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. 🖤
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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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