Hello! I will be at Laurel College Center for their 1st Annual LCC Book Fest Saturday April 13th. It’s a small group of authors who are doing readings and I will be giving a workshop basically cheering you on to get your book written. The one you keep telling yourself you can’t write, or shouldn’t because all the other stories our there have been told already. Stop doubting yourself and write your story!
USE THE QR CODE it takes you to a SurveyMonkey form to fill out just a few questions.
Even though I have my re-release of Red August coming out, I am going to read from my new cozy witchy mystery book that will soon be available for pre-order, The House on Blue Raven Lane.
JUNE Sunday June 30, 11am – 4pm, A Day Retreat for Women Writers: Manifesting an Author’s Life with author Heather Brooks.
If you dream of becoming an author, this day retreat is a step on that path. Learn how to fight past imposter syndrome, find your writing tribe and live a writerly life. Bring a notebook or laptop for a day dedicated to prioritizing your writing. Bring a packed lunch, a refrigerator is available to store it. Light snacks will be provided. Parking is free. $20/person. Ages 18 and up. Please register on www.pgparksdirect.com or call 301-464-5291 or email mariettahouse@pgparks.com for more information. Marietta House Museum is located at 5626 Bell Station Road, Glenn Dale, MD. 20769.
JULY Sunday July 21, 11am-4pm. Make Your Idea Into a Manuscript – An Author Workshop with authors Cardyn Brooks & Heather Brooks. If you’ve been turning an idea over for writing your first book, but just don’t know how to begin, this workshop will help you through the first steps of creating your manuscript. Cardyn and Heather will talk about both the traditional and self-publishing paths to help you be informed about your options. Bring a notebook or laptop because there will be time to write. Bring a packed lunch, a refrigerator is available to store it. Light snacks will be provided. Parking is free. $20/person. Ages 18 and up. Please register on www.pgparksdirect.com or call 301-464-5291 or email mariettahouse@pgparks.com for more information. Marietta House Museum is located at 5626 Bell Station Road, Glenn Dale, MD. 20769.
Two, maybe two and a half, years ago I wanted to add content warnings to my book published in 2015. Red August was meant to be a series, and it is! But I didn’t realize how hard it would be to re-publish her. The book took two years to write and edit the first time, so I guess it’s only fitting I was staring down the face of another two years with the re-release. She’s had two published covers, and two years ago I made another cover that was going to be uploaded when I added the content warnings.
I had to re-read the book just to make sure I got all of the appropriate content warnings and found myself wanting to change some of writing (not a lot, but some things needed tightening) and add a prologue, an epilogue, and a new cover. Well, then life started happening. Covid struggles, my dad passing, my daughter having a baby, growing my book fest (so much of my love and energy has gone into that fest) and so on. My little Red August project kept taking a back seat. But in the end I was glad it was delayed because I had a chance to get some author consulting from Erin Wright, and now I feel like the book publishing side of things is much less of a mystery to me compared to 2015.
A couple of nights ago I was still fiddling with the cover. YES, two years later I still wasn’t happy with it. Mostly because I wanted a script font that was metallic with a 3D effect and it took me a while to figure out how to do it. Now I’m in love. I added gold decoration to the bottom, forget-me-nots to the top of the graphic (because Faolan gives August forget-me-nots), and a key with a red ribbon (you’ll see when you read it). The other thing we did was re-format the book to add a different font and add some illustrations, which I love so much. I feel like it has the romantasy and fairy tale feel I was wanting all along. If somebody doesn’t like it, it’s ok, I love her. Somebody else will love her too.
I spent the last two days proofing the ebook formatting. The ebook launch will be first. It will start showing up this week and next week just about anywhere you can buy an ebook. Then the print version will be out, then the large print version. This will all roll out over the next month. I’m hoping to have an audio book of her done by the end of the year.
The progression of the covers below:
The one above is the one I created two years ago (or so) for the re-release. And While I do think that cover conveys “Paranormal” pretty well, it was too plain for me. The one below is the one I finished last night and am in love with. If it’s wrong, I don’t want to be right.
Also, much love to my friend Natalie who posed for these covers, and all of the Shifters of Mahigan Falls covers so far.
Scrolling on Instagram one night, like ya do, I came across a post by author Liv Macy about burnout. Not just burnout itself, but also the fact that she didn’t see it coming until it had already pretty much chewed her up and was swallowing her. She put a call out to talk about burnout and self-care, so I’m going to talk about my burnout.
