I will not bother you all with my transgressions before I became Amy Lane. Most of them were based in ignorance--nobody can track the harm done by people who assume that a battle has been fought and won and the enemy is no more, but I'm sure every marginalized community has their own horror stories of people who thought they were friends but turned out to blunder ignorantly over landmines that harmed all involved. 

I've worked hard to not be one of those people--mostly successfully, sometimes (spectacularly) not. But I've always hoped that people would forgive me my transgressions as I've forgiven friends who've made fat jokes about people on television as I'm sitting right there. It's hard to remember that people we love and consider our equals have been marginalized and hurt for who they are all their lives. We want them to be loved like we love them and are shocked and saddened to realize that the world is far crueler than we've imagined.

And the more I've grown, the more I've prayed that good I've tried to put into the world would be visited on my children. I've seen that more than one person has quoted the line from Ellery's mother in one of the Fish stories, where she talks about how disheartening it is to fight this fight all your life only to discover that there's a whole new crop of soldiers for the enemy. The least I could do, I hoped, was make the world a little less harsh for my children.

My youngest--whom most of you have known as Squish-- sported a long, beautiful red braid in pictures from long ago. I've stopped posting pictures much in the last few years. My children requested it because they have their own lives and privacy, and I've also discovered that an online friend could hurt with a verbal machete as well as a scalpel. But many, many people remember the sparkling child with the infectious grin, blue eyes, and gorgeous red hair. 

That child is transitioning from the child we thought we had--a girl--to the young man he was destined to be. Tomorrow is the first of the hormone shots, after two years of hard work on their part and private ranting and a painful acceptance on the parts of his father and I. It's not that we're transphobic or against gender care. It's just that, until the particular moment of coming out, this child has had a hard time deciding on everything from a purse to pants to a hairstyle. We had to actively fight the urge to ask, "Are you sure?" because when a child tells you who they are, as a parent it is our job to believe them, and that question is a slap to their face.

But our son was kind to us, giving us time to transition from she to they, and from they to he, and now "he" and the new name comes out nearly as easily as the first pronoun. Give it a few years and we might forget there ever was a first pronoun and a deadname, except for the many pictures of the adorable imp with the braid. 

Our son is that same kid by the way. Adorable, funny, kind, so responsible and organized it frightens us because where would this kid come from? Our child has never stopped being a blessing, even if we were challenged to accept the adult he needed to become. 

Another kindness our son has shown is in listening when I begged to leave the younger pictures up. "Please don't erase your childhood," I begged. "We didn't know everything about you then--but that happens. Parents don't know everything about their children. We don't know how tall you'll be or what kind of music you'll like--and we didn't know you were a boy. We didn't have all the information.  It just means we were wrong, that's all--not that we're disappointed in you, not in any way. We tried to give you the best childhood we could--and hopefully we gave you one that let you feel safe when you came out, and loved. Please don't make us take those pictures down of a kid we love even more now than we did then."  I mean, we know this kid better now, right? It's only right that we love him more.

So there you go. I haven't talked about this much online because it's ours as a family. Private. Not shameful--never that. I'll never be ashamed of my child. But it was ours. Our struggle, our ups and downs. We needed to keep it close to our hearts, and one of the most painful lessons about being online is that people will take something you love and shit on it with malicious abandon. I wanted to make sure nobody shit on my child.

But like I said, tomorrow is butterfly day. When my kid begins to emerge as the adult he's dreamed of being. I needed to say it somewhere, somewhere permanent and out loud, that I love my kid. I loved the little girl I thought he was. I love the young man he's becoming. I love the pure soul inside the body that is going to change in the next few years. I could not ask for a better person in my life. 

And I'd like to thank him for still letting me call him Squish, as long as it's not in front of his friends. 

So, way back when we only had one kid and he was a baby, I was a stay at home mother and Mate was a working student, and we had one vehicle and never saw each other. Our income at the time was id/s-s which is diddly over squat minus the squat in which diddly is an imaginary number, and we had to cash out our pennies to rent movies from Blockbuster.

But dammit, we wanted date night.

