Acceptance

Every New Year’s I make a resolution to improve myself in some way or another. I will be more productive, more focused, more ambitious and so on. But this year, I concluded that if I haven’t changed by now, I’m probably not going to. And all I’m going to succeed in doing is make myself feel guilty, which I already do enough. So this year I decided to accept what I am. And what I am is a slob.    My desk is cluttered with papers, books, pictures of dogs, notes from people I love, notes from my agent with advice, tissues, water bottles, an icon my son brought me from Russia, dog treats, post-it notes, and books. I’d like to say there’s order to this madness, but having just spent half an hour looking for an important bit of information that I found under a chair, I doubt it.  What there is, though, is energy. My office feels alive to me. When I walk in, I feel like I’m jumping into a stream of running water.  Periodically I do clean it, and then I feel very virtuous, and then I sit down and write and darned if I know how it happens, but by the time I stand back up, it’s a mess again. But you know what? It works. How about you? Is there anything you’ve come to accept about yourself this New Year?

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Fitting Reading into a Writing Schedule

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”–Stephen King If anyone can speak authoritatively on what’s required to be a writer, it’s prolific Stephen King. I found his book “On Writing” to be an enlightening mix of craft instruction and autobiography and I have admired his work since first sneaking a collection of his short stories from my parents’ bookshelf as an eight-year-old. I agree with his point on reading. Writers must read other books in their genre to understand what is working and why (and what isn’t). And, we need to read writers that we admire in order to push ourselves and elevate our own craft. Finding time, however, is a challenge.  I don’t read when I am writing. I am too concerned about unconsciously adopting aspects of characters that I like or another author’s cadence.  In between edits is when I devour books, particularly those in the genre of my upcoming novels so I have a sense of how my book will fit with and, most importantly, bring something new, to the cannon. I have a couple weeks until I get my new edit back and I am trying to read a book every other day. It’s been a fun week filled with great psychological thrillers. I’ve read The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena, Little Pretty Things by Lori Radar Day, The Good Girl by Mary Kubica, Summer House Swimming Pool by Herman Koch. Now onto The Girls by Emma Cline.  When do you fit reading into your writing schedule?  

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The Danger Of Too Much Truth In Fiction

Thriller writers must be careful about being too honest about the extent of human depravity lest we be accused of unbelievability. In truth, human beings are capable of far more horrific behaviors than most of us thriller authors could ever write about. Today, for example, I read a story in the Washington Post about people who brutally murdered a former friend for allegedly attempting to steal their marijuana smoking device. The brothers presumed responsible made the victim consume kitty litter before posting photos of the brutal attack on snapchat, an online messaging platform. If I had a villain who I had not established was a psychopath or drug syndicate enforcer perpetrate a similar crime, I’d certainly be accused of taking too much license. How could readers believe that individuals, not under the influence of some psychosis-inducing PCP-type drug, would be so horrible to another human being, especially a person they had liked enough to invite into their home?  In my last book, The Widower’s Wife, a few readers took issue with a character sneaking back into America via a cruise ship. They said that coming into the U.S. without papers couldn’t possibly be that easy and that human smugglers wouldn’t have acted in the way that I portrayed. I had gotten much of my information for that part of the book from a New York Times expose in the 90s called “Loophole At The Pier” in which human smugglers did what I described. To satisfy these readers, I should have probably made sneaking in seem more treacherous than it actually was according to well-respected news sources. What do you think? Has truth ever been stranger than your fiction? 

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New Cover: Lies She Told

Catcher In The Rye, The Bluest Eye, Crime and Punishment, Middlesex, Gone Girl, The Dinner, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Lovely Bones… these are some of my favorite books. The authors, styles, and genres are all different. But, they have one thing in common: though I could write the Sparknotes for all these stories, I cannot recall their covers. I don’t mean to suggest that cover art isn’t important. It is. Before a book browser picks up a novel and reads the riveting pitch on the inside flap or the praise from well known writers and critical publications, he or she needs to take the work off a shelf. I write this to underscore that I have no business deciding what my own cover should look like. I deal in character arcs and plot structures, red herrings and twists, research and, even, social commentary. I am not best qualified to pick the single image that will evoke my story and also beckon a reader from across the room. Not surprisingly, I had very little to do with the covers on my prior two books and had about the same amount of input on this one. My publisher has changed all my working titles as well. That’s fine by me. Marketing is not my forte. So, all that said, here is the cover of my upcoming book. I hope people like it. I do. Though if you do, I can’t take any credit. 

