Sophie Sunshine turned one on Sunday. In honor of the day (and also because why not? all spring Sundays should be spent so delightfully), we went on a little adventure. We drove up into the mountains to Etna, about two hours away, and took a gorgeous (albeit short) walk along the Steinacher Trail, followed by a picnic at a nearby campground.

The puppies were terrific. They were mostly off-leash and they’ve really figured out the “run wild through the woods, then return to check in on your person,” technique. The radius of how far they’re willing to go is probably a little bigger than I’d like it to be — I’d prefer it if Sophie never went out of sight, but she sometimes does — but the time she’s willing to be out of sight is just about right, maybe a minute but not much more than that. Amusingly to me, both puppies do well on a recall command of “Puppies! Far enough!” (Amusing because somewhat accidental — my “no barking” command in the backyard is actually, “Puppies! Enough!” which they’ve apparently learned means, “Rush back to the yelling person.”)

The puppies romping through the grass

On the way back to the car, I fell pretty far behind S, because I was playing a little mindfulness game with myself about appreciation: noticing the sounds of the birds and the rushing water and the wind in the trees; looking for small beauty and big beauty (what’s the tiniest beautiful thing I see, what’s the biggest beautiful thing I see); trying to distinguish and label the smells in the air; and stopping to simply take deep, long, mindful breaths. It was an excellent game — both in the moment and for memory purposes, because my memories just sparkle, it was such a beautiful day and beautiful place — but it was also excellent for enhancing the amount of exercise the dogs got. Sophie spent the entire time running back-and-forth between Suzanne and me. She was perfectly happy to do so, but she really wanted to be sure she knew where both of us were at all times.

While we were driving home, Suzanne spotted a bald eagle by the side of the road. I missed it at first, but then it flew across the road right in front of us. So big! I resolved to pay more attention, conveniently just in time to spot a small white thing moving in the ditch and say, “Hey, that’s a PUPPY!”

We were on a rural highway, so moving pretty fast, but Suzanne pulled over, did a U-turn, and drove back. I was right: it was a puppy. I got out of the car and approached it and instead of running away, the puppy said, “Oh, thank goodness, I’m having a really weird day, would you mind helping me out?” Tail-wagging, eager approach, clearly not afraid of people. Not a dog that had been living in the wild for long. But young, way too small to be away from his mama.

I scooped him up and looked around. Any other puppies? A mama anywhere? Any sign or indication that this puppy ought to be where he was? Answers: nope, to all of the above. So I got back into the car with the puppy and we brought him back to Arcata with us. (Side note: I would like there to be an explanation other than “people suck” for his presence in the ditch, but he must have been dumped. There’s really no other explanation that makes sense. Although I guess the corollary to that is that sometimes dumped puppies get found and rescued, so not all people suck.)

We named him Ishi Pishi, after the bridge we’d driven by just before we found him. (From that link, “Ishi Pishi Falls is a set of Class VI rapids along the Klamath River and can only be considered a waterfall by the absolutely most liberal of standards.” Ha.)

Sophie’s opinion: Worst Birthday Present Ever. She kept giving me Looks. The kind that said, “Get this thing out of here,” and “What have you done?!?” and “Take it away!”

Sophie saying “Oh, hell, no”

I did my best. We called Mara, the next door neighbor who runs a dog rescue, and she found a foster for him, so Ishi only spent a single night with us. A single, very long night — I had already forgotten how much work small puppies are, and Ishi was honestly too small to be away from his mama, in my opinion.

Ishi sleeping on Suzanne’s foot.

But now I’m going to get all woo-woo about the universe working in mysterious ways.  As long-time readers will recall, my dog Zelda owned my heart. I’ve had other dogs, I’ve loved other dogs, but Zelda was special. She was my girl. She died on January 9, 2021, and at the moment of her death, a voice in my head — my subconscious, if you like — said, “I’m coming back. Look for me.”

