Tag: writing

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. 🖤

In Which The Cat Holds Nocturnal Bootcamp And Sunday Does Its Worst

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. 🖤

In Which It Rains And I Have Ideas I’m Not Allowed To Start Yet

It rained today. Properly, committedly, Tasmanian-winter-is-coming rained. Which did not stop us loading ourselves into the car and heading to the Westbury markets, because reconnaissance waits for no weather system and the book van isn’t going to scout its own prospects.

The verdict: disappointing, with an asterisk.

Westbury is lovely. The drive is lovely. The idea of the markets is lovely. The reality was somewhat thin on the ground — not a great deal on offer in terms of what we were hoping to find — but the more surprising discovery was the payment situation. Or rather, the lack of one. A remarkable number of stall holders were cash only, which in the year we are currently living in is a choice that I find genuinely baffling. The book van will absolutely have electronic payment because I would like to actually sell books to people who, like most humans in 2025, do not routinely carry cash. Filed under: lessons learned before we’ve even started.

Came home damp and slightly deflated, spent the rest of the day making graphics for social media because apparently that is just my life now. The three universes require a frankly unreasonable amount of visual content and I am the person who has to create it. Future Suzy will be grateful. Present Suzy’s eyes are doing that thing they do after too many hours of screen time.

Watched a few more episodes of Off Campus in the evening. My verdict remains: it’s fine. It’s perfectly okay television. The thing that is keeping me watching is the hockey, and the hockey alone, because I am a died in the wool hockey person and we support the hockey in whatever form it presents itself. This is not negotiable. This is doctrine. The show could be considerably more compelling than it is and I would still be there for the ice time, and I will say no more on that subject except that Heated Rivalry remains undefeated in my personal rankings.

And then — because my brain apparently decided that what today needed was one more thing — I had a realisation about the Compass Point universe.

The origin series. How they got to be the soldiers they are before I got my hands on them and broke them. Except here is the thing: it already exists. All of it. Two hundred and seventy thousand words of it, sitting there, fully written, because that was the original form of Compass Point. The babies. The fledgling soldiers. The version of these men and women that existed before everything that comes after happened to them.

I wrote it. And then I made a decision.

I decided that writing broken ex-soldiers trying to rebuild their lives was more enriching than writing soldiers I was in the process of breaking. The destination interested me more than the journey. So I pivoted, and Compass Point became what it is now, and the 270,000 words went into a drawer, metaphorically speaking, where they have been sitting ever since in the particular patient way that large manuscripts have when they know their time will come.

Their time will come.

Just — not yet. I have two novels releasing in thirty days, a book van to launch, and a renovation bearing down on me. The 270,000 words will keep. They’ve already waited this long.

The future will deal with it accordingly.

The future is already making a list. 🖤

I have three additional observations about Off Campus that I feel compelled to share.

First: the MMC has curls. Magnificent, abundant, absolutely delicious curls that even a granny-aged woman finds herself wanting to run her fingers through. Full credit where it’s due. Those curls are doing a lot of heavy lifting for the show’s watchability and they know it.

Second: the FMC has, and I say this as a purely aesthetic observation, probably the roundest, perkiest breasts I have ever seen on a television screen. They sit there. They jiggle politely. They are present in, and occasionally almost out of, whatever scanty top she happens to be wearing in any given scene. I respect the commitment.

Third, and this is the one that actually matters:

I’ve worked out the difference. The real one, underneath all the budget and chemistry conversations. The Heated Rivalry boys lived their characters. This lot act theirs. And that distinction — small in description, enormous in effect — is everything.

HR gave us great ugly tears. The kind that aren’t pretty, that come with awkward silences and people not knowing where to look and absolute, overwhelming, unperformed joy when the moment called for it. You felt it in your chest because they felt it in theirs.

Off Campus gives me dry cheeks in the crying scenes and vacancy behind the eyes in the happy ones.

The curls remain exceptional.

Enough said. 🏒🖤

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. 🖤

In Which Yesterday Was A Lot, And Mumma Knows What She’s About

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.

