As long-time readers will recall, back in April of 2020, I was living in my van, parked in the street outside my friend Suzanne’s house. The pandemic was raging, the great isolation was on, and I was not exactly enjoying van life. Vans are great when you’re going places. When you’re sitting still, they’re… less great. Anyway, Suzanne had, in her back yard, a renovated garage. Her stepson had been living there, but he’d moved out. Let’s see if I can show you some pictures from back then…

It had a few problems: no heat, no hot water, and the vivid orange was not a color I could live with. All solvable problems! By June of 2020, I was cozily ensconced in the freshly-painted tiny house, newly named Serendipity. A few more pictures:

In the summer of 2021, I finally moved back into my van, but as I headed east, I realized that I really didn’t want to drive anymore. I loved Serenity, the van, but I also loved Serendipity and Arcata and sitting still. By the beginning of August, I’d sold Serenity and was hopping on a plane to come back to Arcata for good.

But as wonderful as Serendipity was/is, living full-time in a space so small posed some challenges. First and most significant, the sink was a bar sink, suitable for washing a few glasses, impossible for washing anything large. My cooking options were limited anyway, but even using the Instant Pot was a hassle, because I needed to run into Suzanne’s house to wash it. I’d bought one of those Ninja Everything cooking tools — an oven, an air-fryer, a toaster, a dehydrator, all-in-one! — but the pans for it wouldn’t fit into the sink, so I rarely used it.

Challenge #2, clutter. As you can see from the above pictures, everything I owned was out in the open. In those pictures, it’s not such a big deal, because I had an enormous closet (aka, the van) parked right outside and most of my belongings stayed in the van. But when I moved into Serendipity permanently, everything I owned moved in here with me. The shelves were overloaded, the cubes overflowing. I tried to stay organized, but there was only so much I could do. Ruthlessly culling my possessions could only take me so far.

Challenge #3 wasn’t actually a challenge, but an opportunity. The floor in Serendipity was wood laminate and when Serendipity was unheated (when Suzanne’s son lived here), it had gotten damaged by the damp. They thought then that it was water seeping up from the ground, but I think it was probably just Arcata’s climate. S had warned me that the floor would feel cold and wet & that there was no point in putting rugs down because they’d get moldy, but with the heat on, that never happened to me. So I didn’t think it was an ongoing problem. But if we were going to try to solve Challenges #1 & 2, it seemed like a good opportunity to solve #3, too.

Challenge #4, also not a real challenge. But I hated the bathroom floor because I could not get it clean. It was just impossible. The dirt was ground in. No matter how hard I scrubbed, it looked dirty. The dirt didn’t come off, so it wasn’t like I was walking in mud puddles every time I dripped water on the floor after a shower, but still, it felt dirty to me and I’m not a huge fan of dirt.

So, the solution/plan: a new kitchen sink, a real countertop, cabinets for storage, and a new floor for the entire place, including the bathroom.

We began two weeks ago, by tackling the storage shed, cleaning it out and making space for all of my possessions to go into it. (Along the way, we found leftover laminate for the bathroom floor and I discovered that what I thought was dirt was actually the pattern of the laminate. Ha. I went back into Serendipity and studied the bathroom floor and realized yes, what I thought was “dirt” was actually patterned. Somehow my scrubbing had never made that clear to me. Oh, well. TBH, I’m glad we’d already purchased the new flooring and that I didn’t know it could be returned, because the new floor is soooo much nicer.)

Ten days ago, Suzanne helped me move my mattress into her house and then headed off on a trip. I then moved all the rest of my belongings, either into her house or into the shed. Last week, the old floors, sink, shelves and cabinets were removed, and then new ones installed. This weekend, I moved all my stuff back in. So!

My new kitchen sink: deep and with a dish rack and cutting board included.

My new kitchen cabinets and countertop

And the kitchen cabinets open, so you can see how much stuff is now tucked away and how incredibly awesome they are. With bonus cat.

A close-up of the floor. I don’t have any pictures of the old floor, but this one is much, much nicer! Also made of vinyl, so heavy-duty and not going to get damaged by water. The color is off in this photo, though — it’s really the gray of the floor in the picture with the cat in it, just above.

The rest of the kitchen — a table and a bigger fridge. The need for a bigger fridge and a place to eat were challenges that I solved back in 2021, but they’re looking much nicer now that the room is not so crowded.

