Research. It’s Called Research.

Well. We’re going to Canada.

November 30th to December 8th, if you want the specifics, and I can tell you exactly what we’ll be doing with that time: watching the Washington Capitals play three games. Edmonton. Calgary. Vancouver. In that order. In December. In Canada.

Now, before anyone says anything, I want to be very clear about something.

This is research.

I am a working author. I write hockey romance under the Bella Bruce name — an entire fictional league, the Portland Pioneers, a whole universe of men who are enormous and emotionally constipated and skate very fast. You cannot write that convincingly from a stationhouse in rural Tasmania on the strength of YouTube highlights and vibes alone. At some point, a serious professional has to go and stand in the building. Feel the cold come off the ice. Hear what twenty thousand people sound like when the puck goes in. Learn what the air smells like at a rink in an actual hockey country in actual winter.

That’s not a holiday. That’s fieldwork. I’ll be taking notes. There will be notes.

(Jo has been very supportive about the notes. Jo has also been laughing at me for approximately three weeks. Both things can be true.)

Why now

Because Ovi re-signed.

For those of you who don’t follow hockey and are only here for the cats and the kitchen renovation: Alex Ovechkin is the Washington Capitals’ captain, the greatest goal scorer the sport has ever produced, and — at the time of writing — a man of forty who has just put pen to paper for a twenty-second season with the only club he’s ever played for. He’d left it late. There was a genuine possibility he’d simply walk away, and honestly, nobody would have blamed him.

He didn’t. He signed. “I’m back!” he said, which is exactly the correct number of words.

And the moment that news landed, we looked at each other and said: right. Now. It’s now or it’s never. Because the thing about watching a legend play out the last of it is that there’s no schedule for when the last of it arrives. You don’t get a warning. You get one more year, maybe, and then one day you’re reading a retirement announcement and thinking I always meant to go.

I have too many of those already. I wasn’t collecting another one.

The plan

Three games, three cities, nine days, and a schedule that is — I’ll be honest with you — mildly deranged. The Caps are on a long western road swing through that stretch, and we’ve essentially chosen to become barnacles on the hull of it. Edmonton, then Calgary, then Vancouver on the 7th, and then home.

Now about Snow…

And now I have to tell you something a little embarrassing, which is that neither of us has ever seen snow.

I mean properly seen it. Seen it falling and staying. Seen it sitting on things — on a fence post, on a car roof, on a branch — being snow, in the way it does in every Christmas film ever made.

We’ve seen the miniscule flurries you get here occasionally, the kind that come down looking very promising and then vanish the instant the sun clears the hill, like they’ve remembered an urgent appointment elsewhere. And I once saw snow in Oregon, in spring, which I’d been quite excited about until I got close enough to establish that it was really more ice than snow — a sort of grey, granular, week-old business that had clearly given up on being beautiful some time ago.

That’s it. That’s the whole of my snow experience. Forty-odd years on this earth and I have never once stood in falling snow.

So somewhere in Edmonton or Calgary — and everyone assures me it’s a fairly safe bet in December — there is a very strong chance that two grown Tasmanian women are going to stop dead in the middle of a footpath, in the way of everybody, and simply stare upward with their mouths open like a pair of absolute tourists.

I’m not going to apologise for it. I’ve been waiting a long time. If you’re Canadian and you see us doing it, please just go around.

I am also told that Edmonton in early December is not cold in the way that we understand cold. Tasmanian cold is a damp, complaining sort of cold that gets into your knees. Edmonton cold, from what I gather, is a cold with opinions. A cold that takes an interest in you personally. We’re buying proper coats — real ones, not the optimistic Tasmanian approximation of a winter coat — and this has been budgeted for. It’s a business expense, obviously, because it’s research.

And the history

Because it can’t only be hockey — even I have limits, and Jo has conditions — we’re building the rest of the trip around actually seeing where we are. Museums. Old buildings. The bits of a country that tell you how it got to be the way it is. I’m the woman who once climbed a hill in New Zealand to stand where a film set used to be, so you already know I’m not going to be in Alberta and not go looking for what’s underneath it.

There’ll be a fair bit of that. There’ll be photographs. Given my track record with a certain tour group and twelve thousand photos of a fictional village, you should probably brace yourselves.

The honest bit

Here’s the truth of it, under all the joking about research.

I’ve been writing about this sport for years. I’ve built a league, filled it with players, given them lines and rivalries and terrible haircuts and love stories. And in all that time I’ve never once sat in a rink in the country that invented the thing and watched it happen in front of me.

That’s a gap. Not a fatal one — you can write around a gap — but I’ve always known it was there, sitting in the back of my head every time I described the sound of a body hitting the boards and had to imagine it.

