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.

I recently did a presentation for other writers on the use of child characters in adult fiction. At one point I found myself passing along the following observation: Underdogs tend to be far more knowledgeable about overdogs than conversely. Ask a kid to imitate a parent, and you will get the impersonation to the life, right down to intonation, word choice, and gestures.

Ask students to describe their teacher, ask workers what the boss is really like, ask a victim what they notice about their abuser (be prepared for a detailed reply with that last one). If you put the same kind of question  to the dominant party, you are more likely to hear generalities and guesses in response. It’s the difference between paying attention because that’s useful, and paying attention because your survival might well depend upon vigilant observation and recall.

I think this is part of the appeal of the child character. An Atticus or Winnie or Rose is keeping closer watch on the adult cast of a book than the reader is. When Atticus is being chastised for disobedience, he can retort that Julian disobeyed orders himself–of course, he did–when another adult would hesitate to point that out, if they even made the connection. Atticus was probably ahead of most readers when he came out with that argument, but to a child, keeping track of who obeys and who disobeys is not a detail.

In real life, the ramifications of the “less powerful viewpoint theory” are more complicated. If our most accurate reporters are the underdogs, where do we hear what they have to say? In past centuries, children were everywhere. They worked lived, died, and played–in the fields, church pews, taverns, mines (alas), shops, and streets. Many were expected to contribute something from a young age, and valued as a result. They were seen, regardless, and thus they had a chance to  be heard.

I think often of Charles Dickens’s experience. His father, mother, and younger siblings were tossed into debtor’s prison when Charles was 12. He was considered old enough to support himself, and took on a dreary job as a copyist, working long hours for little pay, and sleeping rough. Because of his early experiences, we have the brilliant social commentary of Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, and the scathing indictment of greed that is A Christmas Carol. Little Charles paid attention. His life depended on it.

Of course, I’m a grandma now. The topic of who is listening to the truth according to  the children (among many other less powerful demographics) is much on my mind. I sometimes think, “Eight-year-old Grace would not want me to set the alarm.” And I don’t set it. Or, “Eight-year-old Grace would tell me to give up on this scene and go to bed.” And I put the scene aside and try again in the morning. She was sensible and compassionate, that younger me, and her advice is usually sound, particularly as it relates to self-care and relationships.

Have you been an underdog? When you were, who listened to you? Are there underdogs who can trust you to listen to them now?

PS: Speaking of Julian and Atticus… A Gentleman of Sinister Schemes is already available from the web store!

I recently visited my daughter and grandson in Portland, OR, and oh, by the way, a granddaughter is expected in May. I looked around Portland wondering, “Could I be happy here?” A merely hypothetical question, of course.

Happy is a relative term, and if I have enough good books, enough quiet to do my writing, and my pets are taken care of, I can probably be happy in a lot of places, but not all. I’ve spent enough time in San Diego, for example, to know that is not my kind of sitch. The ocean annoys me. I don’t know why, but I look at a sea vista and feel crabby. This has been true of me since childhood. The population and traffic density are intense in San Diego compared to what I handle well, and I would desperately miss my big trees.

But Portland? While visiting, I tooled up the Columbia River Gorge to meet my younger brother for a pizza in Arlington. (TERRIFIC FOOD at the Big River Pizza and Grill. The grilled cinnamon roll ought to be illegal.) The scenery along the river is mile after mile of breathtaking, and there’s Mt. Hood popping up around every third bend. Talk about big trees…

I asked myself, “What’s the best thing so far about Portland?” Why move here, in other words, other than the obvious lure of family? Welp, have you seen the Portland Rose Garden? Have you smelled the Portland Rose Garden? Then there’s the old growth forest barely fifteen minutes outside of town. And yes, it’s gloomy here at certain times of the year, but as I type this, the Pacific Northwest is not looking at any single digit temperatures thanks to the old polar vortex.

I also like the Oregon Health Plan, which is essentially universal health care. My brother moved here from Montana, expecting to continue in his self-employed endeavors, which had meant expensive, lousy coverage. Oregon offered him full coverage at exceedingly reasonable rates, and for many people with no income, full coverage is free. This is actually cheaper for the state than expecting low income citizens to make do with emergency room band aids and medical neglect.

I love my little place in Maryland, but I wouldn’t advise anybody to move there. In my county, the safety net is nearly non-existent, social trust is quite low, environmental awareness is suspect, and if I wanted to recycle anything, I’d have to drive fifteen miles one way to one of very few locations accepting recyclables and pay for a permit patronize the facility.

What I am attached to in Maryland are my memories. Dear old Augustus Cat is buried in the back yard. Pasha, Sweetie, Stretch, and Prince all spent pensioner years in the paddock across the stream. I raised my only child there and planted thousands of flowers over the decades. But if the best thing about a place is simply memories… maybe it’s time to re-evaluate?

What’s the best thing about your present address? Why would you encourage someone to move to your neck of the woods?

PS: A Gentleman of Sinister Schemes has been published in print!

I’ve added another step to my end of day list of gratitudes. I still list five things I’m grateful for unique to that day, but then I ask myself: What went right? Sometimes, there’s overlap. The store had all the stuff I needed, I could afford to buy what I needed, and so forth. But sometimes, “What Went Right?” sends me thinking in a slightly different direction.

