UPDATE: The winner is…Beth!
*~*~*

November

 

1. I compiled all three Triplehorn Brand books into a single volume and published the box set on November 20th! Thanks to everyone who picked up a copy!
2. I completed writing my standalone small-town/sci-fi/romantic comedy, Little Green Dreams (follow the link to pre-order!)! Something I’ve been thinking about writing for years. And I finally have a cover!
3. I began work on Malcolm (Book #10 of Montana Bounty Hunters: Dead Horse, MT).
4. I completed 4 editing projects for other authors in November.
5. I completed NaNoWriMo 2023!

Health-related:

1. I have not been exercising enough. I’ve gained weight—not saying how much! (Thanksgiving is a blessing and curse!)
2. Through medicines and some diet tweaking, I’ve managed to keep my blood pressure down to 135-155.

Happiness-related: 

1. I worked on making items to sell alongside my daughter at the local Christmas craft fair!
2. Despite the heavy writing workload, I have managed to do some painting. Here are some examples…

December

For work-related, I plan:

1. To make one more pass through Little Green Dreams to find any errors I may have missed, then release it on December 12th!
2. To write, and hopefully publish, my next Stepbrothers Stepping Out short story—With His Fire Crew.
3. To complete writing Malcolm, my next Montana Bounty Hunters book!
4. To complete 4 editing projects in December!

For health related, I plan:

1. To not make promises about counting points for my Weight Watchers diet, because it’s that time of year and I know I’d be setting myself up for failure. However, I will try to make healthier choices—emphasizing no late-night snacking!
2. To continue to reduce salt, processed food, and incorporate foods good for blood pressure (spinach, broccoli, bananas).
3. To pay attention to my daily steps, trips up and down the stairs, and to incorporate some chair exercises.
4. To do more housework because my art room isn’t finished! Cleaning is exercise, too.

For happiness-related, I plan: 

1. To participate in a local arts and crafts event December 2nd!
2. To make some last pieces of jewelry and cards for Christmas gifts!

Contest

Comment on anything you’ve read in this post. Tell me what you’re doing to make yourself happier and healthier, or tell me what you plan to read in December…
Like I said, comment on anything for a chance to win a $5 Amazon gift card!

It’s Sunday. The day I play with my work plans to figure out how to get everything done that has to be done this week. But first, I pull a card…

This is one I’ve never pulled before in any spread. Let’s have a look at the Queen of Swords.

When I look at the card, I shiver. The setting is barren, with snow-covered mountains in the background, so you know it’s cold. She wears a crown, so she’s some queen or privileged princess. Her expression is hard and cold. She holds a silver sword in one hand and a silver urn in the other, from which she’s letting water spill on the ground.

I’m not sure who she represents, but I’ll take a quick peek inside The Mythic Tarot to find out.

I remember her. Not her name, but the story! This Atalanta. She’s the daughter of a king who was so disappointed she was a girl, he set her out in the cold wilderness to die. However, the goddess Artemis took pity and sent a she-bear to the rescue. The bear suckled her and kept her warm. She then grew up surrounded by a group of hunters who taught her to hunt and fight. When she grew into adulthood, she met her father. Only after she’d proven her worth as a warrior did he warm up to her, but of course, he still wanted a male heir, so he decided he’d find a prince to marry her. Atalanta wasn’t so keen on the idea, so she told her father she’d marry a prince if he could beat her in a foot race. If the prince lost, he would be killed. Many princes died trying to win her hand, until one prince met her and fell in love with her and asked the goddess of love, Aphrodite, for some help. She gave him three golden apples and instructions to drop them one at a time during the race to distract her. He won. They were married, but alas, they were doomed. Melanion, her husband, chose to lie with her in a place Zeus considered his own. Zeus turned them both into lions, which was awful, because Greeks believed lions only mated with leopards, so they were forever kept apart.

So, a haughty princess spilling her water on barren land… What does it mean? I think the water represents something squandered—like time or love. She’s holding the sword to assert her independence and protect it. What does that mean to me?  The book says I may be expecting perfection in myself, and while I do that, I may lose something. (I’m thinking time or some emotional gift). Ha! I get it. This week, maybe today, I’ll finish Little Green Dreams. I may be tempted to go over and over it to make it perfect, while I have my family here at home, enjoying the holiday. I’m guessing I should put it aside and enjoy being with them.

