I know the pandemic is truly in the rear view mirror because writers are starting to get together for conferences again. Not the monster cons of yore, which only about twenty venues in the whole country could accommodate, but nice little get togethers at the retreat or single-hotel level.

I agreed to participate in one of those gatherings near my home (DC and Baltimore are both handy), and arrived the night before I was supposed to present. I needed the time to get back in conference mode, where reading name tags without appearing to and listening over a lot of conversations in noise-bouncing rooms are mandatory skills. I also did not want to leave the venue to find dinner, which would have necessitated driving in suburban DC. That activity belongs on my un-bucket list, so I just invited another name-tag-wearing writer to join me at the hotel restaurant.

I did not in fact catch her name, She’s of mature years, a doctor on hiatus from the chaos of American medicine, originally from West Virginia, and very interested in Regency history. We talked and talked, about the parallels between the Regency’s notorious Six Acts and the current sitch. About older women being pushed out and taking healthy organizational culture with them. About too many older men facing a bleak terrain (partly of their own making) after retirement.

I came away from dinner having been pushed to listen reflectively rather than defensively, having been challenged to look for areas of common perspective and areas where my perspective was too narrow. I felt heard at times, and once I even laughed out loud. My conference skills are rusty. I can’t read people all that well, I’m not as schmoove with my small talk as I wish I were, but I was reminded at the dinner table that it’s good for me to sit down with strangers from time to time. Really good.

Of course, a conference is an ideal place to do that. I’m guaranteed some mutual topics of interest, my usual obligations are for the most part parked at home, and I’m safely in public the whole time. I was struck though, by how few places in my life, and in American life in general, are good places to pass the time with strangers. Six days a week, most of us either work or worship with the same people. Americans also don’t have a “local,” a watering hole that’s part club part hideout.

Why build a society like that, where it’s hard to find new connections, or is this a personal problem, that I can solve by joining a reading group or hanging out at the library? Hanging out at the basketball court in the park? Where do we have fertile ground for new connections that are safe enough to be inviting and novel enough to be interesting? Where do I find such settings–if anywhere–in my books?

Thus am I inspired to ask new questions and investigate new answers, because I had a lovely dinner with a stranger. When was the last time an encounter with a stranger brightened your day? Have you been the day-brightening stranger?

PS: I’ve already sent out the first batch of Advanced Reader Files for The Elusive Earl, book three in the Bad Heir Day Tales series, and the print version has gone live as well. If you’d like an ARC file, please let me know at [email protected]. I do have an ARC limit, but we’re not quite there yet!

I was well into adulthood before I understood how much my mother used movement, activity, doing stuff, to manage her emotions. Rage, anxiety, frustration, love… for Mom, all of it was expressed in action. She was infamous for visiting her adult children and re-arranging entire rooms of furniture without a nod in the direction of asking permission.

She cooked as if the Foreign Legion were in town and short of rations, and her house was always tidy. In later life–I mean her mid-80’s–when she had only one house and my dad to look after, she took three and four mile walks six days a week, and those routes had a lot of hills.

Welp, I did not get those energizer bunny genes. I (and I alone in my family) got the genes that make me a champion sitter-downer. Younger authors ask me the secret to my productivity and I want to say to them, “I have a natural capacity for physical sloth.” It helps that I like words too, though truly, my mother could not have endured the amount of sitting I do to get a book written.

But I know the road to senility is paved with comfy chairs, so I do try to get in a certain number of steps every day, and I do try to sit on a horse occasionally. I look after my flowers and so forth. But even the piddly little exertions I achieve are no fun (with the exception of horseback riding) and never get any easier.

So I have to be cagey about coaxing myself out of my writing chair. “C’mon, Grace. You just wrote a great rough draft of a scene. Lunch time has come and gone. Time to go for a toddle!”

I don’t wanna go for a toddle.

“Now, now. You don’t want to go to the home for feeble-minded authors any sooner than you have to, so up and at ’em Gracey-poo.”

I went for a danged toddle yesterday, and don’t call me Gracey-poo, Sister Mary Grace.

