When the CDC notice flashed up on my news feed a couple of days ago, I didn’t immediately believe it.  I read it three times, so carefully, to make sure that I was understanding it correctly, before I told Chuck, “I think, maybe, they’re saying we don’t have to wear masks anyone, if we’re vaccinated.”


We just looked at each other for a long moment.  Wow.  After more a year of fighting the pandemic, maybe, just maybe, this is the beginning of the end.  


We’ve been fully vaccinated since late February.  We were extraordinarily lucky:  We happened to be in the right place at the right time to get jabbed quickly, while others were queuing and searching desperately for available vaccination slots at locations far and wide.  It was a tremendous relief to get our shots, but Chuck and I still wore our masks and socially distanced.  (For the most part, we’re rule-followers.  We believe in complying with reasonable public health mandates for the good of all, and we glared and muttered under our breaths at those who were out and about and ignoring the rules.  And often they glared and muttered at us.  On one occasion an unmasked shopper purposefully coughed in our direction.  What a divisive time this has been for all of us—)


But, perhaps, this horrible time of fear, of masking, distancing and quarantining is coming to a close.  Perhaps in the not-too-distant future we’ll look back at this interlude with the perspective that the passage of time will no doubt provide.  


I’ve been surprised at how little writing (as in, virtually none) I’ve done during this time.  I can see online that some have put this period of enforced isolation to good use—but not me.  The well has been dry.  I’ve been treading water.  (What a weird combination of metaphors!)  I’m hoping that will change now, as we move into the new (and hopefully improved) world.


But Chuck and I haven’t been placid these last few months, as we awaited the end of the plague.  Instead, we stirred up our lives:  In a period of three and one-half months, we’ll have moved four times.  


First, we sold our home in Seattle.  It was the right time for us to go.  We’d tired of the city and we sensed our neighborhood had changed.  The traffic, the congestion, the political and social strife, the implosion of downtown Seattle—all of it led us to the conclusion that we wanted to leave.  


We found another home, close to Seattle but a ferry ride away.  We discovered we weren’t the only Seattle residents with this idea.  House sales were shockingly competitive.  After several months of looking we’d found our house—nearly perfect for us—but in order to make the sale, we were required to rent back to the sellers for 60 days.  We put our Seattle household goods into storage and moved temporarily to our small summer cottage in northeastern Washington.  (So…move #1, leave Seattle house and put possessions into storage; move #2, move into cottage)


Living at the cottage in the spring is not putting in hard time.  In the Okanogan, the cherry and apple trees were in blossom, the birds were twittering (and mating madly), and most days were sunny.  Almost by accident, we discovered another cottage for sale in the community, smaller but with a most fabulous view of lake and mountains, and we fell in love.  We bought it and moved (Move #3, cottage-to-cottage) and put our original cottage on the market.  


Now, as we approach June, we are readying for move #4, onto the island.  Our belongings will be delivered from storage and we will again have a home.  We are both yearning for a sense of being planted in a place, a spot that we will again call home.  We know it will take a while, but we can’t wait to get started.


And maybe, hopefully, we’ll land in our new community with bright smiling faces open and unmasked, with the chance to shake hands with our new neighbors instead of backing away to a safe distance.


As we approach move #4 (hopefully the last for a while), I will leave you with my number one epiphany gleaned from moving, and moving, and moving…


We all have too much stuff.  Well, Chuck and I do anyway—perhaps you are more accomplished than we are when it comes to deleting unnecessary material goods from your life.  When you move, you pretty much have to touch everything you own.  We have a mountain of possessions, and the physical stuff is entangled with emotional memories, the tugs of imagined obligations (“It’s part of our family history and no one else will understand or want it”), even sometimes guilt (“Aunt M gave this to me.  It’s disloyal to her memory to give it away.”) These obstacles are not rational.  I know that.  (And yes, I know about Marie Kondo, thank you.)


Take the ice bucket.  It’s not even a very functional ice bucket.  It was wedding present for my first wedding in the 70’s.  The marriage didn’t last too long but I still have the ice bucket.  I’ve maybe used it five times in all these years.  It’s not very valuable but it has some value.  Sell it (not worth the effort), give it away or what?  I’ll tell you what—I packed it.  It’s going to show up on the island, and I’m not sure why.

