Category Archives: R

A day of highlights

24 Friday May 2019

Posted by in Personal, R, Randomness

≈ 2 Comments

At dinner on Wednesday, we did “best and worst,” a childhood tradition at my friend P’s household in Seattle, where you share the best part of your day and the worst part of your day. There were eight people at the table, and the majority of us went with some version of the best moment being the delight of being at that table, with those people.

I was almost the last to go, so I picked another moment in the day — sitting out on the back porch, on an absolutely beautiful spring morning, while R and M and Zelda all ate scrambled eggs that I’d just finished making. I was enjoying the weather, loving the company, and my dog was eating. What more could anyone ask for?

What more would be the Vietnamese food later; the sitting around the table at the house talking; the dinner; the walk down to Ballard with a conversational crowd; sitting outside eating ice cream and appreciating city energy; and then the later walk through Ballard with just my bouncy dog. Bouncy at least in part because she’d just eaten a full serving of expensive vanilla ice cream, but that’s okay.

It was a day of glorious moments. One of my favorites was when we got back from Vietnamese food. Pam had gotten home from work and when we walked in the door, she turned around, beamed at Rory, opened her arms and exclaimed, “My son!” They exchanged a huge hug and I mock-protested, “Hey! Mine!” But I am so glad and so grateful that they have that relationship, that he has another adult in his life who adores him, another place where… well, what’s that saying about home? That it’s the place where when you go there, they have to take you in? But I love knowing that R has this place where, when he comes here, they are delighted and welcoming and would love to take him in.

A bush of deep pink roses, looking wild and untamed
Seattle, a city of unexpected roses.

A Happy Early Birthday to R

18 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Cici, Personal, R, Randomness, Self-publishing

≈ 7 Comments

a close-up shot of a giraffe, taken at Animal Kingdom
This photo has not been cropped. It just got cut-off because the giraffe was too close to fit in the frame of the picture. 

There is a new ride at Animal Kingdom, in a new area of the park based on the movie Avatar. It is, apparently, the best ride in the world, the best ride that ever there was, and so, for his birthday, I took R and his girlfriend, M, to Animal Kingdom. 

Backing up, it’s actually really hard to buy appropriate presents for a person who’s living more or less out of a backpack. Me selling my house means that R doesn’t have a real home at all, no bedroom with a permanent closet where he can store things. He owns what he can carry with him and the more he has to carry, the more difficult that becomes. So I decided to look for an experience to give him, rather than an object to give him. Animal Kingdom was our favorite theme park when he was young, but it had been years and years since we’d gone there. It felt like a good choice.

So we were not actually at Animal Kingdom specifically to go on the world’s best ride. Which was fortunate, because although we arrived at the park a little after 8, an hour before opening, and headed straight to the world’s best ride, the line was four hours long by the time we got there at 9:05. Yes, you read that right. The resort guests are allowed into the park an hour before non-resort guests and enough of them beat us to the world’s best ride that the line was 240 minutes long. 

We didn’t wait. 

The good news was that the Avatar crowds meant the rest of the park was reasonably nice. We had a fantastic safari ride, where we got to be the people whose truck had to stop while the giraffes sauntered by, plus see all the other animals who were out and active on a chilly day; nice walks through the gorilla and tiger zones; rides on some of the other main rides, including Everest, Primeval Whirl and (for R & M) Dinosaur; and great seats at the Finding Nemo show, which is really beautiful.  And, of course, excellent company. 

At about 5, we went back to the Avatar zone and the line time had gone down to 210 minutes, so three and a half hours. We didn’t wait, but we did wander around the Avatar zone which is actually worth wandering around, too — very pretty and interestingly done. R wanted to write academic papers on the conflicts inherent in turning a movie whose overarching storyline is about kicking exploitative humans off a planet into a theme park whose goal is to attract humans to buy stuff, but figured it was fundamentally too obvious. 

The one minor bad note in an otherwise lovely day was food issues for me. I made bad choices because I was hungry and the lines were crazily long and I paid the price very promptly. Disney offers plenty of reasonable choices for people with food allergies, but it requires planning. It is not a good idea to wait until you’re already hungry and then start looking around for something to eat. I know this, but apparently I have to relearn it every so often. I’m hoping yesterday’s lesson sticks for the next few years. 

In other news, many, many thanks to people who have reviewed Cici. She is so much a book that I published because I wanted to share her, because I wanted other people to read her story and laugh with me, so I’m delighted to hear from people who have. People have asked about sequels and given how many promises I’ve broken about Grace and Fen, I’m not going to make any promises. But I will say that when I found the artwork for the cover, the artist had multiple variations, and I got all the variations. Which means that unlike A Lonely Magic, which is going to require that I find a cover to go with its sequel when I finish writing it, I will have possible cover options ready for Cici sequels whenever I feel like writing them. 🙂 

And now I think I’ll get back to writing Fen. I’m not optimistic about my productivity over the next few weeks: there will be much socializing, some urgent Christmas present shopping, some great time with family. But on the days when I have time to write, I’m going to try to write. Not because I feel the pressure of impending deadlines, but because writing Cici brought me joy and joy is an excellent thing to have more of in one’s life. May you have some as well, today and every day! 