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The Developmental Edit

Today is my birthday. It was also the initial due date for my developmental edit. As a birthday/Christmas present to myself and my family, I finished the second draft a week early. And, it was one of the most difficult things I’ve done in my life.  Novel writing is the long distance running of careers. You have to maintain a pace and get to the finish line, which is typically months, if not years, away.  People take a year or more to pen a first novel. It then takes months–if not a year–to secure an agent and several months to secure a publisher. (Obviously, some books never do. But I learned from the experience of NOT getting an agent for a few novels in drawers that it takes about a year to give up on them too and start something else). If you have a publisher and a contract for a next book, you still have six to eight months or so from the publication of the last novel to the delivery of the next one.  However, writing becomes a sprint during the editing process.  I got back my latest novel from my editors on December 3rd. I had until today to add fifteen to twenty thousand words to it (some parts were cut during the initial edit), make my protagonist have more agency, add a few more red herrings (can’t add all those words without new twists and turns), change some personality characteristics about another character, and rejigger a pretty significant plot point.  I finished the rewrite on Monday December 19th. Sixteen days from when I first received the novel back. It took me a day to just digest the editorial letter and my kids were out of school for three days during that time period (I am a stay at home mom, sans babysitting).   But I knew I had to finish it then because my daughter’s birthday is on the 22nd and I was hosting Christmas and a party for her. And, I needed a day to shop for Christmas and birthday presents, wrap them, and make the house look festive because it’s the holidays, darn it! I finished the developmental edit by working the six hours when my kids were in school and then, after putting them to bed, working another six hours until 3:30 in the morning for two weeks. But, I did it. And I got to spend the whole holiday week planning in-class Christmas parties, baking with my kids, taking care of one kid who got a stomach bug, writing Christmas cards and making my daughter’s 5th birthday pretty cool.  So, I am feeling pretty awesome on my birthday today. Turns out that I can run fast when I need to.      

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COMING HOME (Tales of a Tindominium #5)

Home: 1. Residence; 2. family group; 3. Birthplace; 4. Native habitat; 5. Place of origin; 6. Headquarters; 7. Safe place.            After almost six months in paradise, we left St. John, returning to Massachusetts. But this time we weren’t heading to Scituate, where we had lived for thirty-three years. This time, we were off to live “over the bridge,” on outer Cape Cod, where until now, we had only vacationed.            We arrived at our tindominium in Wellfleet on Friday, the 13th of May, our 39th anniversary. Steve and I had been married once before, a million years ago, each to high school sweethearts, which didn’t turn out so sweet. We intentionally chose to be married on a Friday the 13th, sticking our nose up at any suggestion of bad luck. Almost four decades later, we had come full circle.            The term tindominium came from a writer friend. When I was asked the previous fall at a writing committee dinner where I would be living when not in St. John, I had hesitated. How do you tell people that you are going to live in a trailer? By choice? Even my avant-garde writing colleagues would question my sanity, for sure. I began to describe where and what my new home was, searching for words, when Barbara Ross got it. “Oh, you mean you’re moving into a tindominium,” she said, with delight, sharing she had family who were doing the same. I relaxed, realizing I should always trust my writing tribe to understand writers don’t always do things the way normal people do.            Pulling into the driveway, seeing the tindominium for the first time in a long time, I had an  “Oh shit, what have we done?” moment. Nothing had changed since the first day I set my eyes on my new home, a 1995 Sportsman trailer with wheels that had been flat forever. The tindo hadn’t been on the road in decades. But it had been the vacation home for a family that had been kind and affectionate to it. It just had some wear and tear, and it was dated.            The blue couch and chair with huge gaudy flowers on it felt as if they were from a television set for All in the Family. The bedspread on the queen-size bed matched. The carpet was shag, the linoleum dirty beige, and the “woodwork” dark with gold trim.            The stove was so tiny, the double sinks so miniature, I was sure I was in a Barbie kitchen, grateful at least that it wasn’t pink. There was no dishwasher, no washer and dryer. And all of the work we hoped would be completed before we arrived had never happened. I wasn’t surprised.            But the toilet flushed and there was water running from the faucets. We had electricity and a refrigerator that worked. The stove lit.            Neighbors came by to say hello and offer a hand. Our builder promised us we’d have our improvements in no time.            I knew we had made a commitment to a radical change in lifestyle, but this day, more than any, made me wonder, were we nuts? If I closed my eyes, would I be back in a house with modern appliances and a view of the ocean? I couldn’t help but speculating what my Irish lace mother would think of her daughter living in a trailer park, even if it was next to an Audubon sanctuary. Should we have just stayed in St. John in our little cottage?            No. We knew what we had done and what we were going to do. Giving up living space physically meant we were opening our hearts to chance and choice. We were creating room for the adventures we wanted to share and this was just the beginning.            We celebrated our anniversary with a marvelous dinner at Petit Boulangerie Bistro and then sipped brandy before turning in at our new Home. 

