COVID - Ugh! How I Do Hate Thee

 So Wayne's Celebration of Life memorial was on December 8 and it was a success, if you can use that word to describe that sort of an event. About sixty people came, but not all stayed to the end, which was the best part, at least for me, where we raised a tiny glass of Crown Royal and said Farewell. It was the part where I involuntarily cried. Speeches and memories were shared, some prepared, some not. They were all touching. Old friends of Wayne's, and now mine, took care of most of the arrangements including a lot of food that didn't get eaten. But anyway, that's done and over now, and I supposed there should be some closure as a result, but I don't really feel it yet. Frankly, I was on auto-pilot through the entire thing, just like I was during my mom's funeral, and Daddy's. It's like some fog machine kicks in, and all your hostess training starts making sure you keep circulating, say hi to everybody, accept the hugs, visit with them for a while. Everyone wanted to know some of the details of what happened to Wayne. I tried to give the short version. Some of the people I hadn't seen in years. So, yes, lots of hugging.

Which probably goes a long way to explaining why a couple of days later—COVID! I have heard from people who were at the Celebration and there are others who now have the virus. I actually worried about it, and tested on Thursday before leaving the next day for the event. And I had my fifth booster on November 6, also in preparation for being around that many people, all the hugs and kisses, etc. (Insert a "Waynism" right here—"You can make a plan but don't plan the outcome.") Neither my worries nor my caution kept me from exposure. And now I'm sitting at home, sick, sick, sick, taking a sack-load of medicine, and not feeling appreciably better with each passing day.

Wayne and I quarantined during the Pandemic. We isolated more than most of the people we knew. It was mainly Wayne who insisted on it. He had seen me go through several serious bouts of bronchitis and lung infections. It was, in fact, what caused us to leave the mountains—my breathing trouble. I guess he was worried the virus would go hard on me. So for 15 months we didn't go anywhere or see anybody. And we stayed well—until last September 2022, on a trip back from Oregon when we got delayed in a too-crowded airport. Even though we wore our masks we caught COVID anyway. You can never say for certain, but we felt like all those people at that airport caused it.

So as soon as we tested positive, we called the doctor, did a tele-medical and she prescribed  Paxlovid. It worked, almost too well. It left a terrible taste in our mouths, but it kept the symptoms at bay. We both had one bad day and the rest was about like having a summer cold. Within a week, we were back to fighting strength and testing negative.

Flash forward to now. Paxlovid might as well be a box of M&Ms. It is doing nothing or next to nothing, other than giving me that bad taste lingering in my mouth. I started taking it on Sunday, four days ago now. Monday was rougher than Sunday. And then Tuesday I thought I might be feeling a bit better. However Wednesday came and I woke up with a burning chest and a deep unproductive cough that caused shooting pains in my lungs. And I'm like "what the hell?" I did a tele-medical with my current provider and a few hours later a huge sack of medications arrived at my door. So now, in addition to Paxlovid, I am taking an antibiotic to keep my lungs from developing something worse, like pneumonia for instance; I'm doing a nebulizer inhaler three times a day; and I've got some codeine cough syrup to suppress this painful cough. Then this morning I read an online article from Bloomberg that said Paxlovid is now only 37% effective against the COVID mutations. Duh! I could have told them that.

So I'm hoping I will be better by Christmas.  Yes, I'm thinking that far ahead since the daily improvements are, at this point, miniscule. I don't want my "boys" to have to cancel their flights to come here. And I don't want to further ruin a Christmas that has already been ruined by the death of my beloved. All in all, I just want COVID to go to hell—straight to Hell—where it belongs!

Stay well, friends. And Merry Christmas!

Onward....