As I look over this blog post, I feel like I could have done a much better job with all the current photos: the cutting board still had the plastic wrap on; the light wasn’t the greatest; there’s some random clutter, like the bright red tupperware top sitting on the countertop. And I actually redid my bins in the closet so that the colors are nicer (because I had extra bins leftover after getting rid of one set of cubes.) If I was an interior designer or a realtor, I’d definitely stage my pictures better. But I’m neither of those things and this isn’t a blog trying to sell anyone on new cabinets, just the explanation for why I mentioned moving last week!

In other news, I’m exhausted. Ha. But recovering now that I’m back in Serendipity and not lugging my belongings around, and looking forward to some fun cooking now that I can clean-up, and some productive days now that my own clutter isn’t stressing me out!

In Luck news, I’ve sold 23 copies and it looks like maybe 2 people have read via Kindle Unlimited. Not bestseller list #s, that’s for sure, but I am deeply grateful for the 25 of you who’ve bought me a cup of coffee, and I hope you enjoy/ed Laurel and Niall’s story!

Late last night, I realized it was St. Patrick’s Day and I’d just missed a fun opportunity to publish my book about luck on a holiday related to luck. Drat! If I’d been the kind of organized author who thought ahead two weeks… but I wasn’t. The only thing holding me up, though, was working on keywords and a book cover for the print edition, so I decided to go for it. Voila! (That cover is a link to the book on Amazon, I hope.) 

I spent a fair amount of time this week reading current advice for marketing self-published books. How to do a book launch, where to advertise, how to build a network of supporters with advanced review copies, etc, etc. Promotions, blog reviews, proper use of a mailing list, pre-orders, all that kind of thing.

I should have done all of it before I published, of course, but I didn’t. Or maybe that should be, “I should have done all of it before I published, but I didn’t, of course.” Ha. What a difference moving a couple words makes. 

I’m probably not going to do any of it now, either. Do I lack ambition? Faith in my work? Drive? Maybe. Maybe all of the above. But really, I think my fundamental problem as an indie author is that I write too slowly, and I think I need to work on that problem more than I need to work on marketing a single book. Every minute spent trying to sell Luck is a minute not spent writing the next book. So Luck is published, and I will probably try to let my mailing list know about it sometime within the next couple of weeks* and otherwise, I’m just going to move on to the next thing.

*My mailing list software is doing a big upgrade next week, I believe, and I’d rather re-learn the software as it will be, rather than re-learning it as it will no longer be.

What is the next thing? I don’t know! Not for sure. But it might involve a character named Serena, who has a minor but entertaining role in A Gift of Luck. Meanwhile, I hope you read Luck, I hope you enjoy Luck, I hope you review Luck! (It’s exclusive to Amazon right now and in Kindle Unlimited, so if you’re a KU person, it’ll be free to read. I haven’t seen the print edition yet — obviously, given that I finished the print cover at about 10PM last night — but it’s also available as a paperback.) 

Here’s the current book description for A Gift of Luck. I was going to claim that it was the one and only thing I accomplished this week, but actually that’s totally not true. I also did some editing, sent links to some beta readers, and moved out of my tiny house. (Temporarily on the last, but it still involved packing up all of my possessions and shifting them from one place to another.)

Anyway, comments are welcome! I hate writing these things, but my strategy for this one was apparently to discuss it with everyone willing to listen as I looked for the words that resonated, both with them and with me once I said them aloud. Escape & surprise, that’s what resonated. 🙂

Running away was a mistake. Getting lost was magic. 

• Rule #1 of running away: check the weather. 
• Rule #2: bring a map. 
• Rule #3: get your car a tune-up before you leave home. 

Laurel Moreland’s great escape isn’t going as planned. Florida drivers are crazy; the Florida weather is not what she anticipated; and the mysterious orange symbol on her dashboard feels like doom. But when she stops in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town hoping to find a mechanic, her adventure takes a turn for the better.

Tassamara, the town, is full of secrets and surprises, starting with the crowds at the restaurant, a startling invitation or two, and a very appealing guy. 

Niall Blake’s vacation is also not going as planned. With an engagement ring burning a hole in his pocket and a strained relationship with his twin brother to repair, the last thing he expected to be distracted by was a mysterious woman. What is Laurel running away from? Why won’t she tell him? And how can he help her? 

Return to Tassamara in A Gift of Luck, a short, stand-alone novel with some familiar characters. It takes place after the events of A Gift of Grace, so does include spoilers for the previous books in the Tassamara series, but can be read without reading the others. 