On my list of five, I probably forgot that getting the heating element in the dryer to come back to life (again) was just a matter of unplugging the darned thing and plugging it back in. Or it didn’t occur to me that the potty responded favorably to a vigorous application of the plunger and, boy, NOT having to call a plumber is just about the definition of something going right. Another version of things going right is when I sit down to write with no particular idea what the next scene should be (this happens about half the time), but the manuscript pulls me in, and the scene that happens is actually… pretty good.

I am focusing on this question for two reasons. First, because it popped up as part of my certified therapeutic riding instructor training. My mentor asked me, after one of my less inspired efforts to teach, what in the lesson had gone right. I had to search and sort for the longest time, but so much had gone right–no tears, no falls, no tantrums, no horses going lame, some fun, some learning, some enjoyable exercise. But I stared at the floor and had to have a big think before I could get out of What Went Wrong mode.

The second reason I’m focusing on What Went Right is because I know our brains are pre-wired (not hard-wired) to focus on what’s wrong, what’s negative, what’s bad. Our chances of survival benefit (up to a point) if we keep the bad stuff top of mind, so we can avoid it happening again or get it fixed. Media, both social and news, exploits this tendency without limit, bombarding us with calamities, disasters, impending doom, and (for variety and human interest) the occasional narrow escape. All of that stuff deserves notice, certainly (big hugs to SoCal, where my parents happily dwelled for more than forty years), but it can’t absorb our entire bandwidth all the time.

We aren’t meant to live, and we cannot thrive, on a steady diet of gloom and despair, and in fact, in my life, things are rarely that daunting for long. Sure, it’s shame the feral cat I’ve been trying to catch for weeks popped out of the net, when I darn-near caught her. Frustrating to say the least, but it’s not the note I want to end my day on. I’ll get her one of these days. I’ll figure out where the Elusive Earl’s black moment is supposed to go. I’ll get Lord Julian’s rigged horse races sorted out, though I accomplished none of that today.

And if I let the Houdini cat and unresolved plots stay top of mind, I’m not likely to see all the problems I did solve and all the problems that never arose.

So what’s gone right for you recently, no matter how inconsequential or small it might be?

And… I’m sending out my first round of ARC files for A Gentleman is Sinister Schemes this weekend, so stand by for yours. If you don’t have it by the end of the week and want one, just email me at graceburrowes@yahoo.com and let me know which device you read on.

Every item that has appeared on Lady Violet’s and Lord Julian’s covers is sitting upstairs in my guest bedroom, and that accumulation of clutter, genuine antiques, and flotsam is driving me nuts. In a similar vein, I’ve lost around 85 pounds, thanks to the GLP-1 agonist mounjaro and thus I have about two and half wardrobes that no longer fit  but still take up space in my closets and drawers.

The end of the year finds me in the mood to purge and prune, to free up space in my house and my life. I am no Martha Stewart–far from it. I have tended to view my house as a roofed campsite. In the past year, though, I’ve also fitted the place out with a heat pump, replaced the well pump and tank, replaced the whole electric panel, and upgraded the inside heating back up system.

I experimented with pollinator strips in the yard (one out three came through), planted four different kinds of fruit trees, and started a berry patch.

It’s as if, having revised my outward physical appearance, I am now more susceptible to the urge to get after my environment. It might also be that losing weight means I have more energy for basic domestic projects, though I am not now and never have been any sort of buzz saw. My dear mama had more energy in her eighties than I had in my forties, and her ghost still has me beat by a 2200-step mile.

My Christmas present to myself will be big bags of clothing taken to the Goodwill drop off, and a serious culling of the cover object inventory. For starters. I want my closets, drawers, and guest bedroom back. I want simplicity and efficiency in my domestic spaces, so I’m not hunting through a dozen pairs of black yoga pants (I am not exaggerating) to find the one pair that does fit and has recently been through the wash.

My wish for myself is that debriding my house of unneeded stuff will create mental space as well. The New Year is almost here, and I would like to spend it writing terrific happily ever afters and whodunits, not hunting for clean yoga pants or wondering who might like to have a genuine, slightly worn Victorian traveling desk, or a brown top hat, or a big old chess board…

What is your holiday gift to YOU this year?

PS: The web store has a few stocking stuffers on offer: The audiobook version (just in!) of A Rogue in Winter, and the ebook versions of The Holiday Duet, and What A Lady Needs for Christmas are each priced at $.99. I also figured out how to wangle the back end so that you can download the Rogue in Winter audio files even if you don’t have the Bookfunnel app. Tell Pietr and Joy I said hi!

And PPS: The blog will be on hiatus until early January, when I will be back, with–I hope–ARC files for A Gentleman of Sinister Schemes.

Teddy–AKA Mr. Terrffic

When I student-teach a riding lesson, a very experienced instructor is in the arena at all times, sometimes at my elbow, sometimes simply observing. When the lesson is over, we debrief. What went wrong, what went right, next steps for this student, open questions… It’s old-fashioned mentored learning, and I like that (mostly).