So yes, it’s research. It’s genuinely research. It’s also nine days with my favourite person, in a country neither of us has seen, watching a forty-year-old Russian do the thing he’s better at than anyone who has ever lived, while there’s still time to watch him do it.

And somewhere in the middle of it, if the weather is kind — and by kind I mean appropriately unkind — I’m going to stand outside in a proper coat and watch snow come down and settle on things, for the first time in my life, at the age of far-too-old-to-be-this-excited.

Some research you have to go and get in person.

See you in December. I’ll bring back notes. And photos. So many photos.

— Suzy

The Closest I Ever Got to Sam Neill

Vale Sam.

Sam Neill has died, and I find myself unexpectedly wanting to sit down and tell you all a story.

He gave us so many good films over the years — more than I could possibly list, and every one of you will have your own favourite tucked away somewhere. Jurassic Park, obviously. The Piano. Hunt for the Wilderpeople. That particular brand of dry, watchful, slightly rumpled charm he brought to everything, where you always got the sense he found the whole business of being a film star faintly ridiculous and was quietly enjoying the joke. I liked him enormously, in the way you like someone you’ve never met but have watched be excellent for forty years.

But my best memory of the man isn’t from a screen at all. It’s from a paddock in New Zealand, and it remains, to this day, one of the funniest things I have ever witnessed with my own two eyes.

Let me set the scene for you.

Some years back I was on a Lord of the Rings tour through New Zealand. Now, I want to be clear about the calibre of people I was travelling with, because it matters enormously to what follows. We were not casual fans. We were not there to nod politely at a nice view, buy a fridge magnet, and be back at the hotel in time for the buffet. This was a fully immersive pilgrimage, and it was run like one.

The days were long. We’d often be up and moving before sunrise and still going late into the night, chasing the light, chasing the locations, chasing the exact spot where a thing had happened in a film that, to us, had rather more authority than most historical records. And here is the detail I really need you to sit with: a good number of my fellow travellers would set their alarms an hour earlier than they strictly had to — sacrificing sleep they desperately needed — purely so they could don their ears and their wigs, strap on their fake feet, and assemble each individual, painstakingly recreated piece of costuming, so that they might walk the paths of their chosen race properly attired. Not for a photo. Not for a laugh. For the integrity of the experience.

That was the calibre of devotion on that coach.

And it wasn’t only the dressing-up, either. This was a serious tour — run by Red Carpet Tours, in fact, and this same crew, plus or minus a few faces, has now done the whole pilgrimage twice — and it opened serious doors. We had lunch with the producers. We sat in on classes with the make-up artists who’d done the real thing. Weta Workshop opened their doors to us and let us stand among the actual artistry of it all. We were, in short, known. We were followed around by newspapers — and yes, I’m dating myself here, but this was back when newspapers were printed on paper and a photographer would trail a busload of costumed adults across the countryside because it made for a genuinely good story.

And speaking of photographs: when our group of twenty-five descended on Hobbiton, we came away with over twelve thousand photos between us. Twelve thousand. From one visit. To one location. We used to joke that no tour group on earth had ever documented a patch of ground so thoroughly — that entire professional survey teams had mapped smaller areas with fewer images. Every door of every hobbit hole. Every cabbage. Every artfully placed tiny wheelbarrow. If it existed in the Shire, we have it archived in triplicate from four angles.

Now, I’ll be honest with you: not every one of us was quite that far gone. There were some of us — and I count myself gently among this number — who were deeply, sincerely committed to the books and the films, but who had perhaps not crossed fully into the fake-feet-before-dawn tier of devotion. (And I mean that in the nicest possible way. I have nothing but love and admiration for the pre-sunrise wig people. I simply also enjoy sleep.) But committed tragics, one and all. That’s the important part. Whether we were in full regalia or merely in spirit, we took our roles seriously. Possibly too seriously. Definitely too seriously.

And lest you think I’m exaggerating the depth of it for comic effect — I’m really not. Here is the proof of the pudding: two of our bravest of men, the very fellows who served as our tour’s own Boromir and Aragorn, now work for Weta as weaponsmiths. Actual weaponsmiths. Forging the actual blades. And two of our hobbits went on to join Weta as costume experts. Four of the people on that coach were so genuinely, unshakeably good at this that the wizards behind the curtain took one look and hired them. So when I tell you we were a serious bunch, please understand I am not being cute about it. We were a pipeline.

So there we were, early one particular morning, being told with a certain amount of ceremony by our lovely guide that this afternoon we’d be making a special stop at Sam Neill’s favourite café. Not far, apparently, from his winery. There was a pause, clearly designed for a ripple of excited murmuring to pass through the coach.

The ripple did not come.

