In Which The Cat Holds Nocturnal Bootcamp And Sunday Does Its Worst

Arse crack o’thirty this morning, my cat, Chooky, my bedroom cat, began doing laps.

Not quiet, contemplative laps. Urgent, something-has-breached-the-perimeter laps. Frantic circuits of her sky-level sanctuary with the energy of a small furry soldier who has detected an incursion and is not prepared to let anyone sleep through it. I became aware of the situation in the most direct way possible — specifically, she ran across my head, and then, in what I can only describe as an inspired tactical decision, straight down one bare leg and onto the sky bridge to continue her patrol. Repeatedly. At Pace.

There was nothing for it. I climbed down from the loft bed, conducted a full visual inspection of the room, confirmed that whatever had committed the incursion had either retreated or was very good at hiding, and returned to bed. Before doing so I secured the drawbridge under the watchful supervision of Colonel Chooky. The cat, satisfied that her human had attended to the situation with appropriate seriousness, eventually settled. Her visage deserves a second blog visit for her security determination.

I returned to the sleep of genuinely delightful dreams.

When I woke again it was 10.30, which I am choosing to frame as halfway between naughty-sleeping-Suzy and my 7.30 alarm, which seems entirely reasonable given that I had been conscripted into nocturnal bootcamp at arse crack o’thirty through no fault of my own. I stand by this. The maths works out.

The day, unfortunately, did not reward the effort of waking up for it. It was ugly when I opened the curtains and proceeded to get uglier as the hours went by, in that committed way that a Tasmanian winter day has when it has decided to make a point.

I spent it restructuring my filing system, finishing the graphics, and learning how to make TikTok slideshows.

Fun was had by all.

I have not yet located the sarcasm font and I hope, my faithful readers, that you understood that sentence in the spirit in which it was intended. Learning TikTok slideshows is exactly as delightful as it sounds and I say that with every ounce of sincerity I can muster, which is to say none.

Early to bed tonight. Early appointments in the morning. The day is done and I am releasing it without ceremony.

I hope your Sunday was everything a Sunday should be. 🖤

In Which It Rains And I Have Ideas I’m Not Allowed To Start Yet

It rained today. Properly, committedly, Tasmanian-winter-is-coming rained. Which did not stop us loading ourselves into the car and heading to the Westbury markets, because reconnaissance waits for no weather system and the book van isn’t going to scout its own prospects.

The verdict: disappointing, with an asterisk.

Westbury is lovely. The drive is lovely. The idea of the markets is lovely. The reality was somewhat thin on the ground — not a great deal on offer in terms of what we were hoping to find — but the more surprising discovery was the payment situation. Or rather, the lack of one. A remarkable number of stall holders were cash only, which in the year we are currently living in is a choice that I find genuinely baffling. The book van will absolutely have electronic payment because I would like to actually sell books to people who, like most humans in 2025, do not routinely carry cash. Filed under: lessons learned before we’ve even started.

Came home damp and slightly deflated, spent the rest of the day making graphics for social media because apparently that is just my life now. The three universes require a frankly unreasonable amount of visual content and I am the person who has to create it. Future Suzy will be grateful. Present Suzy’s eyes are doing that thing they do after too many hours of screen time.

Watched a few more episodes of Off Campus in the evening. My verdict remains: it’s fine. It’s perfectly okay television. The thing that is keeping me watching is the hockey, and the hockey alone, because I am a died in the wool hockey person and we support the hockey in whatever form it presents itself. This is not negotiable. This is doctrine. The show could be considerably more compelling than it is and I would still be there for the ice time, and I will say no more on that subject except that Heated Rivalry remains undefeated in my personal rankings.

And then — because my brain apparently decided that what today needed was one more thing — I had a realisation about the Compass Point universe.

The origin series. How they got to be the soldiers they are before I got my hands on them and broke them. Except here is the thing: it already exists. All of it. Two hundred and seventy thousand words of it, sitting there, fully written, because that was the original form of Compass Point. The babies. The fledgling soldiers. The version of these men and women that existed before everything that comes after happened to them.

I wrote it. And then I made a decision.

I decided that writing broken ex-soldiers trying to rebuild their lives was more enriching than writing soldiers I was in the process of breaking. The destination interested me more than the journey. So I pivoted, and Compass Point became what it is now, and the 270,000 words went into a drawer, metaphorically speaking, where they have been sitting ever since in the particular patient way that large manuscripts have when they know their time will come.

