I am an associate professor of human services at a regional Midwestern university. I am also a writer of fantasy and romance, hoping to get traditionally published. I have one husband and am owned by four cats.
I am not a complainer, or at least I hope I’m not. I make an exception for my aching bones.
I’m over sixty, and that means my body has seen a lot of wear and tear. My knees are misaligned, causing a lifetime of wear on my cartilage. A car hit me when I was in my late twenties, and I have a bar and screws in my left leg; this has also caused some lasting problems in my hip.
I ache. I can’t take any of the NSAID drugs because of kidney disease, which leaves me treating all the pain for this with acetaminophen (paracetamol). It is only slightly effective, leaving me with the rest of the pain as part of my daily routine.
This is my life now. I’m told it’s part of getting older, but I don’t feel that old. Sixty is not that old, is it?
(I assume the question above presumes a big jackpot win rather than $2. The type of win that changes one’s life rather than just settles a bit of money on one.)
We (my husband and I) would proceed cautiously. First, we would get a lawyer and an accountant, and let the lawyer take over on the receipt of the funds, avoiding publicity, and the like. We would mark out a bit of money to spend in the first year so that we didn’t go wild with spending. We would spend that money on a mortgage, renovating the house and yard, which would benefit us in the short run and help us sell the house in the long run.
Then we would retire. There’s no conceivable way we could continue working under all the notoriety that a lottery win would cause.
We would work with a financial planner to set up our money in a way where we could live off the interest (not richly) and set up trusts for family members. I think we would also set up a trust for charitable purposes.
We would move to a bigger, more interesting town. Nothing too fancy and nothing too big. A college town would be nice, or an artsy town. We talk about this now as a thought exercise. We haven’t agreed on where yet.
We would be more discerning with our purchases. We would think of quality, not quantity. I think this will be the hardest part for us, as we seem obsessed with gadgets.
My biggest worry is that money might change my mind about the haves and the have-nots. I would hope I would not fall into the trap of believing that I deserved the money while others do not. I would not want to begrudge my tax dollars going to support the poor. I would not want to become a right-winger, and would do anything in my power not to be one.
This is the longest I have gone without writing. I am concerned about this, because I’m afraid I’m losing the habit. I can think of some reasons I have had so much trouble writing.
First reason is that I am facing the fact that my books may never get enough readers. It takes a miracle to get attention. Or notoriety, but I’m reluctant to go that far to get readers. I usually combat this by reminding myself that my focus should be on writing for the sake of writing. That doesn’t always work.
4×4 or truck stuck in the mud at sunset on the Applegate Trail, Black Rock Desert, NW Nevada, US
Which brings me to crippling self-doubt. I compare myself to people who get published and selling books, and I feel that there’s something wrong with my writing that readers avoid it. This is contradictory with the first reason — if people aren’t buying my books, how do they know that they’re bad? My mind is not listening to reason, however.
Third, but just as important, is that I am not finding flow in my writing lately. I’m working on a novella based in the Hidden in Plain Sight universe, and it is bogging down before it’s even started because of my nagging feeling that I have not structured it right. The other, the latest Kringle book, is likewise bogging down because of structural issues. I’m using an outline but still struggling with this.
Part of this is that none of my ideas have captured my imagination. They all feel like contractual obligations, like that album the band had to make because the record company wanted them to.
Thus, I have fallen out of the habit of writing except for this blog. I write it every day, at this point for 170 days running. Maybe this is a good thing because I have a challenging spring semester with one of my classes. Maybe this helps me in the seed-starting season (we’re going to have a garden this year if it kills us, and that’s my responsibility).
I could give up writing — I have enough books to edit and release that I’ll be releasing books yearly for the next three years. I have written sufficient books to call myself an author. I would never have to release another book other than the ones I have already written. But I miss the flow of writing, something that helped my well-being and which defined me.
I need some reassurance, some encouragement, some breakthroughs in plotting or an idea that excites me. I need one of those factors to budge so I get motivated to write.
My family had a Christmas tradition — I guess one could call it a tradition. It involved a set of candle holders that spelled out ‘Noel’ that my mother had. These are common in the US. ‘Noel’ is an Old French word that means ‘Christmas’. One might wonder why the Old French is common; keep in mind that the German version is ‘Weihnachten’, which doesn’t lend itself to candleholders.
