Stay Home

The peach tree I planted
last summer is blooming!

So I'm doing my best to keep distancing and distracting myself. There's a fine line between being well-informed and driving yourself around the bend. I thought I knew that already, but it's even more important now.

So while I'm on the computer, I'm letting Mario have most of the bandwidth for his obsessive Googling and news-gathering, and I'm trying to write. It's going. I'm not sure how well it's going, but it's going.


Mainly I need to keep from climbing the walls, and that seems like a good way to direct my energies, since it isn't garden season yet.

I did get out there the other day - it was nearly 80 degrees and the dirt was calling to me - and I felt "normal" for the rest of the day, and the next morning, until I caught up on the news.

Moral of that story: dig in the dirt, stay away from the news, and STAY HOME.

That's all I've got for now.

Our New Normal

Looking forward to getting back into the garden

How many people feel like they're living in a dystopian or post-apocalyptic novel right now? It's never been my favorite genre, but the kind I do like are the ones where the remaining people pull together, pool resources, re-learn old skills, and get back to the business of living. James Howard Kunstler's World Made by Hand is a great example.

Of course, right now, we can't pull together, except by pulling separately. The best way to show that we care is to keep our distance and act as if we're already infected, so that - even if we're not - we don't carry germs to someone in a higher-risk group.

One of the worst parts for us is just that, distancing ourselves from the high-risk, which would be Mario's mom. She's recently gone into a nursing home in NJ and they're currently on total lockdown, so we can't see her at all. We're calling, but it's not the same to someone who's a little confused about the world.

The way things are going, it looks like we're going to be seeing a lot of our in-house
nearest and dearest for quite some time. For some, this is spouse, kids, pets. For some, it's any one of those. For others, they're stuck at home alone.

None of these are good, in the short term, but for there to be a long run, it's what has to be done.

I feel fortunate, after hearing about all those empty supermarket shelves that I'm the kind of person who always has a month's worth of food on hand. I don't know if it was growing up listening to my aunts' tales of the Depression, hitting the frugal living/FIRE movement at the right time, or  just my natural tendencies, but when I've seen non-perishables that I like on sale, I've always stocked up. We have a chest freezer in the basement (which was just getting restocked pre-pandemic after an unfortunate accidental plug removal and mass meltdown). I have tomato sauce and veggies from our garden that I both froze and canned last year. And I can make soup from anything.

Which is not to say that this is going to be easy. Mario's lucky that he can work from home. I know a lot of people aren't that fortunate. And while I do work from home, a lot of the work that I do is suddenly not around. Spring craft shows have been canceled across the board, so while I want to sew to manage my anxiety, it's not like I really need to build up more stock. Another thing I do is online transcription, but with offices closing, not a lot of work is being submitted.

And I don't even want to talk about Etsy. People haven't hit stress/therapy shopping yet, other than for necessary supplies and perhaps some reading material.

So what am I doing to keep myself from climbing the walls? Prepping the garden for spring, working on my next book (which thankfully has little mention of infectious disease), cleaning corners of the house which I haven't looked into since we moved in, and yes, still sewing. Because if I don't make things, my brain will leak out my ears, and then where will I be?

It's too early to tell, but I feel like this is going to cause some massive reset in our society. How that will work out, I can't even imagine. I hope it's not as bad as I fear it will be. I hope everybody keeps to themselves as much as possible, but also that they get outdoors when they can. Just sitting in the sun for a few minutes makes me feel better.

What about you? How are you handling your quarantine/shelter-in-place/work-from-home/social distancing?

Giveaway

Many of us are stuck at home right now. It's the right place to be - the right thing to do - but that doesn't meant we're not already climbing the walls just. a. little. bit.

Which means we need something to occupy our time. Once the closets are cleaned and the gardens put in order, and you've exhausted everything that Amazon and Netflix have to offer, there's always ... books.

I have a signed paperback copy of Songbird available for giveaway right now.

The rules, such as they are: please go to my writer Facebook page and like and share the pinned giveaway post. I'm trying to get a few more followers there, because followers mean sales, and sales mean I don't have to go back to cubicle-land anytime soon. (Actually, I just turned down a 4 week temp assignment in cubicle-land because Mario's working from home for at least the next 2 weeks and it seemed ridiculous - and risky - to take that much public transportation, and spend that much time with people, when my husband, who works in a much larger space, is at home because his employer has decided it's too risky). So no temping for me. Yay?

If you're not on Facebook, I understand. Like Twitter, it can be a trash fire sometimes, but if you curate what you follow, you can escape the worst of it. That being said, if you're not on FB and you want to be considered for the giveaway, leave a comment telling me that you're entering the giveaway through the blog.

Book Review: The War in Our Hearts

Time for another random book review, this one from Eva Seyler, my publisher's other historical fiction author.