First, I need you to know that I don’t like talking about my burnout. It feels like a weakness. It feels like it makes me sound unreliable. A quitter. Like if you need me for something, I might bail. But that’s the attitude, especially as a people-pleaser, that got me into the gaping maw of burnout before I could even admit it had finally arrived.
Unlike Liv, I did see it coming, I just didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t want to upset people. I didn’t want to interrupt the flow and energy of what I was building. I was afraid if I wasn’t constantly producing that I was going to miss out on something that would make me a success. I also have this deep need to validate my existence, and that validation comes int he form of being productive. It proves I deserve space and that I have value. I also like helping people, but don’t like anybody to have to help me. It is as though not having needs made me more desirable. I’ve had to work very hard on the art of asking for things.
Liv wants us to talk more about self-care, but not in a general way. Not a “you got this girl” sort of way, but in more concrete ways.
I believe my burnout was a perfect storm of many stressors, and that sort of is what happened to Liv, too. So if you’ve been managing a lot of things but have multiple big or new stressors happening, pay attention to that.
To hear about Liv’s specific story visit her Instagram @livemacyauthor.
Here’s my story of burnout, what I think led to it, and how I handled it.
Stress, Work, Loss Starting at some point in mid-2021 I started having trouble sleeping. I was still missing my cat Kali who passed at sixteen. She was my buddy and spent most days right next to me. I would wake up stressed and sometimes shaking and crying. I was having regular therapy to work on what I thought was panic attacks. I didn’t think of them as a result of a lot of stress and pressure, I was thinking of them more like a medical condition and that the right combination of meditation and therapy would make me be able to treat them and they’d go away eventually.
Each day I would wake up with my mind racing about two things: my health, and the fact that I was not going to get everything I needed to do done today. In fact I knew I wasn’t going to get everything I needed to get done, ever. There were so many demands that even though I’m usually very good at prioritizing, I couldn’t even prioritize.
This was not my burnout point. This was a long climb leading to six more months of being stretched too thin, stress from recent events piled on to old stress.
Then our cat Phyl passed.
Liv pointed out that the deadlines she had, she had put on herself. That some of the pressure she created was her own doing. I realized this was the case for myself as well in regards to my writing and publishing, and I decided I was going to stop pressuring myself with deadlines and build in a day every weekend to do something fun with my husband. And I did that, mostly. I let my re-release of Red August take a back burner and worked on it slowly instead of with a deadline. I worked on book ideas in notebooks instead of forcing a certain number of words out of myself per day. I took time to read some books and sit outside at lunch and do nothing for a half hour. It helped. I still woke up with panic attacks, but the sense that I would never be able to do all of my work settled down a little.
It’s important that you know I had a pretty demanding day job during all of this. You couldn’t even really call it a day job because it happened any day at any time due to the nature of the work. I was often in an on-call situation and it pulled from every skillset I have. It was hard to focus on writing and painting and other creative work as that business moved to DC and grew and grew. So during 2021 there was big growth happening there and I was on the management team. I was valued and I did good, satisfying work. But, I put most of my energy into that and not having hard boundaries for when I was working meant I never fully felt I was “off work.” Some people can easily switch their brains on and off or in different directions, but I’m not one of those people, so it made it hard for me to do my writing.
Then in late 2021 my unvaccinated father got Covid and died on January 12, 2022. That would have been traumatic enough, but while he was in the hospital his wife of about two years cut off his cell phone use so we could no longer contact him. I had been through a lot of therapy the previous months to try and have a better relationship with him because he had fallen down the right-wing conspiracy theory anti-mask, anti-vax rabbit hole and I had written him an angry letter. I didn’t want to be at odds with him. It actually was me being angry because I was scared he would get sick and die from Covid. There had been a widening rift since he moved away from Virginia Beach (away from my daughter who he was very close to since she was born, and my sister who he saw almost every day her whole life), to Luray with his new wife. They say there are two kinds of people who can come into your life, the kind who either strengthen or weaken your bonds to others, and she was the second kind.
These are some of the last texts to my dad.
I still text him. His great-grandson just turned one, the day before his two year death anniversary. Yes, his great-grandson was born almost exactly one year after the day he died.
These aren’t even all of the bad things that happened in this situation. If we thought this was bad, it got worse after he passed.
