Author of Keeping the Lights on for Ike, Sunbury Press 2019. A World War II story that follows the marriage of Alec and Mary Daniels, adoptive parents of author Rebecca Daniels.
Today I am celebrating my 30th newsletter since I started writing to you in early March 2020, just before the world went on hold for the pandemic! At the time, I didn’t yet know I would soon have to cancel the regional book tour for my first book with Sunbury Press about my dad’s experiences in Europe during WWII (Keeping the Lights on for Ike), nor did I yet have a contract for either of my two subsequent memoirs that Sunbury published, one in fall of 2021 about discovering my genetic family members (Finding Sisters), and then my grief memoir in spring of 2024 (That Day And What Came After).
I have finally finished all the audio files for Finding Sisters. The original submissions were returned last month for some requested editing to meet the Audible technical standards, mostly to take out audible breaths or silences that were a few seconds too long. I don’t yet know exactly when the audiobook version will be available for sure (hopefully very soon), but I can definitely claim that I have now narrated the audiobook versions for all three of my books with Sunbury.
Richard and I continue to pursue production possibilities for Weaving Penelope in 2026 and beyond, and we remain hopeful, though there are no official announcements to be made, though keep your fingers crossed for us for the summer of 2026. We will keep trying to get a full production of our script, but ain’t neither of us gettin’ any younger!
As some of you might have noticed, I updated my author website last spring, and I hope to add more of the essays I’ve been working on before the end of this year. I sent you a sample of an essay about my delightful meadow in the last newsletter. Other topics I’ve been writing about include aging (inevitable when you get to be my age, I suppose), some past memories of experiences and relationships, my mom’s struggle with dementia, and various other topics that pique my interest. The only real through-line is that all of it really has happened in my life, though I don’t expect it will turn into a published book any time soon.
However, most of the rest of my time and energy has been taken up recently with family events (wonderful times at my nephew’s wedding!) and an unexpected new health challenge. In fact, by the time some of you read this newsletter, I will have a brand new heart valve, which I hope will bring back my sense of well being and my energy and stamina, which have been lagging considerably in the last few weeks. As you might imagine, I’ve started writing a bit about that experience as well.
Not much else to add at this point, but I hope that next time you hear from me, I will feel re-energized and have lots more to say. In the meantime, enjoy an image of my late summer meadow this year.
My latest book, a grief memoir about Skip’s death and making my new life as a widow, is now officially one year old. I just had my last local in-person author reading last month, so I’m officially no longer working on writing, editing, or promoting a new book. Unfortunately, the university Richard and I thought might produce our play with their students has decided to “go another direction.” So we are left looking for other production alternatives, and Richard is taking the lead in that work.
So, what am I doing now, since I have no new book project on the horizon? I’m writing essays. Essays about my life, my experiences, my thoughts about the future, about just about anything. Because magazine and journal publishing has changed, along with the book publishing industry, I’m not even trying to get those essays published anywhere. Instead, I’ve entered the phase of writing in my life simply because I’m interested in sharing my thoughts, and I don’t feel a need to do that widely, so my main audience has been my women writers group. And now I’m thinking of sharing them on this website as well.
I should explain that writing has never been a way to make money for me. Of course, I used writing regularly in my professional life as a college professor, even taught a few undergraduate classes in various kinds of writing, especially playwriting and narrative essay writing, but I have never made much money with my own writings. The journal articles published while teaching, and usually accompanied with national or regional conference presentations to my fellow theatre educators, were mostly to prove my credibility in the field, especially to my departmental colleagues and to bring me a positive tenure review and promotion. The plays I have written through the years have had productions (workshops, staged readings, and semi-pro or student productions), but they have never had fully professional productions, been published, or brought in any significant income. And while I do make royalties on my non-fiction book sales, it’s not a living wage, simply an occasional supplement in my fixed income retirement years. Writing isn’t about money for me; it’s a form of expression that makes the most sense to my head and my heart.
