Wow, it’s been a heck of a year so far, hasn’t it? I’ve had a ton of stuff happening behind the scenes, so I figured it was high time to post an update here.

This fall has been a time of major transition for me and my family, for several reasons:

Family Transitions

Seems like yesterday these boys were toddlers playing pirates together. Now they're one day away from their first day of college. Their moms will miss them. . (For the record, I'm one of those moms.) . @judewinters @warlockbond117 @amagnusson6 #offtocollege #proudmama

Jude, my oldest son, started college this fall. He’s going to Capernwray Bible Harbour, a non-denominational Bible college with a one-year discipleship program. And he has the good fortune to be attending with two of his lifelong friends.

In mid-September, my lifelong friend Amanda and I drove our two firstborns out to the coast together to drop them off. Thanks to COVID restrictions, we were not allowed on the actual school property—it was a drop-and-go event. Amanda attended there, as did my husband and several of our friends.

But despite being surrounded by folks who have great memories attached to this school and knowing a few of the teachers from meeting them other places, I had never been there myself. So I was a little disappointed by that. However, the place looked beautiful, and the photos Jude has been sending home look like fun. He’s have a great time and (I hope), learning a lot.

Literally two minutes after leaving Jude on the doorstep of his new college, while waiting for a ferry to take us back to Vancouver Island, I received a text from my step-dad that my mom had gone into the Emergency Room in severe pain. They were checking her for appendicitis.

It was nothing so mundane.

By the time she left the hospital that day, she’d had a CT scan and they had found a mass in her abdomen. The doctor told her she thought it was colon cancer—the same disease that killed my uncle, my mom’s youngest brother, last year.

Later, the results of her bloodwork confirmed cancer, but a colonoscopy showed her colon to be clear. So we still don’t actually know what kind of cancer it is, what the mass is attached to, etc. They’re still working it out.

In the meantime, my mom has been going through the testing and procedures recommended by the doctor, but also going through some naturopathic treatments like Vitamin C therapy. She’s not waiting for them to figure out what cancer they’re dealing with before she does something about it.

I’ve been struggling with this one for so many reasons. Some of them are too private to share here, but there’s a few I can.

First, it doesn’t make sense.

My mom beat breast cancer naturally twenty years ago, except for having a lymphectomy to remove a few nodes, and she has maintained most of the healthy habits she used to do that. No, she didn’t continue to take a few of the nastier, more expensive natural supplements that helped her through that, but she has stayed active, eaten healthy (much healthier than anyone else I know), gotten her rest, consumes very little sugar, and, for the most part, is a very chill person who doesn’t get stressed out by much.

She comes from healthy stock (my Grandma will be 92 this year and my Grandpa ran marathons until within a few years of his death), and other than her brother—who led a much less healthy lifestyle—there is no history of cancer in the family. Yet she’s had it twice.

My struggle? Like so many of us, I want to stay healthy and reduce the risk of illnesses like the big C. It doesn’t seem fair that she’s the person dealing with this when there seems to be no good reason for it and she’s worked so hard to prevent it happening again. And it makes me realize that no matter what lengths we go to to try to limit disease factors, there are still no guarantees.

So one of my struggles is the reminder of how little we can control in this life.

I’m grieving. Even though I hope, pray, and believe my mom will beat this, with prayer and her usual determination and positivity, I’m grieving that she’s having to go through it at all and that the disease hit her, of all people.

Of all people, it shouldn’t have been her.

Housing Transitions

As has happened nearly every spring since we moved to this acreage, this spring, my husband and I started looking at ways to improve or expand our space. Even though Jude was leaving this fall, he’s planning to come back for a while after this year at college. Not only that, we might be looking at an expanded family in a few years (I mean, our kids are almost adults!), and wanted to finally arrange for each boy have their own room (with an eye for space for visiting kids and potential grandkids when the time comes).

In addition, our addition (where my office is) has structural issues due to water in the roof—there’s a saggy spot in the ceiling tiles right above my computer monitor that I keep waiting to fall on me every time it rains, and in another place, a weird fungus keeps growing through the tiles. We reroofed only a couple years ago, so we’re not sure where the water keeps coming from. But it’s had problems since we got the place, and we never intended for it to be permanent.

So this spring was no exception to our pattern.

Trying to figure out a way to stay within our budget and to prevent decades of house-poor debt, we started drawing up plans to replace our current addition with a larger one that would include another bedroom. But within a day, my husband had found an excellent deal for a house to be moved not far from here, and we arranged to go look at it.

That was the weekend when lockdown hit.

We looked at the house a week later, and decided we wanted to go ahead and pursue purchasing it. Everything since then has been slower than molasses.

I don’t want to get into all the details, but I’ll sum up by saying that because the house is to be moved onto our property instead of built from scratch and we’re using current equity instead of a down payment, it’s been a nightmare getting the mortgage arranged and getting the bank to work with us and the seller (who has been amazing). Between complications caused by everyone suddenly working from home and a type of financing agreement that they were not used to working with, what we thought would take only a few months has only been finalized this past week.