A little bit of a ghost story, a little bit of a mystery, and lot of a romance.

I’m debating next steps. If I wanted to pay for a pre-order ad from BookBub (around $200), I should post it today, apply for the ad, and then wait two weeks. But I went back and checked how that did in 2018 when I released my last Tassamara book (oh, how time flies) and the sales I got from it were negligible. $4/sale is what I calculated, which meant taking a loss on the ad. So yay me for including that data for myself and I will probably not be doing that.

I tried to talk myself into spending the next couple of weeks working on marketing: first looking at each book, making sure that its presentation was as polished as could be, rewriting some blurbs (Sia Mara doesn’t sell at all, so working on those blurbs might help), creating Amazon A+ content for all of them, creating an advertising plan that would maximize my never-used sale opportunities from Kindle Unlimited, aka free days and discounting… and then I downloaded approximately 20 books from Amazon, mostly from Kindle Unlimited, and read them all, one after another, on a gigantic binge of escaping from reality.

(11 books by K.M. Shea, of which The Court of Midnight and Deception series was by far my favorite; everything I could find by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, who is actually dramatically worse than me at marketing, judging by the fact that her author page doesn’t list the majority of her books and her covers are abysmal; three books by Delia Marshall Turner, which are delightfully weird and cheap enough that I was willing to buy them even though they weren’t in KU; and finally Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls, by Jane Lindskold, which is a book I loved almost 30 years ago and was delighted to re-discover. That one was interesting to reread, but my 2022 self found the level of casual sexual violence in it — not explicit, but clearly stated — hard to take. The “good guys” prostitute children but hey, are free from societal oppression. Um, nope. Nope, nope, nope. And how was my 1994 self not revolted by that?) All those links are probably affiliate links, so if you buy something on Amazon from one of them, I might get 4% of the purchase price. Yay, pennies! But I was reminded of the virtues of affiliate links because my own book purchases came from Rachel Neumeier’s blog, and I felt like she deserved her pennies, too.

Hmm, I feel like I’ve gotten very distracted from the point of this blog post. Which was what, exactly? Oh, right, what I’m doing with A Gift of Luck. Well, probably tweaking that description a few hundred more times while I wait for beta readers to tell me what questions they have, then reading the whole thing aloud (always fun), and then maybe releasing it. So, maybe this week? I’m hoping that the work on the tiny house will be done on Thursday or Friday, letting me move back in on the weekend. Maybe I’ll aim to finish before then, so my fresh start in the tiny house can also be a fresh start on my next book. Doesn’t that sound fun?

My file still contains plenty of notes that say things like “Consider revising” and “check for repetition” and “were you going to do something with this?” But I typed the words “The End” in my file today. And then thought, ugh, that’s silly, the reader knows it’s the end and deleted them. Still, the point is that I reached a conclusion to a story. Yay, me!

It’s a little short — the current version just barely breaks 60,000 words, so it’s a quick read. I thought I’d probably add a few thousand words on my first editing pass, and I did, but I also deleted a few thousand words, so net gain of editing was negligible.

I don’t think I’ll be adding any more scenes. I wondered before I did my first read whether maybe I could — maybe a breakfast scene, maybe another outing somewhere? — but it felt very cohesive when I was reading it. If I added, it wouldn’t be because there are missing scenes, it would be adding just for the sake of adding, which is not something I feel inclined to do. I think it’s just going to be a short book.

I’m too close to it to know if it’s any good, of course, but it’s a little bit of a ghost story, a little bit of a mystery, and a lot of a romance. I did not expect those proportions to turn out that way. I specifically thought sometime back in December when I returned to this story that I wasn’t going to worry about writing a “romance.” Although what I said back then was that I’d be writing “stories that maybe wind up with happy endings where good people who like one another end up looking toward the future together” and that’s actually a very apt description for what my main characters wound up doing.

I guess I should set a release date. And ask for some beta readers, do a few more editing passes, write a book description… maybe that’s all for later, though. I think today I’m just patting myself on the back. Shine on, self!

Version A

Version B

The difference is subtle, but I would love a little help deciding which one is best. Version A or Version B? Please vote in the comments!

(Also, yeah, I did a thing/am doing a thing. Why does making a cover make it feel so real?)

Well. Last week was a weird week. Definitely not the week I thought I was going to be having, which is a pity, because I was having so much fun with the book I was writing and it all went rather awry. So it goes, I guess.

