fiction – thestationhousenotebook

Sheds, a Smut Hut and the Great Shuffle

Big news from the stationhouse, and for once it isn’t about a cat turning up after a mysterious absence or a goose holding a grudge.

The sheds are finished.

I’ll give you a moment. I needed a few myself.

For those of you who haven’t been following the saga (lucky you), there has been building going on out the back for what feels like most of my natural life. Tradies, deliveries, mud, more mud, a lot of standing in the yard with a cup of tea looking at things and nodding as though I understood them. The guinea fowl supervised. Loudly. Constantly. With a running commentary nobody asked for. If you’ve never had a building project overseen by guinea fowl, imagine a team of very small, very shrill site managers who disapprove of everything and say so at a volume usually reserved for fire alarms.

But it’s done. Actually done. Walls, roof, doors that open and, more importantly, doors that shut.

Which means I am now the proud owner of a Smut Hut.

Yes, that’s what I’m calling it. No, I won’t be taking suggestions. When you write as many kissing books as I do, under as many names as I do, you earn the right to a room of your own with a slightly scandalous name. Virginia Woolf asked for a room of one’s own. She just didn’t think to name it properly.

It’s my writing space. And my podcasting space. And my blogging space. Basically, it’s where all the words live now, whether they’re being typed, recorded or rambled into a microphone. A door I can close. A desk that isn’t the board across my lap, where I won’t have to shift a manuscript every time someone wants to eat dinner like a civilised person. Somewhere the hockey boys and the soldiers and the fae and the country coppers can all live together in glorious chaos without spilling into the rest of the house. (They will spill anyway. They always do. But the theory is lovely.)

And Jo’s sewing room is finished too. A proper one, with room to spread out, room for fabric, room for all the bits and bobs that turn into the beautiful bookish things she makes. No more packing everything away at the end of the day. No more finding pins in places pins should never be. I am excited for her. I am also quietly excited for her bed, which may finally be pin-free.

Here’s the catch, though. Finished doesn’t mean ready. Right now we have two lovely, clean, empty rooms and a house that is still absolutely full of everything that’s supposed to go in them.

So, for the next little while, life here is going to be one long game of shuffle. Shifting things. Setting up. Moving in. Carrying boxes from one end of the property to the other and then, inevitably, carrying half of them back again because we put them in the wrong place. Deciding where the bookshelves go. Then deciding again. Then deciding a third time, because the light is different in the afternoon and I have Opinions about where the sun should fall on my desk.

And because the universe has a sense of timing, the shipping container has arrived as well.

I know a container isn’t glamorous. Nobody’s writing romance novels about a big steel box parked out the back. (Yet. Give me time.) But for us it’s a small miracle, because it means storage. Real storage. The kind where the things you aren’t using right now can go and live somewhere that isn’t the spare room, the hallway, the corner of the lounge or that one chair that stopped being a chair years ago and became a shelf.

Which means, for the first time in a long time, we might actually be able to declutter the house. Not completely. Let’s not get carried away. This is still a stationhouse with a lot of cats, a lot of books and three women who have never met a box they didn’t want to keep. But a little. Enough to see some floor. Enough to put a cup of tea down without moving three things first.

The cats, I should say, have views. The cats are not allowed in the sheds. This is non-negotiable. The sheds are verboten. Fifteen-odd cats have been informed of this policy and, as a group, have chosen to see it as more of a suggestion. I fully expect to spend the next month shooing someone away from the Smut Hut door, and recording a microphone while a very offended face stares at me through the window. They can have the whole house. They have always had the whole house. The sheds are ours.

So that’s where we are. Lots of lifting. Lots of sorting. Lots of standing in doorways going, “Now where did I put…?” And underneath all of it, a feeling I wasn’t quite expecting: that this place is slowly, finally, turning into exactly what we hoped it would be.

Two rooms built for making things. A home with a bit more breathing space. And a very long list of boxes.

Wish us luck. Send biscuits.

