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.

🖤 🏒

Two Pusheens and Burger KingWilly

I promised you a quiet pre-release day post and instead you’re getting this, which I think is more representative of life around here anyway.

Yesterday was not, as it turns out, the calm and focused day I had planned and partially convinced myself I was having. It was, in fact, quite a lot of things in fairly rapid succession.

First: I went to town and bought a second Pusheen. This felt like an elegant solution to the ongoing territorial dispute between Hopalong and Pretty, the logic being that if there are two beds there is nothing left to fight over and harmony will naturally follow.

Neither cat wants either bed now.

I want it on the record that I considered this purchase carefully and the cats have collectively made a mockery of my reasoning. They are both, as far as I can tell, perfectly comfortable on other surfaces. The Pusheens sit there looking soft and inviting and completely ignored. I have no further comment.

Almost immediately upon arriving home I was turned around and deposited at the local school trivia night, which was an adventure in the very best sense. Our team — the Educated Guessers, which I think is an excellent name and I stand by it — came fourth out of eight, which is not our finest performance historically but is still a respectable middle and I will not hear otherwise.

I will probably never forget the answer Burger King Willy for as long as I live. I won’t tell you the question. Some things are better experienced than explained.

It was a genuinely good night, and I may have — entirely casually, purely in the spirit of conversation — pimped one of my releasing books to anyone within reasonable earshot. If you happened to be at that trivia night and you are now curious about hockey romance, hello, welcome, I am not sorry.

Came home. Went to bed. Did not pass go.

Today has also been a lot, and I will be back later with the full laundry list once I’ve lived enough of it to report on. Consider this the warm-up act.

🖤 🏒

No Big Adventures Today

This morning looked promising. I want to be clear about that — I woke up with genuine optimism and a list and everything. The day had other ideas, as days around here tend to, and by the time I’d finished my first cup of tea the showers were already building on the horizon with that particular Tasmanian determination that means they’re not going anywhere in a hurry.

So. Inside day it is.

The Pusheen situation continues to develop in unexpected ways. Miss Hopalong, having apparently decided that possession is nine tenths of the law, has dug in with a commitment that I find frankly impressive. She has abandoned her spot by the fire — which, if you know cats, you will understand is not a sacrifice made lightly — purely to maintain territorial control of the Pusheen. Pretty is presumably circling. Hopalong is unmoved. The fire burns unoccupied. Some battles are worth the cost.

My plan for today was websites. Both of them, ideally, with enough momentum to make a meaningful dent in the approximately seventeen things that need doing before launch. What actually happened was that a small ginger braincell attached himself to my dominant arm with the quiet certainty of someone who has made a decision and will not be revisited on the matter, and so I adapted (because he was Mumu’s brother and he’s grieving), as one does, and spent the time performing the last edit run on Isolated instead.

Which means the hockey romance may be done sooner than expected. Which means breathing space before the marketing push on the military romance. Which is, genuinely, good news.

And yet. Marketing.

I knew writing was work. I have always known writing was work — I have the manuscripts and the late nights and the four-in-the-morning rewrites to prove it. What I did not fully appreciate, and what is becoming clearer to me with every passing day, is that the writing is actually the easy part. The writing is the part I know how to do. The marketing is a learning curve that appears, from where I’m standing, to extend well beyond the visible horizon in both directions.

There is also the small mystery of why one of my author blogs does not appear to be picking up subscribers the way the other one is. My sister’s theory is that hockey romance is simply the flavour of the month and that explains the discrepancy entirely, and she may well be right. But I have that nagging feeling, the one that sits just behind your sternum and won’t be argued with, that I am doing something wrong and I haven’t identified it yet. I’m not going to catastrophise about it. I’m just going to quietly suspect myself until I figure it out.

Tomorrow. Websites. Possibly.

🖤 🏒

Signs of Life (and Slightly Less Swearing)

I am going to attempt an upbeat post today. Bear with me. I’m a little out of practice.

Here is what I can report: Luke came. Luke delivered. The powerpoints are done — we are almost completely electrically sorted, which is the kind of sentence that sounds mundane until you have been living without it being true, at which point it is frankly cause for celebration.