So one night, we had a coupon and some pizza bites and decided to make it a double feature, and we rented Somersby with Richard Gere and Jodie Foster and Wild at Heart with Marisa Tomei and Christian Slater, and I hope you'll all forgive me for the spoilers when I tell you the hero dies at the end of both movies.

And that we only wished somebody had spoiled the movies for US. 

But they didn't. So there we were, FETAL on the couch at the end of Wild at Heart, wailing, "Wait a minute, he fuckin' DIES???" and Mate says to me, "Great date night, honey. We should do this again." And then we were laughing and sobbing at the same time and the couch was a mess, and it was another ten months and a new baby before we had enough money to hit the movies one more time. 

Now flashforward thirty years.

And Mate and I have made a date night appointment to see A Man Called Otto. Now I'm not going to spoil the movie for you--I will say that it was ultimately WAY more uplifting than either Wild at Heart or Somersby, and that there's a lot of suicidal ideation in it, so if that's a trigger warning, be aware.

But I will tell you that at the most emotional point in the movie, I was sobbing, and Mate's shoulders were shaking, and we were two of four people in the theater ugly crying all over ourselves and I turned to Mate and said, "Date night hasn't been this much fun since Somersby and Wild at Heart, and suddenly we were laughing and bazooka wookie snot-sobbing all over each other, and the intervening thirty years between the set up and delivery of that joke only made it richer.

There's got to be some ​benefits to aging after all, right?

So Bryar (Chicken!) called me yesterday, in tears. 

"Mom, I'm taking tomorrow off because a kid hit me repeatedly in the face and bit me twice and I had to yell at my aid and..."

And essentially had a shitty day all around, and kudos to her for saying, "I'm calling a friend of mine I TRUST with my class to come sub."

The kid who assaulted her--12 years old-- has been a problem. He assaulted an aid (not a very good one, by all accounts, who tends to escalate situations and behaviors) and Chicken before. He's a classic rules and regulations conundrum. He SHOULD be expelled, but there's a rule that says you can't expel a kid if they haven't attended so many hours of school. The rule is meant to protect kids from teachers who abuse the system--and yes, there are some--who will expel a kid they just don't like without making a good faith effort to teach the kid in the first place. The rule does NOT account for special needs kids who attend school so rarely that an instructor's attempts at basic behavior modification have no chance to work, rendering the kid a random chaos bomb. Once every two, three weeks, this kid attends school, creates weapons out of standard classroom objects, and goes around attacking teachers, staff, and other students. And then, when the bruised/bleeding teacher says, "Can we get this kid out of here please?" they are told that the kid's attendance isn't regular enough to expel.

I think they're going to overcome it this time--the principal doesn't want to let the kid back in because he's a danger to students and staff and it's a mess, and, like I said, she's taking an extra day off to make a four day weekend, and her entire staff is like, "Well done!! You do that! Well deserved!"

And I am drawn back to a week ago, when Geoffie ran around the restrooms again and came back to the car covered in people poop. 

Yuck. 

I wrapped her up in a towel this time and called Mate so he'd have the kids ready to wash her, but the kids were like, "People poop? Mom? The hell!"

And I was like, "Well, kids, there was a storm raging and the parks and rec people didn't get the bathrooms open and the homeless folks didn't have anywhere else to go."

And suddenly (this was ten minutes before I was on a Zoom panel by the way because my family sure can pick their moments) I was in an argument about how my dog covered in shit was all the fault of Republicans and late stage capitalism because if the capitalist pigs hadn't been allowed to run rampant the cost of housing wouldn't be completely astronomical and there wouldn't be so many homeless people and they wouldn't need to sleep at the park and use the bathrooms and be forced to crap on the bathroom concrete when it rained.

And I replied that yes, the world was a fucked up place but sometimes the best you could do--the best ANYBODY could do was defend the innocent from the people who'd been too fucked up by a hostile world to function. (This is sort of the theory behind all the zombie movies, actually... that just occurred to me as I was writing. I shall call it zombie theory from here on out.)

