I read a book about the laws of magical thinking recently (The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane) and I obviously didn’t read it carefully enough, because I don’t know which of the laws is the one that applies when you think that the turn of the calendar from one month to the next is magically going to change the weather. It’s September, which means the air is getting brisk at night and the leaves are falling from the trees, right?

Not really, no. 

I am trying to get more motivated, however, despite the weather still calling out for sitting on a front porch in a rocking chair drinking mint juleps, or long slow beach days. Yesterday I was doing useful chores, including some reorganizing of towels — more useful than it sounds, I swear — and I was pleasantly reminded that we can always make new choices. Always. It’s easy to get into a routine and then have that routine turn into a rut, but all we need to do is pause, step back, take a look at that rut, and then decide whether we want to continue in it or not. Any pattern that we can recognize, we can change if we want to badly enough.

And okay, yes, this pattern was technically about not having found a place to comfortably store my towels  — my desk chair has been serving as a linen closet for the last two months — but it applies to anything that I want it to apply to. If I’m just spinning my wheels, I can choose to stop spinning & do something else. I can make new choices! Such an obvious thought, and yet also so radical, and so powerful.

Of course, I haven’t actually managed to make those new choices yet — with the exception of taking over a shelf in the bathroom for my towels — but at least I’m reminded that they’re mine to make if I want to.

Unrelated, I fell in love with an author this week and I’ve been gobbling down her books like potato chips. Trying to do some of my own work and my own writing between books, but reaching for my phone (and its Kindle app) in every spare minute. My Japanese lessons have been getting short shrift and my meals have been mostly bagged salads. Oh, well, bagged salads are pretty healthy, right?

Anyway, the author is Katherine Center. I’d read one book by her before, The Bodyguard, and I enjoyed it, but not so much that I started binging. But The Rom-Commers was on my library wait list for weeks from some recommendation I got somewhere, it finally showed up this weekend, and it just delighted me.

A quote:

They’re romances and they’re definitely not plausible or realistic, but they made me want to believe in love again, which was extremely unexpected, ha. Anyway, I’m not sure which one of her books is going to be my favorite, but since I could be reading one now, instead of writing this blog post, I think I will go do that. And then maybe I’ll open up the file for the romance I was writing that I haven’t touched since sometime in 2023, and see if those characters would like their story to continue. Maybe they would!