The Pusheen sits nearby, empty, watching.

Mumma does not care. Mumma has the fire. 🖤

Day Three of the Pusheen Bed Situation: Evidence

A brief recap for those just joining us: a Pusheen cat bed was purchased for the two small cats. The small cats have not used it. This is their story now.

Today, the small cats made alternative arrangements. Our tiniest girl took to her tower, seen here conducting surveillance from altitude.

Hopalong retreated to one of the large cave beds. They had both, wisely, decided this was someone else’s problem.

Except that it wasn’t quite that simple, because we have just received new information.

The tiniest girl did, in fact, attempt the Pusheen bed. She climbed in while Mumma was already in residence. This tells us two things: first, that our smallest cat is considerably braver than previously assessed, and second, that she is also, ultimately, sensible — because comfort could not be achieved, and she retreated. One does not argue with Mumma, and one does not, apparently, successfully nap beside her either. Mumma takes up a certain amount of physical and psychological space that does not leave much room for a small cat seeking a comfortable afternoon.

And Mumma herself. Fifteen years old. In a house where other cats growl and posture, Mumma simply looks at whoever has displeased her — a slow, baleful, ancient stare — and they retreat. Every time. Without exception. She settled into the Pusheen at lunchtime as though it had always been hers, because as far as she was concerned, it had.

Then the dinner bell rang.

Mumma has never once been late for a meal.

And into the vacancy slipped V1 — V2’s thinner, considerably smarter sister (if they were dogs V2 would be a labrador, V1 would be a doberman), who had been watching this entire situation unfold and quietly doing the maths. While V2, the original coveter, the cat who has spent three days glaring at and lying in front of and dramatically sulking beside the Pusheen bed, was presumably looking the other way — her sister simply got in.

V2 remains foiled.

The small cats remain bedless, despite one valiant attempt.

The Pusheen bed has now been: worn as a decorative millinery by V2, blocked by V2, attempted by the tiniest girl (with Mumma present, which was ambitious), napped in extensively by Mumma, and successfully occupied by V1. It has been ignored entirely by Hopalong, who made a sensible decision early and is sleeping peacefully in a cave bed.

Everyone is winning except V2, who is having a very bad week, and the people who bought the bed. 🖤

A Day of New Beginnings (and One Very Determined Cat)

Well, today was one of those days that reminds you why you do this mad, wonderful job.

We finally met Paul — the artist who is going to bring the worlds of Bella Bruce, Avery Beckett, Tara Benson Boyd and KS Buckley to life on the page. All four series, all four very different universes, one very talented human. And I am delighted to tell you that he is an absolute gem. We met the whole family today and they are just lovely — the kind of people you feel like you’ve known for years after an afternoon together. I had one of those moments where everything just… clicks. This is going to be the right fit for a long time. I can feel it.

We workshopped a mountain of ideas — particularly around Of Fables and Fantasies and where she goes next — and I have thoughts. Many thoughts. Possibly too many thoughts, in the way that only happens when you’re sitting across from someone who actually gets what you’re trying to do. I’ll untangle those for you in a separate post when my brain has had a chance to settle.

For now though, I am just sitting in the very happy glow of a creative partnership that feels like it’s going to be something special.

In entirely unrelated news: I purchased a cat bed today. A very nice cat bed. Specifically purchased for our two smallest residents, who are currently being supervised by fourteen others and deserve a space of their own.

Reader, I did not anticipate that our largest child would take one look at this bed and simply decide that it belonged to her. Only her head fits in it. Just her head. She is aware of this. She has made her peace with it. She is, in fact, aggressively comfortable with just her head in a cat bed that was designed for an animal approximately one fifth of her size.

I present to you: V2 alias FattyPuff. The Pusheen bed is on her head. The entire rest of her is somewhere behind it, living its best life on my window seat. The little pink cat cushion in the background is witnessing this and has opinions. Fattypuff has none. Fattypuff has only vibes.

The small cats, for whom the bed was purchased, remain bedless.