The years of stress, then the loss of my dad, adding to the dwindling time and energy towards my dream of being a writer took it’s toll when the company I work for just kept growing and I didn’t have anything left. I had hit a wall and slid down it and was limp on the ground.
Burnout Aftermath The burnout manifested in not just the morning shaking, crying, and racing thoughts, but I was physically ill, I was binge eating a lot of junk like I did when I had an eating disorder when I was in my 20s. I felt ill and depressed. For the first time my A1C was high, my blood sugar was high, my cholesterol was high. Anybody who has been following me for a while knows I’m body positive, and have been essentially healthy and fat for decades. But the stress, the salty, sugary, fatty foods, the laying in bed, lack of sunshine and moving my body, it caught up with me in a perfect storm and aggravating my thyroid condition and my body.
I had to do something! So…
FIRST STEP – Stop everything for a moment, even just a day! Then admit burnout. I had to write to the owners of my day job and tell them. We worked together to reduce my schedule and define it better with fewer roles and they hired somebody to take on a lot of my other roles. I was only able to do this because my husband worked full-time, too.
SECOND STEP – SLOW DOWN! Ask for help in any ways you need it. Who can you call and talk to on the phone for advice? Who can bring you a few dinners? Who can send you a daily check-in to make sure you got out of bed and tried to wash your hair or go for a walk?
THEN I…
-Worked on my grief with books and asking for support from friends when I couldn’t function -Removed writing and publishing deadlines and worked on things at a slower pace as soon as I was able to function -Let my husband take me out for my birthday even though it felt too soon after my dad’s passing, but it was a nice day and I needed the lightness of it -Started sitting out in the sun more, and when I felt I could, I would walk -Bought art supplies, even though I wasn’t ready to make art (and still haven’t really done much with it so far) but it opened the possibility of making art, it made SPACE for me to think about art -Reduced my time on social media -Organized my spaces to make space for thinking clearer – I was so busy that everything was a jumble -Added more fresh fruits, veggies, and some vitamin supplements to my day when I felt I could -Stepped up my therapy and did daily meditations from an app on my phone the moment I woke up every single day -I prioritized journaling, family, sitting down for meals
Within about two weeks I was already feeling much better. Within about two months I started to feel less piled on and like it might be ok.
I miss my dad and I am sometimes so sad and mad at him at the same time. Having my new grandson is bittersweet without my dad around to enjoy that beautiful baby. But I’m glad I’m in a healing place now.
I want to note that Liv also had a pet death and family death just prior to her burnout. These are major stressors like divorce, bankruptcy, illness, buying/selling a house, breaking up from a serious relationship. So if you work a lot of hours and have any of these major stressors, find a way to be gentle with yourself.
It’s been edited, trigger warnings and author notes have been added, and an all-new cover! When? HALLOWEEN! What goes better together than shifters and Halloween?
Pre-orders will be up soon!
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What if you found out that you’re descended from a long line of clandestine fighters, and that your family is still at war? Or that the love of your life is something other than he appears to be?
August Archer thinks she’s an average hormonal teenage girl—who also happens to have disturbing and sexy dreams about werewolves, all while trying to uncover the mysteries of her ancestry.
Still grieving over the loss of her father, and confused about his final gift of a red hooded cloak, August is uprooted from her New York City apartment to the tiny town of Mahigan Falls, Maryland.
There she meets a cast of characters that hold clues to her past—especially her new neighbor, an enigmatic, fascinating man who refuses to talk to her, yet who seems to know things about her nobody else does.
It’s when August begins to coax her feisty Scottish grandmother out of her self-imposed catatonia that a strange tale of werewolves and hunters emerges—one in which the man of her dreams may be her family’s oldest enemy—in this modern-day Red Riding Hood story.
It’s 3:14 a.m. and I can’t sleep. I went to write in my journal and thought, “Hey, why not catch that blog of yours up?”
A purge straight from the pain and the brain. This is going to be a very personal deep-dive, so if you’re here for sexy werewolf love stories, skip this one.
It seems impossible that my last post was in 2020, but then these last couple of years seem impossible. Covid. Now monkeypox. Alex Jones finally getting a fraction of what he deserves. Kansas standing up and securing reproductive rights. Man there’s a lot happening. And so much has happened since March 2020.
