In November 2019, I took a class called “Write Better Faster.” When the class ended, I went on a self-help binge, reading all the recommended books, as well as a few more I stumbled across along the way. These are the books I read (not including the several I didn’t finish for one reason or another):

• The Power of Habit, Chuck Duhigg 
• Triggers, Marshall Goldsmith
• Deep Work, Cal Newport
• Verbalize, Damon Suede
• Rising Strong, Brene Brown 
• Wired for Story, Lisa Cron
• Purple Cow, Seth Godin
• Winning the Story Wars, Jonah Sachs
• The Dip, Seth Godin
• Story Genius, Lisa Cron
• INFJ Writer, Lauren Sapala
• The Four Disciplines of Execution, Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, et al
• Writing into the Dark, Dean Wesley Smith
• Write Your Novel from the Middle, James Scott Bell
• The Well-Designed Life, by Kyra Bobinet
• You’re a Badass by Jen Sincero
• The Big Leap, Gay Hendricks
• Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg
• The Science of Getting Rich – Wallace Wattle
• Atomic Habits, James Clear
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson
• How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett 
• Stillness is the Key, Ryan Holiday
• Wired for Joy, Laurel Mellin

If I was super together, I’d add links, but that feels like a lot of work. Instead, I’ll add a single link to the book that most stuck with me: Tiny Habits. I’m not going to re-review it, because I wrote about it in March and I also posted about what I’d learned in Ten Tips from Self-Help Books, but as 2020 ends, the concept of Shine is still helping me get through my days. If you have any reason to want to make changes in your life, Tiny Habits is a great book.

So looking backward and forward: when last year began, I decided not to make resolutions, but to have focus words instead. They were Create, Learn, and Appreciate. I’ve written about them before, too: Learn in 2020. Despite the challenges of the year — or maybe because of them? — I did a great job with my focus words. They literally gave me something to focus on when it felt like the world was falling apart.

But 2020 is over (thank goodness). Unlike a lot of people, I’m not really counting on 2021 being a better year. It ought to be, of course — the competition is steep! But I’m always cautious about predicting such things, mostly because a decade ago, when I wrote about what a horrible year 2010 had been, the universe responded with 2011, which was surreal. I still feel kind of like the universe was saying, “You want to whine? Here, let me give you something worth whining about.” Anyway, I hope for better things for 2021, but I’m not assuming we’ll get them.

But one of the things that many of the self-help books agree on is that living a good life means living mindfully, paying attention to your choices, noticing how you’re spending your time. My focus words helped me do that. They also helped me reset when I needed to. When life felt pointless and overwhelming, and getting out of bed seemed like too much bother, thinking about what I could learn and how I could create drew me onward.

So for 2021, my word is GRACE. Conveniently, it’s a nice word with many positive meanings, but I’m using it as an acronym.

G is for gratitude. Every day, I will acknowledge at least three things I’m grateful for. I do this already, so this isn’t a change, just a continuation of a healthy mental habit.

R is for reading. Every day, I’ll record what I’ve read. I’m not setting goals for how much or what to read, but I think paying attention to what I’m reading will be interesting. I’m hoping it leads to less doom-scrolling my way through the internet and more time in books, whether fiction or non-fiction.

A is for Art. Every day, I will do something that relates to artistic expression. It might be as pointless as drawing on my chalkboards, or it might be taking a photograph, creating a book cover, learning something new in my software programs. Maybe even appreciating someone else’s art? Maybe writing, even? This one is probably going to evolve through the year, but my feeling around this word is all about curiosity, exploration, creativity, learning, fun. I want to make sure that my days include creative fun and Art is my word to represent that goal.

Of course, I could have used C, as in Create, for that goal. But nope, this year C is for cooking. Every day, I’m going to record what I cooked. As with the reading, I don’t mean this as pressure: if I don’t cook on a given day or even a given few days, that’s fine. It’s not about making myself do things that I don’t want to do, it’s just about paying attention to what I’m already doing. Ideally, though, I’m hoping it will encourage some creative fun in cooking, too. I’m not trying to become a better cook, but I do like expanding my repertoire. Corn tortillas for the win.

Finally, E is probably obvious. Exercise. Sigh. Yeah, not my favorite. But isolation has not been good for my physical well-being. Well, isolation combined with allergies. I know that I need to be moving more, and I also know — all the self-help books agree on this! — that tracking your activity and paying attention to it are the cornerstones of change. G, R, and C are about paying attention to things I already do, A is partially aspirational, but E is definitely about getting better at something I don’t do nearly enough of. So I’ll track my exercise and push myself to do more of it, whether that’s longer walks, online yoga classes or even just jumping jacks in the garden.

