Hi everyone! This is a long one so here’s a little table of contents for you:

• Book release, audiobook in production, my new author website.
• Stress including my health problems, my father-in-law’s cancer, my ailing dog.
• How not-well I’m doing with the book business stuff that Eric was supposed to manage for me.
• Stuff I’ve been watching & reading.

Book + author stuff

First up, The Lost Diamond of Skywallow is out today! 🎉

The e-book should be available everywhere, there's a slight delay on print books outside of Amazon (more on that below).

The audiobook is underway and will come out in December. VonDexter Montegut II is coming back to voice Hayden and Tiana Holley is narrating Sera. I am beyond lucky to have these talented actors on board!

This is a super quiet launch as I'm just trying to get this series & the Vona Stewart "brand" back on track. I'm not throwing any ad money at this (or if I do, it'll be very small) so any orders or reviews you can send my way would be greatly appreciated! 🥹 I'm already drafting book four, so whatever griefy monster blanketed my creative brain for six years appears to be satiated for now. (I like to picture it as a creature lurking in the woods - best not to anger it.)

My new author website is also live. It was lovingly made with lots of shits and damns: vonastewart.com. I am particularly proud of all the cute little illustrations I was able to pull from Luis Felipe Peredo Noguez's book covers: they're scattered all over the site with little animations, though some are hidden on mobile.

I'm in love with my Reading Room where I manage an ever-growing list of book recommendations for kids ages 8-14+. It's filterable by mood & age! Readers can send me recommendations using the buttons at the bottom.

I'm also very happy with my spoiler-free interactive map (you can click to view it larger if you want) on the Explore Wayfair page. I hope to grow the wee bestiary at the bottom once I find a new illustrator. Sergey Banityuk did the first round of black and white creature illustrations, but he's from Ukraine and I haven't been able to get a hold of him for a few years. I really hope he's okay. 💔

I suppose this is as good a place as any to plead with you: Please (continue to) write your representatives. End the wars, free Palestine, abolish ICE, end mass incarceration, and demilitarize the police, etcetera and etcetera. And please, for the love of god, vote!

More on some of the grief-aspects of reentering the writing world toward the end.

Stress, stress, and more stress!

I'm not sure if I’ve ever spent a September so stressed! In addition to looming book deadlines and brutal editing rounds, I had to travel a lot (which I do not love doing), lead a panel at a work summit (excuse me while I have a meltdown live and on a stage), and my daughter had surgery (she’s going to be okay, but oof. I hate hanging out in surgery waiting rooms without Eric.) My body has also decided that long car rides mean sciatica flares and piriformis syndrome. Honestly, just hand me my advanced AARP membership and let’s be done with it.

Also in September, I did that amazing thing we do in middle age and wrecked my neck sleeping. It was so bad I had to get some muscle relaxers and narcotics from my primary care doctor. Usually I can just tough it out but this one was awful - I felt like I'd been in a car accident.

I don't know if it's related, but in October, I had my first migraine with aura in quite a while. And then another one a week later - with all due respect, universe, WTAF? The second one showed up right before I had to leave for Ben's band concert last week. That pesky dot of static appeared in my vision and slowly grew to become giant crescent moons. I swallowed my medication with a benadryl chaser (the meds makes my face swell up) and drove, half blind, over to the school.

I sat in the back with noise canceling ear buds stuffed in my ears, and wept into my coat muffler (it was very cold) whilst the stunning array of brass instruments bore their way through my tender, tender skull. I made it through (hurrah) and was able to film Ben's surprise solos (one with a harmonica!).

Widowed parenting for the [long string of explicatives] win.

Ben would have absolutely understood if I couldn't make it, but it would have sucked. It kinda sucks anyway. So many kids have not only two parents show up, but grandparents, siblings, and cousins because everyone lives nearby. Ben's siblings and extended family members do come when they can, but it's a long trip and Eric's dad is dealing with advanced stage four colon cancer. Always a happy guy with a rather rotund middle section, it has been devastating to watch grandpa shrink. He now weighs less than Ben and his clothes are hanging off him.💔

Molly, our German Shepherd, will be eight in December and she is not doing well. I'm still waiting on results from her arthrocentesis earlier this week - it's looking like polyarthritis (her legs are swelling up), but as is the nature of many shepherds, she's on a massive misery-based hunger strike, and I'm running out of creative ways to get her to take her medication.

In the middle of the night, she managed to get up onto the sofa for the first time in a while and then proceeded to pee all over it. Unable to get back down without help, she slept in one of the puddles and I've been crying all morning trying to figure out the best way to get her bathed without stressing her out even more.

It's less important, but the sofa she weed all over is destroyed. It's a leather couch Eric and I made payments on. He absolutely loved it because it was big enough for him to take a nap on all stretched out, and he could sit on it comfortably with almost his whole family surrounding him.

I'm doing my best, but once again, really missing my husband the pet-whisperer here. He was so good with Lucy (our red heeler mix) as she aged, giving her daily insulin shots, cleaning up her elderly accidents, and even carrying her from place to place when she could no longer see or hear. Arthritis isn't fatal, but refusing to eat or take medication can be (and she has been sporting a fever so maybe an underlying infection?) and I can't help but spiral into worst case scenarios. The thought of walking her across the rainbow bridge alone just wrecks me.