Another form of expression that has made sense to me through my life is gardening and my relationship with nature and growing things. From time to time in this newsletter, I’ve shared with you photos or anecdotes about my gardening adventures. In fact, because gardening is one of my passions, and because I’m thinking of adding essays to this website, I’m going to share an excerpt from a longer article I’ve written about the creation of my meadow a few years ago as the first “sample” for you to check out. I’m hoping to have more essays to share by the fall newsletter. Actually, I have quite a few of them well on their way to completion: essays about aging, dementia, youthful adventures, friendships and other relationships, and lots more. It will take some time to decide which ones I’m ready to share with the world and then to get them ready for their close-ups.
Here’s a sample from the opening of “Making My Meadow”
“If you ever thought having a meadow full of native plants in place of a grass lawn would cut down on yard chores, think again. Though that idea was part of my early thinking about replacing my side yard with a meadow, it has not been my lived experience, at least not yet. When I first started reading articles in my gardening newsletters (yep, I’m a dork who reads a lot about gardening) about replacing lawns with meadows or native plantings for the sake of the declining pollinator populations, I was immediately hooked on the idea. I loved being able to make a difference to our environment, even if only a small one, and I loved meadows, which seemed to me to be the epitome of self-managed Mother Nature. Some of my most treasured memories of trips with my mom involved wildflower meadows, mostly on the hillsides of the Columbia River Gorge near Dufur or The Dalles, Oregon, and once in an alpine meadow in the Olympic National Park in Washington State. Mom knew almost all the flowers by name because she’d been interested in them since her childhood on a farm in rural Oregon, and she’d passed that passion on to me, though I was much less conversant with the flower names than she was. So, the idea of making a meadow started percolating around in my head, but I wasn’t sure how best to go about it.” (Image below is from three years ago, the first spring my meadow came into flower with lots of annuals that didn’t necessarily come back in the ensuing years.)
“The first thing I did was to visit a local native plant nursery (Nasami Farm in Whately, MA) where I was impressed with their pollinator garden kits, so I decided to start small and bought two kits (a total of 100 plugs with a mix of native flowers and grasses) to plant between the few (non-native) shrubs and flowering trees I’d planted during my first couple of springs in this house as a privacy screen between my deck and the street. I bordered that area with granite bricks as edging and was hoping the pollinator-friendly plants would become an effective ground cover. In addition to the love of wildflowers, my mom had also taught me to experiment in the garden, and she modeled for me that any and all plants can be moved around, sometimes over and over again until you find just the right place for them. So I was confident that this experiment would be something I could play around with in the future, and I planted the plugs in clusters through the area in hopes of creating waves of color beneath the branches. It worked! The remaining side “lawn”–and I’m using that term very loosely–was now much smaller (approximately 20’ x 44’ of green remained, with a mulch pad around the base of a bridal veil spirea on one edge and a narrow mulch path on the house side), and it was still a nightmare to mow. I used to tell friends it was a “broken ankle waiting to happen” because my little battery powered mower was especially hard to push around on the uneven, weed-filled ground. So, mowing that section, with a sidewalk on the short end and a gravel street edge on the long side, felt more like an obstacle course than anything. I knew something had to change; I just didn’t know what that change might be yet. And this side area got the best sun in the entire yard, so it seemed a shame to waste it on grass, especially not-so-nice grass.” (Image below is from 2020, the first spring with my pollinator garden inside the circle of stones and with the side yard in the background, still just grass)
“The more I read, the more I thought a meadow in my side yard would be a wonderful thing to create, both for the pollinators and for myself. So, the next thing I did was to stop mowing that area for a season, to see if there was anything growing there worth keeping. There wasn’t. Not really. I’d been letting the dandelions thrive because I knew they were an important source of food for the bees and other pollinators, but there wasn’t anything else there worth saving and there were still plenty of dandelions and volunteer violets in other parts of the grassy expanse that currently surrounded the house on three sides. So I started reading about how to make a meadow from scratch.” (Images below start with the previous ugly lawn, which had to be torn out with a rented sod cutter, then we added new soil and seeded the flowers and grasses, then mulched it all in for the first winter)
The essay goes on to detail the making of the meadow in the first full year of its existence and the spring results, including lessons about meadow maintenance that followed. Who knew you had to weed a meadow?! But one of my biggest unexpected challenges was getting rid of unwanted volunteer invasives. Check back in with my fall newsletter to see if I’ve managed to get the full essay on the website, along with a couple of others, by the end of September. In the meantime, enjoy the photo below of my meadow from the height of the summer last year; something new and interesting seems to always be happening there as each season progresses.
