Me, as Rick passes me my package- Ooooh I have been waiting for this!

Rick- Yeah? What is it?

Me, knowing I’ve mentioned WHAT it is a couple of times- Guess.

Rick- Uh… you’ve decided to learn sign language?

Me, turning box over in my hands and looking at it objectively- You know, that’s a fair guess.

One of my areas in which I need to give myself a break is wanting everything just so. I like my gear to look like new, my hair to fall the right way, and ohhh how I have missed my occasional manicure. Even if the places I go didn’t have like cool Star Wars designs and really no black polish at all… it was nice to have them shaped and polished up.

But since I can’t paint my own nails worth a darn, I gave it up cause covid. Because I want them to look just so, you see. And an experiment with Rick painting them proved that while my honeybear has many talents, nail art ain’t among ’em.

Then a friend told me about this poppy thing, and I decided to give it a try.. hence the above box that I definitely mentioned to Rick. Sometimes listening and remembering isn’t among his talents either. And yeah, it took me three tries to figure out that sometimes perfect isn’t important. What’s important is how good I feel about my starscape nails, how good it feels to be back in black, and just indulging in some self care.

And if you’re wondering what Rick’s strong suits are… among the many, he makes me laugh, he feeds my imagination, he makes me feel safe, he gets me retro SNES controllers for my Switch, and yes, he does listen.

Last night, we were in our high altitude bed with the TV on the floor with (what else?) Star Wars on. I told him it was like being at the very tip top of a theater with stadium seating looking down at the screen way way below.

Today, he wall mounted our bedroom TV. And screwed down the last countertop in the kitchen. And you know, he’s why I have a bed again.

We were sitting on the couch, watching Kim’s Convenience and minding our own business when Rick hands me his phone with a blank email pulled up.

Me- What?

Rick- You need to write a thank you to Brandi for getting our parts shipped and you’d do it better than me.

Me, with a sigh- OK, but I need a decent sized keyboard.

Rick- Fine, use my computer.

Down the hall, to the office, sitting down at his computer, and I get a goathead in the tender spot right between my foot and my pinkie toe.

Me- /various noises indicating pain

Rick, with a sigh, crossing the room and holding his hand out for the extracted goathead so he can throw it away. HUGE shock as I pass it to him that lit up the dark and hurt us both- OW! What the hell?????

Me, grumbling and turning back to the computer- and I got hit TWICE, what the hell is that about?

I write up the email, still muttering.

Me- I’d ask you to get me a pepcid, but we’d probably get set on fire!

Rick, sighing some more, exits, I think to let me write in peace. He comes back a minute later, with the pepcid.

Me- oh! OK, great, but…. could you just drop it into my hand?

We probably shouldn’t have laughed about it for as long as we did, but it’s kind of been a long day.

No, that’s not the mistake, in case you were wondering, that’s just a change of attitude and altitude.

Our old bed had a set of pup stairs to help the kids get in and out of bed when they were babies. They still use them, though, so we never moved them. When we put them into place, we saw that it was about a foot from the tippy top step to the bed. Rick and I looked at each other with concern, and figured, well, we’ll see what happens.

No, that’s not the mistake either, quit getting ahead of me here.

Understand, the pups LOVE time laying in bed with mom and dad… like a lot. You want to see three previously catatonic tufts of couch potato fur take flight in this house? Say, “It’s bedtime!” and they all sprout wings.

So when I climbed into bed to test it out, our girls, with minimal trepidation, hopped up and checked it out.

And when I got up to go back into my office, they got up to go with me.

Zoe, the aussie shepherd, has seriously long legs. She was fine going back down the stairs.

Jaina, our morkie, also has fairly long legs, and negotiated the stairs with no trouble.

But Bree…

Bree is a corgi, which means she has no legs. She’s a roly poly sausage with stumps that have footies on the end.

Bree was not okay, and now we’re arriving at the mistake.

Once we’d assured ourselves that Bree was fine after her faceplant moment, I laughed.

Now, as you can see, we have addressed the issue, and I’m glad to say Bree is able to get into and out of bed without any problems.

But I’m still getting some wicked side eye, and I know I’m going to pay for laughing at the corg.

I made a huge mistake.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to tell stories. I can very clearly recall long afternoons in my grandfather’s rocker, pretending we were riding giraffes on Mars. I don’t know why it had to be Mars or giraffes- what I do remember is that my grandfather told me that was just fine and joined in my wild imaginationland.

When I stop and think about it, the people I’ve enjoyed the most are the ones that play along. Rick might be my favorite cause not only will he play along, he’ll add to it.