Obviously, I could have made some other acronyms with these goals. Tracking what I cook isn’t really much of a challenge, so I could have stuck with gratitudes, art, exercise and reading and called 2021 the Gear Year. I considered including meditation (something I used to love and have almost entirely given up because I can’t stand being in my own brain these days), for Gamer, or I could have really simplified and gone with just meditation and exercise for a ME year. I always do gratitudes and have for years, so they don’t really need to be included in a resolution-type goal. Really the possibilities were endless. But I knew when I thought of grace that it was the right word for 2021. One of its many definitions is “the free and unmerited favor of God” and we could all use some of that these days.

So here’s to 2021 — may it be a year filled with grace!

I spent the entire month of December — and honestly, most of November, too — dreading the holidays and doing my best to avoid thinking about them. The “will he/won’t he” question of whether my estranged son would demonstrate some basic human compassion and reach out to let me know that he’s alive was a huge part of it. (Spoiler alert: nope.) But I also just couldn’t picture the holiday without family, without church, without any of the rituals of my childhood.

As it happened, it was an incredibly nice Christmas. Ha. I don’t know whether all the dread actually made it better? Maybe I was so poised for it to be horrible that anything would have been better than my worst fears. But nope, it was actually just a really great day.

Suzanne and I dabbled in Christmas preparations ahead of time: we didn’t get a tree, but we put up Christmas lights on our respective houses, and we agreed to exchange stocking stuffers. And then we both bought stockings so that we’d have someplace to put said stocking stuffers! We hung the stockings in her house, along with one for the dogs and one for the cats.

First thing in the morning, well before daylight, I made a pot of coffee and brought it over to her house so we could open presents. (I knew she was awake, because we play an online game, Spelling Bee, and we were both adding words to it by 6AM.) We did such good jobs of present-giving! Also, great minds and all that — both stockings included socks and chocolate caramels. Ha. Hers also included t-shirts and a jigsaw puzzle and a tortilla warmer; and mine included some stickers I’d admired, a set of bamboo camping utensils, and a gift card for the cupcake store. We each also had a few presents from other people, my favorite of which was a magnet from Christina that so made me laugh…

We laughed a lot and drank our coffee and I ate gluten-free Christmas cookies that Suzanne’s awesome next-door neighbor had brought over on Christmas Eve. Then I came back to Serendipity and started calling people: my dad, my brother, Christina and Greg, my sister. With the spirit of Christmas on me, I even called R. He didn’t answer, but I left him a message wishing him a Merry Christmas, and I tried not to let myself get overwhelmed with sadness.

Instead I dragged Suzanne and the dogs off to the beach. Not that it was hard — even on a gray and rainy day, S & the dogs are always enthusiastic beach goers. But it was solidly rainy, so instead of going to one of our usual walking beaches, we drove down the Samoa peninsula to Humboldt Bay’s bleakly famous North Jetty. Bleakly famous, because it could easily be haunted from the number of tragedies that have happened there. We didn’t go anywhere near the jetty, but we admired the waves from a distance and appreciated the ocean air. And got really wet. I’d brought a cup of tea along, sort of randomly, and I’m not sure I’ve ever appreciated tea more than when I got back into the car and realized my coffee mug had kept it so hot that it was still almost undrinkable. Yum, hot mint tea on a rainy day.

On our drive home, we saw a rainbow that was actually more of a splotch of color in the sky than an arch. Beautiful and odd — what does one call a rainbow when it’s a circle, not a bow?

Our Christmas dinner plan was — well, unusual, maybe? Earlier in the month, I’d made a pork roast for dinner one night. The next night, I made pork tacos from leftover pork. But we used corn tortillas from the grocery store and they were terrible. During the course of our dinner conversation that night, I decided that my goal for 2021 was going to be to learn how to make homemade corn tortillas. Good homemade corn tortillas. Suzanne was a little dubious, but onboard for any experiments I wanted to make. She was also, conveniently, the proud owner of a very nice handmade tortilla press that was gathering dust and cobwebs in the cupboard.

Under most circumstances, I wouldn’t pick a major holiday as a day to try something totally new, but given the 2020 situation, why not, right? My plan for dinner was shrimp tacos and if the tortillas were disastrous, shrimp rice bowls.

The tortillas were not disastrous. Tortillas turn out to be ridiculously easy to make if you have the right tools, aka a cast iron skillet, a tortilla press, and a tortilla warmer. Also helpful, a heavy-duty ziplock bag. On two cups of masa (corn flour, available here at every grocery store), pour one and a half cups of very hot, but not boiling water. Let it sit for five minutes, then knead it for several minutes. If it’s too crumbly, add a little more water; if it’s too sticky, add a little more masa. Divide the dough into 16 equal-sized balls. (For me, using the Christmas cookie method of dividing the dough in half, then in half again, then in half again, then in half again, was a good way to get very evenly sized balls.) Heat a cast-iron skillet to fairly hot, but don’t add oil. Cut the heavy-duty freezer bag open and cover the tortilla press with it, and press each ball of masa individually between the plastic sides. Then cook it in the cast-iron pan for about thirty seconds per side or until it puffs up slightly. Put the tortillas in the tortilla warmer to stay nice until you’re ready to eat them.