Forty-Nine Days and Still Counting

We came to each other later in life. I was 54; he was 60. We had both just been through unusually bad times, me a divorce that sucked the self-esteem out of me. He had won a intense battle with cancer. We were road-weary and searching for peace and quiet, a night out for dinner, a movie in a walk-in theater, companionship. We did not expect to fall in love. That part came as a surprise. Maybe it shouldn't have. Maybe that first date with not enough minutes to get everything said ... maybe that should have held a clue. Maybe the phonecall afterwards, to finish the conversations started over dinner ... maybe that should have been another clue. He was still traveling, making his living, with a myriad of phonecalls throughout my day ... from East Texas, then the Panhandle, then the Valley, then the Hill Country, they came from Denver, Bozeman, Cheyenne, Albuquerque. We never talked long, ten minutes, but we talked often, four or five times a day. He shared things he saw on the road, white-out conditions on mountain passes, elk in a field far from the highway, a herd of palamino horses in a snowy meadow. As soon as he was back at home base, we would rush together, at his place or mine, talking, talking, talking, walking the dog, playing with the kitty. He came with a chainsaw the day a rogue wind knocked a big pecan limb down onto my fence. He laughed and talked while he cut the limb into logs. Later, after the wood had cured, he cooked pecan-smoked steaks over his open firepit one cold starry night at his land. 

Ten months after our first date, we moved in together. My house was too small; his too ramshackle. We bought a house on three acres, nestled under a motte of live oaks, just outside town. The house had been abused, so we started right in fixing it up, new floors, new carpets, new appliances, new paint. He joked that it was too big of a house for him. "I could be happy in a teepee," he said. I bought a ceiling fan with a teepee light fixture to replace the broken fan in our bedroom. He bought a hot tub. We gave everything names, the place was the Buffalo Wallow because a buffalo had been a recent resident, eaten every blade of grass and left tufts of buffalo fur hanging in the fences. The Tropical Room was the enclosed sun porch, the first room he decorated by himself with wicker furniture he bought arranged around all my house plants. The Banishment Room was the extra room off the garage with its own bathroom where guests could stay and feel, as his son once said, "Banished from the main house." My son called it the "Bonmyers B&B."

Years went by, and as they did, we grew closer. Each new milestone, each tragedy, closed any gaps we may have still had between us. Trust is sometimes the hardest part of a new relationship, especially when you're older, and road-weary. As we went through life trials together—the loss of his son, the loss of my dad, his mother, a close aunt, my brother, our dog—our trust in each other became complete.

We talked about getting married. The subject was broached many times. But we didn't want to ruin what we had. He said we were "Happily unmarried." He said that to everyone. He had failed three times at marriage, and I had failed twice. Five failed marriages was not a good track record. We were better at what we had, better at being married in our hearts than on paper. After 16 years, we were soulmates, lovers, best friends, companions, confidantes. Our families were melded in our minds, too. We loved them all, on both sides. 

When I think back now that he's gone, I realize we rescued each other. One of his childhood friends sent me a note the other day, thanking me for making Wayne happy, finally, for the last years of his life. He did the same for me. He was my ballast and my anchor, my cheerleader and my protector, my helpmate and my north star. He often talked me off the ledge when I was overly stressed. He took care of me when I was sick. He doctored my wounds and gave me generous back rubs. He made me laugh, and he made me think. He was my intellectual equal and I loved that so much. We finished each other's sentences. 

It shouldn't have worked. He was a country boy, a cowboy, and I was a definite city girl. But there was enough of me in him and him in me, that somehow it did work. Most of the time it was effortless. We liked nothing better than to sit out on our deck with a pet nearby, coffee in the morning, watching the birds on the feeders, listening to the day come awake—the quiet times we had both needed when we first met. We said from time to time, we'd had enough drama in our lives to last us forever. We didn't need more.

I think of him now encouraging me to go do things, to make changes to the house, to get out in the world, to continue on without him. I remember him saying during hard times when life had dealt its blows, "There's no finish line. You just have to soldier on." And so 49 days in,
this is me soldiering, grateful to have had him in my life.

Onward ... (somehow)

Twenty-Four Days In

 In 1988 I lost my grandmother. From my earliest memory until I started school, my mom dropped me off at my grandmother and grandfather's house. Every day. And sometimes on the weekend. For the rest of her life, my grandmother was an important person to me. Even after I was an adult, I called her weekly, and stopped in to see her whenever I was in the town where she lived. It was pretty much the same with my grandfather (We all called him Pop) until he died in 1992. The loss of these wonderful people hit me hard. I remember I couldn't sleep the nights they died, and grieved for them for months.

In 1994, my mother was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer. Her decline was difficult to watch. My mother and I had butt heads for most of my teenaged years and into my young adulthood. She had trouble with high expectations and often found it hard to accept the people around her weren't perfect. When she went on Hospice, I moved in to help my dad take care of her. It was one of the most depressing times of my life, watching my tall, beautiful, healthy mother become unable to take care of her own most basic needs. She died in February 1995. Her death was both a relief and a tragedy. I sleepwalked through the funeral arrangements, and did what I could to help Daddy through those first days. I know now it wasn't enough. For weeks after Mother died I had night terrors. The way she died haunted me and caused mild PTSD.