This goes on nigh daily, but of late, after a very sedentary winter, I scrounge up the self-regard to go for a walk, provided that me, my inner cranky toddler, and I agree that it’s to be a short walk. This is when the real strategy kicks in. I get started, and it’s not awful to walk my neighborhood, in fact it’s very pretty and peaceful. Long about when I can see the agreed-upon turn around point (a mere one thousand steps from my mailbox), the dialogue resumes.

“You did it. You got up and boogied, and this is wonderful of you. But you know, it’s only a couple more telephone poles to the bottom of the hill, and it is downhill, and there’s no headwind. Why not just do a couple more telephone poles?”

I walk to the bottom of the hill, and then the next two telephone poles are a level stretch, so why not do that too, and then it’s only two more telephone poles to the cross-roads…

By keeping my initial expectations very low, and jollying myself along by inches, I get in at least a thirty-minute walk, including some hills. If I said to myself, “You will walk two miles after the daily writing session. Three, two, one…” No walk would happen. Ask me how I know that.

Do you resort to self-management strategies? Offer yourself rewards or make bargains with your inner I-don’t-wanna? Do tell!

My property is bounded on two sides by good old farm country hedgerows. These innocuous looking strips of trees and bushes want you to think they will mind their own business, century after century, but that’s a flaming falsehood. Hedgerows are after world domination. Just leave one unattended for two years, and you’ll see the evidence.

So when I fenced the barn-side of my property, I knew enough to leave a wide strip of grass between the fence and the hedgerow. Mowing is the first defense against relentless encroachment. Very wise of me, except that when my old yard guy retired, and the new guy took over, I did not specifically inspect his work on that side of the pasture. He didn’t bother mowing the strip, and the hedgerow soon ate up the grass.

Several years pass, and I point out to yard guy that it’s time to get the hedgerow in hand. Too many dead trees ready to clobber the fence, too many saplings growing up through the fence boards, and yikes, the poison ivy is having a such a good time…

Yard guy quotes me big thousands to a) remove 270 feet of still-functional three-board oak fence and haul it away, b) bring in huge tree-eating equipment and reduce all unwanted specimens to sawdust (while alas, also killing my two baby apple trees), and c) rebuilding the fence with new materials.

I am furious. His neglect of a job competently done is why the hedgerow has become a menace, though granted, I did not inspect what I expected, because any damned fool knows… I thank him for the quote, tell him it’s out of my range, have a nice day. See you in the spring.

I fumed, I walked up and down that fence line. I said bad words aloud. Went into the hardware store, asked the nice man for the sissy-est electric power saw in the store. The puniest, littlest, most ridiculous excuse for a power saw, and he set me up with a pee-wee glorified hedge trimmer.

Here’s the thing: I am afraid of power tools. They are loud, sharp, and dangerous, and where I live, I could bleed out before anybody besides the turkey buzzards noticed a body by the road (writer’s imagination strikes again). But I was not going to pay that guy thousands of books worth of revenue to vastly over-do what amounted to a day’s clean up job.

I read the power saw manual (with a magnifying glass), fired up the saw, and got to work. Within about twenty minutes, I was thinking maybe I could manage a larger saw. I have repulsed the invading saplings, cut the poison ivy off at that roots, freed the fence of dropped branches, and generally given the hedgerow’s nefarious aspirations a middle finger. And when a tree dropped on the fence this week, I called the guy who tills my garden, and he knew a guy who knew a guy, and the mess was cleaned up for a modest price the next afternoon.

The punchline to this story was that when I got angry enough, when I felt sufficiently disrespected, I took a small step outside my comfort zone, and got a boost in self-respect (and arm muscles) to show for it. I problem-solved in addition to seething, and that felt and feels good.

The hedgerow still has plenty of dead trees to drop on the fence, and I am still scared of power tools, but if I’ve made my point to one over-quoting yard guy, then I am content.

When did you get mad enough to walk away? Mad enough to take scary steps? Mad enough to say the scary words?

I did not much grieve the closing of my law practice. The law wasn’t my first career (the piano holds that honor), and I had the happy prospect of writing more books to keep my focus forward. Then too, I had a trip to Australia and New Zealand planned for my first month free of the courtroom, and holy Ned, was that a wonderful excursion.