We took this news entirely in our stride and carried on regardless, because — and I say this with the greatest affection and no small amount of shame — poor Sam meant very little to a coachful of Tolkien obsessives. We had bigger fish to fry. We had Rohan to think about. This was a group that would rise before dawn to correctly attach a pair of pointed ears; a café patronised by a knighted New Zealand screen legend simply could not compete, in that moment, with the promise of another paddock that had once, briefly, in a certain light, been Middle-earth.

I’m not proud of it. But I’m not going to lie to you either.

When we finally arrived, the group split neatly in two. Some of us descended on the café like a clan of hobbits who’d caught the scent of second breakfast and would not be stopped by man nor Nazgûl. And a few of us — myself included — stayed behind on the coach.

Now, in my defence, I had earned that rest. We all had. It had been a big day. We had made the climb up to the site of the Golden Hall — where Éowyn stands watching the riders return to Rohan — and stood at the top waving the very flag the Fellowship carried, the wind doing its level best to tear it out of our hands. And here is the part that still makes me laugh: I found that climb genuinely difficult in ordinary human shoes, with ankles and arch support and all the advantages of modern footwear. The hobbits did it in silicone hairy feet. Silicone hairy feet. Up a steep, windswept hillside. And they did it without complaint, because to complain would have been to break character, and one does not break character on the paths of one’s chosen race. I have never simultaneously respected and worried about a group of people more.

We had also recreated the Charge of the Rohirrim across a hillside with more commitment than dignity. And we had spent a genuinely alarming amount of time on our hands and knees searching for Pippin’s Elven brooch, which one of our number had dropped and which had assumed, in our collective imagination, the significance of an actual plot point. We were spent. Emotionally, physically, spiritually. We slumped in our coach seats like the survivors of a great battle, which, in our heads, we absolutely were.

Little did we know that we — the exhausted, the seated, the ones who couldn’t be bothered — were about to receive the revelation of the entire tour.

Because as we sat there, a battered old SUV pulled up a little way off from the coaches. Nothing flash. The sort of car a man drives when he has nothing to prove to anybody and a winery to get back to. And out of it climbed a man.

I will never know precisely what tipped him off. I’ve turned it over many times since, and I like to imagine it unfolded slowly, the way dread always does in the films he was so good in.

Perhaps it was the fellow in full Boromir regalia, sword and all, slurping contentedly on a vanilla latte outside the café. Perhaps it was the Elven princess serenely demolishing a vanilla slice, crumbs cascading down her ethereal robes. But more likely — almost certainly — it was the three ginger hobbits who chose that exact moment to come clomping merrily out of his favourite café on their great fake hairy feet, chattering away, utterly at home.

Whatever it was, I watched it land.

The man went still. He slowly reached up and took off his glasses. And his eyes went wide — and I need you to understand that this was not a general sort of wide. This was specific. This was, to the millimetre, the exact expression Dr Alan Grant wears when he first stands up in that jeep and claps eyes on the dinosaurs. That pure, silent, slack-jawed awe. That “we’re going to make a fortune with this place” face. Except in reverse. Except the wonder was horror, and the dinosaurs were us.

And then, without a single word, Sam Neill — knight of the realm, national treasure, the man whose café this was — gently sank back down into his battered SUV, quietly closed the door, and reversed out of there in a magnificent cloud of gravel dust. Gone. Vanished. Fled his own regular haunt rather than face a busload of feral Tolkien enthusiasts eating pastries in cosplay.

I have never respected a man’s survival instincts more.

That was the closest I ever got to Sam Neill. Not a handshake. Not an autograph. Not even a hello. Just the fleeting, unforgettable privilege of watching a genuine legend decide, in real time, that whatever was happening at his café today was Not For Him — and remove himself from it with the speed and decisiveness of a man who has clearly outrun a velociraptor before and knows exactly how these things go.

And do you know what? I wouldn’t trade it. A handshake, I’d have forgotten. That, I have dined out on for years.

Rest easy, Sam. Thank you for the films, thank you for the wine you probably poured extra generously the moment you got home that afternoon, and thank you — most of all — for the retreat. You clocked the situation, you made the right call, and you got out clean.

Life, uh, finds a way. 🍷

The Cat Who Walked Home

Things have been quiet on the stationhouse front lately — quiet in that particular way that only means the chaos has moved indoors. We’re having the kitchen renovated, you see, which sounds very grand and civilised until you realise what it actually means in practice: we are currently washing the dishes in the bathroom sink and eating anything that doesn’t require the application of heat. Salads. Cheese and crackers. Bread with things on it. The occasional triumphant assembly of a sandwich so architecturally ambitious it deserves its own blog post.

