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.)
I want to tell you something that happened this morning, and I want you to know that I am fully aware this is not a sensible thing.
We bought a bookshop.
Here is how that happened.
I went to see the owner of a wandering bookshop — think food van, think wheels, think the ability to turn up somewhere entirely unexpected and hand people a romance novel — because I had a perfectly reasonable question. Would she be interested in stocking my books? Simple. Businesslike. In and out.
I came home having promised to buy the whole thing.
I’m not entirely sure how. These things happen to me more than they probably should. The shop is called Of Fables and Fantasies, and I suspect the name didn’t help — once I heard it, some part of my brain had already decided this was mine. The rest of the conversation was just logistics.
So here we are.
For those of you keeping score at home, the current job description reads something like: romance novelist, publisher, blogger, small-scale farmer, cat wrangler (fifteen of them, don’t ask), and now — bookseller. I genuinely do not know who I am any more, but I’m having a very good time finding out.
Now here’s the part I’m especially excited about, and I want to talk about it properly before we take over because it matters to me. Really matters.
I want Of Fables and Fantasies to champion romance. And I want it to champion Australian romance writers.
Let me start with something that might surprise you if you’ve been living under a rock, or possibly just in Australian literary circles: romance is, by a significant margin, one of the biggest-selling genres on the planet. In 2024 alone, 51 million print units sold in the US market. Romance sales were up 24% year on year. Seven of the top ten books of the year were romance or romantasy titles. At many publishing houses, up to 70% of revenue comes from romance. The genre is not just surviving — it is carrying the book industry on its back, and has been for years.
And yet.
In Australia, romance gets shat on from a great height.
I’m going to say that plainly, because it’s true and it’s been true for as long as I’ve been writing, and I am tired of dancing around it. Romance authors are not considered writers. We are considered purveyors of smut. Our books are not shelved respectfully in literary fiction. They’re not reviewed seriously in the broadsheets. They don’t win the Miles Franklin. We are, at best, tolerated. At worst, openly mocked.
I know this from experience. When I did the first subject of my Bachelor of Creative Writing — which I completed in 2021, in my forties, surrounded by twenty-somethings — the professor asked each of us what we wanted to do with what we’d learn in the class. I listened to them all go around the room. They wanted to write poetry. Speculative fiction. Literary fiction. They were going to be the next Shakespeare. The next James Patterson. Grand ambitions, every one of them.
When it was my turn, I said I wanted to write romance.
The whole class laughed at me.
Not a polite chuckle. Actual laughter. Because I didn’t want to write real books, did I — I wanted to write those silly Mills and Boon things you buy at the supermarket. I sat there and I felt the embarrassment of it, that particular heat that comes from being the odd one out in a room full of people who think they know what good writing looks like.
And then my professor shut them up.
I don’t know why you laughed, she said. She’s the only one with realistic aims and knows where the money is.
I have never forgotten that. Not the laughter — or not only the laughter — but the fact that it took someone with authority in the room to make them stop. That says everything, doesn’t it? About who gets to decide what counts.
Here’s what I want to ask, though. George R. R. Martin writes explicit sex scenes. So does Cormac McCarthy. So does virtually every celebrated male literary author you can name. Their work is considered serious, important, literature. But a romance novel — which is largely written by women and largely read by women — is smut. The genre that outsells everything else on the shelf. Smut.
You’ll forgive me if I find that a little convenient.
Romance is not smut. Romance is rural and gritty and funny and heartbreaking. It is military and sports and contemporary and historical and supernatural and everything in between. It is romantasy with magic systems so intricate they’d make a fantasy purist weep with envy. It is chick lit that makes you snort-laugh on public transport. It is second-chance love stories and slow burns and found families and grief and hope and, yes, desire, because desire is part of being human and pretending otherwise is not literary sophistication — it is just snobbery.
I want Of Fables and Fantasies to be a place where that is understood.
I want rural romance on those shelves — stories set in the landscapes people around here actually live in. I want sports romance and military romance and contemporary romance and romantasy and chick lit and every flavour in between. And I want, wherever I possibly can, Australian authors. Writers who are here, working in this country, telling stories rooted in this place, and who deserve so much more recognition than they get.