As a goal for 2021, learning how to make good homemade corn tortillas feels really satisfying, because DONE. They were great. As it happened, we didn’t have the jerk seasoning I thought we had, and the shrimp was disappointingly bland IMO, but the tacos were delicious. Yum. So good that I’m contemplating making them for lunch now, because even though it’s only 9:30AM, I’ve made myself hungry.

After dinner — early, because the tortillas were a lot less time-consuming than I’d envisioned — we took the dogs for a walk. Just our usual walk, down to the end of the street and back again, but the weather had improved and it was a beautiful late afternoon. We talked about traveling and food, trips that we want to take, places we’d like to eat. It was a thoroughly satisfying envisioning of a future with possibilities rich and interesting.

I’m so relieved to have the holidays almost over. Do I think that life is miraculously going to get better, that my grief will magically disappear, that the world will suddenly become a sane place again? Well, not really, actually. But I had a really nice Christmas, and for today, that is sufficient unto the day.

It was 54 degrees in my bathroom this morning, which I concluded was too cold to shower. So I’m writing from under the covers while I wait for the bathroom heater to work its magic. 

Last night, Zelda’s shivering was so pronounced that she was making the bed vibrate. I tried to get her to snuggle with me, but she wouldn’t. Then I tried to cover her with blankets, but she moved away, back to her uncovered state at the end of the bed. 

What I did not do was get up and turn the heat on. My sleepy brain wondered why she was so cold, but I never woke up enough to think, “Hmm, could it be that you turned the heat off yesterday because it was such a gloriously beautiful day?” 

I did. Because it was.

We took the dogs to Moonstone Beach. Suzanne went barefoot, Riley went swimming, and Zelda and I were at least warm enough to not wear our respective jackets. Moonstone is the local beach we go to least often, because it’s usually crowded, but on a Monday morning in December, it was mostly deserted — one family there with a dog, and one solo walker. So beautiful, though. Churning waves, blue sky, a light mist rising from the water and the sun actually warm on my skin. Not what I imagined December in northern California would be like.

When we came home, I finished a cleaning project I’d undertaken first thing in the morning: organizing ALL the things. I moved into the tiny house in pieces, things drifting in from Serenity slowly. For a long time, I was pretending to myself that it was temporary, that I was going to be on my way again in the very near future. Arcata was where I was going to settle *when* I settled. Not now, not yet. 

Yes, now. Yes, yet. 

Things therefore needed places. Real homes, not just in bins randomly stuffed with whatever had wandered in together. The title to the van belonged with important paperwork, not sandpaper, and the sandpaper belonged with hardware supplies, not sidewalk chalk. (Why sandpaper and sidewalk chalk? Apparently when I rejoined the world of owning stuff, art projects were high on my list of reasons to accumulate clutter.) 

The nice thing about living in a tiny house, though, is that projects like “organize ALL the stuff” don’t actually take that long. When I think back to how long it took me to clean out my house before selling it (weeks, literally)… well, I have no regrets. By mid-afternoon, the tiny house was clean and organized, everything in a proper place. 

I feel like the only concession we’re making to the fact that it’s winter — well, apart from putting Christmas lights up, which I also did this weekend — is in the food we’re eating. I don’t have any lovely pictures, but I’ve made stuffed squash a couple of times, which is basically baked squash filled with a mix of sautéed things — most recently, chicken-apple sausage, leftover rice, mushroom, apple, parsley, & pecans — then topped with some cheese and baked a little more so the cheese melts. Oh, and then finished with cranberry sauce, which is absolutely necessary IMO. Yesterday’s dinner was also autumnal: carrots, parsnips, mushrooms, onion, broccoli, tossed with olive oil and dried herbs, then roasted in a pan with some sliced up chicken apple sausage. Super simple, again served with cranberry sauce. It felt hearty and healthy and filling and very, very wintery.

I guess the other concession to winter — although is it conceding, when you really have no choice? — is that by my standards it is really darn cold. Not freezing much, but I’m finding it hard to motivate myself to walk the dog when it’s 40 degrees outside. But it’s almost 11 now, warm inside, and warmer out, and Z and Riley would both probably like a walk. And the sun is shining so I should take advantage. This is supposed to be the rainy season — days of endless rain, I’ve been warned! — so it’s time to appreciate the sun while it’s here.

Some looks are deceiving. Look at this adorable sweet kitten face:

Doesn’t she look sweet? A little scared, a little worried. This big world might be too much for her, don’t you think?