We do have the microwave, of course, still faithfully humming away in the corner like the last soldier at a forgotten post. Whether what it does to a bowl of leftovers counts as cooking or merely irradiating remains a matter of some philosophical debate in this household. I lean towards the latter. The food comes out hot in some places, glacial in others, and vaguely resentful throughout. But it’s warm-ish, and at this point warm-ish is a luxury we take gratefully.

In the evenings, with the kitchen a construction site and the ambitions of the day duly lowered, we’ve been making our steady way through Supernatural. We’ve reached season thirteen now, which is a genuine achievement of endurance for all parties involved — us and, one imagines, the writers. The production quality is still holding up beautifully, I’ll give them that. But the stories. Oh, the stories are getting weird. And I say that as someone who signed up for a show about two brothers who hunt demons in a muscle car. When the premise is already that unhinged and the plots still manage to make you tilt your head and go “…sorry, what?” — well. You know you’ve come a long way.

But the real news of the week, the thing I actually sat down to tell you about, is this: Bullwinkle came home.

Some of you may remember Bullwinkle. About eight months ago we made the difficult decision to rehome him. He came to us the way so many of ours do — born to a feral little half-Bombay who arrived at our rescue already pregnant, and we kept him ourselves because even though he had a wild streak a mile wide, he loved us. Or rather, to be perfectly honest, he loved Jo. I was tolerated. Jo was worshipped.

Back when we were up in Queensland, Bullwinkle was a happy boy. He spent his daylight hours out in the paddocks, living his best life among the cows, playing at being a very small and slightly deranged member of the herd. But when we moved down here to the stationhouse, something in him wanted out. He became a furred Houdini. A door only had to open the barest sliver and he was gone. We’d be walking out ourselves and he’d come rocketing between our ankles, a small determined missile intent on tripping us into an early grave. It wasn’t safe — not for him, not for our necks.

So we gave him to a young lad who’d often visited us and whom Bullwinkle adored. That boy could not so much as stand still without Bullwinkle wrapping himself devotedly around his legs. The lad had property. Room to roam. Cows, even, I think. It seemed like the kindest thing we could do for our adventurous little man — send him somewhere he could be as free as he so clearly needed to be.

And then life did what life does. The young lad was sent to live with his mum down in Victoria. And ever since, we’ve been quietly trying to work out how to get Bullwinkle back home where he belongs.

Turns out we needn’t have troubled ourselves. Bullwinkle 41

Khad his own plans.

He arrived home on Monday.

Now, I want you to sit with the geography of this for a moment, because I’ve had all week and I still can’t quite get my head around it. He travelled twenty-five kilometres. He crossed a major highway. He crossed two main feeder roads. He navigated country he’d been driven through, not walked, and only the once. And he did all of it, every single perilous kilometre of it, and turned up on our doorstep looking as sleek and handsome and infuriatingly pleased with himself as the day he left. Not a scratch on him. Not a hair out of place. Just Bullwinkle, home, as though he’d only popped out for the afternoon and couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

I don’t know how he did it. I don’t know how any of them do the things they do. But I know that some part of that small feral heart had decided where home was, and no highway, no distance, no sensible odds were going to argue him out of it.

There was, of course, one small complication in all of this. Jo — the sun around which Bullwinkle’s entire universe orbits — is up in Queensland at the moment. So, the grand reunion happened over FaceTime, which is a sentence I never imagined typing about a semi-feral cat. I held up the phone, Bullwinkle stared into it with those unblinking eyes, and Jo cried. Properly cried. And I’ll admit I got a bit wobbly myself, though I’ll deny it if pressed. Whether Bullwinkle understood that the small glowing rectangle contained his beloved I couldn’t tell you, but he sat there and listened to her voice, tail twitching, and that was enough for both of us.

He’s asleep as I write this, one paw over his nose, the whole twenty-five kilometres already forgotten. Fifteen-odd cats in this house and somehow there’s always room for one more — especially when he’s gone to that much trouble to be counted.

But here’s the thing that’s really got me, the part that turns a happy story into something that sits right down in your chest. Because as much as this is Jo getting her Bullwinkle back, it’s more than that. It’s Chookie getting her brother back.

You have to understand — there were three of them, once. Three kittens who grew up together at the same time: Chookie, Bullwinkle, and Rocky. None from the same litter, but littermates in their hearts. And Rocky. Oh, Rocky. He was born with cat flu and had a stroke when he was still tiny, and I bottle-fed that little scrap of a thing, taught him how to use the litter box, carried him around tucked into my bra for the first three months of his life like I’d sprouted a third boob. He was mine in the way the fragile ones always are. We lost him not long after we moved down here, and there’s a Rocky-shaped hole in this house that never quite closed over.

