Talena Winters's Blog, page 11

Hot Alberta Summer and Sphinx's Heart Update

One corner of my desk this morning. Of course, this little mermaid’s name is Calandra. :-)

A little over a month ago, my husband and our neighbour, Brian, put up the rather generous deck that came with our house, just in time for the first really nice weekend we had. Jason and I spent a relaxing Sunday morning before (online) church, sitting on the deck, talking and drinking coffee.

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I’m very grateful for that deck, even if we still have to drag our dining room chairs out there when we want to use it—especially this week.

Because this week, it’s supposed to reach almost 40 above. (That’s Celsius. In Fahrenheit, that’s 104.)

The forecast last Saturday. I think it’s been warmer than predicted.

When you live in northern Alberta, you’re prepared for 40 below. You may not like it, but you expect it to happen once in a while.

But 40 above?

Nope.

No one here has AC. And all those windows in my new house that I adore the other 51 weeks of the year? They’re kind of working against us now.

If we had a working barbecue and deck furniture, I’m pretty sure we’d be living out there in the mornings and evenings right now. But, we don’t. Now I know what the goal is for next year.

(And I’m trying not to worry about my oldest son, who’s volunteering as a gardener on the coast—working long days outside in temperatures already well above 40 degrees. Sounds like it’s been a bit of a trial, but he’s avoided heat stroke so far.)

Anyway, while I’m basically just talking about life, the universe, and everything, it’s probably time I update the blog about my writing.

I finished the first draft of The Sphinx’s Heart on June 3, which clocked in at about 272,000 words. Ever since, I’ve been slogging through the revisions, trying to keep one step ahead of my copyeditor. (To be honest, I’m trying to work far ahead of my copyeditor, but that hasn’t happened yet. It’s been a lot of work, y’all!)

See, I finished the first draft only four days before the date I’d booked with her. Graciously, she let me push that back by a week, but that still wasn’t enough time to make much headway. Most of that week was spent just figuring out what the problems were and how to fix them. I’m glad I’d had a developmental assessment on the first 3/4 of the manuscript already (from a different editor). After finishing the first draft, I took a few hours off to celebrate, then read the critique. Most of the next week was spent overhauling everything. Then I began the nitty-gritty work, which I’ve been doing ever since.

The story is getting better, and I’m grateful. I have the book on preorder on Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble already for October, and I’ve already used up my grace “you can move this date once because the pandemic is hard” option with Amazon so that’s the definite date of release unless I want to cancel the preorder (and I don’t), which means the absolute last day I have to get the copyedit finished is September 13.

I’m optimistic I can get the story whipped into shape and ready to release on time. But optimistic isn’t the same as confident—everything with this book has taken so much longer than I wanted. Blame the pandemic, blame me figuring out my writing process, blame the stress of the last year—they’d all be reasons why. I feel like I’m still figuring things out, but at this point, I just so badly want to be finished with this book. I love it, but I need to work on something new.

At the same time, I’m terrified of putting it out in the world… but that’s just normal. I’ve learned to live with impostor syndrome. ;-)

Anyway, June 3 was also a significant date for another reason—it was the sixth anniversary of Levi’s death. While finishing the manuscript that day meant the day itself wasn’t bad for me, I’d certainly had some rough moments leading up to that over the previous month or so—rough enough that I’ve been talking to a therapist for the last few weeks. I probably should have started that much sooner, as I’m feeling so much better now. Still, I hope to develop some new skills and tools for dealing with that downward spiral the next time it comes around.

Anyway, I need to get editing. Happy Monday, friend!

Wherever you are, I hope you find a way to stay cool.

My garden this year consists of container flowers on my deck. I’m loving these dwarf sunflowers!

Weird Things I'm Grateful For: Toilets

When was the last time you thanked God for your toilet?

I admit, this isn’t something I make a regular practice of. But of all of the advancements of modern man, the two that are the top of my list are indoor plumbing and electricity, in that order.

Photo by Donald Giannatti, Unsplash.

I just returned from a two-day trip with my mom so she could get her weekly high vitamin C treatment in Edmonton. (The treatments are helping her body deal with the cancer she’s fighting.)

On this particular trip, we were also hauling a rather unfortunate-looking Jeep down to my cousin Colby, who’d purchased it from someone near where Mom and I live and who happens to be pretty talented at turning unfortunate-looking trucks and jeeps into lean, mean, off- and on-roading vehicles. I haven’t seen Colby much in the last, oh, two decades, and I’d never met his wife, Emma. So after the delivery was made, Mom and I were grateful to have a visit and get to know the two of them better.

And that’s when Emma told us about the year her and Colby lived off the grid.

She’s writing a memoir of the experience (which I very much look forward to reading someday), but it was clear from the few stories she told that dealing with outhouses and chamber pots in Ontario winters is going to play a major role in the narrative.

A very funny one.

It reminded me of the stories my dad would tell of using the outhouse in the winter for his family of eleven. So I asked Mom (from a family of seven) about whether or not she’d had an outhouse growing up.

Yes. Yes, she did.

Apparently, to prevent the whole “having to go outside” thing, though, they also had a pseudo-toilet in the house, which was essentially a holy chair (see what I did there?) over a metal bucket. One of her older brothers was responsible for emptying the bucket before it got too full—and sometimes he’d leave it a little too long. This usually resulted in a mess on the stairs or some such.

I don’t think you need that much imagination to feel a little dry heaving coming on.

Photo of an Ontario outhouse courtesy of Jennifer Lim-Tamkican, Unsplash.

I’ve used outhouses, obviously. They’re the most practical form of pit stop in national parks and permanent camps, and the bright blue (or pink, or whatever colour) plastic port-o-potties are a vital part of every temporary public event like fairs and concerts. I’ve even used Indian toilets, which is essentially an outhouse you squat over instead of sitting on.

But you use those in warm weather. Yes, they stink. Yes, I’ve tested my lung capacity holding my breath just so I can relieve my bladder. But I’ve never had to bare my behind in the middle of the night at -40 just so I don’t have an accident.

I’ve even used less advanced restroom facilities than an outhouse—namely, going au naturel. Sometimes, you gotta. But that’s definitely not my first choice. An outhouse is still preferable to mooning oncoming traffic next to a road, or heading into the trees while camping in the wilderness (or your own yard, say, if you’re setting up a homestead from scratch *cough*) and using a leaf to clean yourself up with. I’ve hauled my own toilet paper in and out of places.

But, if your outhouse is down a steep hill in a part of the world where “winter” means layer upon layer of ice, and you have to clip on ice picks to your boots just to go pee? And then, on the way down to the outhouse at 1 a.m., you slip and end up sliding all the way down the hill on your elbows, and no one but you knows that if you don’t get up, you’re going to die from hypothermia if your bladder doesn’t explode first?

Well, thank God for my toilet.

German outhouse by Sandra Grünewald, Unsplash.

Of course, this may be a specifically female concern. For a funny take on the travails of finding an appropriate place to pee for women, check out the Where to Pee sketch from Christian & Nat.

(In case you’re interested, Emma makes beautiful crystal jewellery that she sells on Etsy. Check out Earth & Elm Jewellery on Instagram.)

Do you have any weird things you’re grateful for? Or funny outhouse stories to share? Leave them in the comments. I’m always up for a good laugh.

Happy Friday!

Message in a Bottle

Diary of an Internet CastawayDay 1:

The image on the screen freezes for the fourth time during the video call. Rural Internet is to blame. Ever since the trees between my house and the wireless Internet tower a mile away leafed out, the slightest breeze means our Internet is as stable as a toddler on new land legs.

Thank the digital tech inventors for wireless data.

Except . . .

I just reached my mobile data limit.

Oh no! I can’t even text her to tell her what happened!

I’m alone. Alone at home. All my connective roots to the outside world have been cut in a single blow.

I’m not used to this feeling of utter isolation, of being completely cut off.

But then I remember I’m not. I text my husband. He replies to my message in a bottle. We commiserate.

And then I’m fine. So I go let my cat out the door and pet my dogs on the deck.

They have no idea we’re stuck on an island.

But there’s a rescue ship on the horizon. The service technician is coming to move our antenna later today.

Until then, I pound out the words I won’t be able to send into the world until after I’ve been rescued.

It beats waiting alone.

Day 2:

The rescue ship wasn’t able to land.

No matter how many ways the service technician tried to get line of site to the nearest wireless tower, he couldn’t. He blamed Mother Nature.

“A lot of the calls I’m getting are because of all that rain we got last year. Those poplars grew two feet.”

Mother Nature is often the problem when one is a castaway.

But I’m still here, alone on my island. Thank goodness for my furry animal friends. If they start talking, I’ll know I’m in a Disney movie.