And that applies to the situation with the kid in school too. Yes, it's fucked up that this kid with the shitty homelife and the parents who can't get the kid to school more than once a month should now be so completely damaged by the world around him that the place where he should be safe now needs to be made safe FROM him instead of FOR him. It's fucked up. There is no doubt. This kid is twelve and at this point the best bet is Juvenile Hall because THEY at least are getting funding to deal with violent kids with severe learning disabilities as schools are not.

But nobody at the school can change any of that. All they can do is keep the kids who are NOT violent safe from this kid who keeps chasing them with scissors and beating up their teachers. 

​And every time I see some stupid fucking white person whining about "making schools safe" by banning books or imposing religious beliefs on a secular community or suggesting teachers should carry guns (oh my God the rampant fuckihng stupidity there) I'm going to say what I've always said.

I'd suggest they spend a day in a classroom to see what the job really entails, but they're so stupid there's no way they can NOT damage the students further.

They're the worst zombies of them all.

Okay-- Can you see the difference?

My photographing skills really don't do this justice, but I'm just so excited about this!

Most of the pictures--the pictures of the more colorful scarf--are of a scarf I made using two different Cotton Cakes. The cakes are cunningly designed--the yarn is made up of four strands (two plies per strand) of brightly colored yarn. The color shifts are made ONE STRAND AT A TIME. So, four strands of paddy green which changes to one strand of light green to three strands of paddy green, to two strands of light green and two strands of paddy green--and you can see the flow of the scarf in the pictures.

I made this scarf (which is insanely long) according to a pattern I found on Ravelry, and I loved it--but it wasn't that warm. Colorful and exciting, yes, but warm? Nope--cotton, right?

Anyway, it's pretty, and it caught the attention of my friend who asked (nicely and respectfully because us yarners are a prickly bunch) if I could make one for his friend.

I said yes automatically, ignoring a couple of facts about myself.

A. Sport weight cotton yarn takes forever to work up.

B. That pattern is SO long.

C. My hands hurt--my arthritis isn't quitting because Christmas, and cotton makes them hurt worse.

D. I get bored super easy, and doing the same pattern which is long and painful to begin with wasn't going to make me work any faster.

E. My friend--and his friend--live in the Bay Area which is not a place for cotton scarves in the winter. 

So aftrer the beginnings of that project sat in my bag for a good three months, I finished my Christmas knitting and had an epiphany.

I could, with a little imagination, achieve a similar effect using two strands of soft, warm, squishy wool/acrylic blend that was achieved by the cotton.

I simplified the color pattern--by a lot--although it would be fun to do a full out rainbow like this, in smaller color sections, don't get me wrong. And I changed up the stitch pattern, to something that would make the most of two strands of soft, squishy warm wool--something that would warm little pockets of air against the skin and keep the wearer really wrapped in joy, so to speak.

And then I added pompoms. 

The result is a little less subtle--and, like I said, fewer colors and shades, but... but I'm pretty excited about it. 

And, you know. I thought I'd share.

 





* Note-- I have in the past, posted the blog on a blogger website. If I continue to blog, it will be here on this website, but given how little that's happened lately, I left a goodbye/redirect poste there, and, well, reposted here!

So, I started this blog 15 and a half years ago--and I've loved it. I'm not quite ready to let it go in my heart--I mean, I've got a pretty solid record here, of my careers, of watching my kids grow up, of my animals. I've got some funny stories, and, hopefully, some insightful ideas on this site, and I've loved maintaining it.

 But... 

But this is my first post in six weeks. 

And it's not that I haven't done things or said things--or even posted funny things on FB--but even before social media broke my heart (several times over) it was pretty clear that blogs were not cutting edge or end-all-and-be-all. Yes, Twitter is a nightmare, I take the worst pictures ANYWHERE, much less Instagram, and FB can be a real snakepit but, these things are also where I attract readers, and where more people go to read me. 

This may not be my last blog post--but then, I'm not sure how many people would notice if it was.        