So when we gave Bullwinkle away, Chookie lost the last of her real brothers. And she’s been lonely ever since — that flat, quiet kind of lonely you can see in an animal if you’re paying attention. She had us, she had the crowd of other cats, but she didn’t have her people, if you know what I mean.

The first night Bullwinkle was back, the two of them curled up together and slept like the last eight months had never happened. Like no highway had ever separated them. And now they both have their friend again — the one who remembers Rocky, the one who came from the same beginning.

Welcome home, Bullwinkle. You mad, magnificent creature. We won’t be opening any doors too wide for a while — and we’ll have you and Jo in the same room again soon enough. But I think Chookie’s the one who was waiting for you all along.

The Ice Rink That Used to Be My Yard

Right. Hello. I’m alive. Just — hibernating, basically.

I’m not going to pretend I have a good excuse for going quiet. The truth is it’s been cold and grey and relentlessly, insistently wet here in Tasmania, and I have discovered that when the weather is sufficiently miserable, my entire personality collapses into approximately three-metre radius around the fireplace. If it’s not within that radius, it doesn’t exist and I have no opinions about it. The outside world? Theoretical. The writing? Getting done, somehow. Leaving the house? A concept for bolder souls.

The animals have, as a group, been coping poorly with this arrangement.

The chickens have become a roving disaster. The yard is so slippery that they’re basically surfing between the garden beds, absolutely soaked, wildly offended that the sky keeps doing that wet thing, refusing to go inside and shelter, and loudly blaming me personally. The ducks, characteristically, are having the time of their lives. Geese are somewhere in between — philosophical about the rain, opinionated about the mud, unhelpful in every situation.

Then there are the sheep.

We’ve been hosting seven of them while they mow the lawn, which has been working out extremely well, right up until the afternoon I needed to get the car out of the driveway. I opened the gate just enough to squeeze through, which one sheep immediately interpreted as a personal invitation. Out he went. Fine — I thought — I’ll just circle around and push him back in. Logical. Sensible. What happened instead is that the remaining six, who had been watching this development with great interest, collectively decided that this was the moment. All of them. Through the gate. Down the street.

Which is how my neighbour and her five-year-old daughter ended up rounding up seven entrepreneurial sheep as they made their way through the main street of the village. They were absolutely magnificent about it, both of them. The sheep made a brief detour through the neighbour’s yard — seemed to feel it warranted inspection — and then, miraculously, the whole situation resolved itself much faster than it had any right to. Everyone back in. Gate secured. The five-year-old was thoroughly impressed by the entire performance and has since asked when it will happen again.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’m doing my absolute best to make sure it doesn’t.

Yesterday was partly sunny. Today is actually sunny. The ice rink is slowly becoming a yard again, which is good news for everyone involved, including the chickens, who remain very angry about the whole season.

On the writing front, because things have quietly been happening even while I was crouching by the fire pretending to be a comfortable medieval peasant: the developmental edits and line edits are done on the first three books in both the Pioneers and the Compass Point series. I’m half through the first draft of the magical realism and the first rural romance. Which means the first three books in each series are down to final proofreading only — and then it’s just the remaining forty-five and thirty-seven respectively to see through. Only. Only. Artwork is happening too, which means things are genuinely, really, actually moving, even if I’ve been doing it from the general vicinity of the hearth rug.

Jo went back to Queensland on Saturday and is reportedly finding it considerably warmer. Given that I watched her leave into the horizontal rain, I can only imagine.

The fire and I are doing fine.

More soon. 🖤

Well. Here We Are.

Hello, hello. It’s been a minute. Or possibly several minutes. Time has lost most of its meaning this past week and I’m choosing to blame the weather.

We’ve had the kind of Tasmanian winter days that feel less like weather and more like a personal opinion the sky has formed about you. Grey pressing down from all directions, rain that can’t decide if it wants to be dramatic or just persistently miserable, wind that rattles the old station house windows in a way that suggests the building has something to say and is working up to it. The cats — thirteen of them now, which is a sentence I am not yet fully at peace with — have been performing collective judgement from various soft surfaces. The geese have opinions. I’ve had very little motivation to argue with any of them.

I’ve also run out of my ADHD medication, which — if you know, you know. The scaffolding just quietly disappears and you’re left standing there blinking, vaguely aware that there was a thing you were going to do, possibly several things, possibly an entire career’s worth of things, and somehow none of them are happening. I keep meaning to fill the script. I will fill the script. This is me making a promise in public so I actually do it.

In the meantime I’ve been sleeping until what can only be described as the afternoon, waking up to find the morning has fully left without me, and spending the daylight hours doing a very convincing impression of someone who is resting intentionally rather than someone who has simply misplaced their operational software.