Coming up on an anniversary of one of those deeply affecting events, I started doing that thing you do during such times when you get older. It’s much more fun when you do it as a kid, cause it usually means your My Little Pony or video game collection- what you have, what you want to get next, how you’ll managed to wheedle it out of a parent.

Cause when you’re older, sometimes taking stock feels like telling your yesterself you weren’t good enough.

Advice- try not to do that. Even if it’s true, beating up yesterself is an exercise in futility.

This minute, I’m within just a few years of the age my grandfather was when we rode the mystical longnecked beasts of Mars. That was a gaspy thought… because within a few years of those long ago golden afternoons, my grandfather was gone.

But then, I gave that thought another look and realized something.. well, magicalish? All these years later, through all the very strange twists and turns life has taken, I’m still telling stories from my wild imaginationland. Even better, these days I get to share them with folk and sometimes I even get paid!

That part is SUPER magical, no mistake about it.

Fairy tales and girls who don’t know who they are.. and women who find out there’s more to learn… fairy godmother drag queens..

… and yes, self help on how NOT to be an asshole. Yes, that’s my Gandhi moment- I’m attempting to BE the change I want to see in the world. We’ll see how it works out.

It’s a weird time to be alive, yall. Be hopeful, be thoughtful, be imaginative, be kind.

Most of all, be you.

Y’all, I’m not going to lie, I’m in a state of shock. I just got the first reporting in on how the prerelease sales have gone, and… well, I’ve never had a more successful launch. Not even with the book after the one in which there was a nasty, nasty cliffhanger.

I guess this proves-

1. Folk want to read about assholes.
2. Folk want to make sure they aren’t assholes.
3. Folk think they are assholes and want to change.
4. Folk want other people to know they think they are assholes in an understated way.
5. Assholes buy books?

Either way, I’m shocked, thrilled, and flabbergasted all in turns… and since I use word of mouth to publicize, I know I have all of you to thank. So thank you for your continued support, I cannot tell you how much it means to me.

Preorders ARE still live, and the release is Friday the 21st!

And I am Jack’s complete state of shock.

Not going to lie… got a sad/happy/shappy thing going on right about now. Yes, it’s a goofy concept for a self help book. No, it’s not a joke. I wrote down the stuff that I have done, keep doing, and will continue to do to try and be a better person. But I’m also the kind of girl that calls something what it is, and I’m trying very hard not to be an asshole. I hope folks who also want to be better people give it a try, and hopefully get a laugh or two along the way.

I didn’t do anything unique or crazy- just a common sense approach to a problem not many folk are willing to admit to having.

And it entertained me to put it in super faaaaaaancy curly font for some reason. I dunno, sometimes I don’t look too deeply into my motives.

At $3 for Kindle, $4 for paperback, if you think you’d enjoy it, I hope you’ll buy it. Give it as a tongue in cheek gift to someone that’ll think it’s funny.

Now, if you’ll pardon me, I’m going to reach out to Gilbert Gottfried on Cameo and see if he’s willing to do the audiobook version. It’s like I wrote it for him.

The Art of Not Being An Asshole- A Straightforward Guide from a Reforming Asshole

Foreword-

Hopefully you read this before spending your hard earned cash on this book so you know what it will and won’t do.

If you are perfectly happy with who you are and see no reason to change anything at all about how you approach people or how you view the world, this book is not for you.

If this book was given to you as a gift or not so subtle suggestion, but you still don’t see a reason to be open to change, I recommend returning it or using it as a doorstop.

If you think back on situations and you feel like you could have handled them better…

If you feel like people keep telling you that you need to be a better listener…

If you feel like people keep telling you you’re insensitive…

If you feel like people keep telling you you’ve missed the point in a conflict situation…

If you feel like you can’t win…

If you don’t like yourself…

If you feel like you should be more invested in situations around you but just can’t…

If people tell you you’re an asshole…

If you aren’t offended by coarse language and are open to the idea of changing some behaviors about yourself you don’t like…

… yeah, you might want to keep reading.

I think I probably ought to start with why I feel qualified to offer advice here. After all, I’m not any kind of -ologist or -iatrist, and no -ologists or -iatrists were consulted as I underwent my journey to being someone I actually like. And I’m not perfect.. I have days where I fall into my old thinking patterns and have to snap back out of them. In some ways, I’m writing this as much to keep myself on track and accountable as I am to try to help others for whom iastrists and ologists just aren’t helpful or viable for whatever reason.