If you see me posting photos of my new friend Javacup, you know I’ve gone over the edge.

Meanwhile, how long before another rescue ship comes along?

Hard to say.

How long until the leaves fall off the trees?

Just kidding. We’re looking at other options. And I topped up my mobile data to get me by in the meantime. It’s an expensive way to email and make blog posts, and I guess I won’t be doing any YouTube research in the near future.

But that’s okay. I’m supposed to be editing a novel anyway.

That’s not the worst way to be a castaway—hunkered on an island with a good book.

I guess I don’t need to name a volleyball. I’m already talking to the voices in my head.

And they talk back.

Photo Copyright: Gino Santa Maria

Remembering Me

“Do you remember who I am?” Mom asked.

Grandma looks at her with her sweet smile, her face, at ninety-three, so full of stories they almost obscure her eyes. She gives the briefest of nods, the kind that means maybe she does, but mostly, she doesn’t want to look like she doesn’t when she obviously should.

“Do you know my kids?” Grandma asks.

“I am your kid. I’m your one and only daughter,” Mom says cheerfully.

I don’t bother asking Grandma if she remembers me. She hasn’t recognized me as her granddaughter for several years, and I don’t want her to feel bad about it.

This is new for Mom, though, and I’m sure it bothers her more than she shows. On the other hand, when you’re losing someone to dementia, you have plenty of time to grieve before the next inevitable stage comes along. Mom is practical. I’m sure she’s made her peace.

She still comes every week to see Grandma. I come as often as I can. During the heavily restricted pandemic, that was less often than I liked. Now, I’m coming about once a week, too.

I come to see my sweet mother as much as to spend time with Grandma. It does Grandma good to hear us talking and laughing. It does us good to hear her laughing too.

We take her for a walk along the dike. The Peace River rolls along beside us as it always has. It never forgets anything. It remembers its boundaries, it remembers where it’s going, and it remembers where it’s been. It keeps going on and on, unapologetically, knowing it will still be here as silent witness to our fleeting lives long after we’re under the dirt.

I fear becoming the woman whose wheelchair I am pushing—memories of all the people I hold most precious to me faded like a photograph in the sun, my biggest excitement to notice the clouds or the cars or the birds. Noticing beauty is important, but that’s not what makes me who I am.

I know my mom fears it too. She’s joked about walking out on an iceberg when the time comes. I’ve joked about taking up skydiving. Both of us want to live our lives to the fullest until the very end.

Some days, I already feel adrift on an iceberg. The pandemic, and stress, and burnout, have already taken parts of me I used to hold dear. I’ve forgotten some of the best parts of who I am.

But I want to remember. I have a terrible memory, so I write the moment down. To remind me that the only way to forget a life well lived is to have lived one in the first place.

We sit on a bench. Mom and I talk, and when Grandma comments about something, we do our best to decipher her slurred words and include her in the conversation—though she can no longer follow ours.

It doesn’t matter. Her life serves a different purpose now—so we can love and serve her the way she served us for most of her active years. To remind us that a life well lived is full of stories, even if she bears them on her face now instead of her memory. To show her that she’s still wanted and valuable.

Does she remember who I am? No.

But I remember her. And, in doing so, I remember who I can be, too.

Me and my beautiful mom and grandma beside the Peace River. Sunday, June 20, 2021.

Thumbnail photo of the Peace River Valley taken June 14, 2019.

Searching for my Voice

I am constantly accompanied by a deep sense of dissatisfaction.

Dissatisfaction at what I’ve accomplished. What I’m not accomplishing. At the ideas I don’t have time to work on, and the ideas I wish I had.

At the glacial pace with which my writing career is proceeding. At how little there seems to be that I can do to change that.

And it makes me tired.

Or maybe being tired is why I’m so dissatisfied?

It’s certainly related.

I’m so tired of being tired.

Once upon a time, I used to come up with blog ideas at the drop of a hat. These days, I feel like I’ve lost my voice.

It’s a dangerous world out here on the interwebs, and I’m too tired to take the slings and arrows of people who think if they disagree with me, I absolutely must know about it.

Frankly, simply asking questions about sensitive topics is a reason for slings and arrows these days.

To learn and grow as a culture, we must have the social freedom to ask questions and have reasonable discourse. But reasonable discourse seems like a completely unreasonable expectation these days.

We live in a culture that’s forgotten the art of giving grace. Or maybe it’s just that those who haven’t learned we all need grace at some point are so numerous and loud.

Has the Internet killed civility? I hesitate to make a claim that bold. But it’s certainly a bit like the Wild West out here these days, isn’t it? Mob law on Facebook, Twitter lynchings, and even charismatic evangelists/influencers turning entire online communities in one direction or another.

Proof that the information highway hasn’t actually made humans any smarter.

Am I getting smarter? Maybe that’s what happened.

When I started blogging, I had so much to say. I had opinions, and blithely posted them on the Internet for random strangers to find.

Now, I’ve learned that having opinions doesn’t make you right. And posting things on the Internet is great, as long as you can handle the responsibility and potential Twitter-storm that goes along with it.

Or maybe I just don’t want to add to the noise. Because for the Wild West, it’s surprisingly noisy out here, isn’t it?

But even in the Wild West, people knew they needed other people. You might only see your neighbours a few times a year, but it was a reason to party. Today’s Wild West feels more like a rave than a friendly neighbourhood barn dance, though.

These days, the only place to “see” neighbours safely is in the wilds of the Internet, and it feels a little too untamed to party about. More like skulk around and hope you don’t attract the wrong kind of attention while you do what you have to do, pick up your supplies from the General Store, and then head home, like you’re some kind of outlaw—or the town is run by a gang of them.

I don’t exactly know where I’m going with this. But part of my dissatisfaction is not knowing how to be anymore.

I’ve had a lot of changes in my life in the past year, and each of those changes has made me more isolated to varying degrees. There was the pandemic, which meant I could no longer teach piano students in my home. I finished the 2019/2020 teaching year by Zoom, as did every other music teacher I know, but I decided not to continue lessons in the fall. I’d meant to step away from that career in a few years anyway, and I was busy enough with other work last year, it seemed like a good time to just do it rather than add to my stress by making the changes needed to accommodate students in my home again. (Wouldn’t have been possible in our trailer, and then, we moved. All kinds of reasons why just closing the doors last year was a good idea.)

Then, in January, I ended my freelance writing contracts. While I don’t regret the decision, I didn’t really think about how those contracts ensured I was constantly meeting new and interesting people, constantly challenging myself in a way my other work does not, and pushing me a teeny bit out of my comfort zone with each assignment (or a lot, depending on what it was). And I didn’t realize until I wasn’t doing it anymore how much I need that, especially as I was no longer teaching.

And since I’ve found social media has become a rather unpleasant place to be most of the time, I’ve withdrawn from even that source of interaction with people, for the most part—even as far as content creation. It doesn’t seem worth the time to make engaging content when I don’t feel inspired to be there in the first place, and it takes time away from creating the things that will truly serve my customers—more books and patterns.

So I’m dissatisfied. Perhaps I’m languishing, like that article in the New York Times talked about. Because, in reality, things aren’t that bad. I’m getting outside, I’m talking to family and sometimes friends, and I’m making progress on my career, though slowly. But I need something new and different.

I need a change. I’m tired of being closed off and isolated.

I think I’m ready to start blossoming again. I’ve started climbing out of the Pit of burnout, and it’s created this dissatisfaction—I have enough energy to want more to happen, but not quite enough to actually make it happen at any sort of speed.

So, the dissatisfaction is good news if it’s an indicator that I’m healing. If I can only take two steps forward before sliding back one, that’s one more step I wasn’t able to take a few months ago.

And as I climb out of burnout, I’m hopeful I’ll find my voice again on the way.

Thanks for listening. Thanks for sticking around.

Stay safe and well, friend. It’s a wild world out there.

Thumbnail photo by Oleg Gekman, courtesy of 123rf.com.

I Made it Through the Fire Swamp... Okay, close.

How else should one introduce one’s first blog post in six months but with a Princess Bride reference? But that title’s about more than just being cute. The last six months of silence here have been kind of like wandering through the Fire Swamp… or a dumpster fire… or, you know, the Big B—Burnout.

Okay, not just kind of. That’s exactly what it was like. Because, with all the times that I’ve flirted with burnout before, this is the first time it actually happened.

Thus, an unprecedented six months between posts.

And you know, I’m not all the way through. Things are improving. I have more energy most days than I did. But it comes and goes, and I’m still finding the new equilibrium for my life.

I’m not going to rehash everything that’s happened in the last six months in detail, but for posterity, I will at least go over the highlights.