The author socials have slid. The Bella and Avery and Tara feeds that I had very carefully been nurturing back to life are sitting quietly on their respective platforms, not bothering anyone, probably fine. I’ll find them again. Right now I’m in the mode where I know the work is there and I know I’ll get back to it and I’m trying to be kind to myself about the gap rather than catastrophising.

Trying. Being kind to yourself is its own kind of work, it turns out.

The bright spot: the author copies of Almost Yours Again — Avery Beckett’s latest — arrived today, and tomorrow Bella Bruce’s Isolated is apparently on its way, which means by the end of the week this table is going to be significantly more stacked with books that have my words in them.

I held Almost Yours Again in my hands. A real physical object with a spine and pages and everything. I love it. I love it the way you love something you made when you weren’t sure you could, the way you love a thing that exists now when once it only existed in your head. I put it on the table and kept picking it up and putting it down and picking it up again. The cats remained unimpressed. Jo said it looked lovely. I cried a little, which is allowed.

And then, inevitably, the fear arrived alongside the love. What if nobody else loves it? What if the thing I made that feels precious to me lands in the world and the world just continues being the world, unmoved?

I don’t have an answer for that fear. I’m sitting with it. I expect most writers sit with it for the entirety of their careers, so at least it’s good company.

The other thing I’ve been sitting with — and this one is a different flavour of nerve-wracking — is an idea that’s been circling for a while. I’m working up to approaching the Community Progress Association about the possibility of putting together a small Writers Festival in town next year. Something local, something that celebrates Australian romance authors and the people who love them, something that fits the specific shape of where we live rather than trying to be a scaled-down version of something bigger somewhere else.

I haven’t done it yet. I’m in the screwing-up-courage phase, which for me involves a lot of internal rehearsal of conversations that may or may not go anything like how I’ve imagined them. But I think it’s a good idea. I think the town could hold it. And I think — if I can just get myself out the door and into the room — I might be able to make the case.

Watch this space. Or watch me continue to rehearse for another fortnight and then suddenly do it all at once. Either is possible.

— Suzy writing from the old station house, Tasmania, where thirteen cats currently disagree about who owns the good armchair

Sheep, Chaos and Eleven Days

It has been a full day at the old police station and I am going to tell you about all of it.

First, the writing update, because some of us are allegedly professional: the monthly blog posts for Tara and K.S. Buckley are done, Bella has a new post in the world, and there are eleven days until Isolated hits the market. Eleven. I am choosing to feel good about this rather than spiral, and I am succeeding approximately sixty percent of the time, which I consider a passing grade under the circumstances.

Now. The weather.

Today’s rain was not yesterday’s rain. Yesterday’s rain had conviction. Yesterday’s rain knew what it was doing and committed to it, offensively and without apology. Today’s rain was something altogether more Tasmanian — that particular coastal mist that means well, genuinely means well, but cannot find it within itself to either stop or be real rain. It is not enough to justify staying inside. It is not enough to require an umbrella. It is exactly enough to ensure that anyone who ventures outdoors comes back damp in that slow, creeping way that takes you a while to notice and longer to fix.

It is also, as I discovered during my outside adventures, exactly enough to render certain shoes entirely decorative.

I spent most of the afternoon feeling like I was on roller skates. Well-lubed roller skates. The kind with no brakes and an opinion about where you’re going regardless of your own preference on the matter. I remained upright for most of it through a combination of core strength and dignity I didn’t know I had. The mud had other ideas on at least one occasion and I will leave it at that.

And then there are the sheep.

We have seven of them at present, using our yard as what I can only describe as a bed and breakfast. Temporary guests. Passing through. Absolutely delighted with the accommodations, or so I assumed right up until this afternoon when they let themselves through one of the gates — by themselves, without assistance, apparently having worked out the latch through a combination of curiosity and structural disrespect — and went on an adventure of their own devising.

We chased them around for a bit. On the aforementioned well-lubed roller skates. I will not go into further detail. What matters is that order has been restored and the gate situation has been reconsidered.

The poultry watched the entire event with what I can only describe as tremendous satisfaction. They have been cooped up and fenced in and generally managed for weeks and watching someone else get chased around the property for a change clearly brought them great joy. I have no notes. I would have done the same.

And then there is braincell number two.

Big. Floofy. Ginger. Magnificently, implausibly fluffy in the way that suggests he may be approximately forty percent more cat than is strictly necessary. He has discovered the sheep and is processing this information in real time — oscillating between complete fascination and barely contained terror with the frequency of someone who cannot commit to either response but refuses to leave the situation. He cannot look away. He also cannot go any closer. He is simply there, enormous and fluffy and vibrating with conflicting feelings about hoofed things.

And then one of the sheep bleated.

