Living Rural, held together with yarn, coffee and a mind that is always unfiltered
Author: Suzy
Suzy writes from a quiet corner of rural Tasmania, in a 120-year-old station house that has seen more stories than most people ever will. Surrounded by books, cats, and an ever-growing list of ideas, she spends her time building fictional worlds filled with complicated people, found family, and relationships that don’t always fit neatly into a box. She writes under multiple pen names, exploring everything from hockey romance to military stories, magical realism, and fantasy—each one connected by the same emotional thread: people trying to find where they belong. Her personal blog, Life at the Station House, is where she steps out from behind the pen names. Here, she writes about the quieter side of life—rural living, creativity, community, and the moments in between writing sessions that matter just as much as the stories themselves. When she’s not writing, she’s likely tending to her garden, thinking about her next project, or sitting with a coffee while her mind runs a little too fast and a little too unfiltered.
When we last checked in, the scoreboard read: Mumma — 1 lunchtime nap. V1 — 1 successful infiltration. V2 — 0, and a great deal of feelings about it. Tiniest Girl — 1 brave but ultimately unsuccessful attempt while Mumma was in residence.
We assumed V1 had won.
We were wrong.
TG — Tiny Girl, our smallest cat, the one we had written off as a brave-but-sensible non-contender — has claimed the Pusheen bed. Not temporarily. Not opportunistically. Permanently, with the quiet and absolute conviction of someone who has decided, and cannot be undecided.
She is simply in it, every time you look. She is in it with a persistence that borders on the philosophical. She has outlasted everyone. She attempted it when Mumma was there, found the conditions unsatisfactory, retreated, regrouped, and came back when the timing was right. What looked like a retreat was, apparently, a strategic withdrawal.
V2 sits outside it. Waiting. She has not given up. She is a gatekeeper without a gate, a bouncer who has been comprehensively removed from their own venue, a cat who has coveted this bed since the moment it arrived and has been thwarted at every turn — by her own size, by her sister, by Mumma, and now, finally and most completely, by the tiniest cat in the house.
It turns out that what matters is not size, or seniority, or four days of pointed sulking.
It’s perseverance.
TG has it. V2 does not.
The Pusheen bed has found its person. She is very small and she has absolutely earned it.
A brief recap for those just joining us: a Pusheen cat bed was purchased for the two small cats. The small cats have not used it. This is their story now.
Today, the small cats made alternative arrangements. Our tiniest girl took to her tower, seen here conducting surveillance from altitude.
Hopalong retreated to one of the large cave beds. They had both, wisely, decided this was someone else’s problem.
Except that it wasn’t quite that simple, because we have just received new information.
The tiniest girl did, in fact, attempt the Pusheen bed. She climbed in while Mumma was already in residence. This tells us two things: first, that our smallest cat is considerably braver than previously assessed, and second, that she is also, ultimately, sensible — because comfort could not be achieved, and she retreated. One does not argue with Mumma, and one does not, apparently, successfully nap beside her either. Mumma takes up a certain amount of physical and psychological space that does not leave much room for a small cat seeking a comfortable afternoon.
And Mumma herself. Fifteen years old. In a house where other cats growl and posture, Mumma simply looks at whoever has displeased her — a slow, baleful, ancient stare — and they retreat. Every time. Without exception. She settled into the Pusheen at lunchtime as though it had always been hers, because as far as she was concerned, it had.
Then the dinner bell rang.
Mumma has never once been late for a meal.
And into the vacancy slipped V1 — V2’s thinner, considerably smarter sister (if they were dogs V2 would be a labrador, V1 would be a doberman), who had been watching this entire situation unfold and quietly doing the maths. While V2, the original coveter, the cat who has spent three days glaring at and lying in front of and dramatically sulking beside the Pusheen bed, was presumably looking the other way — her sister simply got in.
V2 remains foiled.
The small cats remain bedless, despite one valiant attempt.
The Pusheen bed has now been: worn as a decorative millinery by V2, blocked by V2, attempted by the tiniest girl (with Mumma present, which was ambitious), napped in extensively by Mumma, and successfully occupied by V1. It has been ignored entirely by Hopalong, who made a sensible decision early and is sleeping peacefully in a cave bed.