But in the past few months, I’ve become aware of grief in a different way. It started when I qualified for Medicare, and was faced with a decision along the lines of, “You have to make this change now, or you could be dinged for it for the rest of your life.” I do not like being told what to do, but if there’s a certainty in this life, it’s that old people need good medical care.

Then I had to have a back tooth pulled. When my four impacted wisdom teeth came out, that was just a weekend spent in the company of Tylenol and old movies. The most recent extraction was… you’d have thought I was losing some typing fingers, not a part of me that’s honestly expendable and invisible to others. The problem, I came to believe, was the sense that my molar was a harbinger of the Great Decline–a harbinger I could not minimize, ignore, or rationalize away. This upset me.

Now I’m aware of smaller griefs. Thinning hair, and hair that doesn’t do what I tell it to. The sad day has not yet come, but I am steeling my nerves for that moment when I must buy and use… bobby pins. The last person I knew who used bobby pins was my granny and she was literally blue-haired.

When I cannot hear what a riding instructor says in the arena, I must consider that the problem is not that she’s ten yards off and facing away from me while my saddle squeaks and the horse thumps along, but rather, that I’m losing my hearing. My mom did, (lost her teeth too). My dad kept his teeth and his hearing, but lost his hair. Just my luck…

I now owe it to those around me to operate with a chronic level of self doubt: Did I hear you correctly? Do I smell OK? (COVID delivered a hit to olfaction). Do I look pathetic running around the grocery store in my riding duds at my age?

We have no rituals for these merit badges of decline, no compensatory consolations that raise us in the eyes of society or in our own eyes, so I’m just winging it, one ding and dent at a time. Part of my response has been simply to acknowledge that yeah, bobby pins weren’t on the schedule, and hair that goes all Cookie Monster on humid days is an adjustment. Three pairs of glasses to get through the day, same.

Lots of adjustments, so keep that old courage and resilience and gratitude handy, Grace Ann. On the good days, the dings and dents are balance by lots of humor, a good sense of who I am regardless of the space suit going out of warranty, and an increased appreciation for all that’s still working and still reliably mine to claim. I am also especially comforted by my siblings, writing peers, and barn buddies. We are aging as gracefully as we can, dammit, and like toddlers and teenagers, we are entitled to the occasional moody, rebellious, or pouting day.

This too shall pass, as shall even the need for three pairs of glasses.

Has life presented you with small griefs? Have you found any consolations you’d care to share?

I allow myself one mid-day scroll through Facebook these days, and invariably, I log off in disgust. Endless numbers of Very Smart People wax Very Articulate about current events, most of their posts conveying panic and doom. Our brains are wired to pay attention to panic and doom, and thus the behaviors–both posting that material and reading it–are reinforced by our biology.

Away I go, another day dragged down by current events. When only four percent of the American public support our current stance regarding Ukraine, I have to conclude that those who rejoice in the present state of affairs are fewer and fewer (albeit quite vocal).

So here we are, afraid to look away, afraid to hope, and many of us, afraid to speak up.

I am also disgusted with myself. I know exactly what will happen when I log into Facebook–more daunting facts, even more daunting reactions to those facts, the occasional smug troll or clueless innocent troll. Botheration. Spending time there solves nothing and yields big tech all manner of personal data about me that they are merrily selling on every corner of Wall Street. Another hour wasted, Grace Ann, and for what?

What I want from the wise people commenting on the current scene is a) hope for better days, and b) an actionable path for bringing those days closer. The oracles don’t seem to offer much of either, but then, I’m looking for inspiration on social media, where the algos spread gloom and despair by design. Then too, the Very Wise People who can describe all the reasons we’re doomed weren’t wise enough to see this coming or find us an off ramp, so how wise are they really?

Not wise enough, says a grouchy me. So where to turn for inspiration? Welp, my parents come to mind, maybe yours do too, or your grandparents. My folks lived through the Depression, which for them lasted well over a decade. My mom was a nurse during WWII, my dad served in the Navy, and yes, he saw combat. They watched the Korea War, and sent a firstborn son to Vietnam amid the assassinations (plural) of the sixties, the white supremacist thuggery in response to the Civil Rights Act, and the criminal debacle of Watergate.