Or this one. It’s like she’s saying, “Me? I’m completely harmless. Totally innocent. I can’t imagine what sort of trouble you think I could get into.”

Ha.

Some looks are not deceiving. Like this one:

As baleful a look as any I have ever seen on Gina’s face. If she could speak, she’d be saying something like, “On your heads be it, fools.”

Olivia, formerly Explorer Girl, is the busiest small creature I have ever met. She is a big fan of sneaking up behind you when you’re working at the stove, so you can freak out about nearly stepping on her while cooking. Also a big fan of attacking unsuspecting dogs’ tails. Also a big fan of trying to chew on power cords, yummm, so delicious. She is definitely a little lion at heart. All things must be leaped on, climbed on, jumped from, and attacked.

She’s also, of course, completely adorable, in that way that only baby things can be. At the moment, the other cats are not terribly pleased about this interloper, but it is really nice to be spending the last few weeks of 2020 focused on a kitten. She’s an excellent addition to the Mighty Small Farm!

Last night, around 9PM, I heard a weird noise outside my door. I got up, looked out, determined that the downspout from the gutter had fallen (not unusual, it’s not properly connected), and went back to my computer. 

Then I heard another weird noise. I got up, looked out, decided that the gate (propped open for animal convenience) must have been blowing in the wind. I latched it closed, and went back to my computer. 

Then I heard the weird noise again. I should probably describe the weird noise, right? It was lightweight banging, the kind of thing that could easily be mistaken for a downspout knocking into a wooden fence or a gate swinging loose. But this time, I knew it wasn’t the downspout or the gate. I got up, looked out, and saw the back end of a dog disappearing into the garden. 

Ah, Riley (Suzanne’s dog) must have been crawling through the opening at the bottom of the gate. Mystery solved, I went back to my computer. 

But as I tried to get back to my game, I was a little puzzled. What was Riley doing running around the yard after 9PM? Especially on a cold, damp night. Sure, he might come out for a quick bathroom break before bedtime, but it was a little late for that, and he wouldn’t be raucous about it. He’d do his business and get inside ASAP. 

Also, when had Riley ever been noisy in the backyard? He goes through that opening all the time. He’s been putting on a little weight from the very bad influence of Zelda,* but not so much that he should be banging things around. 

And then I heard the noise again. This time, with enough previous information, I knew it was clearly the gate, and that Riley had crawled through the opening to go into the front yard. I got up. Barefoot, in my pajamas, I went outside. It was cold, but I didn’t intend to be out for more than the minute it would take to grab Riley and take him in to the kitchen. I didn’t know why Suzanne had let him out, but whatever he was doing, he shouldn’t be doing it. 

So I went out in the dark — it was a beautiful night, btw, with lovely stars, despite the chill — and into the front yard, where I could see the dark shape of a dog pacing along the front fence. 

“What in the world are you doing, Riley?” I was saying in my crankiest voice as I approached, my feet already cold against the rough ground. 

The dog turned around. 

It was not Riley. 

But he was happy to see me. Tail wagging, relieved doggie sigh. If he had words, they would have been something like, “Oh, Human, thank goodness. Please, Person-I-Don’t-Know, please get me home now. I thought I wanted to be here, but now I don’t anymore. This was all just a huge mistake.” 

I was 90% sure I knew who he was and where he belonged, but I was also in my pajamas and barefoot. So I ran inside and said, “Suzanne, I’m so sorry to disturb you, but I think Hank is in the yard.” Suzanne promptly got up, grabbed a leash, put her shoes and a jacket on, and took Hank home, aka next door. 

End of story. 

Until this morning.

I got up around 6:30 or so and took the dogs for a lovely foggy walk. I was just getting back as Suzanne was leaving for work. We were saying whatever good morning type things one says when one crosses paths at 7:25 in the morning when I said, “Oh, wow. The chickens are exploring.” 

Hank had apparently come in through the chicken coop. He’d managed to push the wire loose and wiggle in. Once inside, he’d gotten the lid off the can of chicken feed and helped himself to a generous serving before deciding it was time to find his way home. In the morning, the chickens wasted no time in discovering their freedom and taking full advantage. At least eight of them, maybe more, were wandering around the yard. 

Suzanne was not thrilled. She needed to get to work, not chase chickens through the garden. But I spent my summer chasing Mary-Mary-Quite-Contrary around, so after taking a couple of quick photos, I grabbed a bag of chicken treats from my stash in the tiny house, went into the coop and started sprinkling seeds around liberally. In no time, all chickens were safely at home, and Suzanne was on her way to work. 

Yep, these are the adventures of the mighty small farm. The best kind of adventures there are, I think.