Because here’s the thing about romance — about any fiction, really. Part of what it does, part of what it’s for, is letting readers feel themselves inside the story. And there is something that happens when you read a book and the landscape is yours. When the light looks right and the place names are familiar and the characters feel like people from your street, your town, your life. You’re not just reading about someone else falling in love. You’re falling in love in a place that belongs to you. Australian readers deserve that. They deserve to pick up a romance novel and find themselves in it — their country, their voice, their world — not just borrowed landscapes from somewhere else.
I’ll be honest with you. I don’t know how successful I’ll be at sourcing. I don’t know how many authors will want to be involved, whether logistics will cooperate, whether the universe will smile on me or laugh at me. But we are absolutely ready to give it a red hot shot, as we say in this part of the world.
If you’re an Australian romance author, or you know one, or you are one and you’re reading this with a slightly raised eyebrow — come find me. I want your books on my shelves. I want your stories rolling down Tasmanian roads in a little van with a beautiful name.
And if you just want to follow along and watch me figure out how to run a mobile bookshop while also writing novels and wrangling fifteen cats and growing vegetables and generally attempting to do everything at once — well. You’re very welcome here too.
Today was not the productive marketing blitz I had planned. I had a list. I had intentions. I had a book that is about to launch into the world and approximately one million things I should be doing to make sure people actually know it exists before it arrives.
I am going to be honest with you.
I did not do those things.
I watched lawn mowing videos on the internet. I cannot explain this to you. I cannot explain it to myself. There is something deeply, specifically soothing about watching someone mow a lawn in neat stripes and I refuse to apologise for it.
BUT. And this is a significant but.
Today also brought Brian and Sandra.
Brian and Sandra are a new addition to my life and I am very glad about that. They are in their seventies, they are delightful, and they came out to the property today with their ferrets to help deal with the rabbit situation. We have a lot of wild rabbits here. A lot. They are chaotic and destructive and an absolute pain in the bum, and I say that with the full awareness that they are also quite cute, which makes the whole thing morally complicated in a very Tasmanian way.
Brian and Sandra, however, have no such complications. They know exactly what they’re about.
The ferrets did their thing. Brian and Sandra did their thing. I stood around feeling mildly useful.
Here is the part that made my whole day: they are both in their seventies, and every few minutes one of them would lunge for a rabbit with a very confident “I’ve got it, I’ve got it—” and the other one would also lunge for the same rabbit with equal confidence, and then they would both release it at exactly the same time. The same rabbit. Multiple times. The rabbit, for its part, seemed genuinely baffled by its own continued freedom.
They caught four. The other six were released back to continue their campaign of horticultural destruction, presumably wiser for the experience. The four that were caught go home with Brian and Sandra, get skinned, and end up as meals for elderly people in their community who need them. There is something quietly wonderful about that. A whole little ecosystem of care, running entirely outside of anything official or organised, just because two people in their seventies decided to be useful with a pair of ferrets and a Saturday afternoon.
I loved them immediately.
On the actual author front — baby steps, but steps. I set up a BookFunnel account today and released Almost Yours Again as an ARC. It is out there in the hands of early readers, which is terrifying and necessary and probably the most genuinely useful thing I did all day, lawn mowing videos notwithstanding.
Tomorrow I am getting my act together. Deloraine Market in the morning — because some things are non-negotiable and a good market is one of them — and then I am sitting down and whipping the websites into something resembling a functional shape. The garden also needs attention and I have been saying that for longer than I care to admit.
Oh. And I’ve lost my garlic.
I had it yesterday. I was literally filling the garden bed in preparation for planting it, and now it has vanished completely. I have looked in the sensible places. I have looked in the completely illogical places. The garlic is gone and I do not know what to do with myself or, apparently, with a bulb of garlic.
I have given this some thought and I believe the solution is to staple them to my forehead when I find them. Is this practical? No. Will it cause problems? Almost certainly. Will I lose them again? Absolutely not, and that is the whole point.
Baby steps.
But tomorrow, slightly bigger ones. With garlic attached to my face.
The book is out there. Almost Yours Again is listed on Amazon and people can find it and buy it and READ it, and somewhere in the night that went from exciting to absolutely terrifying without asking my permission. I spent a good portion of today spinning through the full carousel of writer catastrophising. Has it been edited enough? What if I got the story wrong? What if it doesn’t land the way it was supposed to? What if the people who pick it up absolutely hate it and decide to tell me so in great and specific detail?