Yep, you read that right. We looked at the house on March 21. We thought we’d have it on our property by mid-summer, giving us plenty of time to get it set up and renovated in time for winter (while Jude was still home to help with the work). Instead, we got approval on October 4, and are now scrambling to see if the contractors we’d lined up in the spring are even able to still do the work before the snow flies.

The amazing thing about the deal is how gracious the seller has been to work with. That’s the only reason that we stuck with it, I think. However, because of contracts and contractors and the Winter is Coming thing, both Jason and I (mostly Jason, which is saying something, because he’s usually the chill one in this relationship) are more than a little stressed out. We’ve both been working 50 to 60 hours or more a week since March, and finding the time to deal with this all of a sudden now that it’s happening is one more stressor.

It’s been “hurry up and wait” for seven months. Now it’s just “hurry up.”

Career Transitions

Into this mixed bag of ups and downs, and partly because of it (and because of pandemic considerations), I retired from teaching piano this year. I’m now a full-time freelance writer and editor.

It wasn’t an easy choice, as mentioned before, and my life has been much too full to even miss teaching. (I miss my students, but not the activity.)

I miss playing piano, though—I haven’t touched my instrument since May, when virtual lessons ended for the last season. I’m hoping to take some “self-care” time this weekend and play for a while. I need some time to pause and have some music therapy.

The Waiting Game

This summer, I decided it was time to start putting my books into audio. I started with The Waterboy, the prequel book to my Rise of the Grigori series, because it’s short and the per-finished-hour for audiobooks is expensive. The process was so fun and awesome and went even faster than I’d hoped it would.

At the same time, based on information gathered from my marketing experiments, I decided to have new covers made for the Grigori series, and initiated that process about the same time. Because updates to audiobooks can take over a month, I decided to wait until I have the new cover before I actually published the audiobook, which I thought would mean it would be published in September.

Unfortunately, due to some major “life stuff” happening in the life of my designer around that time, the design process has also dragged on a bit.

Okay, a lot.

I finally approved the cover for The Waterboy on Thursday, the audiobook version on Friday, and I expect my designer will send me the final files on Monday.

A print-off of the almost-final version of my new cover for The Waterboy. Isn’t it pretty? — A print-off of the almost-final version of my new cover for *The Waterboy*. Isn’t it pretty?

Now that we have the series template worked out, I expect it will only be a few weeks before I have final covers for both The Undine’s Tear and The Sphinx’s Heart. (But who knows? Everything’s taking longer than I’d hoped.)

And then I’ll finally get to publish my audiobook and begin ramping up marketing on this series again, building up steam for releasing The Sphinx’s Heart next spring. Or summer. With all the stress in my life and my extremely full schedule, it feels like I keep having to push back that publishing date. Sigh.

Everything takes longer than I think it will.

While some people will remember this year for the pandemic and the lifestyle changes it imposed, for me, it is The Year of Waiting.

There are good things about waiting. It’s not all bad. But it’s been a trial in its own right, and I’ve often questioned myself this year about whether I’m on the right track and making the right career decisions.

I’ve learned and am learning a lot. I’m tired and overwhelmed most of the time. I’m grateful for my blessings, but still trying to find that elusive balance I began searching for back in January when I almost burned out.

I feel like I’m teetering on the brink of burnout again, but I’m not sure what to do about it. (I’ve booked a week off at Christmas and I’m looking forward to it like you wouldn’t believe.)

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, because I’m grateful. I’m so grateful.

I have an amazing family—the world’s best husband and fantastic kids who mostly get along and whom we like to spend time with.

I’m getting a new house and nearly doubling our space. It’s a lot of work I don’t feel I have time for right now, but there will be ways to exercise creativity while settling in that I will enjoy, too. And hopefully, my husband will enjoy it much more than our current home.

I have an amazing mom who’s a fighter and an optimist, and is such a blessing to me and everyone who knows her. This trial is bringing her and me and my sister closer than ever.

I have steady work lined up for the next year—as a freelancer, this is huge.

I love my career. I’m telling stories I love, meeting new and interesting people all the time and, I like to think, making a difference in the world.

But it seems like my lifelong self-improvement mission is to figure out how to balance the many pieces of my life in such a way that I’m not only grateful for them, but can enjoy them and not sacrifice my health to participate in them.

Maybe my expectations are wrong about what “balance” looks like. Maybe that’s what I need to adjust. But I suspect it’s not that. Not just that.

I’m holding onto gratitude fiercely these days. But that doesn’t mean I can’t acknowledge the hard once in a while.

In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy this rest day as much as I can—because there’s another full week ahead.

And, I’m loving having these two little munchkins in the house:

Our newest additions like to hang out in the hat-and-mitten bins behind my desk. I’m okay with that view. :-)

Meet Korra and Aang. (At least, we think we’ve decided to call them that.)

Thanks to the cruelties of nature in the country, these are our only remaining cats. We’re going to try them out as house cats for as long as my semi-allergic husband can handle it so we can tame them and train our dogs that cats are friends. I kinda hope he can handle it for a long time, because I’ve really enjoyed having these guys inside. (Something I couldn’t have done if I were still teaching piano, thanks to student allergies.)

When I’ve been super-stressed in the last few weeks, watching these two play has brought a smile to my face. That’s something to be grateful for.