Winter Round-Up & Lots of Dog Pictures

The end of the year is always a bit of a weird time for me. I like the colder weather, but with it, comes a little less outdoor time and a lot more cozy evenings by the fire (now that we have a fireplace). The nights are longer and the days are shorter, and as soon as December 1st hits, I tend to feel like I'm in a period of stasis. 

I'm not big on the holidays, so for me, December is a time of waiting. While everyone else is rushing around doing this and that and prepping for whatever days they're celebrating, I'm staring out my window at the changing season, contemplating the progress I made during the year, and waiting for that initial burst of new year energy I get on January 1st.

I almost never set new goals in January, but instead, double down on my old ones. I have new bench press goal weight for 2023, but I'm simply continuing my routine from the last two years. I have a new publishing goal, too, but it's simply a continuation of my business plan I've been plugging away at for the last four years. 

But right now, I'm not really thinking too much about January, but instead waiting. Letting the time pass. It's the only way I really know how to rest. I watch the sun come up in the morning and go down at night. I watch the leaves pile up in the grass. I watch the birds ravage the feeders, and the cat get fluffier and fluffier as the temperatures get colder. 

December trucks past, the slowest month of the year, and then when January hits, I hit the ground running. 

Looking back makes the year feel slow, but also, so incredibly full.

This year, 2022, I published 8 books: 

I also graduated from my fake master's degree program (yay me!), and completed the process of getting the audiobook editions for the first three books in the Land of Szornyek series up and available on your preferred audiobook retailer. In addition, I produced AI audiobook versions on GooglePlay for my non-fiction series for authors, Writer's Reach, and all three books in the Aria's Song series. All this on top of participating in my sister-in-law's wedding, taking several trips to visit family, undergoing a routine surgery, and giving 15 workshops for various conferences and writer's groups around the world. 

Coming up in 2023, you'll be seeing at least two new books in the Rove City series, if not three; How To Pants A Novel under the A.J. Sieling pen name; another book of original fairy tales, and the beginnings of two brand-new series—and more.

I'll also be continuing to share art with my patrons, and they'll continue getting all of my books for free (ebook versions, through BookFunnel). 

I hope your year was filled with more good than bad, and I'll be back in 2023!


Deidre Day

Once upon a time (2010 - 2012), I was a sad, stressed out, very poor young adult, who had managed to graduate from college with a liberal arts degree in the middle of a recession, during a period of time when my generation was largely hated among hiring professionals. “Entitled” was what they called us. Lazy, demanding, and self-absorbed.

My own uncle even told me once, as a VP at Segway, that he would never hire a millennial if he didn’t have to, because he could get a GenXer to do the same work for the same price, but with many more years of experience.

I moved in with my grandmother post college (so I didn’t have to pay rent), and slowly picked up job after job after job, some $9/hour work and some contract gigs which, though I didn’t realize until I started tracking my time more carefully, were paying me roughly $3/hour. It was a very stressful time of my life, to say the least. And I was desperate for something more stable.

Finally, I got an interview, followed a couple weeks later by a phone call: “You got the job.” They offered me $43k/year, health, dental, and vision insurance, and a 401k. I cried. It was $13k more than I’d asked for, and more than double what I’d been making working 5 simultaneous part time jobs.

I began my new job as a curriculum developer gratefully, willing to do just about anything to stay employed. I was fast, efficient, and learned everything they set in front of me as well as I could and as quickly as I could.

The problem was, I’d never had a full time job before. And I didn’t know what types of expectations I should have for what was normal or abnormal. There were some things that bothered me somewhat, mostly in the treatment of lower level employees by managers, and while the issues weren’t critical to my ability to do my job, they did interfere somewhat with my ability to do my job well.

And I didn’t know who to ask for advice. Everyone I knew with a corporate position was either my own age and had no experience to speak of, worked at the same company as me so I didn’t feel comfortable asking them, or worked in a completely different industry.

What I wanted was a professional mentor. Someone who was not invested in this specific company, but was instead invested in me. Someone I could ask questions. Someone I could ask for feedback about how to handle situations at work. Someone I could trust to have my best interests at heart, but also the knowledge, skills, and experience to provide me with valuable advice.

It just so happened at the time, as part of my job, I was working on developing an e-learning for high school students on how to find a mentor. So I thought to myself, “Maybe I should test some of these strategies I’m including in this lesson.”

So I did.