November & December:

After the delivery of our house in November, it was a few more weeks before we got the power and heat hooked up. But once those were connected, I spent all weekend long, every weekend, painting the house. Like, from supper Friday night until supper Sunday night, with breaks only to eat and sleep.

Jason was busy working on other projects with the house, with the help of our neighbour and friend, Brian S. (We are SO grateful Brian put so much time into the project.) Brian installed a water treatment system to remove the nasty iron from our well water and helped Jason get the second furnace for the addition attached (it goes under the house). Jason got a bit of help from another guy putting the foam insulation around the skirting, and managed to close it off before winter got too far along, which made our insurance company happy.

Jason and Brian were building our front steps—also to meet insurance requirements—on Christmas Eve. (SO thankful for Brian!)

New stairs for Christmas. :-)

But while they were doing all this, I was painting. And since the entire house needed it (there was a lot of damage to the walls because the previous owners’ kids were pretty hard on it), and it’s a lot of house, “painting” was not a small project.

Meanwhile, I did take a couple of trips to Edmonton with my mom when she went for her high-vitamin C therapy to treat her cancer.

And, starting December 1, my assignments for Move Up revved up. I was promoted to managing editor and started training a new writer, for which I was grateful and honoured, but which also increased my stress.

I had originally planned to take a two-week holiday at the end of December. Well, the “holiday” was from paid work. It was not a rest. You guessed it, I was painting.

Jude arrived home from Capernwray for his Christmas break in the first week of December, and he helped with projects for the house, including painting. So thankful for that!

Korra getting comfy on Jude in his new room one morning. Jude did most of the painting in here himself.

January:

The extreme stress I was under, including not feeling I had time to take breaks and feeling pressure to move into the new house so we wouldn’t be “split” between places any more, as well as the huge work load (I figured out I logged an average of 62.5 hours a week through all of 2020), started to pile up.

We managed to move our entire household into the new house by the second week of January. Noah slept in the old house about a week longer than the rest of us while we finished painting his room. Move Up assignments were due by January 15, but some of them were taking longer than expected, increasing my stress. I was supposed to start an editing project right after New Year’s, but my capacity was at about half of normal and most of that was being used up for Move Up.

The kids were home for the first week of school because of COVID restrictions (the whole school was working online until the 8th or something). So when I felt like I was losing my mind, I went and hid in the bathroom to cry.

I knew my mental health issues were because of more than stress, but I didn’t know what to do about it. Fortunately, I’d booked an appointment for myself at the same clinic my mom was going to for her treatments, and that appointment was in mid-January. When things got really bad starting in October, I’d googled my symptoms and was already pretty sure I was in perimenopause. I just didn’t know why I felt like I was going insane for a full week before my cycle every month, and I wanted to do something about it. (I feel so unprepared for perimenopause. Why does no one talk about this? I only heard the word for the first time a few years ago. I feel like it’s the “invisible” phase of a woman’s life.)

Unfortunately or fortunately, my cycle in January was the worst I’d ever had, and it coincided with a perfect storm of all those other stresses. I crashed. I burned. And I knew I absolutely had to do something different.

The first time my mom got cancer, she was around my age. I didn’t want to hit the same kind of health wall because of my work habits. Not only that, I physically couldn’t do what I’d been doing anymore.

So I made drastic changes.

I quit Move Up as soon as the issue wrapped up.

I quit all my other writing contracts. (I was doing work for a couple other brands and websites.)

I reworked all my editing deadlines based on my new capacity and a reduced workload. When I contacted my clients, they all decided to continue on with me, even though their projects would stretch out much later than originally planned.

This was the scariest part of the process for me. I hate not meeting commitments, but I knew I had no choice but to make those changes. I also knew that if I lost clients, I could probably use that extra breathing room to heal.

Well, I didn’t lose any of them, for which I am so grateful.

At my appointment with the naturopath, she explained why my mood swings and health issues had become so extreme. The precursors for cortisol, the stress hormone, are the same as for estrogen. I’d basically been in fight-or-flight mode for a year (or longer?), and since survival is more important than reproduction, all my precursors were being used for cortisol. Thus the insane mood swings and prolonged depression for 7-10 days per month—perimenopause on steroids.

She got me onto some supplements and gave me some other things to work on to start to heal my adrenal glands and to start regulating my cycles a bit better. Between that and the reduced workload plan I already had in place, I left her office feeling more hopeful than I had in a very long time.

This unedited image showcases the exact colour Noah chose for his bedroom walls—and he loves it! My eyes, on the other hand, are still recovering… (If you’re wondering, it’s Benjamin Moore’s Lizard Green, 2030-10. There’s probably another person out there who’ll love this colour or be trying to figure out what it looks like on a wall, so, you’re welcome. Photo taken in a southwest-facing room near sunset at a high latitude in early January.)

February to Now:

Okay, I didn’t give myself quite as much grace on those first editing projects as I should have. I didn’t want to stretch those projects out too far. Unfortunately, this meant I was still working more than I probably should have for the last several months, and all non-essentials (like blogging) got perennially bumped from my list.

I just can’t hack those 60+-hour weeks anymore, either, which meant no working through weekends for me. I needed them to work on projects for the house, which we still haven’t finished renovating so we can move “all the way” in. But mostly I needed them for the mental break and, sometimes, a physical one, to just not do anything. Plus, I’m sleeping more than I ever have, because if I don’t, I pay.

Oh, I did try to work through a few weekends, and always paid for it. So nope, no more.

I’ve also been focusing on finishing the manuscript for The Sphinx’s Heart. Since this post is already pretty long, I’ll go into more detail about that in a future post. For now, just know that I’m currently at about 240k of a manuscript I now expect to hit 260k words, and it’s slated for release on October 19. There’s a lot more to the story, but I’ll save that for later.

In March, I took the Write Better-Faster 101 course from Becca Syme, which has helped me a great deal in seeing what systems and patterns contributed to burnout, as well as gave me tools for healing from it and to hopefully prevent it happening again. I highly recommend the course to all writers. She also has a YouTube videocast called the QuitCast, and several books for writers. (One of which I blogged about in January 2020, the last near miss I had with burnout.)

I’ve become a bit obsessed with houseplants. It’s a weird obsession, but it helps my mental health to watch things grow. And I discovered that what I call “obsessed” is nothing compared to the houseplant community at large. When I say it, I mean “I have quite a few more than the average person and I spend time maintaining them every day.” Not “the houseplants are taking over my house and are where all my discretionary income goes.”

My cats are helping, too.

Aang and Korra in my kitchen nook, along with a couple of plants enjoying some January sunshine.

And in March, they were testing out one of the two custom side tables Jason built for our new living room. :-) Cute catloafs, right?

These two are troublemakers, but they also bring me so much joy. I’m so thankful for them. This was one of the first days warm enough to have an open window. They were quite curious about all the things outside.

So, there you have it: my journey through the Fire Swamp. I got bit by a few R.O.U.S.’s and scorched by a few fire spurts, and I have a few new scars. But the trees are thinning and I know I’m getting close to the other side.

I hope I’ve learned my lesson this time. I think I’ve been flirting with burnout ever since Levi died. I push myself too hard and try to accomplish too much in too short a time. But I want my writing career to be sustainable. I want to be around for the long haul, still writing and editing books into old age.

And I want to have a life while I do it.

The more time goes on, the more I’m focusing on doing things that matter more and ignoring things that matter less. I’m going to bed earlier and waking up with my husband so I can spend all the time he’s at work (and the kids are at school, when they’re actually going—which they’re not right now because of lockdown, again) doing my own work, and more time with my family in the evenings. I’m constantly looking for ways to work less.

I’m proud to say that I’ve mostly achieved my goal of working an average of 48 hours a week so far this year. Some weeks, I work even less, though that’s usually because of extraneous circumstances—the commitments I’ve made can only be sustained if I keep to that 48 hours a week. But compared to 2020, this feels amazing. There’s time to breathe. And even read and watch TV and play with my plants…

I’ve dubbed 2021 my “year of self-care”. I’ve already made a lot of positive steps, and I’m feeling better. I hope by the time I’m completely out of the woods, these self-care habits have become so ingrained that I won’t have to think about them anymore. They’ll be an integral part of my new system.

So long as a six-fingered man doesn’t show up to take me to the Pit of Despair, I’ll be fine. :-)

Happy May, friend. I’ll be back again soon, I promise.

It might seem silly, but one of the self-care things I’ve been doing since about March is wearing makeup pretty often. It makes me feel better and more energetic knowing I have it on, so it’s a self-care win for me. :-)

Saga of a House

This is a hard post to write.

It’s hard because ever since I, a kid who grew up wearing hand-me-downs and eating canned soup and fish sticks and playing with toys that used to be my mom’s, spent six months in India at age 20, I have been more aware of my privilege than most. I’d grown up poor, so I thought.

