First Cup of Coffee - updates, Updates, UPDATES

Thank you to everyone who sent my mother well wishes! She is doing very well, and I appreciate you more than you know. Thank you to my friends for being there - you really got me through it (hand-heart). 

Among the Thorns Line Edits are D-O-N-E DONE! Preorder here <3

In case you missed it, Strange Familiar Audio Book is now available on Youtube ~ Listen for free here

You can find the Owl Crate signed edition of Never the Roses here
A very beautiful hardcover edition can be found here
The audio book can be listened to here
And Kindle Unlimited has Never the Roses digital version!

Your friendly neighborhood author is doing author-ly things this upcoming month! Hummingbird House is officially OPEN FOR BOOKING🕊️
🕊️ Book your next writer retreat at Hummingbird House in Santa Fe here 🕊️

Upcoming Events ~
LoveLitCon is a weekend of romantasy and bookish fun and I will be attending! Buy LoveLitCon tickets here using LOVE8368 for $10 OFF!

Tuscon Festival of Books is March 14th-15th this year! See you there *Wink* 

📚Books📚

Preorder MAGIC REBORN here - Dec. 30th

STRANGE FAMILIAR is live - Out Now

You can always buy print copies of my books from my local indie, Beastly Books! - Browse at your leisure

Transcript

0:06

Good morning, everyone! And here, with my first cup of coffee. Miraculous today. And say with me, people, it is Friday and you are on video or have a sensitive ear. You will detect that I am back at home. I'm so happy. So happy to be back home. So yeah, that was that was a lot. If you've been following along. I had to do an emergency trip to Tucson because my mother fell. And in a total cliche, she broke her hip. The other thing that happened that was great was my friend Kelly Robson flew to Santa Fe, to stay so that she could help out with David. And so I know she, like, really cleaned up the house for me because she's a miracle worker. It's just that way. So she's happy to see that at least the Cassie that is coming in for something. Right? And I brought my mom's cats back with me. So the cats are staying home to see that. But I did get some work done on editing among the thorns on Wednesday. I definitely made it through. This is. It's funny. It's, either 27 pages or 129 pages that I finished. I finished. Shall we repeat that I finished? Yeah. So I actually got the book finished on Wednesday morning, and I wanted to talk about that a little bit because I reported it to a couple of my friends that miraculously, I had, finished the book, and one who is a non writer said, you know, it's really that you're the miracle worker. You're amazing that you can work through this. And I said, well, that I, I feel very fortunate that I can work through, difficult times. And she said, well, I think it's more than luck. And I was like, no, I mean, I, I count my blessings. I, I feel like I've really blessed that, for me, the creative work is grounding. And I know for a lot of people, any level of anxiety or emotional tumult or upset completely derails the creative process. And I don't know why that's different for me. I mean, there's certainly if I have been drafting, I don't know if I could have done it, but doing the editing work on Wednesday, I was I was feeling very grateful to and one of my friends and thank goodness for my friends who all got me through this. One of my friends said, that I needed to, just that I should try to just accept that I was. Didn't feel bad. Which is, I tend to be more upbeat person, and I'm kind of typically a happy person, and I like it that way. But I was saying things like, you know, I should be doing better than this. And, this gently suggested that that I let you say, you know, I'm hearing you say a lot of shoulds. You know, maybe you should just let this experience be what it is, which is good advice, because you don't have much choice. That analogy of it being a literally traumatic experience and that I basically have, I can't know, that's red hot school and was not allowed to pull it away, and you have to go through it. I mean, that actually helps. So every time that I was like going up to workshop, and dreading dealing with my mother's emotional state, which was valid. I mean, I did understand I didn't blame her for being upset of hating it and everything being awful because it was work out, but at the same time, it was really hard for me to go there, you know, to be like, oh, I don't want to go, you know? So the temptation to run away is tremendous. But I couldn't I had to get through it. Whatever it is about doing the work, like, you know, like every time I kept spinning and thinking about. You know, all the emotions. Every time that started to take over, I would just focus on the book and like, get this done, you need to get it done. And that's one of the things about being a career creative