I reached out to five different organizations in the area: two professional ones, a local education-based non-profit, and two retirement associations. I told them I was a young professional working in my first full time position, and I was wondering if anyone would be available to answer some generic questions about working at a corporate job, expectations, and perhaps provide some advice on how to handle conflict in the office.

Only one of them got back to me. A woman named Deidre emailed me ten days later and said, “If you'd like to meet for coffee and chat I'd be delighted.” She was the secretary for one of the retirement organizations, and had been the first person to see my letter. She’d run it by the board, and then volunteered to meet with me herself.

She lived only a few blocks away from me, as it turned out, and had a long career working for the Department of Health & Human Services. We met at the Panera not too far from us, ended up talking for nearly two hours, and thus began one of the best relationships of my life.

We started meeting at Panera every other week or so, and eventually, she simply invited me to her house. She always had orange juice, brownies, and snacks on hand. And her dog Jerry was always pissed when I arrived, but would eventually calm down and cuddle with her while we chatted. Her front room smelled like cinnamon, and a family of foxes lived under the shed in her backyard.

She adopted me into her life quickly, inviting me to family events, reading my books when I first published, and meeting my boyfriends. She was open with her opinions, never pretending she thought or believed something she didn’t.

Deidre was one of those people who knew herself. She knew what she wanted and needed. She loved her kids and grandkids more than anything. She believed strongly that it was her role to make the world a better place for the next generations. She poured her time and energy into volunteering wherever she could, and showed up for her friends and neighbors when they needed help. And she showed up for me.

She made me soup when I was sick. Gave me Christmas presents, even when I barely knew her. And for someone whose life was as chaotic and unstable as mine, she provided a solid foundation I could rely on.

“No, that’s not normal,” was a common thing she said to me. “You shouldn’t have to do that. You don’t have to put up with that. Have you talked to HR?”

And her advice quickly advanced beyond my work life and into my personal life. She had thoughts on my family, my friends, the people I dated, and somehow, was always able to give advice without making me feel like she was trying to force her opinion onto me. “This is what I think. What do you think?” she would say.

I was always allowed to have my own opinion, no matter what. She never tried to force me to see things her way, simply provided her perspective and let me draw my own conclusions about it.

During the period of my life when I met her, I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know what I believed about anything—religiously, politically, ethically, philosophically. I didn’t know what I wanted out of life. I didn’t know what I wanted my future to look like. I didn’t know where I belonged. I was floating in level 3 of Dubrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration, and I had no idea how to get out of it.

But I slowly began to realize that with Deidre, I always belonged. There was always room for me on her couch, at her kitchen table, with her family. She was my best friend. A lifeline when I was most alone.

Deidre died in 2019. It was sudden. Heartbreaking. I’m still heartbroken, years later.

2019 was a pretty shitty year for me. Deidre died. Then my cat. Then my great aunt. My grandmother. And the list continues. And, as you’ll remember, 2019 rolled right into 2020. I had next to no time to process my grief for any of the people I lost, and then people started dying all over again, but this time at a macro level. As in, hundreds of thousands dying from Covid.

My primary covid stress-management strategy was art. I drew and drew and drew. I locked myself in our bedroom and binged TV shows, and filled page after page of my sketchbook. It was my cave, my space where I hid from the realities of the world. And slowly, I realized that, perhaps, if I could use art to survive the pandemic, then I could also use it to heal from my grief.

So I drew the people I loved. Each person I lost, I tried to immortalize in art. I drew a pencil drawing of my cat. And one of Josh’s grandmother. My friend’s brother. One of my own grandmother. But for some reason, my heart wouldn’t let me capture Deidre. Every time I tried, it hurt too much.

I changed a lot in 2020. I fully crash landed in the 4th level of Dubrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration. If I’d thought I’d been there before, I was wrong. I was there now, not wondering who I was, but actively deciding who I was. And the whole time, I had Deidre front and center of my mind.

I wanted to be like her.

She was herself, not ashamed of her life, but not prideful. She existed fully as herself, or at least it seemed that way to me. And that’s what I wanted. I wanted to know who I was and what I believed, and I wanted to be confident in it. Confident enough to not apologize for my beliefs, confident enough to change my mind when I learned something new, confident enough to just be myself.

Fast forward to 2021.

I’ve never liked Christmas. And Christmas 2021 happened only a couple months after I’d had a medium-sized surgery. I was on a new medication, dealing with a lot of physical and mood fluctuations, and really didn’t want to be around anyone.