And while I miss blogging, and the introspection that comes with it, I've also come to treasure living in the moment. The thing with having your heart broken by social media is that it makes you very aware of the family and friends you have in the here and now. While I've been noticeably absent on the blog, I've been, I hope, very PRESENT in the lives of my family and on my FB group, which is lively and happening and very, very funny. 

For those of you who have tuned in for every post--and I know there's a few of you--please don't let this be goodbye. My newsletter is surprisingly chatty and newsy and anecdotal, and if you were tuning into the blog to see what's coming out next, the newsletter is a great place to to get that info too. If you liked the blog because I posted the occasional free fiction, well, my Patreon is pretty active. I post there 3-4 times a month, and about half the time the post is open to the public. And if you like the quick, funny family conversations, well, that would be FB and my FB group--and FB is sort of great because it will push up some of your most popular posts. So, you know, if something made me laugh last year, you'll see it again and hopefully laugh some more. 

I'll post the links to all of those things below, and I really hope to see you there--and this might not be the end completely! It's just... I would rather say goodbye and leave some forwarding addresses now, then simply let the whole thing fade away. It feels like a choice rather than simply leaving something I've been pretty faithful to for longer than a lot of marriages last. 

So while I may not be HERE a lot, I REALLY hope to see you THERE much more. And seriously--if you haven't signed up for my newsletter or visited the Patreon (for FREE CONTENT!!!) you really should!

So take care to those who've tuned in faithfully for the last 15 years--I'm not going away, I'm just going to more fully inhabit the venues where we are all more active. SEE YOU THERE!!!
​
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Wow. It's been over a month since I've blogged. I've released a new BOOK since I've blogged. (The Rising Tide--it's a lot of fun--you should check it out.)


I've gone on a long trip since I've blogged. From California to Virginia Beach, where I stayed with Mate for a lovely night, and from there he drove me to Portsmouth, where I attended the GRL convention (while he visited with his family.)  After the book signing at GRL, he came and picked me up, taking me to Gaithersburg where I visited with his family, and from there we went to New Jersey where we both met with my family, and my friend Damon.


And then, after a "bonus" night (or, more accurately, after my curse sentenced us a night at an airport hotel) we came home.


Whew.


In all, we were gone nearly ten days, and our kids seem to have left the house standing and the animals alive. (We left Chicken at home with the teenagers for fun and frivolity. It appears instead of destroying the house, they merely responsibly carried on with their lives. Go figure.)



Anyway--all in all, we had a great time, but, oi! So many things to talk about, right? (By the way--if you like my weird ramblings, be sure to sign up for my Newsletter, where they will be reliably delivered to your e-mail box, along with the newest offering :-) SIGN UP HERE. 


First of all, let's do Thank Yous!


* Thank you to the waiter at the Magic Mushroom Pizza Emporium on Virginia Beach who recommended the Loaded Baked Potato pizza. It really WAS  a magical pizza.


* Thank you to the organizers of GRL--Reese Dante and her husband Ron, Carol Lynne, Teresa Emil--you all do a lovely job, and thank you so much for having me!



* Thank you to the new readers who made a real point to come and say hi and to be excited about the work--I'm always so overwhelmed that people keep reading, and so grateful that they do.

* Thank you to the readers I've seen a few times--who are still excited and come up and say hi. Because I love that, as awkward and weird as I am in person, we can still connect with the stories we love.


* Thank you to my roommate, Kim Fielding, who was as eager to find a coffee place in the morning as I was, and who made me laugh--a LOT--and who didn't mind talking until we really should have been asleep, and who sat on a panel with me and was funny and charming and made me super glad I was there too.


* Thank you to my kids who sent Proof-of-Life pictures of the dogs, bless them. Including the adorable little outfits. <3 <3 <3 to all of you for letting Dad and I have this trip together.


* Thank you to Mate's family, bless you all, who were  happy to see him, some of whom traveled from Pennsylvania to Maryland to meet him and who made him remember that he was not the last of his line. He's so grateful.


* Thank you to his Aunt Margie and Uncle Tom who were happy to see me after he came and fetched me from GRL, and who were happy to sit up with us and watch TV and who didn't so much as bat an eyelash when I read an emergency chapter of Weirdos to them because the conversation had turned to politics and even though I agreed with them, I was just so over politics I went, "HEY WANNA HEAR A BOOK?'