I’d had no idea what that really meant.

Privilege. I didn’t know that’s what that awareness was called until this year. I think that’s a new term for the old sensation of recognizing that your own position in life has certain advantages that you didn’t ask for, but you definitely have, no matter what situation you were born into.

The biggest lesson I came home from India with more than twenty years ago was to be grateful, and to not complain about what I have because there are many others who have not. And also? Don’t brag about what you have either because, but for the grace of God, you may have been (or may become) a have-not.

In 2020, it seems the number of people going without is growing exponentially. People are living in unwinterized campers in local campgrounds or on the side of the road wherever they can find a patch to park. Or maybe they’re not lucky enough to have campers, or shelter of any kind.

There are always homeless people in my town, even as far north as I am. Many of them try to find warmer places to be in the winter, but they can’t always do that. Our local soup kitchen runs year-round, as far as I know.

So this post is hard because, first of all, I’m going to tell you about our new home, and I don’t want to sound as though I’m flaunting my privilege. I’m not. I am so, so grateful that we have been blessed enough to be able to do this, and I have lived a long time by “making do” in various circumstances, so I know this isn’t a privilege to be taken for granted.

Second of all, the process to get this far has had challenges, and the challenges have been stressful. The stress hasn’t stopped, and won’t stop soon—not until we’re done setting up the house and renovating and moving in and have time to really settle and feel at home.*

Again, I’m grateful. I know I’m blessed.

And I can’t wait for this whole thing to just be done already.

The Road to Here

We were blessed when we moved to this property in the country. We bought it for cheap, so cheap, off my step-dad, who had bought the quarter and subdivided it. Normally, that means you can make a lot of money because each piece nearly doubles in price the smaller it gets. (Why is that? Real estate is weird.) But we got to buy it for what he paid for it. (Thanks, Mike!)

We got a loan, paid cash for a crappy old mobile home from 1970s, moved it onto the property, and have been happily living here ever since for a fraction of the cost of the house we once owned in town with three or four times the square footage.

Okay, maybe not completely happily.

That first mobile home was in pretty bad shape. It had been around the block—literally—a time or two, and had some leakage issues. Within months of moving in there, Noah (who was five at the time) developed a dry cough that wouldn’t go away. It was winter by then, so we thought it was just some kind of cold. But when it was still hanging on nine months later (the following summer), we began to suspect something was up.

Jason also got hospitalized with pneumonia during that time, and almost died.

So we tested for mold. The test grew so many pretty colours so quickly that it was a wonder the place wasn’t growing mold on the walls, not just in them.

It was the following spring before we were able to find a home to replace it. The “new” mobile home, which we still live in, was almost the same age (if not exactly the same, I don’t remember) as the one we were in, but it had only had one owner who had loved it very much, it had only been moved once, and it was slightly bigger (bonus!).

The sellers gave us a pretty good deal on the place and we got it moved onto our property with minimal trouble and fuss in the middle of summer. By the time the snow flew, we were warm and snug in our new mold-free home—though we’d blown our savings to do it.

The new place was a huge improvement over the previous one, but there were still issues related to age and size. The windows rattle in the wind and let in plenty of cold air on a winter’s night. The walls are thin and poorly insulated, so there is always a draft in winter and in summer, a moderately warm, sunny day outside can mean inside temperatures reach well over 30 degree Celsius** (that’s 86 Fahrenheit for you Americans).

Our boys were sharing two very small rooms that got more cramped the older they got. And the addition has been developing more and more leakage problems despite repairing and shingling the roof and really needs to be replaced altogether—not exactly an inexpensive project.

We’d never intended for the mobile home to be a long-term solution, but limited income meant that saving up for the house we meant to build someday would take a very, very long time. Especially since an older place like this required more money to maintain and repair than something new.

In the meantime, I kinda fell in love with it. Even my husband, who used to get a certain distaste in his mouth at having to live in a mobile home, grew accustomed to it.

I think he would have been fine with staying in it, too, if it weren’t for those aforementioned expensive-to-repair issues. And when you repair a mobile home, it’s not an investment. You don’t make that money back when you sell—which is fine, if you don’t mean to sell. But we’ve always kept our feelers out for opportunities to move back to where the larger portion of our families live (an attitude which hasn’t changed), so whatever money we put in, we would like to make back and then some at some point.

So, every spring, we’d start looking at options to either improve our current house or buy a new one. Every couple years, it seemed, we’d go looking at places to move here to see if we could find a deal. But in the end, we just couldn’t justify the expense of either option. There wasn’t enough wiggle room in our budget, and we couldn’t agree on the best course of action, either.

The 2020 Chapter Begins

This spring, the cycle began again. This time, though, there was a difference—for the first time ever, I was earning enough of an income that we had options open to us that had never been possible before.

Not a lot more options. But definitely some.

In early March, I approached Jason about the idea of finally replacing our addition. It had been warm enough to start melting snow from the frequent spring storms off the roof, and there were a couple soft spots in the ceiling tiles in my office—one of which is directly above my monitor—that were making me nervous. I kept waiting for the whole thing to come crashing down on me during the next good melt.

A day after we started that discussion, Jason found a house for sale on Kijiji. It wasn’t terribly far away, relatively speaking, and the price was not quite within our range, but maybe we could convince the seller to come down a bit.

We booked a viewing. And almost the same day, lockdown hit in Canada.

We looked at the new house in late March. There were some things about it I didn’t love, but which Jason assured me we could renovate to improve. And the seller was, indeed, flexible with his price, as well as being very accommodating in assisting us in whatever way possible.

We ended up deciding to purchase the home, thinking we’d have it moved and in our yard by mid-summer, giving us plenty of time to complete setup and to renovate and move in long before winter.

But we’ve never been in a lockdown before. We had no idea what we were dealing with.

This project has been riddled with delay after delay. While a couple of those delays were our fault because of steps in the process that needed to be completed while we were both so slammed at work we barely had time to sleep, most of them were the fault of the bank and the general craziness the whole world was getting accustomed to during lockdown.

I’ll spare you the miserable details of all that went wrong to get this far. But by the time September rolled around and we were still waiting to hear if our financing was even approved (and the seller was getting antsy, too), we were about ready to throw in the towel.

It was close. We almost did back out. But finally, in the first week of October, the financing came through.

Aside for context:

If you’re reading this from a part of the world where you don’t understand my climate, let me illuminate you as to what it’s like.

I live in northern Alberta. Sir Alexander Mackenzie travelled through here along the Peace River in pursuit of the Northwest Passage that would give a water route to the Arctic Ocean. Winter typically lasts six months a year, beginning almost like clockwork on October 30 and finally melting off and getting warm enough to strip to a warm sweater in April—but there are always exceptions, such as winter starting October 14 and having major blizzards on the third or fourth weekend of May. There is almost always hard frost on June 1 and the first weekend of September.

There have been years since I moved here that this week we’re in right now has seen temperatures of -40 and a huge pile of snow on the ground.

We had no idea, in early October, that the weather wouldn’t be exactly the same this year. The Farmer’s Almanac is predicting a snowy, cold winter. Whee.

End of aside.

Jason’s stress has been through the roof, and knowing that the project was going to go ahead after all in mid-October wasn’t actually a relief. Now he had to worry about getting the house here, running the utilities to the new location, coordinating contractors, and getting skirting on (it’s a manufactured home plus addition which will be welded to screw piles, with a fair amount of crawl space beneath the house) before it was too cold to even work outside.

But the project has trudged on with jolting, irregular steps.

On October 23, the screw piles for the main house went in. The contractor said this was the hardest ground he ever drilled into—our house won’t be moving at all. He later came back with a higher-powered drill and only got these a little deeper before his welder cut them off and capped them evenly.

We grow rocks here. It’s what we do.

October 25: Jason digging the trench for the sewer and water lines. Our neighbour, Brian Stanley, also brought over his little Kubota tractor to help.

October 29: Water and sewer mostly finished. Whew! Screw piles have been drilled a little deeper by this point too.

View of the waterline work from a different window, included so you can see the derelict mold-filled trailer husk we wish we could just burn down and be done with in the background. Anyone looking for some scrap metal and want to take it off our hands? (The blue Styrofoam is to insulate the house skirting.)

Same view, morning of October 30. Right on schedule. Fortunately, it didn’t stay for long. Yay! God was looking out for us.

Monday, November 3: The day the movers, Jason, and Brian were at the seller’s doing the final prep for the house to be moved—taking the two pieces apart, etc. Meanwhile back at the ranch, the screw piles have been cut and capped and the snow has melted. Yay!