The first time I saw my mother cry was when President Kennedy was assassinated, and there was more and worse of that to come.

How did my parents cope with all that violence, upheaval, corruption, and hardship? How did they get up in the morning and go about their days in a world that repeatedly went mad?

Well, they did drink and smoke, and I am convinced that both forms of substance abuse were palliative. Drinking in particular was also social. Mom and Dad entertained a lot and those were well lubricated occasions. They cherished friendships, they worked hard, they respected each other, and they focused on the challenges immediately before them, despite the bad and worse news.

They kept going, they watched Walter Cronkite, and they folded the laundry and had the new graduate students over for dinner (representing, as best I recall, Finland, Algeria, Japan, and the US).

Our elders did what they could, day after day. My parents managed to raise their seven children and enjoy a long and peaceful retirement. Their “keep on keepin’ on” strategy worked, in other words, and I am taking a leaf from their book: Get up and deal with the challenges of my day, despite all the voices clamoring for panic and despair. Look after my friends and family. Read good books and write good books because that’s my happy place, and get the news in manageable doses from only highly credible, fact-based sources. I also donate where I think it will do some good, and try to listen more than I talk.

So how are you keeping your balance these days? Are any particular role models assisting with that process?

PS: Things to look forward to: Pretty soon, time for ye old ARC list for The Elusive Earl. I’ll send out to my regular commenters, per usual.

I have been thinking lately about what I need to be happy. My perspective is not, “How little could you live on?” though that’s always an interesting question, but more, “If you had all the money in the world, but still didn’t have ___________, could you be as happy as you are now?” (I’m pretty happy in recent years.)

This is a thought experiment, and my conclusions might vary widely from reality, but I think if I could not have regular, lengthy, quiet times of solitude, I’d quickly grow  miserable. My ideal companions are cats who sleep sixteen hours a day. Comforting presences without much noise or movement. Those stretches of hermiting are how I recover from stress, cope with new developments, germinate ideas, and ponder the big questions. I’d lose my balance and make dumb mistakes if I didn’t have my hermit time.

I need animals in my life. Cats work well, horses are a privilege. I love me a friendly dog, and the singing of birds just lifts my spirits. My property is also home to skunks, possums, raccoons (not my fave), and lots of small mammals plus the occasional shy snake. The neighborhood hosts a bear every few years, and white tail deer lurk in my hedgerow.

The sight of big trees, or greenery in general is a necessity that I take for granted until I’m out west, and homesick for verdure. My flower beds are a later-in-life joy that all the money in the world could not convince me to give up. Good books fall into the same category. My family, too, of course. I don’t see as much of them as I’d like, but they are with me in my heart, and I am with them.

I’m tempted to add the creature comforts–starting my day with the perfect cup of tea–but those come after the soul food. We are seeing more and more of the people who have all the money in the world, but when I look at those guys, I wonder, “Are you even happy, Mr. ManyBucks? You don’t look, sound, or act happy to me, and no part of me wants to be you or have your money.”

My wealth isn’t my money. I like having enough money to meet basic needs, and hope I always do, but my wealth is a healthy-enough body, loving family, and a life mostly on my terms with my modest comforts at hand.

What is your wealth?

I tend to be hyper-vigilant, which is characteristic of people who did not have critical needs met in childhood. We’re always watching, always looking for the next source of trouble. I would not say I qualify for PTSD honors–I was mostly safe as a kid, I just didn’t feel safe–but I’m a standard deviation or two from the mean when it comes to scanning the horizon and watching the sky.

I am also fretful, though again, according to ye old DSM, I’m not quite into the OCD zone. My mental wheels get spinning, and on a good day, this means I have scenes to write. On the other days… how many ways can the world come to an end? Can my world come to an end? Lots and lots.

I was afraid of the dark from as far back as I can remember. Terrified to the point of wetting my bed rather than crossing the room to turn on a light switch. In early adulthood, I feared I would never pass the bar when I had a baby to support and all those loans to pay back.

I was afraid my daughter would be taken from me (talk about vicarious anxiety, Madame Child Welfare Attorney). Afraid I’d be so destitute, I’d have to go live with my folks, who’d retired to a location I abhorred. Afraid I’d be disbarred and tossed in jail for incompetent lawyering. Afraid I will end up wearing all the clothes I own, guarding a rusty shopping cart full of sodden books  down along the highway, my pets all confiscated by the authorities, and an empty tin cup in my hand.