I did. And Suzanne did, too. And when Suzanne met Sophie, she said, “This one.” I was in Pennsylvania at the time, so I didn’t get to meet Sophie until a month later. On the day I met her, Sophie said — in so many ways! — YES. In the following days & weeks & months, though, I was less sure. It’s pretty easy to believe that Sophie has an older dog soul than, for example, Bear does. (She seems to have a more instinctive grasp of the difference between People Right and People Wrong.) But still, that doesn’t make her Zelda. She is her own puppy self, her own personality.

Except… her personality is very similar to Zelda’s. Dramatically similar. I wondered sometimes — especially as she developed an obsession with playing fetch – whether it was just me. Maybe the person creates the dog? Zelda was the only dog I raised from a puppy before Sophie, so maybe when you raise a puppy, the puppy just becomes the dog of your expectations?

Because Sophie has Zelda’s sweetness. She has Zelda’s gentle curiosity. She has Zelda’s persistence and inquisitiveness and attentiveness. She watches me the way Zelda used to: aware of my every move and alert to the possibility that it might be interesting to her. Per her DNA, she is more herding dog than terrier, but per her behavior, she could easily be 100% terrier. She likes to dig holes and chase balls, and in a choice between herding chickens and retrieving a ball, the ball wins. She is not Zelda, she is Sophie, 100% herself, but… well…

Enter Ishi. And the universe working in mysterious ways.

Because on a day when I was thinking about Zelda and Sophie and wondering about dog reincarnation, we randomly stumbled across a white puppy. (Zelda was white.) Said white puppy is clearly a terrier mix of some sort — he has a blotch of brown on his side, and a brown spot on his ear, and if you told me he is pure Jack Russell, I would not doubt you. (Zelda was a Jack Russell.) He has eyes like Z had when she was a puppy, with no color around the rims, and splotches on his nose like Z had when she was a puppy. He has physical similarities to Z.

But his energy is so completely totally different from Zelda’s, it would be impossible to ever believe that he is Zelda reincarnated. At maybe five weeks old, Ishi is clearly already a boss dog. No one is ever going to comment on his gentle curiosity or his sweetness. Boldness and determination, sure. I believe that Redwood Pals Rescue will find an excellent home for him and that he’ll grow up to be a great dog, but physical similarities aside, he in no way resembles Zelda.

But Sophie… well, at one year old, she is sunshine. I am so grateful to have her in my life, so lucky and so blessed. Of course, I need to remember this when she’s trying to convince me to throw the ball for four hours a day and when she comes in covered in mud and immediately leaps onto the bed and tries to snuggle down on my pillows. Mostly, though, it’s pretty easy to remember. Because she’s my girl.

Speaks for itself, alas.

You know those vacation t-shirts that say, “My Grandparents went to (exotic location of your choice) and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”? That’s how I feel about Suzanne’s last trip. She got the fun adventure, lots of social time and seeing old friends — plus, alas, COVID — but all I got was the virus. So unfair!

I’m so grateful for the vaccination and booster, though, because it’s honestly pretty unpleasant. I suspect my immune system would be going crazy if it hadn’t already had those exposures. Right now it’s the equivalent of a bad, reasonably long-lasting cold. I tested for the first time last Thursday, because I felt like I was starting to get sick, and I was negative. By Friday I was clearly sick, and yesterday I took the test to confirm that it was the virus, mostly so I could notify my healthcare provider who then notifies the county. (The only way for people to realistically assess their own risk is if sick people share their info and I want the county numbers to represent reality.)

Anyway, yesterday’s test was the fourth time I’d seen a rapid test in action and I had to laugh: after you do the test, you’re supposed to wait fifteen minutes for the positive line (the T in the image above) to appear. I barely had time to say “Alexa, set a timer for fifteen minutes” before the positive line appeared. So, so, so positive.

Even before I got sick I was having many unproductive days, largely because the puppies have turned into escape artists. I blame Bear, mostly, although Sophie is an eager participant. But not only do they move the concrete block to escape out the front yard, someone — and in a choice between the small dog and the big dog, it’s hard to believe that the small dog is responsible — managed to pull down a board from the backyard fence, creating a gap that both dogs could easily go through. And did! They had much fun visiting the neighbor dogs. Fortunately, the neighbor dogs didn’t seem to mind the territorial invasions.