I’d already dialed back my participation with family holiday events significantly through the years as I didn’t believe in the religious foundation of the holiday, and I had struggled with a lot of the secular traditions too. I liked the decorations and good cheer, but didn’t like the over-the-top gift giving (partially because I grew up poor, and partially because I don’t like the stress of the reciprocity effect [social psychology]) and heavy obligations to perform other people’s versions of the holiday for them. I liked the food and the music, but not the extensive traveling and stressful family events.

Josh’s and my preferred Christmas day looks like this: sleeping in, making potatoes and green bean casserole and whatever meat Josh is in the mood for, and playing video games for 15 hours.

But in 2021, I was having intensely swinging feelings about the holiday. The lights and the music made me feel good, and then immediately reminded me of how much I disliked the holiday. I wanted to decorate our house, but I didn’t want to celebrate. I wanted to put up a tree, but I didn’t want to give gifts.

And in a fit of frustration, I said to Josh, “I just want to have it and not have it at the same time.”

To which he replied, “Why don’t you just make up your own holiday then?”

Because I married a genius, obviously.

The idea took root. With my own holiday, I could discard the elements of Christmas that bothered me, while participating in the overall culture of the season. I could celebrate something important to me at the same time everyone else was celebrating something important to them, without feeling like I had to lie about what I did and didn’t like about the holiday. I could have my tree, and eat it too. (Well, not literally haha, but you know me: I can’t resist a terribly mixed metaphor).

The question then became: What kind of holiday? What or who would I celebrate?

You can see where this is going.

Deidre loved Christmas. She loved all holidays, in fact. She was the kind of person who kept themed dishes for every possible occasion. She had strings of lights with tiny Christmas trees, Easter eggs, and American flags on them. Every season, she had some new décor around her house—pumpkins, fall wreaths, snowflake garlands, bunny rabbits.

I personally didn’t care about Christmas or Easter, and not even patriotic holidays all that much. But I did care about Deidre.

And so, let me introduce you to Deidre Day.

It’s sometime in December—the 21st or the 22nd or the 25th—though you can celebrate it anytime, really. Any major holiday you don’t like for whatever reason, simply replace it with a Deidre Day celebration. I think she’d be delighted.

On Deidre Day we celebrate kindness. We do something kind for another person—volunteer, give a gift if you want, solve a problem for someone else. We remember good advice we’ve received from people who love us. We reach out to our friends and tell them how important they are to us. We repair and invest in interpersonal bonds when possible, while taking care to maintain our personal boundaries and respecting others’ boundaries, for our own mental and emotional health.

We give blankets and ornaments as gifts, donate to non-profits, bake zucchini bread and chex mix, and make homemade peppermint bark from white chocolate and candy canes. We drink hot chocolate and drive around to look at holiday lights in our pajamas. We light cinnamon candles and hang up decorations that make us happy. We decorate with sparkles and glitter, in black and silver and green, and we remember the people in our life who we were blessed to know for however long or short we had them.

Deidre Day can be celebrated alone or with others. By running a marathon or watching a marathon. By cooking at home or eating out.

Truthfully, the only thing you need to celebrate Deidre Day, is to be grateful for someone who once helped you.

Happy Deidre Day, friends. I hope you have, had, or will have someone in your life who means as to you as Deidre did to me.

AI-Generated Images for Aria's Song

One of the things I did a little differently for the release of Aria’s Song was to create AI-generated art to go along with the series! It was insanely fun, first of all, but I was so surprised and pleased with many of the images that resulted. I used a discord bot called MidJourney, and adore some of the concepts that emerged.

You can scroll through to see the various descriptions of each of the images.

Aria's Song Maps

As part of my fake master’s degree thesis, I wanted to challenge myself. And one of the challenges I decided to take on was to create maps for the series.

I already do a lot of art, and I’ve sketched out rough maps before, so I decided this was a good opportunity to create a map that was good enough to put in a book.

I used a software called Krita, with a touchscreen on a laptop. I had no idea what I was doing when I started, but I messed around creating other art first, figuring out how to use the different tools included in the tool, watched a few videos on it, and then got started.

I created the background layers, then added textures and colors, and then I moved the final image to Canva, where I added the text. My first version of the map printed horribly, so I ended up selecting different fonts and making the text slightly bigger, to make it easier to read in the paperback book.

I was pleasantly surprised with how it turned out. It was challenging, certainly, and required a great deal of time and energy to create. But if I were my own professor, I’d give myself an A.