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The Adventure Begins- Tales of a Tindomium #4

And we were off to the races, or at least to Logan Airport at 3:00 a.m. on that December morning after what felt more like a nap than the catch-up sleep we were both craving. But we had sold our house the evening before and were flying to St. John to spend an entire winter in a lovely home we had rented. Let the adventures begin.            Although my suitcase with my summer clothes was missing and I was still wearing the clothes I had been in since the day before, I felt grateful for all that we had enjoyed until now and for what I knew would be our future. We didn’t have our favorite aisle seats on the plane and weren’t even near one another, but I felt a unity with Steve as we soldiered toward a new life.            I plopped into my middle seat, expecting that I would fall asleep before takeoff. I was about to apologize to the two women who flanked me. One appeared to be about my age, the other a speck younger. They deserved to be warned I would soon be serenading them with my infamous snoring. I noticed the younger woman in the window seat was vigorously marking up what I recognized were not just legal pleadings, but family law pleadings. I immediately felt sorry for her, guessing we were both trying to escape from the same stressful profession.            “Oh, are you another family law attorney trying to go on vacation?” I said, without thinking.            “No, but if you are, I’d love to ask you a few questions.”    I stifled a groan, knowing I had walked right into a situation I might likely have avoided if I weren’t exhausted and without my filter functioning.            “Shoot,” I said, and started a conversation beginning with questions about a custody battle my British flight mate’s boyfriend was engaged in and moved on to multiple topics so naturally, it was as if we’d known each forever. By the end of the flight I knew I had made my first new friend. A great start to a new life.            I also received my first text message from an island realtor just as we landed. “Showing the house this afternoon at 3:00.” Although we had a year-long lease, our landlady had reserved the right to list her home after the first of the year, any sale subject to our lease. It was a week before Christmas. In my sweaty day-old outfit, I could feel the stress that had been the inspiration for making radical changes to our lives returning to my body.            When the landlady arrived for a stay in her unfinished unit below us in January, we already had the full flavor about what our existence would be like in a house on the market. Her offhand remarks that she wished she had never rented to us, that her realtor had told her it was a huge mistake, and she’d even considered giving us money to leave, confirmed what we already knew. The house, although lovely, was filled with negativity. After thirty years working in the field of conflict resolution as a lawyer and mediator, I knew the best way to deal with conflict is to avoid it.            I took to the Internet, reviving old contacts I had made while initially searching for St. John housing. December is the beginning of high season and I doubted I would find anything in January, but ever the optimist, I reached out. I received an email from a woman telling me she had a unit available, asking would we like to see it that afternoon. Would we ever.            We took the money Landlady One was willing to throw at us and gladly gave it to Landlady Two for a darling studio in Coral Bay on the other, “wilder” side of St. John overlooking Hurricane Hole. Steve’s slogan was, “Just part of the adventure.” Our living room, dubbed a “living porch” because it was room with no screens and hurricane shutters perched high where we shared it with the birds. We were intoxicated with fresh air and the sounds of the Tradewinds blowing through the lush green treetops.            There were a few accommodations we had to make in order to adjust to our tiny quarters. Just six weeks before, we’d left our ten-room home. Now, we had a queen size bed, a large flat screen television, a desk for me to write on, and a corner with the kitchen appliances, counter, cabinets, and sink, all in one room. In the morning when Steve would first wake up, he liked to ask me, “Is our kitchen in our bedroom or our bedroom in our kitchen?”          It didn’t matter because we made living small fun. On the evenings when we wanted to watch the primary returns, we would cook dinner, just as we had in our over-sized gourmet kitchen for thirty-three years, and serve it on trays, eating on our bed. We had been campers, we reminded ourselves, and this was living high.          When the tiny freestanding cottage below us in the same complex became available two months later, we jumped at the chance to grab it. With a twenty foot long covered porch facing a more expansive view of Hurricane Hole surrounded by greens which provided total privacy, we were living with the bananaquits, who frequent the coconut feeder Steve made and watch hawks and frigate birds soar above. Our efficient, tiny U-shaped kitchen is no longer in our bedroom, although our sofa and living area are at the foot of our rattan bed, which is covered with a mosquito net.         Our living space may be small, but our lives are large, filled with new friends, including my friend from the flight down and her charming boyfriend, a former restaurant owner and chef who cooked us an unforgettable meal at his home.        The mysteries I have set on St. John have been well received by its residents, who are constantly providing me with information and new material. Writing about paradise in paradise is sublime.        May came before we knew it and it was time to go meet the tindominium in Wellfleet where there was no shortage of adventures and writing material waiting to greet us.  