​Even the shoes we choose—for the past few months it's been running shoes and slippers, with an occasional foray into rain boots.  All the fancy shoes (and all the fancy clothes, for that matter) rest comfortably in the closet.  There’s no reason to dress up, no place to go.  And though there really isn’t a great need to order anything other than food, online ordering is both an outlet and an addiction.  It’s pretty exciting when those boxes get dropped on our doorstep…
​

Zoom has become an essential part of our lives.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  It works well for yoga class, when everyone is moving slowly, but not so well for my attempt at line dancing class—too easy to lose the pattern as you sway away from the computer screen.  The Zoom classes offered by the University of Washington have helped to save our sanity.  We just finished a six hour course on immunology.  (Viruses are wily and fascinating, it turns out.) On-screen visits with friends and family have helped too, but of course they’re a poor substitute for the presence of living, breathing humans offering up hugs. 



Even my relationship with my dog is affected.  Rusty has always been attached to me, but I’ve been around the house so much lately that I’m pretty sure he’s going to have some separation anxiety once we’re all released from house arrest, and I go out into the world without him.
​

And then there’s sleep. I sleep a little bit longer every day.  Of course the days are getting darker, and we all slow down naturally during the dark months, but it’s more than that.  There is no reason to spring out of bed.  This day will likely be very much like the last.  

So, this would be a perfect time to write, wouldn’t you think?  Wouldn’t you think that these long unstructured periods of time at home would spawn vast quantities of new material?  It doesn’t seem to work that way for me, and I think for many other writers.  The creative process hasn’t been nourished by this interlude, this time of waiting, hoping for the vaccine to come and save us.  I spend too much time cradling a coffee cup and staring into space. 

​ I’ll keep trying.  

“When he sees her turn toward the window, reaching for her coat, he scrambles behind the dead broken stump barely in time, slamming his shin hard as he stumbles into an icy hole.  He growls a curse under his breath.  He doesn’t think she’s seen him, but he’s got to be careful.  Better to watch when it’s totally dark, when the light from her cabin rolls into the meadow and he can see her so clearly, bent over her potter’s wheel, weaving her spells into lumps of clay…

He wants to stay all through the night, to be near her when she sleeps.  It’s so cold that he can’t stay long.  His arms and legs are cramped in place and his nose stings from the biting cold air.  The skin on his face is crusty and stiff, coated with ice crystals.  He raises his head over the stump, inch by inch…”

And so begins A LATE HARD FROST, the sequel to COMPASS NORTH.  

A LATE HARD FROST will take you back to Homer, Alaska, and into the intertwined lives of Merry, Cassandra and Nick.  

Lately I’ve been asked if there’s a third book brewing in this series.  I am in the preliminary stages of work on two new books, but they are not in the COMPASS NORTH world.  We’ll just see.  It’s hard for me to say goodbye forever to Merry, Cassandra and Nick.  We leave them in such an interesting time in their lives…perhaps there is another story for them to tell.  

But most recently Raven Applegate won’t leave me alone.  She keeps popping into my mind, though she hasn’t revealed her story yet.  Raven is fair-skinned and blue-eyed, and named Raven because her mother once saw an albino raven and was enchanted by its uniqueness.  But like her namesake, Raven doesn’t really have a place in the world, or at least not one she’s found yet.  And as we all know, the world isn’t always kind to those who are different…  I’m letting Raven float around in my head for now, wondering where she plans to go and what she plans to do.  And that’s the way it works with most writers:  You don’t really know where your characters and ideas come from.  They lurk in shadows in your brain and haunt you until, one day, they start to spill onto the paper (or, more accurately, into your word processing program.)​

Maybe Raven will decide to head to Alaska…

A LATE HARD FROST, the sequel to COMPASS NORTH, is now available on Amazon.

The link for the ebook is https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07897V7LJ
 
The link for the paperback is https://www.amazon.com/Late-Hard-Frost-Stephanie-Joyce/dp/1942623771

​

A LATE HARD FROST returns to the world of COMPASS NORTH, and the entangled lives of Merry, Cassandra and Nick in the quirky small town of Homer, Alaska.

Cassandra's life as a talented but isolated artist hides the emotional wounds that haunt her.  Now, unexpectedly, she finally has the love of the one man she's adored for so many years.  But that love has come at a terrible price:  the destruction of the only true friendship that matters to her.  As Cassandra struggles with the massive changes ricocheting through her life, a sinister figure lurks in hiking, watching her, waiting for his chance to claim her as his own.

I'm planning to be back on the blog very soon, but in the meantime, take a look at the book trailer for Compass North just released by Duncurra (my publisher).  Very nice I think!  What do you think?

    There was a bit of a stretch of time between week 9 and week 10 blogs, but my “year of new” project is still ongoing—and great!  Finding time to write about each week’s new event has been the issue—but more about that later.