Everyone is winning except V2, who is having a very bad week, and the people who bought the bed. 🖤
Yesterday I introduced you to V2 and the Pusheen cat bed she was wearing as a hat. I want to give you an update, because things have developed.
The small cats — the ones for whom this bed was purchased — remain bedless. This is not the update.
The update is that V2 has a sister. We shall call her V1, because original bednapper, in the grand tradition of naming things in this house, is V2. V1 has discovered the Pusheen bed.
And here is where it gets interesting.
V1 can almost fit in it. Almost. Her head is approaching the exit at some speed, but she is in there. Technically, legally, she is using it as a bed rather than wearing it as millinery, and she would like that noted for the record.
She was very comfortable. She was very smug about it.
And then it was dinner time, because in this house dinner time is law, and V1 departed.
V2 , yesterday’s hat-wearer, the original claimant — assessed the situation. Looked at the bed. Looked at where her sister had been. Looked at the bed again.
She is now lying directly in front of it.
Not in it. In front of it. Pressed against the entrance like a very large, very dramatic bouncer. The message is clear and it is this: if I cannot sleep in there, no one can.
The small cats are watching all of this unfold from a safe distance.
Well, today was one of those days that reminds you why you do this mad, wonderful job.
We finally met Paul — the artist who is going to bring the worlds of Bella Bruce, Avery Beckett, Tara Benson Boyd and KS Buckley to life on the page. All four series, all four very different universes, one very talented human. And I am delighted to tell you that he is an absolute gem. We met the whole family today and they are just lovely — the kind of people you feel like you’ve known for years after an afternoon together. I had one of those moments where everything just… clicks. This is going to be the right fit for a long time. I can feel it.
We workshopped a mountain of ideas — particularly around Of Fables and Fantasies and where she goes next — and I have thoughts. Many thoughts. Possibly too many thoughts, in the way that only happens when you’re sitting across from someone who actually gets what you’re trying to do. I’ll untangle those for you in a separate post when my brain has had a chance to settle.
For now though, I am just sitting in the very happy glow of a creative partnership that feels like it’s going to be something special.
In entirely unrelated news: I purchased a cat bed today. A very nice cat bed. Specifically purchased for our two smallest residents, who are currently being supervised by fourteen others and deserve a space of their own.
Reader, I did not anticipate that our largest child would take one look at this bed and simply decide that it belonged to her. Only her head fits in it. Just her head. She is aware of this. She has made her peace with it. She is, in fact, aggressively comfortable with just her head in a cat bed that was designed for an animal approximately one fifth of her size.
I present to you: V2 alias FattyPuff. The Pusheen bed is on her head. The entire rest of her is somewhere behind it, living its best life on my window seat. The little pink cat cushion in the background is witnessing this and has opinions. Fattypuff has none. Fattypuff has only vibes.
The small cats, for whom the bed was purchased, remain bedless.
She is magnificent and she knows it. 🖤Photographic evidence below, because some things need to be seen to be believed.
Not the furry kind — although given that I live in rural Tasmania with fifteen cats, that particular tally is considerably higher and I accept no responsibility for it. I mean the small plastic kind. The kind with the little scroll wheel that is, as it turns out, not built to survive the editing habits of a romance novelist in the middle of a manuscript crisis.
The scroll wheel went first. Then the clicks became increasingly non-committal, the kind of performance where the mouse would technically register the click but in a way that suggested it was doing so under duress. And then, on mouse number two, I watched the scroll wheel spin freely and uselessly like a tiny hamster wheel that had seen things it could not unsee, and I knew it was over.
Two mice. One week.
In my defence, I have been editing.
Not in a pleasant, let’s-refine-the-prose kind of way. I mean deep-trench, where-did-that-paragraph-go, I-know-I-wrote-this-scene-but-I-cannot-locate-it-in-any-of-the-seventeen-iterations-of-this-document kind of editing. Some of my current manuscripts are on their fifth or sixth pass. What that means in practice is that I have taken scenes out and put them back in. I have moved chapters around like furniture in a room I’m never satisfied with. I have cut a beautiful paragraph because it slowed the pacing, grieved it, come back three days later and pasted it into a different chapter, realised it didn’t work there either, and the paragraph now lives in a document called good_bits_dont_delete.docx along with seventy-three other orphans.