Elvis has left the Concert Hall

Or: Service Station Sandwiches, Ninety Stairs and an Aldi Grail Quest

First, a confession. If you’ve been waiting on tenterhooks for my last post about the Spirit and her glorious showers, it turns out my phone decided to publish it as a draft. As a draft. It sat there, finished and polished and visible to precisely no one, while I went about my week believing I’d shared my thoughts with the world. So if it pops up now, that’s why. Technology, like the Strait, does what it wants.

Anyway. The drive up was fine. Eighteen hours is eighteen hours, and there’s not much you can do to dress it up, but we did our best with an endless parade of service station sandwiches. I now consider myself something of an authority on the genre. There’s the egg and lettuce that has clearly been through things. There’s the ham and cheese that tastes faintly of its plastic triangle. And there’s the chicken and mayonnaise that you approach with hope and leave with regret. I steered clear of all of them. I stuck, loyally and without exception, to the roast beef, cheese and relish. It’s a little fancy for a servo, I grant you, practically fine dining by fuel-stop standards, but that’s not why I chose it. I chose it because the relish hides a multitude of sins. Whatever the beef has been through, whatever the cheese has seen, the relish covers it all with a sweet, tangy blanket of forgiveness. Eighteen hours, umpteen servos, one sandwich. I regret nothing.

We rolled into the aunt’s at four in the morning, which is not so much an arrival time as a cry for help. We slept until midday, then lounged about in that pleasant, slightly stunned way you do after a very long drive, until it was time for the main event.

The main event was an Elvis tribute concert. The aunt was going with her two sisters, one of their husbands and the other one’s daughter, and Jo and I were promoted to official chauffeurs. Let me set the scene with one statistic: the average age in that room was about eighty-two. Possibly higher. These were people who saw the actual Elvis the first time round and had firm opinions about whether this one measured up.

And they had dressed for the occasion. Oh, how they had dressed. The men had sideburns, proper ones, and every one of those sideburns had clearly been silver-white that morning before being treated to a generous application of black shoe polish. You could tell. You could always tell. There’s a particular flat, matte, boot-cupboard black that no hair has ever grown naturally, and it was everywhere. The women, meanwhile, had gone in hard on the sparkle. Sequins, diamantés, glitter, lamé. Any one of them could have been hung from the ceiling and used as a disco ball, and the room would have been adequately lit. And to a person, not one of them was wearing anything that matched. Not a single coordinated outfit in the building. Leopard print met paisley. Gold lamé met a floral cardigan. Somebody’s sequinned top was having a frank disagreement with somebody’s tartan trousers. It was glorious. It was a room full of people who’d stopped worrying what anyone thought about forty years ago, and honestly, I’ve never been more jealous.

The venue, in its wisdom, had a grand staircase between the showroom and the floor level. Ninety stairs. Ninety. For an audience with an average age of eighty-two. I can only imagine the meeting where someone approved that. The disabled lift, bless it, worked harder that night than any of the performers. Up and down, up and down, carrying its precious cargo of hip replacements and handbags. If there’s an award for the evening’s hardest worker, I’m nominating the lift.

I’m told a good time was had by all. I can’t confirm this myself, as my role ended at the door, but nobody came home complaining, which for that particular crowd is a glowing review.

Saturday was given over to a quest. Somewhere out there in the Aldi Special Buys universe there exists an electric eight-in-one barbecue, steamer, smoker and, honestly, I’ve forgotten the other five things it does. Possibly it does your taxes. Possibly it walks the dog. All I know is that I hadn’t been able to get my hands on one, and I spent a good chunk of the day tracking one down. There’s a particular kind of determination that comes over a person when an appliance has been denied to them, and I had it in spades. Did I need a machine that does eight things? Probably not. Did I want one? With every fibre of my being.

In between appliance hunting, I had lunch with my brother and his two spawn, aged twelve and eleven. They’re at that lovely age where they’re still happy to sit with the grown-ups but are starting to be very much their own people, full of opinions and theories and stories that go on a bit. And then, somewhere between lunch and dessert, one of them said, quite plainly, that they don’t see me enough. I’m not ashamed to say it nearly undid me. Kids have a way of saying the truest thing in the room without any fuss at all, and then going back to their chips. I’m still thinking about it. I think I’ll be thinking about it for a while.

