Osiyo!

I hope this email finds everyone doing well. It’s been over a month since the last newsletter and yes, I’ve slipped a little behind schedule but not without good reason.

As you know by now, I’ve been dealing with a lot of health challenges since summer. I’m currently undergoing chemotherapy along with immunotherapy and all the rollercoaster up’s and down’s that go with it. The good news is that I’m learning to predict how my cycles will go, so I can anticipate my “good” and “bad” days and plan accordingly. Also, it’s not an indefinite trudge. Five more cycles and I’ll be done. The good news: The surgery itself was successful. The adjuvant therapy, which is what I’m undergoing now, is mostly (as I understand it, at least) a preventative measure. Because the disease was already advanced into three lymph nodes, they have to make sure there aren’t little rascally, rogue cancer cells floating around in my body waiting to take up residence somewhere else.

There are pros and cons to chemo treatment. Yes, I’ve lost my hair (but it will grow back once treatment ends). But it also causes other weird things like loss of body hair (no shaving now, yay!). And so far, I haven’t been sick once. In fact, if anything, the steroids make me want to eat more! It’s easy to fall into bingeing on comfort food, mostly because exercise is limited, boredom sets in—and well, let’s face it, having a cancer diagnosis is pretty depressing, so it’s easy to fall into the habit of “I deserve this.” I’ll have to be careful to keep the pounds off, although that’s another “perk” to chemo-my medical team said for now, don’t worry about weight and don’t restrict yourself too much. Your body needs the calories, they said.

So there you have it. Full on permission to eat what I want, when I want. I could definitely get spoiled to this. The dilemma, however, is exactly what I said before: It’s not indefinite and there will come a time when the treatments are over and then I’ll have to reckon with it all. So I’m working hard not to let the permission go to my head and just trying to stick with a healthy diet that hopefully will keep my weight stabilized.

The worst, honestly, is just the overwhelming fatigue and joint pain. I’ve learned to expect that approximately 3-4 days post chemo, I’m going to feel like someone is kicking every limb and joint in my body! Fortunately, it runs its course in about three days and then it’s back to normal. The next worst part of the cycle is when the white blood cell count dips (1-2 weeks in) which is when the extreme fatigue hits. That, too, runs its course in about a week.

Anyway, that’s all a long way to apologize for the delay but hopefully I’ll be able to get back on a regular schedule with the letter soon.

Meanwhile, autumn has finally come to the land of the Singing River, mostly thanks to Hurricane Isaias. It was actually refreshing to turn on a bit of heat yesterday as I sat at the computer, cuddling with my baby Socks and polishing off the last chapter of Book I of The Kids of Crossroads.

I guess I should add Socks probably doesn’t consider himself a baby. He’s a senior in cat years, pushing the equivalent of 65. Maybe that makes us closer to contemporaries than parent-child.

Anyhoo, finishing that first book in the series just means it’s now time to start Book II. I’m still struggling with what to title it (not that titles really mean much-publishers often change them, anyway). But as a working title, these are some of the ideas I’ve come up with:

Always and Forever at the Crossroads

Forever at the Crossroads

Girl at the Crossroads

Children of the Crossroads (hmmm…sounds a bit too much like Children of the Corn; also may be too much of a horror vibe, which the book definitely isn’t albeit we have vampires, witches and warlocks).

Let me know your thoughts. I’m definitely open to suggestion at this point!

An interesting perk to writing this book: If you’ve read even part of the manuscript or even just seen the blurb, you know that 70’s pop music is crucial to the worldbuilding of this story. Thus, it’s forced me into a deep dive of the music of my youth. I’ve noted an interesting pattern about 70’s Top 40. The number of hits that featured stories of misfit girls living through the music was an extremely common trope (which kind of makes you wonder what was in the water during the decade). For example, Helen Reddy’s “Angie, Baby” and the Ozark Mountain Daredevil’s “Jackie Blue” both featured protagonists that I’ve found to be eerily-and I do mean eerily, as in shudder-down-the-spine variety—similar to my MC Lucinda. The idea of living through the music on the radio seemed a way that many kids coped with dysfunction. Perhaps this made sense in a world before social media. I remember vividly the summer of 1975, spending hours at a time planted by the AM radio in our kitchen, listening to every song on WMSL until I knew every record on the charts, every note of every song spun, by heart. I would listen until the tubes in the radio heated the plastic coating to the point of melting. I also really did have an old, water-damaged console (my Grandmother’s Sears Kenmore) that I spent hours in front of, letting the music fuel my imagination in the moments when it played through the static. This adolescent phenomenon of the 70’s-isolated kids who use the music and the idea of living a secret life within the music- is what I wanted to recreate for Lucinda, and became the impetus for how the novel’s magic works. Here are just two songs from my “Kids” playlist that were hugely influential in capturing the loneliness and importance of music to “lost” kids in the 70’s. “Angie, Baby” in particular was a song I’d completely forgotten and only discovered again, in hindsight, after I had written my first draft of “Kids.” So you can imagine how that one, in particular, made more than a few hairs stand on end.

DESPITE Isaias:

We are still planning to make the drive up to Nashville this evening for the conversation between Barbara Kingsolver and Ann Patchett. I am so excited to be in the same room tonight with two such amazing authors! This event is part of Kingsolver’s tour to promote her new book, Partita. I find for me, as a writer, that there is nothing so contagious as the energy of being in the same space with writers! Just getting to hear them talk about their craft and the works that inspired them is enough to get me out of whatever slump I feel stuck in. Mostly, it helps keep the dream ignited and alive. It reminds me that no one just materializes overnight and hits the New York Times bestseller list. These are real people who have spent years honing their craft and paying their dues to get there.

What’s in the Bedtime Bookstack This Month:

Right now I want to give a shoutout to an amazing YA imprint I’ve discovered—HarperCollins’s Heartdrum imprint. Started by Cynthia Leitich Smith, this is an amazing imprint whose sole focus is to publish YA books by indigenous authors. I’ve ordered several titles, both because I want to support this imprint and because it’s an excellent way to gauge the current market for YA Native American stories. I’m especially impressed that most of the authors published by Heartdrum are not huge “names.” Many of these are debuts, indicating the imprint is very open to supporting new voices. Unfortunately for indigenous literature, the same holds true for us as for many marginalized groups in the publishing world: Publishers tend to select their “tokens” and once the quota has been met, it’s hard to get in. The stories intrigue readers, but are still considered a niche market. Once publishers have a few, major breakthrough names—Stephen Graham Jones, Louise Erdrich, etc—it often makes it more difficult (rather than less) to get into the door of those imprints. This is all the more reason to give a shoutout to Cynthia Leitich Smith and the excellent work she’s doing with Heartdrum!

Here are a few of the titles I’ve read and fell in love with over the past couple of months.

The Great Big Book Festival

I’m excited and honored to be one of the featured authors at the debut Great Big Book Festival on November 7th! I will be doing a presentation on writing stories based on the myths and folklore of The Tennessee Valley.

It’s going to be an exciting lineup overall, including our keynote speaker, NYT bestselling author Ariel Lawhon, author of The Frozen River and The Pirate Queen. Her book The Pirate Queen is based on the Irish folk heroine Grace O’Malley.

Last but not least, if you’re enjoying the newsletter, please consider subscribing to my Substack. I promise the Substack will not be a repeat of the newsletter. Instead, it’s a platform where I intend to delve into more in-depth topics, featuring articles on books, folklore, films, music, and more.

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On that note, I’m going to close this letter out since I have a limited window before we have to get on the road to Nashville this afternoon. I’ll catch you all up next month and let you know how the Great Big Book Festival went.