love – thestationhousenotebook

The Rent-Free Tenants: Or, What Would You Like to Read?

In which I ask the small and very select readership of this blog a question, and promise a poll, technology permitting.

I have a confession to make, and it’s not a surprising one to anyone who’s met me. There are a great many things living in my head, and almost none of them pay rent.

They don’t do the dishes either. They leave the lights on at three in the morning, they bring friends over without asking, and every so often one of them stands in the middle of the room and demands to be written about. I’ve been a terrible landlord for years. I’ve just let them all stay.

So it occurs to me that the sensible thing (and I’m aware “sensible” is a stretch around here) would be to ask you which of them you’d actually like to hear from.

I know there aren’t many of you. I can probably picture most of your faces. But that’s rather the charm of it, isn’t it? This is less a blog and more a long conversation over the back fence, and it seems only polite to ask the people on the other side of the fence what they’d like to talk about.

The candidates

Here, in no particular order, are the tenants currently jostling for a room of their own on Stationhouse Notebook.

The farmstead. Progress reports from our semi-rural patch and the market garden we’re slowly coaxing out of it. The llamas. The Highland bull and the sheep who is hopelessly, embarrassingly in love with him. The geese, who believe they own the place, and who may well be right. What grew, what didn’t, and what the possums got first.
The cats. I’m qualified to speak on this one in the way that a person who has never once won an argument with a cat is qualified. There are a lot of them. They all have opinions. Some of them have left home and walked twenty-five kilometres back again, which tells you something about either their loyalty or the quality of the biscuits.
The writing, and the six people in my head. I write under a handful of names, and each of them is, frankly, her own woman. One writes hockey boys with marshmallow centres. One writes soldiers and their secrets. One writes fae courts. One writes murder in a little Tasmanian town. They don’t always get along, and they absolutely all want the good chair. I could introduce you to them properly, one at a time, and tell you how the books actually get made.
Semi-rural life in Tasmania. Living in an old police station in the shadow of the Western Tiers. The weather, which deserves its own blog. The neighbours, the roads, the wildlife on the roads, and what it’s actually like out here once the tourist brochures go home.
Our wobbly journey towards sustainability. Not the glossy, everything-made-of-bamboo version. The real one, with the mistakes left in. What we’re trying, what’s working, and what we’ve had to quietly abandon behind the shed.
The Halloween shenanigans. I want to be clear that I’m not calling this “decorating”. Decorating implies restraint, a colour scheme, and a person who knows when to stop. What happens here every October is shenanigans, pure and simple. This year there’s a theme, and the theme is water. Everybody is a skeleton. There’s a skeleton paddling a canoe, a skeleton having a shower, a skeleton lounging in a pool, and more where they came from. I’m prepared to document every one of them, and every questionable decision that got them there.
Something else entirely. Hockey, perhaps (you’ve been warned). The mobile bookshop. Books I’ve loved. Whatever you’re curious about. If there’s something you’ve always wanted to ask me, here’s your chance.

Or, the cheat’s answer

Of course, you might say “all of it, please, just mix it up,” which is what I’d say in your shoes and is also, if I’m honest, what’s going to happen anyway. Nothing in my life stays in its own lane. A post about the vegetable garden will turn into a post about a cat sitting in the vegetable garden, which will turn into a scene in a book. That’s just how the house works.

But I’d still love to know what makes you lean in. What’s the bit you’d come back for?

About this poll

I’d like to put this to a proper vote. I say “I’d like to” because control of technological matters is not, regrettably, one of the things living rent-free in my head. It’s more of a short-term guest that keeps losing its key.

So, if I can work out how to do it, there’ll be a poll right here. If I can’t, there won’t be, and you’ll have to tell me in the comments like it’s 2009. Either way works for me. I just want to hear from you.

Pick one, pick several, or tell me I’ve missed the obvious. I’m all ears. And so, I suspect, are the cats.

From the Stationhouse, with the kettle on x

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

Organised Chaos, Roughly Alphabetised

I want to open with a bold claim: I am kind of, sort of, organised. I’ll give you a moment to sit with that. I know. I had to sit with it too, and I still don’t fully trust it, the way you don’t fully trust a ladder even after you’ve tested the bottom rung.

Here is the evidence, presented in the order it occurred to me, which is to say no order at all.