My darling cat Kali died in July 2020. We still talk about her all the time. She was a pure soul and I needed her more than I realized. She had a way of grounding me that I don’t have now that’s she’s gone. I know people make jokes about emotional support cats, but she really was emotional support for me. She was with me all day, every day. Back when my monitor was a CRT, she’d climb on the top and hang there while I sat and wrote the day away. She’d hop down when she got overheated and would cool off on the floor not even two feet away, just to repeat the cycle until she was hungry and I had to get up to feed her.
Tonight though, something else has been keeping me awake. I’ve been in a bad cycle of watching TV on the couch to unwind, but I watch it until I fall asleep. Tonight while watching Buffy was such a moment. I’ve been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer series for a couple of weeks now, at the insistence of my friend Kristen. I’m finally into the Spike episodes. Anyway, on such nights my husband comes and gently wakes me up and nudges me upstairs, at which time I may be too groggy to do anything but fall onto the bed, or I may wash my face and brush my teeth and then be all awake and minty. A combination of this minty awakeness and the fact that today a memory came up on Facebook – a once happy memory – has been keeping me from sliding back into the slumber that I had so easily found on the couch.
I asked my husband a couple of months ago, “Why is it so easy for me to fall asleep on the couch? Why doesn’t that transfer to the bed?” His answer was brilliant in its simplicity, “There’s no expectation for you to fall asleep on the couch.” My solution to test that theory? I lay on top of the covers, with my head at the foot of the bed like I’m on a couch and not expecting to fall asleep, just watch some TV and chill. And you know what? That shit worked.
But no TV on in the bedroom tonight, my darling had fallen asleep and I didn’t want to wake him–so it was hard to turn off my brain. My old doctor always used to tell me what a bad idea a TV in the bedroom is, but finally after all these years I’ve gotten one, and it’s been good for me. People who don’t have anxiety surrounding their bedtime have no idea how much an anxious brain needs distraction.
I ended up crying and waking him up anyway. You see, my dad got sick with Covid at Christmas last year, and he stayed sick until he died a very scary death in mid-January. Facebook brought up a six-year memory today–a video of him in physical therapy standing after his motorcycle accident, which honestly left him with a lot of pain (and he hated taking pain medication) and some heartbreaking disabilities that would linger. I’m told by the time he died of covid he was in regular pain from these injuries.
I don’t have any of my father’s worldly possessions he’d been holding onto – because his new wife wouldn’t give them to us. That is a whole blog post by itself.
His relationship with her had my full blessing when I’d first met her, but as soon as they were married it felt like a wedge was being driven between my dad and his daughters and grandchildren. My sister and I loved my dad. My sister is probably the person who spent more hours with my dad than anybody else in his life – because they worked together.
My sister and my oldest daughter and I were NON-FUNCTIONAL when he passed, for weeks. I don’t think I could smile until mid-March when my husband decided I needed to get out of the house for my birthday.
My dad wouldn’t vaccinate and he wouldn’t wear a mask and people in his life encouraged that attitude. I cannot tell you the level of blame and regret I have for my part in telling my dad that I was happy for him if he was happy. I had no idea how quickly it would all go south.
At some point after he stopped masking and the year before he got covid, out of frustration, I sent him an angry letter. I didn’t feel like he cared how worried we all were. Especially since at first he was taking it all so seriously, masking, checking on us, but the tone changed a few months in. It caused so much stress for me I can’t really even explain how worried I was and I lashed out, upset. I keep wanting to go back to read the letter I sent, to see if I was truly awful, but even just writing about it right now it makes me cry. Just the IDEA of it, makes me cry. I don’t know if I can ever look at it, but I do plan to publish it with my memoir I am writing about my complicated and somehow simple love I shared with my father. He was a damaged man. Damaged by war. Damaged by a toxic patriarchal society. Damaged by a twisted and toxic form of Christianity. During his funeral, which I watched virtually via a Facebook livestream, the preacher boasted–with my father’s body lying in front of him in a casket–that they didn’t mask at their church. I recorded it. I have video. He came off as bragging in my opinion.
I’ve gone over in my head hundreds of times how I could have handled all of it differently. I’ve had long discussions with my sister, my therapist, my husband–was I a bad person? Should I have just not cared he wouldn’t get vaccinated? Why did I let it become a point of contention? Why did I get so upset when he sent me a birthday card? What should I have done to make it better? Their answer over and over is that he was surrounded by people that made it hard for any of us to be close to him. Even the one that had always been the closest to him – my oldest.