Daddy outlived Mother by 18 years. He moved closer to me and we saw each other several times a week. He was there for me, my rock, my north star, through the erosion and dissolution of my 34-year marriage. He listened to my rantings, gave me words of encouragement, and when I met Wayne, he gave me his seal of approval without me having to ask. I adored my dad. He was always my champion. When he died in 2013, I was devastated. It took me years to recover from that loss. I'm still recovering from it. And then in 2018 I lost my brother, my only sibling, to cancer, and again I grieved.

In between all these important people in my life, I've lost cats and dogs I adored and grieved for. I've lost friends who died too young. I've had close relations and in-laws I respected and wept over when they passed. But put all those losses, parents, grandparents, sibling, pets, friends, in-laws—put them altogether and they cannot begin to compare to the indescribable grief I feel for the loss of my beloved soulmate, my Ol' Darlin' Wayne. 

One of the things that has become crystal clear through these past weeks is how much more compassion and care I could've and should've shown to others in my life who lost their soulmates. I remember my Pop sitting in his chair, a crumpled old man with tears in his eyes and my grandmother's photograph on the table beside him. I didn't commiserate with him enough through that. I remember my Dad marching from the funeral home to the gravesite after Mother's death, grief marring his face despite his bravest efforts to put one foot in front of the other. I didn't help him through that enough, either. I left him alone far too much in those first weeks. And the same goes for all the others. I realize all that now as I stumble through this landscape of grief, wanting to find the easiest way out. 

Each day brings some new obstacle whether it's dealing with the world, the frustrations of settling his affairs: credit cards to notify, a will to probate, a memorial to contemplate, what to do with all his belongings, who should receive what momento of his life. And then there's the self-care aspect, the brain fog, starting one project only to abandon it to another, forgetting to eat, to shower, to wash clothes, to pet poor Sam, who is also grieving in his feline way. I make lists of things to do, then lose the list. My Echo Dot and Alexa have become my personal secretary. There literally are not enough hours in the day. I wake up wondering, will I ever get through this first part? 

Maybe the worst thing is losing interest in things like reading, sitting out on the deck, having a glass of wine, all the things we liked to do together. We never missed Jeopardy and I think the DVR is still recording it. All those episodes to eventually erase. Buying wine, a thing we both relished and enjoyed. We made a game out of it—"You pick three and I'll pick three." Buying wine has just become another job, like filling a prescription because I need that glass or two of wine so I can sleep. The deck sits out there unused, almost the entire reason we chose to buy this house, that deck. All the plans I had for it, gone. Who do I cook for? Who do I clean the house for? 

When I went through my first divorce, my wise grandmother told me, as she stoked my hair off my forehead, "In a year you will look back and realize you are doing better." She was correct. In a year I had met my soon-to-be second husband. A year after that marriage ended in divorce, I had met Wayne. So I know a year can make a difference, but when I was 20 a year wasn't such a big bite out of my life. Now, at 70, a year is a big sacrifice. It's a year I'll never get back, but if in a year I will believe in the future again, it's a year I will gladly give. 

Onward....

STOP ALL THE CLOCKS

 He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought love would last forever: I was wrong

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good. 

                                    - W.H Auden -

The last two stanzas of Auden's "Stop All the Clocks" have always moved me, but not as much as today when they speak words I can't. My North, my South, my East, my West died suddenly last night. I'm devastated, and this is all I can put on Facebook right now. 

The happiest 16 years of my life were with Richard Wayne Myers (August 30, 1947 to October 7, 2023).

Goodnight my sweet prince........

Ode to My Brother

 My brother, Ray, would have turned 75 today—if his life hadn't been interrupted by cancer, as so many have been. Too many. Cancer is the scourge of our times. The last coherent conversation I had with him he told me he was hoping to make it to age 70. He missed it by three months. And he said he did not want to die while Donald Trump was president. Unhappily, he did. 