We have business cards now. For the nook. Actual little rectangles of card with actual words on them, which I keep pulling out of my bag just to look at, the way you’d check on a sourdough starter. The nook itself exists — properly exists, not just as a plan taped to the fridge — and I am currently elbow-deep in inventorying the stock, which mostly involves me picking up a book, having a small feeling about it, and putting it down again in a different pile than the one I meant to put it in. Jo, meanwhile, is off making the bookish ephemera we’re going to sell alongside it, which is the kind of sentence I would have found deeply improbable a year ago and now just say out loud in the supermarket without blinking.

On the writing side of the ledger: the first eight books in the PHL universe are edited within an inch of their lives. I mean that literally — I think if I looked at Rookie Bloom one more time it would flinch. Now, ‘edited’ is doing some quiet lifting in that sentence — it means edited by me, by my sister, and by an editing program, three separate lines of defence, and still not yet handed over to the cousin, who reads a manuscript the way border security reads a suspicious suitcase. So there is still a very real chance those eight books come back from her with a million more changes, because nothing is truly finished until it’s survived being read through the eyes of a grammar nazi. Said with love. Enormous, terrified love. The artwork for all eight is done, which still feels like a magic trick every single time, because I am someone who once spent forty minutes deciding on a font and I have somehow produced eight finished covers without personally combusting. All the marketing artwork is done too, just sitting there patiently, waiting on delivery like a very well-behaved parcel.

What’s left in that pile is tax. Glorious, glamorous tax, going through every purchase from this whole endeavour and turning it into numbers a human accountant will one day squint at. I have not started this. I am telling you I have not started this the way you tell a doctor you’ve been meaning to get that thing looked at.

So: business, organised chaos. Genuinely. I’ll stand behind that description in a court of law.

Life outside the business and the authordom, however, remains a crime scene. Not a metaphorical one. An actual, if-you-opened-that-cupboard-you-would-need-a-lie-down one. I am aware of this. I am, very slowly, doing something about it, in the same spirit that you eat a large meal one bite at a time — mostly by ignoring the size of the plate.

The one bright, fully-assembled corner of that disaster zone is Canada. We now have all the clothes and ephemera we need for the trip, thermals included, which feels like an enormous adult achievement given that packing for cold weather usually defeats me entirely. It’s 71 days away now, which is either a very long time or no time at all, depending entirely on which pile of tax receipts I’m looking at when you ask me.

More soon — probably in a slightly different kind of chaos by then, knowing my luck.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.com

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.

Well. Here We Are.

Hello, hello. It’s been a minute. Or possibly several minutes. Time has lost most of its meaning this past week and I’m choosing to blame the weather.

We’ve had the kind of Tasmanian winter days that feel less like weather and more like a personal opinion the sky has formed about you. Grey pressing down from all directions, rain that can’t decide if it wants to be dramatic or just persistently miserable, wind that rattles the old station house windows in a way that suggests the building has something to say and is working up to it. The cats — thirteen of them now, which is a sentence I am not yet fully at peace with — have been performing collective judgement from various soft surfaces. The geese have opinions. I’ve had very little motivation to argue with any of them.

I’ve also run out of my ADHD medication, which — if you know, you know. The scaffolding just quietly disappears and you’re left standing there blinking, vaguely aware that there was a thing you were going to do, possibly several things, possibly an entire career’s worth of things, and somehow none of them are happening. I keep meaning to fill the script. I will fill the script. This is me making a promise in public so I actually do it.

In the meantime I’ve been sleeping until what can only be described as the afternoon, waking up to find the morning has fully left without me, and spending the daylight hours doing a very convincing impression of someone who is resting intentionally rather than someone who has simply misplaced their operational software.

The author socials have slid. The Bella and Avery and Tara feeds that I had very carefully been nurturing back to life are sitting quietly on their respective platforms, not bothering anyone, probably fine. I’ll find them again. Right now I’m in the mode where I know the work is there and I know I’ll get back to it and I’m trying to be kind to myself about the gap rather than catastrophising.

Trying. Being kind to yourself is its own kind of work, it turns out.

The bright spot: the author copies of Almost Yours Again — Avery Beckett’s latest — arrived today, and tomorrow Bella Bruce’s Isolated is apparently on its way, which means by the end of the week this table is going to be significantly more stacked with books that have my words in them.

