Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 41

Cedar Beach Campground

In the distance — not so very far away at all, but obscured by trees and campers and people stuff — I can see a glimmer of blue. A lake. And I assume it has a nice beach, because this campground was, over the weekend, absolutely filled with families and kids having fun.

I, however, haven’t looked at it, because Zelda can’t really walk and she makes bad choices when left alone. Bad choices! I used to tell R, when I sent him off to do things with his friends as an early and then late-teenager, “Make good choices,” and eventually he said the same thing to me whenever I left the house. It always made me smile.

But I would scold Zelda with that phrase if I could. Alas, she wouldn’t understand. But if I leave her on the floor, she jumps onto the seats to look out the windows, and if I leave her on a seat, she jumps to the floor so that she can go try a different window. She wants to be able to see my return. So no walks for me, because every jump for her causes a yelp of agony and yet she refuses to not jump if I’m not immediately available to stop her.

I like my campsite, though. The campground is very much a seasonal place, a mix of permanent installations and trailers that look like they’ve been here for a while with some short-term spots. But there was a grassy row — I’d guess four campers could get squeezed in if necessary — that I had all to myself. With a cute family kitty-corner to me with three small kids and a brand-new trailer and very Canadian accents. They made me smile, too.

Today is seven years since my mom died. I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately, about why she is the only person I want when I need to cry. She was a brisk mother. My ex once described her as “austere” to me, which I thought was totally wrong, but she did not suffer fools gladly and his experience of her was undoubtedly different than mine. But she could be quite dispassionate. I could cry to her and she would be warm and loving and sympathetic, but she wasn’t going to take on any of my pain and she was going to stop me as soon as she decided I was wallowing.

It occurs to me that maybe I said it best in my eulogy for her, so I’ll link to that: my eulogy for my mother.

But I didn’t need to be a grown-up with her. It wasn’t about love, it was about her endless ocean of calm. She was extremely good at pulling small children’s loose teeth, because she didn’t particularly care how much you fussed. If you were ready to have the tooth out, she was going to yank it. If you weren’t ready, she was going to shrug and leave you alone. I think she was probably an excellent nurse.

There’s a line in Grace — oh, a paragraph. I’ll quote it:

She wished she could talk to her mom. Just for half an hour. To hear her mom’s voice, to let herself be folded into her mother’s hug. She could imagine the sharp, searching look her mother would give her, followed by the, “Chin up, darlin’. That’s my girl,” words of approval.

Pretty sure my mother never, in my entire life, said those words to me or would have said those words to me. That wasn’t her language, and she wasn’t a southerner. But a look, a nod, a “You’ll be fine,” the confidence in me, but the hug, too. That was my mom. I miss her.

But no wallowing! Moving on, I’m on the road today, headed to a provincial park. Did I mention that I’m in Canada? I’m in Canada. It was fun being confused by the distances on the road signs — 88 miles to Ottawa? How did I get that so wrong! Oh, right, kilometers. Sigh of relief...

And today I’m looking forward to trying out a Canadian grocery store. I’ve eaten only snacks for the past two days — healthy-ish snacks, carrots and nuts and dried fruit and jerky and turkey slices — but I am ready to buy some ingredients and cook some real food.

So those are my goals for the day: get moving, go to a grocery store, eat some real food, and enjoy Canada. And not let Zelda hurt herself anymore. I’m not happy with how the stitches look, but I’m not yet so worried that I am searching for Canadian vets. And she’s putting weight on her foot now, so that’s a good sign.

Eight days until Grace releases. I’m trying not to be anxious about it, but I am. I try to avoid reading reviews, but you have to read the first few in case there are issues with the file or problems with the download. I’m going to bet myself a container of Sanders dark chocolate caramels with sea salt — extremely delicious, not at all good for me — that at least one of the first five complains about pronouns and Avery. If two or more do, I’m going to buy myself something even nicer, although I’m not sure what yet. Maybe a sushi dinner at a good sushi place. A win! (Although if you’re reading this, planning on reading Grace, and willing to write a review, don’t let this influence you, please. I know that people are going to complain about Avery, just the way people complained about not knowing that Henry was black in A Gift of Ghosts, but that doesn’t mean I’m looking forward to it.)