And here is the thing nobody warns you about when you finally publish a book — you have no idea if you’ve made a terrible mistake until other people tell you. Which means there is a window of time, possibly quite a long one, where you just have to exist with the uncertainty and not spiral directly into the sun.
I am not good at that window.
I should also warn you, since we’re getting to know each other here: I am a crier. Not a dignified single-tear-down-the-cheek crier. I mean full-commitment, big wet ugly tears, sobbing, shuddering, the whole catastrophic production — triggered by the most unpredictable things. A moving book. A kind comment. A particularly good piece of music. An ad about a dog. You’ve been warned. If reader reviews start coming in and any of them are lovely, I will absolutely be a mess about it.
Anyway.
Enough of that. Because here is the thing about living the life I live — the actual physical world has a very effective way of interrupting an anxiety spiral and demanding your attention.
Jo mowed the lawn and did the edges. The place looks a thousand times better. We sorted out the chickens — filled the feed bin, filled all their feeders, made sure everyone was happy. Put the rooves on their new coops. Got the snake wire up around the fancy new nesting boxes, which feels extremely necessary given that we live in Tasmania and I would like the chickens to remain un-harassed, thank you.
And then I half-filled my garlic beds with soil. I’ll finish tomorrow — there’s a lot of garlic to go in and it’s running late. Should have been in in April, but it’ll be close enough. There is something genuinely meditative about garlic beds. No one is reviewing your garlic. The garlic does not care about your publication timeline. The garlic just needs soil and time.
I could learn something from the garlic.
That’s today. Publishing panic, chicken coops, and soil under my fingernails. Not the worst combination, honestly.
Almost Yours Again is listed on Amazon. As of tonight, it is a real book that real people can find, click on, and buy. I have been staring at the listing for the last twenty minutes like it might disappear if I look away.
I don’t entirely know how to feel about this. Proud? Terrified? Both at the same time in a way that is making my chest do something weird? Yes. All of that. Simultaneously.
Here’s the thing about writing for as long as I have — and I have been at this for a very long time, long enough that I’m not going to put the number in writing because it will make me feel ancient — you get comfortable living inside the work. The writing is yours. The characters are yours. The story happens in your head and on your screen and it belongs entirely to you, and that is a deeply comfortable place to be. Nobody can tell you it isn’t good enough when it’s still just a document on your hard drive.
Uploading it to Amazon tonight felt like opening my front door and shoving one of my cats out into the street and saying off you go then, make your own way in the world.
(For the record, none of my actual fifteen cats are going anywhere. They are all fine. This is a metaphor.)
The book is Avery Beckett’s — that’s the name on the cover — but the sleep I’m going to lose over it is entirely mine. Every writer who has ever hit publish knows this particular brand of stomach-drop. You spend all this time making something, and then you let it go, and then it’s just… out there. In the world. Without you.
What if nobody finds it?
What if somebody finds it and hates it?
What if somebody finds it and loves it and wants more, and then I have to actually deliver more? (Okay, that one I can handle. I have notes. I have so many notes.)
I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. And tonight I did it. The book exists in the world in a way it didn’t exist this morning, and that is not nothing. That is actually something quite enormous.
And just in case that wasn’t enough chaos for one brain, I should mention that Avery Beckett is only one of three active pseudonyms currently taking up residence in my head. Three. Distinct. Voices. All with their own worlds, their own characters, their own very strong opinions about where their stories are going. You might think that sounds confusing. You could possibly be right.
What this means in practice is that the Avery universe alone currently runs to forty books. Forty. The first ten are written, edited, and ready to go — which means I have somehow committed to one book a month for the next ten months. I’m genuinely unsure whether that’s impressive or certifiable. Possibly both. Probably both.
So. Almost Yours Again is out there now, finding its feet, looking for its people. I’m sitting here with a cup of tea going cold beside me and a publishing schedule that would make a sensible person lie down in a dark room. Proud and terrified in equal measure.
Mostly proud.
If you happen to find the book out there in the wild—thank you. For looking. For clicking. For even considering it. That matters more than I can quite put into words yet.
The cats love me unconditionally and ask no questions about release schedules. This is very important right now.
