mental-health – 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

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

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.

🖤 🏒

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.

🖤 🏒

In Which I Have A Word With Myself

Today feels like a wasted day.

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

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

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

So. There’s that.

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

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

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

I know what I need to do.

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

I just need to actually do it.

Tomorrow, Chooky.

Wake me up. 🖤

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.