The scroll wheel is the victim of all this frantic up-and-down-the-document activity. The endless hunting. The it was here a minute ago. The scrolling up to check a character’s eye colour because I’ve used three different shades across six drafts and I cannot be trusted with continuity.
Here is what nobody tells you about being deep in multiple series simultaneously: the books start to blur. Not in terms of characters — I know my characters the way I know my cats, which is to say completely and with great fondness and an awareness of exactly which ones will cause problems — but in terms of where things are. Which version has the scene. Which draft kept the subplot. Whether that line of dialogue was cut for length or moved to a later chapter or exists only in the document called backup_backup_REAL_backup_FINAL.docx.
The mice are paying the price for this structural chaos.
I have ordered replacements. Possibly two, on the theory that I might as well accept who I am as a person and an editor and plan accordingly. I am also looking, somewhat desperately, into better document management — because while I love the chaos of a novel in progress, the chaos of losing a novel inside itself is a different and less romantic experience.
If you’re a fellow writer who has also achieved the impressive feat of scrolling a mouse into an early grave, I would love to know I’m not alone. And if you have a genuinely foolproof system for tracking what you’ve moved, cut, or buried alive in a miscellaneous document — please, for the sake of the mice, tell me about it in the comments.
The cats, at least, are fine. Thriving, even. Possibly because they do not edit.
Suzy is a romance novelist writing as Bella Bruce, Avery Beckett, and KS Buckley. She lives in rural Tasmania with fifteen cats and an increasingly unreasonable number of half-finished manuscripts. She also runs Of Fables and Fantasies, a wandering mobile bookshop.
Well. I brought it up. I may as well finish the thought.
Fanfic.
I have been writing it, in one form or another, since approximately 1978, when I was a child watching Battlestar Galactica and became so personally offended by what the scriptwriters had done to my favourite characters that I sat down and fixed it myself. In a notebook. Because I was a child in 1978 and that was the technology available. I had absolutely no idea it was a thing people did, that it had a name, that there were others out there quietly rewriting television shows in their bedrooms because the professionals had gotten it catastrophically wrong. I thought I’d invented it. I was extremely pleased with myself.
Fast forward to 1996, and I was deep in it — still not quite knowing the shape of the world I was swimming in. Then 1998 arrived and suddenly I did know, and my head promptly filled to the brim with new plots for The Young Riders and Magnificent Seven. Cowboys were, and honestly still are, quite the thing for me. I’m still working out which of my four personas is going to write cowboys. It’s an open question. They’re all looking at each other.
Magnificent Seven is also, not incidentally, where Karen and I found each other — milling around in RPGs and fanfic, testing our writing against each other’s, discovering that we were doing something similar and that it worked better together than apart. We’ve been finishing each other’s sentences ever since, across however many thousands of miles of ocean currently separate rural Tasmania from Portland, Oregon.
Then in 2010 CBS made Hawaii Five-0 and I had an entirely new pond to play in. If you ever want to ask me about the crossover fic I wrote featuring vampires and every single character Alex O’Loughlin had ever played, all in the one story — ask. I will tell you. It was ambitious. It was possibly unhinged. I regret nothing.
Fast forward again to 2025, and I was desperate to write 9-1-1 fanfic. Keen as anything. It just wouldn’t come. Something about the format, the constraints, the box of it — it never quite worked for me, no matter how hard I pushed. But taking those characters and putting them somewhere entirely new? Whole different story. Completely different experience. I was on that like a seagull on a hot chip.
Not a serious problem. Not even an unusual problem, if you know writers. But a problem nonetheless.
I have a plot bunny and nowhere to put it.