It’s strange: I both want and don’t want to write about it. I told the troll that I would write about my feelings as I pleased, and nothing he could do would change that, but at the same time, I sort of dread opening my email now. He has not emailed again, and my last sentence to him was “Get a life and stop reading your estranged mother’s blog,” so maybe it’s over.

But in an email to my aunt, I summarized some of the highlights of the emails I’d received:

“According to him, I’m whiny, shallow, self-pitying, narcissistic, a bully, a wretched emotionally-stunted creep, hapless, self-serving, obsessed, undeserving of his time and energy, stupid, and a textbook emotional abuser, with a mask of sentimental superiority and a martyr complex that I mistake for a personality.”

I followed that up with, “And oddly enough, copying all that out just made me want to laugh. It’s so beyond anything that is remotely within the range of reason. In the middle of the night, night before last, I actually felt like I was letting go of a heavy weight. Because for almost two years, I wondered whether maybe I was condescending, maybe I did talk over him, maybe I didn’t listen. Maybe his attack on me was justified, even as hurtful as it was. But all that? Nope.”

It’s been almost two years since I’ve spoken to him, so basically all of his insults are based on things I’ve posted here, I believe. Well, or on whatever stories his brain is telling him. The “textbook emotional abuse” was apparently related to me trying to get his address to send him a “sad little suicide note.” Um, no? Not in the least? The actual letter that I wanted to mail him (back in June 2020, so a long, long time ago) went more like this:

I’ve reached out to you again and again, always with love, and you have made it abundantly clear that you don’t care. That my crimes — of being really smart, of challenging you, of not wanting to discuss politics — outweigh all of the Marvel movies, the hours spent reading aloud, the meals shared, the beach visits and Disney trips and camping. The twenty-five years of love. 

For over three months, in a time of world crisis and fear, when everyone is stressed and scared and afraid, you have ignored me. And that’s not just rude or even simply unkind. It’s cruel.

You’ve treated me like I am worthless. You’ve thrown me away like I am nothing but trash. 

And I let that be the story. I let that be my story. As I cried and grieved and worried, every single day, I let your actions define me, instead of seeing how they defined you. 

I wanted so desperately for this story to have a happy ending — the kind where everyone is together and happy, and all conflicts were just misunderstandings — that I couldn’t look at the reality of your behavior. 

I couldn’t stop and say to myself, Wait. A person who deliberately chooses to hurt you is abusive. A person who is treating you like trash is not someone you want in your life. A person who doesn’t care about you doesn’t deserve you.

But all those things are true, and all those things are part of this story. 

Nothing suicidal about that. I am pretty sure no random bystander (preferably with a therapy degree) would call it “textbook emotional abuse,” either. Tough love, maybe. Hard truths for both of us, although good reminders for me now.

On December 30, 2012, I wrote on this blog: He is–okay, I’m a little biased–the most amazing kid ever. He’s never going to disappoint me. Not because of anything he needs to do, but because he is who he is. He could fail every class, and he would still be the gentlest sixteen-year-old you have ever met. He would still be a charm magnet for six-year-olds. He would still be himself. There is nothing he has to achieve to be wonderful. He simply is.

I’m so glad I couldn’t see the future back then.

Anyway, I assume that sharing all this opens me up to more nastygrams, but there’s a real push-pull. I don’t particularly want to be a punching bag and I definitely have no intention of being a doormat, but being quiet because I’m afraid of his reaction is anathema to me. If I’m not willing to stand up for my freedom to write about my own experience… well, it feels like a kind of cowardice to NOT speak up. To not say, holy shit, that was all really awful, and made for a really pretty crappy week.

But moving on, because I also have no intention of dwelling on it any more (my theme song needs to be either “Let It Go” from Frozen or perhaps “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”, ha)… this week is probably not going to be a lot more productive, because Suzanne is away, enjoying a family vacation in the sun, which puts me on puppy & pet duty. Three dogs, three cats, and a lot of chickens adds up to a great many distractions. It’s hard to find the focus for story when a dog is trying to get in or out or convince someone to play with her and a cat is demanding food. And more food, and more food. I was literally five hours into pet-sitting duty when I first told a pet to fuck off. Not a good sign. (It was said to the cat, who was informing me — loudly and repetitively — that none of the multiple types of food available to her were acceptable.)