Last Wednesday morning (after an icy rain the night before), the first piece arrived—the main house. There was still a large addition to bring from the seller’s land nearly 150 km away, and the next day was spent in putting the main house on blocks at our place before the house movers headed back to the seller’s location.

Thursday morning, my phone alerted me that there was a winter storm warning for that evening until the next morning—lots of snow and driving winds. The movers had the addition here by that night anyway—but it was covered in road grime and ice from the storm and had lost quite a few shingles along the way. It was late and dark—there was no way any more work would be done that night. Which meant we couldn’t get gas and power put in until Monday at the earliest.

On Friday, they managed to get the main house on the screw piles and welded down to the caps, and they lined up the addition to move it onto the screw piles, but left it on the trailer.

Then the movers decided to finish the job on Monday and go home to see their families for the first time all week. Understandable, but we’ve been looking at this project all weekend, which we can’t hook up to the heat and power and water until the whole thing is put together. It’s too cold in there for me to even wash walls in it to prep for painting.

How everything looked when I got home from town Friday night. I don’t think this snow is going anywhere. Winter has begun in earnest.

So we’re waiting again.

In addition, the weather is going south quickly. South in the sense of getting worse, not getting warmer. (We wish!) So some or most of those renovations we’d wanted to do may have to wait until next summer, if they happen at all.

However, I’m still going to paint. We definitely need to build some storage closets—one of the house’s main flaws is that in all that space (it’s about double the floor space of our current house, most of which is a large living room), there was almost no storage available. The only way I’ve managed in a small house this long is by using ample storage and organization, so that’s obviously a fatal flaw that will need to be remedied. Our stored stuff still has to go somewhere.

But when we’re done, we will finally, finally have two bathrooms. And a guest bedroom for the first time in thirteen years (when it’s not occupied by our oldest son during brief sojourns home). We can finally host overnight company and not feel guilty for making them sleep on an air mattress in our living room. Yay!

So there we are. We hope to be moving in within a month. And even though it’s literally just next door, moving out of here causes distress on its own. I love my house, which I’ve worked very hard to make into a home. It’s going to be a long time before this new place feels that way.

But still I’m grateful. However, if you don’t see regular posts from me in the next little while, you’ll know why.

And, for those who are wondering about my mom (see “A Season of Transitions”), she’s starting to feel a little better, thanks to the natural treatments and measures she’s undergoing. She’ll be getting a laparoscopy (her appendix removed, along with the largest mass) in a week, and they’ll be exploring to see how far the cancer has spread at that point. That will tell them exactly what they’re dealing with and will determine the kind of treatment she will have going forward. Thank you for all your kind words and prayers. She appreciates them, and so do I.

If you read to the end, I hope you were at least somewhat entertained by my trials and foibles. One of the things I’m looking forward to is updating the colour scheme of my surroundings—I’ve been wanting to paint my house for almost three years, but it’s difficult to make that project work when you live in a space and a life so jammed full.

While I’ve waited for the house to be ready, I’ve been looking through paint colours.

Colour is awesome. I love it.

I love choosing paint. So much fun. Can’t wait to see how it all looks when we’re done!

More updates to come.

Happy wee-hours-in-the-morning Monday!

*I think the test for this is when you can cook an entire meal and not have to wonder where the new “spot” for that thing you need is a single time. Or maybe when you finally unpack the last box. Not sure which.

**At a certain point, our thermometer stops measuring, so I don’t know exactly how much over. It gets hot, okay? Like, my-computer-shuts-down-on-its-own hot.

Rhonda Parrish: Thriving with her Tribe

When I ask someone to appear as a guest here on my blog, I am frequently humbled, awed, and amazed by the story they share with me. Rhonda’s story was that times a thousand.

As I read through the responses she sent to my interview questions, I laughed, I cried, and frequently nodded my head and said “I feel ya, lady.”

I mean, Rhonda and I have known each other as acquaintances for a few years, but I had no idea how much we had in common (besides both of us having multiple creative interests and being workaholic sisters).

I am so thrilled to share her story with you. But here’s the thing: the article that follows is actually a small smidgeon of the story she shared with me, because, y’all, the woman can write, and she wrote a lot. So we decided that I would write my typical “Cole’s Notes” version here, and then she will share the full, glorious story on her Patreon page.

It would be worth it to sign up to her Patreon for a month just to read the whole thing. Trust me. (But you get lots of other goodies as her patron, because her catalogue is, like, long. But we’ll get to that.)

Okay, without further ado, let me make the introductions.

Rhonda Parrish: Author, Editor, Hydra-Tamer

“I work hard to make people feel included no matter what stage of their own journey they’re on, and to give of myself to help other people along the road.”

According to her website, Rhonda Parrish is an “author, editor, and hydra-tamer” (with a cute, awesome graphic to match). She has edited nearly three dozen anthologies, is the past editor and creative mastermind behind Niteblade e-zine, and has written many books, stories, and poems, mostly in the speculative fiction genres.

For Rhonda, writing has always been there—through a troubled childhood, supporting herself through high school and distance-ed university, and a rocky first marriage. Her writing got temporarily sidetracked during her stint as a single mom before finding her current spouse, Jo, and, as you will see, is now the centre of her full-time career as a busy multi-stream creative with a thriving tribe of creatives around her.

Whatever Rhonda tackles, she does it with all her heart.

“I come from a long line of hard-working women. It’s a thing we take pride in—my grandmother raised ten kids and worked hard her whole life, which may explain why my mother was a workaholic, and so am I,” says Rhonda.

Rhonda’s childhood was, as she describes it, “unsettled.”

“My mother was young when she had my brother and me, and that impacted me quite a bit. Things got better over time. The lifestyle mellowed, the family life solidified. It was never idyllic, but it was… okay,” says Rhonda.

She was born in Calgary, where her family lived for a few years until her parents split when she was four. They moved to Nanton so her mom could work in the restaurant her grandmother owned. Soon, a little sister joined the family, but the father (who was abusive) skipped town around the same time she was born. A few years later, Rhonda’s mom remarried.

“Not so long ago, my grandmother said, ‘You kids didn’t have a happy childhood,’ and she’s not wrong. We didn’t starve, but we didn’t have much money. Relationships were chaotic. There was a lot of fighting and addiction problems. My biological father was completely absent, and my relationship with my stepfather was pretty rocky, especially when I was a teenager,” says Rhonda.

Soon after Rhonda turned sixteen, she moved out of the house.

“It wasn’t an antagonistic move. I had a lot of emotional support from my mother, and we knew it was for the best. But it was tough,” says Rhonda.

To support herself, she worked a full-time and a part-time job and babysat regularly. She was living with a boyfriend who had a hard time holding a job, and her health wasn’t the greatest. When she was 19, she and her boyfriend married, and a couple years later they had a daughter, Danica.

“My daughter was just over one when my first marriage dissolved. I was working full time as a waitress, raising Danica alone, and attempting to go to university by distance learning,” says Rhonda. “Sometimes working hard is necessary just for survival.”

Young Rhonda.

 

“The library was warm, friendly, and familiar. The playground was a jungle where I had few allies and was easy prey.”

Writing for her Life

In addition to the chaos at home, Rhonda was frequently bullied throughout her school career. Fiction was her escape.

“I’ve always been interested in story. In part, it was an escape from the turbulence of real life where I didn’t have many—or any—friends. I read a lot so I could escape a lot,” says Rhonda.

She discovered the library early—in first grade—and from then on, preferred to escape there than go to the playground.

“I remember the freedom I felt in the children’s section of the library. I can even still smell it. The library was warm, friendly, and familiar. The playground was a jungle where I had few allies and was easy prey,” says Rhonda.

Not long after that, she began writing. A lot.

“Apparently I was pretty good at it. All the way through my abbreviated school career I was the writer in the class. I was happy to grab onto that label and cling to it. It sure beat any of the others that were put on me as a kid,” says Rhonda. “That role became central to my identity.”

Her writing constantly impressed and intrigued her teachers. In Grade Six, she got 100 percent on a writing prompt assignment that became a short story (about merfolk! Yay!) for a teacher who famously never gave perfect scores.

“That moment is definitely on my Top Ten Proudest Moments list. And it happened at a time in my life when I really needed that injection of self-worth,” says Rhonda.

“That moment is definitely on my Top Ten Proudest Moments list. And it happened at a time in my life when I really needed that injection of self-worth.”

She kept writing, mostly for school. In Grade Eight, she wrote a report on Jani Lane, the lead vocalist of glam metal band Warrant. Her teacher handed it back with an excellent mark and a comment that read, “I don’t understand why you always write about sex, drugs, or rock and roll.”

“Teenage me thought that was pretty epic. ‘Yeah! Sex, drugs, and rock and roll! Whoo!’ Grown-up me is like, ‘Maybe that should have been a clue to that teacher that things weren’t all well in Rhonda’s world,” she says. “But she was a teacher, not a social worker, and she did what she could—including going out of her way to empower my writing.”