It arrived the way they always do — uninvited, poorly timed, and entirely too comfortable making itself at home in the back of my head. It’s a cowboy series. Historical, probably. Maybe fantasy. Possibly both, because apparently I have no instinct for simplicity. The details are still fuzzy and the world is still mostly smoke and suggestion, but the feeling of it is there, which is usually how these things start.
And here’s the thing about cowboys.
They’re a little bit magic already, aren’t they? Before you add a single supernatural element, before you build a world or a magic system or decide what lives in the dark beyond the firelight — there’s already something about them. Those impossibly narrow hips. The broad shoulders. Just enough stubble to read as rugged rather than untidy. The particular way a man looks when he’s capable and quiet and not particularly interested in proving either. Cowboys occupy a very specific space in the imagination and they have done since I was a child watching westerns and feeling something I couldn’t yet name.
I’ve wanted to write them for years. You may remember I mentioned this.
The problem is that none of my four authors are immediately putting their hand up.
Bella took one look and went back to her hockey rink. She’s not wrong — her universe is full and loud and has very specific energy, and cowboys don’t quite fit the frequency. I respect the boundary even if I’m slightly annoyed by it.
Avery is considering. There’s an argument to be made — your protective soldier and your weathered cowboy are not, at their core, entirely different creatures. Both capable. Both carrying something. Both with that particular brand of quiet competence that I find endlessly compelling to write. Avery’s thinking about it. She hasn’t said no.
But if the magic comes — and I think it wants to come, I think that’s part of what the bunny is asking for — then it might really belong to Tara. Tara’s whole world runs on the old magic, the wild magic, the kind that lives in landscape and bloodline and the spaces between things. And there’s something about the American West, about that particular quality of vast and merciless and beautiful, that feels like it could hold that kind of magic very naturally.
So for now the cowboys are living in the hallway. Waiting to find out whose door they belong behind.
Let me explain something, because it’s probably overdue.
If you go looking for me on the internet — the writing me, not the fifteen-cats-and-a-rainy-view-of-the-Western-Tiers me — you will find not one author but four. Bella Bruce. Avery Beckett. Tara Benson Boyd. And KS Buckley, who I share with my best friend and writing soulmate Karen, because apparently one of everything was never going to be enough for either of us.
There are two reasons this happened, and I’ll be honest about both of them.
The first is that when I was going through university they hammered one particular rule into us with genuine conviction: one author cannot write in more than one genre. It confuses the reader, they said. It’s messy, they said. A brand is a promise, they said, in that way academics have of making marketing sound like philosophy. I absorbed this so thoroughly that even when I eventually threw most of what I learned about publishing out the window, I kept the pen names. Turns out they weren’t entirely wrong — each of my four writers does have a genuinely different voice and style, and keeping them as separate people works better than trying to shift gears inside the one identity. My brain seems to agree, even when the rest of me finds it absolutely exhausting.
The second reason is simpler and considerably more personal: there are parts of my family who would mock me mercilessly for writing romance. The smut, they’d call it, with that particular tone that means they think they’re being funny. I’d have had a pseudonym regardless of genre rules, just to keep the peace and my dignity intact. I simply didn’t anticipate that one pseudonym would quietly become four.
So: Bella Bruce writes sports romance — hockey, mostly, though her universe has expanded to include rockstar and movie star romance because apparently I have no restraint. Avery Beckett writes military romance with thriller tendencies. Tara Benson Boyd writes whimsical fae romantasy. And KS Buckley writes magical realism and detective noir — that one belongs to Karen and me together, in theory, though the distance between Portland and rural Tasmania is doing its level best to complicate things. We have the people. We have the story. We just need to nail down the magic system and the grit, and then we’ll be properly on our way.
There’s a funny thing about KS Buckley’s main characters, actually. Sharp-eyed readers of Avery’s books might notice something familiar about a pair called Marc and Finn. Those two are, in their own way, a version of KS’s world — the same essential people, living a different life. And if something about them seems oddly familiar beyond that, well. You might be thinking of a certain television show. Our plans for these characters never quite fitted the fanfic box, even when that’s where we started out. There’s no shame in fanfic — none whatsoever — but that is absolutely a tale for another day.
