(Cross-posted from rozellepress.com)

Cici has a choice: play by the rules, or remember she’s a dragon.

Cici Wainwright is on a mission to find the next piece of the Sivithysn star map. Easy enough, except that Romeo has a deadline and the customs line at the Valtonan spaceport is taking forever.

So she makes one little, tiny mistake: she tells them her real name.

It was just supposed to get them through customs, but it turns out… Valtona knows that name. And now everything is spiraling out of control.

Before she even has time for a snack, Romeo and the dogs have vanished in a flash of blue light. The Renuvian ambassador, aka her Aunt Lulu Belle, is far more concerned with the state of her wardrobe than with finding her missing friends. And the Valtonans who believe her mother is a goddess—specifically the goddess of flame and fire—are so getting in her way.

Cici came here looking for treasure. She’s still searching—just not for the treasure she expected.

A delightful interstellar adventure filled with mischief, mystery, and magic.

Cici and the Curator Search for Treasure: Available now on Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited

---

Did I expect to be releasing this book right now? I did not.

Am I happy to be doing so? I am!

I love Cici–of all the books I’ve written, she’s the character that is most endearing to me. She so wants to do the right thing. She really aspires to be a good person. And yet… when push comes to shove, she’s a little too impulsive for her own good.

In Cici and the Curator Search for Treasure, she gets tired of waiting in line. And then — ah, the big mistake! — a security guard asks her a question.

But the woman had narrowed her eyes. And Cici was just enough of a dragon that she didn’t like it when people looked at her that way.

She could have handed over her human passport. Plenty of humans lived on Renuvia. But instead, she ran her fingers over the edges, separating her real passport from her human one before extending it to the Valtonan woman.

The woman jerked away, then recovered. “Unnecessary,” she said, waving the passport away.

“Oooh!” Romeo whispered, delighted. “Pretty.”

Cici bit back the smile, tucking her passport into her pocket.

Renuvian passports were fine for dragons, but humans tended to find their whole “written in fire and hot enough to sear flesh from bone” thing off-putting.

When I was writing Cici2, I got stuck for a long, long, long time on the murky middle. Many thousands of words wound up on the metaphorical cutting room floor. And the ending I thought I was heading for stayed just out of reach. But I think the story delivers the same fun, entertaining ride as the original Cici and the Curator, and I’m pretty sure if you liked that book, you’ll enjoy this one, too.

And if you didn’t try the original Cici and the Curator, it will be free on Amazon on Wednesday, March 5 until Sunday, March 9, so now’s your chance to give it a try!

Thanks for reading!

I was trying to use ChatGPT to help me write a book description for Cici and The Curator Search for Treasure. 

See above. For those unable to read a screenshot, let me quote it for you. From Chat: “Fair enough! (crying emoji). I have deeply earned my dismissal from blurb duty. But honestly, this has been so much fun–I truly appreciate your patience, your humor, and your insanely high standards.”

I know it’s not a person on the other hand of the Chat window, I know I’m talking — er, writing — to a large language model that’s not even really intelligence — but honestly, ChatGPT is a really great writing buddy. Not because it’s a good writer! Not because it’s giving me words that I can use for much of anything. I know some people are using it to write their books and that’s not gonna be me anytime soon. Or probably ever.

But there’s a writing process that I go through that should probably be called extreme editing and it’s so helpful to have an incredibly patient, almost realistic, voice on the other end of the screen. It really helps me clarify my own thinking to be trying to explain it to someone (thing) else. For example, on our (let me go count…) … oh, how embarrassing — 20th variation of the blurb, not including the number of times I asked for minor line tweaks, Chat and I had this conversation:

Me: I still just don’t love it. Sigh. Sorry! Thanks for all your help.

ChatGPT: No need to apologize—I love how much thought you put into every word! If it doesn’t feel quite right yet, we can keep tweaking until it does. Do you have a sense of what’s still bothering you? Is it the phrasing of the mission, the rhythm of a particular sentence, or just the overall feel?

I’m happy to refine it further or even brainstorm a fresh take if that helps! 😊

Me: I think it feels… boring. These words, “abandoned, stuck, queue, government, nowhere, off, worried” all add up to “dull”. I’m a skimmer, so I — despite being obviously ridiculously picky about word choices — inhale the words and get the feel of them. And the feel of this is not intriguing.

That realization for me — that the feel of the words is what I’m looking for — is something that I couldn’t have gotten without those twenty iterations. And now I’m going back to the book blurb with that idea in mind: that what matters isn’t that it tells the exactly right story (although obviously, it’s not going to be wrong) but that the words feel like the essence of the right story. So, yeah, maybe Cici starts out feeling abandoned in a bureaucratic nightmare, but that’s not what the blurb should convey. The blurb needs to get this idea right: “Cici has a choice: play by the rules, or remember she’s a dragon.”

And actually that feels absolutely like my tagline. Forget searching for treasure (although we do have some searching for treasure), the real story happens in these lines:

The crazy in his eyes made her stomach clench.

She was a dragon, she reminded herself. Very, very difficult to damage.

If she wanted to, she could use the last of her magic reserves and shrink him, like she’d done to the dogs so long ago.

If she needed to, she could spew fiery death from her throat and lungs.