When I was a little girl, my brother was my everything. He was five years older. He looked out for me, took my side against Mother and Dad, as I did his, and held my hand when we went off on our adventures together. And we had many many adventures. Once he got into junior hight school (7th, 8th, and 9th grades in my hometown), he was given permission to ride the city bus downtown, and I was allowed to go with him. We walked the three blocks to the end of our street where the bus stopped. Ray always gave me my fare so I could drop the coins into the meter beside the bus driver. Then we took seats all the way at the back of the bus, because we were going what we considered a long way to the downtown library. Now, it doesn't seem like such a long way, but back then the bus stopped at a lot of corners. It took thirty or so minutes to get downtown. 

The stop beside the library was a hub where several bus lines converged. I don't remember which line was ours—that was Ray's job to keep up with—but we looked at the time table signs and decided how long we had to "fool around" downtown. Our fooling around consisted of lots of time at the library, and almost always a movie at the Centre or Ritz theaters, both of them nearby. The library was the old La Retama Library, not the new one that stands up on the hill in Corpus Christi now. The old one was three stories with an elevator to the third floor but if you just wanted the second floor, there was a beautiful, wide, curved freestanding staircase you could climb, and climb it I did, pretending I was a princess in a castle. Ray was always busy doing some sort of movie research in the microfilm department. I never then or now knew what he was researching. It seems we came from a family of researchers. I have myself spent many hours in the microfilm departments of a library.

The third floor of the La Retama Library was the children's section. There was usually almost no one up there but me, which suited me fine. I could continue my princess pretend game uninterrupted. I gathered an armload of picture books and sat at the low round table with child-sized chairs and spread all those books out in front of me, making up my mind which ones I would check out that day. You could only have three at a time. I liked the ones with lots of colorful pictures, but not too baby-ish. There had to be a lot of words to read, too. And I wanted stories about real people, not animals which probably explains why I never read The Velveteen Rabbit until I was an adult. I had no guidance. No one to tell me which books I should pick, the ones that might be good for me, or the ones that might be classics. Nobody ever told me about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, although I did see the movie on television. We were not a fancy, academic, or even well-read family. We didn't have a lot of books in our house: a set of World Book Encyclopedias, and maybe a couple of other old books. My parents were accountants, not scholars. But at least there was the wonderful library downtown. 

We also had a Bookmobile that came to the end of our street. Again, it was Ray who somehow found out about it, and dragged me by the hand down there where we got our first library cards. After a foray downtown to the big library, I could then turn in my three books at the Bookmobile when it came every other Thursday. I loved the Bookmobile, too. It was dark and cramped and smelled of books, and there were little cushioned benches where you could sit and paw through the pages before you checked out a book. The woman who drove the Bookmobile always sat up front knitting and never bothered or even spoke to anyone until they had books for her to stamp the due date on a flap inside the cover. It was another great adventure, rushing down to the Bookmobile after school for more books to read.

So whether he ever realized it or not, my brother was directly responsible for putting books in front of me and giving me my lifelong habit of reading, and later writing. When I wrote my first terrible (and forever unpublished) novel, thinking it was the greatest thing I had ever done, I gave it to Ray to read. It was about 300 manuscript pages, and he read maybe eight of them before he handed it back to me and said, (kindly for him), "It's not ready to publish." I was crushed but he was right, it wasn't. By then he had his degree in Radio/TV Journalism so I trusted what he said. But still, I was crushed. He never told me, later after I had a novel or two published, but I think he was proud of me. He always came to any event I had anywhere near where he lived. 

As the years went on and we grew up, we stopped seeing so much of each other. Lives get busy and diverge, but we never EVER failed to give each other a call on our birthdays. We usually talked for an hour or more, about all the things that were going on in our lives, about members of our family we had heard from, plays he was in, books I was writing, TV shows we were watching. We talked about our parents, our dogs and cats, our houses, cars. A lot of it nonsense, just keeping in touch. My-my, how I miss those phone calls. 

There's a memory I have that keeps coming to me. I tried to remind him of it when he was lying in the hospice hospital in Austin, but he was far too close to death to listen or care. It's a memory of the two of us climbing up on the roof of our house, something we were NEVER supposed to do. Capital punishment would follow if we were caught. But we sat up there one summer night when the parents were off somewhere playing cards, perched right at the peak, side by side, his arm around my shoulders to keep me from falling, peering over all the other roofs of the houses in our neighborhood, watching from a distance of maybe a half-mile, the screen at the drive-in theater out on the highway. We couldn't hear what the actors were saying, of course, but we didn't need to, we had already seen the movie downtown at the Centre or Ritz and knew the storyline. I remember it as a cool star-studded night, but maybe it wasn't. Maybe it's just my imagination embellishing it, but it was so much fun, sitting there with my brother, that it has stuck in my memory all these years. 