This is probably one of the last times I’ll lay all of that out here. This blog is not my writing life — it’s the brain dump that keeps me and the four authors living in my head from collectively losing the plot. You’ll hear about the writing on series launch days, because those make me nervous and excited in equal measure and I tend to spill over a bit. Otherwise, this is just me. Suzy. Clan of three humans, fifteen cats, an indeterminate number of chickens, and a view of the mountains when the weather allows.
You’ve heard about the cats. Fifteen of them, because apparently at some point in my life I made a decision and then kept making it. You’ve heard about the chickens too, though they had considerably less to say for themselves today given the state of the weather.
What I haven’t told you much about is the rest of the household. There are, in fact, humans here as well.
The first is my sister Jo. She’s six years younger than me, which she has never once let me forget, and we have been each other’s people for our entire lives. Every single person we know — and I mean every one, without exception — calls us co-dependent, and I’d love to tell you they’re wrong. I can’t quite manage it. What I can tell you is that it’s not the dramatic, dysfunctional kind. It’s more that we’ve spent so long operating as a unit, us against the world in the most cheerful possible way, that we’re genuinely just better together. We fall to pieces a little when we’re apart for too long. Not really fall to pieces. But a bit.
The second human is our cousin, whose house this actually is, and who is therefore tolerating the rest of us with what I can only describe as extraordinary grace.
Together, we are the clan. Cats, chickens, cousin, sister, me.
We live on the edge of the Western Tiers — and one day, I promise, I’ll take you exploring out there with me. They deserve their own post, their own proper introduction. For now, just know that we measure our weather by them. On the good days you can see crisp white snow sitting on the peaks, clean and sharp against whatever the sky is doing. On the medium days they’re still there, softer, grey-green and present. And then there are days like today, when they’ve simply gone. Vanished entirely. Today was a you-can-barely-see-four-houses-across-the-street day, the rain so heavy and so thoroughly annoyed about something that the mountains might as well not exist.
So, the clan was indoors. All of us. The garden will have to wait. The chickens managed, as chickens do, with great indignation and very little dignity.
One of these days I’ll tell you about what we’re actually building here — the plans, the ideas, the things that have us excited about what this place is going to become. Today is not that day. Today was a kettle-on, don’t-look-out-the-window kind of day, and I think that’s allowed sometimes.
I woke up this morning to what can only be described as a crime scene.
Toys scattered the length of the hallway. Blankets dragged from the tables. Cat beds flipped upside down. Feed bowls — every single one — upended, with kibble spread across the floor in that particular pattern that I can only compare to stepping on Lego in bare feet at two in the morning, except instead of Lego it’s biscuits, and instead of your child’s bedroom it’s your entire kitchen, and instead of one small architect of chaos there are fifteen.
Fifteen.
I have fifteen cats. Not one of them looked remotely sorry.
They had, by all available evidence, thrown themselves an absolute rave while I slept. I don’t know what the occasion was. I don’t know who DJ’d. I wasn’t invited, which I think is a little rude given that I pay for the kibble that was now distributed evenly across every inch of flooring, but apparently that’s not the kind of detail that concerns them.
They looked, if anything, rather pleased with themselves.
I, on the other hand, woke up with a headache and a toothache and approximately zero capacity for dealing with any of this. So I cleaned up the kibble — because what else do you do — and then I did what any sensible person does on a day like that. I slacked off. Properly, deliberately, without apology.
I watched lawnmowing videos. If you’ve never fallen into the lawnmowing video corner of the internet, I can’t fully explain it to you, but there is something profoundly soothing about watching someone else tame an overgrown lawn when your own head is doing what mine was doing today. I recommend it highly.
I also pottered around the edges of the bookish things I need to finish — nothing strenuous, nothing demanding, just the gentle kind of work that lets you feel like you’re still moving without having to actually push.
Some days are like that. You don’t fight them. You clean up the kibble, you make the tea, you let the cats sleep off whatever that was, and you keep going gently until tomorrow arrives with a bit more grace.
Tomorrow will be better. It usually is.
(The cats are already eyeing the cat beds again. I’m choosing not to think about it.)
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