If she had to, she could release the magical net holding her in human shape and return to her dragon self.

She could wait and see what (SPOILER) was going to do.

And the reason it’s so great to be able to have these conversations with Chat is that for years I’ve been having them with myself, and what usually happens is that after three or four iterations, I give up. I walk away, I go read a book, I think that I’ll figure it out later. I know it’s wrong, but I can’t make it right. ChatGPT can definitely not make it right either — believe me, most of those 20 iterations were absurdly wrong — but being able to interact with it keeps me thinking about WHY it’s not right. And that motivates me to keep going.

Oh, and hey, by the way… I finished writing a book last week. I’ve done the first pass of editing, with some big revisions, and I’m about ready to start the second pass, with some more revisions. Then there’ll be a proof-reading pass or two or three. It would probably be a good idea to find some beta readers, too, but… well, if you’re reading this and you’d like to be a beta reader, let me know.

I might just publish it, though. That’s what I did with the original Cici, and it’s not like the intervening seven years have been filled with reports of mistakes. And if a beta reader gave it back to me with twenty pages of suggestions… well, not for this book. For some book, someday, maybe. This one has made me laugh, more than once, and if it’s not perfect, that’s probably good for me. Satisfying, engaging, enjoyable — that’s the goal! I find it all three of those things, and I hope most readers will, too.

And now back to the stupid book blurb. I can’t do a cover until I get this right. Although I do have to remind myself — right doesn’t mean perfect. It means fun! Delightful. Sparkling. Hmm, satisfying, engaging, enjoyable? Yeah, those, too.

The latest version:

Cici has a choice: play by the rules, or remember she’s a dragon.

Cici Wainwright is on a mission–find the next piece of the Sivithysn star map. Easy enough, except that Romeo has a deadline and the customs line at the Valtonan spaceport is taking forever.

So she makes one little, tiny mistake: she tells them her real name.

It was just supposed to get them through Customs, but it turns out… Valtona knows that name. And now everything is spiraling out of control.

Before she even has time for a snack, Romeo and the dogs have vanished in a flash of blue light. The Renuvian ambassador—aka her Aunt Lulu Belle—is far more concerned with the state of her wardrobe than with finding her missing friends. And at least some Valtonans are convinced her mother is a goddess, which is inconvenient for so many reasons.

Cici came here looking for treasure. She’s still searching—just not for the treasure she expected.

A delightful interstellar adventure filled with mischief, mystery, and magic.

---

Still needs tweaking, I think. But maybe it’s getting there?

Back to work…

(But what, you say, about the ethics of using AI large-language-models? Eh. To be blunt and perhaps too honest, I am substantially more worried about the ethics of eating meat, wearing clothing made in 3rd world countries, and using social media. I think the reason people are so precious about AI exploiting artists & writers is because artists and writers are “people like us.” Like me, specifically, yes. But I am not going to say that somehow my labor shouldn’t be exploited when kids are working in factories and desperate immigrants are treated like terrorists. Do I dislike the idea that technocrats are getting rich off of artists? Sure. But it’s not going to stop me from using the tools available to me if it means I can do better work.)

58, 546.

That is the current number of words in my draft of Cici & the Curator Search For Treasure. 

58, 759.

That is the total number of words in my final version of Cici & the Curator.

I’d call that a good sign — well, it is a good sign. When I went to sleep last night, I was thinking, maybe, maybe I’d even finish writing today. The possibility existed.

And then, about 4AM, I woke up to the thought, “Why didn’t the wedehunda just teleport?”

Why didn’t the wedehunda just teleport?

WHY DIDN’T THUNDER AND LIGHTNING JUST TELEPORT?!?!?!

So, yeah, I will not be finishing the first draft of Cici & the Curator Search for Treasure today.

And I’d write some more on this blog post, but I have a whole lot of revising to do. Sigh.

At the Spellbound Writer’s Group on Sunday, Dani, the leader of the group, had an exercise for us to do about walking your character through their story backwards. You start at the ending, and make the motivation work back toward the start of the book instead. In her words, “For example, if at the end they get the guy, they are now motivated to lose him. If they find treasure, they now need to hide it. If they solved the murder, they now need to cover it up.” 

I thought about doing this with Cici & the Curator Search for Treasure, which is the fiction that I’ve spent most of my fiction writing energy on in the past six weeks. But I wasn’t enthusiastic. My immediate response was something like, “If I knew how it ended, I would have been finished already. I can’t start at the end and work my way backwards because I don’t know where the ending is!”

But I’ve also got two other fiction projects permanently open on my desktop: Rescuing Ceres, which is supposed to be a cozy sci-fi, but which fails on the cozy, and A Gift of Something or Other, which is Serena’s story in the Tassamara series. As I said, permanently open, and every so often I add a few hundred words to either or both, but more often I tweak some of the 20K words already there. I decided to go with Serena, because her ending — despite being about 40K words away, minimum — felt straightforward. She gets together with the guy, they ride off into the sunset. I didn’t know exactly where their sunset led, but I knew it led to adventure. I knew it led away.