Onward...

Awash in STUFF!

 Who knew it would be so hard to find a moving company to load us up and move our stuff to Ingram? I sure didn't. It has been quite some time since I hired a moving company and then it was for a short haul. When we came back to Texas from New Mexico we did it in increments, mainly because it took 2 and a half years to sell that house in the mountains so there was no hurry, but also because we didn't have as much STUFF as we do now. We had downsized before we moved to the small house in New Mexico, but somehow, over the 10 years we have been in Yoakum, we have accumulated a whole lot more STUFF. Partly that's due to the house on the coast we bought in 2014 and just sold. We sold it furnished but there was still STUFF we wanted to keep from there, so that got put in the storage room that used to be a garage. And then Wayne has been bringing 60-plus years worth of STUFF from his land and the mobil home there where he used to live long ago. That place has been the home of misfit toys for many decades, but it is under contract now and all that STUFF has had to come here to the storage room that used to be a garage as well. So now, we are awash in way way too much STUFF. 

I did a virtual walk-through with a moving company a week ago. The iPad lost its internet connection just as I was about to step out the laundry door into the used to be garage, and I was kind of glad. The quote that I got stopped my heart and it probably would have been a lot worse if the company had got a load of that used to be garage. We have been boxing up stuff for charity but it really became so awful that one day, without me knowing, Wayne went and rented a storage building. So we moved a lot of the STUFF in the used to be garage to the newly rented storage building, but that doesn't solve the problem, does it? This is what happens when you reach our age and have somehow collected too many sentimental items and/or things you think might be useful sometime in the future. 

About those sentimental items: here is where I'm conflicted. For instance, I have three sets of dishes. One set is the everyday dishes. Those we will definitely take with us because, well, they go in the dishwasher; they go in the microwave; they are essentially sturdy stoneware dishes. Then there is the set I inherited from my mother-in-law from a past marriage. They are antiques, and they are Haviland China, and they are lovely and delicate, and they look so perfect in the china cabinet. Plus, I adored the woman who gave them to me, even though I divorced her son quite some time ago. However, I am the mother of his children which would make one think they are family heirlooms to be handed down, right? No. The kids don't want them. They have their own STUFF now and can't make room for sentimental items like antique china. The third set of dishes I now own belonged to my mother. It is also delicate china just not quite as valuable as the Haviland. But—here's the catch—I remember when Mother got all of it back in the 1970s by making deposits in a bank in Mississippi where they lived then. Each $10 deposit bought you a piece of china. Mother diligently went to the bank weekly, made her deposit, and began accumulating this china. She made so many deposits she ended up with a service for 20!! Why in the world did she think she would be giving a dinner party for 20? So now all this lovely STUFF belongs to me. I checked with a antique dealer here and he really didn't want to take either set on consignment. I checked with Replacements.com and they will break up these beautiful sets and sell one piece at a time. That's a notion I cannot stomach, so I have already transported the Haviland to the new house in Ingram, and am about to do the same with Mother's china. Sigh!!!

About those things that might be useful sometime in the future: this is Wayne's conflict more than mine. Maybe it's a man-thing, I don't know. But he is a hunter/gatherer when it comes to oddball items. He collects empty coffee cans, empty plastic tea jugs, empty containers of any kind. I recently noticed he's been saving the empty OxyClean buckets. In fact, anything that will "hold" something, makes his eyes gleam. A friend gave us a Christmas nut tray with different little slots for the all different kinds of nuts, which really took us an eternity to eat. However, Wayne kept at it so determinedly that I finally realized it wasn't because he enjoyed eating the nuts, it was because he coveted the wooden tray all the nuts came in. And sure enough, it now sit propped against the wall out in the used to be garage, empty and clean. For those of you who have a cat, you know how you can jiggle something shiny and maybe stringy in front of them and they will paw at it relentlessly. (You're nodding.) Yeah, well, that's Wayne when it comes to containers. So my question is what the hell are we going to do with all of that STUFF? Move it to Ingram? Please, God, no. But how can I argue with him over that stuff when I'm carting up my sentimental stuff and driving it there myself?