I want to be precise about what happened next because it deserves accurate documentation. He did not simply startle. He did not flinch or skitter or perform the standard surprised cat retreat. What he did was something that can only be described as an almost-backflip — a full-body reversal of opinion executed at considerable speed, all four limbs briefly expressing different views about which direction to go, his magnificent floof temporarily achieving a volume I did not know was possible. He was, for one glorious moment, a ginger explosion of secondhand thoughts about sheep.

He recovered his dignity. Eventually. He would like you to know he was never frightened. He was simply reassessing.

The sheep were unbothered.

I find all of this extremely relatable.

Eleven days.

🖤 🏒

Frightful Weather, Small Consolations, and Amazon Being a Dragon

The weather today was, in a word, awful.

In more words: the rain was insistent and relentless and entirely without charm, the kind of rain that doesn’t have the decency to be dramatic about it and just settles in with its bags unpacked and its feet up, prepared to stay indefinitely. There was nothing delightful about any of it and I say that as someone who does not, in principle, object to rain. This was not rain you could enjoy from a window with a cup of tea. This was rain that was making a point.

I had to go to town anyway because groceries do not materialise simply because the weather is demoralising, and the drive was exactly as hairy as the sky promised it would be. I made it there. I made it back. The house was rewarded for this act of meteorological bravery with Subway for dinner, which is not nothing. Some days the consolation prize is genuinely consoling.

The cross stitch subscription box arrived, which is exciting and being treated accordingly — which is to say it’s sitting there looking full of potential while I decide the right moment to open it properly. These things deserve the right moment. I’ll know it when I find it.

In the meantime I have been making a colouring book.

This is for the Meandering Book Nook — the wandering bookshop project, for those just joining us — and I’m not entirely sure yet whether it will become a regular fixture or whether it will remain an occasional thing. My instinct says occasional themed colouring books are probably going to be a permanent feature of the Nook’s life, because they feel right in a way that is difficult to articulate but easy to act on. We’ll see how the first one lands and go from there.

And then there is the other thing.

I would like to report that Isolated is out in the world and Bella Bruce’s author page is live and everything is proceeding beautifully on the hockey romance front. I would very much like to report that. Unfortunately what I am actually reporting is that Amazon has decided to be an absolute bitch about the whole thing and is currently sitting on both the book approval and the author page like a very bureaucratic dragon on a very unhelpful pile of gold.

I don’t have details beyond that. There are no details beyond that. There is just the waiting and the refreshing and the particular helpless frustration of having done everything right and then handed the whole thing to a platform that operates on its own timeline and its own logic and does not particularly care about your release schedule or your nerves or the fifteen years you have been carrying these characters around in your heart.

Bella is stalled. Her boys are waiting. There is nothing to do about it right now except wait.

So I am doing what writers do when one door slams shut on them: I am wandering through the other rooms. There are other projects. There are always other projects when you have three pen names and approximately a hundred books in various states of completion, and right now that particular abundance is genuinely a comfort. Something is always moving forward even when something else is stuck.

It is not the forward motion I wanted today.

But it is forward motion, and I am choosing to count it. Amazon will sort itself out. Or it won’t and I’ll have to go a few rounds with it, which is a battle I will fight when I get there. For now — other projects, more tea, a colouring book taking shape on the table, and a cross stitch box waiting for its moment.

And the cats, who are blissfully unbothered by publishing platforms and have, as ever, the right idea.

🖤 🏒

Peaking, Poultry Diplomacy, and the Audacity of Sleep

I am, by any reasonable measure, peaking.

One book in the world. One two weeks from release. The second books in both series queuing up behind them like very patient, very demanding children who know their turn is coming. Life at the moment is an unending carousel of blog posts and release dates and Instagram content and newsletter chains and trying to remember which pen name needs what and when, and I am riding it with all the grace of someone who only yesterday slept until one forty in the afternoon.

In my defence — and I do have a defence — I only went to sleep after the sun came up. So technically it wasn’t a late start so much as a very committed finish to the previous day. This is the story I’m telling and I’m not taking questions.

My cousin, who is a saint among people, fed the fur babies for me while I was horizontal and completely unavailable to the world. I owe her something nice. Possibly several somethings.

Tomorrow is a real day with real tasks. Jo and I are going shopping — groceries, chicken feed, the great recycling of the accumulated drink containers which have reached a volume I’m not going to specify publicly. And we need to find some solution to the poultry situation, which has become a matter of some delicacy.

The birds have been visiting the neighbours.

Not in an aggressive way. Not in a way that suggests anything other than genuine sociable interest in what is happening next door. But poultry are not, it turns out, universally welcomed as impromptu visitors, and the neighbours have expressed that they would prefer their yard to remain a poultry-optional space. I feel this is a reasonable position to hold and I am not unsympathetic. The birds, however, have opinions about fences that I can only describe as flexible.