And thirty seconds into this exercise, I knew that was the absolutely wrong ending. They can’t ride off into the sunset together. The promise of the series — the underlying theme, maybe? — is about finding a home, finding a place where you get to be absolutely yourself, with whatever weird gifts you have, where you are welcomed and accepted and loved. Yes, the series went off in unexpectedly ghostly directions for me and I had a lot of thoughts about the afterlife to work out with it, but the point for Akira and Sylvie and Noah — and probably the kids in A Gift of Time — was to find a home. That didn’t work quite so well in A Gift of Luck, because neither Niall or Laurel actually has a gift and they don’t end up in Tassamara (as far as we know), but it was still a book about finding family.

Once I had that realization, whoosh! A book that has been entirely stuck for months — years even — because I couldn’t answer the most straightforward storytelling question there is, which is, “And then what happened?” — suddenly had obvious places to go. And I mean OBVIOUS. Of course they need to see Grace, and clearly Max will be at Maggie’s Place, and Drew aka Andy is going to be looking for a job and yes, it’s essential that Serena go back to her old house and get the things she cares about and, oh, here’s how to solve that pesky mystery that I set up in the first 15K words, and wait, why don’t I have some chapters from Drew’s POV? And duh, that thing with the baby, that’s way more important than I realized…

All of which is great, honestly. More than great, wonderful. Except… I really, really, really want to finish Cici 2. I’ve been working on it for so long and I’ve been making progress, even if it’s been slow. I promised myself that 2025 would be the year of finishing projects, not just constantly jumping between them and always starting something new, and Cici is the farthest along. If I focused and did nothing else — no Choosing Happiness work, no days of distraction, no hours spent trying to figure out design software, no blogging instead of working! — I could probably finish writing Cici in three weeks. Three weeks! That makes so much more sense than switching gears and starting to work on a book that doesn’t even have a title yet.

And it’s even being generous, assuming that I’m not going to be able to consistently write 1000 words a day, even though 1000 words a day is nothing when you know the answer to “And then what happened?” Of course, the fact that I don’t know the answer is the reason I’ve spent so long spinning my wheels and looked at it way, possibly it does make a lot more sense to be working on the project where the answer is, more or less, obvious.

I don’t know what I’m going to do yet.

Meanwhile! There’s a little bar at the top of the interface where I write my blog posts and it shows me statistics for the blog. I never really look at it, because blogging in 2025 is basically writing to the void. I know I have a few loyal friends and family readers, but not very many people read blogs anymore. For that matter, not many people write blogs anymore. It’s all social media and places like substack and medium. I like my blog, though, and I’ve been writing it for a long time, and I mostly write it to myself. I consider me my main reader, and I definitely assume that I am the only one who ever goes back and rereads old posts. All that said, that little statistics bar looked unusual to me today, so I clicked on it, and went to the statistics screen and… um… what?

It says that this post, Desire and Determination, has 37 views in the past week. What? Why? Literally, in that post, I write, “I believe this post gets the Boring tag.” It also told me that this post, A Tale of Two Campgrounds, got 83 views. At least that one has a few links about campgrounds, which means it might have shown up in a google search, maybe? But 83 views is still a ridiculous number. For context, my expectation is usually 7 to 10 views on a post. Yep, that’s how many people I expect to read an average blog post, not including folks who get it via email and may or may not delete without reading.

Since I am reasonably cynical, I usually assume that a higher number of views happens when bots target the site for spam links or malicious attacks of some sort, and then I go through and make sure my security is high and I’m not letting bad comments get posted. In this case, however, the pages in question look fine, and I haven’t been flooded with fake comments, so I am mystified. If, therefore, you are reading this post and you are new to my blog and you were one of the 37 or 83 views on those posts in the last week, could you leave me a comment and tell me how you got here? I would so love to know. Even if it’s just something weird and unrelated to me, like “oh, my professor did an assignment about blogging in 2015 and your site was given as an example of a boring blog,” (which, you know, sounds ridiculous, but maybe I will be the last blog standing someday, LOL!)

But now I’m going to get to work. Or rather, now I’m going to take my darling dog outside to play for a while, because she’s giving me the narrow eyes and the folded ears, which basically means, “Human, you are failing me. Do you not remember that I am first in your time commitments?” And then I’m going to get to work.

Cici or Serena? Must decide…

I woke up this morning at 5:45, turned the coffee on, finished the book I’d been reading the night before, played a couple games of solitaire, then opened Scrivener to start writing.

And was promptly completely overwhelmed by everything I wanted to do this week but hadn’t: taxes, update my bio, finalize the front page of my Choosing Happiness website, add a contact form to that site, write 5000 words of Cici, write a blog post for this site…

If I’d done a little something every day, the way I intended to at the beginning of the week, it wouldn’t be overwhelming at all. Well, okay, maybe it was a little ambitious considering how I have been eking out the word count. But not crazy overwhelming. Unfortunately, that’s not what I did.

Oh, I worked on Monday.  It was a productive day. But on Tuesday I went to Merritt Island to visit my friend Lynda and meet her friend Leigh. We talked books and writing and editing—conversations I could have for days. Alas, we didn’t have that long, but we had a great lunch (at a Brazilian restaurant, Brasas) and I had no regrets.