The grief aspects of publishing book three

Managing all the nitty-gritty behind-the-scenes stuff is beyond laborious. I've said it before, but I would never have gone the indie-pub route if I knew my husband was going to kick the bucket at forty-six years old. NEVER! And I can kind of hear him chuckling over my shoulder and telling me "You got this, hon." And okay, I do (sorta! kinda!), but UGGHHHHHHHHH I am cranky about it. A co-worker asked how in the world I have time to write a book when I work full time and I responded, "Easy, I have no life." And I don't!

But the writing part - now that the monster is back in the hedge, anyway - is easy. Or at least easier. It's all the other stuff that makes me want to stick forks in my eyes.

It's just so tedious. For example, I get edits done on book one and update the files at the various distributor sites, but then there are little weird errors because the formatting software updated, the page numbers changed, and so the book cover template for print no longer works. Updating these takes weeks, with multiple rounds of fixes due to human error. Every time I re-upload new files, it has to go through another round of reviews and proof approvals. And now that the books are wide (I turned off the exclusive Amazon programs books one and two were in as part of the relaunch), it's going through this process at multiple locations, many of which have different requirements and different approval processes. And that's not even counting the audiobook stuff.

Even writing about it is tedious! Did you fall asleep just then? Because I would have if I wasn't so frustrated.

Last night with the launch deadline breathing down my neck, I discovered a couple more issues with formatting and muttered bad words over my computer racing to fix them. It means that all the print versions of The Lost Diamond of Skywallow are showing up as out of stock (see B&N here!) until I can get the umpteenth proofs approved again. These are problems Eric would have caught and managed well in advance and I just... I have other strengths.

It'll be easier, I hope, when book four is ready, since the learning curve this time about killed me dead. But in reality, my ADHD fog-brain will probably kick in and I'll have to relearn it all over again. Catch me cussing out the entire world come June-ish.

ALLRIGHTY THEN. What are y'all watching and reading? Here's a list of some stuff I've either hated or enjoyed.

Media consumption

• After binging all of The Mentalist last spring, I wanted something similar, so I watched all of Castle this summer. Since I always google the actors in anything I'm watching, I was disappointed to learn that Nathan Fillon maybe isn't all that stellar of a guy. Rumor or real, do you think? I'm guessing real, unfortunately.
• Since I now like police procedurals, I also watched all available episodes of High Potential (With Ashley Trashley from New Girl!) I don't know how many new ways they can figure out how to give a detective a spunky/quirky non-cop sidekick, but this one is fun. We stan a girl genius. (Don't tell my kids I typed 'stan.' I think the new thing is 'it's tea.')
• The Social Reckoning - Watched this in the theater with a couple of my kids over their fall break. The acting is phenomenal, but the story is enraging. TAX BILLIONAIRES.
• Ben and I started Vision Quest and are liking it so far, though some, uh, robot romance? in the last episode gave us both the ick. That might be the point, though? Since Ben only knows James Spader from his recent work, I'm going to make him watch Pretty in Pink tonight. Spader is famously an asshole in it, but such a pretty asshole!

I know everyone is watching the Nathan Fielder documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, but so far I cannot muster the energy to care. I didn't follow the scandal as it broke and didn't tune in for any of her court case coverage. And Fielder's stuff is just so unsettling and the clips are so weird. I know, I know, everyone says it's stunning and a must see. Maybe I'll rally one of these days.

I am BARELY making my Goodreads goal this year what with all the writing and editing of my own stuff going on. Highlights so far:

• Whose Names Are Unknown by Sanora Babb - John Steinbeck read all of Babb's research before writing The Grapes of Wrath. Babb already had a book under contract when Wrath was optioned but her publisher dropped her, not wanting to publish anything similar. She's been largely erased from history and in my (obviously infallible) opinion, her book is much better.
• The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy by Brigitte Knightley - This started out as Dramoine fan fiction, I believe, which I typically hate. But this was shockingly good. It's violent, yes, and I had to work to suspend some disbelief at times, but I will absolutely be reading the second one.
• The Incandescent by Emily Tesh - Have I raved about this one already? This is NOT fan fiction, but please imagine if we got an inside look at Minerva McGonagall's inner sapphic, life, only it includes self-aware commentary on exclusionary boarding school life, more grown-up goings on in school administration, and it's set in a world where magic isn't secret, but well-known and even considered old-fashioned (public schools don't teach it). It's not really Professor McGonagall (and the author isn't a horrific TERF) - our MC is Doctor Walden and she's the Director of Magic at Chetwood Academy. It's very good.
• How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy's Guide to Silencing Women by Zoe Venditozzi & Claire Mitchell - Are we angry enough? I don't think so. I listened to the audiobook on this one and highly recommend it - I bought a paper copy immediately. It took me a bit to adjust to the authors' lovely Scottish accents, but it's really wonderful. It's the witch trials but with so much more history and background and some imagined dramatizations mixed in. I cannot believe I used to be so proud that the Mormon Bible was the King James version (I felt it validated us). What a heinous douchebag he was!

As per my usual, sorry this is seven years long. Congrats if you got all the way through. Hit reply and tell me what you've been watching or reading lately. xx