Ooh, after 10 already, so time for me to get going. More about Grace soon! I’ve got some fun bookmarks to give away, so I need to think about how to do that. But check it out:

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That is one ridiculously thick book. By my standards, anyway. My sister-in-law’s review: “Oh, it’s so pretty!!!”

The story

I’m going to start with the good news: Zelda is going to be fine. Most likely, anyway, but let’s stick with the optimistic belief for right now. Zelda is going to be fine.

I’m going to point out some more good news: people are kind. I’ll elaborate more on that in a minute.

And some more good news: we got incredibly lucky. We really did. Every time I think about that, tears start rolling out of my eyes, but it doesn’t change the truth — an inch to one side, a different spot on her body, and her story would be over today and I would be devastated. So I’m not devastated and that’s good. I’m just kind of… well, crying a lot.

So, the story: I’m in a nice campground, my first New York State Park, which shall go unnamed because I don’t hold the park responsible. Oh, but it really is very nice. Loads of green grass, a water view, sea gulls swooping in, lots of people but big spaces so we’re not all on top of one another.

And I’ve had a very nice day. I sent out an email to my mailing list this morning and have gotten some lovely emails back from people happy about Grace, and then I worked on Fen for a while and liked what I wrote. The weather has been pretty overcast, but not unbearably hot. In the late afternoon, the van is getting toasty, but there’s a cooler breeze outside, so I decide to take Z for a walk.

We’re walking along and I am totally in my head — I don’t remember what I was thinking about, but I know it wasn’t admiring the scenery or being in the moment. I’m just daydreaming. And then suddenly a dog is jumping Zelda.

A bigger dog.

And it’s not playing.

It’s trying to kill her.

And I hate to admit this truth, because I do think that they get a bad rap and I have known some lovely pit bulls — our back yard neighbor dog Haley was a sweetheart — but it was a pit bull.

And it was not going to let go.

And that’s probably why pit bulls get such a bad rap. They’re terriers. They are absolutely determined, they have been bred to be absolutely determined and they are not giving up. I was trying to pull it off — totally willing to get bitten myself, not avoiding its mouth at all — its owner was trying to pull it off, a guy from a neighboring campsite was trying to pull it off, and that pit bull did not give a damn what any of us were doing. It had its prey in its mouth and it was keeping it.

The guy from the neighboring campsite got a stick and started hitting it and whether it was that or the owner getting a better grip on its harness, they finally got the dog off Zelda.

She had been bitten only once, but it was deep, all the way through her shoulder. I was shaking. So was she, probably. Stuff happened. People talked. I wrapped myself around Zelda and tried to breathe and tried to organize my thoughts about what needed to happen next.

That’s where the people being kind comes in. Neighboring campsite guy — named John — gave me water, got a wet cloth for her, offered me a ride back to the van (eagerly accepted). He stopped on the way and reported what happened to the campground host and then to the ranger. He called his dad and asked him to investigate vets, got my number from me so he could call when he knew more. He dropped me off and I carried Zelda into the van. She couldn’t put any weight on her leg.

Some people were walking by the van on their way to the water, with a small dog. I said to them, no preamble, “Where do you live? Do you live here?” The woman gave me a name, I said, “Where is that? Is it near here?” She started describing its location, somewhere around Buffalo, I think, and I interrupted her and said, “No, too far, I need a vet here,” and headed to my next door neighbor, who also had a dog. I did the same thing to her.

Within minutes, I had four or five or six people, gathered around me and Zelda. Bringing her ice and a first aid kit, finding a vet, calling an emergency vet service, handing me the phone, cleaning up the blood, bandaging her puncture, finding the one on the other side. Fairly soon — also forever, but I know it was fairly soon — I was on the phone with the vet. She was about 45 minutes away, an hour given that I was going to need to pack up the van to get there, and it was after hours so walking in the door was going to cost $175. By this time, I was pretty sure Zelda was going to be okay — we were both traumatized, but it was her leg, not her face or abdomen. But I was going to feel a lot better when a) a vet told me that and b) a vet gave her some painkillers. So I packed up the van and headed off.