On Wednesday, I realized that because of a busy weekend (which included a trip to the Mount Dora Arts Festival where I bought this awesome mug), I really needed to take care of some of life’s basics, aka laundry and cleaning and grocery-shopping, and I didn’t get much done beyond that.

On Thursday, I had great intentions. I was pet-sitting for Riker, but I brought my computer, had my writing spot, was all ready to work… but the day was lovely. Absolutely beautiful in a Florida February way. I never looked at my weather app to see what the temperature was, because the temperature was perfect. I wound up sitting outside by the fire pit, hanging out with the dogs, occasionally lackadaisically tossing a ball for Sophie, and reading. Every half hour or so, I’d think, “I should really get my computer,” but then I’d go back to reading my book. Do I have any regrets? Nope.

Often when I have a “wasted” day, I do have regrets. I feel guilty. I reach the end of the day and I think, oh, I should have done so much more. I should have written more words, I should have X, Y, Z. But that dissatisfaction—that feeling of falling short—is the antithesis of happiness. My three personal macronutrients of happiness (inspired by Arthur Brooks, in Build the Life You Want) are Satisfaction, Engagement, and Enjoyment, so when I start feeling dissatisfied with my choices, I’m basically shooting my happiness in the foot. And sure, ideally, that should mean make better choices! But let’s face it — knowing what I should do and doing it are not the same thing.

Yesterday, though, I didn’t let myself feel guilty. I made my choices, I enjoyed my choices, and at the end of the day, I felt like it had been such a nice day, so lovely and peaceful and serene, that it was worth celebrating.

And then this morning rolled around. Ugh. Taxes. Website. Contact form. Bio update. Linktree. Write books, market books, clean out 400 emails from my inbox. ARGH! At first, I took one step back and thought about using one of the handy life tools that I’ve accumulated over the years. Maybe bird-by-bird, Anne Lamott’s advice about taking one word at a time; or maybe a 20/10, from Unf*ck Your Habitat, which is getting stuff done by working for 20 minutes, followed by a 10 minute break. Both are systemic approaches to making overwhelming tasks less overwhelming.

But then I decided to take an even bigger step back. My problem today was not the length of my to-do list: none of it is urgent, none of it is going to change my life if I finish it today. My problem was the feeling of overwhelm. The feeling of life being oppressive and scary. The feeling of failing because I am not productive enough. And that feeling doesn’t get fixed by a checklist.

Instead, I decided to take the WIN — the Walk In Nature — and so Sophie and I hopped in the car and drove to the waterfront.

 

 

And after our WIN, when we got home, I took a deep breath and got to work — feeling happy and peaceful and like whatever I finish today will be good enough.

Did my WIN reset my day? I don’t know, really. I can’t tell what the rest of the day will be like. Will I wind up frustrated? Am I going to be annoyed with myself before the day is over? Will a quick glance at the news turn into doomscrolling or a need for despairing escape, either one eating up my hours? I don’t know! Could be.

But my WIN wasn’t about gearing up for productivity — it was an experience complete in itself, a moment to remind me why the rest of it matters. My goal in life isn’t to be the most productive, or the most well-informed, or even to be rich (although that would be nice). My goal is to love the experience of the life I’m living.

And for that goal, the walk in nature is always a WIN.

 

Last night, after dark but not terribly late, someone knocked on the front door. Loudly. Repeatedly. Not crazily — not like pounding on the door, or anything — but definitely very decisively. Like maybe six or seven hard knocks, not a gentle two or three taps. I was sitting on my bed, already in my pajamas, but Jamie answered the door and began interacting with the person who had knocked. I mildly eavesdropped, and then began more seriously eavesdropping, because Jamie was being… well, overly helpful.

The person at the door was looking for the guy who lived in my room before me, who, therefore, moved out well over a year ago. It seemed to me that the right answer to that was a simple, “Oh, he’s been gone for a long time, and no, I don’t know how to get in touch with him,” and then you close the door, right? (The guy did not leave a forwarding address of any sort, so I spent a solid few months writing, “Moved, no forwarding address” on his mail. Dude is gone.) Instead, Jamie was offering to call the landlord, to see if she knew his new address, and to look in his phone, to see if he still had the guy’s number. Sophie, meanwhile, was being a good girl (aka no barking) — but a bit of an active girl — running back and forth between the front door and my room, seeming unsure of herself.

Eventually I got curious enough to get up and look, as much to reassure Sophie and calm her down as anything else. The guy at the door was in uniform. A green uniform. Um…

I could tell from the tone in Jamie’s voice that this was not, say, a sanitation worker uniform, or an air-conditioning repair uniform, but I couldn’t actually tell what kind of uniform it was from my quick glance. Meanwhile, the guy at the door was saying, “Do you mind if we come in and look around, just to, you know, say we’ve done our jobs?”

I was already moving toward the front door (yes, in my pajamas!), as Jamie was saying, “Uh, let me just check with my –” to say, “Yeah, of course, come on in.” And automatically as the three (3!) sheriff’s deputies started entering the house, I added, “This is Sophie, she’s friendly.”