About six months before he died I had become quite urgent in therapy about trying to reconcile with my father. My therapist would later point out how urgently I was trying to heal that rift as though I had intuited what was to come. But his life he’d started with the new partner made it impossible to reach him – literally and figuratively. There was now a gatekeeper was the feeling among those who had been close to him before.
My family and my sister’s and my daughters all made it to my dad’s burial in Quantico where he was buried with honors. The staff there didn’t know we were family and only treated his new wife, her son, and his girlfriend like family. This was excruciating for us, but we all just remained quiet about it and stood there and sobbed. Even my younger daughter (who is late into her 20s) who isn’t much of a crier, was sobbing. They folded that flag and gave it to his widow. My family had lived on that base twice when I was little. I don’t know if his new wife had ever even been to Quantico before. It all felt so wrong. After that preacher from the funeral had some words to share as if he had an in with God, we waited for people to clear out and we took a moment – our literal only moment that was ours – and my husband sang a Scottish dirge and we said our goodbyes to him and that was it. The best closure we would get.
My sister, my two daughters and I are in the hotel room after the burial. Our husbands are not in view. My sister and oldest daughter live near each other in Virginia, my youngest daughter lives near us in the D.C. area. My sister and oldest hadn’t been in the same room with me and my youngest since January 2020.
I wanted his ceremonial sword. It hung in our house for as long as I can remember. We were told we get nothing. But worse than that she told is in a way that made it sound like he didn’t want us to have anything. His will did reflect he’d put her in charge, which I fully understand and that’s how it is for my will as well. That’s not the same as saying you don’t want somebody to have something.
My sister and daughters believe the idea put forth that he didn’t want us to have anything was an unmitigated twisting of what was true – which was that my dad was never much for material possessions and that he trusted her to be good to us upon his passing. His new wife’s assertions were in direct conflict with our beliefs about our dad and were hard to reconcile with the images flashing in my brain after he was gone: softball practice when I was nine, fishing together on a hot Sunday, warming my small frozen feet between his hands when I’d come in from the snow, calling me in the middle of the night from Okinawa when he was stationed there. And so much more, like a slideshow flashing through my mind’s eye. He taught me how to flick that sword to my shoulder when I was about nineteen. I never did get it quite right. My daughter went to her house after he died and bought my dad’s truck from her. She wouldn’t give us anything but she’d sell my daughter something. My daughter said some of his awards and things were in a basement on a box. Things we wanted. But weren’t allowed to have.
We don’t know what’s happened to his things. Maybe they’re floating around some thrift stores. Maybe she sold them. Maybe she gave them to her son’s girlfriend. I just don’t know and probably never will.
On my way to Quantico for his burial. I wore the “Marine Corps rose” pin my mother had had since an early Marine Corps ball when I was little. It made me feel a little closer to him.
My husband also lost his father to covid. Christmas Eve 2020, just about a week before he was to get some of the first rounds of vaccines out there – he was in a nursing home and that nursing home lost people. My husband loved his dad, but he wasn’t close to his like I was with mine and our mourning has been vastly different. At times I feel guilty, like I’m sucking up all the grieving energy, but he tells me it’s ok.
While I he was in the hospital with covid we were texting each other. I would send him an old photo or tell him I was making homefries for breakfast (which he taught me how to make). Little things, just to keep him motivated to heal. Eventually I am told his phone was removed by his wife because it was disturbing and exhausting him. We had no real way to talk to him after that unless we called the hospital and we were too afraid to stress him out so we tried to wait it out a bit, but it wasn’t long after that he was gone.
But not too long before his phone was cut off and he passed, he sent this. He meant “amends.” And it’s the one thing I keep going back to when I want to clear my mind of all the rage and resentment. Of all the hurt and blame. I go back to this, and it clears out the haze surrounding what some people wanted me to think, and what was real.
Important lessons from my experience:
1 – If you love your parent and want to be in their life, don’t give a potential partner your stamp of approval out of some sense of being supportive or minding your own business. I wanted my dad to be happy and he seemed happy when he met her, but what I didn’t realize was how emotionally vulnerable he was to this person. We are of the opinion that if my sister and my oldest and I had not given our stamp of approval, he wouldn’t have continued on with that relationship, he would still be living near my sister and my daughter, and there is a very good chance he would have continued to wear a mask and get vaccinated. The man had been vaccinated a million times in the military and he cared more about what we wanted for him before his these changes in his life.