The vet was lovely. Truly a nice person, very gentle with Zelda, and pretty gentle with me, too. She sedated Z, took x-rays to make sure her leg wasn’t broken (it’s not) and gave her lots of stitches. I knew that antibiotics were in our future, but when I said that Z’s weight was a little lower than usual because she hadn’t been eating during her three weeks of antibiotics for ehrlichia, she gave her the antibiotic shot instead of pills. Z’s not out of the woods — the vet was worried about nerve damage and warned me that there’s going to be some deep bruising. Z’s probably going to be in pain for a while and we’re going to have to start doing gentle exercises with her leg in four days to make sure she maintains the muscle.

But she’s alive.

I’m incredibly grateful for that. Apart from that… I don’t really know how I feel. People have suggested that I should be angry, and maybe I should, but I don’t feel it. People have told me that I need to make the other dog’s owner pay for her vet bill, and obviously I should do that, but I don’t know, I don’t, can’t, feel the energy to make that happen. I stopped by their campsite to tell them that she was okay and they were apologetic but they didn’t offer to pay the bill and I didn’t ask. I didn’t feel hostile to them, I felt sorry for them. They were so in the wrong and that’s their karma, not mine. But we all got lucky. So, so lucky.

And people are kind and at the end of the day, that’s what I want to remember.

But I really wish I could call my mom. Three days from now, it will be seven years since she died, but she’s still the only person I want when what I really need to do is cry and say how scared I was and cry some more. I miss her.

On the road/Barber Homestead Family Campground

On Tuesday, I finally left Pennsylvania. I was a little torn when I started out — part of me wanted to stay in my comfort zone — but almost as soon as I was underway, I started feeling the thrill of being on the road again. I think I have some bio somewhere where I described myself as liking “cautious adventures” — setting off on a long drive, being on a strange road, wondering what comes next, it’s just fun. Even when it is going to be a long drive.

And I had a bizarrely nice experience on the road that I want to remember: I stopped for groceries at an Aldi in a town whose name I don’t know. It was just after the Malden Service area in New York State, and I had to drive on some little winding roads to find it, but then walking in, it was your basic Aldi. Maybe a little more run-down than most, with prices across-the-board slightly higher than most, but still the cheapest gluten-free cookies and decent Greek yogurt.

When I got to the check-out line, though, I went back and browsed some more because the line was so long. Finally, however, I bit the bullet and got in line, because it was not going to stop being long. I think I was probably the fifth person in the one-and-only line and before long there were several other people behind me. I couldn’t help noticing that it was a very diverse line. A couple young black guys, some older women, a Hispanic mom with kids, a person in a motorized cart… I don’t remember everyone, but it was a multicultural crowd — diverse by race, ethnicity, age, disability, everything.

And then a second cashier showed up and opened a new line. And people were so incredibly nice! There was no pushing, no rushing to get to the new line. There was much, “oh, you go first, you don’t have much,” and “no, no, you’ve been waiting longer.” I stayed in the old line, because the two people who already had things on the conveyor belt had lots of things, as did I, so I figured we could be the line of lots of things while the other line could be the quicker line, but the whole group of people just sort of organized ourselves that way. Kindly. Nicely. Generously. Politely. People spoke to one another and everyone was… respectful. Kind. Patient and friendly.

It was a seriously… well, honestly, a seriously odd experience. But lovely. Really, truly lovely. No one was impatient or hostile — we all just accepted that we were in this boat together and that we’d all get our turn eventually. And obviously, I can’t read minds — maybe some of the people behind me were fuming, maybe some of the ones that I wouldn’t have been able to hear were grumbling under their breath. But all the people around me behaved beautifully.