They are poultry. Not social butterflies. Someone needs to explain this to them.

We have also been continuing our Supernatural rewatch, which has introduced a complication I was not prepared for.

Jensen Ackles crying.

I am a grown woman of a certain age. I am, in fact, old enough to be his grandmother, a fact I am choosing to hold loosely because it is not helpful to anyone. And yet. Tears on those lashes do something to my nervous system that I cannot fully explain or justify and am not going to try. There is an instinct that fires — part maternal, part something that is absolutely not maternal — that just wants to make it better. All of it better. Not always in a PG manner. I said what I said.

I am not proud. I am also not sorry. He started it.

Anyway. One book in the world. One two weeks out. The cycle beginning again. The blogs continuing. The Instagram posts requiring their regular feeding. The chickens wandering wherever they like and the cats negotiating their complicated feelings about Pusheens.

And Dean Winchester somewhere in the middle of all of it, being unreasonably beautiful about his feelings.

This is the life. I have chosen it completely and I would choose it again.

After a sleep, though. Preferably before sunrise this time.

🖤 🏒

The Night Before

Today was slow in the way that days are slow when your brain is running at approximately four hundred kilometres an hour underneath the surface of everything. Outwardly: not much. Inwardly: a complete disaster, but a functional one.

I cannot decide if I am proud or terrified. Both, I think. Mostly both, simultaneously, with no clear winner.

Here is the thing that is sitting with me tonight. I come from fanfic. A long history in fanfic, years of it, and if you know that world then you know exactly what I mean when I say that fanfic readers are ruthless. Not all of them, and not without reason — they care deeply and they know their subjects and they will find the thing you got wrong at two in the morning on a Tuesday and they will have feelings about it in the comments. I have been on the receiving end of that particular flavour of feedback and it leaves a mark.

Screenshot

And now I am putting original work into a world that contains those same readers, and every instinct I have developed over years of that experience is quietly losing its mind.

I have been juggling these boys in words since 2018. I have done everything I can short of actually living their lives for them. I have researched and rewritten and edited and refined and had the whole thing pulled apart and put back together, and I still lie awake wondering if there is something I’ve missed, something someone will find, something that will give anyone a reason to drop negativity on my babies.

I know, logically, that I cannot control that. I know it. The logic is right there, very clear, completely accessible, and absolutely no comfort whatsoever.

But. The websites are functional. Not perfect — I want to be transparent about the not perfect — but functional, which is considerably better than where we were forty-eight hours ago. The newsletter welcome chains for both currently publishing authors are finished and in place. The things that needed doing got done, even on a slow day, even while quietly freaking out.

Tomorrow it goes into the wild.

I’m going to stop chewing my nails now. Or try. We’ll see how that goes.

Dead Hockey, Live Bugs, and the Truth About Pusheens

Hockey is dead to me.

I want to be clear about this. Not resting. Not on hiatus. Dead. Stone cold, no pulse, do not attempt resuscitation. My choices for this year’s Stanley Cup are, and I say this with the full weight of my feelings on the matter, assholes or cheating assholes. Neither of them is worthy of Lord Stanley’s Cup. Neither of them deserves to so much as be in the same room as it. I knew you’d agree with me. You’re very sensible.

I’m not talking about it anymore. It’s dead. Moving on.

We started a rewatch of Supernatural tonight.

We are up to episode eight. Bugs. For those of you who have seen it, you already know. For those of you who haven’t — imagine every creeping, crawling, flying, scuttling nightmare creature that has ever made you reconsider your relationship with the outdoors, and then put all of them in one episode, and then make them angry.

Tarantulas. Cockroaches. Ants. Bees. A comprehensive survey of the reasons I am sometimes very glad to be indoors, delivered in one convenient forty-five minute package. I did not enjoy that episode. I watched it through my fingers for portions of it and I am not ashamed to admit that.

What I will admit, without a single shred of shame, is that Jensen Ackles was an absolutely ridiculous young man. Pretty in a way that was frankly inconsiderate. Crackers in bed would not have been an issue. That’s all I’m going to say about that and I stand by every word of it.

And finally — the Pusheen situation has resolved itself in the most unexpectedly wholesome way possible.

It was never about the bed.

Miss Pretty does not want the Pusheen. Miss Pretty wants Miss Hopalong. The bed is simply where Hopalong is, which makes it the correct and only location as far as Pretty is concerned. She is not defending territory. She is not being difficult. She is grieving her wingwoman and she has selected her replacement and she is simply committed to the arrangement whether Hopalong has fully signed off on it yet or not.

Honestly? I understand her completely.

More tomorrow. There is apparently always more tomorrow.

🖤 🏒