And the internet.

Oh, the internet.

I will not dwell on the full experience because some of it is not fit for a family blog, but I will say this: three hours on the phone with Telstra, four — four — factory resets of the modem, and a sustained act of collective human will later, we appear to have stable internet. I am using the word appears deliberately and with full awareness of my own trauma. I am cautiously optimistic in the way that you are cautiously optimistic about something that has betrayed you repeatedly and at the worst possible moments. But right now, in this moment, it is working, and I am choosing to accept that as a win.

Which means that tomorrow I might — might — be able to wrap my head around the websites. Which I need to do because, as it turns out, it is four days until my very first book is live in the world.

Four days.

I would like to tell you I am handling this with grace and equanimity. I would like to tell you that. What is actually happening is that I am cycling between cranky and stressed, gleeful and nervous, sometimes all four in the same ten minutes, with no predictable pattern and very little warning. The cats have noticed. They are keeping a respectful distance, which honestly shows good judgement on their part.

Four days.

We’ll see how that whole shenanigan goes.

🖤 🏒

Small Steps Forward

The house is still sad. There’s no other way to put it — Miss Mu left a Mumu-shaped hole that we’re all navigating around in our own ways, human and feline alike. Some days that’s fine. Some days you turn around expecting to see her and the missing her lands fresh all over again.

But life, as it tends to, has been happening anyway.

First, the practical: our internet has been absolutely abysmal, which has made everything approximately three times harder than it needed to be and my patience approximately three times thinner. Luke is back tomorrow, and I am choosing to believe with my whole heart that this will be remedied. I’m sure Luke is a perfectly lovely person in all other respects but right now I am thinking of him primarily as the man who is going to fix my internet, and I will not apologise for that.

Now. The Pusheen situation.

For those playing along at home, there is a Pusheen in this house that is apparently up for grabs, and we have reached a diplomatic resolution of sorts. Our two littlest girls — Hopalong and Pretty — are going to share it. I use the word share loosely. What appears to be happening is that Pretty has decided this is happening and Hopalong is coming to terms with that reality on her own timeline.

Hopalong’s participation, I suspect, is reluctant at best. She has the energy of someone who has been voluntarily annexed and is still working out whether to file a formal objection. Pretty, meanwhile, has apparently decided that the answer to everything is overwhelming affection, and is pursuing this strategy with considerable commitment.

It makes a certain kind of sense. Pretty was Mu’s little wingman — always nearby, always orbiting. She knew her role and she was good at it, and now there’s a Mu-shaped gap where that role used to live. It seems she’s decided Hopalong is the logical candidate to redirect all that devotion toward. Hopalong may not have been consulted on this decision.

In other diplomatic news, Hopalong appears to be slowly, cautiously, with great dignity and absolutely zero acknowledgement that anything has changed, warming to her similarly sized adversary. No formal statement has been issued. Progress is being made.

And then there is the weekend’s great reshuffling of the flock.

Six of our geese are heading off on Saturday to a truffle farm belonging to friends of ours, which is honestly a retirement story befitting their personalities. I wish them well and I suspect the truffles do not yet know what is coming. In their place — because this is how things work around here, nature abhors a vacuum and apparently so do we — we are welcoming two Sebastapol geese, which will bring the goose flock to a very respectable four.

And also arriving at the same time, because why do one thing when you can do several simultaneously, is the foundation of our Cochin flock. One hen, one rooster. The rooster is Columbian variant. The pullet is Partridge variant. They are, by all accounts, extraordinarily fluffy and I am choosing to lead with optimism on the subject of how the existing residents will receive them.

We are, in our own chaotic way, finding our feet again. The farm turns over, the cats negotiate their new arrangements, and somewhere in all of it there is something that feels, cautiously, like forward motion.

🖤 🏒

Gone Too Soon — For Mumu

I had a whole different post planned for today. Something cheerful, probably involving a chicken doing something ridiculous or an update on the renovation plans that have been sitting with council long enough to have developed their own ecosystem. But life had other ideas, as it tends to do around here, and instead I find myself sitting down to write the kind of post I hate writing.