*Have I mentioned before that Riley has turned into Zelda’s personal emotional support dog? Convincing her to eat is always a challenge these days — with the canine dementia, she seems to be forgetting what you’re meant to do with food. But she will sometimes eat food that has Riley’s spit on it, and once she’s started eating, she will often continue until she’s had enough, so Riley gets to lick the chicken/meatloaf/roast beef/sausage/whatever and then we take it away from him and give it to Zelda. Obviously, this is dog torture, so of course Riley has to get some bites, too. I think he thinks it’s a worthy trade-off. 

Ten years ago, almost to the day, I fell so much in love with the television show Eureka that I searched online for news about the next season, and discovered fanfiction. I’d never even heard of fanfiction before, much less read it, but I promptly read all the Eureka stories that were available.

None of them were quite right. None of them were what I wanted the story to be. So I wrote my own. I published it on 11/9/2010. And then I added a chapter, because people said nice things about it. Then I wrote a whole story, with a plot as much like a Eureka episode as I could manage — crazy science, familiar characters, the diner, and the smart house named SARAH. It was called An Australian Werewolf in Eureka, and literally, ten years ago today, I would have been three days into writing it. It took me a week — the first chapter was posted on 11/14 and the last on 11/21 — and was 20,894 words long. Almost 3000 words a day — a number I would declare impossible for me except for this clear evidence that I did it once. While also working full-time and going to grad school part-time.

Then I wrote another story and another and another, and eventually I stopped writing fanfiction and started writing fiction, ie stories set in my own worlds with characters from my own imagination.

Then I quit my job, published a book, dropped out of grad school, published another couple of books, sold my house and moved into a van, published a few more books, and spent four years wandering around the country.

Today I stood in the Eureka, California DMV, and made it official: I live in California now. Not quite in Eureka, but just a few miles away. And it is so amazing and weird and amusing to me that there is such a direct causal link between falling in love with a television show named Eureka and winding up living here, in this delightful quirky small town.

This isn’t what I expected for my life. This isn’t even what I expected at the beginning of the year. But I really am grateful every single day that I wound up here, and for what came into my life from that incredibly random moment of sitting down next to my son and saying, “What’s this show about?”

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I discovered a great thing about masks this weekend: if you’re allergic to cats, but hold one while wearing a mask, your chances of having an allergic reaction are greatly reduced! Or at least I held a kitten without winding up miserable. Three kittens, in fact!

So Suzanne’s co-worker’s wife rescued a cat in need of a home. Said cat turned out to be seven cats, actually. I only heard the story second hand, but it sounded like the co-worker was feeling sorta gloomy about that when he said to Suzanne, “Want a kitten?”

She laughed at him and then said… “Wait. Yes. Yes, I do.”

This weekend we went to meet them. Properly socially distanced and masked, of course. Suzanne’s pick came down to one of the two in the above picture, currently known as Explorer Girl and Boots.

I thought Boots (the more solid gray) was the cutest, but I think my opinion was probably affected by the fact that Explorer Girl was already known for being the most interested in food. My favorite of Suzanne’s current cats, Gina, is also highly interested in food (when Suzanne is at work, I feed her a few times a day most days), and I wasn’t sure how she’d feel about having competition. But one of the kitten goals — if such a thing is possible? — is to give Moe, the current youngest pet on the Mighty Small Farm, someone to play with, and Explorer Girl might be the best bet for that. Plus, Suzanne is hoping to bring her home for Thanksgiving, when she’ll have plenty of time to supervise introductions, and Explorer Girl is going to be the most ready to leave home by then. She’ll be a little young, but she’s already eating cat food.

Honestly, though, I don’t think it matters which one joins us. A kitten is a kitten! I’m probably going to be wandering around in an allergy drug stupor for a while, but it’s going to be so much fun! Totally worth it.

Halloween night was a sleepless night for me. As you probably know, it was a full moon. Also a blue moon, the second full moon of the month. In Arcata, a lovely light layer of fog turned it into a literal blue moon. It was extremely pretty, so much so that I texted Suzanne around 9PM to tell her how beautiful it was.

Zelda, however, did not share my admiration. Or maybe she did. Because the moonlight was so bright shining through the skylight in the tiny house that sometime around midnight Zelda decided the day had begun. She was highly committed to this idea. From midnight to about 3AM, she did her absolute best to convince me that it was morning, and we should be going for a walk. She hardly ever sleeps through the night anymore — she almost always wants to go out at midnight — but usually I can sleepily get up, let her out, then five or ten minutes later, sleepily let her in again. This was different: she really believed we should be going for our walk together. It’s tough to convince a senile dog that moonlight and daylight are not the same thing. But you know, it was still beautiful. And I love the skylight in the tiny house and the light it lets in, even when it is the middle of the night. And I adore my dog, even when she’s confused.