Back to moving companies. So far I have contacted four. Only one has come back with a quote, and it was staggering. So staggering that Wayne is ready, at nearly 76 years of age, to rent a U-Haul and try to do it ourselves. He even went to Cuero yesterday to scope out a couple of truck sizes. I refuse to do that. I absolutely refuse. So, I am hoping that one of these other companies comes back with a more reasonable quote in the next few days, because people, we are moving August 1 come hell or high water. Now is the time to sell the Yoakum house when the inventory here is low and the summer people start thinking about a move before school starts. Keep your fingers crossed for us that we get lucky because it will take a special person who wants to commit to living in a 100-year-old house like this one. I've done the 100+ old house three times and my flat wallet is testimony. 

Have a Happy Fourth, everyone! Meanwhile we will continue to inch toward our big move!

Onward...

When Ideas Come At the Wrong Time

 I have more irons in the fire, as the old cowboys used to say, with a move in a couple of months, the sale of three properties (well, two, the third one hasn't been listed yet.), and now with Wayne having issues related to his health taking up a lot of oxygen. And so naturally, an idea for a book has been trying to crowd out all this other stuff. I'm already stretched, and I'm not that flexible anymore. I promise (hope) that will be my last cliche in this post. They have been rolling over me like surf lately. Here's what has been going on around here:

The sale of Wayne's family land is pending. He has 60 years worth of crap—oh I meant to say stuff, I really did—out there, and he has been bringing a lot of it home, by the pickup truckload, to add to the 15 years worth of crap/stuff already piled high in the garage, or what once was the garage before we closed it in to store things. There are boxes of samples in there from Wayne's years on the road. (He retired during the pandemic.) There's enough bedding to outfit a homeless shelter. There's luggage galore, we could go to Europe for six months and never have to do laundry with all the clothes we could pack. Why, pray tell, so we have so much luggage? And this is not to count all the tools, painting supplies, bric-a-brac and just plain old junk. No sooner do I get some of it boxed up and donated than here comes Wayne with a whole lot more. 

The sale of the coast house is also pending, both are due to close in a couple of weeks. And we have brought stuff/crap home from there as well. Thank goodness we sold it furnished or I would have so much more furniture to sell than I'm going to have already. We have said our goodbyes to both these places, a little teary-eyed at times, but now we face this mountain of crap (there I've SAID it) to claw through. 

We are moving to Kerrville, did I tell you that? Maybe I did. And we are downsizing. Again! We did this once already when we moved to New Mexico. But here we are again, back in that same situation with all this additional stuff from the other two properties. We also have some work to do on this 100-year-old house. The deck needs painting. The garden-beds need weeding. There's a bit of carpentry work to have done. And on top of all that, Wayne just had some major, MAJOR oral surgery done, and needs special food to eat right now. And he's scheduled next week for MOHS surgery on a small skin cancer. All this and all that. And so.....

New characters start running around in my head, new situations, a new time period. An old unpublished/unfinished novel has been playing in there, too. And I focus on that while I'm supposed to be focused on this other stuff, and can you just imagine what happens next? I lose my sunglasses. I have to turn around and drive back to the dentist's office when I realize I don't have my purse in the car. I forget to set the dishwasher and wake up to no clean coffee cups. I forget to call back people who have left messages. So far I haven't forgotten to pay a bill but I sense that coming. Why now? Why is this story idea pestering me now, when I'm up to my eyeballs with these big life changes? 

Maybe it's because it's the only thing I really would like to be doing right now. How great it would be if I could hire someone, trust someone, to do all this other drudgery for me over the next few weeks, nay months. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Too bad I've written all these books and none of them have been bestsellers or gotten made into movies (although one did come close one time). But even if that had happened, I wonder if I wouldn't still be in this situation. Because, alas dear follower, I confess I am a control-freak. Who can't seem to control her imagination. Any tips on that?

Onward....

Back in the Saddle, Part Deux

 (Trying this again, after I screwed up the last attempt.)