I’m not going to say it renewed my faith in the world, because despite all of the horrible things in the news every day, I’ve never lost my faith in the world. But I did sort of wonder whether we were all choosing to behave better because of all the horrible stuff in the news, because this seems like a time where we all feel helpless & overwhelmed, and being kind to a stranger of another race or culture is our own little match against the encroaching darkness. Or maybe it’s just a town of really nice people. That could be, too. I wish I knew the town’s name.

Post Aldi, I continued on to Westport, New York, to meet up with an online acquaintance from the Facebook Travato Owners group. Chrys is a fellow solo full-timer, closing in on her third year in her van, and an artist. She commented on a FB post of mine, something about our paths someday crossing, and I realized our paths were pretty close to crossing right now, so we made someday today.

She was staying at an independent campground, the Barber Homestead Campground on Lake Champlain. I mostly avoid the independents in favor of state parks or ACoE campgrounds, but I was so glad I didn’t in this case. My spot (#37) was great, possibly the only site with an actual water view. The showers were fantastic — clean, great water pressure, lots of hot water, and the individual room model, so you’re not actually showering in a place that strangers can walk in and out of. I like that in a shower. I also wound up doing laundry, because there were two laundry machines, reasonably priced at $1.50 per load. There was a pavilion with picnic tables, nice walks, tons of wildflowers, a beautiful 1800s school house, a gorgeous lake, an arts-and-crafts festival happening in the town…

And a new friend, too. I imagined, I suppose, that Chrys and I would meet up, chat for an hour or two over dinner, talk about Travatos and our travels and the FB group, and then wish one another well, wave good-bye, and anticipate meeting again on the road someday, maybe at one of the larger FB group meet-ups. Instead, she fed me delicious zucchini noodles over quinoa while we talked for MANY hours, until it got dark and the bugs were nibbling. And the next day we went to the arts-and-crafts festival together. And then had dinner together again and talked for many more hours. She’s a person who makes friends everywhere she goes, and so has great stories, a great attitude, a great approach to life. It was such a pleasure to meet her and get to spend time with her.

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Room with a view

I didn’t get any particularly good pictures: in fact, most of them look out-of-focus. Since I’m using my phone — which doesn’t actually require me to focus! — I think that means I need to clean my lens. But I should do that soon, because I have already moved on from Barber Homestead and am at a state park in New York, my first NY State Park. I want to take lots of pictures. It’s fun and nostalgic and unfortunately, I’m going to have to write about it some other time, because the campsites don’t include electricity and my laptop battery is just about dead. So much to write about, so little… well, electricity. I’ve got the time, just not the charge. More soon!

A Gift of Grace

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The above showed up in my email this morning. I thought, “Wow, that was surprisingly efficient of someone.” Well, or something — some computer system that is much speedier than I am, anyway.

But, yeah, since some people (or maybe just me?) have already received an email, it feels like a good time to say that A Gift of Grace, the fourth book in the Tassamara series, will be released on August 14th.

And is available for pre-order right now!

Best of July 2018

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My last berries

July isn’t quite over — I’ve got two days to go — but I also know what I’m going to be doing on those two days, so I feel I can pretty definitively say that they are not going to be the best days of the month. Today is going to be proofing/editing followed by uploading files. Tomorrow is going to be a long, long drive. Neither one is going to come close to Saturday’s simplicity and delights.

So July of 2018 was spent entirely in one place — Pennsylvania, specifically my brother’s places. I bounced back-and-forth between the yard of the unused 1850’s farmhouse (aka the garden house) and the street in front of the house he actually lives in, with a few days actually spent inside the real house, taking care of the dog while the family was away.

For a while, I was pretty sure that my dog-sitting days were going to be my pick for the best of the month. I took baths. I watched television. I used the internet without ever considering connection speeds and data usage. I let the water run while I washed the dishes, and I even cooked bacon! I should have grabbed the opportunity to make some fish, too, but I didn’t.