Trois-Rivieres, Quebec

27 Monday Aug 2018

Posted by in Food, R, Randomness, Travel

≈ 8 Comments

I am sitting in a gray Walmart parking lot, as the sky slowly gets darker and darker. I count at least a dozen other campers and trailers here, so probably this town is a good place to be a tourist. It was certainly beautiful when driving around, despite the gray. I crossed a fantastic bridge, over a huge river that looked green in the foggy light. Then I crossed another bridge. Then another, then another.

Somewhere along the way, I thought, “Wow, how many rivers are there?”

And then I thought, “Duh, I need R in the van, so that I could have said that thought aloud to him for whatever his deadpan response would have been.” Pretty sure the name indicates that there might be three of them. Me driving over what felt like four was probably me getting lost.

I was headed to a beautiful church, one that I believe allows overnight camping in a parking lot behind it, but there was a No Dog sign on the parking lot. Alas. I might have been able to park on the curb of the very pretty river — it really didn’t feel like the kind of place where the police come and tell you to move on — but did I mention the gray? The fog was spooky. Yes, I literally had a lovely parking place on the side of a river that might have been a perfectly good place to spend the night, but I wimped out because the fog made everything just that slight bit surreal that makes you think about monsters rising out of the river. Sometimes my imagination is just too good for me. Or maybe that’s not good for me, I’m not sure which.

Either way, I retreated to Walmart. I was putting together a list of things I need — I know that there are several random things that I’ve been meaning to get, like another coat hook because one of mine broke — when I realized that the Walmart looked closed. Yes! It closed at 5PM. I was once again reminded that I am not in my own country, ha. I know that some Walmarts are not 24-hour, but 5PM? And actually, the reminder should have come from me needing to translate 17:00 back to 5:00. Or maybe from not being able to read any of the words on the sign.

So I have a random story from a while ago that I keep remembering, and I’m going to write it down because ten years from now it will make me smile should I stumble across this blog post. R and I ate well, of course, during the week that he camped with me, because I do eat well. We ate out a few times, too, because that’s definitely one of the pleasures of traveling with company, but I cooked most meals. We didn’t eat anything special, particularly — sausages on the grill with salads, risotto with asparagus, sautéed salmon, eggs and potatoes and blueberry pancakes… just food.

And he complimented it, but he grew up while I was learning to cook. He is the person who got to eat every failed experiment, every lesson learned the hard way, every “oops, maybe not like that,” and so he approaches my food with a little more wariness than the average person I feed. But on one of our last nights together, he said to me, “You really are an incredible cook.”

And I was sooo pleased. So delighted. So just a-glow with pleasure that my hard-earned skill was being acknowledged by my toughest audience.

And then I looked at what we were eating and laughed, and said, “Seriously? We’re having quinoa bowls. Not rocket science. Are you complimenting my vegetable-chopping skills?”

Because I make quinoa bowls ALL the time. It’s practically the TV dinner of my life. Put some salad greens in a bowl, add a couple big spoonfuls of quinoa, top with vegetables of some sort and protein of some sort and a dressing, probably based on Greek yogurt, but varying depending on what’s in the bowl. Sometimes even bottled salad dressing! I love the Simply Lemon vinaigrette. It is not a meal that requires any kind of cooking expertise at all. It’s just tossing a bunch of stuff together. Although I actually don’t even really toss it – I like having the ingredients be more layered.

But he said, “I’m serious. This is the best quinoa I’ve ever tasted.”

And so I went back to being pleased. But I also told him, as I will tell you, that the secret to good quinoa is to toast the grains before cooking them, which in my case means sautéing them in the base of the Instant Pot, with no oil or liquid. He asked how long to saute them and that’s a question to which there is no real answer, because it depends on quantity and the heat of the pan, but the effective answer is “until they smell toasted and nutty and delicious.” He has since made his own first quinoa bowl — he went with olives, feta, and a vinaigrette, and reports success, which adds to my pleasure. The only thing better than being a good cook is teaching someone else to be a good cook, too.

river view

I could have been parked next to this beautiful river for the night. I wonder if it was the graffiti on the rocks, unnoticed at the time, that made me feel unsure? Or maybe it was jut parking right next to a river when it was clearly going to rain? But no, I really just think I was worrying about the Loch Ness monster or some Canadian variant.

On the positive side

20 Monday Aug 2018

Posted by in Personal, R, Randomness, Travel, Zelda

≈ 9 Comments

Yesterday, I picked up R at the closest subway station (or light rail, I’m not sure which) and we set off for a day of city luxuries. It turned out to be a day of very minor city luxuries because we are too cheap for much in the way of city fun. We tried to go to Mission Impossible and it was $26 per ticket. $26! Thank you, but I’ll wait until it hits some television-type format.