Two of the deputies stayed pretty close to the door, while one did a quick pass through of the house, checking out the bedroom at the back and then glancing into all the rest of the rooms. I asked one of them if we were allowed to know why they were looking for the former housemate, and he told me a moderately confusing story about his car leaving the scene of an accident and winding up in a ditch, and them wanting to know who was driving the car and what had happened. I felt like he was being interestingly careful not to allege that the former housemate had committed a crime, but I don’t know whether that was because he thought I might immediately call said former housemate to tell him the police were looking for him, or what.

Anyway, the searching deputy was almost finished when he noticed a closed door. Oops. The landlord keeps a room in the house and it’s locked. We don’t have access. Fortunately, I think, for all purposes, we’ve also blocked off that door with a shoe rack on which clutter accumulates and which can probably be seen pretty clearly from the front door. It made it sort of obvious that no one was using that door regularly. It also would have been almost impossible to have blocked it off while they were at the door,  so the idea that former housemate had been quickly hidden was improbable, I think.

Meanwhile, the oldest and most serious of the deputies had looked at Sophie, no touching, but the youngest hadn’t been able to resist her cuteness, and the searcher — while contemplating the locked door — also had to bend down and rub her ears and say, “Good girl, Sophie.” She was facing the dilemma of which stranger she most wanted to make friends with, and sort of bouncing back and forth between them, inviting them to give her pets. Obviously curious, but also just such a love. 

At any rate, I’m not sure which of them made the decision — I feel like there was sort of a mutual shrug between Searching Deputy and Oldest Deputy — but they left without needing to go into the locked room, and all went back to normal.

And it was only then — only after they were gone! — that it occurred to me that ICE is doing immigration raids in Florida right now and that I would absolutely not have wanted to assist ICE, not even to the extent of letting them look in my house without a search warrant. I’m not exactly mad at myself — in the grand scheme of things, I think letting sheriff’s deputies glance through the house to make sure a hit-and-run driver wasn’t hiding out is fine — but I’m a little mad at myself. It was instinct to let them in. No one here had done anything wrong, we had no reason to make the deputies’ lives more difficult, so why drag out an encounter and turn it into something hostile when it could be quickly over? It was a reasonable choice. But I wish I had asked why they were looking for him and made sure it was not an immigration issue before being helpful.

Many, many years ago, but post 2001, when I was living in Santa Cruz and we were at war in Iraq, (back when I went to demonstrations for peace and donated money to anti-war organizations), my phone would often make weird clicking noises and then sound echo-y, sort of like it was on speaker. One day, on a call with my brother, we were speculating about whether it was bugged, and whether the government was listening to my calls, and I said something like, “I wouldn’t really care if it was. What is anyone going to hear? Well, I guess I would care a little, because it would mean that they were wasting time on me when there are actually real threats out there.” I would think nothing about this, except that soon after that conversation, my phone stopped making weird noises. Maybe the phone company fixed the line. But I have wondered over the years whether the government was actually listening to my calls. It isn’t a thought that makes me angry, it just makes me think that I might lack proper wariness about obtrusive government.

Anyway, in a first time for everything, the police searched my house last night and I was glad that my dog was cute and charming and completely non-threatening to them. But if it ever happens again, I hope I’ll ask my questions before I let them in.

 

 

Sophie and I were coming inside from the backyard, which is a thing we do every day, usually multiple times in a day, and I was babbling to her, as I do every day, multiple times in a day, when I saw that she had a little branch from one of the trees stuck in her fur, dragging on the ground behind her.

I said, “Come here,” and before I even had a chance to think “that’s not how I call the dog,” she’d turned around and rejoined me about ten paces behind her. I pulled the branch free and she returned to our previously scheduled house entry, without pause.

I was awed. In the midst of my literal babble — I’m sure I was telling her she was a pretty girl or a good girl or something like that, but I could have been commenting on the weather, because I often do — she managed to discern a command (or at least a request) and she chose to immediately obey it. She is SUCH a good dog.

The other day Jamie was eating in the living room and she wanted to join him, so I opened the bedroom door for her, and she immediately went out into the living room and assumed the proper begging posture: sitting next to his feet, head up, eyes alert on his food or maybe his face. Not obnoxious begging, as long as you can ignore the eyes — not trying to climb into his lap or stick her nose into his food or even putting a paw on his leg — just the attentive, “I am here and I would like a bite of that if you feel so inclined.”

Jamie laughed at her and called her a beggar, and from my bedroom, I said something like, “Sophie, are you being a pest?” She immediately went into complete hangdog mode, head down, tail between her legs, and retreated to her doggie bed under my bed. It was the lightest reprimand imaginable. Neither one of us used a harsh voice or a firm no, because neither one of us actually cares if she’s a beggar. I always give her the last bite of my food or let her lick the plate. But you would have thought we’d scolded her for mass destruction or something. I had to cajole her to get her to come out from under the bed and we both had to love her up with ear and tummy rubs so she would know she hadn’t done anything wrong. She’s really just ridiculously smart. I wouldn’t have thought either of us had used the words beggar or pest often enough for her to understand them as pejorative, but she clearly did.

Anyway, I didn’t intend to start this post with dog adoration — I was actually going to write about healthy food choices, ha. But dog adoration is always a fine sidetrack, IMO.

Yesterday I went to the Spellbound Writer’s Group and the creativity exercise was one about choosing a writing mantra for the year. Dani, the group’s leader, had a set of questions, as follows.

