Updates:

The gum surgery didn’t kill me. Isn’t that good news? It was, however, even more unpleasant than I expected it to be, mostly because it was hard to eat and after a bunch of days of not eating, I felt lousy on top of having a really sore mouth. Basically, it sucked.

Just when I started to finally feel better, my websites all went down. And stayed down. For close to a week, maybe a little bit more, I got daily emails from my hosting service saying, yep, we know, we’re working on it, we’ll fix it as soon as possible. If I’d been earning money from any of my websites, I would have been seriously distressed, but as it was, I just sorta shrugged and did on other things.

After that, the BBE (Best Brother Ever) came to visit and I had such an excellent time with him. He did many useful things, like trying to fix all the holes in my fence so that Miss Sophie Sunshine couldn’t wander out whenever she felt like it, but we also had fun, ate well, and did one major project that wasn’t exactly useful, but was delightful.

Specifically, we turned this:

Into this:

I’d been wanting to paint the golf cart ever since my dad and stepmom gave it to me back in the fall, but it felt like a two-person job. Mostly because the roof seemed like it was going to be challenge. I wound up buying a cover for the roof instead, and new seat covers for the front seat, and then spray painting the body, and adding stickers. I’m very pleased with how she turned out. Golf carts are great; cute, fun golf carts are awesome!

In the midst of my brother’s visit, I had a really, really nice birthday. We went to the beach with Christina, appreciated the sunshine and 80 degrees weather, almost swam in the ocean (yeah, it was cold, but we did get wet, at least), and ate oysters and more at my favorite rooftop patio restaurant.

On the way home, Christina asked if I wanted ice cream and I said, yes, I did, but I didn’t want the specific ice cream place she was referring to: I wanted to go to Kelly’s Ice Cream, in the Foxtail Coffee Shop in downtown Sanford, and have either their horchata ice cream or their Mexican chocolate ice cream. Then I had a brilliant idea and said that what I’d really like would be BOTH those ice creams, together, but that that would never happen because they never had those two flavors at the same time, and realistically, I shouldn’t be getting my hopes up for any specific flavor of ice cream anyway, because they’re always mixing up their flavors. You never know what they’re going to have.

But later that afternoon, the BBE and I went out for ice cream and they DID have both those flavors. It was, really, so incredibly nice. On your birthday, to have an unrealistic wish about ice cream, and to know that it’s not going to come true, but to want it anyway — and then to have it come true! And then, also, to have it be exactly as delicious as you imagined it would be!! I have had some very nice birthdays in my life — as well as, of course, some completely unmemorable birthdays — but I honestly think the magic of horchata plus Mexican chocolate will linger in my memory for the rest of my life.

Meanwhile, though, through the nice birthday and the fun painting, and the website hosting failures and the extended recovery from unpleasant dental work… I just kinda let everything “work-related” fall to the wayside. My email, in particular, just turned into Avoidance Central. I’d pick up my computer, open it, then… decide to go do something else. Anything else.

I went literal days where I didn’t touch my computer at all. I read books on my phone and played ball with Sophie and ate delicious foods and tried really, really, really hard to stay away from the news and not enter into any doom-scrolling experiences. I guess that was part of the computer avoidance, too. The computer is this window into a world that seems completely insane. And if I’m on the computer, I have to observe the train wreck. I get to see the news headlines, and wonder why all the people shouting “Have you no shame?” are just… meaningless noise, apparently.

I read a post-apocalyptic book recently in which a huge number of the survivors were bad guys. No other way to describe them. They were all people eager to have slaves and rape young women and murder children. I didn’t like the book, but I also felt like it was really unrealistic. A world in which 9 out of 10 people immediately descend into a savagery that goes beyond mere selfishness is not who people are. Humanity, as a species, has thrived because of community. Because of our ability to work together. That’s our strength as a species: not our sharp teeth or our physical strength or our violent impulses, but our ability to co-operate.  And somehow it feels like the internet has broken that. Maybe it’s unfair to blame the internet, but the view of the world that I get via my computer is a world that seems to be running on greed and fear right now, and I have just kind of preferred the view of my backyard instead. And also the view of downtown Sanford and the view of the park where I play ball with Sophie and the view of my Dad’s kitchen table…

And now that I’ve gotten that reflection out of the way, it’s time to move on. Since I have bravely tackled my computer, it’s time to bravely tackle my email. Ugh. Delete, delete, delete, delete…

 

Last night, in the middle of the night, I woke up and thought, “Oh, I’m so much better, tomorrow I am going to get back to work. And I’m going to take Sophie on a really long walk, and I’m going to eat healthy foods, maybe cook myself something interesting, and I’ll do a bunch of writing…”

And then I woke up this morning and realized all that enthusiasm was just because I took an oxycodone and an ibuprofen before going to sleep and once they wore off… yeah, not so much.