Not long after that, the same teacher arranged for Rhonda to attend a special event for the Grade Twelve students with an author guest. The privilege of being the only junior high student to attend, in a room full of people that included her bullies, reinforced her desire to write.

“I can still remember sitting in a desk at the end of a row, simultaneously hoping no one would notice me and that everyone would,” say Rhonda. “Which kind of sums up working in publishing as a whole, doesn’t it?”

After winning second place in a Remembrance Day essay contest put on by the local Royal Canadian Legion the following year—and getting paid a whole $20 as a prize, her first “paid writing”—she started to submit her work for publication. Unfortunately, she was trying for the wrong genre… for her.

“It went about as well as you’d expect. Primarily, I was attempting to write children’s stories. It was a mistake. The girl who wrote mostly sex, drugs, and rock and roll was just not ready for a complete switch of gears,” says Rhonda.

Some of the rejection letters she accumulated over the years had words of encouragement scribbled on them. After writing a non-fiction* piece for Canadian Gardening Magazine based on gardening with a goat—an experience she gained when her first husband gave her one as a wedding gift—she stopped writing. The busy-ness of life as a single mom (which she soon was) moved it “off the radar.”

Eventually, she fell madly in love with her current husband, Jo. They moved in together, Danica started kindergarten, and life stabilized. And Rhonda began thinking about writing again.

Jo, Danica, and Rhonda

Gaining Confidence

For that year’s NaNoWriMo (an annual November challenge to write a 50,000-word novel in a month), she wrote around 30,000 words. At the time, that seemed like a lot.

“My day job was writing erotica and the like—still that sex, drugs, and rock and roll, I guess—but now I was using my spare time to write other things. Fantasy, horror (which is definitely the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the speculative world, amirite?), and poetry,” say Rhonda.

After joining an online critique website, she developed the confidence to start sending her work out for publication. Her first acceptance was a poem called “Snowflakes”.

“It didn’t come with a cheque but, empowered by that acceptance, I started writing and submitting more,” says Rhonda.

By then, the publishing industry was shifting to an online world. Submitting was less time-consuming and expensive than it had been in the old analog days of mailing self-addressed stamped envelopes with a manuscript. With more submissions came more acceptances.

“As I slowly began to build up some publication credits and got better at writing, I also kept attempting to do NaNoWriMo. I created an online community that stayed active even during non-NaNo months. We’d cheer each other on. At its peak, we had a couple thousand members,” says Rhonda.

On her third attempt at NaNoWriMo in 2005, Rhonda completed the challenge with a finished erotica title.

“The book was terrible, but I did it. Just knowing I could write a novel changed my life,” says Rhonda.

“The book was terrible, but I did it. Just knowing I could write a novel changed my life.”

Why yes, that’s Rhonda with The David Tennant. :-)

An Editor is Born

Submitting to so many markets of varying quality, many of them online, planted a new idea.

“That thing happened. You know, where a writer reads a book and thinks, ‘I can do better than this,’ except it was related to these online magazines. That’s how I, a woman who hadn’t graduated from high school, who had no formal education when it came to writing or editing or publishing, decided to start an e-zine and be both its editor and publisher. And Niteblade was born,” says Rhonda.

With Jo’s help (who did the cover design and the formatting of the downloadable version), Rhonda ran Niteblade for over eight years, putting out four issues a year. She worked with a staff of volunteers and paid her writers—not much, only a dollar at first, a little more later, but it was better than the “exposure” many writers are paid with.

“Working with all those people taught me it’s a good thing to give up control and delegate. When we shut down Niteblade after 33 issues, it was on my terms, because I felt like it was time to move on,” says Rhonda.

Keepin’ it fun. :-)

Oh, no! Rhonda’s being attacked by a Pokémon!

After Niteblade, Rhonda began editing anthologies.

“The first I did was Metastasis, which is speculative fiction with a cancer theme. It sounds depressing, but it isn’t. My mother had recently died of lung cancer, and I needed a way to process that,” says Rhonda.

At that point, Rhonda still had a day job she hated.

“Jo asked me what I would do if I could do anything in the world, and I said, ‘Write, but I can’t do that.’ I meant ‘because I’m not good enough’ or ‘because the odds are against me.’ But when he said, ‘Why not?’ all I could say was ‘I don’t know?’ And that’s just one reason why I dedicate almost book I create to him, because without his support, none of them would exist,” says Rhonda.

Rhonda has now published three full-length books under her own name—two non-fiction (Haunted Hospitals and Eerie Edmonton) and her most recent book, Hollow, a young adult horror novel.

She has also accumulated 31 published anthologies to her credit, which means she’s doing a lot more than just write. But when she thinks about her career goals, she often returns to that conversation with her husband.

“These days, I probably spend fifty percent of my time doing marketing and administration, forty percent editing, and ten percent writing, and that’s being generous. While I love editing and anthologies, it’s not nearly the same as writing,” says Rhonda.

Rhonda’s “Ego Shelf”—her books and anthologies.

Writing Is a Team Sport

When asked what she is proudest of in her life so far, her answer is surprising—and yet, given her history, totally not.

“I’m proud of the role I’ve played in helping to grow the community I’ve surrounded myself with. I work hard to make people feel included no matter what stage of their own journey they’re on, and to give of myself to help other people along the road,” says Rhonda.

She goes on to say:

“I love when people approach me at conventions to tell me I’ve had a positive impact on their life. Sometimes it’s because I accepted their first story, or gave them some good advice, or even just sincerely cared when they were struggling with their choice to ‘do this writing thing.’

“I spent so much time on the outside. So much time being left out and bullied. I don’t ever want to make anyone else feel that way. In fact, I want to do whatever is in my power to prevent it. I really believe ‘writing is a team sport’**, and I’m proud to be a strong, contributing member of the team. That’s what I’m most proud of.

“… and also of Hollow.”

 

“I’m proud of the role I’ve played in helping to grow the community I’ve surrounded myself with. I work hard to make people feel included no matter what stage of their own journey they’re on, and to give of myself to help other people along the road.”

Rhonda’s latest anthology, Hear Me Roar, is about women and dragons and was inspired by this gorgeous premade cover. (She’s a self-confessed addict to premade covers, but when they turn out such wonderful ideas, I say we encourage it. :-D)

* “I say “non-fiction” in quotes because I absolutely exaggerated the success I was having gardening with a goat,” Rhonda adds.

**Rhonda has made this saying of hers famous with swag and fun convention ribbons. I’m proud to be “on the team” too. :-)

 

Like a magpie, RHONDA PARRISH is constantly distracted by shiny things. She’s the editor of many anthologies and author of plenty of books, stories and poems. She lives with her husband and three cats in Edmonton, Alberta, and she can often be found there playing Dungeons and Dragons, bingeing crime dramas or cheering on the Oilers.

Her website, updated regularly, is at http://www.rhondaparrish.com and her Patreon, updated even more regularly, is at https://www.patreon.com/RhondaParrish.

Normally, I put a bit of my own news after one of these posts. But since that was pretty long already, I’m just going to say one thing:

The new cover for The Waterboy is here, and so is the audiobook! Find out more on the book page.

The Waterboy by Talena Winters, now on audio. A standalone prequel in the Rise of the Grigori series.

(Also, the new cover for The Undine’s Tear, the first book in the main series, will be coming soon.)

Happy Friday!

And if you’d like to comment for Rhonda, either leave it here and I’ll make sure she sees it or head on over to her website or Patreon and touch base with her there. She’d love to have you in her tribe, too. :-)

“Writing is a team sport” ribbon from Rhonda.

A Season of Transitions

Wow, it’s been a heck of a year so far, hasn’t it? I’ve had a ton of stuff happening behind the scenes, so I figured it was high time to post an update here.

This fall has been a time of major transition for me and my family, for several reasons:

Family Transitions

Seems like yesterday these boys were toddlers playing pirates together. Now they're one day away from their first day of college. Their moms will miss them. . (For the record, I'm one of those moms.) . @judewinters @warlockbond117 @amagnusson6 #offtocollege #proudmama

Jude, my oldest son, started college this fall. He’s going to Capernwray Bible Harbour, a non-denominational Bible college with a one-year discipleship program. And he has the good fortune to be attending with two of his lifelong friends.

In mid-September, my lifelong friend Amanda and I drove our two firstborns out to the coast together to drop them off. Thanks to COVID restrictions, we were not allowed on the actual school property—it was a drop-and-go event. Amanda attended there, as did my husband and several of our friends.