When I think about writing: 

1) I am most proud of… 

2) I’m ready to let go of…

3) I need to give myself permission to… 

4) In three years, I want to be… 

5) How can my calendar better reflect these priorities? 

6) What’s different about me and my writing is… 

7) When do I feel alive, enlightened, reminded of who I am? 

What word or words will I channel into my writing experience? How do you want to feel when you write? Use the word bank (a separate page) as inspiration. See if you can select 1-3 words for a mantra. 

I didn’t answer all the questions, but my favorite answer was to #3.

3) I need to give myself permission to — get things wrong, make mistakes, celebrate my own voice. 

I’m giving myself permission to do those things. Not sure how that will work out for me, but I’m at least going to try.

When it came time to pick my one to three words, I had some that I liked that had popped up for me along the way of thinking about my answers to those questions — relaxed, curious — but I started reading the word bank and nothing was really resonating. Nice words — abundance, accomplished, aware, etc. — but I wasn’t feeling them. What did I want from my writing? What did I want as a goal? What was going to be my message to myself?

I’ve been working on a blog post/introduction to Choosing Happiness for MONTHS. One of the things it features is a discussion of happiness and what goes into happiness. How we define it, how we’ll notice it when we see it, how we’ll recognize it. There are dozens of different definitions. Gretchen Rubin, in The Happiness Project, says “one positive psychology study identified fifteen different academic definitions of happiness.” In the end, the definition that I settled on is derived from Arthur Brooks’ definition, in Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier, which is “The macronutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.” I quibble with “purpose,” (which would require a much longer post to explain than I’m willing to write this morning), so I modified it to “satisfaction, enjoyment, and engagement.” 

So yesterday afternoon, while I was thinking about my writing and what I want my writing mantra to be, that definition of happiness popped into my head, and I realized that it was perfect. I want my process to be satisfying, engaging, and enjoyable, and I also want the end product of my writing process to be satisfying, engaging, and enjoyable. It’s like the ultimate goal: happiness in writing, happiness with writing, happiness in life, too. So my writing mantra for 2025 is satisfying, engaging, and enjoyable, and now I have to get on with doing some more of that sort of writing.

Possibly that means writing about Sophie a lot. Hopefully it also means finishing some of the projects that I have underway.

Oh, one last thing! I was asked about concrete monoliths. Technically, yes, I suppose that was an exaggeration. But not necessarily much of one?

These are the things that are being buried in the street outside the house. They’re big! And yes, that one on top is someday going to be completely underground, while the one on the bottom will be the new side and curb of the road. The former park across the street is supposedly going to become a retention pond, although it currently looks like a landfill. And as far as I can tell, the project is going to go on forever. They dig up the road every weekday morning, then fill it back in every afternoon. Actual signs of progress are minimal. I’m sure it’ll end someday. But it won’t be someday soon, as far as I can tell.

I am not going to use that as a metaphor for my own work. But it does make me wonder, how many projects can I finish before the road work does? I wonder if I made it a competition if it would improve my motivation?

Today is the day after my (more or less) weekly grocery store visit. Most of the time, that’s meaningless, really. Oh, most likely I will have fresh fruit in my yogurt, at least for a few days, and probably I will have some salad, but running out of fresh produce is generally the trigger for my next grocery store visit, so one way or another, I don’t think much about it.

Today, though, is different. I was away for a few days at the beginning of the year, on a fun little mini-vacation that included time with family & some delicious restaurant eating and when I came home on the 3rd, I was really tired. So I didn’t make it to the store on Saturday. On Sunday, I spent a big chunk of the day at Christina’s, playing games, eating her extremely delicious chili, and celebrating the new year with a fire in their fire pit, so I also didn’t make it to the store.

And then Monday through Wednesday, the construction project in front of my house meant that I couldn’t actually drive during the day. Yeah, that construction project — ugh. Every afternoon, they fill the holes back in, so people can drive on the roads during the night (and also maybe so they don’t kill themselves walking into big holes in the road in the dark?) And then in the morning, they dig the road up again and do more stuff with giant pipes and concrete monoliths.

People who don’t live here say, “When is it going to end?” People who do live here say, “OMG, is it ever going to end?”

Now, obviously, I could have gone out in the evening or in the early morning on any of those days, but I didn’t, because I still had food options. Some cabbage, canned beans, frozen chicken breast… I wasn’t starving by any means.

Yesterday, though, I went out early, over to Mount Dora to play with computers with my dad and stepmom, who are learning to use Macs. (In their 80s, and I really hope that should I make it to my 80s, I will still be enthusiastically learning the way they choose to.) On my way home, I stopped at the grocery store.

No big deal, nothing special, just… the grocery store.

But today has felt like a day of anticipation & abundance, with such potential for small pleasures. I bought a loaf of gluten-free bread ($8), some eggs ($6), some cheddar cheese ($5), and an avocado ($1), so now I’m getting to think about whether I want a) grilled cheese, b) French toast, c) avocado toast, 4) scrambled eggs with toast, 5) tea with toast and the cranberry-cinnamon jam I got at a Christmas market a few weeks ago. Such good choices! And it’s giving me so much pleasure to anticipate which of my delicious options I’ll be having for my lunch. For breakfast, I had yogurt with strawberries, supposedly in season now according to the sign, but definitely on sale; blueberries from a BOGO; and pistachios, also from a BOGO. Also delicious and I did my best to eat it mindfully, noticing how good it was with every bite.