My fears are rooted in reality. Every parent has bad moments. The recession hit my finances very hard. My lawyering was imperfect at times, and destitution and homelessness in old age are happening with increasing frequency. Some of my fears were more justified than others, some more rational than others, but they had a hold on me either way.

Compared to people living in Gaza, Afghanistan, Sudan, Ukraine, Rwanda, and many other violence-saturated locations, my fears are laughable. Compared to people living with cancer, same. Compared to people whose children have been taken by the authorities, same again. I am a mere tadpole in the Coping With Fear waters, while others have had to grow their courage to leviathan proportions. I hope I am never called upon to join their ranks.

But if I am challenged to be braver, I have a place to start. I am no longer afraid of the dark (most nights). I have had to make some hard decisions to get through hard times (waves to the sainted memory of Delray the Wonder Pony). I have been broken-hearted, broke, and broken, and yet, here I am with all my dings and dents, still mostly enjoying life (most days). I have some courage. I have love. If owning a copy of Darius become a criminal offense, well, so be it.  I might be facing my first rodeo, but not my first ride. I will trot around until I find a light switch or two, even if it scares me to initiate the search.

What makes you brave?

My daughter’s birthday has come and gone once again, and a happy birthday it was too!  The anniversary of her arrival, full of wondrous memories, often turns me up thoughtful and this year was no exception.

When I conceived without benefit of matrimony, people offered me money for my baby. Nice people, or so they seemed. People in better circumstances than I was at the time,  and in better circumstances than I was ever likely to be. I had not planned to become pregnant, and I lectured myself at length to do the right thing for the baby. Except… if someone is desperate enough to pay for a baby (under the guise of covering my expenses and tuition bills), is that the right thing? I got into counseling, and this was back in the day before managed care (greed) limited that kind of support to ten sessions shared with twelve other people.

I kept the baby, but have often doubted the decision. If you want to wreck a kid, the process is simple: Take dad away. Every bad outcome that can befall a child becomes MUCH more likely if dad is not in the picture (especially for boys). My daughter’s dad took himself out of the picture very early in her life (he tells a different story).

It’s not that dads are intrinsically more magical than moms, though dads do tend to earn more money than moms. It’s that if a mom disappears, other women will step in–aunties, grandmas, step-moms, neighbors and so forth. If a dad disappears, other men–for whatever reason–are much less likely to step in. Often, a single mom is truly a single parent. A single dad is a single parent with reinforcements, and children know the difference.

Anyhoo, I doubted my decision, all the while appreciating that I lived in a society where I had options. The road I chose was hard on my daughter (see above), and I regret that. A lot. I should have moved closer to family, I should have found better daycare, I should have set firmer boundaries, whatever, whatever, whatever.

When I see my daughter with her own child, though, I get a strong sense that I made a good choice. She’s a devoted, well informed, loving and extraordinarily good-humored mom. She has taken both the good  and bad examples I set as a parent, and synthesized them into excellent mothering for her child (her partner is doing a first-rate parenting job too), and this gives me more peace than you can imagine. She had a good enough mother–and I made a good enough choice.

This is another gift that results from remaining on the planet after the bright and bold years have passed (though I hope bright and bold moments yet remain to me). Belated hindsight can be kind and even revelatory. I did the best I could, doubts and all, and maybe that was even better than I knew.

Now there’s a thought.

Have you had occasion to look back on your younger self, your decisions and struggles,  and found both respect and compassion for younger you that eluded you at the time? When the best you could do turned out–in hindsight–to be pretty impressive after all?

I stand by every word of last week’s post. I AM mellowing as I age, I vow and declare, I AM. But as fate so often has it, I made that statement in public, and sure enough this week I am feeling anything but mellow. I feel once again as I did when I started law school: Working full time in a new-to-me field, going to class five nights a week, blasting away on my studies over the weekend when I wasn’t putting in overtime at the office.

And then I got pregnant. And then the truck blew a head gasket. Et cetera and so forth.