Open Contests

1. Flashback: Strokes (Contest–3 Winners!) — Last day to enter! Win a FREE book!
2. Gabbi Black: Those Pesky Side Characters (Contest) — Last day to enter! Win an Amazon gift card!
3. Genevive Chamblee: Ways to Give Thanks (Contest) — This one ends soon! Win a FREE book!
4. Let’s celebrate Veterans Day! Plus, a Puzzle (Contest) — This one ends soon! Win an Amazon gift card!
5. 1st Annual Silly Sayings Day (Contest) — Win an Amazon gift card!
6. Word Search: World Pickle Day! (Contest) — Win an Amazon gift card!
7. Gabbi Grey: What I love about the Best Friend’s Brother Trope (Contest) — Win an Amazon gift card!
8. Why LITTLE GREEN DREAMS? (Contest) — Win a FREE book!
9. Saturday Puzzle-Contest! — Thanksgiving’s Almost Here! — Win an Amazon gift card!

On October 25^th of this year, I went in for total knee replacement surgery. It’s been a long time coming. In fact, the surgeon told me I probably should have had it done ten years ago. While I don’t think he’s wrong, precisely, I didn’t want to rush into anything. I was doing “all the things:” physical therapy, working out three times a week with a trainer, twice a week yoga, mindfulness meditation, pain management training, and I have lost about forty pounds in the last year. In September, my husband and I went on a work trip to San Francisco, and it became glaringly obvious that the status quo could not continue. So, I called the surgeon, and we scheduled it as soon as possible.

You’d think that would be it, right? I mean, major surgery is, well, major surgery. I met with my Human Resources team and my department head to schedule my time out of the office. Would I need medical leave? No, I would just take two weeks off, so it was done on “PTO,” or “paid time off.” I’d scheduled the week of American Thanksgiving as vacation for my family, and I “gave” that back – since I’d be out from October 25^th ’til November 8^th. And then I settled down to prepare.

What I didn’t realize, is that I was, in fact, embarking on a roller coaster.

Our annual Founders Retreat for Writer Zen Garden is the last full weekend in September. This year, we met in picturesque Park City, Utah, at a ski resort. It was, in a word, amazing. The condo we rented was enormous, with a full kitchen and huge living/dining room with a large table to seat all of us. We cooked, we wrote, and something magical happened: Dear Reader, I got my writing mojo back. I wrote more in the month of September than I’ve written in the last eight years combined. It’s felt like one long, dark slog through the Mines of Moria: first the 2016 election debacle, then the publishing world imploded (which, to be fair, had already started by then), the pandemic, the riots, the wildfires, (one of which, the Bolt Creek Fire, was within fifteen miles of our home), and the rise of fascism around the world. All of it meant that my well was bone dry. Sure, I’d try to write, and I kept up my avid journaling practice. But Story?

Nothing.

It’s immensely painful beyond words for a writer to go dry. I’ve met people who will airily assure me they don’t “believe” in writer’s block. My friend, I wish you the peace of your naivete. It happens, and it happens to the best of us. And it’s like bleeding to death with nothing coming out.

So to say I was ecstatic would be an understatement. It’s as though a part of me that had been amputated, suddenly grew back. Things started to heat up: I met some new friends through the NaNoWriMo Seattle Discord server and started writing “word sprints” with them (a word sprint is where you show up and do timed writing for, say, fifteen minutes).

When I settled in to prepare for my knee surgery, Dear Reader, I thought everything was going to be easy-peasy: I was writing again, I could take two weeks off to recover, what could go wrong?

I did not schedule any time to prepare. I worked until October 24^th, and surgery was October 25^th. That was my first mistake.

Then, the week before surgery on October 16^th, my beloved eleven-year-old cat Nadya had a stroke at 07:30 while I was on a video call with my therapist. She told me, “don’t catastrophize,” which is good advice but I knew what I knew. My husband was out with the dogs and our housemate, his brother and a retired emergency veterinary technician, was asleep. I waited for my husband to get back and my appointment to be done (which was the longest fifteen minutes of my life, let me tell you). My husband woke up his brother, and he examined Nadya, and gave us his advice.

Get her to the vet immediately and tell them it’s a thrombus. It’s not a saddle thrombus, which affects both hind legs; he said in his opinion it was a thrombus (i.e. a blood clot) that lodged in her right front leg, cutting off sensation and nerve impulses to her right leg. We got in the car and raced to the vet. I told my husband to call them first, to make sure they were open and that we were coming, and they told us the bad news: take her to the emergency hospital in Lynnwood, an hour’s drive, because they have the scanning equipment we’d need.