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The Excavation

 Tales of a Tindominium #3 Least you think I have been suggesting that the transition from daydreaming about whether to live on an island to realization was a purely cerebral adventure enjoyed over glasses of wine, let me tell you about The Excavation.                       I had no idea that living in one house for thirty-three years would result in a pile of debris the size of a small mountain. I can’t fathom how we managed to fit all of the “stuff” we had accumulated into the house. Now we had to deal with it in order to sell our home, which meant we had to prepare for the realtor-mandated “staging.” Staging means you strip your house to its naked flesh, scantily dress it with a few enticing items from whatever precious decorating trend is in, and create an antiseptic setting where potential buyers can imagine themselves and their stuff living in ecstasy. You can thank HGTV for this obsessive marketing practice, where the line between reality and fantasy blurs for buyers and makes fanatics out of sellers.                         The volume of the stuff was bad enough, but the weight of it was something I had not been prepared for. I thought I was going to do a little digging through, throwing out, and then clean. Instead, Steve and I began peeling through layers of our lives. We had lived next door to my parents, who lived next door to my grandmother and uncle, and had cleaned out their houses after they passed away. Steve’s father had lived with us for a while after we cleaned out his house of forty years. So you can see how we ended up having some of their stuff.                       Our children had lots of stuff when they lived at home and during occasional rounds of the rotating door. Each had passions and interests, all of which require more stuff. When you love dance, music, and art, you have to read about them and display all sorts of reminders of the plays you saw, the performance you were in, the guitar you first played, right?                       Steve and I were no less guilty. We shared a passion for gardening and cooking. Do you know how many tools and toys there are for gardeners? For cooks? Our kitchen had his and her sinks so we could cook together and not get in each other’s way. We each had our favorite pots and pans. I collected cookbooks, many of which I still have been unable to part with.                       The garage and cellar had been off-limits to me by my own choice because the array of tools and gadgets that my husband had acquired, including the ones from his father, was enough to make me want to call the fire marshal.                       Then there was the writing stuff. The writing books. The writing, because you have to print what you write to see it as others will. The tools for writing. Who can live with less than a hundred pens in various colors? Or the rainbow of post-it poised for ideas to be scribbled upon.                       Have I mentioned music? We still had LP’s, on top of a tower of CD’s that threatened to avalanche without warning.                       The word “minimalist” was not in our family vocabulary. I told myself that the stuff surrounding us reflected our interests and zest for life. All true, but now we needed to get rid of the stuff.                       I had read Marie Kondo’s books about joy sparking you through the art of decluttering and others before them, not entirely unaware that the day of The Excavation loomed. Still, what I was unprepared for was the emotional evisceration I experience when faced with objects undeniably part of my family history. My mother’s wedding dress, my father’s formal Navy cap, and epaulettes, lace from my great-grandmother’s slip, postcards my own grandmother had sent me, and photos. Oh so many photos, some mysterious in their own right because I found myself asking over and over, who are these people? None of this stuff sparked joy, but it did trigger other emotions, including pride, sadness, and nostalgia. It was exhausting.                       My first strike had been to see if anyone wanted any of these items, but another lesson I was learning about stuff was everyone has their own and nobody wants yours. Yet it felt disrespectful, almost irreverent to be discarding family memorabilia.                       I tried remembering that getting rid of stuff didn’t mean I was discarding the memories evoked by it. Easier said than done.                       In the end, it was the pressure to get the house on the market during peak season and the parade of moving professionals crawling through our home that ended the paralysis. Donations to organizations who would pick up stuff with their trucks. My car headed to Savers without any prompting by me for a daily drop-off of more stuff. The Metal Man. The Stop Junk Truck. There is an entire industry devoted to getting rid of stuff.                       By the time our home went on the market, we no longer recognized it. Urged by our realtor to be prepared for a showing with little notice, we stopped cooking fish and garlic and shampooed our poor old golden retriever without mercy. We ate take out, packed on pounds, and didn’t know where anything we owned was. Well, not entirely.                       There were the inevitable storage units. Note the plural. One near the home we were selling and one with essential stuff we advanced to the Cape where we would be living six months a year. The excavation had not quite scraped us to the bone.                       We closed on the sale of our home at our kitchen counter one evening in December and were on a plane set to spend the winter in St. John the next morning. A suitcase with my stuff for paradise got lost and I arrived in St. John with the clothes on my back, a husband who had just learned surgery had been successful, and a lightness I hadn’t felt since I was a child. 

