Like last week, this post is late. I mean to write early, but it’s been a week of strong wind, heavy rain, an 18-hour power outage, some baking and planning and writing, and exhausting work on our rental. A friend sent me notes on the novella version of my book and I began a new draft. Good stuff. It sounds like I’m complaining, but I have no business doing that.

I finished reading a novel this week and struggled to explain in a review what I liked and didn’t like. There were actual mistakes, I believe, and aspects of the story I argued with and others I just didn’t like. It was not the first that I found disappointing. Mostly, though, I had a great reading year! I am still thinking of the books I’ve loved: Helen Whybrow’s The Salt Stones and Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This and Westover’s Educated in nonfiction and Novik’s short stories that I expected to find disappointing but were wonderful (the later novella was disappointing). I enjoyed poetry by Joseph Millar, and many novels, both current best sellers and older works. I am quite certain I read Herland fifty years ago, but rereading it was a revelation. Helen Fellin Tierney’s If the Train Arrives affected me deeply for the mother’s wisdom urging her neurodivergent son to engage with possibility. I read Hamnet, have seen the film, and found both deeply affecting. When I found the local place name Dismal Nitch in D.S.G. Burke’s dystopic Mean Higher High Water, I was both surprised and filled with wonder. The author suggested her novel and mine would be friends. [At least hers has a plot.]

We had waffles for breakfast and then Gary went off to work on the bathroom floor of the rental. On Tuesday, we picked up the floor paint and I spent a long time in the tile department, but didn’t buy tile. The tiny space will be tiled with leftover handmade tile I bought by the pound from Pratt + Larson in Portland over a period of several years in order to tile the bathroom in our house. I’ve laid them out on the concrete floor of the atrium, just to see if I had enough to fill the space. I do.

I already chose premix mastic, but didn’t purchase grout. I couldn’t decide on the color, premix or dry? I’ve mixed the grout in the past, but the premix is tempting.

In the mean time, my short story—novelette—22k-word-novella—70k-word-novel—81k-novel—40k-novella-again-with-a-new opening—50k-novel has become a 60k novel with a slight shift at the end. Does it have a plot with someone-wants-but-so? No. It does not. Except that eight narrators survive alone, raise daughters, and struggle to understand why? What they accomplish, mostly, is accepting that there is no reason. Perhaps that is my contribution: there is no grand plan. Stuff happens.

I keep finding typos.