have been punched in the face enough times to know I can take a punch, but never like this. It rewrote my reality. It affected my sense of self and time and my role in this reality.

I didn’t want this blog post to become a sad little whine fest, but I owe you a proper explanation of where I have been and why I have been away, and the best way to do it is to be open and truthful. A few other things happened after this event that also contributed to my absence. About three years ago, I fell down the stairs and landed on my head. I lost my job as a result, because the concussion left me with headaches and memory issues. I even damaged my ears, and I’m supposed to wear hearing aids, which I don’t. Shortly after this, I severed the tendons in my left index finger in a wood carving accident. I won’t go into too much detail (unless you ask), but I’ve had five surgeries on my finger and arm (they took a tendon from my arm to rebuild the finger) over the last three years, two of them this year, and I have not been without pain since the accident. I have to wear a special sleeve on my index finger when I type because of the pain.

I was fortunate enough to continue receiving an income when I lost my job, through our Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC), which paid me 80% of my salary. Those payments stopped in January this year. Out of necessity, I have applied for over 40 roles since, but nothing has come of it. I had been off work for three years and it showed on my CV. My memory is still somewhat wonky and I get headaches from bright light, but this is all manageable. What is not so easy to deal with is the depression that follows a brain injury. The feeling of being broken and not being good enough anymore. Not being able to provide for your family. All of this added to the dread caused by the heart attack, and it left no room for writing and reading, two things I have cherished and enjoyed most of my life.

With only one income from my wife, finances became really tight, and so did the stress levels in my marriage. My relationship with my wife began to deteriorate. The constant injuries, the mortgage, school fees, my eldest going to university next year—all of it weighed heavily on our marriage. And I didn’t blame my wife. Like her, I blamed me too.

So, because my job applications went nowhere—I wasn’t even getting invitations to interviews—I decided that if no one in New Zealand wanted to employ me, I would employ myself. My background is in law, and more specifically employment law, and with the development in AI technology I decided to start a consultancy called Lex Praxis. It specialises in employment law and AI governance. I am proud of it. In the past I wanted to keep my professional life and identity separate from my author life. I don’t care to do that anymore. They are both part of who I am.

Something happened while building this practice. I have a blog attached to the website where I write about employment law and how AI affects employment. Not because I love writing, but out of necessity. I did not notice at first, but after a while I started catching myself thinking about authors I like, how they write, and how I want to write. Slowly, very slowly, my love of writing began to show up again. I started a Substack, more as an experiment, and it triggered that old feeling that brought the Woelf Dietrich blog into existence so many years ago.

And thank God for my oldest daughter. I introduced her to books when she was little, and today she is a ferocious reader. She is responsible for getting me to read again. She always shares with me the books she is reading, telling me how awesome they are, going on about how wonderfully written this and that scene is. She came up with reading targets and other ways for me to get back to reading. It is hard to stay away from reading with a daughter like this. I am currently reading Prince of Fools by Mark Lawrence. I never finished it, so now I aim to change that.

There is one bright spot I should mention. When Stella died, Sonic, our cat, was not himself. He and Stella had been friends in the way a cat and dog can be friends, and we could see he mourned her. When you view pets as part of your family, you notice the change in behaviour immediately. A couple of months later we got another cat, baby Luna, to keep him company. It took longer than I thought it would, but they became friends. Somehow that turned into six cats. We tried to find homes for some of them, but no one was interested, and by then it was too late because I had fallen in love with all of them.

And there you have it. The short version of where I have been and why I haven’t been here. I’m slowly getting back into things. I have updated the website and made sure the links work. You will notice the website logo keeps changing. That’s done on purpose, just a fun little exercise. It will keep changing every few weeks, and I may use it as a signal to show what I am busy writing at the time. We will see if that works. I am still out of practice, and I won’t use AI to write these posts, because that would defeat the whole purpose of this blog. So I won’t promise a schedule. I’ll post here as often as I can, and more than I have. Soon I’ll share what I’m working on.

Woelf