    Friends have climbed on my “year of new” bandwagon and have helped with ideas and, on occasion, have been my intrepid partners for adventures.  Susan found the Groupon for the drag queen brunch, and suggested we go.  It definitely qualified as a new experience for me. We collected some other friends and six of us abandoned the bright Seattle sunshine on a Sunday afternoon to sit at the long plank tables in a packed, small darkened theatre, facing a dimly lit stage.  We sipped our mimosas (part of the Groupon) and awaited the show.

    Okay, I’ll be frank here.  I had an idea of what a drag queen is, but honestly, I wasn’t sure that I had it right.  So I did a little online research:

    The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a drag queen as a homosexual who dresses as a woman especially to entertain people.

    dictionary.com states that a drag queen is a male transvestite, especially a performer, who dresses as a woman to entertain the public.
​
    Both those definitions were straightforward.  But the most intriguing information came from a Huffington Post blog:
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-bartolomei/10-myths-about-drag-queens_b_2979249.html

    It turns out that in the drag queen world there is nuance.  For examples:  Most drag queens are gay, but there is a small minority who are straight.  “Bear” or “slag” drag queens don’t shave their facial hair.  It’s a little more complicated than it first appears.

    Our show began with the introduction of our mistress of ceremonies, a roundly robust and extraordinarily festooned and wigged figure with a voice that could flatten a room.  We were exhorted to drink heavily, tip the performers liberally, and applaud at pretty much every juncture.  Audience participation (and tipping), we were told, were the keys to a great show.  

    Then began the parade of acts.  The performers lip-synced to very loud popular songs while dancing around the stage in spike-heeled boots, sequins, feathers and fans, fishnet stockings, giant wigs and headdresses.  The two main performers were strikingly attractive, with figures any woman would envy.  In spite of their heavy makeup and restricting costuming (imagine Cher all dolled up, but even more so), they were masterful dancers and athletes.  

    If there was a defining theme, it was that vast excess was required.  One drag queen wore contact lenses that made her eyes glitter and glow like an alien from another planet.  The drag queens were accompanied by dancers, men not in drag, but in very puzzling costumes.  I couldn’t tell you why one dancer in the finale wore only a silver bikini and what appeared to be a silver submarine on his head, topped with the number 12.  (Well, I do know about the number 12, because this is Seattle and 12 is shorthand for support for the Seahawks.  But still.)

    For me, it all fell a little flat.  I’m fine with bawdy (and there was plenty of bawdy) but somehow the energy in the room didn’t build to a crescendo.  The cast worked hard, but the show didn’t quite come together—perhaps because this was brunch, and for most of us, a mimosa is all we manage on a Sunday afternoon.  Perhaps if this had been a late-night show with late-night energy and more alcohol, the experience would have felt different.  It was an interesting experience, but I don’t think I need to go again.

    But one thing I did realize:  These are hard-working people.  They strutted and danced and jumped and cartwheeled—they didn’t hold back.   
​  
    It must be frustrating for them when the right energy doesn’t materialize in the audience during a show.  Crowd energy is such an elusive quality, that invisible thrum, almost a pulse, that surfaces at great parties and concerts, sometimes emerging unexpectedly and spontaneously with a swelling updraft of pure fun and even joy.  We’ve all experienced it—but it’s finicky.  Sometimes it’s just not there, and that’s all there is to it.


    So…why the blogs might be a little further apart in the weeks to come…​

    I am still pursuing my “year of new.”  It’s infused me with optimism.  In fact, it’s helped me regain the focus I need to recommit to finish my next book.
    I don’t know if all authors experience the stages of writing in the same way, but I think most do.  In the book writing world, composing the first draft is a dreadful slog.  You’re putting together the bones for your book, and although the story may be living in your head, it’s a painful and slow process to pull it out of your brain and get it into written words.  It takes a long time and it’s exhausting.    
    (Stephen King wrote that first drafts of books should take no longer than three months.  If he could show me how to manage that, I would worship at his feet.)
    I began my first draft of the sequel to Compass North before Mark received his devastating cancer diagnosis.  As he struggled through treatment, the draft languished.  There was no help for that.  I’d pick it up periodically and write a scene or fiddle with some language, but I couldn’t give it the attention necessary to move it forward.  
    Then, when Mark died, I felt as if I’d dropped deep below the surface of an ocean.  I was submerged in grief and loneliness and loss.  It’s taken a long time to emerge from that, and though I’ll never be the same person I was before, I’m back in the world.
    I have a wonderful event coming up in late October (more about that in later blogs) and I am determined to finish the first draft of my next book before then.  It’s a huge amount of work to do in a short period of time, but I think it’s attainable if I work diligently.  So I’m diving back into the world of my story, and already I’m experiencing some of the less desirable side effects.  I miss turns when I’m driving because my brain is gnawing on a problem with a scene.  Emails go unanswered.  Garbage cans don’t get moved to the street on pickup days.  I open the refrigerator and find, to my surprise, that there’s nothing for dinner because I haven’t thought to go to the grocery store.  It’s all part of the process.
    The completion of the first draft, of course, is only the beginning, but it’s a huge accomplishment.  For me, it will mean the worst is over.  I love the process of revision, of chewing on words and sentences and paragraphs, of rearranging scenes, revisiting my characters.  It’s hard work, too, but it’s so much fun!  
    So yes, the “year of new” is continuing, but if there are reporting gaps, it will only mean that I’m once again putting in time at a table at Starbucks, Bose noise-cancelling earphones firmly clamped over my ears, and I’m probably frowning at my computer screen because the right words are sometimes so darn elusive.
    Wish me luck!