That said, I consider myself totally lucky to get to hang out with all these delightful animals. All three dogs are currently sleeping, which is why I can write that so cheerfully. Ha. Oh, shoot, that reminds me that I need to take care of the chickens, which means the dogs are going to have to be woken up. Oh, well, it wasn’t going to last, anyway. Nothing ever does. An important thing to remember for 2022!

When I was a senior in college, my friend Michelle had a psychotic break. I actually googled to see if we still use that term — psychotic break — because it just sounds so awful, and mostly it’s “psychotic episode” these days. That’s probably a better name. The word “break” makes it sound like a thing that happens quickly, a fast snap into delusion, but that wasn’t how it was. 

Instead, over the course of several days, Michelle started saying strange things. I think I probably laughed off the first few, or thought she was quoting poetry to me, or even admired the incredible poetry of her own weird and wonderful mind. 

But then the strange things started dominating her conversation. Other people started getting puzzled. Everyone started getting worried. It started to feel like she couldn’t be left alone, like the choices she would make on her own would not be the safest. I can remember her boyfriend and I trying to convince her to sleep and me, desperately tired, finally giving up and going to sleep myself. 

It was our birthday week — hers on the 4^th of the month, mine on the 7^th — and our friend Zach, whose birthday was the same week, stopped by to wish us happy birthdays, maybe to celebrate with us. I don’t know how long he hung out, I don’t know which night it was. Maybe the 5^th? 

The next morning he came back and woke me up. Early, maybe 7AM. He said, “You are the person who has to do something; you are the person who has to make this stop. You’re the only one who can.” 

I… didn’t disagree. She was my best friend. 

As soon the health center opened, I said to Michelle, “We’re going to go to the health center now. You and me.” She was dubious, but I was calm and centered and resolute. I didn’t start crying until we got to the health center where I told the receptionist that Michelle needed to see a doctor now, that we needed to see a doctor now, that we needed help. 

I remember so vividly the seats in the doctor’s office. It wasn’t an exam room, not then, it was an office. Michelle took the seat by the desk, I sat behind her in a chair against the wall and tears streamed down my face, silently, just pouring out of me, while Michelle told the doctor that there was nothing wrong, that she was fine, that it was just the drugs. 

I told the doctor she wasn’t on any drugs. 

He tried to tell me that sometimes recreational drugs could last longer than expected.

I said, “No. She is not on any drugs. She has not taken anything. This has been going on for days and I have been with her. This is not drugs. This is something else.” 

And I could see the doctor glancing between her and me, not understanding why I was so upset while she was so well-spoken. And then, finally, slowly, he started to get it. Everything she said, taken in isolation, maybe made sense, but when you listened for long enough, it got stranger and stranger. 

Things get blurry. I think they took her off to do an actual exam: blood pressure, maybe some blood work? I think they gave her an actual room, one with a real bed, not just an exam room. I know they decided pretty quickly that this was beyond anything they could handle and called her parents. I know they told me that, but wouldn’t tell me anything more. Medical privacy, of course. 

Did they ask me to stay? Or did they just ask me if I wanted to stay? I don’t know the answer to that.

But I spent the day with her, over and over again saying, “No, this is what we’re doing now,” when she tried to convince me that she was fine to leave, that we should go to the beach, that adventure was waiting for us and we needed to escape. 

“Please let’s go now,” she would say. “Please let’s leave here. I don’t want to be here. I need to go. Please let’s go.” 

“No. I love you. No.” Over and over again. 

Other friends, our housemates, showed up, too, including her boyfriend. People came and went, because they had classes, and because it was incredibly, incredibly hard to listen to her and not be able to find the real Michelle in the chaotic Michelle. But I stayed with her all day. 

I remember her deciding the nurse was trying to poison her with orange juice. I remember promising her the orange juice was fine, drinking some of it myself to prove that it was okay. One of the reasons why it had to be me who took her to the health center was that she’d decided only blue-eyed people could be trusted. Blue-eyed people were special. Blue-eyed people were safe. 

I’d never noticed before then how rare blue eyes actually are. 

Finally her parents came. They were confused and worried and so grateful that we’d done our best to take care of her. I couldn’t help feeling like our best had been pretty shitty if in the end they were driving away with her, but they’d already made arrangements to check her in to a mental hospital in Boston. The one from Girl, Interrupted, in fact. 

For a very, very long time, that day was the worst day of my life. I’m not sure I’ve conveyed how exhausting and upsetting and terrifying it was. I’m not sure it’s even possible to convey that. I was twenty-one years old and my best friend had gone to a place where I couldn’t follow her, had stopped being the person I knew. And instead of helping her escape, I was the one turning her over to the scary strangers and the institution.

