As many authors know, December isn’t the best month for books sales. Some people do very well, yes, but on the whole our sales tend to take a downturn this month. Those who have been in the game long enough know this, plan for it, and don’t panic when sales slow down remarkably the week before Christmas.

As for why sales slow down, it’s pretty understandable—we have a number of major holidays in December which involve traveling, lots of food, and gift-giving. All of this requires money, so people have to budget for their particular holiday and all the accoutrements that come with it. When that happens, book buying falls by the wayside (except for Iceland, where the gifting of books on Christmas Eve is a tradition that is prompting me to learn Icelandic so that I can retire there. But I digress).

So as I spend today cleaning, cooking, and putting up last-minute decorations, I’m not fussing about the drop in sales. It’ll pick up in January, or maybe as early as next week once people get gift cards or cash for Christmas. That being said, it occurred to me that a possible reason for drooping sales in genres that are primarily read by women could also be due to the fact that we’re running around like scalded cats trying to get everything ready for the holidays.

We’re tired. After days of cleaning the house (and in my case the garage so that I could park the car there during Winter Storm Elliott), wrangling the family and pets, baking treats, prepping and cooking the actual holiday dinner, and trying to make everyone’s Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Yule/Saturnalia/Festivus/Add Holiday Here a wonderful experience, we’re wiped. We’re too tired to read, too tired to buy books even if we have the spare cash to do so, and all we really want to do is crawl into bed and sleep for a couple of days.

Speaking of that, I have to finish putting up the rest of the living room decorations, then make a batch of cookies, then get started on Christmas Eve dinner. I hope everyone out there has a wonderful holiday, and I’ll talk to you again once I manage to dredge up some energy.

Today’s Word Count: 2,042
Total Word Count: 2,042
Words to Go: 47,958

Today’s blog post was supposed to be about how today was the first day of NaNoWriMo 2022 and why I was using it to finish Crystal Blade (Paladins of Crystal 2). Mainly, it’s a good excuse to nail my ass to  a chair long enough to finish a book, especially one that already has about 20,000 words. And I’m proud of my word count for the day—didn’t make the 3K I was aiming for but I’m also taking time out to make dinner and write this entry so I still may add another K once all that’s done.

But then I read about Julie Powell. For those of you who aren’t familiar with her, she was the brash, hilarious writer who started a blog called The Julie/Julia Project in 2002, with the goal of cooking all the dishes in the first volume of Julia Child’s Mastering the Fine Art of French Cooking. And in a tiny apartment in Long Island with the assistance of her husband Eric, she did just that, blogging about her efforts at Salon.

Much to Powell’s surprise the blog went viral, spawned a book, and later became the basis for the movie Julie & Julia (Nora Ephron’s last film) starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. All of this allowed Powell to quit her job as a secretary in Manhattan and become a full time writer. Her second book, Cleaving, followed her desire to train as a butcher offset with the ups and downs of her marriage. It wasn’t as popular as Julie & Julia but I thought it was the better book.

Today I found out she died on October 26 from cardiac arrest. She was 49, an age that seems impossibly young and wrong for that kind of death. And while my heart goes out to her husband, family and friends, I’m also a little (well, more than a little) freaked out that someone of my generation and with a similar background and occupation died so young. It’s a cold reminder that tomorrow isn’t promised to anyone, and you need to tell the people in your life that you love them and work on making your dreams come true now instead of thinking, “Well, someday…”

So I’m going to work on this book because it’s part of my dreams. And I think I’ll dedicate it to Julie, another sarcastic secretary who made good.

And laughed heartily. Needless to say, Crystal Blade isn’t out yet, and neither is Shifter Woods: Growl. I shouldn’t even talk about books anymore until they’re done and off to the editor because every time I do I jinx myself and something pops up to delay everything.

In this case, it was a twofold issue — in mid-August I got some extremely bad news about a friend’s health. I had promised to make this friend a queen-sized quilt and after she told our friend group about what was going on she pinged me and said, “So, about that quilt…”

Needless to say I replied, “On it,” and spent the next week or so frantically sewing together a queen quilt top. She’d given me the fabric years ago and requested a Día de los Muertos quilt so that’s what I made. The skulls are on the backing fabric; the top features these gorgeous Virgin Mary panels offset with colorful nine patch squares bordered with a bright striped fabric and edged on the outer borders with a Frida Kahlo fabric.