Not much else to share at the moment because my book-publishing journey has come to a slowdown, perhaps even a close, for the foreseeable future. Further, the political reality in our country has consumed a lot of the oxygen and energy all around me, and most of what I’ve been focusing on this spring and early summer is in the garden, not on the page. I do intend to keep writing, but who knows for sure to what end?
Enjoy the rest of your summer months. I’ll be back in touch again in the early fall.
Spring is sprung, the grass is riz. I wonder where the birdies is. Anonymous author
Though no one really knows for sure who or where this verse came from, many of us have heard it before, perhaps even know it by heart, though I’ve gotta say, my grass is definitely not looking like it’s gonna “riz” any time soon, though the birdies are definitely here. In fact many of them stick around for the winter, but the birds who went south are slowly coming back to the area, though my favorites, the hummingbirds, probably won’t be back until later this month or early in May. This year, we had a true winter with some serious snow for the first time in several years, and we are now heading into the roller coaster that is spring in New England. March, April, and even sometimes May, can be completely unreliable, weather wise, so there’s no telling what lies ahead of us. But the snow is gone (for now), and the sun seems to have returned every now and then, even if the wind can still be rather bitter.
I’m including a photo of the snow-covered back yard from this past February (it’s thankfully now clear of the white stuff), but I’m also including a hopeful picture of my flowering cherry tree from last April below this, which allows me to dream about how soon the blossoms and leaves might be returning to those currently nearly bare skeletons. There are buds a-plenty but nothing is unfurling just yet. Hopefully soon. Another poet once said “hope springs eternal” (Alexander Pope, 1734), and this rings true for me, especially in the spring months. Though current politics can often feel like hope has gone into hiding, there’s nothing like new leaves and flowers to raise my spirits.
When last I wrote, there were lots of things in process, so here’s the latest report on my author activities. Last week, I finally finished all the audio files for the re-recording of the Finding Sisters audiobook. It’s now being reviewed and (keeping fingers crossed for no unexpected technical glitches) will hopefully be released later this spring. I had several successful in person events about the newest book (That Day And What Came After): talking about my writing process and reading segments from the book at a local senior center, a library, and as a selected author for my regional group, Straw Dog Writers Guild. I also participated last weekend on an author’s panel about our experiences with publishing, also sponsored by Straw Dog.
In February, I was finally able to record the podcast for my latest book, which ironically went live on Valentine’s Day. I guess it was a good thing that I used the phrase “the love of my life” in the subtitle. Here is the link to the recording, for anyone who might be interested. It’s about half an hour long, and you don’t need to open an account to listen. And as long as I’m talking about the love of my life and the coming of spring, below is one of the illustrations of Skip from the book you can enjoy while you listen. He’s mixing fertilizer in our greenhouse for his copious spring veggie plantings.
The book was recently selected as one of the March 2025 winners of the International Impact Book Awards in the Grief category. There appear to have been six winners out of 60 entrants in this category, and monthly winners get to boast with a digital sticker and certificate and compete with other monthly winners for a year-end grand prize. It’s not an important award, but it’s nice to be recognized, even in small ways, now and then.