She is magnificent and she knows it. 🖤Photographic evidence below, because some things need to be seen to be believed.

It’s fine. Everything is fine.

It was still a really good day. 🐾

In Which I Murder Two Mice in a Single Week (and Other Tales from the Editing Trenches)

I have killed two mice this week.

Not the furry kind — although given that I live in rural Tasmania with fifteen cats, that particular tally is considerably higher and I accept no responsibility for it. I mean the small plastic kind. The kind with the little scroll wheel that is, as it turns out, not built to survive the editing habits of a romance novelist in the middle of a manuscript crisis.

The scroll wheel went first. Then the clicks became increasingly non-committal, the kind of performance where the mouse would technically register the click but in a way that suggested it was doing so under duress. And then, on mouse number two, I watched the scroll wheel spin freely and uselessly like a tiny hamster wheel that had seen things it could not unsee, and I knew it was over.

Two mice. One week.

In my defence, I have been editing.

Not in a pleasant, let’s-refine-the-prose kind of way. I mean deep-trench, where-did-that-paragraph-go, I-know-I-wrote-this-scene-but-I-cannot-locate-it-in-any-of-the-seventeen-iterations-of-this-document kind of editing. Some of my current manuscripts are on their fifth or sixth pass. What that means in practice is that I have taken scenes out and put them back in. I have moved chapters around like furniture in a room I’m never satisfied with. I have cut a beautiful paragraph because it slowed the pacing, grieved it, come back three days later and pasted it into a different chapter, realised it didn’t work there either, and the paragraph now lives in a document called good_bits_dont_delete.docx along with seventy-three other orphans.

The scroll wheel is the victim of all this frantic up-and-down-the-document activity. The endless hunting. The it was here a minute ago. The scrolling up to check a character’s eye colour because I’ve used three different shades across six drafts and I cannot be trusted with continuity.

Here is what nobody tells you about being deep in multiple series simultaneously: the books start to blur. Not in terms of characters — I know my characters the way I know my cats, which is to say completely and with great fondness and an awareness of exactly which ones will cause problems — but in terms of where things are. Which version has the scene. Which draft kept the subplot. Whether that line of dialogue was cut for length or moved to a later chapter or exists only in the document called backup_backup_REAL_backup_FINAL.docx.

The mice are paying the price for this structural chaos.

I have ordered replacements. Possibly two, on the theory that I might as well accept who I am as a person and an editor and plan accordingly. I am also looking, somewhat desperately, into better document management — because while I love the chaos of a novel in progress, the chaos of losing a novel inside itself is a different and less romantic experience.

If you’re a fellow writer who has also achieved the impressive feat of scrolling a mouse into an early grave, I would love to know I’m not alone. And if you have a genuinely foolproof system for tracking what you’ve moved, cut, or buried alive in a miscellaneous document — please, for the sake of the mice, tell me about it in the comments.

The cats, at least, are fine. Thriving, even. Possibly because they do not edit.

Suzy is a romance novelist writing as Bella Bruce, Avery Beckett, and KS Buckley. She lives in rural Tasmania with fifteen cats and an increasingly unreasonable number of half-finished manuscripts. She also runs Of Fables and Fantasies, a wandering mobile bookshop.

The Homeless Plot Bunny

I have a problem.

Not a serious problem. Not even an unusual problem, if you know writers. But a problem nonetheless.

I have a plot bunny and nowhere to put it.

It arrived the way they always do — uninvited, poorly timed, and entirely too comfortable making itself at home in the back of my head. It’s a cowboy series. Historical, probably. Maybe fantasy. Possibly both, because apparently I have no instinct for simplicity. The details are still fuzzy and the world is still mostly smoke and suggestion, but the feeling of it is there, which is usually how these things start.

And here’s the thing about cowboys.

They’re a little bit magic already, aren’t they? Before you add a single supernatural element, before you build a world or a magic system or decide what lives in the dark beyond the firelight — there’s already something about them. Those impossibly narrow hips. The broad shoulders. Just enough stubble to read as rugged rather than untidy. The particular way a man looks when he’s capable and quiet and not particularly interested in proving either. Cowboys occupy a very specific space in the imagination and they have done since I was a child watching westerns and feeling something I couldn’t yet name.