But despite being surrounded by folks who have great memories attached to this school and knowing a few of the teachers from meeting them other places, I had never been there myself. So I was a little disappointed by that. However, the place looked beautiful, and the photos Jude has been sending home look like fun. He’s have a great time and (I hope), learning a lot.

Literally two minutes after leaving Jude on the doorstep of his new college, while waiting for a ferry to take us back to Vancouver Island, I received a text from my step-dad that my mom had gone into the Emergency Room in severe pain. They were checking her for appendicitis.

It was nothing so mundane.

By the time she left the hospital that day, she’d had a CT scan and they had found a mass in her abdomen. The doctor told her she thought it was colon cancer—the same disease that killed my uncle, my mom’s youngest brother, last year.

Later, the results of her bloodwork confirmed cancer, but a colonoscopy showed her colon to be clear. So we still don’t actually know what kind of cancer it is, what the mass is attached to, etc. They’re still working it out.

In the meantime, my mom has been going through the testing and procedures recommended by the doctor, but also going through some naturopathic treatments like Vitamin C therapy. She’s not waiting for them to figure out what cancer they’re dealing with before she does something about it.

I’ve been struggling with this one for so many reasons. Some of them are too private to share here, but there’s a few I can.

First, it doesn’t make sense.

My mom beat breast cancer naturally twenty years ago, except for having a lymphectomy to remove a few nodes, and she has maintained most of the healthy habits she used to do that. No, she didn’t continue to take a few of the nastier, more expensive natural supplements that helped her through that, but she has stayed active, eaten healthy (much healthier than anyone else I know), gotten her rest, consumes very little sugar, and, for the most part, is a very chill person who doesn’t get stressed out by much.

She comes from healthy stock (my Grandma will be 92 this year and my Grandpa ran marathons until within a few years of his death), and other than her brother—who led a much less healthy lifestyle—there is no history of cancer in the family. Yet she’s had it twice.

My struggle? Like so many of us, I want to stay healthy and reduce the risk of illnesses like the big C. It doesn’t seem fair that she’s the person dealing with this when there seems to be no good reason for it and she’s worked so hard to prevent it happening again. And it makes me realize that no matter what lengths we go to to try to limit disease factors, there are still no guarantees.

So one of my struggles is the reminder of how little we can control in this life.

I’m grieving. Even though I hope, pray, and believe my mom will beat this, with prayer and her usual determination and positivity, I’m grieving that she’s having to go through it at all and that the disease hit her, of all people.

Of all people, it shouldn’t have been her.

Housing Transitions

As has happened nearly every spring since we moved to this acreage, this spring, my husband and I started looking at ways to improve or expand our space. Even though Jude was leaving this fall, he’s planning to come back for a while after this year at college. Not only that, we might be looking at an expanded family in a few years (I mean, our kids are almost adults!), and wanted to finally arrange for each boy have their own room (with an eye for space for visiting kids and potential grandkids when the time comes).

In addition, our addition (where my office is) has structural issues due to water in the roof—there’s a saggy spot in the ceiling tiles right above my computer monitor that I keep waiting to fall on me every time it rains, and in another place, a weird fungus keeps growing through the tiles. We reroofed only a couple years ago, so we’re not sure where the water keeps coming from. But it’s had problems since we got the place, and we never intended for it to be permanent.

So this spring was no exception to our pattern.

Trying to figure out a way to stay within our budget and to prevent decades of house-poor debt, we started drawing up plans to replace our current addition with a larger one that would include another bedroom. But within a day, my husband had found an excellent deal for a house to be moved not far from here, and we arranged to go look at it.

That was the weekend when lockdown hit.

We looked at the house a week later, and decided we wanted to go ahead and pursue purchasing it. Everything since then has been slower than molasses.

I don’t want to get into all the details, but I’ll sum up by saying that because the house is to be moved onto our property instead of built from scratch and we’re using current equity instead of a down payment, it’s been a nightmare getting the mortgage arranged and getting the bank to work with us and the seller (who has been amazing). Between complications caused by everyone suddenly working from home and a type of financing agreement that they were not used to working with, what we thought would take only a few months has only been finalized this past week.

Yep, you read that right. We looked at the house on March 21. We thought we’d have it on our property by mid-summer, giving us plenty of time to get it set up and renovated in time for winter (while Jude was still home to help with the work). Instead, we got approval on October 4, and are now scrambling to see if the contractors we’d lined up in the spring are even able to still do the work before the snow flies.

The amazing thing about the deal is how gracious the seller has been to work with. That’s the only reason that we stuck with it, I think. However, because of contracts and contractors and the Winter is Coming thing, both Jason and I (mostly Jason, which is saying something, because he’s usually the chill one in this relationship) are more than a little stressed out. We’ve both been working 50 to 60 hours or more a week since March, and finding the time to deal with this all of a sudden now that it’s happening is one more stressor.

It’s been “hurry up and wait” for seven months. Now it’s just “hurry up.”

Career Transitions

Into this mixed bag of ups and downs, and partly because of it (and because of pandemic considerations), I retired from teaching piano this year. I’m now a full-time freelance writer and editor.

It wasn’t an easy choice, as mentioned before, and my life has been much too full to even miss teaching. (I miss my students, but not the activity.)

I miss playing piano, though—I haven’t touched my instrument since May, when virtual lessons ended for the last season. I’m hoping to take some “self-care” time this weekend and play for a while. I need some time to pause and have some music therapy.

The Waiting Game

This summer, I decided it was time to start putting my books into audio. I started with The Waterboy, the prequel book to my Rise of the Grigori series, because it’s short and the per-finished-hour for audiobooks is expensive. The process was so fun and awesome and went even faster than I’d hoped it would.

At the same time, based on information gathered from my marketing experiments, I decided to have new covers made for the Grigori series, and initiated that process about the same time. Because updates to audiobooks can take over a month, I decided to wait until I have the new cover before I actually published the audiobook, which I thought would mean it would be published in September.

Unfortunately, due to some major “life stuff” happening in the life of my designer around that time, the design process has also dragged on a bit.

Okay, a lot.

I finally approved the cover for The Waterboy on Thursday, the audiobook version on Friday, and I expect my designer will send me the final files on Monday.

A print-off of the almost-final version of my new cover for The Waterboy. Isn’t it pretty?

Now that we have the series template worked out, I expect it will only be a few weeks before I have final covers for both The Undine’s Tear and The Sphinx’s Heart. (But who knows? Everything’s taking longer than I’d hoped.)

And then I’ll finally get to publish my audiobook and begin ramping up marketing on this series again, building up steam for releasing The Sphinx’s Heart next spring. Or summer. With all the stress in my life and my extremely full schedule, it feels like I keep having to push back that publishing date. Sigh.

Everything takes longer than I think it will.

While some people will remember this year for the pandemic and the lifestyle changes it imposed, for me, it is The Year of Waiting.

There are good things about waiting. It’s not all bad. But it’s been a trial in its own right, and I’ve often questioned myself this year about whether I’m on the right track and making the right career decisions.

I’ve learned and am learning a lot. I’m tired and overwhelmed most of the time. I’m grateful for my blessings, but still trying to find that elusive balance I began searching for back in January when I almost burned out.

I feel like I’m teetering on the brink of burnout again, but I’m not sure what to do about it. (I’ve booked a week off at Christmas and I’m looking forward to it like you wouldn’t believe.)

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, because I’m grateful. I’m so grateful.

I have an amazing family—the world’s best husband and fantastic kids who mostly get along and whom we like to spend time with.

I’m getting a new house and nearly doubling our space. It’s a lot of work I don’t feel I have time for right now, but there will be ways to exercise creativity while settling in that I will enjoy, too. And hopefully, my husband will enjoy it much more than our current home.

I have an amazing mom who’s a fighter and an optimist, and is such a blessing to me and everyone who knows her. This trial is bringing her and me and my sister closer than ever.

I have steady work lined up for the next year—as a freelancer, this is huge.

I love my career. I’m telling stories I love, meeting new and interesting people all the time and, I like to think, making a difference in the world.

But it seems like my lifelong self-improvement mission is to figure out how to balance the many pieces of my life in such a way that I’m not only grateful for them, but can enjoy them and not sacrifice my health to participate in them.

Maybe my expectations are wrong about what “balance” looks like. Maybe that’s what I need to adjust. But I suspect it’s not that. Not just that.

I’m holding onto gratitude fiercely these days. But that doesn’t mean I can’t acknowledge the hard once in a while.

In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy this rest day as much as I can—because there’s another full week ahead.

And, I’m loving having these two little munchkins in the house:

Our newest additions like to hang out in the hat-and-mitten bins behind my desk. I’m okay with that view. :-)

Meet Korra and Aang. (At least, we think we’ve decided to call them that.)