But the puppies aren’t the only escape artists. Bear — and it was definitely Bear because I caught her in the act — also tried to pull a board off the chicken coop. I stopped her, but she loosened the wire fencing enough that the chickens are now capable of letting themselves out of the coop. Chickens, incidentally, are stupid. When the big predator opens a hole in your enclosure, the right response is NOT to go visit the big predator. Or even the small predator.

The chickens have escaped three times now, much to Sophie’s delight. She is SOO excited to chase them. The chickens are not so excited to be chased. The first time was the worst, because it was just me and both dogs, and the dogs did not understand why I was not happy about the new game. I had to get the dogs shut into the tiny house before I could work on getting the chickens back into their coop. Fortunately, chickens — although apparently stupid about big predators — are not stupid about food. A person carrying cheese is like the Pied Piper as far as the ladies are concerned.

My point, though, was that the puppies are requiring enough supervision when outside that I wasn’t getting much done even before I got sick. Once I got sick, I just stopped even trying. I will get back to writing, obviously, but it wasn’t going to be last week. It’s not the worst of fates, though, to need to spend my time supervising puppies in the backyard supervising puppies. Sophie is eleven+ months old, Bear is ten+ months old, and they are growing up fast. I feel really lucky that I get to spend so much good time with them.

Me, make trouble? Never! (jk)

I do have a lot I want to do, though. First priority should definitely be writing some thank you notes, (thank you, Dad & Charleene! thank you, Marcia & Bill! thank you, Christina & Greg!) but I also have an audio short story (The Spirits of Christmas) that I’ve been meaning to post for a couple weeks and… hmm. Well, I know my to-do list was a lot longer than that, but apparently I have just hit my energy wall. I think I need to go back to bed. Still, I got out of bed today and I wrote a blog post; perhaps I can call that sufficient accomplishment for the day.

Last Friday morning, I was lying in a hospital bed, thinking about the nature of reality and its relationship to memory. I was waiting to have a colonoscopy and the doctor had already been by to introduce himself and discuss the procedure. He let me know that he preferred his patients to be conscious, but that I’d be somewhere between Cloud 5 and Cloud 9, wouldn’t feel anything, and would probably not remember the experience. I was less than enthusiastic about that, but if I wasn’t going to remember it anyway, did it really matter? Wouldn’t it basically be like it had never happened?

Answer: No. Even if your mind doesn’t remember, your body does.

Also, though, he was wrong about everything: I was not on any clouds, I did feel it, I do remember it, and it sucked. Apparently my colon is “loopy,” so it was a struggle to get the probe through and the tech had to try to rearrange my insides from the outside. I assume that was effective, since they did manage to get all the views they wanted, but it was super uncomfortable — I was complaining while on the operating table, which surprised them at least twice — and I’ve been sore for a couple of days now. Even if I didn’t remember (but I do), my body would be letting me know that it was an unpleasant experience. I’ve even got a painful bruise on my wrist from the IV.

(That said, my colon is now stamped approved for the next seven to ten years, which is nice, and maybe a decade from now, technology will have improved so much that no one will be doing colonoscopies anymore. I’m going to choose to believe that, anyway. And, of course, my day of unpleasantness is a whole lot better than treatment for colon cancer would be, so worth it in the end.)

I think my philosophical question, though, was really whether forgetting could be the same thing as healing. If you can fully forget a painful experience, could it be the same as the experience never having happened? I’m pretty sure the answer is still no, still that the body remembers.

Speaking of remembering — although this time in the context of sharing a story I expect I’ll probably remember myself — on Saturday, I was at the farmer’s market with our next-door neighbors when a vaguely familiar face said hello, and then added, somewhat tentatively, “Do you have a black dog and a small black-and-white dog? Because they’re playing on Dan Hauser’s lawn right now.”

EEP!