But I’d picked out a restaurant for lunch that sounded like a bistro-type pub — interesting food, claiming to have gluten-free options. We got there and it turned out to be more like a combination sports bar/Applebee’s, with the only gluten-free items on the menu being pad thai or potato skins. We decided to pass and left.

I was frustrated, because we’d both spent quite a while browsing various review apps on our phones, trying to find the perfect place, but there was a Vietnamese restaurant in the same strip mall-type place, so we decided to go there.

Spontaneously.

Without reading any reviews.

Without consulting TripAdvisor or Yelp or even Google.

And it was delicious! I had mango salad and shrimp summer rolls and R had pho. I took one bite of his pho before he added hoisin sauce (which has gluten, so is not an option for me) and it was so delicious that I ordered myself a pho to go. I ate it for dinner last night and lunch today and it was so good that I’m now feeling in ridiculous harmony with the world. Good soup, that’s all one needs to cheer one up.

I liked the restaurant so much that I went to TripAdvisor to leave a review for it and… it doesn’t exist! Or at least not in Trip Advisor. But for anyone wandering around Toronto, it was called Good Pho You, and that’s the right address and the right menu, even if the name on the website is Mr. Ping’s Noodles. And it was very good for me, several times. If it rains tomorrow, I might have to go back there.

Why is rain connected to dinner, you wonder? Because R and his girlfriend are coming over. I’m planning on making chicken piccata, gluten-free, which is a food I don’t make when I’m on my own, because it requires wine and I need someone else around to drink up the wine. But dinner in the van for more than two people only works when it’s really dinner outside at a picnic table. Still, if my chicken piccata plan fails, we will have Vietnamese and I, at least, will be content.

In even more positive news, albeit already mentioned, R and his girlfriend are coming over for dinner tomorrow. I haven’t met her yet, but I’m looking forward to it. R paid her a compliment that I am not allowed to repeat (not because it’s overly personal, but because he feels it might stress her out to have to live up to said compliment), but it makes me highly inclined to think I’m going to like her a lot. I’d probably think that anyway, though, because R is so happy about their relationship. I told him that while I refuse to take on his unhappiness as my own, his happiness boosts mine by about 20%. So happiness boosted and I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

In additional positive news, Zelda is doing great. She’s not limping anymore, even on long walks. And we’ve run into some other dogs on our walks and she’s been perfectly pleasant to them. I was worried that she might adopt an “attack first” attitude, but a lifetime of good dog encounters has not been jeopardized by the one Very Bad Encounter. At least not for her. I’m working on my own anxiety around the issue.

The only continuing problem for her is that after hurting herself when jumping off the bed a few times in the first days after the VBE, she’s decided against doing that anymore. I’m hoping she’ll get over it eventually, but right now, she jumps up on the bed and then gets trapped there until I realize she’s standing, staring at the ground, and help her down.

And another positive — I’ve made a decision about what I’m doing next! I’ve really been debating about what to do, where to go. I know I write better and more when I sit still. The past two weeks have been terrible writing weeks, because I’ve done so much driving. But what’s the point of living in a van if it doesn’t include some adventuring? If I’m just living in a tiny space, I could do that much more comfortably in one that had a permanent connection to hot water.

Anyway, I was debating between heading west and going along the north side of the Great Lakes all the way to Winnipeg, then south through North Dakota in order to see North Dakota (#49 on my list of states); or heading west to Michigan and visiting the upper peninsula, as missed earlier in the summer; or heading south through New York, over to New Hampshire and Massachusetts and then continuing south.

I decided to do none of the above.

If you were to take a list of the top 50 things to see in the US, I would have seen most of them. Not all of them. I’ve never been to Yellowstone, Glacier, Carlsbad Caverns or Denali. I’ve not watched Old Faithful or visited Craters of the Moon. And there are definitely places I’d like to spend more time, like the Great Smoky Mountains and the entire state of New Mexico. But the places that I actually want to see? Not just “will go see, because hey, why not?” but “want to see”? There are not so many of them left. In fact, when I — in exasperation with myself — meditated on that question only one popped into my head.

Prince Edward Island.

Which, conveniently enough, is actually in the same country that I’m currently in! Not exactly close to where I currently am, but close is relative, right?

So I’m heading to Prince Edward Island, hoping to find places to stay along the way that don’t involve too many parking lots. This last week of summer is a terrible time to find campgrounds and places are mostly booked. And I don’t want to brave PEI until after Labor Day if I can manage it, since this is peak tourist season. But Labor Day is only two weeks away. On Wednesday, I’ll head to a campground in Quebec for the weekend, and then after that… well, I’ll play it by ear, I guess. But I’m excited! Anne of Green Gables country! And the ocean! And then south through Maine and maybe even some New Hampshire autumn foliage.

Life is good.

spiderweb photo

It’s very hard to take a good picture of a spiderweb but it was a beautiful web!

