Storytellers

I come from a family of storytellers. Not writers - they wouldn't have thought to do that - but they could tell stories, and many of those stories built a world in me that came out on my Ava and Claire books.

My great aunt Margaret (my cover girl) talked about the Depression. She was very nearly the same age as my characters. My dad wasn't much younger, but he had a very different upbringing. While my great grandmother kept up a pretense of gentility, even when they were poor, my dad was the youngest of a dozen kids, who stopped going to school at 12 to get a job, and who told me about going to the rail yards at night with his friends to pick coal off the tracks and to see if any of the boxcars were unlocked.

A different world, and one I tried to reproduce.

For anyone who's read the Ava and Claire books, the prequel novella about Claire's wedding and the Thanksgiving epilogue will only be available as newsletter bonuses until the end of the month. After that they'll be included in the new omnibus and the freebie will be Tudor-themed, as my next book will be a return to that series.

If you want the freebies, you can sign up here. I won't spam you - after the initial sequence confirming you've downloaded your bonuses, I check in once a month unless there's a sale or a new release to tell you about.

Handwork

This Monday I went to my town's fiber arts meetup. I always intend to go, and I've only gotten there a few times before. 

It started during Covid as a meetup in one member's backyard so the makers in town (and there are many) could get out of their houses while still keeping their hands busy. Now it's held in the local maker space, which is less personal, but warmer and with better light.

The reason I've often ended up not going is that when I'm working on a project, I plow straight on to the finish. And for this meetup, I need hand work. Over the weekend, I finished piecing four custom Christmas stockings made from baby clothes, and I held off doing the applique and embroidery work because I knew I could do that on Monday night.

And I actually got them done. It was nice to sit there with coffee and a half dozen other women and catch up on our projects and our lives. It happens every other week, and I'm going to try to make it a more regular occurrence.

What about you? Do you like getting together with others or do you prefer your creative pursuits done alone? No judgment here - I'm firmly in both camps.

2023 Recap

Indulge me a little, if you don't mind.

A few friends (the ones on the snarky scale) tell me that I worship at the altar of productivity. They're not wrong; they just mean it in a negative sense but I've always seen productivity as a positive. Maybe it's not healthy, but I've always judged myself by how much I've gotten done. I think it's the remainder of that bored only child - I can't be bored if I'm busy.

So, in writing/publishing, I put out two books this year: Coming Closer and Coming Together. I've assembled the ebook omnibus for the Ava & Claire trilogy, and that will be released on my birthday in January as Coming Home.

I've taken workshops on marketing and advertising; I've edited two books for other people; I've commissioned covers after trying (and failing, again) to design my own. The answer to the question, "Would I be better off writing?" is almost always "yes."

In animal news, we lost Harriet in February and acquired Rufus in April, after two very strange cat-free months. At some point, Rufus will get a friend because he's insistent upon being a cat and not a cuddly, non-verbal family member, and I want a writing and sewing buddy.

The garden was both out of control and very productive this year. I neglected to pull the volunteer tomatoes before they set fruit - and then I feel bad about yanking them - so I ended the season with eighteen plants, enough jars of sauce for the next two years, and a lot of happy neighbors. Produce and canned goods are currency in my town. The fig rree also put out its fair share, and that turned into nineteen half-pint jars of jam. 

There was no "real" vacation this year because we lost the credits for our thrice-postponed trip, but we did end up going to Vegas for my writing conference, which was a half-decent vacation when I was able to focus. I'd never want to go there for any other reason, though. I have nightmares that look like Vegas felt.

Even though I'm not usually the type to write it down, when I make my next day's to-do list lately, I've been writing down three things that I was grateful for during the day that just ended. It keeps me looking out for those good things throughout the day, and no matter how bad the day was, I can always manage to be grateful for my husband and coffee, and then I only have to find one more.

A merry little Christmas

Low key was the order of the day. My husband is feeling much better but I've apparently started a completely unrelated cold, the kind with the huge surprise sneezes that come with the risk of putting your back out.

We waffled about whether to do our big meal on the 24th or the day itself, but decided to go with Christmas Eve. The meal is important because we don't go gifts anymore, just usually go shopping and buy something fancy and spend the day wrecking the kitchen. Neither of us had the energy for that, so we made paella from a box and added extra mussels and peas, and it was delicious.