My least favorite part of being a writer has always been the promotion, in particular, in-person promotion—getting out there in the world, reading, signing books. I have been to book signings that were successful and those that have been big flops. The flops are usually because the venue did bother with any sort of advertising. Ot they scheduled no other event along with the book signing, or the signing was a single writer (me!) and not a group of writers, which usually brings out more people. The venue has to buy in books and if none are sold, it turns out to be a waste of time for all concerned. But when a venue does do a little prep work, a little advertising, an online announcement or a newspaper ad, things usually go better. 

I will be doing my first in-person appearance on April 27 at the Cuero Municipal Library, and it has been about nine years since I have given a presentation of this kind. I'm not nervous about it but I do want it to 

go well. They're doing all the pre-work so I want it to pay off for them as well as for me. I've been planning what I'm going to say, which passage from which book I'm going to read, and I'm trying to do my part in getting out the word, so if you live anywhere near Cuero and would like to attend, it would be wonderful to see you there. April 27, 6:00 pm to 8:00.

In 1994, I moved to DeWitt County, which is located in south central Texas. For the first twelve years I lived in tiny Yorktown. Then I got divorced and moved to Victoria for a couple of years, where I met the love of my life, sweet Wayne, who said to me when we first met, how he hoped he could help me find my way back to my writing. Well, he has!

We moved from Victoria to the outskirts of Cuero for three years, and then left on our big adventure to the New Mexico Rockies. We lived there another three years before health issues and aging parents brought us back to Texas—Yoakum, this time, on the opposite side of DeWitt County. Hopefully during all those years, I made some lasting friendships. The library asked me for a list of people to invite and I provided what I had. Several people have told me they received the above invitation to the event, and I'm thrilled with the enthusiasm so far.

Luckily for me, the Cuero Shutterbugs will have an exhibit going on at the same time as I am at the library. The Shutterbugs always have a wonderful Spring exhibit with lots of wildflower photos on display. Taking pictures of wildflowers takes a certain skill and the Shutterbugs have it. When I go out and take wildflower pictures, mine always seem flat and devoid of interest, certainly not the beautiful colors before my eyes. If coming to the Cuero Library to hear me doesn't interest you, come for the wildflower photo exhibit. You won't be disappointed.

Speaking of wildflowers, we have had a magnificent wildflower year here and I have no idea why. Texas has had back to back hard killing freezes two years in a row, with exceptional drought conditions in between, but still there they are, along all the roads and covering open pastures. Even the tiny patch of bluebonnets in my yard re-emerged this year, after having been dug under when the local natural gas company replaced their lines a few years back. I was so happy to see the little bunch of them again, I ran out and put some white border fencing around them so Wayne wouldn't mow over them. Oh yes, down here in Texas, we DO covet our wildflowers. But if you ever come during the wildflower season,  you will soon see why. 

Here's an update, for those who follow this blog, regarding our plans to move to Oregon. They are starting to morph into a more realistic plan to relocate to the Texas Hill Country instead. The disparity in cost of living between here and there will, it seems, keep us in Texas despite our desire to live near the Pacific Ocean. We have been looking at 55+ communities for "active seniors" as they say, and have found a plethora of them in the Hill Country. And the prices there are about one-third what similar houses cost in the area of Oregon we love. With that much savings, we figure we can plan a trip or two every year to visit our favorite town in Oregon, Florence. 

For those who don't know, the Texas Hill Country is roughly located in the center of the state. It's an ancient crumbling-down mountain range said to be one of the oldest in North America. Those long-ago mountains have eroded into "hills" and so, Texas-like since we have to name everything, we call it the Hill Country. But the best part about it is it's WINE COUNTRY in Texas! And anyone who knows me well, knows wine is one of my most favorite things of all. The soil in the Texas Hill Country is rocky and poor—perfect for growing wine grapes. There are roughly 65 vineyards and wineries in a 54-mile stretch of highway from Kerrville to Johnson City, with the quaint German town of Fredericksburg smack in the middle. I remember when these places began to pop up in the late 1980s. People pooh poohed the very idea of Texas wine, didn't believe it could happen here, but it has! And tourists flock to this area every time the sun shines, including in winter. So another big adventure awaits us as we start down this new stretch of life. Until next time, Sláinte!

Onward....