I should point out that my mother decorated for Christmas HARD, by which I mean she decked the halls until they got dizzy and tied ribbons around everything that didn’t run away fast enough. The Noel candleholders always sat on a piece of furniture that took up part of the living room.
My father, on the other hand, had a peculiar sense of humor. And dyslexia. And a colleague named Leon. All of these came together, and my dad would rearrange the letters NOEL to spell LEON. The trick was to see how long it took Mom to recognize that the letters now spelled Leon.
I adopted the practice of rearranging the letters. This made two generations of letter-swapping, and my mother had to be extra vigilant that her decoration was not declaring ‘Leon’ She was not vigilant enough; she never caught us.
One year for Christmas, I found a cute set of block candles that spelled out ‘Noel’. I unwrapped the packaging carefully and rearranged them, then had my niece smuggle them under the Christmas tree (wrapped, of course) to Mom from Leon. This niece got the joke, because she herself started rearranging the letters, making three generations to adopt the trick. My mother also got the joke and laughed hard. The next year I got a bottle of homemade wine for a Christmas present — named Vin Leon.
My parents are gone now, but my husband and I bought a set of letters spelling out NOEL, and we rearranged them for our tree. The Christmas tree proclaims LEON.
I think it’s the flu. I’m still sick. Wish me luck.
Right now, I think I have the worst cold I’ve ever had. I was up all night last night, and this morning, writing is not a flow activity.My cat is trying to write for me, and she’s further off than I am. Time to go back to bed.
I haven’t had my coffee yet this morning. I fell asleep upright (thank goodness this is a work-from-home day) and I’m not yet awake even though I’m writing this. I guess I am a coffee addict.
Clutter is the bane of my existence. We have clutter everywhere in the house. The coffee table is piled a foot high at the moment, and the kitchen counters are covered with soup cans and boxes of cornbread mix. There’s not a place for everything unless it’s at the bottom of a pile.
We’ve considered Swedish death cleaning, but we’re sure we might need all these things someday. That’s what you get when hobbies and projects take over life. I’m sure there’s a fishing reel winder at the bottom of the table clutter that I could never get to work. The seed-starting materials are piling up by the couch where I swear I will take them down to the basement eventually.
I could reduce clutter anywhere in the house if I could only find a place to start.
I have this fascination with unincorporated areas in the US — these are not quite towns, but places that have names and very little population. They fascinate me because they obviously have a history and, at least at some time, an identity, yet many of them are forgotten now.
Some of them have road signs, such as Quitman, which is in the county where I live. I have been to Quitman and seen the small collection of houses there. According to Wikipedia, there are 45 people there in 23 households as of the 2010 census (Wikipedia, 2025). However, an unincorporated area’s road sign doesn’t have a population posted, which is part of how one can tell it’s unincorporated.
Other unincorporated areas are unmarked, but can be found in the memory of people who lived there. Wikipedia may have information on unincorporated areas in a county. Having the name of the unincorporated area, one can often locate them on a maps app on the phone. Even Gaynor, MO, which is listed in Wikipedia as ‘extinct’, can be found on Google Maps.
I have not been to Gaynor, but I have been to both Quitman and Wilcox, the two other unincorporated areas in Nodaway County, Missouri. And I remain fascinated by these former towns and not-quite towns that haven’t quite disappeared from human memory.
I have three cats, and all three have very sharp claws. They work hard to keep these claws in perfect working order, and I can attest to the functionality of these appendages. The three use their claws in unique ways to keep me in line.
Chuckie reaches out with his claws when I haven’t petted him enough. He reaches with just enough claw to sting, hinting at how much worse he could apply his claws. Sometimes he reaches for my face, and I suffer five tiny points of pain.
Pumpkin lurks in the kitchen and claws at my feet as I walk by. She’s not a very social cat, and she’s asserting her boundaries. My feet are trespassing in her space. The entire kitchen is her space.
Chloe likes to dig her claws into me when she’s jumping off my lap. I appreciate her need for leverage, but I appreciate her claws less. I have claw marks on my thighs because she digs deep.
I could clip their claws — ha! Have you ever tried to clip a cat’s claws? My cats aren’t highly trained sweethearts — they’re cats. I would be shredded if I tried to clip their claws.
Claw marks are a small price to pay for the privilege of being owned by amazing creatures.
Words Like Me 