I finished up a lesson where a good time was had by all, but my almighty lesson objective–walk/halt/walk transitions, or some other utterly dazzling equestrian feat–hadn’t really gotten across to one of the students. “What else should I do? What should I do differently?” Because my endless flow of brilliant instruction hadn’t worked, my imagery had fallen flat, my pantomiming the correct aids was useless when the student was watching where her horse was going (always a good idea) rather than watching me…

The senior instructor thought for a minute, then said, “Let them fail.” She did not mean, let the student become in any way unsafe, nor was she advocating a downer lesson. I wasn’t sure what she meant, really, other than maybe–???–allow some trial and error? I have much to learn. MUCH.

Another week rolls around, and a student who normally rides as part of a group ended up having the lesson all to herself. She’s an utterly delightful child–sweet, bubbly, giggly–and she’s been taking lesson for a while. In groups, she tends to be a follower, and almost never asks questions.

I thought the exercise was simple: Stop the horse in the exact middle of the arena. The center of the arena is like the break room for the horses. It’s where they get to stand around while stirrups are adjusted, girths are checked, and where the dismounts often take place. But on this occasion, the 25-year-old pony decided that he would just keep moseying along toward the (securely latched) gate. He wasn’t rude about it, he simply kept shuffling in the direction of his version of the promised land.

I’d already told my student to shorten her reins, to make her reins shorter, to move her hands down to the yellow section of the reins so she had a better feel of the horse’s mouth. She smiled and laughed and told the horse to stop and asked him to stop and told him he was supposed to stop.

Toddle, mosey, shuffle.

Teddy was a pony on a slow-mo mission. The horse leader very wisely did not intervene, and when I would have put a hand on the reins to stop the wee beast, I instead wondered aloud how anybody could get a horse to stop with such looooong reins?

As Teddy made it darned near to the end of the arena (nice try, Tedster), the rider shortened her reins (a not-so-simple business of sliding both hands wide on the reins, then bringing the hands together), and stopped her horse.

Oh, thinks me: Let them fail. From that point on, the rider’s steering was more effective, and she was more focused on communicating with her horse in ways he understood. The lesson for me though, was that to not intervene, to let the horse be the teacher (within the dictates of safety), to trust that the student will eventually puzzle out the solution… that’s hard. That’s… hooboy. I’m not supposed to help, not supposed to fix anything, not going to fix anything by controlling the outcome?

Hard, but in this case, for me to let the student fail was the path to a learning moment for the student, and for me.

Have you experienced any educational failures in life? Have you had to step back and let others fail for the sake of a useful lesson?

PS: I’ll be going on holiday hiatus after next week’s post, and be back in the saddle in early January. I hope to have ARC files for A Gentleman of Sinister Schemes right after the first of the year. Wheeee!

I’m pretty sure that if not for texting, I wouldn’t hear from my thirty-five year old daughter much at all. She loves me, she misses me, she wants to keep in touch, but email and phone just don’t work for her. So I get the occasional cheery text, or short update, and sometimes we even get a little text-conversation going (I refuse to refer to it as a thread).  In an emergency, she will answer the phone if she sees it’s me, but I got word that I was to be a grandma by… text.

I dislike texting intensely. Because it’s phone-tech, it is designed to be intrusive and un-ignorable, but the actual mechanics of communication, letter by letter on a teeny screen and micro-teeny keyboard, are also tedious as heck. (Because predictive text trains AI, mine is turned off, and was even before AI for being intrusive and so frequently wrong). The back and forth of texting is stilted, and particularly in groups, gets out of sequence easily. But Millennials and younger people apparently prefer texting, so I grump along mostly in silence.

The reason many young people give for preferring texting is that they can control their content more precisely than they can with a spoken dialogue. They can choose every word, choose whether to use emojis, choose jargon or abbreviations, and how quickly to reply.They also claim that texting lets them control the timing of their communication so they contact friends when convenient for them. (Presumably not so conveniently for the friend, because to not reply to a seen text is apparently rude.) To phone without first asking by text whether the time suits is also apparently rude.

I find these reasons ridiculous as applied to friendly texts (I can tolerate practical texts along the lines of: Running 5 min late, see you soon.) If you’re going to blow up a friendship over the use of a word here or another word there, it wasn’t much of a friendship. If you think emojis are more precise and nuanced than your tone of voice and facial expressions, you delude yourself. To my mind, all the justifications for texting come down to: Communication is hard, good communication harder and even scary. We’re so afraid of each other, we’d rather tiptoe through texting than do the hard work of communication.

I can cite you study after study proving that constant texting reduces cognitive and linguistic abilities as well as productivity, that the hunched over posture we assume when using a smartphone is bad for our health and mood, that the result of all this “wonderful” connective tech is anxiety, short attention spans, more car accidents, smaller vocabularies, and people who won’t order a pizza unless they can do so by text.

I want to put a sign in my yard that smartphones are the new smoking. We have the data warning us that these devices should be approached and used with extreme caution. An IQ is a terrible thing to waste, and a decent mood just as precious. But if I want to communicate with my daughter…

What aspect of taken-for-granted life right now do you think future generations will look back on and shudder over?