First Blog of 2023: a Writing Process

 I made no New Year's resolutions for 2023, except for maybe to clear out the clutter—physically and mentally. We are continuing to work towards trying to move to Oregon, although that still seems a long way in the future. We have our bay house for sale, and there hasn't been much action on that. Wayne is putting his land on the market next week, fingers crossed on that. I know it's been a tough decision for him, and not an easy slog to try to get it ready. He keeps coming across personal momentos from his life that make it more difficult for him. It's always been his home base, and was given to him by his parents. But there comes a time to move on. I think I've heard something like that before.

The plan is for one (or preferably both) to sell quickly, take the proceeds to Florence Oregon and find a house so we know where we're going and can downsize accordingly. Then we get our primary house listed and start selling off—for real—furniture and other overage we no longer want or need. No matter how you plan it, though, things don't always fall so neatly into place. We're aware of that, and also aware of time creep—meaning "we're not getting any younger." We're going to make another trip to Florence in three weeks. We have never been there during the winter and it's time to see what that's like, although we do keep daily tabs on the forecast and temperatures. It's a mild climate for Oregon. The real estate agent said Florence lies in the Pacific Temperate Rainforest zone, and judging by the slight variation in day and night temps, I think she must be correct. The only other place I can think of where there is only a few degrees of change during a 24-hour period is Ireland. Anyway, it's where we believe we want to spend our Golden Years. The weather isn't perfect anywhere, least of all where we live in Texas. As shown in the picture below—our backyard last summer, Ugh!

Meanwhile, I am in the middle of a (what—10th, 12th, or 100th) read-through edit of my next novel. My agent submitted it to a couple of publishers last Spring, got kind rejections but rejections nevertheless, and so I hired an editor to give it a look. She gave me a really thoughtful analysis and now, with her suggestions in mind, I'm going through and tweaking parts that need tweaking. Not all her suggestions rang valid to me, and those I'm leaving unchanged. It's alway smart to have another set of eyes on something. This novel is such a departure from anything I have written before that I wanted someone who was totally unfamiliar with my work. This novel is so different I have, in fact, been kicking around using a pseudonym. One minute I feel that yes, doing that would free the story; the next minute, I'm like—well, I wrote it so I should take the credit or the criticism that comes. I'm not a big-name writer anyway so what the heck—although I do have a small circle of loyal fans who have stuck with me for 30 years. Thank you to all of you if you are reading this. It gives me great joy to hear from you from time to time.

So back to working on this novel. I'm at the place where I always have doubts. Writer-friends of mine will know exactly what I mean. The sentences are smooth, images pretty clear, but does it sound a little smarmy? Too predictable? Overly melodramatic, or maybe it's too understated? As I read through this millionth draft I am still mortified that I actually let anybody read it in this condition. Some of the scenes are less than dynamic, some seem even a little sophomoric. I know, deep down, that this is a normal reaction for me at this stage, and that I have to slap away that naggedy little editor whispering in my ear, telling me I'm a washed-up writer, that this is a piece of crap and I should just stick it in a drawer and forget about it. 

However, this particular novel has already done a lot of drawer-time. I actually started writing it way back, even before LILY. Dashed off a quick, sloppy, first draft, dusted my hands and stuck it away. I might have thought about it once or twice in the ensuing years but didn't really linger on it until I started trying to clean up my office during the pandemic: all the boxes and bins of old correspondence, contracts, scraps of notes, etc. There were several unfinished manuscripts in that clutter, but this was the only one that inspired me to give another go, to try to untangle plot-lines that went nowhere, to flesh out the characters, brighten up the settings. After I worked on that a while, it seemed to be getting better. Several more walk-throughs continued to help, especially with the addition of sensory details. And then, after several months of this, a lightbulb went off in my brain, and I finally FINALLY figured out what the hell it's about. A whole new spin began there. Once I had that, I was going full speed, writing those million drafts. 

I'm blogging about this here because I have been asked to do more writing blogs so I thought I would share my process. Everybody has their own, and this scattered one I've described is mine. I'm not a naturally gifted writer who can put down fabulous words from the outset. I have to write several drafts, each one a little less terrible than the previous, agonizing over works like "the, or should it be an" until it starts gelling for me. If I knew from the first minute I put pen to paper, or word to computer screen, what was going to happen in my novels, I would probably never write at all. I like discovering where it's going as I write it, just like I enjoy discovering a story as a reader. Guess that's why I can never be a mystery writer. I don't know how to plot. 

Onward....