Fifty Point Conservation Area, Grimsby, Ontario

15 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by in Campground, Grace, Personal, R, Randomness, Travel

≈ 8 Comments

I wrote the name of this campground as Conversation Area initially, which really amused me. And it would be so apt! This is a lovely campground on the shores of Lake Ontario. Our site is a pull-through adjacent to another pull-through pointed in the opposite direction, so we’re very close to our neighbors but facing in opposite directions. Conversation would be easy, but is not required.

the sun setting over Lake Ontario

Last night’s view of the sun setting over Lake Ontario.

The campground itself is pretty much everything I like in a campground — grass, trees, water, sunlight, space, beautiful walking, a dog beach where Zelda can play, birds, including the world’s cutest woodpecker working on the tree by the picnic table this morning and some unidentified species sauntering through the grass. Even the bugs were cute — I have no idea what the one crawling on the sink this morning was, but it was green and tiny, with long legs. Maybe some kind of aphid?

Also lots of birch trees, and I’ve decided that the wind rustling through birch tree leaves really makes a unique noise — it’s not the same as wind rustling through other tree leaves. The birch leaves sound like they’re whispering. And tons of cricket noise last night, or maybe they were frogs? But the night was loud and seventy degrees, perfect summer feeling.

So yesterday was Niagara Falls. It was crazily tourist-y, in the way all the main tourist attractions seem to be. Amazing people watching, and frankly, pictures of people would be by far the best photographs from any of the tourist attractions. Preferably pictures of people taking pictures. I started amassing a little collection of those in my travels, but then I realized that I would never be willing to post them anywhere, because it would feel so rude to post a picture of a stranger, but yesterday’s collection of strangers would have been amazing. It reminded me of being at the southern-most point of the United States, in Key West — lots of tourists, people from all over the world, there just for the sake of being there. That said, they were some pretty cool waterfalls, no question about that. And it was such a hot day that it was pretty lovely to stand in the spray of the mist.

Zelda in a field of wildflowers in front of edge of Niagara Falls

You can just see the top of the falls in the background. In order to get a real view, you walk down a hill to the right of the photo, and join a mob of people clustered at a railing, all taking pictures. We liked the wildflowers better than the concrete platform, though.

We also saw my very earliest childhood home yesterday — only somewhat out of our way. The interesting thing about that was not so much how different the neighborhood looked from my memory — very different, and so much smaller — but that I had the address wrong. The day before, when I was failing to find my other childhood homes, I told R confidently that my early memories were the most reliable and that of all the different places I’d lived in during my childhood, the only one that I actually remembered the address of was the first. Wrong! I had the street right, but not the number. I’m not sure that means anything, except maybe that none of my memories are reliable. But I had a very different feel looking at that house than at the others, much warmer and cozier. I’m glad we drove by, even though it was a very long driving day for me. It was worth the stop.

Today we’re headed on to Toronto. Our mattress hunt yesterday failed — perhaps the influence of the bed bug revival? Thrift stores don’t seem to carry mattresses anymore, unfortunately. But we’re going to check out Ikea this afternoon, so fingers crossed for good luck there. Otherwise, R might be going to steal one of the mattresses from the van for a few days while he orders a mattress online or tries for a Craig’s List find. Either way, he’ll have something on which to sleep tonight.

And somehow it is already 10AM, which means it’s time to get moving. Lots to do today, but much, much enormous thanks to the readers who have reached out to tell me that they read Grace — your words brought me much joy this morning! R and I had pancakes (gluten-free, of course) to celebrate!

Green Lakes State Park, Manlius, New York

14 Tuesday Aug 2018

Posted by in Anxiety, Campground, R, Travel

≈ 10 Comments

Post our lovely time in Grand Isle, R and I had no specific plans, but he needs to be back in Toronto by Wednesday. Originally, I’d thought we’d wander slowly through Ontario, but after much discussion, we went for a slight change of plans and decided to take the southern route back to Toronto instead. It’s longer, because we’re swinging pretty far south to get below Lake Ontario and then go up the other side of the lake and around to get to Toronto, but it offered several advantages.

First, gas is enough cheaper in the US that the cost was probably close to the same. Second, R needs a cheap mattress for his new living situation and we’d like to buy it on the last day possible before arriving at his new place, ie Wednesday. US prices might be cheaper, so being in the US on Wednesday could be handy. Third, driving through the south opened up the possibility of driving by several places where I used to live — this area of upstate New York is where I mostly grew up and I haven’t really been back in decades. And fourth, Niagara Falls! Classic Americana road trip sight — the kind of thing that belongs on a list with the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore.