Their time will come.

Just — not yet. I have two novels releasing in thirty days, a book van to launch, and a renovation bearing down on me. The 270,000 words will keep. They’ve already waited this long.

The future will deal with it accordingly.

The future is already making a list. 🖤

I have three additional observations about Off Campus that I feel compelled to share.

First: the MMC has curls. Magnificent, abundant, absolutely delicious curls that even a granny-aged woman finds herself wanting to run her fingers through. Full credit where it’s due. Those curls are doing a lot of heavy lifting for the show’s watchability and they know it.

Second: the FMC has, and I say this as a purely aesthetic observation, probably the roundest, perkiest breasts I have ever seen on a television screen. They sit there. They jiggle politely. They are present in, and occasionally almost out of, whatever scanty top she happens to be wearing in any given scene. I respect the commitment.

Third, and this is the one that actually matters:

I’ve worked out the difference. The real one, underneath all the budget and chemistry conversations. The Heated Rivalry boys lived their characters. This lot act theirs. And that distinction — small in description, enormous in effect — is everything.

HR gave us great ugly tears. The kind that aren’t pretty, that come with awkward silences and people not knowing where to look and absolute, overwhelming, unperformed joy when the moment called for it. You felt it in your chest because they felt it in theirs.

Off Campus gives me dry cheeks in the crying scenes and vacancy behind the eyes in the happy ones.

The curls remain exceptional.

Enough said. 🏒🖤

In Which I Have A Word With Myself

Today feels like a wasted day.

Except it isn’t, not really, because I’ve spent most of it creating what feels like approximately one million social media images for all three universes so I have them ready when the time comes. That’s productive. That’s genuinely useful work that Future Suzy will be grateful for.

Present Suzy feels like she achieved nothing and is sitting in her own head like an unwelcome houseguest.

I’ve been trying to work out whether the blah is situational or physical, and the honest answer is probably both, because they don’t really separate neatly. Here’s the current full inventory, because apparently I collect conditions the way other people collect stamps: Type 2 diabetes (better than it’s been in ten years, which I’ll take), hypothyroidism (miraculously perfect at the moment), ADHD with a probable ASD flag that I haven’t officially pursued because the diagnosis costs upwards of two thousand dollars and I have a renovation coming, bursitis in both shoulders, fifteen-plus ganglions in my hands that make them considerably less reliable than I would prefer, no cartilage left in my ankles, and depression, PTSD and anxiety as the foundation layer underneath all of it. I’ve also just come off a week-long migraine, which does things to your energy levels that are difficult to overstate.

So. There’s that.

The sleep has become its own separate problem. I’m sleeping until midday if Chooky doesn’t intervene — and Chooky, bless her, does not always intervene. This is not me. I am a person who loves the early morning. I love the light and the quiet and the particular quality of a day that hasn’t been used yet. Sleeping through it feels like a loss every single time, and yet here we are.

When I do surface I’m pinned to the laptop, which is partly because I have two novels releasing within thirty days and the anxiety about that is its own weather system. I have five ARC copies out in the world and I have heard back from exactly one reader. Tensions, as they say, are high. I’m trying not to catastrophize. I’m not entirely succeeding.

Meanwhile the house needs prep for the renovation — the plans are with council, which means it could actually happen sooner than I thought, which means the moving and sorting and shifting needs to happen — and the garden is sitting there in the last of the good weather waiting for me to do the winter prep work that I keep meaning to do and keep not doing, because instead I stay inside and refresh my inbox and create social media graphics and feel vaguely guilty about the garden.

I know what I need to do.

I need to get out of my own head. I need to boot myself firmly up the bum, close the laptop, go outside, and remember that the daylight and the fresh air and the physical work of being on the land is exactly the thing that makes me feel like myself again. Every time. Without fail. I know this. I have known this for years.

I just need to actually do it.

Tomorrow, Chooky.

Wake me up. 🖤

In Which I Have Feelings About Hockey Shows

I watched the first episode of Off Campus last night.

Before I say anything else, let me be clear about something: I idolise Elle Kennedy. Have done since I read the Out of Uniform series, which is when I understood exactly what she was capable of, and from that moment I have made grabby hands at everything she’s written. The woman is a giant of this genre and I say that with complete sincerity and zero caveats.