* Thank you to my cousins, who all gathered in the charming New England town of Piermont to have dinner with mate and I after we drove from Maryland to New Jersey, just to say hi and give me a hug and to have a raucous wonderful dinner where we remembered that we were related again. 

* Thank you especially to my cousin Alex who welcomed us into his home the night afterward for pizza and conversation. He and his wife were lovely and they just wanted to talk MOAR and I love them so much you have no idea. Also their son is adorable. They're my age and they had a child at 48 and that takes an amount of bravery I don't think I could ever have. Bless them all.


* Thank you to Damon Suede who met us for lunch at Annabella's Mozzarella Deli (with a milkshake at the banana hut which was every bit as kitschy and weird as I thought it would be) and who was lively and entertaining and awesome and still my friend after nearly ten years. Love you, honey. Thank you for everything <3



* Thank you also to the maitre de and proprietor of Annabella's Mozzarella Deli who... well, he started off by singing Frank Sinatra to us as he dropped off our waters and ended up by soliciting some writer help from Damon on a script he'd been working on and... okay. He was the entire New Jersey experience in a very handsome package and a red henley shirt. I should have taken a picture, but... dude. There was just so much to capture.


* Thank you to Johns Hotel and the Thai Place and cookie places we found on Door Dash after we ended up spending a "BONUS" day in NYC because there was fog in Chicago somewhere. All three of these businesses were unlikely to be patronized by two exhausted tourists from California, but they all rose to the occasion.


Whew! I hope I remember everybody. I mean, I had a LOT of fun on this trip--I wanted to give credit to all the kind folks who made it happen, right?


And now for the "Needs Improvement" portion of our program, which I hope is taken in good fun--with a tiny bit of irritation for spice. Are we ready? Here we go.



* And to the wonderful coffee shop in Portsmouth who welcomed the GRL clientele with a lot of good humor and the fastest service one barista and a food server could possibly deliver. I loved you. The only reason you're in the Needs Improvement column is that I really could have used a 24 oz Irishman in Paris every morning for a week, and you only offered 16 oz. Seriously, my only complaint. Thank you guys for being awesome.

* And to the Public House that served steak and catfish at night and brunch on Saturday afternoon? Steak and catfish ALL THE HOURS. Damn. It was so good. I mean, brunch was wonderful, but the catfish was GREAT. I need catfish now. Nobody fries catfish in California and it's a damned shame.
​

* And to the mobsters who apparently ruined New Jersey's freeway and road system in the fifties by giving all the road contracts to people in the concrete business and getting kickbacks for all the concrete they used, creating a concrete vermicelli nightmare that changed one mile as the crow flies to a twenty minute odyssey of jug handle exits and zero right turns? Fuck you guys, I hope you're all roasting in hell. You were batshit insane sociopaths in life, and your concrete souls remain to torture the people of New Jersey in death and generally I spit on your memories, you bastards.


* And to Patton Oswald whom I normally adore and think of fondly, I have a particularly complicated fuck you. See, when we got to Mate's Aunt and Uncle's, we sat down and turned on the TV and tried to destress from the drive. We turned on Patton Oswald's new special, Hysterectomies and Hemorrhoids and enjoyed the first ten minutes. A little spicy, but very funny. So when Mate's Aunt and Uncle got home, and we put the special on pause, we weren't reluctant at all to unpause it when conversation wound down and we were all ready to lose ourselves in media for a bit.  What Mate and I did not know was that the next ten minutes of the comedy routine would be about clown pubes. Mate and I looked at each other in horror and I texted the adult daughter and teenagers with "Help! Dad and I are watching a comedy special about clown pubes in front of Aunt Marge and Uncle Tom!" to which they responded, "ABORT ABORT ABORT! FIND A SITCOM, MOM--GET OUT OF THERE!" But it was too late. The mortification of two 55 year olds made to feel like children getting caught watching SNL when their parents thought they were asleep was complete. So Patton? You will never see this, and I still love and adore you, but seriously? For that moment in my life? FUCK YOU.