That said, the good(-ish) news is that I have no more looming dental issues hanging over me. I need to heal from this week’s gum surgery, go back for a check-up, and then… and wow, I’m seriously anxious that I might jinx myself here. Okay, so let’s just say that I’m going to heal from this week’s surgery beautifully and leave it at that. I’m manifesting that healing!

My oral surgeon actually told me that I was a great patient, which I felt very validated by. I did not tell him that it was because I pretending to be a Special Forces operative being tortured by the enemy and using box breathing and disassociation to survive. I’m gonna say that it worked quite well. Not so well that I wasn’t happy to have painkillers available once I got home, though.

In other purely good news, the first reviews on Cici2 have been so nice. I did realize that I’ve screwed up by using two pen names: neither Bookbub nor Amazon told my followers at their respective places that I had a new book out, because Sarah is the one with followers; SJ has none. Alas. I did want to keep the romance titles a little separated from the fantasy/science-fiction — didn’t want to disappoint romance readers! — but that was probably a mistake. Oh, well, live and learn. I can’t change the author names now, so it’ll be what it is. Meanwhile, I have 5 reviews, so I will stop hovering over the book page, anxiously awaiting the 1-star review from the person who thinks there’s too many dogs in the book.

And I went looking for the blog post where I wrote about the guy who gave me a one star review on Practicing Happiness because I wrote about my dogs too much, then came to the blog and left a nasty comment to the same effect, but I was so vague about that experience in that post that I deemed it unnecessary to share again. Plus… well, I’m not going to unpack it all. But wow, the post about that troll has a lot of emotional heft, on a lot of different levels. I leave the link there for my own future reference, and move back to my appreciation of yay, nice reviews, with some specific lines that just warm my heart and make me grateful to do what I do.

This –> “I feel happier just reading them” <– is one true goal as a writer. Let other authors make you cry, make you think, make you scared to turn off the lights at night, I’m just about the happy, and so glad that I accomplished it for jkuci.

Somewhat unrelated, I was talking about editing the other day, and I do a lot of editing passes. But I’d love to come up with a catchy name for the one that I privately think of as the ABC pass. Hmm, maybe that is the catchy name? It’s the pass where I look at every paragraph and consider:

1. Does this advance the plot? (that’s the A.)
2. Does it establish character? (that’s the C.)
3. Does it reveal a relationship? (alas, that is not a B, and it’s always third, anyway. I’ve thought I could make it develop a relationship, except reveal is more accurate. This question doesn’t mean that the relationship is changing/developing, it just means the reader is learning something about the relationship.)
4. Does it set the stage? (Not as important to me as the first three, but an essential ingredient in grounding the reader, and also in providing important props, if you will. Ie, if you’re going to use a gun in the last act, you need to put it on stage in the first act, and that would count as setting the stage. But so also would be a nice description of a sunset or a fancy embassy bathroom or a beautiful park, depending on why they mattered to your story.)
5. Does it make me laugh? Not the reader, because I have no way of knowing what a reader will think. But if it makes me laugh, it gets to stay.

This is derived from Kurt Vonnegut’s classic writing advice, “Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.” Technically, I suppose, a lot of things that make me laugh do also reveal character and one could also argue that everything that reveals relationship also reveals character and if you’re in a single POV, then obviously setting the stage also reveals character in a way… but at a certain point, namely that one, “reveal character” just gets too over-stuffed. Anything can reveal character. When the character says, “How do you do? I am so pleased to meet you,” they’ve technically revealed that they’re very boring and maybe that’s what you want in your story. (It’s probably not a good thing to want in your story, though.)

Anyway, I detect the ramblings of a person who’s under the influence of pain meds, so I think I will stop rambling now. Poor Sophie is giving me the stare. Let’s see if I can find a picture to go with this meandering post. Oh, here’s one that I like a lot.

(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.