Then yesterday I flew home on Virgin, leaving Jo behind to be the good and useful one for the month. It was a lovely flight, smooth and on time, with the bonus entertainment of my seatmate, who was some sort of influencer. She spent the whole flight either making videos or meditating, switching between the two with impressive ease. Serene one minute, talking brightly into her phone the next.

Meanwhile, in the seat beside her, I was editing M/M erotica.

I have no idea whether she glanced over. I like to think that if she did, she simply added it to her meditation, breathed in, breathed out, and let it go. Either way, I hope I gave her something to think about between takes. It’s the least I could do.

And now I’m home. The cats have been informed. Judging by the looks I’m getting, they’re still considering whether to forgive me. The bull hasn’t noticed I was gone, which is either a compliment to the house-sitting arrangements or an insult to me, and I’m choosing not to find out which.

It’s good to be back. Now, about that barbecue.

— Suzy

Last of the Party People

Or: How We Farewelled the Spirit by Being Asleep for Most of It

There is a particular kind of person who boards an overnight ferry, finds the bar, and treats the whole of Bass Strait as a nightclub that happens to float. I have seen these people. I have admired them from a distance, the way you might admire a bird of paradise doing its little dance: with wonder, a touch of envy, and absolutely no intention of joining in.

Jo and I are not those people. Jo and I were in bed by half past eight.

I want that on the record because I suspect it will be used against us later, and I would rather confess it myself. Half past eight. The sun had barely finished setting. Somewhere above us, people were no doubt ordering their second drink and solving the world’s problems, and there we were, tucked in like a pair of Victorian invalids, having a lovely time.

It was, in our defence, a very good crossing. The Strait was on its best behaviour, which is not something you can say about it often, and the old girl rolled along so gently I barely noticed we were moving. Which brings me to the slightly sentimental bit, so bear with me.

This may well have been our last trip on Spirit One. With the new ships coming, the old Spirits’ days are numbered, and I found myself getting a bit misty about a boat. A boat! I have walked those carpeted corridors more times than I can count, usually hauling a bag that was too heavy and full of things I did not need, and there is a strange comfort in a place that never changes. The same slightly chilly cabin. The same hum of the engines coming up through the floor. The same announcement at some dark hour of the morning telling you, very cheerfully, to get up. I am sure the new ships will be shinier and better in every measurable way. But I will miss the old one, and I will not apologise for that.

There is one thing I will be lobbying for, should anyone at the shipyard be reading, and that is the showers. Please, I beg you, keep the showers. The Spirit’s showers have the kind of water pressure that can blow you clean across the bathroom if you step in unprepared, and I say that as someone who has stepped in unprepared. More than once. And when you turn the tap to hot, you get hot. Not lukewarm. Not the apologetic tepid dribble that most of the world’s plumbing seems to think is acceptable. Actual, honest, scalding hot. They are, without exaggeration, the most satisfying showers I have ever met, and yes, I said met, because a shower like that is less a fixture and more an acquaintance you look forward to seeing again. If the new ships come with some sad little eco-trickle, I will be writing a strongly worded letter. Possibly several.

So we said our goodbyes in the most fitting way we could think of, which was to sleep soundly through most of it. I like to think she would have wanted it that way.

Now we are on the road, and here is where the arithmetic gets humbling. From here to Queensland is roughly eighteen hours of driving. Eighteen. I have written entire chapters in less time. I suspect that before we reach the border I will have plotted several books, abandoned two of them, and developed strong opinions about every roadhouse sausage roll between here and there.

The plan is to stay with the aunt. Jo, being the better person of the two of us (this is widely acknowledged and I have stopped arguing), is staying on for the month to give her a hand. I, being the one with fifteen cats, a Highland bull, a lovesick sheep and several books that will not write themselves, fly home on Saturday. Jo will be doing genuinely useful and kind things for a whole month. I will be doing a few days of being fed and then leaving. We each play to our strengths.

