Category: Blogging

January Joys

I took some pictures yesterday at the very close of 2024.

It was one of those stark, clear midwinter days, without a single cloud, the sky a color gradient as smooth as if someone had rolled it on.

On days like this, you can see Mt. Denali very clearly from the top of the hill on the drive into town.

These are also the days when you have temperature inversions, as cold air settles to the valley floor and collects in pockets of heavier air, with the temperature in the hills as much as 20 degrees warmer than the valley where the town is. This can lead to striking mirages (“fata morgana”) where the mountains appear to stretch, distort, or float. There is a little of that going on here – Denali is usually more pointy and iconically mountain-shaped; here it appears flat and kind of square. But some days bring much more dramatic distortions, with mountains appearing in unusual places or separated into discreet, square blocks.

The sky feels almost infinite, a dome rising from the sunset west to the darkening twilight overhead.

I had a solid slate of releases in 2024, but all were for my Lauren Esker (paranormal romance) and Julie Ecker (cozy mystery) pen names.

But I have big plans for 2024, including some new projects that I’m excited to share with you soon. I’m going to try my hand at writing thriller, and more books set in Alaska, as well as joining a shared world cozy fantasy project. It’s been a rough few years, and I’m hoping 2025 will be a year of regeneration and renewal, with some projects I’m really looking forward to working on.

Stay tuned here, at my Facebook group, or my mailing list!

Fall Equinox 2023 in pictures

I drove about 28 miles or so up the Elliot Hwy today – the southern part of the road that’s locally known as the Haul Road that supplies the Prudhoe Bay oilfields.

There were so many places where I would come around a turn and would be confronted by a golden hill that made me say “Wow” to myself. The pictures can’t really capture the experience of simply *everything* that isn’t a spruce tree being this bright vivid gold.

I like how you can see the rippling of the frost heaves in the road in this one. 🤣 Behold the interior Alaska driving experience!

In non-highway experiences, the woodland trails around our 11-acre property have a fall magic all their own.

My somewhat minimalist fall table setting display … fake leaves and real gourds.

In book news, Keeley #7 will be out on Sept. 26, and Vicki Vandermoon #2 follows closely on Oct. 11. As always, it’s a busy fall, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

June updates

Apparently I have failed to update the blog since March. It’s definitely been a couple of months. Here’s a quick summary of what’s new.

I have some other exciting news which will be announced in more detail later this month. I’m launching a new pen name for cozy mysteries, so I’ll have lots more news about that in June and July, as well as some free things to give away!

What others are up to

There’s a big multi-author fantasy and sci-fi sale this week at Bear Mountain Books – click here to see the books! Lots of variety, from space opera and epic fantasy to cozy and paranormal.

There is also discussion and individual book spotlights at the main Bear Mountain Books blog page, so you can read the books and talk about them there. (I’m not in the promo, but there’s a spotlight on the Keeley series on the homepage.)

I leave you with a few pictures of homestead spring.

Cozy backyard hangout spot.

This is probably going to turn out to be another year when I think about doing something slightly more appealing with the backyard and then fall comes before I actually get around to managing any of my plans …

My spouse painted the top of this old patio table that was rusting badly.
We don’t have a lot of spring flowers here, but violets are one of the few!
Newly planted strawberries.
Greenhouse ready for warm weather!

The Long Winter

It’s definitely in March that it starts to feel like winter will never end. The days are getting longer, the sun is coming back – the heaps of snow are still everywhere.

Just a quick update this time:

  • Keeley #6, Shamus & Shifter, will be out at the end of the month in ebook and print. Currently in second-round revisions.
  • Keeley #7, Sleuth & Psychic, is up for preorder on Amazon. I’m hoping to get a good start on the book this (or at least get the plot worked out). The preorder says September but I’m optimistically aiming for July if possible; I have another book for the romance pen name coming out in between.
  • New short story from the mailing list: Kitty Cornered.

And that’s it for now – spring (and new Keeley!) is just around the corner.

February of a beautiful year

It continues to be one of the loveliest winters I’ve seen since I’ve lived here, snow bowing down the trees in lacy graceful waves, occasionally refreshed by a new snowfall. I took a couple of pictures when I walked up to get the mail in late January after one such light snowfall, enough to freshen up the world with a new layer of white.

A little earlier in the month, I also took a few pictures of the “blue hour,” the long midwinter dusk.

And we had a cute tiny visitor:

…. attempting to gnaw its way into the outside compost bin. (It’s a vole.) The bin moved to the garage and the vole lost its free lunch.

Books continue on! In January, I got the rough draft done of Shamus & Shifter (it’s going to need a hard rewrite, though) and wrote half a paranormal romance novel for the PNR pen name.

Slowly, the light returns.

2023 is upon us

Happy New Year! There was a free Christmas story on the mailing list in December, which you can read here.

Settling into January, working on Keeley #6, Shamus & Shifter – currently at 43K of about 55K. It’s up for preorder at the end of March. I’m planning to have the book finished, edited, and out to beta by the end of the month.

Male grosbeak on the lilac bush.

A flock of grosbeaks has been hanging around lately. They’re really the only bright-colored birds we have here in the winter – males are red, females yellow. It’s nice to look out and see those little splashes of color. I have a chickadee feeder, but the larger birds can’t get into it (essentially as a squirrel-defense measure). I’m thinking about getting a larger tray-style one to encourage the grosbeaks to keep coming back.

Moon from the upstairs window.

Our days are incredibly short here – daylight by 10 or 11, dark by 3 or 4 – but with the solstice behind us, they’re getting longer. Spring still feels very far away. This is the time of year when I daydream about gardens and traveling to warm, sunny places.

December 2022

December is upon us and the shortest days of the year are here. Three weeks until we turn the corner at the solstice.

