Tag: love

The First Blog of a New Year

Every year, on New Year’s Day, I make it a point to do the things I want to carry through the next year. One of the things I’m doing today is writing my blog, because I have let it go for too long.

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I had burned myself out writing daily for a year, so I let it go for a couple of weeks, which turned out to be two or three weeks, then several weeks more. Then I lost the habit of writing and the initiative.

Now I’m thinking of writing today. Not a resolution, but a goal. Which means I need to set it up as a SMART goal — specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound. Here goes: I will write my blog at least twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays, in the morning before I work.

Now that I got that out of the way, here’s my first blog of the year:

How was 2025? It was a year of shock and horror looking at what came out of our government. We became a harsher, more bitter nation, obsessed with ‘sticking it’ to someone else. Personally, it was a year of little excitement, of doing my day to day routine and getting by. I don’t mind that; I’m older, and I’ve wearied of big surprises. My bipolar is under control, and my weight is down by almost 70 pounds. I pulled triumph out of failure for my research this year and made two presentations, which will keep my boss happy. I am one year closer to retirement — I’m looking at 5 years now.

What are my big plans for the New Year? I have two books I want to publish at the end of the year: a Kringle book and a Hidden in Plain Sight book. I have completed both (except for a cover for Avatar of the Maker). Finishing the editing and the formatting was a 2025 goal that I discovered at the last minute. Other than that, it will be another year without big surprises. I hope. Especially from the government.

I Wish I Could Talk to You

Daily writing prompt
Who would you like to talk to soon?
View all responses

I’m a pretty self-contained person. I really don’t feel the need to talk to anyone, except my friend and mentor Les, who died some years ago at age 95.

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I talked to him the other day in a dream. I ran into him on a stair landing and gave him a hug. He told me he was in a hurry because he needed to meet his other family, and we parted ways. That was the most real dream I’ve ever had; maybe I really did talk to him.

If I were to talk to him again, I would tell him how my life has changed since my bipolar diagnosis, how I didn’t feel like crying for hours anymore, how my crushes didn’t control me. I would tell him I had more trouble feeling in touch with the spiritual world and how that worried me. I would tell him how my ordinary day reflected quiet joy, and how a lot of that had to do with my husband. He would know I was in a good place.

I would thank him again for all the times he listened to me, above and beyond the line of duty. How I don’t think I would have gotten through life without that. And I would apologize for all those times, because if I had been in my right mind I wouldn’t have needed so much support.

We talked about all this before, a few years before he died, so it’s not unfinished business between us. But I would talk to him again about it, because I am so bewildered about what it means to be become sane after fifty years of crying jags. Who was I and who am I now? He might have known better than I did.

My Friend Les

Daily writing prompt
List the people you admire and look to for advice…
View all responses

The person I most admired has been dead for a number of years. He was my friend, surrogate father, and confessor. He got me through some of the most difficult years of my life. He was also the most interesting person I’ve ever met.

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Les had a series of experiences that I could only dream of, and he would let them slip in conversation. “When I was in the Navy,” or “When I was in graduate school in Scotland,” or “When I was a pilot” … there were quite a few of these over the years. He was a combustion expert, and one of his sidelines was building controlled explosions in coal mines to burn off dangerous gases. He also studied religion on the side, and held a concert of his original compositions at age 80.

Les gave me a lot of advice over the years. Everything from grad school advice to life advice. I was going through considerable trauma and bad breakups in the time I knew him, so I know I did a certain amount of crying over the phone. Never did Les judge me.

He always held that, if I found the right person to have a relationship with, I would heal. It was scary, but he was correct. He knew I would marry Richard when I had barely met him, and he was (as always) right. I never got him that bottle of Talisker (Scotch) I owed him for that bet.

He died at 95, which is fitting for someone whose life was that full. His memorial service was filled with all the people whose lives he’d touched over the years. We had lost touch with each other, but we reunited for him. It was a fitting send-off.