when it's your freaking job. To get the work done. You know, you you have to do it. You have to find ways to make yourself do it. And I know that that's not always easy for everybody. And I know that I'm blessed to have decent chemistry. I will give myself credit for that. I have spent a lot of years developing mental concentration and mental peace. I do yoga, I meditate daily. I get a whole lot to cultivate peace of mind. One thing that my yoga teacher said that really stuck with me and it was kind of a random remark, she said. So now just let yourself fall into that deep yogic breathing state. That is the one that is easy and natural for you to fall into because you've done it so often. And I thought, well, that's true, that I can sit down in my cross-legged position and fall into that deep breathing state pretty fast, and it's not something that you can do if you're, like, just starting. Right. But because I've been doing that for so many years, it's like the writing habit. If you don't have that dreaded procrastination that get in the way of it, and it's actually easier to fall into, doing the work than to allow myself to keep spinning. And so I, I don't know how to advise people on this, because I know that for someone who struggles with anxiety and depression and so forth, and I have several friends that I talk to about that a lot, you know, that that really gets in the way of the work that they cannot work because the anxiety directly prevents that. But there are ways for you to find developing that natural pattern where, you know, those two days when I was alone in that house and my mom was Apple Tracker, it was, yeah, it was it would have been very easy for me to, just dropped in to collapse, to, to spin out for me, it feels like spinning out. But the work was grounding, and it was like, okay, you were just doing the work. And then I finished the book and turned it in and they're all like, oh yeah, because my deadline was the 1st of December and I'm I'm happy with it. I think I did do good work. So, so yeah. Monday we had toured the new place called Brookdale in Tucson, and it was lovely and fabulous. Tuesday I went to see my mom and she had a new roommate at the awful, less skilled nursing and just the whole skilled nursing thing annoys me because really, the skilled nursing at Brookdale is amazing and wonderful, and it actually seems like skilled nursing and the skilled nursing at the other place, which let's just call it Le Qatar at Le Toca, was it was basically a nursing home. My mom did not have a private room that look, okay, but she had gotten a new roommate come in on Tuesday, and the previous roommate had been a, a Fox News blaring woman who yelled at us anytime we talked too loudly. So that wasn't ideal. And so my mom was actually having more fun on Tuesday, which was great, except that, I thought that we could move her Tuesday. I mean, it was this whole thing of, like, the paperwork going through narrators voices. It did not go through the gel. Brookdale didn't want to move by mom in the evening, and she said she much prefers to move people in the middle of the day because it's just better for the patient and better for everyone, which I can totally see because after the Saturday evening debacle, after my mom was already sundowning I mean, that was horrible, like the worst experiences of my entire life, which I hope never to replicate. So now I know how to do it. And then we learned how to deal with these awful things. To try them on Wednesday morning, I, you know, I went to see her early. The love triangle opened at seven, so I went to see her at seven to see how she was. Have my coffee with her. I was in the house by myself Tuesday and Wednesday nights, which I don't mind being by myself, but it was. It was hard to be in that house with just me, where once in, there we go with the tears. My mom and I stepped out and my husband, David, you know, we have a lot of great years in the house. So, yeah, 20 years in that house, and some, you know, great. Just a lot of great times. We have to, you know, enjoy the things that were that were great, actually, that I would get through this book that crying. Silly me. Actually, do we go? Okay, I'm feeling much more steady, but I have a very thin, thin skin. Maybe. I know I've ranted before about not liking that term. It doesn't take much to break through the crust of composure. And then. So Wednesday we moved her to the new place and everyone it is, it's chalk and cheese. It is so wonderful. In that afternoon, after we got there, we had a bunch of different people come in to see us. The nurse practitioner came in and he was great and incredibly knowledgeable, and we went through her whole medical history and she got evaluated for, you know, like her physical abilities, they were professional, but there was a little bit of