It was interesting, because I really loved it for the first two days. Maybe even the third. Life in a house is just so easy. Taking a shower whenever the fancy hits as opposed to when I’ve heated the water or feel comfortable with my environment is a serious luxury. When I wanted to cook something, I didn’t have to consider whether I was running the AC and whether another appliance would blow the power. Not needing to strategize about washing dishes, plan out the cooking so as to minimize the mess, think about water use, question the tank levels, balance the electric load, was all so relaxing. But by the fourth day… well, it was kind of boring. I was glad to get back to the van.

I moved the van back to the garden house and settled in. And I’m going to pick Saturday, July 28th, as my favorite day of the month. There were other good days in the month. I took Zelda swimming once and she got to play with a basketball, which was joy for both of us. My niece spent the night and we played board games and had conversations and went out for ice cream, also joy. On July 17th, I finished Grace, which honestly, sort of deserves the award just because it was such a long, long time coming. Of course, I then went back and wrote another chapter a few days later, but still, there was a moment when I thought I was done that felt pretty damn amazing.

But when I woke up on Saturday, Z was snuggling with me. The van was a comfortable temperature, not too hot, not too cold. Outside the window, the sky was blue, and a hawk was sitting in a pine tree. I spent probably twenty minutes lying in bed watching the hawk hop around the tree. It was remarkably ungainly.

When I got up, I took Z for a long walk. My feet got unreasonably wet, but she was super bouncy and energetic, and I scolded her for dragging me. Then I remembered how three months ago, I was pretty sure she was going to die and I got a little teary with gratitude for my dog being obnoxiously energetic. Then she dragged me some more and I scolded her again, but with pleasure that I was having the opportunity.

I settled into work — reading aloud the chapters of Grace for a proof-reading pass — and felt very productive. The day was beautiful, though, so for most of the morning, I had the windows open and the fan running, instead of needing to sit inside the air-conditioning. I felt productive while enjoying nature, which is my favorite way to feel productive.

A little after lunch, my brother came by to do some yard work, and I got him to take me to CoreLife Eatery. The only people who will truly understand my deep, deep, deep love for this restaurant are others with food allergies. It’s such a luxury to have options. They were having a BOGO on a watermelon-feta-mint-chicken-quinoa salad. It wasn’t something I would have ordinarily picked, but it sounded interesting and hey, buy-one-get-one is nothing to scoff at when you’re talking full meals. So I got the watermelon chicken salad and also a flank-steak salad that comes with falafel, wild rice, roasted vegetables and pickled onions, to go. I snacked a little on the latter in the afternoon, but for dinner I ate the watermelon salad and it was delicious, absolutely delightful. The flavors had mingled while it sat and the sweetness of the watermelon went beautifully with the feta and the mint. It was such a pleasure to eat something delicious and surprising. Delicious I manage on a pretty regular basis, but surprising doesn’t happen all that often.

In the evening, I took Z out to the blueberry patch. The season is mostly over, although that’s partly because we’re not defending the berries from the birds. Every time I look, there are plenty of unripe berries, but they never make it to ripe because the birds swoop in and eat them during the day. The one exception is a few of the bushes that are netted. So I went to the blueberries to see if there were any left on the netted bushes and instead I found a bird, trapped in the netting. I wish I had thought to take a picture. I don’t know what kind of bird it was, but I sort of think it might have been a young starling. It was much bigger than a sparrow or finch, and its feathers had a grey fluff look to them that made me think they were maybe not entirely fledged. (Not sure that’s the right word, but the internet is not cooperating with my desire to google.) It was surprisingly challenging to rescue the bird, who was much too scared to understand that the big holes near the scary person were more use to it than the tangled netting away from the scary person, but I finally managed to steer it to freedom. Watching it fly away was lovely. I felt filled with happiness.

And while there weren’t a lot of blueberries, I managed to find some nice raspberries on the way back to the van. That night, while I was going to sleep, I saw a firefly. One lone last firefly to close out a July that has been a very simple, but very pleasant month.