I held Almost Yours Again in my hands. A real physical object with a spine and pages and everything. I love it. I love it the way you love something you made when you weren’t sure you could, the way you love a thing that exists now when once it only existed in your head. I put it on the table and kept picking it up and putting it down and picking it up again. The cats remained unimpressed. Jo said it looked lovely. I cried a little, which is allowed.

And then, inevitably, the fear arrived alongside the love. What if nobody else loves it? What if the thing I made that feels precious to me lands in the world and the world just continues being the world, unmoved?

I don’t have an answer for that fear. I’m sitting with it. I expect most writers sit with it for the entirety of their careers, so at least it’s good company.

The other thing I’ve been sitting with — and this one is a different flavour of nerve-wracking — is an idea that’s been circling for a while. I’m working up to approaching the Community Progress Association about the possibility of putting together a small Writers Festival in town next year. Something local, something that celebrates Australian romance authors and the people who love them, something that fits the specific shape of where we live rather than trying to be a scaled-down version of something bigger somewhere else.

I haven’t done it yet. I’m in the screwing-up-courage phase, which for me involves a lot of internal rehearsal of conversations that may or may not go anything like how I’ve imagined them. But I think it’s a good idea. I think the town could hold it. And I think — if I can just get myself out the door and into the room — I might be able to make the case.

Watch this space. Or watch me continue to rehearse for another fortnight and then suddenly do it all at once. Either is possible.

— Suzy writing from the old station house, Tasmania, where thirteen cats currently disagree about who owns the good armchair

Peaking, Poultry Diplomacy, and the Audacity of Sleep

I am, by any reasonable measure, peaking.

One book in the world. One two weeks from release. The second books in both series queuing up behind them like very patient, very demanding children who know their turn is coming. Life at the moment is an unending carousel of blog posts and release dates and Instagram content and newsletter chains and trying to remember which pen name needs what and when, and I am riding it with all the grace of someone who only yesterday slept until one forty in the afternoon.

In my defence — and I do have a defence — I only went to sleep after the sun came up. So technically it wasn’t a late start so much as a very committed finish to the previous day. This is the story I’m telling and I’m not taking questions.

My cousin, who is a saint among people, fed the fur babies for me while I was horizontal and completely unavailable to the world. I owe her something nice. Possibly several somethings.

Tomorrow is a real day with real tasks. Jo and I are going shopping — groceries, chicken feed, the great recycling of the accumulated drink containers which have reached a volume I’m not going to specify publicly. And we need to find some solution to the poultry situation, which has become a matter of some delicacy.

The birds have been visiting the neighbours.

Not in an aggressive way. Not in a way that suggests anything other than genuine sociable interest in what is happening next door. But poultry are not, it turns out, universally welcomed as impromptu visitors, and the neighbours have expressed that they would prefer their yard to remain a poultry-optional space. I feel this is a reasonable position to hold and I am not unsympathetic. The birds, however, have opinions about fences that I can only describe as flexible.

They are poultry. Not social butterflies. Someone needs to explain this to them.

We have also been continuing our Supernatural rewatch, which has introduced a complication I was not prepared for.

Jensen Ackles crying.

I am a grown woman of a certain age. I am, in fact, old enough to be his grandmother, a fact I am choosing to hold loosely because it is not helpful to anyone. And yet. Tears on those lashes do something to my nervous system that I cannot fully explain or justify and am not going to try. There is an instinct that fires — part maternal, part something that is absolutely not maternal — that just wants to make it better. All of it better. Not always in a PG manner. I said what I said.

I am not proud. I am also not sorry. He started it.

Anyway. One book in the world. One two weeks out. The cycle beginning again. The blogs continuing. The Instagram posts requiring their regular feeding. The chickens wandering wherever they like and the cats negotiating their complicated feelings about Pusheens.

And Dean Winchester somewhere in the middle of all of it, being unreasonably beautiful about his feelings.

This is the life. I have chosen it completely and I would choose it again.

After a sleep, though. Preferably before sunrise this time.

🖤 🏒

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.

🖤 🏒

Signs of Life (and Slightly Less Swearing)

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

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

And the internet.

Oh, the internet.

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

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

Four days.

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

Four days.

We’ll see how that whole shenanigan goes.

🖤 🏒

Rainy Days and The Clan

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.

Welcome to the Chaos: A Blog About Fumbling Through Life with Enthusiasm

Hello. Pull up a chair. Mind the cat.

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.

Glad you found it.

Now, seriously — mind the cat.