We lost our girl Mumu yesterday.

Friday night we found a lump on her neck — not a tick, not obviously a scratch, just there, suddenly, the way alarming things have a habit of appearing without so much as a warning knock. My cousin, who is an actual doctor and therefore infinitely more qualified than the rest of us googling at midnight, thought it might be a blocked salivary gland. Manageable, we told ourselves. Something to sort out first thing Monday.

She never made it to Monday.

Sunday morning she was struggling to breathe, and then, gently, in her mum’s arms, she just… stopped.

Today she went to the pet crematorium. She’ll come home to us in a little urn, which is both comforting and absolutely devastating at the same time, and if you’ve ever lost a pet you’ll know exactly what I mean by that.

The house has been off-kilter ever since. The other cats know — they always know — and they’ve been restless and strange, doing that unsettled prowling thing that cats do when the world has shifted slightly on its axis. We’ve all been sad and grumpy and not particularly useful to anyone, which I think is probably the correct response.

There’s not much else to report from here. The farm ticked along because farms don’t pause for grief, and the guinea fowl continued their ongoing project of being extremely loud about nothing, and I drank more tea than was strictly necessary. That’s about the sum of it.

I hope your last couple of days have been considerably kinder than ours.

Sleep well, sweet girl. 🖤

A Day of Small Wins and Smaller Disasters

Today has been a day.

Not a catastrophic day. Not a triumphant day. Just… a day. The weather has committed fully to this assessment by refusing to commit to anything else — it has been hovering somewhere between put a cardigan on and take the cardigan off since approximately seven this morning, and I have given up trying to predict which direction it’s heading next. The sky is doing what it wants. I have made my peace with this.

The bigger concern today is one of our girls, who is not herself. We think she has a blocked salivary duct — poor love — which means tomorrow morning I’ll be on the phone first thing trying to get her an emergency appointment, and Monday we make the trip to the vet. She is being very stoic about the whole business, as cats tend to be when they are unwell, wearing their discomfort with a quiet dignity that makes you feel simultaneously heartbroken for them and slightly judged by them. We are keeping a close eye on MuMu tonight. Fingers crossed.

On the more chaotic end of the animal household updates: the ducks have entered their nesting phase, and they are taking the mission very seriously. Two of them have decided that the catio roof is the ideal location to survey their options, which means we currently have ducks on the roof and cats underneath watching them through the wire with expressions ranging from baffled to professionally offended. I cannot tell you this is not my life every single day, because it absolutely is.

Inside, the hierarchy has been firmly established. Mumma has taken over the Pusheen bed with the air of someone who has always owned it and simply allowed others to use it until now. And Hopalong — my little broken sunshine — has had the fire going since eleven this morning and is, by all observable measures, in a state of complete bliss. She has barely moved. I respect this. If I could spend the day in a pink fluffy bed in front of a warm fire, I would not move either.

On the productivity front — well. It was going to be the day I finally taught myself Reels and Instagram Shows. Or whatever they’re called. I had a whole plan. The plan required the printer. The printer, as it has been doing with grim consistency, refused to cooperate. And without the printed notes I’d prepared, I found myself staring at the platform with the particular blank energy of someone who knows there is a system here and cannot locate the entry point without their cheat sheet.

So that’s an agenda item that lives to fight another day. These things happen.

What did happen — and I am claiming this victory fully — is that I got my emails sorted into an actual email client. Everything in its place, properly organised, no longer living in the chaotic wilderness of a browser tab I was afraid to close. It is a small thing. It is also genuinely satisfying in the way that only administrative tasks you’ve been quietly avoiding for longer than you’d like to admit can be.

One tick. I’ll take it.

So that’s today. A sick kitty to worry about, ducks on the roof, a printer that owes me an apology, and one small organisational win that I am holding onto with both hands. Hopalong has the fire. Mumma has the Pusheen. The weather remains undecided.

Tomorrow we call the vet. Tonight we count cats and make sure everyone is where they’re supposed to be.

That’s enough for a Saturday.

🖤🏒