I took some pictures of the first day of the year’s last month on my walk today.

Sunshine on the hill beyond the neighbor’s machine shop. We are in the shadow of the opposite hill and don’t get sunshine at this time of year.
Snow-covered trees along our driveway.

It’s really been a hell of a year. I’ve had a lot of health issues in the back half of the year, of the “multiple ER visits” variety, leading up to abdominal surgery (a hysterectomy) in mid-November that will, I hope, fix the problem and also a number of other problems that have been dogging me at a lower level for years, dragging down my energy and causing me to lose multiple days a month to illness. I’m about two weeks out from surgery now, recovering at a reasonable pace and keeping myself fit with light walking. Like today’s walk up to the highway and back.

It snowed last night, so everything is fresh and white.

Driveway trees.

I do, in general, genuinely enjoy December despite the cold and the short days. I love the Christmas season, I love lights and gifts and Advent calendars (am I even slightly religious? no. Do I have one this year? OBVIOUSLY) and all the books/movies/TV episodes that are seasonal this month only.

The tree was up early in November due to post-surgery restrictions on lifting things. I regret nothing.
This year I got emotionally invested in W.E. Johns’s Biggles books – yes, the boys’ own adventure books from the 1930s-50s – and so there are tiny airplanes on my tree.

So yeah – a lot of this is just finding the pleasures where I can, but there are a lot of them. Not the least being my wonderful husband, who is rarely mentioned here, but has been doing a lot of heavy lifting (sometimes literally!) through all of this. It has very much been A Year, but we’ll be starting the new one in a month, and I’m looking forward to getting back to the books.

Mooses in the mist

I drove up the Elliot Highway this evening at sunset to Whitefish Campground (about mile 6 or 7) just to get out for a while. As I started back, I saw this small lake or slough with mist rising off it, so thick and white that it looked like it was smoking. Very beautiful and weird!

I parked on the shoulder of the highway and walked down to the shoreline to take some pictures, and was cheerfully doing this when I looked up and situational awareness kicked in and I realized there was a moose watching me from really not all that far away.

Quietly I walked backwards up to the car and continued to watch her for a while, and eventually spotted what I guess was her calf deeper in the swamp. No pictures of that one; it was too mist-cloaked to see very well, but I could definitely tell that it was another moose, especially when she turned and sloshed toward it, making those little grunting noises they sometimes do.

It was completely magical, one of those joyous moments that reminds me why I love living here.

July in Alaska

It’s high summer! The garden is growing …

This is actually from about a week ago. The peas are halfway up their trellises (white frames) by now!

Corn, squash, and tomatoes all cheerfully growing in the greenhouse. We’ve eaten our first tomatoes and squash already!

It’s been extremely hazy lately with wildfire smoke, but I’m still trying to get out and enjoy the flowers. June and July are peak wildflower season – the wild roses of June are over, but the fireweed of July is just kicking off.

Behind the greenhouse, with smoke haze in the background.

More flowers around the yard …

The irises are still my favorites.
Sitka rose still going strong, eighteen years after we moved in!
The house is a bit of a construction zone this summer, with an insulation project in progress.

I haven’t obtained pictures of any of them, but we’ve had beavers, moose, and a variety of birds around to enjoy. I think a pair of robins are nesting near here – we haven’t seen any babies or the nest, but they’ve been around a lot, and we found a broken robin eggshell on the road. A hawk is most likely nesting nearby as well; we’ve seen it in the yard several times. There is a beaver dam within walking distance that we enjoy visiting to watch it grow.

It’s not all idyllic wilderness fun, as the gravel pit on the property between us and the highway is now actively being worked again, so there’s a lot of noise and dust, and the new work has wiped out most of the trees that had grown up over the old gravel bed. (It was being actively worked when we moved here in 2004, then went dormant around 2006 or so, so we’ve had a lot of time to get used to just being able to walk around out there.) But we knew it would happen sooner or later, and the new owners – actually neighbors of ours – have been great to deal with and very considerate about keeping the noise and dust down as much as possible. And they’ve also fixed the road, which is not state-maintained and had been falling into disrepair.

Plus we get to look at cool stuff like this gravel sorting machine.

We also did some exploring back in June of old mining roads around our area. Here’s a no outlet sign on a road we just drove through from the other end …

No outlet is a state of mind!

We also got some nice views from the top of the hills, on a rare not-very-smoky day.

State of the Studio: April

Winter: still wintening for all it’s worth. It’s actually snowing today. I was just out putting more seed in the chickadee feeder. Gray jay (a.k.a. camprobber) on the suet block this morning. One of my plans for this summer, now that we no longer have an outside cat and I’m getting into feeding the birds as a hobby, is to redo my backyard for more pretty little bird nooks and feeders and flowers. That’s probably going to be my main garden push this summer … at least if summer ever gets here, which seems unlikely at the rate we’re going. We still have three feet of snow.

Moose: still moosing.

Cow and calf on the hillside behind the house.

They spent a few days hanging around in the general yard/driveway area, including bedding down for a while next to the plow truck.

She’s as tall as the truck! Hi, lady.
Guess this is an okay place to nap after all.

Yesterday they browsed slowly down the creek and we spent some time watching the lady moose try to break off a willow that was at least 15 feet tall to eat the pussy willows at its top. Eventually they drifted on and seem to be gone today.

I worked on Keeley #5 edits all this past week and will be finishing revisions this upcoming week (I hope). Kismet, the webcomic, remains on hold for now, as there have been various additional delays with family emergencies and travel and such, but I’m posting some extras to the Patreon to help make up for it, and plan to get back to regular updates in May – after I get back from the first traveling-for-fun vacation I will have taken since 2019. (Planes! Hotels! What even!)

Looking forward to spring, and all the good things that go with it …