Nobody comes back from that unscathed and she was not the exception that proves the rule. 

Neither was I. 

Anyway… I was reminded of that experience this week, first via a couple of comments on the blog, followed by a fast-paced stream of emails, to which my responses started with words like “mystified” and “confused.” Am I right to be reminded? I have no idea. But now I understand why Michelle’s parents were grateful. I wish I knew that a me-equivalent was hovering in the wings somewhere, braving him or herself to say, “You need help. We need to get help.” 

Meanwhile, if you see some comments on the blog that seem like the kind of thing I should be deleting (I have a no trolls policy), I’ve said that if this is something he feels like he needs to do, he should go ahead. Well, in all fairness, what I actually said was, “I have no idea what this means. Do you intend to keep posting insane screeds on my blog? I guess that’s okay, if it’s something you need to do.” 

This is not an open door policy for trolls, and if it gets too horrible, I’ll start deleting, but it actually took me most of a sleepless night to realize that hey, maybe those insane screeds are, you know, literally insane. Either way, they’re so over-the-top that as far as I’m concerned they fail as attacks and just make me sad for the attacker.

I’m glad Michelle’s parents had blue eyes. 

My “move more” goal was to walk at least a mile, preferably between 2-3 miles, every day. The past week was 3.3 (my last blog post); 2.7 (a walk to the marsh); 3.1 (beach in the morning, marsh in the afternoon); 2.1 (marsh with my writing accountability partner and Sophie); 3.2 (beach visit); 3.3 (a walk out to the farmlands in the morning, plus the farmer’s market, plus a neighborhood walk); and 4.2 (the community forest and redwood trees). Go, me! Shine on, self.

Honestly, I wish to make no predictions about my ability to sustain that level of movement  in nature — it helped a lot that the weather has been absolutely fantastic — but it was an awesome week.

The Arcata Marsh. There’s a picnic table that’s exactly one mile away from the house.

It was also an awesome writing week. I said in my last blog post that I was just about to hit 20,000 words on my WIP: one week later, I’m at 35,000. That averages out to over 2K words a day and for me, those are stratospheric numbers. Especially for the me of the last couple of years, when writing has just been Sisyphean. I’m attributing this success to a number of factors, but I think the most important one might have been words of wisdom from my writing accountability partner. And I see that I have never mentioned her on my blog before (I had to read back), so…

Sometime after I got back to Arcata in August, I got a message on a writing site (The Creative Academy for Writers) from a local writer who was looking for an accountability partner. She wondered if I was interested. I was! Ever since then, we’ve been meeting up once a week or so for an hour long chat about writing, including setting goals for the week ahead. Sometimes we get lunch at a local restaurant; often we spend the hour walking. She is, in her day job, (and conveniently for me), a therapist, which makes for excellent conversations. But she really helped me break through my long-standing writer’s block by — to make a long story very short — encouraging me to “embrace the pain.” Long story, very short! But wow, there is a lot of great creative energy that comes with letting your characters suffer & hate & grieve & be betrayed.

None of which is to say that this story is dark — it’s actually possibly the most romantic fairy tale I’ve ever written and I’m making myself laugh all the time with it. My POV character has been giggling a lot, too, despite being worried that her twin brother is plotting to murder her. It is also trope-tacular! I’ve got evil twins, a super model, millionaires, a marriage of convenience, angry ghosts — all set (so far) in glorious Walt Disney World. My heroine falls in love with the hero in the Japan store at EPCOT, aka, as our hero says, “Not just any gift shop, the best gift shop in the entire park.”

I’ll obviously have to do some kind of COVID disclaimer when I publish this story — alternate timeline, maybe set in the past, the multiverse — but COVID is boring and no fun, so I really don’t mind not including it in my non-boring, extremely fun, delightfully entertaining story. And when I say “delightfully entertaining,” I really mean delightfully entertaining to me — I’m having a great time writing it. (Another factor in my success: Suzanne is being an excellent audience, both in listening to me work out the details and also laughing at my jokes.)

Have a (non-edited, rough draft, snippet):

Noah said, “No offense, but I don’t want Niall to be collateral damage if you’ve got a jealous ex trying to kill you.” 

Laurel’s smile was wan. “No jealous exes here.” She took another bite of her chocolate mousse, then remembered Sierra calling her fat. The memory made her start to giggle again. 