Which is precisely why I want to like the show. I really do. The cast is lovely — every single one of them — and the people in their orbit are well played and I have no complaints about the performances on an individual level.

But.

You heard that coming, didn’t you.

Here’s the thing. When Heated Rivalry wrapped its first season, some intrepid reporter announced that Off Campus was on its way as a replacement. A successor. The next hockey show to fill that particular gap.

No. I’m sorry. It really isn’t. And not just for the obvious gay-versus-het reason, though that’s obviously significant. This is something else.

Heated Rivalry was shot on what I can only describe as the most heroic shoestring budget in recent television history. Two cameras. Two complete unknowns in the lead roles — we didn’t get a recognisable face until episode three. And those two? They had chemistry that sizzled on the screen even when they were supposed to hate each other. Especially when they were supposed to hate each other. That’s the thing about rivalry done right — the friction is the heat, and if you can feel that heat in the middle of open hostility then you’re in extraordinary hands.

Off Campus has a larger budget. More established names. Better resourced in every technical sense.

And the two leads had no chemistry for me. None that I could find, anyway. I kept waiting for it and it didn’t arrive. The character I found myself genuinely interested in was the FMC’s best friend, and one of the MMC’s teammates — which is a lovely sign for the future of the supporting cast and a slightly worrying sign for the central romance, which is, after all, the engine the whole thing runs on.

Here’s my possibly controversial take: the budget increase didn’t do Off Campus any favours. There’s something about a small production that has to rely entirely on performance and chemistry that can produce something extraordinary when it works. When it doesn’t have the money to dazzle you, it has to move you. Heated Rivalry moved me. Repeatedly. While being shot in what appeared to be three locations and a car park.

I’m giving Off Campus a proper shot because it’s hockey and because Elle Kennedy’s source material deserves that much from me at minimum. The books are wonderful — Garrett Graham has been making readers weak in the knees for years and rightly so — and I live in hope that the chemistry finds its feet as the season settles in.

But I know which is the better hockey show for me this year, and it’s not a close contest.

Come back, Heated Rivalry. All is forgiven. You were irreplaceable and the replacement proves it. 🏒

In Which Yesterday Was A Lot, And Mumma Knows What She’s About

Yesterday was one of those days that gets quietly written off. Medical things happened — nothing dramatic, just the kind of thing that is efficient and necessary and still somehow uses up every bit of available energy by the time it’s done, leaving you with approximately enough fuel to sit on the couch and watch the fire and call it a victory. Which I did.

Life on the farm, of course, does not pause for energy deficits.

The guinea fowl remain numpties. This is a constant. I have stopped expecting improvement and have found a kind of peace in it. The geese are currently performing their Evil Overlord routine, which involves a great deal of purposeful waddling and meaningful staring and an overall air of barely contained menace. They’re not fooling anyone but they’re very committed to the bit.

And then there are the chickens.

My next door neighbour’s chickens — eight of them — have decided, apparently without consulting anyone, that they live here now. They have moved in with my menagerie and they will not go home and they cannot be reasoned with. My neighbour has assessed the situation, recognised a lost cause, and formally ceded ownership.

I now have eight more chickens.

I am not counting them. I know the number will bother me and I have made the executive decision not to know it. They’re here. There are some of them. That’s as far as I’m going.

In more soothing news: Mumma has moved on from the Pusheen bed, but let no one think for a moment that Mumma has given up on warmth. Mumma has simply upgraded. She has installed herself in the fluffy donut bed, directly beside the wood fire, and she is glowing. Not metaphorically — the firelight is literally on her face and she looks like a Renaissance painting of a cat who has made every correct decision.

The Pusheen sits nearby, empty, watching.

Mumma does not care. Mumma has the fire. 🖤

The Pusheen Bed Situation: A Resolution Nobody Predicted

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.

Day Three of the Pusheen Bed Situation: Evidence

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. 🖤

Day Two of the Pusheen Bed Situation

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.

They remain bedless.

It’s fine. Everything is absolutely fine. 🖤

A Day of New Beginnings (and One Very Determined Cat)

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.

It’s fine. Everything is fine.

It was still a really good day. 🐾

In Which I Murder Two Mice in a Single Week (and Other Tales from the Editing Trenches)

I have killed two mice this week.

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.