Recently, I hired a web designer to update my author website for easier navigation. I’m also in the process of having her add photo galleries for all three books and, most importantly, we’re starting to create a system of indexing my past blog entries, so my thoughts can be tracked by themes throughout the years. I hope to have the entire website re-vamp completed this spring.
In terms of theatrical adventures, Richard, my co-playwright, and I continue to pursue possible full productions for Weaving Penelope, one at a university in Georgia, where a group of faculty members is currently reviewing the script with their students in mind, and another, lower tech version in Oregon, with Richard at the helm as director. Continue to keep your fingers crossed for us.
Though there’s no definitive new book project on my publishing horizon, I continue to write, mostly short essays about my life experiences, a project I have referred to before as my Mosaic Memoir, though it will likely not be in book form. If I were a famous writer, publishers might be interested in a collated volume of my random life experiences, but I’m not. Mostly, I’m just having a great time focusing on these memories and trying to get them in shape as essays, which seems to be the non-fiction equivalent of the fiction writer’s short stories.
And, of course, I’m eagerly awaiting the return of my meadow. Who knows what this spring will bring to my little corner of western Massachusetts. Last year, foliage was between mid-shin and knee level by mid-May, with only a few flowers to speak of until later in the season. I expect it to be a bit slower this year because we had a much deeper winter than we’d been having for the few years before that. But who knows? That’s what makes meadow-watching so much fun!
When last I wrote, my virtual tour was halfway complete and the holidays were looming. Now, the tour is over, the holiday season is in the rearview mirror, winter is headed our way in earnest, and spring will be arriving before you know it. When I was young, time seemed to pass ever so slowly. Now, it has a tendency to fly by!
Here’s the quick update on my “author business:”
The virtual tour finished in mid-October with 10 out of 10 excellent reviews for That Day And What Came After.
Unfortunately, the podcast recording of me talking with my publisher about the new book has been postponed yet again—this time until early February.
I have booked a couple of solo in-person reading events early this year in my local community (Greenfield Senior Center in January, Greenfield Public Library in March), and I’m one of twelve featured writers for the Straw Dog Writers Guild annual group presentation honoring Pioneer Valley authors whose books came out in 2024.
I finished the audio files for the Finding Sisters audiobook since last I wrote. However, once the files were complete, we discovered that my microphone had caused some random drop out in a number of the files, so everything will have to be re-recorded. That was a frustrating discovery, but it will give me something to work in the coming weeks, in addition to more essays for my mosaic memoir project, and will hopefully be done and released before I write again in the spring.
As far as theatre events are concerned, I served as dramaturg for my friend and fellow playwright’s new play, How to Fold a Fitted Sheet & Other Pandemic Pastimes. In December, we held three public readings and got lots of great positive feedback on the script plus some good ideas for the next revision, coming in the new year.
Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, the hoped-for production of Weaving Penelope out in Oregon next year will not be happening after all, though we now have a solid chance for a university production in Atlanta, GA, in late 2025. Please continue to keep your fingers crossed for us. We are really proud of the script and hope to see a full production before too much longer.
On a personal note: the meadow continued to be beautiful this fall, even as it and the season waned. It was trimmed, mulched (the trimmings serve as a self-mulch for the winter months), and put to bed for the season by the end of October. For the first time in several years, we did have a white Christmas in western Massachusetts, but somehow, a couple of inches of snow isn’t quite the romantic thing one envisions in one’s dreams and wasn’t even photo-worthy, though I did have a lovely holiday celebration overall.
The election came and went, and lots will be changing on the national scene in the coming year. Though I don’t write much about politics, and I live in one of the bluest of the blue states, I will say this one thing: the arts are more important now than ever before. Keep creating, and keep the faith!
As I previewed for you in the early summer, I had my first in-person event as the featured Author of the Month at the Northampton Senior Center in August. The event was small and the audience engaged and supportive. In fact, three of the audience members were women from my women writers group, and the others were clearly widows (one fairly recently). After my talk and reading two short excerpts, we had a good conversation about grief journeys and strategies for dealing with the “new normal” that comes after the loss of a loved one. And I sold three books!