But along the way is Green Lakes State Park, a gorgeous park, very green and lush, beautiful lakes, pleasant treed campsites and really nice showers — the single room kind, where you have a door, plus control over the water temperature. The weather, typical of this oh-so-familiar area, is gray and gloomy, but we drove around for a while, passing by my old high school, three of the houses I lived in (one of which I couldn’t identify — best I could do was say, “sort of somewhere around here and now we must have passed it”), and the site of every bookstore and library that I loved. In fact, R’s impression of my childhood is probably that I did nothing but go to school and read books, because those are the only things that I remember. Although that said, I do vaguely remember this park as a place where we sometimes came to swim in the summertime.

a camper van in a spacious campsite

Our site at Green Lakes. Very green.

Perhaps it’s because I vaguely remember it that I’ve been feeling utterly phobic about poison ivy. I swear, every random leaf looks like a poison ivy leaf to me. Did I once get poison ivy in this park? Is that why I’m so paranoid?

That’s probably not it, though. Sometimes anxiety manifests as semi-irrational fears in order to shield our mind from less-irrational fears. In this case, I think I am struggling not to let last week’s attack turn into a serious dog phobia on my part. It was so fast, so out-of-nowhere, so aggressive and so brutal. My head still knows that dogs are our friends, but the back of my neck seems to be experiencing some post-traumatic stress, and while I try to talk myself out of it, I worry about poison ivy. Now that I’ve figured that out, maybe I’ll stop. Or maybe I’m actually right that all these random leaves are poison ivy and I’ll be hunting for remedies by the time we get to Canada.

Meanwhile, today is release day for A Gift of Grace. I’m trying not to let that stress me out — Niagara Falls, way better thing to think about! — but I’m not that zen. But I checked and double-checked the files, and I do know that it’s time to let go. So I’ll be working on that while I admire the big waterfall today. But I do hope that all of you reading Grace today enjoy yourselves!

Grand Isle State Park, Grand Isle, Vermont

13 Monday Aug 2018

Posted by in Campground, Food, R, Zelda

≈ 8 Comments

a beautiful Jack Russell terrier next to a tent

Zelda is healing well — eager to go for walks again and happy to greet the dogs we encounter on the way. Still limping a little, but not yelping when she jumps any more.

I made my reservations for Grand Isle State Park in Vermont several weeks ago. It’s the most popular state park in Vermont, on an island in Lake Champlain, and in my imaginary visit, there was much kayaking, some swimming, some hiking — several days of actual nature adventure. Real camping, not just living in a van.

My imagination did not include a limping dog.

Nor did it include human companions, in the form of my delightful son and my favorite cousin.

So things sort of balanced out, some bad, some good. I’m sorry to say that my kayak never touched the water, and neither did Zelda or I. R walked down to the beach and went swimming but it was too long a walk for Zelda.

We did, however, have a campfire one night and cook sausages over the fire, which was fun, and we went to a farmer’s market where I bought maple syrup, which felt very Vermont.

And the campground was as beautiful as I’d expected it to be. Vermont is gorgeous. This was my second visit, not nearly long enough, and it’s so green and hilly. I suspect that I wouldn’t like it nearly as much in winter, when I would be admiring the hills and wishing to be somewhere warmer, but in August, it’s lovely.

The campground was great, too. I wasn’t in love with our site (#96, for future reference) which was packed dirt, but it was huge and felt quite secluded, because it was surrounded and sheltered by trees. Total shade, with only tiny patches of sunlight. Z wandered from one sunlit patch to another as the day wore on. Some of the other sites are grassy and sunnier, so if I ever go back, I’ll aim for one of those (on the outside, for my own future reference).

The only real negative for me was the showers: coin-operated, no control over water pressure or temperature. Not my favorite and on our last day, the shower stole R’s coins and neglected to give him any water. He was not a happy camper.

Despite being less energetic than I’d planned, we had a very pleasant three days there. No electricity, so lots of reading and relaxing, and for me, lots of cooking fun food. We ate blueberry pancakes and bacon for breakfast one morning, scrambled eggs with avocado and cilantro and sausage another. I braved the fish smells and did sockeye salmon for dinner one night, with salads of mixed greens, avocado, pea pods, radishes, sunflower seeds, and lemon vinaigrette.

On one of the other days, I ate a nameless food — ground beef and rice cooked with turmeric, cinnamon, parsley, garlic, cilantro, chili sauce, and fresh cherry tomatoes. My description of it to R was so poor that he passed and ate leftover salmon, but he did take a bite after I’d cooked it and agreed that it was better than he’d been imagining. It actually was pretty delicious, although it felt like an ideal mid-winter food, rather than a deep summer food — rich and spicy and satisfying.

After five days, R is now my longest van companion. He says that he’s tired of hitting his head, which I sympathize with. I don’t know that he would ever want to drive around exploring the country anyway, but I am pretty sure if he did, he would like a taller vehicle. And I just asked him and he agrees, he would rather not spend a lot of time in this vehicle this size. The perils of being 6’4”!