I hope I said thank you, but I’m not sure I did. I rushed home, not quite running but moving as fast as a not-quite-run would take me, not seeing any sign of them in the neighbor’s yard as I got close. I’m reminding myself that they’re both micro-chipped; that they’re together so noticeable; that they’re reasonably street smart these days, at least to the extent of understanding that the people are worried when they go out into the road… but there are no dogs, no dogs, no dogs.

I’m making a plan — I will dump my purchases inside the tiny house and grab the bag that usually holds treats and then start searching. Sophie, most likely, will have followed our usual walk and gone up the street to the park… But then there they are, lying by the neighbor’s garage door, on the side of his house. And they see me and say, “OH! Our person! We’ve been waiting for you!!” and both of them come running.

A couple, just ahead of me on the sidewalk, was rather taken aback by this. I think they were already speculating on whether those dogs were loose and now both dogs were tearing toward them at full speed, one of the two being rather large. (One might even say exceedingly large. Bear is a BIG girl.)

But both puppies followed me very happily through our gate and into the yard and were super-excited and pleased with themselves. Oh, such a good adventure, they were saying. Much tail wagging and pleasure.

The explanation for the escape was pretty easy to discover: we have a concrete block sitting in front of a hole in the gate between the back and front yards. It blocks enough of the hole that the dogs can’t go through, but the cat can still go in and out. Someone — and Suzanne is blaming Riley — someone shoved that concrete block out of the way, letting the puppies into the front yard, which has a short fence that both of them can leap over effortlessly. I think we will be boarding up that hole before the dogs get left in the backyard alone again.

And I can’t believe I don’t have a recent picture of the two puppies together, but I don’t. I’d go take one, except Suzanne is away for an overnight with both of her dogs, so I can’t. Size-wise, though, Sophie is turning out to be smaller than I expected: I thought she’d be a medium-size dog and she’s only medium-size if she’s standing next to a chihuahua. Here in Arcata, where chihuahuas are few and far between and pit bulls are plentiful, she’s definitely small.

And Bear — well, Bear is ten months old this week, so she still has a few months of growing to do, and she’s the size where people say things like, “Wow, that’s a big dog.” Or, as I said this week when I saw her trying to sleep on the dog bed — head and feet both hanging over the edges — “Holy cow, she is immense.” She’s easily twice Sophie’s size now.

Back in September, the puppies were almost the same size although it was obvious that Bear would be bigger.

Today, not so much. Not sure this picture really captures Bear’s size, but it’s as close as I can get right now.

Suzanne is away again this week. It’s her sixth (or maybe tenth or eleventh, depending on if one counts overnights) trip since I came back in August, I think. When she returned from her last trip, Olivia Murderpaws — who is supposed to be an inside cat — was on the roof of the chicken coop, refusing to come down. I was also worried about one of their royal majesties, the chickens who joined the Mighty Small Farm in the summer of 2020, and rightfully so: she passed away that night and Suzanne had to bury her the next morning. Pet sitter fail.

Not that I actually blame myself for either of those things — I didn’t let Olivia out, and chickens, sadly, do sometimes die. She wasn’t even the first chicken to pass away on my pet-sitting watch. I didn’t write about it at the time, but one of the very old ladies died while Suzanne was away last year, probably on her Oregon trip. It would have made a good post, actually, because I thought she was dead so I dug a hole in which to bury her. But when I picked up the dead body, she opened her eyes and wiggled. Ack! I nearly dropped her, which I would have felt terrible about. Poor dying chicken, dropped from two feet up. Instead, I set her down gently and when I came back a couple hours later, it was easy to see that she was dead, because one of her comrades had started testing to see if she was meat. Chickens are such dinosaurs. I buried her quickly, before the rest of them could get in on the action.

Back to pet-sitting. Back in January, when Suzanne first retired, we were making grand plans for this spring. We were going to head off on a long road trip adventure: wildflowers in Texas, family in Florida, opal mining in Idaho. But Gina, #notmycat, is very frail these days. She eats a ton, but the food rushes right through her, and she’s so skinny she looks emaciated. Her fur’s coming out in clumps, too, and she’s very cranky. Suzanne was pretty sure she wouldn’t last until spring, but sometime around mid-February, she said, “Not sure I can leave Gina with a pet-sitter,” to which I replied, “Oh, absolutely not. Of course not.” That would be horrible, to leave Gina to potentially die with a stranger. (As it happens, gas prices might have killed this trip anyway. Long road trips and $6/gallon gas do not coincide in my mind.)