Suzanne likes Halloween, so even though we suspected this year would be weird, on Halloween day we carved Jack-o-lanterns. Well, Suzanne carved Jack-o-lanterns, plural: I carved a Jack-o-lantern, singular. As it grew dark, we set them up with lights on hay bales, with our socially distanced chairs six feet away from a bowl of candy. As it grew cold and foggy, we managed to give away a single tootsie pop to a homeless guy wandering by, before we acknowledged that it was a year of no trick-or-treaters and retreated to our respective cozy houses. It was still fun.

You might notice in the above picture that Zelda is wearing a jacket. Yep, I have turned into a person who dresses her dog. Or she has turned into a dog who wears clothing, which might not be exactly the same thing. Not that she dresses herself, but she trembles when it’s cold and seems to welcome her coat, so… *shrug*. And I have to admit, I think she looks adorable in her various layers. Mara, Suzanne’s next door neighbor, gave us two of them; one which seemed a little small; one (above) which is pretty big; and I bought her a sweater at Target, which fits just right. Yep, my dog now has a wardrobe. I like it, and I think she does, too.

Another thing I like: the cozy pajamas I bought at Costco. One pair is plaid and one pair has snowflakes on them and if you had asked me as recently as six months ago if I would ever wear something plaid or with a snowflake print, I would have scoffed at you. Clearly, no, never. But, oh, these pajamas are sooo comfortable. I would be tempted to stay in them all day if I didn’t think that was unhealthy.

Another thing I like: the crispy cold morning air turning into sunny afternoons. I’m not excited for this upcoming Friday where the high temp is predicted to be 48, but the past few days have started out chilly and then become warmer with clear blue skies by the afternoon. Yesterday I convinced Suzanne that we should walk the dogs in the forest instead of at the beach. What I really wanted was the crunch of leaves, which she pointed out to me I wasn’t going to get in a redwood forest, but it still felt like autumn.

Another thing I like: my friend Christina’s taste in music. Every season, she makes a Apple music playlist. I’ve been listening to her autumn playlist all morning. It’s filled with songs I would never have discovered on my own, some of which I would also probably have skipped through if they actually showed up randomly on the music Apple picks for me, but I’m loving it. I really like Run Far by Elliphant, among others. Weird, and delightful, IMO.

Another thing I like: playing with covers. I didn’t make one yesterday because the day wound up being filled with others things: phone calls and errands and laundry and pumpkin-pie eating and long conversations. But Saturday I went for the fairy tale & painterly look for a horrible title:

And today I did a sci-fi cover for my font project. This font is Encode and it’s definitely a good sci-fi font. Straightforward, but the curves on the top of the letters and the straight lines down the sides make me think of spaceships. I would absolutely have sworn that I’d downloaded a spaceship, but I couldn’t find it, alas. It would have made a nice background element. I tried about six different backgrounds before finally settling on a texture and those splashes of color, but it was mostly experimenting with fonts. Still, I like it.

Still more things I like: leftover Halloween candy, gluten-free bagels, complicated cooking plans (pork carnitas for dinner, I hope), and Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education, which I’ve read three times now. It’s maybe not a book I want to look at too closely (how does the narrator know everything she knows?) but I love it anyway. I downloaded the author’s entire 9 book dragon series from the library to help me make it through the next days of uncertainty. Distractions & more distractions! That, plus plenty of candy, are going to make this week much easier, I hope.

On Twitter yesterday, NK Jemisin said:

Said to my therapist this morning that I can't plan anything, bc the next few weeks are a singularity of possibilities that I can't see past. She gave me permission to play video games all day — "practice radical self-care," basically. Anybody else needs to hear this, you too.

— N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) October 29, 2020

My immediate reaction was, “OMG, yes!” This is what I’ve been wanting. Permission to stop struggling to accomplish things every day. Permission to let go and not worry and not feel sad and scared. Permission to just kill monsters. Or build farms or take care of gardens or whatever non-real simulation thing I want to do. Permission to wander around Pandaria, my favorite land in World of Warcraft, if that is what I want to do.

Writing has been impossible lately. My imagination is broken. I have no stories left. NaNoWriMo starts in two days and first I was planning to finish one of the multiple novels I have underway. But they’re all stuck for a reason: I don’t know what happens next in them. Then I thought I’d start something new and fresh — it’s always easier to begin something than it is to persist through a murky middle. But I don’t have any ideas. Nothing fun is happening in my daydreams.

Next I thought maybe I’d just write fanfiction of my own books — scenes and short stories with characters I already know, no worrying about plot, just character and dialogue and moments in time. I even for a brief moment had Maggie and Max in my head, with Maggie getting annoyed at Max in December 2019, when he provides her with blueprints of a diner renovation that would improve all the little annoyances in her kitchen. How can she shut down for the three months it would take to get that work done? she demands, but he grimaces and suggests she schedule it for the spring. Yay, an idea! But that’s all it was, an idea of that one moment and it didn’t lead me to anything else.