But we’ve done pretty well together, I think — I was worried that after a few days of tripping over each other, I’d be getting cranky about having extra stuff in the way and he’d be getting cranky about me being cranky, but so far, so good. A second (and, briefly, third) person does mean a lot more dishes to wash, though, and that’s meant some minor tragedies. Yesterday I broke two of my favorite bowls, because I didn’t stow them properly when we were on the road, and I’ve been surprisingly sad about that. When you own almost nothing, the things that you own that you love become much more important, I guess. But I’m trying to remind myself that the universe has plenty of bowls, and maybe I’ll find some new ones that I love just as much.

Tomorrow is the release day for A Gift of Grace, and I’ve been meaning to write about that — some more about the book itself, maybe some about the things I learned writing it, some self-publishing thoughts about how the release has gone and what I’ve done, that kind of thing. But I spent a solid twenty minutes staring at a blank document and writing and re-writing some words and then decided that maybe that wasn’t going to happen. At least not yet. I’m doing a pretty good job of letting go of the anxiety and stress and tension that comes with releasing a creative baby into the world and I think I’d like to keep it that way. So instead, R and I are going to go do laundry. Exciting days!

A Gift of Ghosts available as an audiobook

04 Monday Jun 2018

Posted by in Audiobooks, R

≈ 4 Comments

audiobook cover for A Gift of Ghosts

A square cover equals an audiobook!

I made the appropriate professional(-ish) announcement about the audiobook of A Gift of Ghosts on my business blog last week, but I wanted to share some of the background details about it in my less professional(-ish) space. (I admit, I don’t consider myself terribly businesslike, even in my official business space. My former employers would not have been impressed by the low-key, un-marketing-speak nature of the announcement. :))

I’ve wanted to make an audiobook for a while. I think the first time I considered it seriously was probably sometime in 2013, so five years ago. At that point, I looked into doing a royalty share production. That’s when an audiobook producer creates the book for 50% of the proceeds rather than being paid upfront. At the time, I listened to some auditions, but I just wasn’t sold on it.

One of the problems I’ve had with creating an audiobook is that I really don’t like audiobooks. I sometimes think the one life-skill I learned in high school was the ability to tune out completely when someone is talking at me. Audiobooks trigger that ability for me. I find it very hard to pay attention to them, even when I want to.

But back in 2013, I listened to some auditions and I just didn’t feel it. I wound up abandoning the idea.

In 2014, I decided to take a different approach and I invested a few hundred dollars and several weeks of my time trying to create a home studio and do it myself. The folks at Audible were nice enough to tell me that my delivery was great, but unfortunately, I couldn’t get rid of the air-conditioning noise in the background of my recordings. The guy I worked with suggested turning it off… in July, in Florida, in a closet with no ventilation. Yeah, no. I thought maybe I’d try again in winter, but I was busy with other things and it never happened.

Last year, I again looked into the possibility of doing an audiobook and I listened to a bunch of auditions. Somehow none of them quite did it for me. The thought of having to listen to any of the probably perfectly adequate narrators read my own words aloud just seemed torturous. I wanted the end product, but I didn’t want to go through the process of making it happen.

Then, this year, I got a tax refund. I’ll skip the details — no one wants to read about taxes! — but for Reasons, I felt like I wanted to do something for R with part of my refund. About the same time, he was deciding on graduate school, so I decided I would invest in an audiobook and split the proceeds of said audiobook with R.

Logical decision, right? Ha. I’m sure it makes no sense to anyone who hasn’t experienced the unexpected delight of small amounts of passive income. But one of the projects I did, the wedding anthology, seemed like an entirely quixotic, pure marketing investment when I first did it. I didn’t expect to earn any money from it. For a while, though, it made $20-25/month, and it was awesome. It wasn’t money that I counted on, it was just an unexpected small windfall every time. I almost always moved it straight to a Starbucks card and turned it into treat money. Obviously, I have no idea if the audiobook will earn anything — reports vary wildly about the profitability of audiobooks and I know people who don’t make much of anything from theirs — but I liked the idea of giving R at least a chance of windfalls.

Still, making the decision didn’t mean that I would be able to bring myself to act on it. But I went back to Audible and posted my project, this time not as a royalty share arrangement, but paying upfront, Screen Actors Guild rates.

Wow. I received over fifty auditions. It was a really surreal experience. I spent a weekend in Arkansas listening to various people read the same section of Ghosts over and over again. After about the first ten, I noticed every mistake. But some of them were really good. Others were really good, but not at all what I’d imagined for the characters. And some were not so good, of course, but really, there were at least a solid dozen that were better than anyone I’d heard before, maybe even more than that.

It was not an easy decision.

But I kept coming back to one of my early favorites. I think she was the third narrator I’d listened to and the first one where my eyes widened and I thought, “Oh, yes, this could work.” Not just that I could get an audiobook made, but that I could listen to someone read Ghosts aloud without cringing inside. I actually laughed out loud when she was reading Rose’s lines.