I will say this for Jo: she has the patience of someone who has listened to me narrate an entire plot out loud across half the mainland and still agreed to get in the car with me. She does the perplexed little smile she saves for the weirdo creatives, nods in the right places, and occasionally asks a question so sensible it unravels a whole subplot. Every writer should have one. Mine is currently in charge of the snacks.

Back home, I am told, the menagerie is carrying on without me, which is both a relief and mildly offensive. I fully expect to arrive on Saturday to a round of pointed stares from the cats, who will want it known that the service in my absence was not up to standard.

But that is Saturday’s problem. Today’s problem is eighteen hours of bitumen, a car full of luggage that is somehow heavier than when we packed it, and the quiet satisfaction of being extremely well rested.

The party people may have had the better night. We, I suspect, will have the better morning.

More from the road soon, assuming I survive the sausage rolls.

The Cat Who Walked Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Khad his own plans.

He arrived home on Monday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frightful Weather, Small Consolations, and Amazon Being a Dragon

The weather today was, in a word, awful.

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

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

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

In the meantime I have been making a colouring book.

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

And then there is the other thing.

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

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

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

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

It is not the forward motion I wanted today.

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

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

🖤 🏒

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.

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.

🖤 🏒

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.

🖤 🏒

The Day the Wheels Fell Off (And Hopalong Asked Nicely)

I had a plan for today. A proper, colour-coded, very-adult plan. Blog content, scheduled posts, maybe even a newsletter draft if I was feeling ambitious.

Reader, none of that happened.

Instead, I am writing to you from the middle of what I can only describe as domestic chaos theatre, surrounded by furniture that has migrated to the centre of every room like some kind of indoor Stonehenge, waiting for an electrician who — bless him, he’s busy, it’s not his fault — won’t be able to get back to us until next week. So here we all are. Me, the cats, the cousin, Jo, and approximately four hundred kilograms of displaced furniture, just… existing together in the middle of the floor.

Jo, for her part, would like to burn it all down and start again. This is not an exaggeration. Jo has a very particular relationship with order and tidiness, and what is currently happening to her living environment is the stuff of her personal nightmares. She is coping. Barely. With the energy of someone who is very pointedly not looking at the corner where three chairs and a bookshelf are having an impromptu meeting.

The internet has been up and down for two days. Seriously, more up and down action than a cheap hookers knickers at happy hour. Two days! I will not tell you what I have been calling my hardware situation in the privacy of my own head, but let’s just say it rhymes with “Turdy McTurd Pants” and leave it at that. The connection has been spottier than a chocoholic teenager’s face, which has been a particular adventure given that we have a houseguest electrician. I’ll be honest — I was bracing for the cousin to struggle with it. She has not. She is, in fact, handling the Great Internet Outage of this week with a cheerful resilience that I did not see coming and which I find both impressive and slightly annoying, given that I am over here refreshing my connection every four minutes like it owes me money.

So. Nothing scheduled is getting done today. And I’ve decided that’s fine. Sometimes the universe puts its foot down — or in this case, pulls all your furniture into the centre of the room — and you just have to work around it.

Which brings me to the actual highlight of this entire chaotic day, because every terrible day needs one.

Yesterday, I lit the fire, and Hopalong — my little spina bifida girl — claimed her spot in front of it in her pink fluffy bed and basked. That’s the only word for it. She basked in the warm orange glow like she was on a very small, very cosy holiday, and it was the best thing I saw all day.

This morning we woke late, which meant the whole household launched immediately into that particular brand of morning chaos — feeding everyone, sorting the animals, trying to impose some kind of order on a house that is currently doing its best impression of a furniture warehouse. I was moving through it all on autopilot when I walked past the fireplace and stopped.

Hopalong was there. Quietly, politely, pawing at the glass door.

Just asking. Just wondering if perhaps today she might have her warm orange sunshine back again.

I lit the fire.

Obviously I lit the fire.

Jo could not even be annoyed about the delay to the morning schedule. Some things transcend OCD.