But the world map wasn’t the only one I needed. In Book 2 of the trilogy, Fugue, the main character spends a significant amount of time in a place called Thistle City (which you don’t see on the map here for reasons that are spoilers.

It didn’t even occur to me to make a map of Thistle City until I was almost ready to start the paperback design of the books. I debated not doing it, but decided it would be a good extra challenge and maybe earn me some extra credit; plus, I thought it would add to a reader’s enjoyment of the stories.

I whipped out the same software and got to work.

The second map was much easier, mostly because I knew how to use the tool, already, so I didn’t have as much figuring out to do. It was also a simpler and more straightforward map, generally speaking. Regardless, I was quite pleased with the output.

In conclusion, I would most definitely create a map for a future book or series again. It was an enjoyable process, for starters, that I think creates a better experience for a reader.

And in case you’re curious, I’ve included the black and white versions below, as they appear in the paperback editions.

Undamaged Goods

Me circa 2008

The last year or so, I’ve been working really hard on my identity. If you’ve never done identity work, this concept might sound a bit strange, but the truth of the matter is that the person I thought I was as a middle schooler, high schooler, and college student are not actually who I have become. Much of my identity then was based not on who I wanted to be, but who I was expected to be.

And I’m not really the type of person to just sit back and let myself evolve. I like to have a say in the matter.

I’m not sure where the drive to understand and decide who I am came from (other than I think it’s a common experience shared by a lot of people), but what I do know is that I’ve been experiencing increasing levels of cognitive dissonance since I was about 12, when a Sunday school teacher told me that if I dated anyone, my future husband would be getting “damaged goods.” The teacher illustrated this point with a very impactful object lesson in which all the girls in class were given construction paper hearts and told to go around the room and “fake date” the boys in class. The boys were instructed to rip a piece off the heart of each girl they dated.

Me circa 2002, clearly very concerned with dating lol

No, the boys did not get hearts too.

After our fake dating, we were told that if we (the girls) dated too much or broke the “rules”, this is what our hearts would look like by the time we met our husbands.

Even at 12, this was very confusing. I already had a basic understanding of biology, and knew that if my heart was literally ripped to shreds like this, I’d be dead. I also understood metaphor, but I struggled to make the leap. How could I become damaged just by dating someone? Were boys really that evil? And in the christianity I was raised in also taught me that god was supposed to be a great healer and forgiver. So… even if something bad did happen, wasn’t he strong enough to prevent this heart-shredding? Or at least fix me after? After all, how was I magically expected to know whether a particular male specimen was the right one? Surely there had to be some room for getting it wrong at least once or twice?

Like I said, cognitive dissonance.

me circa 1988

The question I was walking around was one of right and wrong, morality, and ideology; but more importantly, I was asking the question: What do I think? And why?

The message of “you’re inherently damaged,” was particularly strong in the specific culture I grew up in, and it didn’t apply just to dating. I was inherently sinful in every way, I was told, but I honestly didn’t want to be. I tried to be good anyway, to be better. I believed I was broken, and had to do everything in my power to fix it. But the whole time, there was a part of my mind that didn’t feel damaged. It didn’t feel wrong. It didn’t feel broken.

Sure, I messed up sometimes. But wasn’t that just part of the process of learning how to be a human?

In my efforts to fix myself, I tried to embody the fruits of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self control. I tried to be kind and listen and obey my parents. I learned the ten commandments and beatitudes. I followed all the rules taught to me by my sunday school teachers and pastors. I wasn’t always good at it, but I tried.

Mostly, though, I tried to make things make sense.

Me circa 1999, clearly also very concerned with dating lolol

I started my own personal study into apologetics when I was about 13. I read book after book after book on faith, religion, and philosophy, trying desperately to understand what I was missing. By the time I was in my early twenties, I’d made some significant shifts in my understanding of my self and eased the relentless cognitive dissonance somewhat, but then life got hard(er). I graduated during the recession, worked part time jobs making under $20k/year for two years, before I finally got a full-time position that allowed me enough of a financial cushion to have time to think again.

I remember my twenties as being wildly chaotic. I was desperate to figure out how to be an adult, longed for any type of stability or safety, and barely hung by a thread throughout, emotionally speaking. Then, everything I thought was going to be safe or stable turned out not to be: my first company was sold only a little over a year in and I got laid off; the second company had an incredibly toxic environment; I started freelancing with a solid number of contracts and making a good salary, but they slowly dropped off one by one, no longer needing freelancers and preferring full-time employees.

me circa 2013 with my first published book <3

I had started publishing with great hope, but my books didn’t take off. Dating was chaotic even after I met Josh, and then once we decided on each other, it was a whirlwind of dating, moving in, engagement, and marriage, followed almost immediately by his career shift dragging us to a different state.