And I sort of felt like the universe had drawn a big red arrow pointing toward her, and lit it up with shiny neon: her name is Sarah Grace, and the name of her company is GraceWright Productions. Ha. Given that I’ve spent three years trying to write a book with Grace in the name… well, it’s superstitious of me, but I did feel like the universe was all but jumping up and down, saying “this one, this one, this one.”

Since I don’t entirely trust the universe, eventually I made several friends (thank you, A, J, L & T!) listen to my top five candidates. All of them approved, and so GraceWright Productions it was.

And the process was not torturous! I chose to have Sarah team up with her partner, Tristan, to do the narration so Zane’s POV sections and all the male dialogue are in a male voice, and Akira’s POV and all the female dialogue are in a woman’s voice. I think it works really well. I admit to both laughing and probably blushing during the seduction scene, but I also started to cry when Zane talks to his mom and didn’t stop until that chapter finished. I was surprised at how moved I was.

If you’re an Audible subscriber, I hope you’ll take a chance on Ghosts and let me know what you think. If you’re not an Audible subscriber, but have considered trying the service, I should let you know that I (and by extension, R) get a bounty of $50 if Ghosts is the first audiobook you try and then you stick with the service for two paid months. The service costs $14.95/month, so you’d eventually get three ebooks for $30, which is a pretty good deal, but obviously not worth it at all if you don’t think you’d want three audiobooks.

And you can also, of course, just buy the audiobook directly either from Amazon or from iTunes.

Of course, if you hate audiobooks, don’t feel obligated. But I will say that I, an affirmed audiobook hater, really quite enjoyed this one.

PS Privacy? Europe? Something-something mysterious abbreviations, crazy expensive laws? I guess I will write a privacy policy and add it to my site, but the only information I “collect” is whatever you enter when you comment. And I use the term “collect” quite loosely, because even though it’s probably sitting in the backend of the database somewhere, I would have no idea how to get it out, nor would I have any interest in doing so. I don’t use that information for anything, I don’t plan to ever use it for anything, and the only emails you’ll ever get from me, unless you’ve signed up for my mailing list, are entirely personal and individual. I was going to say that I’d never email you, but that would be silly, because I can think of half a dozen people offhand that I’ve emailed directly who will read this. But yeah, privacy — I respect it?

Commencement and other things

23 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by in Personal, R, Self-publishing, Translations, Zelda

≈ 8 Comments

This morning, I knelt on the floor at my dad’s house to rub noses with his dog, Gizmo. Gizmo is, I think, a mix of cocker spaniel and poodle* — golden, soft, fluffy, with an extremely endearing underbite, and a passionate devotion to his person, my dad. With his person out of the room, he was willing to come be loved up by me and maybe even play a little.

When Zelda saw what we were doing, she decided to come play, too. Within minutes, she and Giz were both chasing after a squeaky skunk, racing down the hallway after it, shoving one another out of the way, even playing tug as they were bringing it back to me. Zelda was play bowing, batting at the toy with her paws, even mock growling, and Giz’s tail was wagging a hundred beats a minute.

If I’d had a tail, it would have been wagging even faster than Giz’s.

So Sunday before last, Z was sick and getting sicker. Not eating, hiding under the table, lethargic, no energy. Not even interested in going for walks. I’d been bracing myself for the worst and it felt like the worst was coming even faster than I could have imagined. Last Monday, I decided to stop the medication she was on. On Thursday, I got the news that she had no signs of a UTI and so I also stopped the antibiotic she was on. She started getting better immediately. Yesterday, at my dad’s suggestion, I took her to his vet. Instead of recommending an ultrasound and x-rays, which was where I was at with my vet, his vet put her on estrogen.

Wow. Just wow, wow, wow, wow.

The vet said it would take a couple weeks before we’d know whether it was going to help with the peeing problem, but watching her play with Gizmo; having her almost drag me out of the van to go for a walk in the rain; seeing her lick every last speck of food out of her dinner bowl, then nose me and look expectantly for more… I will buy stock in doggie diapers, I will plan on doing laundry as often as it takes, but oh, it’s so nice to have my energetic dog back!

a cute Jack Russell terrier in the grass

Zelda, attending R’s commencement ceremony. She listened about as well as some of the students around us did and was much less chatty. But it was a very festive atmosphere!

In other news, R’s graduation was lovely. New College students treat commencement as a combination costume party and picnic. It took place at sunset, by the water, and while there were appropriate speeches, suggestions to go out and change the world, and professors attired with dignity in their academic robes, the students were celebrating.

sunset with silhouettes of people

New College commencement

R had been torn earlier in the day whether he was going costume-party or dignity, but he went with the costume and I got to watch — with immense pride — my six-foot four, bearded son accept his diploma while dressed as a lobster. I’d been thinking prior to the moment that despite the whistles and cheers and yelling of the audience, I’d probably only be able to bring myself to applaud until my hands hurt, but as it happened, I yelled and whooped for him with the best of them. I’d worried that I might cry, but I think it is actually impossible to cry when watching a lobster graduate. There was much beaming with pride, though. He told me later that his favorite part of the evening was all the parents of the kids he works with coming up to him and asking to take his picture to show their kids.