Thanks to the cruelties of nature in the country, these are our only remaining cats. We’re going to try them out as house cats for as long as my semi-allergic husband can handle it so we can tame them and train our dogs that cats are friends. I kinda hope he can handle it for a long time, because I’ve really enjoyed having these guys inside. (Something I couldn’t have done if I were still teaching piano, thanks to student allergies.)

When I’ve been super-stressed in the last few weeks, watching these two play has brought a smile to my face. That’s something to be grateful for.

They also like the chair next to my desk. Again, no complaints here. :-)

Aang getting comfy on some hand-me-downs for my nephew. Guess I’ll be washing those again…

Korra watches something out the window from the safety of a hat bin.

Do you ever get the feeling you’re being watched?

Wherever you might be at today, friend, I hope you’re holding on to gratitude, too. Fiercely.

The Sphinx's Heart and the Lion of St. Mark

I originally posted this on Patreon a couple weeks ago, but I recently decided to narrow down my community-building efforts in order to make the best use of my time. For now, I have put my Patreon on pause. (New members can still get all existing benefits for only their initial charge, but I will not be creating any new content for Patreon for the foreseeable future.)

Starting today, I have decided to put up a series of posts over the next few months that let you peek into my research and cool things I’ve learned while writing my Rise of the Grigori series, a young adult epic historical fantasy set in the late 18th century which incorporates ancient religions, multiple cultures, and countries all over the world (including one I made up that’s inspired by Atlantis).

I mean, c’mon, the research and learning this stuff is part of what makes it fun for me. I figured that seeing the things that led me to make the decisions I did in the books would be kind of cool for you, too.

Right? Right?

I posted this on Patreon on Friday, September 4, and the quote came from my first draft words that morning. In case you’re not 100% familiar with the story because you haven’t read any of the books yet (and, ahem, you can get started with a free standalone prequel for free if you want to remedy that), several of my main characters are shapeshifters.

The world uses the idea that the Creator made multiple races at the beginning of time, including seraphim, cherubim, humans, and, erm, undines.

Okay, so the undines, a.k.a. merfolk, were where I jumped off into the “fantasy” aspect of the cosmology. Hey, my job is to make stuff up. That’s what makes it so fun. (And mermaids might be real. There’s lots of stuff about the ocean we don’t know yet. ☺)

However, not only can my undines appear in both half-fish and fully human form, but so can the other races (except humans. Poor clay-based humans, we’re too stuck in the material plane to shapeshift).

I didn’t come up with all that out of nowhere, though. I’ll let my original post take it from here.

“Darkness conceals the truth, and light reveals it. Choose the light. The rest is moths and rust.” - from The Sphinx’s Heart by Talena Winters.

From Patreon, September 4, 2020:

“Cox, you have so much potential, but you worry far too much about what matters little, and not enough about what matters most. Darkness conceals the truth, and light reveals it. Be sure you, too, always choose the Light. All the rest is moths and rust.”

— Eduardo Romero speaking in The Sphinx's Heart, Rise of the Grigori Book 2

It's been a good couple of weeks for my Sphinx’s Heart project. I've added almost exactly 20,000 words in the last two weeks, and I'm hoping to sneak in a few more today and this weekend. It's getting real, folks.

Yesterday, I planned out my publishing schedule for the next year, and if I can keep on track like this, I should be able to publish by the end of March 2021.

PLUS! AND!

I should also get another side story novella written and published in January, and a contemporary romance published in May, if all goes well.

It's crazy how much time it takes to write one of these long fantasy books, especially when you compare how quick it is to produce something much shorter.

Why my Cherubim are Sphinxes and Lumasi Shapeshifters

In the biblical book of Ezekiel, the eponymous prophet has a vision of four strange creatures. Here is how he describes them in Ezekiel 1:

I looked, and I saw a violent storm coming out of the north – an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The centre of the fire looked like glowing metal, and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures. In appearance their form was human, but each of them had four faces and four wings. Their legs were straight; their feet were like those of a calf and gleamed like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands. All four of them had faces and wings, and the wings of one touched the wings of another. Each one went straight ahead; they did not turn as they moved.

Their faces looked like this: each of the four had the face of a human being, and on the right side each had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of an ox; each also had the face of an eagle. Such were their faces. They each had two wings spreading out upwards, each wing touching that of the creature on either side; and each had two other wings covering its body. 

Later in chapter 10, these creatures are called cherubim and again described as having four faces, as well as human hands.

Cherubim make a few other appearances in the Bible. There were cherubim woven into the curtains of the Israelites' desert tabernacle, and later into the curtains of Solomon's Temple, with their lion face pointing one direction and their human face pointing the other. I imagine these images in relief, as a single colour, against another solid background, so they were only able to show two aspects of the cherubim at once.

In Ezekiel 41, the prophet gets to visit the heavenly tabernacle of which the others were only a copy, and cherubim are also woven into the curtains there.

The four Living Creatures (cherubim) also make an appearance in the book of Revelation.

And, of course, the most famous location of cherubim is the cover of the Ark of the Covenant—you know, the one made famous by Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, wherein they depicted them much like the ones in this c. 1900 painting by James Tissot:

For some unknown reason, in that movie and in so many other illustrations, cherubim are always depicted as how we now visualize "angels"—men or women with wings on their backs, stretched forward rather rigidly. No hints of lions, bulls, or eagles (unless you count the wings).

In this 1728 woodcut, they look more like soft Greek putti than the fierce guardian warriors of ancient times:

I don't know about you, but I feel sorry for the models who had to stoop for ages in those postures!

No wonder so many of us modern folks grow up picturing angels as soft, feminine beings who spend most of their time floating on clouds playing harps and eating cream cheese... wait. That last part was probably just in an ad campaign. (But, as someone who is lactose intolerant, I sincerely hope that I can eat cream cheese in the afterlife. It's amazing.)

However, the cherubim of the ancients were portrayed a lot in near eastern culture of all religions. They weren't just guardians and chariot-bearers in the Hebrew religion, but were often portrayed guarding the gates of other holy places.

Only, they often looked like this:

Or this:

Or this:

Yep. Griffins and sphinxes and lamassu are all versions of the same creatures described multiple times in the Bible as cherubim.

But why the shapeshifting?

A long-popular illustration of Ezekiel's vision of the cherubim described above was created in the 17th century by Matthaeus Merian, and has graced pages of illustrated Bibles ever since. Check out this tortured representation:

I know, right?

Now, in Matthaeus's defense, this was long before the Internet, and travelling to the Middle East was done, but with great difficulty. So he'd probably never seen a lamassu, and may not have even heard of the Great Sphinx.

And yet, this scream-inducing representation of cherubim has fueled some truly nightmarish variations. (Okay, I'm not going to lie—that particular description in Ezekiel is weird, yo. I mean, eyes and hands everywhere. I think a lot of that is probably figurative, though, not literal. But who knows? I wasn't there. It's just that cherubim are never described or portrayed that way anywhere else.)

Fortunately, other artists since then have come up with something more reasonable, and much closer to where I landed—that these are either four different creatures, all with wings, or they are one creature with the possibility of different attributes at different times.

Think about it. If you were trying to weave a shapeshifter into a temple curtain, or, say, represent one on a temple wall (I'm thinking of the entire pantheon of Egyptian gods here), how would you do it?

After all, there are sometimes conflicting descriptions of the same "living creatures" who are actually cherubim, or weird variations like hands showing up out of nowhere. Even in Ezekiel, they are described as having two distinct sets of four heads. (There's overlap, but what was a bull the first time is described as a "cherub" in chapter 10. *cough* Lamassu *cough* anyone?)

In addition, spirits in both biblical and extra-biblical sources are often described as having variations in appearance.

Do I know for certain that cherubim are shapeshifters? No. Just like I don't know for certain that the "wheels within wheels" that they use to propel the chariot of God around are gyroscopes.

But I'm sure having fun thinking of them that way. And no one knows that they aren't, so why not?

By the way, in the early Christian church, the four attributes of the cherubim in Ezekiel's vision were eventually ascribed to the four apostles who wrote the gospels in the New Testament. (Somehow, ancient scholars weren't confused about the separate natures of the cherubim characteristics. What happened with you, Matthaeus?)

The winged lion was ascribed to St. Mark, and later adopted as a symbol of the Venetian Republic. There are several rather striking statues of this sphinx, and I used an image of one in the quote card above.

I hope you enjoyed this peek into the world of my Grigori books. If you liked it, please leave a comment below. I would love to share more of my research with you and the reasons why I made the decisions I did in my books... as long as this kind of thing doesn't bore you to tears, haha.

Happy Friday!

(Note: The header image is licensed through 123rf.com, and the rest of these images are either under a Creative Commons license or in the public domain.)