She giggled helplessly for a minute, maybe longer, while the brothers looked at her with identical expressions of confusion that just made her giggle harder. She had tears of laughter in her eyes when she finally stopped to catch her breath. 

“Sorry. Sorry. It just —“ She turned to Niall. “Look, I was probably over-reacting. I’m sure I’m going to be fine. Noah’s right. Marriage is a big deal and I don’t want to take advantage of your — your — ” She searched for the right words, finally finishing, “—your chivalrous spirit.” 

Noah snorted. “Chivalrous spirit. That’s a new one.”

Laurel pointed her fork at him. “You’re losing your good twin badge, you know. Pretty sure you’re gonna be in evil twin territory soon.” 

This week I am hoping to write many, many more words. Suzanne is — barring further COVID disasters — headed out for a family vacation next week, which means I’m going to be on puppy-dog-cat-chicken duty. I am not optimistic about my word count that week. On the other hand, I will probably score quite well on the exercise front.

One of our beach mornings. All that debris is driftwood, much of it remarkably beautiful.

This morning, before heading out on my morning walk with Sophie, I went in Suzanne’s house to see if she wanted to come with us and maybe make it a bigger adventure. I’ve been walking to the marsh down the street most mornings, which is awesome, but I’ve been seeing signs for this thing called the Hammond Coast Trail for the past two years. Every time I’ve mentioned it to Suzanne, she’s had a “Oh, sure, we could do that someday,” response. This morning she said, “Yes, let’s go!”

We drove off to a mid-point of the trail, unloaded the dogs and started walking. Within a quarter of a mile or so, I said, “Wait, is this trail like an urban trail? Are we seriously going to be walking past chain link fences the whole time?” (I paraphrase: I was not quite so scornful about the chain link fences out loud, because I wouldn’t want to be rude to the owners of the chain link fences. But I do find them so ugly, and not at all conducive to pleasant strolling.)

Suzanne replied, (again paraphrased, because I don’t actually remember her real words), “Yes? It goes up through McKinleyville.” She gestured to a playground on our left, and said, “There’s a dog park over there, including an area for off-leash dogs, but it’s not fenced. The trail goes this way.” She gestured straight ahead to the road.

I believe I said, “Pfft,” or some other basic noise of disgust. All this time I imagined the “coastal” trail as a scenic wilderness trail with views of the ocean, soaring birds, and probably incredible smells of salt water and eucalyptus. No wonder Suzanne always said, “Oh, someday,” about this walk.

But the aforementioned park to our left had a dirt path running through a field of dry grass. In a choice between your basic asphalt road, and a dirt path, I’m always going to try the path, so I veered off that way. I think Suzanne might have offered a faint protest — “That’s the wrong way?” — but she wasn’t opposed to checking out the dog park, so she followed me.

The dog park was a big empty field, not fenced. We let the dogs off leash and they ran around like crazy creatures in the way that puppies do, with Riley meandering along checking out all the interesting smells. Some other dogs appeared, but their owners kept walking along the path and disappeared into the distance.

Suzanne said, sensibly, “Let’s see where this path leads.” And so we did.

Guess where the path led? If you’re guessing “to a coastal trail with views of the water, floating birds, and delightful woodsy smells,” congratulations, you hit the jackpot! So did we.

Somewhere along the way, in a woodsy section where the dogs were disappearing into the undergrowth and I was taking deep breaths of ocean air, I called out to Suzanne, who’d gotten pretty far ahead of me, “I’m feeling very pleased with my life choices.” She laughed, but I seriously was appreciating the sense of smugness that comes when you find a really good walk.

Sophie appreciated my choices, too. A walk that includes a place to get wet and muddy is the best kind of walk, in her opinion.

Of course, I should have been writing a book. It was a Monday morning, after all. I’ve got an assortment of practical business things to deal with, including getting the audiobook of A Gift of Thought posted and finishing off some covers, but I’ve been trying to write fiction words every day, ideally at least 1000 of them. Today will be the day when I reach 20,000 words on my WIP, which is a nice solid chunk. I’m guessing the WIP is not going to be a short story, and probably won’t even be a novella. I might be 1/3 of the way through, though, so probably a short novel. Assuming, that is, that nice walks don’t get in my way.

Ten days into my 2022 projects and I have made a few important discoveries.