2 – Ask your parent to have you marked down somewhere in legal documents as a person who can talk to the hospital and make decisions even if their new spouse is available.
3 – Having a hard relationship with your parent doesn’t make you a bad person. What is your motivation? Did you intend harm? This is the key! My therapy had to turn from reconciliation with my dad, to reconciling my upset feelings towards him for doing this “to us.” Was I a bad person for not just swallowing my concerns? Was I a bad person for not just accepting his views, which he felt the need to tell me, even when I asked him not to? Turns out that what matters is intent. For me, our rift, my angry letter – all of it was out of concern for him and his wellbeing, my intent was to protect him. I was afraid he was going to catch covid, die on a ventilator in the hospital regretful and scared. And that is exactly what came to pass.
4 – Grief is RELENTLESS and will lay you low. It will come in waves. It will knock you on your ass and make you keep wishing this and wishing that but feeling smothered by the fact that none of that wishing will do a damn thing. Let the grief happen. Do what you have to in order to process it. Write. Paint. Run. Cry. Whatever you have to do to get through each of those grief waves. They will get a little less overwhelming and happen less and less over time When my dad first died I was sure there was no way I could ever be happy again. It felt definite and final. And as it got futher from his death if I had moments where I wasn’t thinking of him I felt so guilty, like I was forgetting him and if I was forgetting him it meant he would disappear altogether. I only made it through with the support of friends and family promising me it would settle down. It will, but it will take a while.
5 – The only thing worse than your own grief is watching helplessly as your child is drowning in grief for a loss that felt avoidable.
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I’ve begun notes on my memoir, but I can’t say when it will be out. Whenever I try to write it I get overwhelmed with sadness. I know at some point that won’t be true, and that is when I will know it’s time to write it.
This morning I woke up and thought “Wonder what the shit news is today?” And then I picked up my phone and checked. I checked Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. I got the bad news I was looking for, but also some funny dog videos and a lamenting author, as well as some political rants. Meanwhile my less tech addicted husband was feeding the cat and making coffee.
Know what I used to do when I woke up? Lay there for a bit. Look out the window and pet the cat. Look at my sleeping husband, or if he was awake ask him what we should make for breakfast. I’d contemplate whatever book I was reading, or what blog subject I should write on. Maybe I’d get up and write letters and paint something.
This isn’t my first blog. I’ve been blogging since 2002. This is maybe my eleventh or twelfth blog. And blogging used to be kind of fun, before there was more of a chance people who were reading it actually lived near me, or worked with me. Something is different about blogging these days and I’ve dropped off a bit over the years with it. Even though I enjoy it. But there are only so many avenues of energy and I’ve got mine going in every direction.
So what is this blog entry all about? What am I lamenting over? I have the choice to set my phone down and stop doom-scrolling whenever I want, right? This is not about weaning myself off of technology or admitting I should set my phone across the room so I get out of bed before looking at it. This is about things that are now lost and that Millennials might have forgotten and Gen Z will never know.
I’m not talking about what it’s like to anticipate some small event–not big concerts, or huge political rallies, milestone life moments like weddings and babies–but smaller things. Getting your news in a few cycles per day is one I actually really miss sometimes. I also miss what it’s like to let my mind rest more, and daydream. I have to make myself set aside time to daydream. I know that this could be viewed more as a “personal responsibility” sort of thing. I get it. But as I lay there in bed I made the effort not to touch my phone and it lasted about ten minutes before I caved, and despite the “personal responsibility” aspect of this behavior, I know for a fact I am not alone.
When I was little many phones looked like this and eventually I would be thrilled when cordless ones with push-buttons became a reality. It was a while before Caller I.D. was a reality though, so when it ran it was anybody’s guess who it might be!
There are some things that are lost to change, and that’s fine. I’ll adjust. We’ll adjust. Just like vinyl came back, and ebooks didn’t totally replace paper ones. Maybe there will be a club of some people who miss waiting for Wizard of Oz to be broadcast once per year. There used to be an anticipation of holiday specials – I would worry about them being on at the same time as my dad’s football game and him watching it on the one television in the house. Oh the dreaded drama of me missing my special if dad didn’t compromise and let me watch the specials! But we often did have compromise. I still recall that there was a time when the phone would ring and you’d have absolutely no idea who is calling before you pick it up. Sometimes when I am watching a YouTube video on my phone when I’m in bed I am reminded of being about nine years old and wishing for that very thing. And the ever-futuristic “video phone” that was long dreamed of by all sci-fi enthusiasts before the invent of the smart phone – now is just a fact of life. Amazing! Facetime and Zoom technology allows us to talk to loved ones who are deployed and family that’s far away.