The usual writing advice is just to persist. Keep thinking about it, keep sitting down at the computer, keep opening up the file and staring at the blank page. But I fill my blank pages with endless ruminations about my failures as a parent, what it means to have been so wrong about a relationship. To believe it was one thing — love and affection and appreciation of one another, a firm belief in the other person’s value and worth as a human being, the very definition of family — only to discover that all that appreciation was a one-way street. That while I thought my son was fantastic and interesting, he thought I was condescending and annoying and not even worth reaching out to when the world was burning down. When I called him from the desert, sick and scared and crying, and he didn’t call me back… well.

Can I tell you how much these ruminations do NOT serve me? They don’t serve me. I’m trying very hard — very, very, very hard — to stay out of that black hole, which means that I delete those words and close that file and move on to other things.

I am tempted, of course, to do that very thing right now. (In fact, I did, for about an hour.) Writing words and sharing them, even in the form of a blog that only a few people read, means accepting that other people will judge those words and, of course, the person behind them. Are you going to think I’m a bad mother? Are you going to think I’m over-sensitive? Do I need to care? A helpful friend this summer told me I was co-dependent for hurting so much and I should get help. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine how that felt. Fortunately for my state of mind, around the same time the Best Sister-in-Law Ever (married to the Best Brother Ever) sent me the Best Email Ever. So you, oh, reader, can feel free to judge me for my over-sensitivity and my wallowing; I can pretty much guarantee that your judgement won’t be as harsh as my own anyway.

What does all this have to do with cover design? Well, I was eager to accept the internet’s granted permission to play video games. I truly was! Yay, video games! I actually started downloading WoW again, so I could go take care of my farm in Pandaria. But back in August, shortly after I posted my Daughter of Flame cover, I decided that my graphic design education needed a focus. My daily drawings (never actually daily) were entertaining but it didn’t feel like they were getting me anywhere, and I don’t have nearly enough book projects to keep me learning design via my own stories. So I made up a project, or rather, a series of them. I found a random title generator on the internet, generated a bunch of titles, and started making covers to go with those titles.

This is that project to date:

And this bring us to today. Am I going to create a cover today? Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe I’m just going to play video games, the internet having given me permission to grieve for my son and my country and our world in whatever way gets me through the day.

But I am also going to pat myself on the back and acknowledge the shine I deserve for having created this portfolio of mostly lousy, sometimes great work in the past two months. I am halfway through my list of titles: I don’t want to stop now. Despite the temptation of video games and escapes from reality, I’m looking forward to what I’ll be able to do and how much I’ll know by the time I reach the end of my list. (Although I’m willing to bet the very last one will be either Gnome of Time, Nymphs And Foes, or the aforementioned Dogs and Goblins, none of which strike me as particularly good titles. I guess that’s the peril of a random title generator.)

Meanwhile, I’ve actually started another cover design project, which is maybe going to turn into something I share with other people some day? I got tired of re-inventing the wheel typographically. I like playing with fonts but I also wanted to create some cheat sheets for myself of fonts that look good together, specifically for book covers as opposed to web sites, and that are also genre-appropriate for given genres. The last two covers in my list are actually part of those genre tests. I’ve got multiple versions of Crown’s Power using all kinds of different fonts, most of which I rejected, while Chasing Destiny was my Roboto test. I used Roboto for the title (with some playing around with tracking and leading) and then tried out approximately nine or ten other fonts for the author name and tag line before settling on versions of Roboto.

My notes say:

Roboto  – Available on Google fonts. Roboto was designed for Android and is sort of a mix of styles; a rounded san serif that feels straightforward and simple. Per Wikipedia, Google was aiming for “modern, yet approachable” and initial reviews were mixed. But it’s everywhere and has the kind of clean lines that could easily work on a science-fiction or modern tech cover. (It might also work on contemporary romance if it was a geeky romance.) Because it’s used on interfaces (Android, Switch), it feels familiar. I’d say it’s not a noticeable font, but possibly a good choice for a cover where you want the art to stand out more than the type treatment.  

Pair with Lato, Josephin Sans, Rubik, or stick to a different weight of Roboto. 

Note: this is NOT Roboto Slab, which is a serif font and which doesn’t work for me. It looks more typewriter than tech. One source suggested pairing Roboto and Roboto Slab, but while that might work for a web page, it doesn’t work at all for a book cover, IMO. The Slab would be better for blocks of text, rather than display. 

See Chasing Destiny cover for Roboto example. 

I’m going to try to do one font a day from a fairly lengthy list of fonts I generated by reading all the articles on “best fonts for book cover design” on the first couple pages of Google’s search results. I’m hoping to end up with five to seven sets per genre — enough that I have plenty of flexibility and choice but not so much that I feel consistently overwhelmed by the thousands of font combinations that are available. It doesn’t feel like information I should share on my blog — admit it, even if you’ve read this far, you skimmed that block of italicized text, didn’t you? — but maybe I’ll make a new blog for indie author cover design tips. Or maybe I’ll turn it into a tiny ebook or something. Or maybe I’ll just have it as a useful tool for my own future fun in cover design.

