October 4, 2023
When last I wrote in early summer, I had hoped to be deep in the editing process for the new book by this time, but things have moved more slowly than I might have liked. Unfortunately, that pace is entirely out of my control due to some staffing changes at the publisher. However, I am continuing to creep up the queue toward being assigned an editor (was #6 in early August and #3 by mid-September), so I hope to start the process by the end of this month or early in November. This means that the release of That Day, And What Came After will undoubtedly be in early spring of 2024 instead of fall/winter of 2023. Ironically, we are about to enter what I’ve called “my dark season,” which encompasses a series of sad anniversaries between Skip’s death next week…10/9/2010, hard to believe it’s been 13 years!…and the start of the winter holiday season. In addition to Skip’s death, these anniversaries include Mom’s death on 10/27/2006, and both their birthdays, 11/4 and 11/18—yes, they were both Scorpios. All this in the six weeks before Thanksgiving every year! Seems fitting that I will be revisiting this grief memoir during this period of both literal and metaphoric darkness this year. (The image below is of the crabapple tree I planted in Skip’s memory and the stone underneath it, I thought it might make a nice cover image for the book, but I’ll have to wait to see what the cover designer thinks about that idea.)
Just because I have a dark season each year doesn’t mean that life stops. In fact, as I write this Weaving Penelope, the play Richard and I worked on together for many years, and which I wrote about last year when we had a modified staged reading at Keizer Homegrown Theatre, is under active consideration for a full production at Linfield University in Oregon for their 2024-25 season. Send good vibes that our script will rise to the top as they work their way through multiple possibilities available for their active theatre program.
I didn’t do any author talks over the summer about Finding Sisters; the last events happened last spring, one in person and one on Zoom (there’s a link to that talk at the Events drop-down on this website for anyone who might be interested). I wonder if bookstore or library events are perhaps similar to theatres in the summer months, when business can be very slow at times, especially if the weather is beautiful and the event is indoors. But it might also be a reflection of my personal situation, living in a mostly rural area as I do. I suspect that if I lived in an urban area, there might be more opportunities to tell people about my books in person. One bright note on that horizon: there’s a new bookstore opening in my area soon, and I definitely intend to contact them about carrying all of my books and about me doing an event of some kind there in the near future, perhaps to do with the release of the new memoir. And I will definitely book another virtual author tour as soon as the new book is given a release date.
While only one of the women in the cover image below is my genetic sister, they are all female family members I found in my genetic genealogy search. Upper left is my birth mother’s high school photo (about a year before she had me), right is my paternal grandmother, and lower left is a deceased maternal half sister that I never got to meet.
As I wait for an editor to be assigned and creative work on the book design for That Day, And What Came After to begin, I continue to write regularly and share that writing with my wild women writers group, though I have no specific book project in mind at the moment. I’ve been playing around with a few “mosaic memoir” essays about experiences I had in the 1980s and early 1990s, which are challenging my memory for details, but I have no overarching theme or sense of structure to put these essays together in a coherent whole. Not yet. But they sure are fun to write.
So, what do I do when not writing? I read, I take zoom yoga classes and do online strength and mobility workouts with a terrific trainer, and I garden. My meadow had a very different look this year because the perennials started coming into their own, though the evening primrose did dominate quite a bit later in the season and had to be “weeded” out because it was so much taller that it masked everything else for a while. Yes, it’s possible to weed a meadow! (The image below is the meadow in early July dominated by lots and lots of black-eyed susans before the evening primrose–the taller, spikier plants at the left edge and back in this photo–took over.)
And this year, for the first time since 2019, I traveled purely for pleasure, visiting old friends who have moved to Traverse City, MI, for their retirement years. I even got a new cat, an adult male that was needing a new home, which has led to some fun photos and regular posts on Facebook. I call these updates the Feline Follies, and as the two cats get adjusted to each other, things are never boring and often quite funny. (The image below is of Katniss and Smokey, the fluffy new guy, who are enthralled by the bird action in the front yard on “Kitty TV.”)
Life is good!
Rebecca Daniels 