I admit, technology has done some amazing things. I was just listening to a true crime podcast (podcasts also are amazing) today about the huge breaks in criminology because of technology. Technology to broadcast, take videos, publish books, these things are all helping to create more diversity in what we read, music we listen to, shows we watch. It doesn’t just leave the choices up to a small group of folks (mostly white men) to decide what is the “best” music and the “best” books and the “best” movies. It allows so many more layers and voices.
Other good things I like is that I talk to my sister more than years ago because we have so many ways to reach each other easily. During this pandemic technology has been a lifeline. Those things are awesome. I wouldn’t change it. I just want to find a way to balance more of it with my real life. How to find ways to
I realize this is all over the place, but I’m not going to go back and smooth it over too much – I’m trying to get my blogging vibe back, so I’m gonna let it ride.
What kinds of things do you remember having to wait for that were exciting? Or things that are now lost that you remember being a big part of growing up?
Pride is a good time to talk about who we are “supposed” to love. Who we are “supposed” to have sex with. I love writing fantasy stories because you can talk about all sorts of things that are hard to talk about. Plus, when you start with a classic fairy tale, some of the framework is all set up. So if you’re telling a story about different kinds of magical creatures, it’s a little easier to say a Hunter shouldn’t be with a Lycan because that’s not as anchored in the “real world.” In fantasy and supernatural stories you can talk about things indirectly in a way that removes the real world politics that are already in place.
I do have a gay and a bisexual character in my Red August series and I hope that when readers who might not normally be open to that idea will see the parallels between saying one species of magical otherkin shouldn’t be with another – or with a human – it begs the question: why does it matter? If you’re rooting for the wolf and the non-wolf to get together, maybe you should be rooting for love instead of being concerned about which gender loves which. How does it hurt you if a wolf falls in love with a shifter? How does it hurt you if a woman loves a woman? How does it hurt you if a person’s biological sex doesn’t fit the gender they choose? It doesn’t hurt you at all. It challenges some of your beliefs, sure. I get that. I didn’t always know or understand all of those things. I sometimes reacted badly to new information. But challenging your beliefs is not the same as it hurting you. Show some grace and let people live their lives. It is hard to take in new information, but once you do try and allow yourself to change your mind.
Once upon a time I got very defensive about my use of yoni (vulva) imagery in my artwork. I upset some people by trying to over-explain why it mattered to me and I didn’t mean anything bad by it. But I couldn’t grasp the deeper issue because I personally had never dealt with it. Through that experience I eventually came to realize the below image would have really helped me. Why didn’t I think of it right away on my own? Because I was being reactive. Feeling attacked. But I stepped into a conversation I really should have not stepped into so defensively to begin with. I should have stepped in with more curiosity and less defensiveness. One thing some people will eventually learn is that the older you get the more things you will have to adapt to if you want to grow as a person. Things change over time. Change can be hard. But if it makes the world a better place, it’s worth it.
This below image is one I found on Facebook. It doesn’t have a credit, so if you know who made it, please let me know! I feel like it’s a really good representation of what I’m talking about and it’s a great image to share. Thank you, whoever did it!
I caved and bought the complete “Murder, She Wrote” series on Amazon, and the four-movie set on ebay. When in times of great stress, I turn on the easy-watching T.V. shows. In the end, you know the mystery will be solved. Or in the case of The Dick Van Dyke Show, that no matter what shenanigans Rob and Laura get up to, no matter what fights they get into, they are going to be ok.
The real champion of soothing television right now is The Repair Shop. It’s so pleasant. Nobody is mean. People have beloved treasures and skilled artisans lovingly restore them. The people bring in their ancient teddy bear, Victrola, sled, you name it. They bring it. They leave it, a little worried usually, in the hands of The Repair Shop. Then they come back and get the unveiling of their restored family treasure. It’s perfect T.V. for such a stressful time.
One thing I wonder is how single people who are falling in love are faring in their mostly virtual worlds.
I wonder how marital partners who were having some trouble before all of this are faring. Healing? Growing further apart?
I have seen a lot of gardens growing, home renovations, and side-projects pop up all over my friend’s feeds.
H.L. Brooks 