I’ve wanted to write them for years. You may remember I mentioned this.

The problem is that none of my four authors are immediately putting their hand up.

Bella took one look and went back to her hockey rink. She’s not wrong — her universe is full and loud and has very specific energy, and cowboys don’t quite fit the frequency. I respect the boundary even if I’m slightly annoyed by it.

Avery is considering. There’s an argument to be made — your protective soldier and your weathered cowboy are not, at their core, entirely different creatures. Both capable. Both carrying something. Both with that particular brand of quiet competence that I find endlessly compelling to write. Avery’s thinking about it. She hasn’t said no.

But if the magic comes — and I think it wants to come, I think that’s part of what the bunny is asking for — then it might really belong to Tara. Tara’s whole world runs on the old magic, the wild magic, the kind that lives in landscape and bloodline and the spaces between things. And there’s something about the American West, about that particular quality of vast and merciless and beautiful, that feels like it could hold that kind of magic very naturally.

So for now the cowboys are living in the hallway. Waiting to find out whose door they belong behind.

I’ll let you know when someone claims them.

The Four of Us

Let me explain something, because it’s probably overdue.

If you go looking for me on the internet — the writing me, not the fifteen-cats-and-a-rainy-view-of-the-Western-Tiers me — you will find not one author but four. Bella Bruce. Avery Beckett. Tara Benson Boyd. And KS Buckley, who I share with my best friend and writing soulmate Karen, because apparently one of everything was never going to be enough for either of us.

There are two reasons this happened, and I’ll be honest about both of them.

The first is that when I was going through university they hammered one particular rule into us with genuine conviction: one author cannot write in more than one genre. It confuses the reader, they said. It’s messy, they said. A brand is a promise, they said, in that way academics have of making marketing sound like philosophy. I absorbed this so thoroughly that even when I eventually threw most of what I learned about publishing out the window, I kept the pen names. Turns out they weren’t entirely wrong — each of my four writers does have a genuinely different voice and style, and keeping them as separate people works better than trying to shift gears inside the one identity. My brain seems to agree, even when the rest of me finds it absolutely exhausting.

The second reason is simpler and considerably more personal: there are parts of my family who would mock me mercilessly for writing romance. The smut, they’d call it, with that particular tone that means they think they’re being funny. I’d have had a pseudonym regardless of genre rules, just to keep the peace and my dignity intact. I simply didn’t anticipate that one pseudonym would quietly become four.

So: Bella Bruce writes sports romance — hockey, mostly, though her universe has expanded to include rockstar and movie star romance because apparently I have no restraint. Avery Beckett writes military romance with thriller tendencies. Tara Benson Boyd writes whimsical fae romantasy. And KS Buckley writes magical realism and detective noir — that one belongs to Karen and me together, in theory, though the distance between Portland and rural Tasmania is doing its level best to complicate things. We have the people. We have the story. We just need to nail down the magic system and the grit, and then we’ll be properly on our way.

There’s a funny thing about KS Buckley’s main characters, actually. Sharp-eyed readers of Avery’s books might notice something familiar about a pair called Marc and Finn. Those two are, in their own way, a version of KS’s world — the same essential people, living a different life. And if something about them seems oddly familiar beyond that, well. You might be thinking of a certain television show. Our plans for these characters never quite fitted the fanfic box, even when that’s where we started out. There’s no shame in fanfic — none whatsoever — but that is absolutely a tale for another day.

This is probably one of the last times I’ll lay all of that out here. This blog is not my writing life — it’s the brain dump that keeps me and the four authors living in my head from collectively losing the plot. You’ll hear about the writing on series launch days, because those make me nervous and excited in equal measure and I tend to spill over a bit. Otherwise, this is just me. Suzy. Clan of three humans, fifteen cats, an indeterminate number of chickens, and a view of the mountains when the weather allows.

The four of them can look after themselves.