And it’s only since 2020 (the year everything stopped), that I’ve found a little bit of room to notice myself, and to consider who I’m becoming. And who I want to become.

But it’s not that simple. After all, how do you quantify becoming?

One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that for the first time in my life, I’ve begun to accept one-word labels for myself. Agnostic. Absurdish. Exvangelical. Intelligent. Imaginative. Neurodivergent. Introspective. Wanderer. Opinionated. Curious. Strong.

Me & Chainsaw circa 2016. Nothing says cognitive dissonance like your friend of almost 30 years having a baby

But the one-word labels are, for lack of a better idiom, only the tip of the iceberg. They’re individual words that may have a technical definition in the English language, but they mean something very specific to me (and not necessarily what someone else might think). It’s like saying, “Oh did you read the book about the wizard?” and knowing exactly what book that is, with the whole story, plot, characters entering your mind like a wash of color in response to a simple phrase. But there are a thousand different books about wizards, so someone else might think of a completely different one.

me circa 2010 at my cousin’s wedding

In the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, the author talks about how, if you want to instill a specific set of habits in yourself, one of the most useful things you can do is adopt an identity that those habits reflect. If you want to run, decide you want to be a runner. If you want to write regularly, adopt the identity of writer. Because, if you want to be a runner, then you have to run. If you want to be a writer, you have to write. If you don’t feel like a runner or writer, it’s okay; you can still act like you’re one.

It can create a positive feedback loop over time, and eventually you can look back and realize you’ve embodied the identity you wanted. You want to run, so you identify as a runner; you want to be a runner, so you run. Even if you weren’t a runner before, you are now—because you run, and have consistently over time. And if you want to continue to be a runner, you have to keep running. And voila! Habit.

I love snow. Me circa 2012

I picked runner and writer because they are easy examples. But what does it mean when you’re working with more complex identities? What does it mean to be intelligent, for example? Is it a passive thing, where you just are or you aren’t? Or is it something that you can work on? What actions embody “intelligence”?

Similarly, what does it mean to be imaginative? Or a wanderer? Curious? Introspective? How do the things I choose to spend my time doing embody these concepts? And how do these concepts influence the way I spend my time?

Right there—the answers to those questions? That’s the rest of the iceberg.

Me circa 2006, one of my last parades. Fun fact: this was the first time and only time I ever played bass drum. I usually played bells for parades, but this particular one, none of the bass drums showed up, and five bells players did. So I volunteered, and the drum line was me, one snare player, two cymbals, four bells, and a quints.

And the answers to those questions may be entirely different to me than to someone else.

For example, to me, being imaginative means to use my imagination in a way that is unique to me. Not just for the stories I write (my vocation), but also when I’m solving problems in real life, when I am brainstorming how to spend my weekend, and when I’m being creative in my free time. I even plan time now simply for exercising my imagination. Josh will walk in on me doing nothing but staring out the window, lost in the exploration of an idea.

I’m imagining. Because I’m imaginative.

I can create habits and actions for any identity I want to embody. And I can look at the actions I’m already taking and use those to identify who I am becoming.

In college, I took a class that delved pretty deep into Identity Theory. We looked at how identities develop over time, social identity, and neurology. We explored some of the practical expressions of identity, specifically in the context of communication, which included things like behavior, mental schemas, gender, religion, sexuality, and myriad other things. We read books and essays about identity expression.

me circa 2001 with a box of bees

But I didn’t really get it then. Because back then, I thought I knew who I was. I’d been told my entire life up until that point exactly who I was meant to be. Helpmeet. Future mother. Feminine. Kind. Good. Pure.

But none of those things reflected who I wanted to be. Only who others thought I should be. I can see the double and triple binds inherent in those labels. And I can see why I never fit inside them.

I get it now. I get why you can have a whole class on Identity Theory. And I get that my professors barely scratched the surface. I get why it’s complicated and messy, and why so often it doesn’t seem like it makes sense.

The whole thing about becoming is that it’s hard. And it hurts. And it’s never over.

We become until we die.

And I think maybe that’s what it means to be human.

me circa yesterday (9/27/2022)