My virtual book tour is currently at the halfway mark, and all the reviews have been five stars! Here are a few highlights of the things the reviewers (most of them book bloggers) have had to say about That Day And What Came After:
“Something about Rebecca Daniels’ writing is so transporting, you can be halfway through the book before you even realize it. ‘That Day and What Came After,’ is not just a memoir, but a treatise about grief, love and finding contentment again after everything has been taken from you. “
“I recommend it for readers who have unfortunately found themselves in the widowed club. It is definitely worth reading and I believe they will feel like someone actually understands them.”
“Rebecca Daniels has created a memoir here that I think will be an invaluable resource for those that are suffering, or have suffered with grieving the loss of a loved one.”
“The fog of grief is so well represented in this book that I found myself grieving along with Daniels, despite having never known Skip.”
“A stunning memoir from the author of some of the best books I’ve read in the last decade, ‘That Day And What Came After,’ is an intimate look at grief, pain and moving on in the wake of a tragedy.”
“In ‘That Day And What Came After,’ Daniels paints an unflinching portrait of grief, loss and heartbreak in a way that few other authors are willing to do.”
See the entire tour schedule, with links to the full reviews, and an opportunity to sign up for a book giveaway here.
Most grief narratives have abstract covers, but I didn’t want random shapes. I wanted there to be something real under the abstraction. So, I gave my cover designer three photos (below) that I had taken of Skip’s grave as well as the tree memorial I had created in my back yard. I thought they might be manipulated into a somewhat more abstract image for the cover. Obviously, the designer agreed.
I’ve started to book more readings and author talks locally for early 2025, and there’s still the second half of my virtual tour to come, but this is a small market (a picturesque valley full of many small rural towns), so online reviews are incredibly helpful to get the word out to a broader readership. I’ve said this before, but if you have read and enjoyed the book, I hope you will consider putting a review on Amazon or Sunbury Press (wherever you bought your copy), or perhaps on Goodreads, if you are active there or bought the print version from your local bookstore. In addition to the promotional work, I’m going to send the book in for consideration for a few book awards, both regional and national before the end of 2024. Keep your fingers crossed for me!
Unfortunately, the Sunbury Press BlogTalk Radio program interview with the founder of the company, originally scheduled for August, had to be postponed again, twice, and probably won’t happen until November. This latest book is not exactly holiday gift material for a general audience, but if someone you know is struggling through their own grief journey, it does make a good gift, though it can be helpful if the giver has read it first.
The audiobook for That Day is now available through Audible on Amazon, with yours truly doing the narration. That was a tough challenge, but I’m glad I decided to do it. I’m also working on narrating Finding Sisters, which came out during the second year of the pandemic, so it has languished until now. But I hope to have that finished before we get too deep into the holiday season.
The other project that is taking my time this fall is the play I co-wrote with my good friend and collaborator of many years, Richard Carp. We are deep into production planning for a premiere full production of Weaving Penelope next fall at the Chehalem Cultural Center’s brand new LaJoie theatre in Newberg, Oregon, located in Yamhill County wine country just outside Portland. Richard will direct and I will assist electronically from a distance, flying out west for final auditions/casting and then again for the last rehearsals before opening night. We’re just getting started with assembling a production team, and it’s finally starting to feel real, very real! The images below are from the workshop staged reading in the fall of 2022 at Keizer Homegrown Theatre near Salem, OR. One is our wonderful dramaturg (Zachary Dorsey, who continues to advise us from afar) waiting for rehearsal to get started; the other is a scene from that same rehearsal.
It feels too early to be saying this out loud, but it seems the holidays are nearly upon us. In fact, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas (or whatever other winter holiday you celebrate), and New Year’s will have passed before I write again, since I only write once every quarter. So, Happy Holidays to you, however and whichever you choose to celebrate.