eye rolling about what had happened that we talked to. For example, they had put her on, medication at 60mg, and the nurse practitioner was like, we started at 20. This is insane. That is at 60. And it was it's I'll just tell it was, wasn't it? Which is apparently a mood like an antidepressant. And it was probably because she was so miserable at work. Okay. So they just like, I don't know what dosed her. Right. And then she just, like, dosed through with it that Saturday night when we got there. But she was so angry and upset, very interestingly, she I haven't been happy with my most general practitioner either. My mom has had a pulmonary embolism, so they were the nurse practitioner. I was telling these interesting things because the other thing that had happened was when my mom was originally in the emergency room, this time she had an atrial fibrillation that they couldn't recapture and couldn't find again. And he was like, oh, well. And I told him, I said, every woman in our family does jokes, not to mention that do have the stroke. And he said, well, you probably have a genetic clotting disorder that was like, that's been pricking at my ears. I'm like, well, nobody's ever said this to me. And he said, yeah, he says, it's not not common. But it's also the thing. And he suggested that I get tested for it. And he said also that that boosting atrial fibrillation is part of it, which my aunt has also had. And she was also on a work center, so which I'm glad she's on it. So he thinks I should do like a harness test, you know, like a couple weeks or a month long, because that's the only way you catch this occasional fibrillation and because the blood flow through the heart goes down, then you're much more likely this flow class. So isn't that interesting. And like, nobody's ever our you know, our medical system is so uneven and and the Carrie is just amazing. She has her own room. It's beautiful. So beautiful place. I picked out an apartment for her in the assisted living, which is actually just upstairs from where the skilled nursing and social have the same practitioners, the same care all the way through. And you'll go figure out the level of assisted living that she needs. And it's just, yesterday morning when I went to see her, she said, are you going home today? And I said, yeah, yeah, I wasn't planning to come home till Friday, but I thought, you know what, I need to get home. And and so I took the opportunity. So I ended up, you know, picked up the cats in the car and left about 2:00 at home. Ten. And it was just, you know, sleep in my own bed so well and just being in my own home and all of that and knowing that that she's in really good hands and and I feel conflicted about this because I got a call on the drive home, from the admissions gal saying that between her Medicare and her secondary insurance, which is very good, it's Tricare, that she's 100% covered for 100 days in the skilled nursing. So that's fantastic. But also, she has enough money coming in, and saved that, you know, I was just going to figure it out. But the people stuck at the caca, which is entirely Medicare. You know, I left out a piece that because she has this fracture, she was only supposed to be cutting 10% weight on the injured leg, and it looks like they were just having her use the walker and doing full weight on that leg. And we had a long conversation with the PT person, you know, and they're like, why were they having to do that? I'm like, why did they do anything out of the pocket? Because, it was easier for them, right? They don't they don't care about, I mean, maybe they care if they're probably people that care that physical therapist they were seeing. Lovely. And some of the aides seemed very nice, but, you know, they're they're understaffed and probably by business design and, you know, so the faster they can get my mom in and out of the bathroom, the better, right. And if that means putting weight on that leg, that's more important to them then that bone healing, the way the orthopedist said it needed to. And it said, you know, that recognizing that level of privilege where once I got my act together, that I could move her out of there and get her in a place where she's getting the best care, you know, that's wonderful for my mom. And then I feel really bad for, like, this delightful roommate that we left behind who's, you know, her choice is Lukaku. So here we are. Anyway, I am going to, recuperate. Kelly and Megan, I believe, have plans to make me, like, sit in hot water and think about nothing. I want to go see wicked for good. It's it's going to be good. I'm not going to do any creative work until Monday, but I do have some business to do. And. Yeah, I think, you know, thanks to all of you for your very kind messages and, Gina Koosman sent me this. I probably got that memo, didn't I?