    It’s not always the big changes that whack you sideways.  Sometimes, it doesn’t take much at all.  

    This week, I tried out a new gym class called “Core Essentials.”  I expected we’d be doing sit-ups and other nasty abdominal work, the kind of workout that’s standard in the gym world.  To my surprise, however, the class was led by a graceful and obviously accomplished male dancer, and the work involved a lot of dance moves and balance.  Not my strengths.
 
    I clunked my way through it, overheated and a little flustered.  I wobbled on one leg as we swung our other leg through space while swaying our arms “gracefully” above our heads.  We flung ourselves into arabesques and dropped into plies.  We rose from deep knee bends to perch on our toes.  George, our instructor, was the picture of grace.  I felt like the dancing hippo in Fantasia.  (Actually, the dancing hippo was a lot better than I was.)  

    But now, as I get more new experiences under my belt, I can start to generalize about this world of new.

    Approaching these new situations, even the small ones, makes me anxious.  It takes a bit of a mental shove to get me going.  I’ve mentioned before that I think we get out of practice at being beginners when we graduate out of childhood and assume our status as competent adults.  We don’t want to look stupid.  We don’t want to lose face.  Taking chances is not what we do.  Each week, I have to give myself a little talking-to before I jump into a new situation.

    This week’s experience also reminded me of a snippet from a motivational talk I heard years ago.  I couldn’t tell you now the subject of the talk.  The sound bite I remember is, “You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.”  The speaker’s point was that we make choices in our lives.  We aren’t gifted with unlimited time and energy.  As we invest in developing our expertise in one area, we forego other options.  An extreme example is the Olympic athlete, who spends so many hours every day honing her skills.  She makes a choice, and as a result there may not be room in her life for much else.
 
    Although I do envy instructor George (and some of the other graceful souls in his class), they have probably spent years practicing dance skills and have muscle memories that I can only dream of.  I will keep going to this class because I think developing good balance is important, and I’m a little shocked by how poor mine seems to be.  I expect I will stumble and wobble and curse under my breath, but that’s okay too.  I’ll add this to my list of new experiences and move forward, without having any expectation that professional ballet is in my future.

    So what if I looked like a deranged dancing hippo?  No one was paying attention to me anyway.  They were all trying to get their own legs pointed in the right direction.  I got a fine workout and I was once again reminded that there are many, many things I’m not good at.  It’s an important reminder.
​
    So far, no matter what the outcome, I’ve enjoyed a little thrill of accomplishment after every experience.  I feel a bit more alive, as if I’m edging my way back into the world.  

***

    Grieving isn’t a linear process.  I know I’m moving forward, but there are still days when the reality of my loss slays me.  This last week, I could feel the dark abyss looming behind me.  I was missing Mark and feeling very sorry for myself.  As an experiment I decided to make a deliberate effort to break out of my dark place.  I marched myself down to my local coffee shop, bought myself a frothy coffee, and took out a notebook.  For an hour, I scribbled, as fast as I could, a list of things for which I’m grateful.

    At the end of the hour, I had 115 far-ranging notations of gratitude, including the cheerfulness of hummingbirds; fresh salmon, tart blueberries, and very dark chocolate; my sister-in-law’s prayers; nice gel pens; Mary Oliver’s poems; and of course, having been fortunate enough to have 30 years with Mark.  Little things and important things and silly things.