We got there and got her seen by the emergency techs right away. We came back home, and I naively thought I’d be able to pick her up again.

The cardiologist said that she was in early-stage heart failure. My brother-in-law and his partner, also an emergency vet tech, said they’ve seen exactly one cat survive this scenario and that cat died within three months, because once they throw one clot, it’s inevitable they’ll throw another. The treatment is unpleasant and consists of either subcutaneous medication (i.e. stabbing my cat with a needle) or oral meds (shoving a pill or, more likely, multiple pills down her throat on a daily basis), or both.

We made the decision to let her go and drove over that night after work.

Afterward, we came home and I went back to preparing for surgery, and trying to relax because relaxation is critical to good outcomes.

At 0430 the morning of surgery, my old man cat Boria fell down behind the dryer and got hung up in the wires for the dryer and the septic tank alarm. We’re not sure if he fell asleep on the dryer and fell off, or if he just got confused and climbed back there, or what. We got him out and my brother-in-law and his partner tended to him for the next two days. Meanwhile, I went in for surgery on Wednesday as planned.

Boria died in my husband’s arms on Friday, October 27^th.

Dear Reader, may you never go through back-to-back events like this.

I had planned to give you the news that Six Geese Laid, our holiday story set in the universe of the Chicagoland Shifters, is available at your favorite eBook seller. I even have it halfway uploaded onto Amazon but didn’t quite get it finished in time to get my guest post over to Delilah. I will, and my goal is to get it done by this weekend for you so you have something new to read before the holidays (our longtime fans will know this is the audio story that the talented Vance Bastien read for us on the WROTE podcast, and this is the long-awaited eBook version). And I also can tell you that Rachel Wilder and I are hard at work on our newest book series, the first of which is called, for right now at least, As the Crow Flies and is about crow and raven shifters and the trouble they get into.

I’m still doing all that, but I’m moving a bit slower than I planned. But the good news out of all of this is that I AM moving, at long last. Nadya and Boria are with me in spirit, keeping me company as I get back onto the page. And like Peggy Carter in the Marvel series, we’ve decided that I will be the bionic battle granny to my newest grandchild, who we will get to meet in June of 2024.

Talk about ups and downs, Dear Reader. My heart is sad, and glad, and grateful.

Best wishes,

Noony

Resources

• National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo: https://nanowrimo.org/
• My NaNo: https://nanowrimo.org/participants/a-catherine-noon
• Park City, Utah: Then Best Ski Resorts: https://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotels-g57097-zff8-Park_City_Utah-Hotels.html
• Knee Replacement Surgery: https://www.prolianceorthopedicassociates.com/services/knee-replacement

“My own experience has taught me this: if you wait for the perfect moment when all is safe and assured it may never arrive.”
~ Maurice Chevalier

acatherinenoon.com | noonandwilder.com | writerzengarden.com | knoontimeknitting.com

UPDATE: The winner is…flchen!
*~*~*

October

Work-related:

1. Gunn’s Mission released on October 17th and is still going strong (see today’s ranking?)! Thanks to everyone who picked up a copy!
2. I began work on a standalone book, Little Green Dreams (follow the link to pre-order!)! Something I’ve been thinking about writing for years. (I don’t have a cover yet!)
3. I set up pre-orders for two more books, Malcolm (Book #10 of Montana Bounty Hunters: Dead Horse, MT) and What Happens in Bozeman (Book #3 of We Are Dead Horse, MT).
4. I completed 3 editing projects for other authors in October.

Health-related:

1. I have not been exercising enough. Without the pool to run to every day, I’m falling off the wagon.
2. Through medicines and some diet tweaking, I’ve managed to keep my blood pressure down to 135-155. I had one bad spike this month.

Happiness-related: 

1. I participated in the local art festival! Wind knocked down a panel full of framed art, which hit my sales hard, but it was still satisfying to see how many people appreciated my art and bought tons of bookmarks and postcards.
2. I am still working on and making more great progress organizing my art room, getting ready for the next arts and craft show in December, and then the reopening my Etsy store.
3. As for making new art, again, work has kept me too busy to do much. But I have renewed energy here at the last of the month. Right now, I’m just trying to refill my stock of the small things. Here are some examples…

November

For work-related, I plan:

1. To compile the stories in my Triplehorn Brand trilogy into an ebook and print box set for publication this month! Be looking for it!
2. To complete writing Little Green Dreams which will release in December!
3. To complete 4 editing projects in November!