I read The War in Our Hearts, which came out around this time last year, before I became friends with Eva on Twitter. I was interested first because we shared a publisher, but also because I've always had a soft spot for WWI stories.

The description from Amazon: France, 1916: Estelle Graham faces a nightmare. Expecting to meet her beloved husband and bring their newly adopted daughter home to Scotland, she instead finds him gravely injured and unconscious in a casualty station. As she fights for his care, she takes solace in his journals and letters.

In a farmhouse in Somme, Captain Jamie Graham is forever changed when he meets young Aveline Perrault. Both of them broken and walled off from the cruel and cold world around them--made even crueler and colder by the Great War--the pair form an unlikely bond. She finds in him the father she never had, and with her love, he faces the pain from his own childhood.

Discover the depth of love and faith in the face of brutality and neglect as they learn to live while surviving World War I.

This is not your standard WWI story. While it certainly covers the horrors of war, much more of it is made up of the actions that brought the protagonist, Jamie Graham, to this point - his awful childhood, his years at school, finding his love of music. His meeting and courtship of Estelle. And, finally, his fellow soldiers - and Aveline - who he encounters in France prior to his injury.

Unusually told in flashbacks, diary entries, letters and memories, this is a mosaic of a tale that will stay with you long after you've finished.

Weekend Roundup

An letter from Anne Boleyn to her king.
16th century handwriting transcribed
by the folks at Hever Castle.

I post a lot of interesting historical goodies over on my writer Facebook page, but for those of you not on the festering dumpster-fire that can be Facebook, I thought I would share the more interesting links over here, on a semi-regular basis (as in whenever there are enough of them to make it worth our mutual while).

To the left, a transcription of a letter from Anne Boleyn to Henry VIII. It wouldn't pass as a love letter these days - then again, neither would a letter - but that was apparently enough to keep the king hot and bothered.

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by metal detectors. This treasure hunter found a ring which may well have belonged to one (or two) of Henry's queens.

And for readers of Songbird, you'll have noted that the sweating sickness was mentioned several times. It was a strange and often deadly disease in Tudor times. There were only five documented outbreaks, but they were memorable. History.com has a good article about it here.

Never mind. Just one more section.

The strangest thing happened the other morning. It was good strange, but I will probably never experience its like again.

I've mentioned before how much I like Twitter, and how many like-minded writer folk I've found there. Well, there's one who I've gotten friendly with - we discuss our reading and plot ideas both on Twitter and by DM - and she started reading Songbird a few weeks back.

Life got in the way and she hadn't been able to progress very far, though she assured me she was enjoying it.

And then I woke up yesterday to a tag which said she'd been up until 3 a.m. (west coast) reading. There's no better feeling than keeping someone up all night. Then I checked my messages, and she LIVE MESSAGED HER REACTIONS AS SHE READ THE BOOK. It was a long, long string, because she read for over 3 hours, but it made my day.

I told her during the day how much it meant, seeing her reaction in real time to what I put my poor characters through, and I got to experience it in even more real time as she finished the book last night - thankfully before my bedtime.

As I sat on the couch alternately watching TV and reading Twitter messages on my phone, Mario asked, "Which one of you is supposed to be entertaining the other here?"

I think it was mutual. I know that I value these messages even more than her Amazon and Goodreads reviews, because I got to actually watch my work hit home and hear her reactions to my story. That's not something every writer gets to experience. Honestly, some probably wouldn't like it, but I did.

I really did.

Fait Accompli - for now

I should have posted this sooner, but I've been taking a little down time and recovering. I finished the first draft of my second Tudor novel on January 31. That was my goal, and I did it.

 A first draft is a rough creature. In the sewing realm, where I still meet a lot of my readers, it would be a jacket with three sleeves or a skirt with a zipper at the top and the bottom. It might be the wrong
fabric for the intended purpose. Or the right fabric, but the wrong garment.

As with all completed projects, written or sewn, it's going into the magic closet for a month to rest. I'll be able to see it a lot more clearly after that. At this point, I'm not even dipping back into the document to look for the highlighted portions, which are things that need to be researched for the second draft. I'll get there. But this was a longer book than I thought it was going to be, not so much in words but in span of time, and there are still incidents during the period that need to be researched so I don't don't sound like I'm talking out of my butt.

That's both the joy and sorrow of historical fiction. You have to be accurate, and when you can't be accurate, you have to at least be plausible. You can't come up with something that will jar readers out of the story, make them cock their heads and go, "Huh?" At the moment, I fear that would be the reaction in at least several crucial places. So Robin Lewis, and the dissolution of the monasteries, and Thomas Cromwell and all sorts of other fun, are sleeping it off in the magic closet.

I'll let you know when they emerge. In the meantime, I'm thinking of new projects...