Though I normally write at the beginning of each quarter of the year, because I wrote last month about the release of my new book, That Day and What Came After: Finding and Losing the Love of My Life in Six Short Years , this will be a very short newsletter, mostly let you know that, now that the editing and design phase is complete and the book is finally out, the promotion and publicity phase of being an author is starting to pick up steam.
This month, I will get a review in the largest local paper (The Greenfield Recorder) at my end of the Pioneer Valley and will participate in a local/regional author book fair in one of our beautiful local parks [Peskeompskut Park in Turners Falls on Sunday, July 14 th—book fair starts at 1 p.m., with a concert by Do It Now in the band shell at 2 p.m.]. Keep your fingers crossed we don’t get rained out!
Then, in August I’ll be featured on the Sunbury Press BlogTalk Radio program in an interview with the founder of the company and will have my first in-person event as the author of the month for the Northampton Senior Center. I’m hoping for a local library talk or two and perhaps another senior center talk in the early fall as well. Unfortunately, most of the independent bookstores in my local area are too small for holding author events.
In the early fall, I’ll be taking another virtual book tour around the US and parts of Canada (hoping for about 20 “stops” with a curated group of book bloggers). My next newsletter will share some of the highlights from that tour with you.
This image is from our trip to Ireland a couple of years before Skip’s death.
If you have read That Day, online reviews are an important part of the marketing program, so I’d really appreciate it if you would consider putting a review on Amazon or Sunbury Press (wherever you bought your copy), or perhaps on Goodreads, if you bought the print version from your local bookstore. Thanks, Nyla, for the lovely 5-star review at Sunbury!
And if you haven’t bought your copy yet, Sunbury is running a summer special to celebrate 20 years in business. Just use the code 20/20 when checking out for 20% off all the books in your cart.
I’ll report back again in the fall, and I’ll also have an update on the audiobook version, which is still in process as I write this. In the meantime, stay cool as much as possible. As for me, I’m hiding out indoors near my new mini-split, which is making a lovely difference in this, our second heat wave of the summer so far.
What if you came home one day and found your husband dead in his favorite chair? This grief memoir explores the author’s experience of the unexpected death of her husband from sudden cardiac arrest a mere three months after his doctors had pronounced him hale and healthy. The author shares her experiences in the immediate aftermath of the abrupt shock of discovery, reminisces about the details of the couple’s late-in-life courtship and marriage, and imparts other experiences she has had along the grieving road in the years since becoming a widow.
This is the promotional introduction to my newest book, a grief memoir called That Day and What Came After: Finding and Losing the Love of My Life in Six Short Years. This book has been a long time coming. When Skip died, I could not write cogently about that event for a very long time. Then, once I did decide to write about it (more than personal journaling, that is), it took time for the story to find a shape, an overarching structure. Finally, thanks to the encouragement of friends and the wonderful and useful critiques from my amazing women writers group, I had a manuscript I was ready to submit to my publisher. Long time readers of this newsletter will remember that the book was originally scheduled to be released last year, but changes at my publisher (things specific to them combined with industry-wide trends) caused yet more delay.
As I wrote last time, the editing was complete by early March of this year. The cover design (featured below), based on a photo I had taken a few years ago, was finalized in early May, and the terrific book designer (I’ve worked with her on all three of my Sunbury books…she’s the best!) finished her work before the Memorial Day holiday weekend. So, now it’s finally ready to be out in the world! Today is the official release date. You can order your copy directly from the publisher here. The print and Kindle editions should be available on Amazon later this month (usually takes one or two weeks after the publisher’s release date).