* And finally. To the designers of Flushing Meadows, That wonderful place in Queens where you see the globe and the alien spaceships left over from the World's Fair in 1964 and is featured in Men in Black? I'd like to give you fuckers a hearty sendoff for creating a place with --when the museum is closed--two public bathrooms, total, each one 3/4s of a mile from the center of the park. Seriously, you assholes. FUCK YOU. If I'd been in California, there would have been a portajohn every 150 yards. Considering we had to spend an hour in traffic to get there? Would it have killed you to put a bathroom in with less than a mile's walk from parking? You fucking assholes. I'm not even kidding. Jesus.

* And to the airlines--a particularly personal Fuck You because this whole overnight curse thing is starting to feel like you're picking on me. I know someone who gets on a plane three times a month who does not have overnight layovers as often as I do in a year. I've got to tell you, that bonus night in NYC was not the bonus the airlines thought it was. Yeeesh. 

Warning--dark humor alert! If you don't take this post with a heavy dose of salt, you will be really worried about me, and seriously--I'm fine.


 Also--I'll write one of these posts about what's coming in earnest on my Patreon soon, complete with links and pub dates--this one is mostly for fun!


We had a birthday party for Chicken this week, which everybody made a big deal about since she didn't really let us do anything for her when she graduated. Because she wanted to be comfy and cozy, we ended up with thirteen people in our teeny tiny living room, eating Chinese food and having riotous conversation. This included my parents, who rarely if ever come to my house because I'm pretty sure the mess--and the deterioration--makes them absolutely batshit crazy.


So when my dad excused himself to use the bathroom, Mate and I braced ourselves.


He returned trying not to look appalled.


"Was that a... uhm... hole in the floor under that mats?"


"Well, yeah--I mean, it's not through the sub flooring yet, but, uhm, yeah."


He made a manly attempt not to flail. "Aren't you afraid of falling through that?"


"Yes," I said. "Mate is fully aware it's a possibility."


"Have you thought about getting that fixed?"


Only every day for the last twelve years. "Of course we have," I say. "I offer to call in contractors, and Mate says he'll absolutely do it after soccer season."


My dad looks at Mate, who has a stoic look on his face--he's known this has been coming and he was fully prepared to get thrown under the bus. "So what happened?"


"Soccer season is from August to July," I tell him, and he looks from my face to Mate's to see if I'm joking.


As you all know, I am not.


"So what do you plan to do?"


"Well," I say, "One day, while Mate is at a soccer game, I'm going to fall through the flooring and bleed out, alone in my own home, up to my waist in dry-rot, with my phone mere inches away from my reaching hand."


My father is horrified. "That's a plan?"


"Sure."


And the conversation gets coopted by somebody else.


Later, Youngest wants to know what the conversation was about, so I tell him. "Wow, Mom--you sure do have a lot of plans for how you're going to go out. Face down on your keyboard working a deadline, falling through the bathroom floor--and the dogs have been trying to kill you for years. Shouldn't you plan on life?"


"I do plan on life! But this way, I have fun guessing what's going to get me first--the fat, the dogs, or the bathroom floor."


"Just try to make sure Dad's the one who finds you."


"Roger that."
​

Seriously, my money's on face first on the keyboard, but that's just me. 

So Weirdos came out this week, and people really seem to love it! I'm so glad--my dogs take up a big percentage of my day and it's nice to know that love too is universal.


So far the only criticism has been... well, predictable, really--it's one I'm used to and always makes me smile a little.  


I dared to mention gas and poop.


Yes, I know--it's not every book (I SWEAR it's not every book) but it does come up . Part of that is I grew up with a stepbrother who used to sit on our heads and fart in lieu of beating us up and part of that is my family used to sing "Beans beans the musical fruit! The more you eat the more you toot!" every time my stepmom cooked beans. However, aside from being prepped from the cradle for having the sense of humor of a perpetual twelve-year-old, there's another reason I dare to mention bodily functions in romance books.


We are human animals.