To say I was overwhelmed is to make the grandmama of all understatements, and I’m feeling a little bit of that same out-of-breath, can’t think, too seized-up to scream overwhelm lately. The news is part of it, but so are publishing deadlines, technical challenges (formatting in Italian!?), physical limitations, and tax season exercises.

That blitzing the populace with chaos is apparently the current political agenda doesn’t help one bit. It does help to know that’s a well studied, established tactic, and I don’t have to fall for it. I can instead rely on the strategies I learned much earlier in life for dealing with what I call “compression phases.”

First priority: Get enough rest. Not just enough sleep, though that’s vital, but also enough downtime. Enough solitude, silence, and solitaire. Enough good books. Enough nature. However I recharge, I need to make sure that doesn’t go by the wayside especially now.

Second priority: Delegate, reschedule, prioritize. Do not abdicate control. With respect to the news, that means I focus on a few trusted commentators to analyze the blizzard and report the facts. NEVER let the news into the beginning or the end of my day. Sniff through it in the middle of the day, after I’ve tended to what’s important, before my mental energy ebbs for the night. For the doc appointments, that means see ya in late March and not before.

Third priority: Positive connections only. Now is the time to have lunch with Graham, with barn buddies, and not with that old friend who just has to pontificate on the topic of my lousy financial planning skills. She’s right–I know she’s right–but I’m doing the best I can, and she is not contributing to the success of the mission now. See ya… sometime, but I’m not putting her on the calendar now for love nor money.

There are other steps I take when I’m in my emotional bunker. I lower my standards, to be honest, and look for progress rather than accomplishments. So I didn’t get Lord Julian Nine done and dusted by Ground Hog Day. Welp, did I write 500 words today? Did I pay the bills on time? Am I pulling my share of the load at the barn? All good, all sufficient unto a long and wearying day.

How do you cope with compression phases? Was there an experience or a period in life when you had to acquire those coping skills?

In the past year I’ve lost a tooth, some muscle mass, several pairs of reading glasses, and two gloves from two different sets of gloves, the right glove in both cases…. among other things. The upper frequency range of my hearing is getting a bit dodgy, and I have absolutely parted ways with what little interest I ever had in social media.

Focusing on what’s fading, what’s been destroyed, what’s on the verge of expiring is tempting, because the losses are real and sometimes painful, but I’ve also noticed some gains.

I’ve gained some detachment, which is not the same thing at all as indifference. I see the news, I hear the neighborhood squabbles, I watch industry experts disagree on why the sky is falling (though the publishing clouds seem to be at about the same altitude to me), and I am more able to say, “All very interesting, and much of this is alarming if true. I will do what I can to support the people and values I believe in, but it’s time for bed now, and Loretta Chase has a new Disgraceful Duke. The good fight will have to wait until morning for further contributions from moi.”

And then I go up to bed with His Grace of Blackwell (or Oliver Twist or Alexander von Humboldt), and get my forty winks (unless the moon is full).

Some of this detachment is a product of the pandemic, when we all overdosed on anxiety despite every effort to the contrary. Some of it is age. For better, worse, or in-between, the show will be going on without me one of these years, and long before that, I will have ceased to be the boss of anybody, probably even the boss of myself. Detachment will come in handy as those developments manifest.

Another gain is more diplomacy. I am better able to say the nice things and mean them, rather than preface them with my wishes, opinions, prognostications, and caveats. All babies are wonderful, and that part about resembling Winston Churchill really doesn’t need to be aired. Every aspiring author deserves encouragement, no matter how small I think the audience might be for Amish dinosaur menage. Fresh homemade cookies are almost never a bad idea, thank you (even if they have raisins, coconut, and almonds in them, which some people must like because look at all those recipes, really).

My sisters excel at this kind of tact, so I have good role models for it, and when I have been the recipient of kind, supportive words, I am invariably grateful. As time goes on, I think I am getting better at being a nice old lady, and that just might be a superpower.

Are you acquiring any nascent superpowers? Would you like to start on one?

PS: In case I have not bombarded every corner of the reader-verse with the news, Lord Julian’s eighth mystery,  A Gentleman of Sinister Schemes, has hit the shelves.