Bad File Management & A Lonely Magic

I started work on A Precarious Balance, sequel to A Lonely Magic, last week. I didn’t get very far, partially because I kept getting distracted by Grace, but also because I was flailing a bit. I’ve got lots of notes, and there were things I’d already written that I wanted to re-use, so I compiled everything into a Scrivener file and got started. But as I tried to write, I was having a tough time finding Fen’s voice.

I finally decided two days ago that I needed to re-read the book again and refresh my memory on all the details, not just the ones that I’d put into my notes.

I didn’t like it.

That was a weird experience. I don’t always like what I’ve written (understatement, yes), but I LOVED writing A Lonely Magic. It was so much fun and I liked being in Fen’s head so much, and her adventures were so surprising, and such a beautiful blend of things I enjoy, science and adventure and fantasy and romance. But four years later, I’m re-reading and I didn’t like her at all. She’s bland and a little whiny and annoying.

And then, at about the halfway mark, I read the line, “Her own reputation had been shot to hell even before she dropped out and she hadn’t given fuck one.” and the “fuck” was startlingly out-of-place. It wasn’t the first time she’d used the word, but it was pretty close. And I realized that the version I was reading — which was in Vellum, which is the software I use to create ebooks — was the version I had once-upon-a-time tried to delete all the swear words from.

I wrote about it at the time. I was tired of getting negative reviews about Fen’s swearing so I tried to edit it into a “clean” version, and I realized partway through that Fen’s cursing is part of her, that it didn’t work to clean up her language, and I stopped. It REALLY doesn’t work to clean up Fen’s language. She goes from a character who is internally tough, a fighter despite her relative level of helplessness, to a… well, leaf in the wind.

In the hotel room scene, Swearing-Fen is stuck because she’s considered her options and she can’t find a way out but you know that she’s still fighting, even if it’s only in her head. (She never swears aloud in that scene, it’s all in her inner dialogue.) In the same scene, Clean-Fen is stuck and she’s passive and helpless about it. She’s going along with what other people are deciding for her future because she’s got no choice. Losing her inner obscenities takes her from edgy and angry to blandly accepting. She is not an interesting character to me when she’s being bland.

Largely, I think, that’s a good realization to have. I can’t write a book with Clean Fen. She is not someone I want to spend the next six months with. But it was not at all a happy realization to discover that the version in Vellum was the bland version. That means that the one available online is also the bland version. I know that because I only have one Vellum file and it has the latest cover. But oh, what a screw-up. I suppose it doesn’t matter terribly if I publish another version online, but these were non-trivial edits. They changed the flavor of the story. I don’t even know how long that’s the version that’s been available. Sigh.

The good news, I guess, is that it doesn’t really sell much — 100 copies in the past 12 months — so not many readers are going to know or care. Yay for being an unsuccessful author, I guess?

It is interesting, though, as a writer, to discover how such a seemingly minor change can become so important. One of my favorite occupations is playing with ideas for book covers. I’ve got probably at least a dozen designs for A Lonely Magic that I’ve toyed with — it’s literally been published with at least five or six different covers, but I’ve got a bunch more that haven’t seen the light of day — but I’ve never been satisfied, because somehow I’ve never found one that conveys the feel of the book to me. Maybe that’s because I don’t really know how the book feels?

I do know that the last time I read the book, which was in a print edition just a few months ago, I laughed when I got to the ending. Despite all the reviews that criticized the cliffhanger ending, I never believed it ended in a cliffhanger, not once. Fen found family, she found magic, she’s in a safe place, she knows who wanted to kill her, she’s defeated the bad guy — what the hell is a cliffhanger about that? Except it’s totally a cliffhanger, because when I was reading it with the perspective of time, I ended it really, really wanting to know what happens next. Everything with Malik is interesting and even though he’s the bad guy, and his resolution technically doesn’t matter, I absolutely want Fen to figure out how he’s bound and how to get him unbound.

A few of the many covers for ALM that I’ve made and never used. Which one looks most like the story to you?

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Book description for A Gift of Grace

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The spine size on the cover is undoubtedly wrong. Grace is the longest book I’ve ever written.