Valentine’s Day

I remember being single. It was a few years back, but I was single for much of my adult life. Valentine’s Day was rough back then, because it was just a reminder that I did not have a romantic relationship.

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I have been in a bad marriage. Valentine’s Day was a reminder that other people were in a better situation than I was.

I don’t like Valentine’s Day. It seems to exist so that women in relationships can show off what they received as presents, while men spend money on these gifts. At the same time, I enjoy getting the flowers and going out to eat with my husband. I’m a hypocrite in this regard.

I feel for the people who are looking for someone and failing. I feel for the ones who don’t feel secure in their relationships. And I admire the hell out of those people who make the holiday their own — valentines to friends, Galentine’s Day, random sticky notes with hearts across campus. I have nothing against spreading the love.

Mocha Mornings

How can I tell that my husband loves me? He’s not known for big gestures, for which I’m grateful, because I don’t trust big gestures. A quiet promise is better than a diamond ring.

I know Richard loves me because of mocha mornings. He makes the coffee every morning, presumably because he likes to, but probably because my pour-overs taste somewhere between Folgers (US coffee brand) and a wet dog. Lately, however, coffee tastes too strong for me, probably residual from COVID, which paradoxically has made everything taste stronger to me. Richard has made mocha in the morning these last few days, a combination of hot chocolate and coffee. This makes a perfect breakfast drink for me.

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I wonder how this affects my romance novel writing. My writing is very emotional, but not very splashy. My protagonists are good people who, like me, find meaning in little things, like redemption and shared experience and maybe mocha mornings.

What’s Up

What’s on my stereo

I’m playing Rock Lobster by the B-52s, which isn’t conducive to writing but is conducive to bewildering my husband at this time of the morning. I’m using it to wake up.

What’s on my mind

I feel like the summer is slipping away from me. I have a month before fall meetings start, and I pretty much have my course sites (the difficult part for me) set up for the Fall. I assume the university will be de-masked, with those students without vaccinations at risk for getting sick, unless we get a variant more daunting than the delta version.

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I’m going to have to get used to not having to set up a camera and microphone, not having to stand glued in one specific place, and not having to spray the chairs and tables with disinfectant (called “Bearcat Thunder”) between classes. Thank goodness.

What’s in my heart

I’m struggling in my heart. I haven’t fallen in love with anything lately, and love is what fuels me to write. I wrote a poem the other day, though, about one of the things I hate the most: proselytizing. Specifically, the hand extended when someone says “Jesus loves you” only to pull you into a place where Jesus purportedly hates everything you are. (I believe that Jesus loves who we are regardless.) There might have been a crush involved, and an intense disappointment.

My emotions are not strong lately, and I’ve always written out of a place of strong emotions. This is not entirely true — Kel and Brother Coyote Save the Planet was written out of a sense of fun, and I’ve made it to the first edit stage.

What’s on my plate

As I mentioned above, I’m editing Kel and Brother Coyote, which if I haven’t mentioned it, is a serial novella in the space opera genre. I’m hoping to get it on Vella just to see how well Vella works. It will, of course, need edits.

I’m waiting for beta reader responses on both Gaia‘s Hands and Kringle in the Night. These will be self-published on Amazon. Gaia’s Hands is a contemporary fantasy romance, and the first book I wrote, and thus has gone through many, many rewrites. It asks the question: what is hidden from plain sight? Kringle in the Night is the second in the Kringle Chronicles series to come out at Christmas time. Both of them have atypical protagonists — imperfect, ordinary, made extraordinary by what might be called magic.

So I have things to edit, things to re-edit, and hopefully things to publish (self-) various places. I will also keep submitting to agents, but I keep that to every six months or so.

So it’s not like I’m not busy. I’m just not creating right now, and it makes me itchy. I need to submerge me into the editing.

Hello

So jump into my comments and tell me how you’re doing!

This Morning

Gloomy morning

I type this as I look out the window right by my writing area, a corner of the living room. The sky is pretty dark and teases rain. The rain, however, shifts to the south of us, barely sprinkling us.