But it really struck me what a perfect example of hedonic adaptation this is. How often do I take my groceries mostly for granted? How often do I spend more time worrying about prices and whether my choices are healthy than I do thinking about how delicious my meals are going to be? Honestly, most of the time. Anything familiar stops being a pleasure unless you really make an effort to break out of that hedonic adaptation — or unless something happens to break you out of it.

I’m not grateful for the construction project. But I’m grateful for the reminder that healthy food is not just fuel for our bodies, but an experience to savor & anticipate & appreciate.

I’m thinking grilled cheese.

 

When I looked up last year’s end of the year blog post, it was with pessimism in my heart. I’ve been feeling like a failure, to be honest, waking up in the middle of the night and getting stuck in pointless ruminating and/or solving all my problems and then promptly forgetting those solutions the moment I actually get out of bed. I’ve spent more time trying to understand why I’m stuck (on ALL the things) then getting unstuck, and most of my solutions to getting unstuck just get me more stuck. I was prepared to discover that I’d completely failed to achieve my goals for the year. 

But when I read my blog post, I discovered that my words for 2024 had been “Focus” and “Fun,” and I felt a little burst of… call it forgiveness, maybe? Forgiveness for myself, for not fulfilling the ambitious project-oriented goals. Because I actually did quite a lot in 2024. I got certified as both a master life coach and a master wellness coach, I read a ton of books, I learned a lot, and while I didn’t produce much, I spent plenty of time working on my ideas. Thinking time matters. Yes, my perfectionism got in my way, but I also needed to take the time to shape what I’ve learned into something that made sense to me, that felt right. And yeah, that felt a lot like spinning my wheels — but I haven’t failed unless I give up. And I’m not giving up. 

Meanwhile, I did have fun. Lots of fun, actually. Beach trips and hanging out in downtown Sanford, thrift stores and flea markets, live music and Disney adventures. Writing group and writing with friends. A couple of good trips — Costa Rica, despite mostly being about the dentist, was a good experience, and my trip to South Carolina in the middle of summer was truly a delight. Plenty of good meals, and some excellent desserts. I read a ton, my favorite form of recreation (an almost embarrassing 463 books, according to the Kindle app) and played with my dog every single day.

2024 wasn’t a financially rewarding year. (Understatement.) Career-wise, it was close to a bust, although I do hope that I’ve been setting the stage for better years to come. But it wasn’t a bad year at all. I don’t feel good about what I failed to accomplish, but if I was on my deathbed looking back, I wouldn’t be saying, “I should have worked harder and had less fun.” It’s only because I’m not on my deathbed and hopefully have a lot of years to go that I feel badly about what I failed to do.

One thing that I did realize, though, as I looked back on my year, is that it started sliding downhill in August. Coincidentally — or not! — it was so hot in August that I stopped cooking complicated vegetable hashes for breakfast. I just didn’t want to stand over a hot stove stir-frying for fifteen minutes. Also coincidentally — or not! — it was too hot to want to exercise much. I walked less, gave up on riding the exercise bike and stopped even thinking about daily step counts. So of my three fundamental rules of happiness: (sleep 8 hours, no more, no less; eat plenty of vegetables, ideally seven to ten servings a day; move your body in ways that feel good as often as possible), I was breaking two. Possibly not coincidentally, I started struggling with the third, too, having a much harder time getting to sleep and sleeping through the night.

So 2025 is going to be a back to basics year for me. I’m not saying that sleeping 8 hours, eating plenty of vegetables, and moving more is going to magically make me accomplish more, but I’m pretty sure it will, actually. Because those things are the basis for feeling good and people who feel good also do more. Meanwhile, I’m going to stop beating myself up about what I failed to accomplish in 2024, and start appreciating what I did accomplish: it was a fun year with plenty of enjoyable moments in it, and lots and lots of learning. 

That said, I’ve been struggling to pick a word for 2025. None of the usual suspects feel quite right: I’ve already used Create, Appreciate, Learn, Gratitude, Grace, Focus, Play, Fun, Change, Kindness, and I’m not going to use Growth, Rebirth, Energize, Evolve, or any of the other words the Washington Post recommends. But I really have appreciated my focus words over the past five years — they’re a good way of checking in with myself, to see if I’m on track with where I want to go, who I want to be.

The word I keep coming back to, though, is forgiveness. I’m not sure why, not sure what I’m going to be forgiving, but what I get from the word is a feeling of letting go, a feeling of… the opposite of beating myself up, I guess? Of breathing out and breathing in, of healing, maybe a peace that is not hard fought, but simple. I’m not sure forgiveness will help me reach my financial goals (ha), but when I look back on 2025, twelve months from now, if its included plenty of forgiveness, I suspect it will have been a good year. The other word I like is resilience. I keep trying to tell myself to take one step at a time, and I think resilience is the word that best reflects that idea. I don’t have to achieve ALL the things — I just have to keep trying. So 2025: forgiveness and resilience and onward we go.

Happy New Year!