1. Cookbooks aren’t meant to be read straight through from beginning to end. Or at least I’m not good at reading them that way. I still haven’t even made it to the recipe sections on the cookbook I started with, which obviously also means I haven’t cooked anything from it yet, either. I’ve been reading a little of it most days, but it’s packed with information and a little goes a long way.
2. I like learning, but apparently I really don’t want to learn anything more about writing. Or at least I seem to have tremendous resistance to opening the pile of writing/publishing/marketing books in my 2022 Learning Project collection.
3. Books make it into my “you’re a good book and so maybe I’ll read you someday” collection when they’re dark and depressing, sometimes violent, sometimes just angsty or sad. Also? I don’t want to read depressing books these days. How long has it been since I willingly read depressing books? Um, possibly a decade, since my mom died. But I’ve definitely rejected the dark during the pandemic years. Brilliantly-written mystery that starts with a young woman’s mutilation and murder? NOT INTERESTED. Compelling story of a family facing tragedy? NOPE. Engrossing fantasy in which a protagonist faces the forces of darkness? Eh, probably not.

I understand my 2021 reading a lot better, in which — for example — I read approximately 35 books in a science fiction series where basically nothing happens. But nothing happens in a very comfortable and friendly manner, with uber-powerful Artificial Intelligences stepping in to stop the biologicals from hurting themselves or others. Those books are, honestly, boring, but I read one after another after another until I was done. (All in KU, so they weren’t costing me money.)

What does this mean for my 2022 Fiction Reading Project? Well… I’m not sure yet. But it might take me a lot longer to make it through those 36 books than I anticipated it would and a lot of them might just move back to the Read Someday collection. Someday I’ll be tired of comfort reads, right?

Basically, I’m 10 days into my 2022 project and… well… I kinda just don’t wanna. On the other hand, I’m being good about trying to walk at least 2 miles a day & avoid sugar, so maybe this year is just going to be a year about getting a little healthier. There’s plenty of the year left in which to find out. But I’m not going to push myself through reading books I don’t enjoy — this is not grade school and I am not my own teacher, demanding I do busywork for the sake of doing busywork.

Also, when it comes to how I choose to spend my time, reading things that I don’t enjoy just for the sake of saying that I read them feels… like perhaps not the smartest use of my energy? At any moment, I could be walking a dog, going to the beach, taking a photograph, writing a book or story, learning more about art… yeah. I’m not quite giving up on my 2022 projects — I’m still going to try to turn to those books when I’m looking for something to read. But they’re not going to be a drain on my energy.

In other news, I finished my review of the audiobook of A Gift of Thought this weekend, so it’s going to be available reasonably soon. It was another interesting reading experience for me. Where did I ever get the idea that I wrote light, fun fiction? That book is about a dead teenager struggling with guilt over his own death! It did make me laugh here and there, and I really loved a few of the scenes, but it’s not nearly as light as I thought it was.

The hardest scene for me to listen to was one at the end with Sylvie telling Dillon how much she loved him and how hard she’d tried to always make the right choices for him and how she would do anything, absolutely anything, to help him. Talk about heart-breaking. I was, of course, writing my own feelings about my own son. The irony — one I was completely unaware of at the time — was that Dillon has acknowledged in the previous chapter that he doesn’t really care about her. Can we call that irony? Maybe just prescient in some way? It made me cry, but fortunately, it was the last chapter so I finished up and moved on.

This Christmas/New Year’s was the first time I made no effort to reach out to R. I’ve usually texted him on holidays, even though I’m fairly sure he blocked my number, and of course, I tried to send him stocking stuffers on Christmas for 2020. This Christmas, though, I spent hours wavering — email? voice mail? another text into the void? — and finally I resorted to asking the universe for a sign. The universe gave me a gorgeous, full, bright rainbow, which felt so much like an answer! Not, unfortunately, a very clear answer. But it did inspire me to google, which led me back to his Twitter feed. He’d unlocked it at some point, so I read through it. It turned out to be helpful, because he had a tweet about taste that was in phenomenally poor taste, which reminded me that he is not the 15-year-old I adored. I guess I needed the reminder.

Speaking of reminders, though, I could be writing fun things now. Or walking a dog. Or going to the beach or cooking something delicious or even scrubbing the toilet, any of which would be more fun, productive, and satisfying than dwelling on the past. Or even on the future. There’s a therapy line (or maybe a 12-step line), “Do the next right thing.” I think I shall go do that, whatever it turns out to be!

The marsh down the street. I could be walking there right now!