I believe in love--all the good stuff people say about it, I believe. I believe that finding your person can be a fundamental part of your life, if that's how you want to live. (Not for everybody if that's a choice--I believe that too.) I believe love, kindness, forgiveness, all those good things that people can do, bring us a little closer to being part of the divine, whichever form that takes. Sometimes it just means kind humans are the pinnacle of evolution, right?


But all of that love and divinity and angelic kindness is attached to a very real, very fallible, very human body, and sometimes it works to perfection (hello, orgasm!) and sometimes it betrays us (Arthur Itis, I'm glaring at YOU!) and very often, it produces unpleasant byproducts such as gas, waste, and ammonia-tainted water.


And still, we love. 


Mate and I went honeymooning on a shoestring. We got camping equipment, some cash, and headed for the coast in a 1976 AMC Pacer for two weeks of roughing it bliss. On the third day, I got food poisoning. On the fourth day, we changed locations so we could visit my stepbrother and got a flat tire on the way. We spent half our limited cash buying a new set of tires so we might not wreck and die on the coastal roads for the rest of the trip. When we arrived at my stepbrother's, he treated us to pizza. Food poisoning again--this time both of us, and we spent the night in adjoining portajohns. The next morning--day five--we called it. We'd seen sickness and health, better and worse, richer and poorer--we were going home.


You'd think that would be a bad omen for a 35 year and counting relationship, wouldn't you. That much pain, misery, and penury would break us--right?


But on that third day, as I was crouching behind a giant tree stump in an empty campground, after having just lost everything--both exits, no waiting--into the powdery dirt, Mate was running around in front of the tree stump asking me what I needed. 


A teleportation machine and a giant bathtub, obvs, but none of that was in the dusty campground.


"Water," I wailed. "And all the towels. And a change of clothes. And some help to the shower." And then the capper. "AND YOU CAN'T LOOK AT ME WHILE YOU GIVE THEM TO ME."


The one thing that has not changed about my Mate in 35 years is his eyes. I remember those blue eyes--a little bloodshot because he really didn't like camping and sleeping outdoors didn't come easy--peering at me from over the stump. "I have to look at you sometime. We're married."


"But I'm SO GROSSSSSSSS!!!!"


"Which is why you need to shower. Here, take off your clothes and put them in this bag, and here's the towel and the shampoo. The bathroom's right over there." 


"I was heading there," I sniffled.


"You didn't make it. You go get clean and I'll try to..." He gestured with the water bottle in his hand. "Clean the mess."


And as I did what he instructed, it occurred to me that A. I was glad we'd lived together for a year because otherwise, I might have expired from embarrassment on the spot, and B. This was how you got through the worst of things, wasn't it. You did the logical thing. The next thing. And you held hands and went on from there.


A week and a half ago I brought COVID home from Houston and shared with Mate and Squish. One of the signs that we all might live--including Mate and I--is that we spent a good five minutes hugging in the kitchen this morning. Human touch--ah, that glorious, magical, amazing healing element--finally made its way through the misery of the headache, the exhaustion, and the stupid coughing fits that have wracked us all. 


Love and the human animal aren't always a comfortable fit. But one of the first ways of helping that along is to accept that one of the most divine emotions springs from one of the grossest and most animal of places: our bodies.


Which the long explanation of why my characters often laugh at fart jokes, and sometimes mention poop.

I'm leaving for Book Lover's Con tomorrow, and one of the forever weird things about jumping on a big jet plane to go somewhere new is the day before. It's always a combination of regular ol' Tuesday and OMG I HAVE TO GET ON A PLANE TOMORROW. So when something odd happens in the course of regular ol' Tuesday, it sticks with you.


There we were, Bob and I. Bob is my walking buddy--he's got a dog named Dude who is sort of my spirit Chiweenie. Dude and I have the same look when someone wants us to do that extra lap around the park, if you know what I mean. -.- THAT look. Anyway, we were wrapping up our walk and I was telling him about hating airport shuttles with a passion. I usually have a story to pull out of my... ear, and I found myself talking about getting off the red-eye, running to catch the shuttle, and ending up in traffic because President Obama was going through New York that day and almost fainting before I got to the hotel because NO FOOD.