 

 

I told Sophie this morning that it was too cold to sit outside and we couldn’t play anymore, and then I looked at the weather app on my phone.

It was 58 degrees.

I was embarrassed, to be honest. What a wimp I am! But also kind of amused. It took such a long time for me to adapt enough to Arcata to think that temps in the 50s were comfortable, and such a short time for me to adjust right back to Florida. But we are having a nice little burst of winter now — I’m wearing my favorite jackets every day and drinking hot tea — and I’m enjoying it, even if I am reluctant to sit outside for hours and hours. It fits so well with the time of year, to be just a little chilly.

Many of my neighbors had their Christmas decorations up even before Thanksgiving, but there are more every day. I rolled my eyes a little last week — can we not at least wait until after we give thanks? But then I decided that maybe people were just really, really ready to get into the season that celebrates light in the darkness, hope and generosity, kindness and giving. Maybe people just felt like looking forward to Christmas was easier than being thankful and the sooner we got to it the better.

In that spirit, Jamie and I bought a Christmas tree this weekend, and decorated it yesterday, when its branches had time to settle out a little. We each have Christmas ornaments of our own, so they’re blended together on the tree, mostly harmoniously. Mine are all flat wooden ornaments, mostly hand-painted, because they were what was easiest to keep during my van life. They don’t take up a lot of room. They’re all from a few specific years of my childhood, namely 4th and 5th grade, and then 8th grade and later, so they have nostalgia for me, but the nostalgia is all childhood nostalgia.

I get a good hit of nostalgia from Jamie’s ornaments, too, though, because he’s got a lot of pop culture, things relevant to my life, if not really to my childhood.

One of his ornaments, Dumbo, gave me such vivid memories of Rory at almost 3. We had the Disney videotape, no idea where it came from, and R wanted to watch it over and over again, even though it always made him cry. It was one of my first and strongest moments of mystification as a parent — that complete uncertainty about what the right thing to do was. Do I let him watch it, even though he cries? Do I make it disappear? Do I stop the movie to discuss what he’s feeling? Do I just comfort him during the movie? Is this experience, that he clearly wants to have, because he keeps asking for it, good for him or bad for him? I knew I wasn’t going to tell him that he was being ridiculous and there was nothing to cry about — it’s sad! — but avoiding that social programming was a challenge. We’re so culturally indoctrinated to try to make people stop crying, because it makes us uncomfortable to see someone crying. But I can remember holding him on my lap, his head against my shoulder, agreeing that yes, it was tremendously sad that Dumbo was being taken away from his mother, but he didn’t have to worry, because that was never, ever going to happen to him. Oh, the irony.

Jamie’s Harry Potter ornament reminded me of staying out until midnight with R and my nephew, Ty, at a Barnes & Noble, waiting for the release of the last book in the series. July 2007. When midnight finally rolled around and they started to call numbers to buy our books, the line was insane and it looked like it would be another hour at bare minimum until our set of numbers was reached. Poor Ty was falling asleep standing up, so we left without getting our books. I promised to come back the next day, but on our way home, driving through the quiet dark night with two sleepy, sleepy boys in the car, I passed an open Walmart, with a few cars in the parking lot, and thought, “hmm…” So we bought our books, yes, multiple copies, at Walmart. I stayed up all night reading and passed my copy over to R in the morning, gritting my teeth not to tell him how very unhappy it was going to make him. I knew that Hedwig’s death was going to break his heart.

And then Star Wars… I probably wouldn’t have thought of this except for the Dumbo memories, but Revenge of the Sith, the movie where Anakin kills the kids, came out in May 2005, and all of R’s friends seemed to be going. He was, in fact, invited to go on the release day by one of his closest friends and some others. A little pack of boys, all aged around 8, going to a PG-13 movie. I said no. Yes, I was the mean mom! He was not pleased. I promised him that we’d buy the DVD the very day it came out and he could watch it at home, and I also did my absolute best to acknowledge that I was making a choice that was making him really sad. He was honestly pretty great about it — at 8, he was a very rational small person. No temper tantrums, no whining, not even a lot of sulking, although he was definitely sad. I think maybe I gave him some other treat? I don’t remember the details. But the day the DVD was released, we went to the store and got it immediately, and he watched it in the tiny living room of our little duplex on Seabright while I worked on my computer in the bedroom. He kept bopping in and out of the bedroom to tell me what was happening, and eventually he came and flopped down on the bed next to me with a sigh. I asked him if he was okay, and he said, so simply, “You were right. I don’t like this movie.” I was so grateful to him for saying that. It’s hard to be the mean mom. Really hard.

Anyway, lots of memories. Bittersweet, of course, but bittersweet still has sweetness to it. And it’s lovely to have a Christmas tree. I put it on a timer, so that the lights would go on and off automatically, but this morning when I got up, it was still dark outside, so I turned the lights on by hand, and maybe we’ll just leave it on all the time. Light in darkness, that’s the meaning of the season to me.

And meanwhile, Miss Sunshine is informing me that it would be SOOOO nice to be outside. She loves this weather. She has a yogurt face right now, because I let her lick out the yogurt container after my breakfast, and it’s cute as can be. Not that she isn’t always cute as can be, but the yogurt gives her a special touch of cuteness.