I was raised by two lovely individuals with narcissistic tendencies, who taught me all the important lessons about how to comport myself and be successful in life.

Yeah, that’s definitely sarcasm, in case you needed the note. What I learned was that no one was going to care about what I wanted or needed but me, so I’d best be on the lookout for number one. When you think about it from a certain point of view, that’s one of the key roots of assholism. You, for whatever reason, elevate yourself to the point that you are the center of your personal universe at all times no matter what. Side effects include the deep seated fear of being wrong, inability to connect with others in a meaningful way, and ongoing rotating groups of friends as people get to know you and then decide they don’t actually want to know you. (Don’t worry about that last one, sometimes it’s a side effect of rejecting toxicity on your own, we’ll talk about that later on.)

So how is it that I broke out of that mindset and made myself aware that there are others in the world that I don’t automatically outrank?

I almost died. Yeah, super dramatic, right? But it wasn’t a near miss car crash. My plane didn’t start falling out of the sky for a couple hundred feet. I didn’t almost get run over by a bus. It wasn’t one of those split second affairs that let me have the oh my god I could have died adrenaline rush and then go back to my life after a fantastic steak dinner and better sex like normal people get to do.

When I say I almost died, that means I laid in bed for two weeks, waiting for my body to decide if my own personal favorite and long running series was going to be renewed for another season or not. That kind of time gives you plenty of opportunity to think about how you got there. It really gives you plenty of time to think when you’re laying there by yourself, maybe because you’ve surrounded yourself with people just fucking like you. Because, as it turns out, they are the only ones that can fucking stand you and find all your not so charming behaviors to be normal.

You start to think about why that situation exists, and if that’s how you want to live the rest of your life. That is honestly how wrong things had to go for me to decide the person I was I wasn’t okay with anymore. I hope if you’re reading this and you identify with anything in that if section, that you’re smarter than I am and you don’t have to be in a place like that to make you want to roll up your sleeves and get started.

Here’s what is not going to happen in the pages of this book- I will not tell you all the answers lie outside of yourself. That means we won’t be acknowledging a higher power, destiny, The Gift, Celestine Prophecies, or any kinda voodoo wuwu stuff. No Wish It, Want It, Do It stuff happening here. (I’m going to say if you’ve come this far and want to keep going, you’re too damn smart for any of that junk to work anyway.) I’m also not going to use a bunch of big words and promise you if you just follow all these steps in order that you’re going to be all better forever. You’re going to do better if you want to do better. And you may find steps that work for you that I’ve never even thought of- and that’s fucking awesome. You do you. 

I’m not going to pretend this is easy.

I’m also not going to try to convince you that you shouldn’t be an asshole. That’s your decision, full stop.

Here’s what will happen. I am going to talk about what worked for me to better understand who I was versus who I wanted to be and how I got there. I’m going to lay it out step by step in plain, kitchen English and if I can make you laugh along the way, so much the better. I’m going to talk to you like I’d talk to a friend, cause if you’re on this journey, you could use a friend and I’m there for you.

So, whenever you’re ready, let’s fuckin do this.

In fact, when I had to study her through my lit classes in college, she formed half the dastardly duo that moved me from wanting to major in English to Humanities. (Kate Chopin is the other offender.)

But for all that I hate 99% of her work and dismiss it as trite, she did have the gift of words that linger in the mind- even mine. Today, those words are as follows-

“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.”

Let me be a thousand and one percent clear here… what we got today isn’t justice. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a step, and an important one. But how can we forget that while George Floyd’s murderer will be behind bars tonight, Adam Toledo’s walks free? The blue wall hasn’t come down, and we haven’t addressed the real issue here. It’s not civilians versus cops or gun control or what Maxine Water or Marjorie Taylor Green said about any of it.

When you clear away all the noise, the issue is this- there is something inherently wrong with the idea of one person having the power of life and death over another… and we, as a society, pretend that it is inevitable and allow it to exist with minimal to no checks and balances of that power.

Big leap of logic, I know, but walk with me a sec. There’s three main pillars that I can think of in which this power exists- law enforcement is the easy one. Then there’s the medical profession, which has a system of checks (and malpractice insurance, which is a different system of checks) and balances with licensing and revocation of licensing in extreme circumstances. And so we feel secure in that system… though a lot of me thinks that’s because we don’t really have a whole lot of alternatives.

The last one? Parenting.