No, the other cat. The one on the chair you were about to sit on. There are fifteen of them, so this is going to be a recurring problem, and I apologise in advance.
My name is Suzy, and I live in an old police station on two acres of land in rural Tasmania, which tells you almost everything you need to know about the kind of life I’m living. It’s not the life I planned. It’s considerably weirder and, on balance, considerably better.
I’m somewhere in my sixties — the good side of sixty, I keep telling myself, which is apparently something people say — and I was diagnosed with ADHD and probably ASD in my late fifties. If you’ve had a late diagnosis yourself, you’ll understand what it’s like to have your entire history suddenly recontextualise itself in the space of one conversation with a specialist. All those years of thinking I was broken, scattered, too much, not enough. Turns out I was just running the wrong operating system for the environment. I’ve since found an environment that suits me considerably better. It involves chickens.
Twenty-five of them, in fact. Chickens, ducks, geese, and guinea fowl, which are nature’s car alarms and I say that with love. The cluckers, quackers, goobers and weirdos all live on the two acres alongside the fifteen cats, and if you’re doing the maths on the predator-to-prey ratio, I promise it works out. The cats are, to a one, deeply unimpressed by the poultry and have reached a détente best described as mutual contempt with occasional curiosity.
In the hours when I’m not attending to the menagerie, I am an author, a content creator, a community volunteer, and what I generously call a farmer, though I suspect actual farmers would have opinions about that.
Now. About the author part. Because that one has a story.
I have been writing since I was old enough to hold a pen. Not as a hobby I dabbled in — as a compulsion, a necessity, the thing my brain simply did and could not stop doing. I eventually formalised it: a Bachelor of Creative Writing, a Bachelor of Creative Industries, because if your brain is going to insist on doing something obsessively you may as well get some credentials out of it.
I have been seriously putting manuscripts together since 1982 (but apparently real authors don’t count fanfic), so let’s say 2010 when I started using my own characters. In that time, across three large interconnected fictional universes — romance, mostly; military, supernatural noir, hockey, because apparently, I contain multitudes — I have written ninety-eight books.
Ninety-eight.
I want to be honest about why, because it’s not the story you might expect. I never really planned to publish them. That wasn’t really the point. The point was to get these worlds out of my head — three entire universes of characters and storylines and relationships that were taking up considerable real estate in a brain that was already, as I would later learn, running at a somewhat unusual frequency. I wrote them for myself. I wrote them because the stories needed to exist somewhere outside me. I wrote them and I filed them away and I kept writing more, and I thought that was simply what my life was: a very long private conversation between me and my own imagination.
And then someone read them.
And then that someone did a very silly thing and told me they were good.
So here we are.
Over the next couple of years, I’m going to be polishing and releasing those ninety-eight books into the world, which is equal parts thrilling and absolutely terrifying and something I genuinely never saw coming. I’m starting this blog partly to document that process — the wins, the stumbles, the moments of blind panic, the unexpected joys — and partly because I have ADHD and I need somewhere to put all the thoughts or they will simply accumulate until something gives way.
This blog is not going to be curated. I’m not going to show you the good light and the tidy desk and the perfectly composed flat lay of my morning coffee. My desk is not tidy. I’m not sure my desk has a surface, technically. What I am going to do is show up here honestly, maybe even daily— with the things that are working, the things that are not, the projects I’m proud of and the ones I abandoned at the fifteen-percent mark because something shiny happened.
Sometimes I get things right. Sometimes I absolutely do not, and those stories are usually more interesting anyway.
If you’re here because you’re neurodivergent and figuring it out late, welcome. If you’re here because you’re curious about what it looks like to sit on ninety-eight completed manuscripts for years before finally letting them out into the light, welcome. If you’re here because you want to watch someone simultaneously run a small farm, manage a cat parliament, volunteer for too many things, and launch a publishing career in their sixties, I promise it’s going to be a ride.
If you’re here for the cat content: also welcome, and I’ll try not to disappoint you.
And if you’re here because of the books — the ones that are finally, slowly making their way out into the world — you’re very welcome here too. I’ll leave a door open for you when they arrive.
This is the brain dump. This is the honest account. This is me, with my two degrees and my fifteen cats and my ninety-eight books and my twenty-five opinionated birds, muddling through with as much grace as I can manage on any given day.
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