Meanwhile, if you need permission to make it through the next few weeks/months by playing video games all day, you hereby have my permission. And NK Jemisin’s permission and her therapist’s permission, too. Go forth and conquer Azeroth! Or Animal Crossing or wherever your gaming takes you. But please vote first. (Um, for Biden-Harris. If you’re planning on voting for this guy, you might be codependent and should consider seeking help.)

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1321692442983366656

At the beginning of the summer, Suzanne had a dozen chickens in a coop next to the tiny house, with a second, smaller coop near the shed at the far end of the yard. The ground of the enclosures around the big coop was bare dirt, all traces of plant life gobbled down by the birds inside, but the area by the back coop was surrounded by brush and weeds with plenty of opportunities for thriving communities of bugs and spiders. You’d think this would be a no-brainer for the chickens, right? Smaller coop with prolific food and snack sources should always win out over bigger barren coop, right?

Not so much. Chickens do not like to be separated from the flock. The small coop — overflowing with snacks! — was the punishment zone, and the chickens hated being relegated to it. Suzanne, however, wanted them to clear out the weeds for her. Her solution was to add a few more chickens to the flock: young ones, who would start out in the small coop and stay there.

She bought four… teenage chickens. I’m sure there’s a name for that in the chicken world, but I’m equally sure that I’m not in the mood to start browsing the internet looking for it. Well, it’s not that I’m not in the mood, but if I fall into an internet rabbit hole today, I will probably not manage to pull myself out anytime soon. So whatever, four teenage chickens, mixed breeds of ameraucana and something else that Suzanne can’t remember.

Suzanne, having had many chickens over the years, doesn’t feel the need to name every chicken anymore. She calls the flock of them, “the ladies,” and pretty much leaves it at that, although a few of the older ones do have names. I’m not so nonchalant about cute teenage chickens, though, so within a few days, I’d decided that these birds should be named after the queens of England.

If you look closely at the above picture, you’ll see that the bird who’s looking out at the camera has some dark fluffy feathers around her beak. Another one has white feathers in the same spot. I named the one with white feathers Elizabeth, for her Elizabethan ruff, and the one with the dark feathers Victoria, for her expression of disapproval. The other two, somewhat interchangeable, were Mary and Anne.

Their royal majesties, however, did not grow up to be interchangeable. To begin with, three of the four of them were escape artists. The area around the small coop was enclosed with soft fencing, boards, and buildings (the shed and the coop), but Victoria, Elizabeth, and Mary treated that whole enclosure thing as more of a suggestion than a rule. I’d regularly go out into the garden and discover chickens wandering free. After all, given a choice between gobbling on thick weeds or tender basil plants and strawberries, who would choose the weeds? Anne, apparently, who never seemed to wander with the others.

Because Suzanne wasn’t inclined to let the chickens feast on the plants that she wanted in her garden, she decided their majesties needed to move into the main coop with the rest of the birds. I was worried about them — wouldn’t they get picked on? Were the older chickens going to share their food? I’m not going to say Suzanne laughed at me, but she definitely didn’t share my concern. And rightfully so.

Possibly I shouldn’t have named them after royalty, because the teenage hooligans took over the main coop within a few weeks. They stay up later than the others — everyone else has gone to bed and they’re still roaming, hunting for the last of the daily pellets of food — but despite their late bedtimes, they sleep on the top rung of the roost. They share it with a couple of the others, but all four of them wind up squished in on the highest row, which is the power position for chickens.

And Mary, formerly the Queen of Scots, now known as Mary-Mary-Quite-Contrary, has continued her escape artist proclivities. She’s still light enough to fly to the top of the fence on the big coop, then fly down on the other side and wander around the garden, selecting leaves of basil and flowers to snack on at her leisure.

Initially, getting her back into the coop was a challenge for me. But chickens are not nearly as stupid as I was always told they were. Now when Mary-Mary gets out, I grab a chicken snack — maybe some scraps of vegetables leftover from cooking, or a handful of berries, or maybe a little granola — and head to the door of the coop. Mary-Mary hurries back to get her share of the fresh loot before I can leave her out of it. She would probably say that human beings aren’t as stupid as she always thought they were.

Yesterday I spent $20 at the feed store to buy a big bag of chicken treats. Suzanne laughed and said the chickens would adore me. I, somewhat smugly, said that her chickens already adore me, and she promised that adoration would turn to worship. I am pretty sure that Mary-Mary is not the worshipping type, however. She thinks those treats are nothing more than her due.

I am ridiculously fond of her.