One of the things many authors do prior to publication, yours truly included, is to submit what are called beta copies of the manuscript in process to advance readers in hopes of having those readers write “blurbs” (short promotional pieces often added to the book jacket or other publicity materials and, in this case, to be included in the opening pages of the book itself). I was privileged to have four wonderful folks—a fellow widow, now a certified grief counselor; an old friend who is also a pastor; a licensed mental health counselor; and a fellow Sunbury author—read the manuscript in draft and provide generous and thoughtful blurbs to be included in the opening pages of the book. A few selected excerpts from their generous praises and longer reviews are below for you to peruse, which will hopefully stimulate your interest in the book itself.
Back when my world collapsed and I felt completely alone and terrified, I needed the soothing and validating words that Daniels provides as she gently and lovingly walks us through what it’s like to be suddenly widowed. I needed to know, by reading this book, that I would get through this, and that I was normal in feeling changed forever by the experience.
—Kelley Lynn, author/speaker, widow, and certified grief counselor.
Rebecca Daniels invites us into her story of falling in love later in life, her husband’s sudden death, and ten years of evolving grief. Daniels’ memoir is a helpful companion for people who are grieving, especially for women who have lost their husbands suddenly. While each person’s love and loss is different, this memoir serves as a reminder that they are not alone.
–Theresa Mason, retired pastor/chaplain
This memoir, rich with details and imagery from her marriage with Skip, comes together to craft a work of genuine love that delights in their relationship and extends that joy to its readers. As a culture we tend to discuss death so infrequently that Rebecca Daniels’ unflinching and brave decision to wade headlong into that subject is like a balm for those of us looking for catharsis and to make sense of the unimaginable.
–Jay Sefton, licensed mental health counselor
In this memoir, Rebecca contemplates deeper questions and chronicles navigating the minutiae of day-to-day life after losing her beloved partner. Heartbreak and loneliness are tempered by found family and precious memories. By turns sorrowful, hopeful, and reflective.
–Natalie Pinter, author
Now that the editing and design process are complete for the print edition, I will begin a series of in-person author talks in my local and regional area this summer. And I’m beginning the process of working with a terrific organizer who will arrange a virtual book tour for me in the early fall. I will also be starting work on the audio book version next, so if you want me to read my latest book to you, you will have to wait for that second release, which should be coming soon, possibly in the fall or early winter.
This image, taken just months before it happened, is the one I posted on Facebook to announce Skip’s death. It also became the image on his funeral card. To finish today’s news update, I’m also including the book’s dedication.
I had a terrific time working with my Sunbury Press editor, Sarah, and she gave me some excellent feedback on my grief memoir, That Day, And What Came After: Finding and Losing the Love of My Life in Six Short Years. not least of which was giving me strokes for submitting the most polished manuscript she’d seen all year. Her other comments were also very encouraging: “I applaud the structure of the story. … It didn’t feel like I was reading a memoir; it felt like I was experiencing it. … You walk a reader through a journey that feels complete, both with at-the-moment description as well as personal reflection. This is a story that sticks with people, whether or not they’ve been in your position.”
That part of the process of getting the book ready for publication is complete, and now I’m waiting in another queue for the book designer to get to my name on her list. Crystal is incredibly creative and has designed the inner pages of both my other books with Sunbury, so she is definitely worth waiting for. Lawrence, the multi-talented company CEO, who was also my editor for Finding Sisters during the pandemic, will be designing the cover. Still no official release date, but I was just invited to sign up for an interview on Sunbury’s Book Show on their BookSpeak Network at the end of June, so it’s a good bet the book will be available this summer. I’ll be sure to keep you all posted once there is a pre-order link.
Most grief memoir covers are rather abstract, so I thought this photo might be something the designer could manipulate for a possible cover image.
As far as Weaving Penelope, the play Richard and I wrote together, two of the three possible situations I wrote about last time have turned out to be no-gos, but the third option is still alive for a possible Seattle area production in 2025 or 2026. And there’s an exciting new Oregon possibility that’s come our way recently, but there are not enough confirmed details to share. However, it’s looking probable that a production could happen there in spring or summer of 2025. So, Oregon friends, keep your fingers crossed that I’ll have a perfect opportunity for some visiting time out west early next year.