The voices are driving him crazy. And he’s driving them crazy, too.

For Noah Blake, pretending to be normal is getting harder by the day. A near brush with death in Iraq has left him suffering from chronic auditory hallucinations. Ignoring the voices he hears isn’t always easy, but Noah knows it’s better than the alternatives.

Yet when a mysterious redhead hands him a seemingly innocuous business card, a new voice — that of a teenage boy — becomes too insistent to deny. It wants him to go to Tassamara. It swears he’ll find help there.

It’s bad enough to have hallucinations, but doing what they say is bound to lead to disaster.

Isn’t it?

I wrote that sometime before December 8, 2014. The reason I know the date is because that’s when I had the cover done for A Gift of Grace. I’m… amused? Yeah, that’s the word. It still applies! Four years later, innumerable revisions, a plot that’s included multiple career changes for my main character, about a hundred thousand words written and not used, and here I am, back where I started.

So what do you think of the blurb? Does it sound like something you want to read?

Two years

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Eureka Springs, Arkansas, at a campground where every site had a water view.

Tomorrow marks two years since the day I signed the paperwork on my house and drove away. Which means today is two years since I wandered around my house, doing last-minute cleaning, having one last torchlight swim, feeling surprisingly peaceful as I said good-bye to my home and ventured out into a new life.

My brother asked me the other day if I’d take my house back if I could and I didn’t even hesitate before saying, “Oh, yeah, definitely. If I could afford it. I loved my house.”

But I have no regrets. It’s amazing to me to look back on this past year, which feels like it’s lasted a lifetime, and remember all the things I’ve done.

Campsites by the numbers:

8 parking lots

28 state parks

3 national parks

2 national forests

1 Department of Natural Resources

1 Bureau of Land Management

6 Army Corps of Engineers

4 county parks

1 KOA

3 Thousand Trails

1 Good Sam

1 independent, not affiliated with a program

11 driveways

2 streets

2 guest beds

1 air mattress in an office

If I’m counting right, 75 different places in 32 different states.

I saw Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon; a moose in Montana and a bear in Washington. I visited friends and family across the country. I cleaned out a refrigerator in California and organized spices in Seattle. I took a few ferries and walked on a few beaches. I got elevation sickness in Arizona and a phenomenal cold (or possibly an extended gluten-reaction) in Arkansas. I took a lot of pictures; I wrote a lot of words.

It was a good year.

As it comes to an end, I’m honestly not sure what the future will bring. I love experiencing a beautiful sunrise surrounded by nature, but I’m really tired of needing to strategize about how to shower. I like seeing new places, but I’ve lost all enthusiasm for driving. But I told a friend recently that I’d failed to plan an exit strategy.

And there’s still an awful lot that I want to do. Vermont again, Canada, Wyoming, more time in Montana, another visit to friends in the west, another visit to friends in the northeast. I’m fairly sure that a year from now, I’ll be writing a post titled “Three years” but maybe by then I’ll have some better ideas about where I’d like to settle down and how I can make that work.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a book to edit. I did a first round of revisions last week, after a quick fix on an incorrect name turned into a first-pass edit. I didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t help myself. I’m waiting on feedback from some early readers now, trying not to look at it again until I hear from them, but after my own first read through, I’m fairly sure it’s solid enough that I’ll be publishing it soon. The actual date might depend on when I have internet. I’m heading into Vermont and as I recall, cell signals there were pretty much non-existent. It might have to wait until I get back into a signal-friendly zone. I’ll know more soon, though. And I’m really, really glad not to be going into Year 3 with Grace still unfinished!

FINISHED!

Um, yeah, so… I have a first draft. Or, I suppose, one could call it a 900th draft but the first one that actually has an ending. A real ending. One that maybe, sort of, works. There were definite moments of delight in writing it, when a line or an idea fell into place, but I haven’t read the whole thing yet so I don’t know how well it all holds together.