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Oh, The Places We'll Go

Tales of a Tindominium #2 Before the dreadful winter of 2015, which I fully lamented yesterday ( https://www.missdemeanors.com/single-post/2016/12/19/Tales-of-a-Tindominium  ), there was a wonderful season of daydreaming about how and where Steve and I might live if we were to let go. Let go of the beautiful house by the sea with its lush gardens and rooms filled with memories. Let go of lawn mowing, weeding, home repairs and replacements (We were no longer striving for “improvements”). Let go of real estate taxes, a mortgage, and a life that we had outgrown.            Just pondering questions like, “Do you think the medical care can possibly be that good in Ecuador?” or “Would we be bored in Belize?” were more fun than we’d been having for a while. While we knew we’d love to spend winters in St. John where we’d vacationed for thirty years, wouldn’t it be wise to explore other destinations?            We’d never been Florida people. The few times we went, we found it too crowded and busy for us, but reading about The Forgotten Coast made us reconsider. This stretch along the west coast of Florida was not part of the development madness the rest of the state experienced. Plenty of state parks and endless beaches prompted us to spend an October weekend there exploring.            The beauty of the Forgotten Coast is unexaggerated, but it’s chillier than we wanted in the winter. Plus, we tried a test we invented to determine whether a location would work for us: Pretend it has been raining for four straight days and your eyeballs hurt from reading. What would you want to do? We quickly came up with three ideas. A movie, a bookstore, or a fabulous recipe to cook. Unfortunately, the first two were difficult to find and the ingredients for our make-believe jambalaya impossible to hunt down. No, we were not meant to be Floridians.            The other question we deliberated, and we learned we really know how to deliberate, was where would we live during the summer months? I’d read a fascinating account about a couple our age who left New Jersey to relocate, not retire to mid-coast Maine. Notice, I’m not inclined to use the word “retirement” because I felt we were reassigning ourselves to new adventures, not popping into rocking chairs waiting to die.            I had a ton of wonderful writing friends who lived in Maine, many between Portland and Belfast. Real estate was reasonable and cultural stimulation plentiful. Maybe St. John in the winter and Maine in the summer? We spent Steve’s birthday weekend in April exploring the area. Steve, who was an Eagle Scout, knows how to explore. Inch by inch. In three days, I’d seen every small town I’d read about, visited bookstores and galleries, and had the best croissants this side of Paris (Moonbat in Belfast). I saw a wide variety of homes ranging from cabins to Victorians to farmhouses, teasing my imagination about what it might be like to join the folk who live Downeast.            In the end we were lured back to beaches, but this time to Outer Cape Cod, which had been our escape all the while we lived in Scituate. On a cold and dreary January Sunday morning, Steve might turn to me and ask if I’d like to take a drive to the Cape, walk the Audubon Sanctuary in Wellfleet where we used to camp, and then go for a bite to eat. The Cape had always managed to buoy my sagging spirits. Steve thought it might be the solution.            We happened upon a tiny Sear Roebuck bungalow in Truro. By now, I had become a member of the tiny house fan club, so the size didn’t bother me and it was near a similar bungalow we spent a week in each summer. One with a screen porch where I would utter, “I could live here.”  The house we were considering needed work, but I loved Truro. I could live there.            It wasn’t meant to be. While we were clearing out the debris from our home in Scituate (a blog post in itself, if not a book), we waited for certain zoning conditions to be met and were constantly disappointed. Finally, with a closing date on Scituate on the horizon, I realized we had no place in Massachusetts to come home to after our first winter in St. John. More importantly, no place to come home to if we needed medical care, which seemed likely since Steve had been given a scary diagnosis.            I panicked as I scrolled through the Outer Cape real estate listings, always starting with the lowest price, of course. Each time I would see the listing for a trailer in Wellfleet for sale for $25,000. There was even an article about it in Cape Cod Curbed, referencing $4 million dollar trailers in Malibu. (https://capecod.curbed.com/2015/8/24/9927554/wellfleet-mobile-home-for-sale).  Steve would laugh and say, “We could do worse, dear.” It was located next to what we believe is the most beautiful Audubon sanctuary in the country. I would bristle and tell him to get more serious.            He did. One day, as the closing date loomed and I was wailing about being homeless, Steve grabbed the car keys and said, “Let’s go look at that mobile home.”            We did. I sat on the dated old sofa on a November afternoon and saw light beaming into the tiny unit. Outside skyscraper tall pine trees, just like the ones we camped under at the Audubon Sanctuary, swayed and danced. My imagination went wild with ideas about what I might do with the challenging blank canvass I was looking at.            “I could do this,” Steve said to me. I knew it was an invitation.            “I think I can too,” I said, accepting, knowing people might think us crazy, but exhilarated by changes we were ready to embrace.            