Except… I really don’t want to be the pet-sitter on duty for her death, either. Every time Suzanne leaves, there’s a little repetitive prayer running through the back of my head, “Please, please, please don’t let Gina die.” Suzanne is gone tonight, then back for a couple days, then gone for five days, then back for a few weeks, then gone for another week. Pet-sitting would be a lot easier without Gina — she’s really the only pet that feels like much of a responsibility, because she needs to eat five or more times a day and produces waste commensurately — but I really, really hope that she lasts through spring and into summer.

And maybe come summer, I’ll get to take a trip of my own. It’s feeling like time!

I’m baking granola this morning and my cozy tiny house smells of cinnamon. I don’t have particularly high expectations for how this granola is going to turn out, because the Best By date on my oats was sometime in 2020, I didn’t have any vanilla, and I’m experimenting with the temperatures on my air fryer, but even if it is inedible in the end, it sure smells nice now.

Plus, it’s a Monday morning, not yet 9:30, and I’ve already started with the experimental cooking, so go, me. Shine on, self. It’s always satisfying to start off a new week feeling productive. Although I guess if my granola is truly inedible, my accomplishment won’t feel like much.

That said, nothing is inedible for chickens. If I decide I can’t eat my granola, I will feed it to their royal majesties and the other ladies of the chicken coop and they will be thrilled. Then I will get to have eggs, which is win-win.

Of course, I actually get to have eggs whether or not I feed my granola to the ladies. Egg season is definitely in full swing right now. The chickens pretty much stop laying in December and then in February they start up again. If I’m the person to collect the eggs, I generally bring them into Suzanne’s kitchen where they get washed, put into egg cartons, and stashed on top of the refrigerator until a neighbor or some random passerby knocks on the door and says, “Hey, I see your sign says Eggs.” (Actually, the neighbors say something more like, “Any eggs today?”)

Last week, when Suzanne was away, I had three pleasant egg-related interactions. One was a college-age kid, so young, who was really pleased to get cheap eggs. $4 a dozen is a bargain in Arcata right now. He told me that at the farmer’s market they were $10/dozen. Ouch.

The second was from a nice woman who wanted to know if they were organic. Um, nope, not in the least. They eat our table scraps and we don’t eat exclusively organic, so they don’t either. Also, I’m going to guess that if the chickens started getting sick, and a vet said it was bacterial and antibiotics would help them feel better and save their lives, Suzanne would vote for saving their lives. They are happy chickens, however — they’ve got lots of space, friendly relationships, and regular treats. The woman didn’t wind up buying any eggs, but it was still a pleasant conversation.

The third was from a regular, delighted that eggs were back in season. He told me  we had the best eggs in town. I used to be of the belief that an egg was an egg, although I bought expensive eggs because I hoped my extra dollar would mean a better life for the chickens laying them. But now I’m pretty convinced that the ladies of the chicken coop do, in fact, lay really superior eggs, more delicious than your average egg.

Also, they lay very pretty eggs. I have many more than usual in the tiny house today, because Suzanne’s kitchen is in the process of being as disrupted as mine was last week, and I looked at them this morning and thought of Easter. Their royal majesties lay the ones with the greenish tint, while last summer’s new hens must be laying the speckled brown ones. But I wouldn’t even have to dye them to have a nice Easter collection.

My oven timer just beeped, so I think I’ll go check on my granola. And then move on to other things, specifically, writing my next book. I didn’t think this blog post was going to be about eggs and chickens — I thought it was going to be about self-publishing — but you know, eggs and chickens will probably be just as interesting to Future Me. Maybe even more interesting.

Goals for today: 1000 words on A Gift of Sight (possibly to be called A Gift of Touch); a walk with my writing buddy and Sophie; and a delicious meal that might include eggs. May all your Mondays be equally satisfying!

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!