I said that I was going to send it out to three people without reading it, but I’m not sure I can bring myself to do that. I don’t know who the three people would be and I hate to waste some of my best copy-readers on a version that might suck. Also, I hate to waste anyone’s time on a version that might suck. But I definitely know that I shouldn’t start reading it myself for at least a couple of weeks. I need a little distance.

Along the way this week while I was eking out word after painful word — I wrote every day but deleted most of what I wrote as I went — I did some editing of earlier parts. The section that I put an “abysmal” comment on a few weeks back? It was still abysmal. I’ve fixed it, I think, but there’s a definite character motivation issue there that I might not have solved.

And I think some of the timing might be flawed. Some ideas might be out of order because of how long I spent writing, and some scenes that made sense… well, you know, I think for the moment I’m going to stop ripping it apart and criticizing myself. I finished it.

I FINISHED!

Also of note, Z took her last antibiotic today and ate three small meals.

And I got an email from a listener — the first person (that I know of, anyway) that listened to the audiobook and enjoyed it. Yay!

What a lovely day it is.

Progress report

Tried to write a post last week, and you know, I just didn’t have anything much to say. It is an incredibly beautiful summer in Pennsylvania — blue skies, warmth, green grass, lightning bugs, blueberries. I’m so glad to be here. It’s amazing to me how much it pleases me to know that I will not be driving more than ten minutes for any day of the next two weeks.

I’m spending much of my time staring at a computer screen, writing a sentence here and there on Grace and then deleting it. I consider it absolutely ridiculous how much I’m agonizing over this — seriously, I know I’m not writing the Great American Novel, it’s a happy romance, all that needs to happen here is for my delightful heroine to fall into my charming hero’s arms with a nice fade to black. But knowing that apparently doesn’t make it any easier for me to actually write it.

I’m still persisting, though. I’ve considered re-reading the whole thing to see if it makes any sense, but I’m not going to — I’m going to give it to three first-draft readers as soon as I actually finish a first draft and not even look at it again until they’ve finished reading it and sent me back comments. And if they never finish reading it, I will know that it just doesn’t work and I’ll let it go. And get a job as a waitress, maybe, because if I’m not going to be a writer, I seriously need to do something with my life.

The other thing I’m doing with my time is fighting with Zelda. I used to say that Zelda would do anything if I could make her understand what I wanted, but this is no longer true: she understands that I want her to take her pill and she is sad that she can’t oblige me, but she also thinks I’m trying to feed her poison and she is not going to cooperate. I would love to get someone to take a video of me trying to get the antibiotic into her, but it would be a long video.

I can try to hide it in any food and she will turn her nose up at it. Nothing works for more than two pills. She’s now refusing to eat steak, prosciutto, hot dogs, chicken, canned fish, as well as canned dog food, if she thinks there’s any chance it might contain a pill. I literally put chocolate on a pill — a tiny amount, I know chocolate is deadly for dogs in any quantity — and she ate it once, but then not a second time. That’s how desperate I’ve become.

Fortunately for my sanity, the Best Brother Ever is feeding her slices of Whole Foods roast beef when I bring her in the house. She’ll eat that when he feeds her. I’ve thought about trying to get him to give her pills, but I suspect she would willingly starve to death in that case and I’d rather know that she’s getting at least a few calories.

Some days I don’t bother trying to make it easy, I just try to force it in her mouth. This morning, I got it in her mouth, held her mouth closed, stroked her neck while whispering sweet nothings to her, and counted to 60. At the end of my count, I let her go and she spit the pill out at me. Not the first time.

I have to remind myself on a daily basis that ehrlichiosis can be fatal — if she dies of it, I’ll hate myself if I haven’t actually kept her on the antibiotic for the whole three weeks. But I am counting the days until we’re done.

I wish I was also counting the days until Grace was done. But every day I wake up thinking, “this is it, I’ll finish today” and every day, I go to sleep thinking, “maybe tomorrow.” But it’s still early, so I’m still on the “this is it, I’ll finish today” mantra for today. It’s more likely if I start staring at that file, though, so I think I’ll get back to that.