    Half way through the hour I found myself grinning.  So many reasons to be happy.  And of course it’s not an exhaustive list.  As I walked home (still smiling, I think), I was mentally ticking off new reasons to be grateful:  the feel and smell of slick wet clay in the pottery studio, an auto mechanic that I trust, Rusty’s goofy dog grin…

    Meditation practices often incorporate gratitude into their repertoire.  However, I am a terrible meditator.  Controlling my “monkey mind”—the term yogis use for the continuous mental chatter that fills our heads—is very difficult for me.  But somehow, this simple act of listing so many positive aspects of my life led me right into a happy place.​

    I don’t give advice to other people about grief and recovery.  I’m not qualified to do that.  I’m working through my own  grief as best I can, with the help and support and love of those who care about me.  I think our paths through grief may have common elements, but each journey is unique too.  But today I’ll make an exception:  I found this exercise, this consciously taking just an hour to reflect and record what makes me happy, to be very powerful.  If you’re feeling a little low, it might be worth giving this a try.










































 








































        Grif

In an early scene in the movie Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts’ character enters an exclusive clothing store on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles.  She’s a down-on-her-luck hooker.  Richard Gere’s character, an extraordinarily rich businessman, has handed her a wad of cash and told her to buy an outfit for the evening, but the store’s two saleswomen refuse to wait on her.  They pretty much throw her out of the store, telling her that she doesn’t belong there.  It’s painful to watch.  (Happily, there’s payback later in the movie.)

Roberts’ character enters the store oblivious to the scorn she’s about to engender.  But for some of us, visiting an establishment that markets pricey couture clothing is nothing short of terrifying.  I know, I know, you may have no idea what I’m talking about.  But class distinctions still shadow some of us.  I grew up in an immigrant family, with parents who turned frugality into an art form.  My mother had lived through World War II in England, and the deprivations of that time marked her.  (She would squirrel away leftover pats of butter in her purse on our rare visits to a restaurant.)  We were clothed from thrift store gleanings, long before it was in any way fashionable to forage for the vintage.  

The trappings of the well-off were foreign to me, and frightening.  I had no training in how to act in situations where wealth and advantage were taken for granted.  Nowadays, my life is very different, but my history remains intact.  As comfortable as I may be with my life now, I cringe a little at my belief that I’d still be horribly out of place in the halls of the rich and famous, sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb.

And so, this week, I put myself to the task of entering a couture studio and having a significant interaction.  For years I’ve walked past the Luly Yang couture store in the graceful Fairmont Hotel in downtown Seattle.  In the picture windows, formal gowns ranging from the demure to the outrageous face the street.  These gowns are amazing.  Up to now, I’ve admired them from afar but I’ve never entered the store.  One of Luly Yang’s signature creations is in this store:  the Monarch Butterfly dress, a couture formal silk corset and petaled skirt that clearly evokes the butterfly.  It’s theatrical and magnificent.  I decided I would go to the store and ask to try on the dress.

Again, I know, some of you will think that this isn’t much of a new adventure.  But like trees, we bear the marks of our years inside us, no matter what our exteriors now show.  If you cut a tree in half, you can tell the years that the tree suffered from lack of water or environmental stress from the size and quality of the growth rings for those years.  Those rings never go away, even though they may be covered up with new robust growth.  Like trees, our past is always inside of us, always with us.  For me, walking into that store was just plain scary.  

The store is compact and quiet, with pale beige carpet and small glass tables.  One of the two saleswomen, both clothed head to toe in black, asked if she could help me.  I’m just here to look at your lovely dresses, I said.  She smiled and told me to let her know if I needed any help.

I wandered through the store.  Half the store is devoted to exquisite wedding dresses.  The other half is primarily for evening wear, of the very showy kind:  lots of satin.  I glanced at a few price tags.  Each piece I looked at was priced at thousands of dollars.

The original butterfly dress rests there, the central showpiece of the collection.  I chatted with the saleswoman about it.  She was friendly and charming, not frightening at all.  She told me that the they could customize a new gown like it for me, but that the original could also be rented.  In the end, I didn’t ask to try it on. I just didn’t want to, after all.

When I got home, I found I was curious about renting the butterfly gown—a purely theoretical curiosity, since I certainly had nowhere to wear it—so I emailed the store about what it cost to rent.  They responded that they had made a mistake and the dress was not in fact now available for rental, but that I could buy it for $25,000.  

Well, as you may guess, I’m not buying the butterfly dress.  ​

The whole experience, though, was remarkably empowering.  Analytically, I know that there is absolutely no reason why the salespeople would be cold or rude to me.  I looked perfectly respectable.  But inside I am still carrying that uncertain fearful girl in thrift store duds, devoid of  self-confidence, the girl who got picked on because of her funny accent and her bad clothes.  She’ll always be in there, a ring in my tree that’s a little shriveled and puckered, but today she has a hint of a smile.