For health related, I plan:

1. To not make promises about counting points for my Weight Watchers diet, because it’s that time of year and I know I’d be setting myself up for failure. However, I will try to make healthier choices—emphasizing no late night snacking!
2. To continue to reduce salt, processed food, and incorporate foods good for blood pressure (spinach, broccoli, bananas).
3. To pay attention to my daily steps, trips up and down the stairs, and to incorporate some chair exercises.
4. To do more housework because my art room isn’t finished! Cleaning is exercise, too.

For happiness-related, I plan: 

1. To work on art and ornament-making to get ready for a local arts and crafts event in December!

Contest

Comment on anything you’ve read in this post. Tell me what you’re doing to make yourself happier and healthier, or tell me what you plan to read in November…
Like I said, comment on anything for a chance to win a $5 Amazon gift card!

This is the card I pulled when Hard Knox was about to come out. And this week, I have Gunn’s Mission releasing on Tuesday. What I thought the card meant the last time was exactly how my week went. Of all the cards to pull! 🙁

The card isn’t “The Devil.” It’s Pan, the half-goat/half-man, playing his reed flute while holding the chains of two humans (with horns, why?) who are dancing to his music. It also appears that they are inside a deep dark cave, which, to me, indicates Pan is trying to hide something—or maybe that he’s playing for them while he draws them into the deep abyss. When I look at this card, I think it’s telling me I’ll be captured by a mood or temptations that will keep me doing things I shouldn’t.

And yes, the last time, I was tempted to F-around. Temptations came from everywhere—and I allowed myself to follow the many things (family, pleasure) pulling me away from what I needed to accomplish. Can I fight destiny this time around? Do I even want to try? Hmm…

Open Contests

1. Gabbi Grey: Rock Star Books — Axe to Grind (Contest) — Last day to enter! Win an Amazon gift card!
2. Saturday Puzzle Contest — Cuddly Stuffie on a Rock — Last day to enter! Win an Amazon gift card!
3. Word Search: Types of Handbags for Handbag Day (Contest) — Win an Amazon gift card!
4. Saturday Puzzle-Contest: It’s beginning to look a lot like…Halloween! — Win an Amazon gift card!

So, it’s Wednesday. Tomorrow, I have to load a book I have to finish today. I have to have my art ready to cart to the festival that begins on Friday. I’m a bit overwhelmed this morning and on my second cup of coffee. Think I’ll make it?

Oh, and do you like the bookmarks? I have a huge stack of them ready, almost as huge a stack of postcards, plus art in plastic ready to be framed and some framed pieces. I’ll take pictures when we’re set up on Friday to share. So nervous!

That picture’s not me. My desk doesn’t look that good!

I’m just popping in to journal, I guess. Yes, my blog is just sometimes my place to put my thoughts on a page. I think better with my fingers clacking on a keyboard. Put a pen in my hand, and my brain goes blank. I’ve told friends and family that I never have a clue what I’m going to write until my fingers start moving. I couldn’t tell you where the letters are on the keyboard, but somehow my fingers find them. I’ve had fortune tellers tell me I have three muses/angels who hover over my shoulders, so I think they’re pretty much responsible for what ends up on the page—and I know that makes me sound nuttier than squirrel turds.

Anyway, I’m facing my keyboard right now. I have new edits to begin (I finished a set last night! Whew!), and I have a book to finish, but I got a really late start today. I slept in. Something I don’t like doing because morning is my most productive time. I can’t look to the right because the L of my desk, which is the flat, working area of my desk, is completely covered with tchotchkes and toys, a plant that needs watering, a laptop I have open but haven’t used in days, and stacks of paperwork. If I looked right to see it, I’d have an anxiety attack. I’m not the “dig in and get it gone” girl; I’m the avoider. If I don’t see it, it’s not a problem. But I do know there are some bills under there. A calendar that needs updating. Story notes that I should read, although the story I’m writing is far different than what I thought it would be.

So, here’s to another day of letting the piles get higher while I keep my gaze focused on the white screen in front of me.

How’s your day going so far? Do you keep a neat or messy desk? Any ideas for how an “avoider” can stop avoiding?