I have no idea what I'm doing...

My Experience with Breastfeeding Really, Really Sucked

I had a vision for my postpartum period. I bet a lot of women and non-binary birthers do – I pictured myself in one of the two large recliners in our living room, a sleeping baby on my chest. In my vision, I was tired, but slept whenever I could, so I wasn’t too terribly sleep deprived. When my baby started fussing, I’d deftly unclip my nursing top or bra, latch, and let kiddo handle the rest.…

That was what this post was supposed to be – that isn’t really what it turned into. What it turned into is a bit more intense, and makes me feel pretty damn uncomfortable, particularly in the world we’re living in right now. But as a person with a lot of privilege, I acknowledge I need to make myself uncomfortable in order to check myself. So here goes, what wasn’t necessarily supposed to be, but…

Everything is “A Lot” Right Now

You’re sitting next to me right now, and I’ve caved and given you my phone. I wasn’t going to – you’ve been getting such a surplus of screen time these days that you’ve come to expect someone to give you their phone so you can watch songs on YouTube or play one of the quasi-educational games we’ve bought for you. We want to break you of that habit, but we’re still in the midst of some level of…

I decided in 2020 that I was going to become a planner person. I asked my husband for one for Christmas, and not only did he find one I ended up loving, he spent hours customizing it. Surprising myself as much as anyone, I really kept up with it for the first two and a half months of the year—I buckled down and put my planned gym visits, my work schedule, all my appointments, and all the days I’d…

“I ran away from my problems, Maxo. I literally got on an international flight and ran from them. I don’t see eye-to-eye with my parents a lot these days, but even I can admit this was a pretty immature way of handling myself.”

“Well. If it was, and I don’t entirely agree, I’m not mad at the fact that you ended up here. With me. For a little while, anyway.”

It’s everything Alyssa can do to…

Presenting this week – the rare SSS that’s actually only six sentences! WHAT?

“Beer, slightly dodgy white wine from a box, or something sweeter?”

“Beer is fine.”

She hears a couple of quiet pops, and then he sits down at the table across from her, setting a brown bottle with a blue and orange label in front of her. 

“Drink and eat up. In whichever order suits you.”

She doesn’t…

I did mention in my post introducing SSSs on this blog that the inspiration was my Tumblr feed of old – and I’ll be honest, if an SSS was ever ACTUALLY six sentences and only six sentences, it was a near miracle. This is obviously not only six sentences. Let’s just go with it, yeah? Accountability and all that.

What are you doing tonight? 

Alyssa’s text to the group chat between herself,…

Several years ago, when my social media of choice was Tumblr (hi there, whoever has made it here from there!) and my writing was mostly fan fiction, one of my most frequent original posts was Six Sentence Sunday. It’s exactly what it sounds like: six sentences (and often more) of whatever you’re working on, posted without further context, sometime on Sunday. I loved Six Sentence Sundays, both as…

Temporarily, I just deleted both of the apps for Twitter and Instagram. Not my accounts – just the apps on my phone.

Things are really fucking nuts right now, we all know this. And if your social media threads are anything like mine, 99% of what people are posting are making things worse, not better. Mine are inspiring one long, low-key anxiety attack. And I consider myself a pretty rational…

I always see people griping about the month of January, saying it lasts forever. I sort of get the sentiment – the festivities of the holiday season are basically over, people take down the lights they put up, it’s dark and often dreary. But, as the mother of a kiddo whose birthday is the end of January, January hasn’t been a slog for me for a couple of years. Ever since I was pregnant, the first…

Last Look Before Launch

Greetings, blog friends!

Olfaction hits Amazon on Wednesday, and I’m beyond excited to have it out in the world. In celebration, here’s one last first look. In the meantime, you can add it to your GoodReads TBR, if that’s the sort of thing you’d be inclined to do.

Today may very well be the day I fall in love with him, she’s thought every time over the last three weeks she’s waited for his…

First Look at the First Meet

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve put a couple of teasers of Olfaction up on my Instagram. A couple of years ago, while promoting The Fix, I shared the opening couple of chapters with my old mailing list. At this point, I think I’ve decided I’m just not a mailing list-having author, at least not right now – I’m pretty happy with this blogging thing instead.

Since Olfactionis shorter, I’m…

Malisse expected to just go through the motions on her first Christmas without Ossie. After all, that’s what she’s been capable of doing since she became a widow. She definitely did not expect to meet Jason, the (extra) tall and accented stranger, and have him oh-so-briefly weave himself into her life, let alone her heart.

After Jason’s departure to his native New Zealand, Malisse figured…

I’m 34 today.

Some nice things that have happened so far:

My kid slept in and then gave me the biggest hug when I got her out of bed.

I’ve gotten myself to the gym and feel surprisingly strong considering how sick I was last week.

My kid waltzed into the gym drop-in center like she owns the place – a far cry from just a couple weeks ago when she’d scream and cling to me as soon as we were…

THE FIX, and What’s Next

I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for ages: I dropped off a copy of my novel at a Little Free Library near one of the coffee shops I used to write at a lot pre-kiddo. It’s in a neighborhood we visit weekly for our local farmer’s market, so it’s going to take a lot of willpower to not stalk back to the library and see if anyone’s come by and picked it up. As much as I love THE FIX,…

Filed Under: A Thing I Did Not Expect

An Instagram post I wrote for a mid-October writing challenge set by The Kindred Voice has been posted on the same’s blog. It’s a quick little thing I wrote for L, my daughter, on the prompt of Hope.

The link for it their blog post is here, and my original IG post is here.

For someone who spent an entire calendar year barely looking at social media of any kind and definitely not writing,…

I recently became a Patreon donor for a digital magazine called The Kindred Voice.Their niche is modern women’s issues, often surrounding motherhood, work/life balance, and the general guilt that is part and parcel to a lot of women’s lives. When choosing my donation tier, I purposely chose a tier that included the perk of monthly journaling prompts, because when your well is running dry, any…