So once I got that done and off to the quilt shop so that it could be quilted (I don’t have a long arm machine and can’t quilt anything larger than a twin) it was suddenly September and I remembered, oops, I have a story due to F*ck the Patriarchy: Getting Smutty for a Cause. So for the last few weeks I’ve been finishing that—it’s a novella called, “A Theory of Crystal” and it’s set in the Paladins of Crystal universe so theoretically I AM working on the right series.

Oh, and then there was the followup knee surgeon visit, the PT visit, the dental cleaning, the periodontist’s visit, trying to dig out this house from all the crap that’s collected over the summer when it was too hot to clean, yadda yadda yadda. So, yeah, I’ve been busy.

But hey, at least you got to see some pretty quilt pictures. So that’s something!

Yes, it finally happened! Despite unexpected family events, shingles, and a total knee replacement, Crystal Shard is finally out in the world! I’m describing it as Shadow and Bone meets The Nevers with five tall, hot, protective Big Cat shifters, a small town girl with an unexpected magical talent, and the destiny (and ditzy muse) that throws them together. It’s on sale at Amazon for $0.99 until July 7, 2022, or you can get it from KU.

Here’s the release schedule for the rest of the series:

Crystal Blade (July 31, 2022)
Crystal Reflection (August 31, 2022)
Crystal Citadel (September 30, 2022)
Crystal Empress (October 31, 2022)

There’s a sneak peek of Crystal Blade at the end of Crystal Shard. And if this series does well, I’m planning on at least two and possibly three sequel series. I am never going to sleep again at this rate…

Up until 2015, North Texas was pretty arid, and was in fact in drought conditions for years. Then May 2015 rolled around and it rained for pretty much every day of the month. Ever since then, we get what I can only call monsoon season for May and part of June — we can expect rain every week, often for days at a time. While this is great for the land, it does drive the humidity up to sauna levels, and don’t get me started on the mosquitos.

That being said, it’s weird to read weather predictions for the summer and find out that most of Texas is supposed to be at average or slightly cooler temps than normal, while these massive heat domes squat over the West Coast and the Pacific Northwest and flash-steam everyone there. I’m not making fun of those folks, either — they’re not used to those kind of temps, their homes and businesses aren’t set up to handle heat, and suddenly getting slammed with 107°F temps when your A/C consists of opening windows to get a cross breeze is no bueno indeed. We ran into the very same problems with Winter Storm Uri, after all.

So right now we’re dealing with a shaky energy grid (thanks, Greg), but temps that seem to be staying in the high eighties to mid-nineties, with a fair amount of rain in next week’s forecast. When I first moved here, I probably would have complained about the heat. I know better, now.

When I started writing Degree of Resistance I posited a future where a wannabe totalitarian president, climate change, and Big Tech-backed political rights grabs had wreaked havoc on North America. I mean, it was supposed to be a theoretical dystopian background for my romance. I never thought that I would get it right.

(For those of you who are uncomfortable with discussion of menstruation or other uterus-enhanced people’s issues, you might want to skip this. *mwah*)

So, I’m in my mid-fifties, and one of the lovely things about my age is that my reproductive system is on the verge of hanging it up and shutting down shop. Which is fine and dandy with me — I ain’t having kids, monthly periods are both a huge pain AND my fertile periods also make me retain water so I feel like a camel most of the time. Menopause? Bring it on.

My last period was on January 6 (thank you, Cheeto-supporting yahoos, for making it easy to remember), and before that I had a period in September. When nothing happened in February, March, and April, I was starting to hope that this was it, I was done. but you have to go a full year without a period before you’re considered fully in menopause, so I had another eight months to go.

Until last night. The last couple of days I have been irrationally irritable. I knew it was hormonal, PMS without the actual menstruation, so I took a black cohosh each day to calm down and regain some balance. Yeah, except that black cohosh is chemically similar to estrogen, and apparently my body thought, “Oh, wait, there’s some spare estrogen floating around here! Welp, time to shed lining.”

Now, all of my life I’ve had heavy periods, to the point where I normally use Super tampons because my uterus laughs heartily at Regular (and once I discovered Ultra, those became my go-to tampon for overnight use). Which made the September and January periods absolute delights because they were minor. I mean, a little bit of blood over three days, and then I was done.

This time? Right back to the Supers/Ultras, and I went through a Super in less than four hours this morning. I’m really hoping that this is my uterus throwing its “Going Out of Business” party, possibly combined with me getting my COVID vaxes in March and April. But man, it’s annoying as hell right now.