I want a gullywasher, the sort of rain that, if you’re caught in it, you just give up and stand in it, getting drenched to your skin. The sort that sheets as it hits the pavement, that drums on the roof.

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I think I’ve written about this before. I am obsessed with rain.

Coffee and love

The coffee has arrived. My husband makes it every morning, because his love language is acts of service. I thank him because my love language is verbal affirmation. Then I spank his butt because another of his love languages is physical affection.

Is coffee itself a love language?

With miles to go

My latest project is laying out the pieces to publish a newsletter. The reason for this is that I’m working on developing a more robust marketing platform for my books. The reason is twofold: it provides reassurance to an agent who’s considering my work, and it provides me a platform for what I self-publish (currently just the Kringle Chronicles books). It was — and continues to be — much work on sometimes buggy platforms.

The whole concept of marketing has taken on a life on its own; I now see a third reason to do it — to connect. I think that online contacts are real connection, although the character is more like seeing people in the café and saying hi than being intimately connected to someone. Social media is more like light flirting, although platonic.

What about you?

What are you doing today? Let me know in the comments.

Stages of Writing

 I have just gone through the first proofreading pass of the second book in the Kringle Chronicles, Kringle in the Dark. In the book, Brent Oberhauser, self-professed nerd, falls for Sunshine Rogers, who keeps the books for Yes, Virginia, a Christmas charity. Her boss, Jack Moore, receives blackmail letters in the mail and Sunshine finds significant mysteries in the paperwork buried under the category of “miscellaneous”. In a clash of wills, Sunshine and Brent break up to avoid heartbreak later. The two must find a way back together to try to stop the blackmailer and solve the puzzle of Yes, Virginia.

Right now, I rather like the book, being amazed that I could produce something that good in less than 30 days (aka NaNoWriMo project). But that’s just a stage in my writing. Here’s the stages of my writing:

  1. Beginning: Look how effortlessly I write!
  2. After a quarter of the way through the book: I’m just slinging words onto pages. This book is going to be a mess.
  3. Finishing the first draft: Thank goodness it’s done.
  4. Proofing the first draft: This book is actually good!
  5. Finishing the first draft: There has to be something wrong and I can’t wrap my head around it.
  6. Receiving document back from my in-house editor (i.e. husband): No, look it over again. What’s WRONG with it?
  7. Second draft: This book is a mess.
  8. Fast forward to book in hand: This is MY book. Don’t you hurt my little book!
I guess this means I’m a writer. 

Collecting Kindness

Today, one of my favorite Internet Cats, Maya, is #collectingkindness. Toward this end, she is asking people (I love the imagery of this) for pictures, poems, essays, etc about what they consider kindness to be.

To me, kindness is giving without calculating a return, without regarding how the other compares to you relative to color, race, ability, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, or religion. Just giving, whether that be a smile, a favor, a conversation, recognition, love. No strings attached.

Day 33 Lenten Meditation: Love



What can I say that hasn’t already been said about love?


The Greeks a long time ago talked about different types of love, which I spoke about on Valentines’ Day. Here they are as a refresher:

  • Agape – love of humanity.
  • Storge – love of family
  • Philia — love of friends
  • Pragma – love which endures.
  • Philautia – self love
  • Ludus – flirtatious/playful love
  • Eros – romantic and erotic love.
Love, as an emotion, has the power to motivate. Storge motivates us to care for and protect our families; eros motivates us to take the risk to commit; philautia motivates us to take care of our bodies.

Love has the power to transcend. Agape moves us to do our best for others. Ludus finds us gifting others with our moments of dazzling brilliance — or our clumsy attempts at wittiness. Pragma transcends the ravages of time.

Love is one of the forces that changes the world. The other is anger; however, anger without love can become destruction rather than creation.

I’ve said nothing that’s not already been said; perhaps that is the curse of being a writer. But I write with love, and maybe that makes the difference.