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Tales of a Tindominium

  How I downsized my dwelling and grew my life. We all talk about it. We are the Baby Boomers. Watergate. Vietnam. Birth Control. Marijuana, Zero Population Growth, Organic. Lots more.            Here we are, children of the sixties, entering our final chapters on the planet. Who knew the day would ever come? And for so many, it passed prematurely.            For those of us still here, forging ahead as some of us like to think toward new adventures, we got to thinking, why do we have all of that stuff? What were we thinking? Where did it come from and more importantly, how can I get rid of it.            The winter of 2015 was the winter from hell. Steve and I had lived in Scituate, Massachusetts, since 1983. I had summered there my whole life. My great grandmother, Catherine, had purchased land on Kenneth Road when her daughter, my grandmother, gave birth to a premature infant who did not have the benefit of an incubator and suffered brain damage.  Catherine built a summer cottage on it, thinking the salt air would be good for her grandbaby. Nanna died in that house at the age of 106 and her baby lived in it until he was 85.            Steve and I had decided Scituate was a good place to raise kids, and it was. We purchased a house two doors down from Nanna. My parents had retired to a cottage in the middle. Our home was less than 200 feet from an ocean that could be gentle or insanely aggressive. The weather was savagely unpredictable. The satellite trucks from local media outlets often parked at the foot of our street poised for the latest coastal shots. We were fortunate never to be directly hit by waves, but we had a clear view of waves splashing over the seawall like geysers. We had quite an adventure and loved almost all of it, but we knew the ride was over.            That snowy frigid winter of 2015 found us huddled in front of the fireplace on our couch in the living room, stirring soup or chili in our kitchen, or buried under feather comforters in our bed. When we opened the front door, often there was an imprint of its panels embedded on four feet of snow. Our 14 year-old outdoor cat had to use a litter box because the snow was too deep to let her do her business. I could go on, but I’ll spare you.            We had been going to St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands for nearly thirty years and you can be sure we didn’t skip 2015. Over the years, we had dreamed of retiring there. We had even put a deposit on a lot in 1987. Unfortunately it was a week before Black Monday.            But our conversations were a little more concrete this trip. No Virgin Island, my first mystery, was being published in August. Set in St. John, I had a contract to write a second. Our connection to St. John felt a little more permanent.            Using three rooms in a ten-room house began to feel ludicrous and wasteful. The gardens we had grown as a younger Steve and Michele now were becoming more of a burden than a joy, and anyone who has known the delight of a garden understands how disheartening that discovery might be. Property taxes were rising. Worse, FEMA threatened to make owning even modest coastal property financially inconceivable with new flood insurance rates.            The good news is that none of this made us feel old or finished. We just weren’t sure if we owned our house or our house owned us. And we wanted to sprout wings. To feel light and unencumbered. To try a new lifestyle. To simplify. To have new adventures. To explore.            We came home from St. John in May after a three-week visit to our favorite rental home where No Virgin Island had been conceived and set and committed to a radical change in our lives. We were giddy with excitement, not having a clue about what the future held.            We went from living in a ten-room Cape Cod by the sea to splitting out time between a cottage on St. John and a tindominium in Wellfleet. What’s a tindominium, you ask?            I’ll share more about that tomorrow.

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