updating my dear readers

Just Updating a Bit


Since tomorrow is #fridayflash, I thought perhaps I should just bring all my dear and gentle readers up to date on the goings on in my life. It fascinates me that it interests you to be honest.

Rob is better, but there is concern that his condition will morph into something chronic that will lead to surgery down the line. There are steps that can be taken to lessen the risk, but it is not something over which he has total control which his Virgo nature is not at all down with.

Edie, number one daughter, is now dealing with a douchebag roommate too. He was at one time a favored candidate for romantic possibilities, but now he is merely a cat-napper who appears to be trying to stick her with the last month’s rent on the house they have been sharing this past year. He moved out several months ago to live with a young lady who, I believe, was married a whooping couple of months when she threw her husband over to chase down and bag Edie’s roommate – who is not quite the prize one would suspect him of being if he caused a married woman to such lustful idiocy.

The cat in question is one of the many descendants of our former cat, Bouncy. You might remember the story. She adopted us and moved her litter behind a stack of lumber by our garage. Bouncy proved too crazy for us to keep and we found a good home for her in the city. The woman who took her remarked that Bouncy reminded her of her own late mother. I think it was the eyes. Anyway, the kittens have gone on to have kittens who have always had kittens. Scuzzy Roommate absconded with one of the grandkittens much to Edie’s horror. She is now in negotiations to get it back.

I don’t like to remember the men I involved myself with when I was Edie’s age, but watching her and Mick remind me of the less than stellar choices. I wonder if that is par for the experiences of women who do not meet and marry in the late teens or early twenties. Perhaps.

On the writing front, Sundogged is proceeding at a slower clip but I like the direction. I also have a new idea for beginning the memoir and a published friend of mine has offered an introduction to her agent when I have something to present – which I am planning to have by summer’s end. I need only a proposal and the first three chapters based on my research and I have way more than that.

I am not going to Williamette. The plan was to drive and with Rob’s recent ailment a long road trip is not wise. Disappointing but there is a conference in Surrey in October I am considering now instead. But I haven’t checked the dates, it may conflict with yoga teacher training.

Yes, I am inches away from committing myself to a nine month course in the instruction of hatha. At the end I would be able to teach and there are more possibilities for that around here than one would think. Trollope advised writers to have a day job, but the thought of teaching teens unappeals on so many levels at this point in my life. My wise former English supervisor, Jerry Wadden, always recommended taking breaks from the classroom and changing grade levels frequently. I followed the latter advice but was never able to do the former. I like the idea of yoga. My yogina is on holiday but one of my other favorite instructors, Ani, filled in for her yesterday. I would so like to be able to do what she does.

Blogher begins tonight in Chicago. I am strangely torn about not being there despite knowing that in the pantheon of weblogs, I matter not at all.

So, between Dee’s swim lessons, sleep-overs and her birthday, the next days are full. Especially when one adds the continuing reno and purging, a trip to the city to unload things we don’t want on Mick in her new apartment (where she should be enjoying the solitude but is dealing with a barely wanted guest) and of course, writing – there is always the writing.

Tomorrow’s flash is fantasy based. I hope you will stop by to read and comment. Next week might be more Eubie Blake. I finally got a hold of a library copy of Pride, Prejudice and Zombies which might inspire me.

Oh Yea, Friday


If you are reading this from work – shame on you – but know that we are on our way to the Canadian Rockies as you are reading. Wedding goodness awaits near Revelstoke, if not actual good weather. Warmer than home certainly, but nothing to crow about.

I am, by and large, putting on my happy face – which is neutral to an extreme degree and content to sink back into the shadows and observe without attracting attention. The whole “in-laws of my husband’s late wife thing” is fraught with awkwardness. No one wants to be unpleasant to my face because they know I am not the cause for Shelley’s absence, and yet no one is thrilled to have me around because it highlights the sad reality of her death. I so dislike being thrust into this position and am trying to zen my way through it, but the fact remains that I am neither welcome nor unwelcome, and it continues to be not easy for me to try and exist without being obvious about it.

The publisher of the new newspaper start-up in The Park contacted me the other day. He’d initially declined to offer me any type of position when I queried him a couple of weeks ago, but apparently my Mac experience appeals to him now. An interesting development.

I finally got the copy of Jack Kilborn’s (aka J.A. Konrath’s) new horror novel, Afraid. It’s gruesome but compelling so far as I have read. I will have the review up sometime next week. J.A. only asked for 75 words. I will probably give him a few extra.

If you friended me on Facebook, you know that my sister, DNOS, has been very ill. Double pneumonia. We have been quite worried because there were several deaths locally attributed to pneumonia this past month. She is mending but good thought would be appreciated.

The tomcat is still peeing on our front door. I had to buy new rugs for the entryway. It’s foul and I would be in favor of relocating that cat to its final reward if that were possible. The other cat hasn’t puked again … in a location I have stumbled across anyway. We have no one to care for him while we are away, which is another reason why we decline to acquire a pet of our own – it would hinder our mobility, so we filled up the water and food bowl and are hoping for the best. Best would be the cat not eating until engorged and barfing all over the garage thus rendering itself near foodless (unless you count vomit, which it will eat) until we return. During the warmer months we had the girl next door check in on it and fill the bowls, but we can’t depend on the kindness of neighbors when the temps are still brutal and the snow is knee deep. Seriously, we really can’t impose on the neighbors anymore where animals are concerned. It’s went past the point of “neighborliness” a while ago.

Night Dogs slinks along.

Yoga is going well. I can almost do a headstand. I cannot do the chupacabra (or whatever that fingertip/tippytoe plank thing is called). If I could hold that pose for 12 minutes a day, I would never get sick again – eventually. Or so the yogis maintain.

So, okay. That’s it. Good weekend to you all.

The State of the Writing


I have been working on Night Dogs as my primary fiction piece. It’s coming along slowly now. This seems to be the way of storytelling. An idea appears, details gel and I write like gangbusters and then it slows as the story starts to demand sturdier legs to stand on. However, this is probably the best story of this length I have ever written and I know it has novel potential. My goal is to finish it in May and workshop it via a writing course I am going to be taking at the university this June.

Which leaves my regular readers wondering about the memoir? Well, maybe you aren’t. I haven’t forgotten it. Ideas about what to do with the rough draft swirl, recede before morphing into something tangible.

It’s hard to pick up again because it was hard to write. Deliberately picking at emotional scars is not my idea of something that is good for a person, but I want to finish it. It’s just not going to be quite the memoir it started out to be.

I have come to realize that the story of my loss and widowhood is not a story that would strike a cord with too many people. And, that the loss was not mine. It was Will’s loss. He died. Too young and too horrifically. All I lost was the option to live a life I thought I was supposed to live, however, that life was never mine to live. It was not a part of the great overall scheme of things for me. My loss was insignificant compared to his.

No, the story is in accepting and rebuilding because how many people really and truly do that?

And it’s Rob’s story too, so I have been in semi-discussions with him about writing his story as it overlaps with mine. He is warming to the idea, but regardless, we wouldn’t start on it until summer. So that is where that is.

I continue fitfully at 50 Something Moms. I have two short works I want to finish this spring that have promise, and then there are the boxes in the basement with half-finished or simply outlines ideas that I need to go through.

And thus I end my state of the writing address, dear readers.