Did you feel that chill? Shit just got real, yeah? Because if you are a parent, you just felt the weight of that responsibility all over again.. and if you have parents that maybe didn’t use that power in the best ways, you just admitted to yourself that you’re sitting in your chair reading this trivial little blog of mine by luck.

In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe we should have this kind of power over one another- and if I’m being perfectly honest, I’m a little in fear of the mentality that would seek it out on purpose. Living in our society, I don’t see how not having this imbalance is avoidable. But I started off this little posting talking about hope- so here’s where that ties in. In this moment in time, when we seem to be more ready than we’ve ever been to admit that our society has problems, I hope that we find a kernel of something better in ourselves. I hope we have the conversations about being better without defensiveness, without dragging our feet- because in those conversations comes the admission that we all deserve something better and brighter. And set about to achieve it, understanding there are wonders enough for all of us to have something bright and beautiful in our world.

It’s occurred to me once or twice (an hour) that being on the outside of me and dealing with me has to be fucking exhausting. My imagination is a wild, untamed wildebeest who hates sleep, thinks nothing (and I do mean nothing) is off limits, is easily bored, and has a direct connection to my mouth.

This has been grossly inconvenient and unsettling for a lot of people over the years. I feel for them, I do, but at the same time, I guarantee the wildebeest has kept me awake more nights than it has you.

The wildebeest has a pair of fast friends… I call them my anxiety monsters. The He-Monster on my left shoulder (cause that’s the ear that hears a little better) is babyshit/puke green and super fuzzy, so everything gets caught on him. Something dumb I said in 7th grade? It’s still there, snagged in his shoulder fur. The thing I wish I hadn’t done a week ago? He knows just where it is. He-Monster likes to remind me how utterly self absorbed I am and that everyone is just sick and tired of having to deal with me and my stupid precious feelings. He tells me everyone hates me and is just waiting for me to shut up so they can get on with their day. I’m pretty sure he smokes, with that deep gravelly ‘you’re an idiot’ House voice he’s got going on.

He’s a dick, and probably only right like 30% of the time tops, I know.

On the right shoulder, speaking in a nice, soft voice that feels like common sense and regret in a noxious mix is my She-Monster. She-Monster is putrid hot pink with floofy ponytails nowhere near even, like any actual ponytail I attempt would look. She likes to tell me about how wrong every decision I’ve made is, and how someday soon I’m going to be so so sooooooooorrrrrrrrry for what I’ve done and all the opportunities I’ve passed by to make all the things okay again if I would just get the fuck in line right the fuck now. I’m a disappointment in oh so many ways which the She-Monster is glad to point out to me.

Of the two, I probably hate the She-Monster more because the hate she spews can so easily be mistaken for wisdom.

I hate my anxiety monsters. They don’t stay in their closets. They don’t shut up. They hold wild parties with the wildebeest and keep me up at night.

But you know what I can’t do? I can’t treat He and She Monsters like they aren’t there. Because that’s when they really go to town and work me over where I can’t see them. As exhausting as it is to give them bodies to go with their voices, there’s wisdom in it- that which has a name is within your ken to control.

Honestly, with all the other gifts the wildebeest has given me over the years- six novels, endless entertainment, creative ideas to make and go and do and help, dreams that I can actually make come true sometimes… I think I can forgive it a couple of anxiety monsters.

So I guess all of that to say that if you catch me on a not great day, sometimes the monsters can be seen by people that aren’t me.

Just don’t feed them, please? And tomorrow I’ll try harder to keep them where they belong.

So you know how it is after a run of hoooooly chao omfg wth could happen next bad luck, when that next stroke of good luck comes, you don’t even know what to think and you just stand there, blinking at it stupidly?

Yeah, that’s kind of where I am.

Understand, we worked on getting The Witch’s Daughter to audio for the better part of a year… then bam! One day it was just out in the world and a real thing, no warning whatsoever.

Well, the same thing just happened three weeks later with The Werewolf’s Daughter. Last night, we’d had dinner with the foster kid, watched Raya and the Last Dragon and were messing around with building new Magic decks when I got the notification. Now whether you look on Amazon or Audible or iTunes, I have a (insert arabesque of hands type flourish here) audiobook presence.

Books 3 and 4 are already in production, and I really, truly, madly, deeply hope that going into this format and with the amazing skills of Meredith Bennie that more people get to connect with these characters. I may be biased, but I think they are kind of entertaining.

Now, don’t mind me, I’m just going to be over here still in a little bit of shock at how fast this happened after how slow the rest of it went.

Happy mediums, folks. We need to aim for those happy mediums- and I don’t mean a giggly Miss Cleo.