We just had a last gasp winter storm here in southern New England a few days ago that left us with 3-4 inches of snow and ice on the ground, but it’s already melted away. It won’t be long before my meadow will start showing signs of life again, and my flowering trees are all starting to develop this season’s buds. I’m in the process of writing a new essay about the process of becoming a meadow creator and caretaker.
This was last summer’s meadow. Who know what will happen this year?
The next time I write in the early summer, I hope to have a cover design to reveal and release date to share with you. And by then we might have more specific details we can share about Weaving Penelope in 2025.
Happy New Year, everyone! I enjoyed a couple of lovely holiday celebrations with family and friends, but my biggest Christmas present in 2023 was finally being assigned an editor by Sunbury Press for my grief memoir, That Day, And What Came After: Finding and Losing the Love of My Life in Six Short Years. The frustrating part is that the work itself will not start in earnest until late January because Sarah first has to finish work on the other projects she’s got in process before we can get going. But the fact that I now have a real person to look forward to working with is a great way to begin the new year!
The process was delayed in 2023 for a variety of reasons. First, there was a downturn in book sales at the end of 2022 that caused Sunbury to back off their previously-announced and rather aggressive publishing schedule for 2023, a schedule that had originally put me on the editing list for the second quarter of the year. Then, following the schedule slowdown, there was a big change in personnel in the editing staff (the long-time chief editor was given an offer she couldn’t refuse from a larger company) that slowed things down further. Finally, there was a mistake in the administrative coding that was used for the revised editing schedule that put my title in the wrong queue for several months. All that got sorted out late last spring, things got back on track, albeit slowly, and I spent the last three months inching up the editing queue, finally getting to the top just before Christmas. I’m very much looking forward to getting started on the book and cover design work and the editing process, but because of the unexpected delays, I haven’t looked at the manuscript itself in nine months. So that’s the reading I’ll be doing in early January in preparation for working with my editor. Though it will be a bittersweet endeavor to read about and re-live the loss of my wonderful husband yet again, I can’t wait to get this story in front of the public!
This photo was taken just months before Skip’s sudden death and was used as the image on his funeral card.
In the meantime, the suspense continues for Weaving Penelope, the play Richard and I wrote together and workshopped in the fall of 2022. The script is under consideration in three different theatrical situations in Oregon and Washington for 2024 or 2025. Not enough confirmed detail to share just yet, but it’s all pretty exciting to think about, even if only one of the possibilities comes through. Hopefully, I’ll have more news to share on that front in my spring newsletter.
A scene from the modified stage reading of Weaving Penelope on the outdoor stage at Keizer Homegrown Theatre in OR in September 2022.
Winter in western Massachusetts this year feels more like the Pacific Northwest than New England: cool, overcast, and rainy. It was warm enough on New Year’s Eve for my neighbors to have a pleasant fire outside in their patio fire pit and for us to sit out there comfortably for a couple of hours. According to our local weather guy, we might see more seasonal weather and even our first snowstorm in the next couple of weeks, though I won’t believe it until I see it on the ground in my yard.
Feline follies continue to keep me entertained on a daily basis, as Smokey and Katniss continue to get to know each other and negotiate their places in the household. It often feels like one step forward, two steps back, but it’s never boring.
The cats are getting along, most of the time, especially when napping.Smokey was quite intrigued by the holiday decorations, though he left them mostly alone once he figured out they weren’t more cat toys.
The next time I write in the early spring, I hope to have some cover art possibilities to share with you and to be well into, and perhaps even close to finished, with the editing process for the grief memoir, which I hope will be released in the summer or early fall. And we should have more information we can share about those various possibilities for Weaving Penelope. So, 2024 could bring lots of action and lots of excitement. Hope the new year is good to all of you as well.
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.”)
Rebecca Daniels 