So that’s where I am today. Off-schedule, slightly frantic, very much typing this to clear my head rather than hit any kind of content goal. Some days are just like this — the house has its own agenda and your job is mostly to get out of the way and try not to make eye contact with Jo while she contemplates arson.

Normal transmission will resume. Probably once the electrician comes and the furniture goes back where it belongs and the internet stops performing its impression of a very indecisive yo-yo.

Until then, I have a fire, I have a cat who knows exactly what she wants and asks for it with the quiet dignity of someone who has earned it, and honestly? That’s enough.

In Which The House Continues Its Campaign Of Attrition And I End Up Behind Bars

Luke was here today. Luke is our favourite electrician — loyal, patient, competent, and possessed of the specific spiritual fortitude required to work in this house — and he spent the day installing power points. Twelve in the living room. Eight in the library. And then he got to my bedroom and asked how many I wanted in there.

I said: all of the power points.

I am getting eight. Which is, in fairness, a lot of power points. But I want it noted that my ambitions were significantly larger, and I stand by the impulse, because I am extremely tired of daisy chaining power boards across the room to access basic electrical services. Particularly since my bedroom also hosts the modem and the network hub, which means it is functioning simultaneously as a bedroom and a server room and the power situation has always reflected this in the most chaotic possible way.

The house was, as is its custom, an absolute arsehole about the whole project.

The walls are lathe and plaster. Old school to the point of being genuinely historical, and plastered over so many times that what we have now is not technically plaster — it is powder, held together by an outer skin of paint and apparently spite. We have tried to hang things on these walls. What happens is: you put the screw in, the wall considers this briefly, and then opens into a gaping maw you could put your head into. Luke dealt with this with patience and muttered commentary I have learned not to fully register. He left at 4.30, which is early for him, which tells you everything about the nature of the day. The walls foiled enough of his plans that we currently have no power to the entertainment centre area, which means no Jeeves and Wooster tonight, which I am taking personally.

Now. The boudoir.

The reason my room has been resembling the city tip is simple: I open the door, shove my personal belongings approximately in the direction of the room, and close the door. I create stacks on surfaces. Towers of intention. And Chooky, who conducts regular patrols with the thoroughness of a quality inspector and considerably less care, knocks the stacks over. Pushes things off counters. Redistributes my belongings according to her own inscrutable logic. I used to pick everything up daily. At some point I reached the threshold and said, not quite out loud but absolutely spiritually: fuck this, gravity wins. Everything stayed in its landing spot for longer than I will specify.

Today everything was stacked. Not sorted — stacked. Luke needs access to finish the installation. This is apparently the motivator that years of personal resolve could not provide.

On the subject of Chooky: I also bought cat gates yesterday. Until now my system for giving her a safe space was a gate hook that pulled my bedroom door to — open enough for air and dignity, closed enough to keep the other twelve from deciding that wherever Chooky was constituted an excellent place to be. It worked, technically. The limitation was that Chooky had to remain at hook-height or above, which meant floor time was largely theoretical. The gates solve this. What they look like is my doorway is now the entrance to a medium security facility. I am on the inside. I feel like I’m in Alcatraz.

Chooky is lying flat on the floor. Whiskers forward. Entirely at ease. She is, by every available measure, significantly more content than she has been in some time. She has the room. She has the floor. She has a view of the hallway through what I must now accept is her personal portcullis and she finds this arrangement extremely satisfactory.

She does not care about my feelings on the matter even slightly.

In much better news: my best friend, who lives in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, has been having a fortnight. She was given notice to leave her rental by August and has been sad and cranky and frantic accordingly. I have coped with this by trawling Zillow at all hours and sending frantic links — how about this one, what’s the neighbourhood like, have we seen that house on COPS — which I’m certain has been enormously helpful.

Last Friday, she and her wife put in an offer on a house.

Today, they heard they got it.

I am so excited I am practically a liability. Entirely disproportionate response to something happening to someone else. I cannot be regulated. She deserves it completely.

Now if the orange turnip would vacate the premises, I could actually get there and celebrate in person. I miss the Pacific Northwest. I miss my Hawaii. I miss my friend.

One of these days. 🖤