It’s the end of the month I turned 73, and we were busy with cleaning and walking; I’m running a mile at a time on the flat and writing and reading. There’s more. The basalt shore is stirred up along the edges and we’re finding things.

I missed running all summer due to an injury the end of May, but now I’m running a mile at a time and no more sharp, stabbing pain. “Discomfort” a doctor would call it. It was much worst than that throughout the season when I would normally expect to be covering 3-6 miles every other day. Aging and injury will do that. And then last month, I abruptly felt better and we could go out for a morning walk. We are walking these days together most mornings, about three miles, and I’ve risked very short runs. Next month during the holiday zoo we’ll walk a 5k. Maybe I will run a mile of it. The downhill part? Easy does it.

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My novel transformed dramatically twice this month. First I butchered it back to 40k words, cut two characters entirely, and one of my repeated characters in half. Each chapter was carved back to about 3k words. That gave me a manuscript of barely inside the limit of what’s called a novella. There are presses only interested in novellas. I haven’t submitted to them.

Then I put the two cut characters back in (3k each) and another chapter from my favorite secondary character Tula [who deserves a novella all her own and I have enough words to make that], and fiddled more to get 50k. There’s work to do on that version.

Then I took a scene from a later chapter and swapped it out for the Preface. This was in response to a suggestion from a friend’s response to that Preface and chapter 1. Tessie explained how I might “raise the stakes” for the character with a specific scene, and grab the reader by the throat. Then I submitted that new version twice and alerted two presses of the change and they asked for the newer version, and by then I was in such a mental muddle about where I was going that I stopped.

Recent input from younger writer-friends (another very helpful writer has made clear they won’t look at it again) and a workshop suggest further work. Last night I participated in the first of a world-building series led by a wonderful author. Nisi Shawl is a kind and generous person, older, but not so old at me. [I can recommend her novels.] She used the term “speculative fiction” routinely, and that was a comfort concerning what to call my DAUGHTERS book. I came away with ideas about details I think deserve attention in my book, and I will be hard-pressed not to return immediately and begin revising. But, no. I made notes both general recommendations and specifics applied to me book during the Zoom. I will wait, stew, and consider Dinty Moore’s post today about detail and Jane Friedman’s interview with publisher David Wilk. I will complete a definitive draft in January.

[an aside: The writers featured in emails from literary journals and small and large presses all look so young, but then I turned 73 and am old, right?]

My short story collection is out to two small presses, and a few individual stories are in submission too. In total, thirty-one submissions are still under consideration as I write this, mostly small presses and a handful of agents for the novel/novella.

I decided last spring that if I didn’t have a publisher by 2026, I would self-publish my novella-novel and move on to another writing project. That’s still the plan—a small, numbered edition of maybe 50 copies, and I wonder if I could sell that many? I owe copies to the people who helped this story find itself, and people tell me they want to read it. Maybe I could dispose of 100 copies if I gave a lot of them away. What I most treasure is the notion of a high school class reading it and arguing ferociously about it. I know enough teachers that I might be able to make that happen. ALL THE DAUGHTERS SING is meant to stimulate discussion and options, stir reconsideration of assumptions, and get people considering the impossible. [I would teach it if I were still teaching high school students.] Maybe it can still do that; maybe I can find the money to print copies.

Throughout the process of writing and revision, I have entertained myself by designing covers. I have the cover design using a local painter’s work. She wrote in an email that I could use it, but I would need her to sign “limited use of artwork” contract before I dare follow through. The university press I was working with claimed she would not sign their contract, because they would not agree with use her work unaltered. That’s something I am very willing to do. I have found presses that offer guidance on interior design, and I have a back-up cover designs using a works from the public domain. I have designed hundreds of covers.

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You might have read elsewhere about the disaster in our tiny rental. One tenant for the past fifteen years. He did not clean. He did not kill anyone when he drove drunk. He was incontinent and was starting to black out—several times to the emergency room. Gary talked to him nearly every day. We liked him and continue to talk to him. We called his out-of-state brother when he was suicidal years ago and recently about him totaling his car and being life-flighted to Portland. Six hours of surgery and he’s doing better and able to walk and is moving to assisted living. All good. We are left to clean.

We had truck haul away fabric furniture (stained in a way I will not describe), filled a dumpster twice with trash and the carpet, filled two extra over-size garbage cans, and stripped out the carpet—seriously not salvageable. There was a lot of dope that we sent on to our former tenant’s good friend. Some personal things we suspect he might eventually ask for [his mother’s ashes?] and things we hope to donate such as a half-dozen pieces of salvaged furniture, is cleaned and stored in our garage—nothing we want except for my mother’s little hand-painted table which is in bad shape. The cleaning is in two stages—cleaned and the deep-cleaned. This takes a while (ceiling, walls, windows, floors, counters, appliances), and some aspects of this gut-job are still up in the air. Will we need to replace the shower stall and toilet? The bathroom floor? Lighting? There’s a burn-mark on the kitchen counter—can we live with that? Can a future renter? Even the simpler repairs will wipe out our financial cushion I’ve worked so hard to build. The shower-stall estimator was a kind man but the estimate more than three times our budget and I was sorry to have dragged him out. He said the unit would rent for 5k a month in Maui, and admired the gray-stained t&g pine wall and ceiling (unharmed). I’d hoped to paint the clean ply floor, which our sons and I put in, but the thin coast of mastic used to install the former carpet may preclude that. We might have to install new carpet.

I anticipate publishing before-and-after photos.

Income from this long-term [not short-term] rental covers almost half of our property taxes. My grandfather built the structure specifically to ensure he would be able to afford living here in retirement. We are doing the same. All around us wealth and monetized short-term-rental houses that used to be home. Few are homes.

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In the mean time, I am working on a trio of quilts, maybe four. The center panel of the first is pieced, and I’ve made a decision about the frame and border (I think).

I have a 215-game streak in Wordle and earned Queen Bee in Spelling Bee this morning. No rain here until 6pm, so we can walk once the sun is up without getting wet. Probably. Best of all, the members of the 6-week writing cohort live in the Pacific NW, so this might lead to a post-workshop writing group? A possibility. That would be my best-case scenario.