The box said four servings. That was probably accurate because we each had two, and then fell back on the couch and moaned about how full we were.

That didn't stop us from going to our local cafe the next morning for breakfast. They were open until noon today and the town came out to support the owner getting up on Christmas morning to take care of us. There were probably a dozen people there, and I knew all of them. One of the perks of being in a small town.

After that, we took a long walk to settle all the calories and then came home. 

Nothing wrong with a quiet holiday. Nothing at all.

Positively positive

Well, this was unexpected.

Maybe it shouldn't have been - most of us have either experienced this or been anticipating it since March 2020 - but there are only two positive tests I don't want to see, and the ship has sailed for the other one.

It's not me; my husband went to his office's holiday party at a bowling alley last Thursday, and by Saturday was feeling achy. Sunday he had a sore throat. Monday was a cough and chills. Yesterday was a fever.

I'm clear so far. Not sure how, but I'll take it because someone needs to be healthy enough to ask, "Have you taken your cough medicine? What was your temperature just then?"

He's feeling some better already. Not there yet, by any means, but I think for the most part we've also all forgotten how to be sick. Masking didn't just prevent Covid, it kept all the normal nasty germs and allergens from getting in.

What absolutely astounds me is that we flew to Las Vegas, hung out in a smoky, crowded casino with thousands of people, and then flew home again, and while a lot of attendees did get Covid and RSV and just general con crud, we didn't. 

At a bowling alley. A freaking bowling alley. 

Christmas will be quiet this year. (There's an upside to everything if you look for it).
 

Insomnia

Rufus can always sleep.

I'll be 60 in January. No, I have no idea how that happened, and it's a topic for another day.

What I'm thinking about today - because I haven't slept - is another one of the benefits of aging. How much more I can get done be because I'm rarely tired at bedtime.

Peri- and then full-on menopause has been fun. Not. Would not recommend. Except for the parts that I would, like a better sense of what my body is going to do (gain weight, slow down, ache in random places) and the at-first-insulting but then rather wonderful realization that I'm now mostly invisible to a certain class of annoying people.

Which means I don't have to worry about impressing anyone except myself and the select few I care enough to want to impress. It's lovely.

All this to say, I couldn't sleep the other night. I listened to my favorite bedtime podcast, Nothing Much Happens, where a woman reads lovely, no conflict, low stakes stories that normally relax me and send me to sleep long before she's finished.

Except that night's episode was called The Pantry. It was a simple story about the kind of chores we put off, and how good cleaning and organizing your space can make you feel.

Not a good thing to tell me when I'm lying there, still with my tank half full. I wanted to get up and go down to the basement and organize things. I wanted to scrub the floor. That's how I knew I was stupid tired, because I never want to do that.

And guess what? Next day, did I get any of that done? 

Nope. 

Tomorrow is another day.

Representation matters

Stepping away from books agin this week to talk about a custom order I just shipped out on Monday. A woman reached out to me, and said that her four-year-old granddaughter was obsessed with the character of Chrissie from Daniel Tiger. Apparently Chrissy has spina bifida and uses crutches and braces on her legs. The little girl had never seen a doll like her before, and Grandma wanted to know could I do something similar that wasn't exactly Chrissie.

It's high craft show season, so custom orders aren't my favorite, but I took this one as a challenge. I didn't have any pale gray felt on hand, and since this order was already going to take more time than it should have, I wasn't going to run up to the fabric store to buy any. The braces and the crutches are made from felt of another color, covered with light gray cotton which I did have in stash.

The braces are stitched onto the doll's legs, while the crutches have a snap fastener so they can come off her wrists. I was baffled with what to use for the crutches, and then it came to me that straws would work. Of course, I didn't have any of those either, but my local buy nothing group supplied a handful. Really, the hardest part of the whole doll experience was calculating the width of fabric to make tubes for the straws. I left a tab of fabric at the top, to be sewn to the cuff, and the leftover fabric at the bottom was tucked inside the straw using the tube turner.

I can't wait to hear what the little girl thinks of her.

Also, because everything does lead back to books eventually, another reason I wanted to do this was because the youngest daughter in Coming Apart wears braces on her legs, and I tried to imagine how it would feel to her to find a doll that looked like her. Representation matters.