And then another nice thing happened this week: I was taking care of some basic business stuff, including checking to see whether the Italian translation was finally available, and I remembered that I’d scheduled free promotions for the other translations. Instead of going to Amazon and looking for the German translation, I used Google and it took to me Amazon-Germany, where I discovered…

screenshot of German bestseller list

A German best given-away-er

I could have used Google translate to read the reviews, but I didn’t — I just enjoy knowing that they exist. And that for a brief moment in time, Ghosts — or rather, Die Gabe der Geister — was an international best-given-away-er.

*edited to add a message received in my email:

The Giz is pissed at you. He is not in any way genetically related to any Cocker Spaniel. He is a ferocious peek-a-poo, a descendent of a fierce line of savage Pekingese who mauled Cocker Spaniels every day. He will probably bite you the next time he sees you.

The discomfort of change

16 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by in Personal, R

≈ 10 Comments

People in Florida keep asking me how much longer I’m going to keep traveling. It’s a legitimate question, I think. I’ve certainly been wondering about the answer myself. But I don’t know. Being back in Florida definitely feels like coming home, more than any other state, which is not so much what I would have expected. I lived in California for longer than I lived in Florida, and I spent my entire childhood visiting Pennsylvania. New York is the state where I’ve lived the longest. But Florida feels comfortable, Florida feels easy.

Sort of.

I also almost cried yesterday when the grocery store didn’t have the dog food I wanted. It was my grocery store, a home store for me. Not the one that I went to most often when I lived here, but one that I went to often enough that it should have felt familiar. But it didn’t. I had to hunt for the dog food and then it wasn’t there. Change happens. And a grocery store changing brands, re-organizing aisles, that is not the sort of change that should make one want to cry.

I think, though, that navigating unfamiliar grocery stores has turned into one of the most exhausting elements of a life of continual travel for me. I can remember in my first month on the road loving the adventure of a new store. Sometimes I still do. Often I still do!

But then there are the days when all I want is to get in and get out. I don’t want an adventure, I just want to get a need met as quickly as possible so I can get back to whatever I am doing that is more interesting to me. Yesterday it was to get on the road so that I could come down to Merritt Island and write with my friend, Lynda. I didn’t want to waste hours hunting for the right sort of dog food.

As it happens, I didn’t. I bought some strange canned food, ridiculously expensive and radiating organic healthiness, so that I could get moving, and today B and I are paying the price. Dogs don’t react well to abrupt changes in food, usually. Poor B. On top of the ear infections and the wheezing, he didn’t need an upset tummy. He’ll be okay, though. I also bought ingredients to make the homemade food that he likes, so if I can’t find the right food today, he’ll get to have chicken and sweet potatoes for dinner and he’ll be delighted.

Meanwhile, my travel plans for the next six weeks or so involve nothing new: familiar driveways, a couple of familiar state parks, lots of time spent with people I love. At the end of it, after the holidays, I think I’ll have a better sense of whether I’m tired of traveling and really need to figure out where I can settle down for a while or whether I’m eager to get back on the road. Maybe, like right now, both will still appeal.

I’m probably not going to spend a lot of time blogging, either, because even though I know that these memories — of time spent well, of friends and people and good conversations, of interesting meals and holidays — will be as important to me in the future as any campground review ever, well, I’d rather be spending my writing energy on Grace and my life energy on living.

That said, here’s a story I want to remember: hanging out with C and her son, A, in her back porch, talking about media mothers and C’s resemblance to Joyce on Stranger Things.

I texted R.

Me: What media mom would remind you of me? (Am conversing with C and her son)

The next day

R: No idea. Sorry!
Me: (Sad emoji)
Me: I shall choose to believe that is because I am unique and original.
R: Precisely!
R: You could also construe that as representative of the fact that good parents are only interesting in fiction if they die.
R: (Shrug emoji)
Me: … (Dustin’s mom from Stranger Things) is personally my take.
Me: and since you haven’t watched Stranger Things that doesn’t mean much
R: I have
R: all of it
Me: Oh! Well, then, really, Dustin’s mom?
R: Dustin’s mom is pretty close
Me: (Blushing smile emoji)

For anyone who hasn’t watched Stranger Things, S2, Dustin’s mom is gullible, easily manipulated by her son, but clearly dotes on him. He makes her laugh and she thinks he’s awesome. I looked for the internet’s take on her and the only articles I found described her as a “lovable helicopter mom” and “lacked much definition beyond her status as a loving mom.” Eh, not the perfect descriptions, but as media moms go, I’m very pleased that R sees the resemblance.

And I really shouldn’t have let myself fall into the internet rabbit hole that is articles on Stranger Things, because I could be writing right now. Or doing laundry or hunting for dog food or even hanging out with L, who’s working away at her kitchen table while I’m sitting on her porch!