I was saying this as we wrapped up our walk--we went the extra half-lap today to avoid the ecstatic Rottweiler chasing the sprinklers because sprinkler day is the BEST DAY EVER, so we were skirting the parking lot as we neared my car. (Bob takes the thruway into the nearby neighborhood--this, people, is how all suburbs should be built. With a GIANT FRICKIN' PARK in the middle.) Anyway--about the time I got to, "Yeah, Obama was in town that day," somebody heard us.


The guy was scrawny and tattooed and working on a beater car with a million dents, and normally that's my candy, but apparently this candy was batshit crazy. He picked up on the word "Obama" and was off and running about how Obama was the reason the country was currently spiraling into the end times and we were all assholes for voting for him and... you get the picture.


Now, Bob is a Never Trumper--a Republican, but actually very pro-choice, pro-civil rights, pro LGBTQ--he's about 10 years older than I am, and I think the Republicans were just the people who helped you make money back in the day, and he liked to play the stock market. What matters here is he thought Obama did a decent job, and this batshit crazy vehicular resident was NOT speaking for him or anybody he knows. 


We met eyes you could read the mutual decision. Do not, repeat, do NOT engage with the psychopath screaming about how Obama caused the gas prices to go up and that's why he was doing drugs in a Subaru in the park. (I mean, seriously. He was TWO PRESIDENTS ago!) 


So we made polite conversation until we got to my car and then I made to leave and he said, "See you next week. Have fun." He gave the Tattooed Screamer a sideways look. "Don't talk to crazy people."


And sometimes, that's the best advice a friend can give.
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Have a good week everybody!

 Okay--true story-I forget a lot about my blog. I think my last post was a month ago--all those things I used to need to shout from the mountaintops are perfectly content fermenting in my twisted little heart, silent as the grave.

But I DO need to remember to post about new releases.

I did a HUGE breakdown of the Fishiverse HERE, back when Constantly Cotton was released, and people really seemed to enjoy being walked through the connections and byways of the evolution of Fish. Fish in a Barrel has some of those byways cooked in--Henry (of Fish on a Bicycle and Shades of Henry) has become a steady fixture, as have the Flophouse boys and Henry's boss (and Ellery's best friend) Galen. Ace, Sonny, and Burton didn't get any play in this one, although they do show up in the backmatter because I wrote a lot of ficlets in the last two years. 

And I really love the idea of Ace, Sonny, Burton, Jason, Jai, Ernie, and George all hanging out in the desert and keeping the peace. Just a little gay coalition for peace--nothing to see here folks, make sure you check your antifreeze before you drive your car through the desert.

But Fish in a Barrel is Jackson and Ellery at their most pure--pursuing a case for the greater good and applying compassion and common sense to a justice system badly in need of both. We get so used to reading about injustice, vanity, stupidity and cruelty masquerading as politics--writing these stories is my way of fixing at least a tiny bit of what's wrong with the world.

So I hope you enjoy the Fishiverse--and I especially hope you love Fish in a Barrel. 

If I'm lucky, I'll get to write these guys for the rest of my career. If I'm not lucky, I'll keep writing them for myself. 

Jackson and Ellery face their toughest case yet—against the criminal justice system itself.


Jackson Rivers and Ellery Cramer have worked difficult jobs before, but usually it’s getting the facts that’s the problem. For their newest client, the trouble isn’t finding the truth—it’s corruption at the highest levels of the justice system. It isn’t enough to find the actual perpetrator and unveil a heartless plot—not when the DA is the bad guy and he’s using cops as his goons. Keeping their vulnerable client alive and out of jail takes blood, sweat, and tears.


When one of their major antagonists is killed and the DA tries to pin the death on Jackson, he’ll need every ounce of luck and all his resources to clear his name—and to find the perpetrator before the DA can use the murder to further his own agenda. They soon find that it’s easier to spot an honest man in a field of thieves than it is to shoot fish in a barrel—and both the man and the fish will be lucky to survive….
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