UPDATE MAY 28, 2023: I will begin charging for my work again in the next few days. Thank you to everyone who has downloaded and enjoyed the books. I hope they brought you some respite in escaping the stresses of the real world.
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Due to the disastrous pandemic of COVID-19, I am now offering all three of the current Druid Chronicles books for FREE. All I ask is that you stay home and read… and maybe share my books if you think someone will like them.
All three books are only free on Smashwords at the moment, but Smashwords is awesome and offers ebook files in most popular formats. Amazon will probably take a few days to catch up.
My granddaughter already went back to school a couple of weeks ago and my daughter went back to college this week. I was really looking forward to getting a regular schedule and having a daily time block every afternoon to work on book stuff (writing, editing, etc.), but guess what?
The plague has finally invaded my house.
My husband is a registered nurse who has been caring for mostly unvaccinated covid patients that are in the hospital. As we all know by now, Omicron is one contagious little variant, and he tested positive for it on Tuesday morning. He mentioned having sinus congestion on Saturday and a sore throat on Sunday. Also, he said he was tired. I should have paid attention to that because this man is never tired. He is a powerhouse who, except for a couple of vacations and a couple of months, has been working 60 hours a week for the past year and a half.
The good news is that he only had a sore throat for 3 days and now just has a little congestion. Thank you, vaccines. And scientists. And science. He’s been isolating in our room (I’m sleeping on the couch) and we both wear masks if I need to go in there. We’re all vaccinated and half of us are boosted, and so far no one else has any symptoms. Fingers crossed that it stays that way.
I haven’t gotten any writing or editing done because we only have one laptop (mine) and he’s been using it to keep himself entertained. Even though he’s feeling better, he can’t go back to work until he tests negative on the 25th, or five days afterwards if he’s positive and asymptomatic. He’s annoyed that he can’t go back to work, so I decided we could make the best of it by spending time together playing FFXIV (wearing masks) in the Command Center (basement) while the girls are at school.
He did bring my laptop out before he went back to bed this afternoon, so I emailed all the Chosen book files and all the finalized files of books 1 – 3. I’ve read all my own books in the last three weeks (wow, Druid is looooonnnng) and I made notes on what to include in Chosen and corrections to make in the others. Holy shit, Warrior is a mess but Druid, while it has its flaws, is in much better shape. I was going to start charging for them again, but I think I’ll wait until they are whipped into shape, given new covers, and re-published. Hopefully, all that will be accomplished around the same time that Chosen is published.
I don’t usually work on my PC and it’s cold af in the basement – especially when it’s twenty degrees outside – but I have a comfy computer chair and a space heater. I’ve been whining to myself about how everybody always wants to use my laptop and the house is always noisy, so maybe this is a good opportunity to find out if this could be a productive workspace for me. My PC is my gaming rig, but I might as well put this big screen and those awesome Bose speakers to good use.
Tomorrow is my cleaning and home organizing day, but hopefully, I’ll have enough energy in the evening to get some real work done. I’ll keep ya posted.
I read Traveler last week and just finished Warrior. Two thoughts have been most prominent:
#1, So Many Typos. Like, SO MANY. So many that I’m kinda dreading reading Druid (because I’m sure it’s worse). I apologize to everyone who has read my books and having an editor would definitely be the best part of getting published traditionally. Cleaning up the first three books is one of my major goals for the year, along with new covers.
#2, This story is SO GOOD. The books are good in spite of the typos. Maybe it’s conceited of me to say so, but after not reading any of my own books for a few years, I can look at them more objectively. If I can lose myself in a novel in spite of errors, that’s a damn good yarn. Now I’m even more motivated to make sure that Chosen is just as good as the first three. I certainly don’t want anyone to be disappointed by it. Even though it was 20+ years ago, I’ve never forgotten finishing Wheel of Time book 6 (or was it 7?) and thinking “I waited a whole year for that???”
I’ll start reading Druid tomorrow. I’ve been making notes about things to include in Chosen (and the inevitable Book 5) as I’ve been reading. There are a few characters from Warrior that I need to include, as well as some plot threads that I want to tie up.
[SPOILER ALERT – skip if you haven’t read Warrior]
I also want to include more of the content from“Child of Storms” (probably as flashbacks in Angie’s chapters) to explain what happened to Angie in the grove after she and Davis are separated.
Author-wise, I haven’t done anything else but re-read my own works. It’s necessary for story continuity and, honestly, it’s been too noisy and busy for me to write in a house with 6 people living in it. I used to write at Starbucks, but… pandemic. My husband works nights so I can’t even seclude myself in my own room and the basement is freezing. I’ve given serious consideration to writing in my bathroom but am resistant to embrace that level of ridiculousness. My granddaughter went back to public school last week (Praise the Gods!) and my daughter goes back to college next week, so I will finally have the quiet I need to write. I’ll try to put up the next chapter of Doomed this weekend but have found myself debating whether or not to devote time to it at all. Sometimes I hate my impulsive and indecisive brain. Mostly, though, it’s my friend. Gotta take the bad with the good, right?
I’ve always loved writing resolutions. However, the word “resolution” has such a negative connotation these days that I’ve joined the Word of the Year and Yearly Challenge clubs.
First, my word for the year: Reset
I’ve been struggling with adrenal fatigue for at least six years now and probably longer. I’m a morning person and working as a night shift nurse in consistently high-stress jobs for years helped my bank account but hurt my health. I powered through my master’s degree with ADHD meds and caffeine, but after all was said and done, no amount of stimulants can relieve the brain fog and fatigue. I’ve taken some steps to improve my health and it’s gotten better, but there are still many days when I just don’t have the energy, motivation, or brainpower to do much more than take care of my horse, myself, and the laundry. This is the big reason that I haven’t been able to finish my fourth book in a timely fashion, but in 2022 I aim to lick this thing once and for all and GET SHIT DONE. 😀
The basic steps to “curing” adrenal fatigue are sleep, diet, no caffeine, and stress reduction. I am not working a paying job (my husband has encouraged me to stay home!) and my granddaughter is going back to public school next week (woohoo!), so those sources of stress have been eliminated. I’ve cut down to 1/3 caf coffee and should be caffeine-free by the end of next week. I’m pretty good with sleep, i.e., I’m in the bed for at least 8 hours on most nights. I do tend to stay up late on the nights we play Dungeons & Dragons, so I’ll have to make sure we start and end on time, no matter how much fun I’m having. #adulting. I have IBS, which may have led to leaky gut, which can lead to adrenal fatigue because it causes physical stress on the body, so I’m cleaning up my diet for the next 12 weeks. It won’t be fixed in 12 weeks, but it’ll be better.
The hard part about choosing 22 goals for the year is being realistic about how much I can actually accomplish while also resting and not stressing out over any of it. So I’ve made “fix adrenal fatigue” one item and created a separate project list, most of which is hobby and art stuff. So here it is:
Read Traveler, Warrior, and Druid and make notes. Need to make sure I wrap up all the plot threads. I will probably do this before continuing to edit Chosen, but I feel it is necessary.
Finish editing Chosen and publish (this encompasses several steps but it’s still just one). BTW, I’ve scheduled time for this: 1230-1530 Monday through Friday. Fifteen hours a week doesn’t sound like much, but I wrote my first book (not about druids) in 7 months by writing for only four hours, three days a week. It was over 300 pages.
Proofread, re-edit, & republish Traveler
Proofread, re-edit, & republish Warrior
Proofread, re-edit, & republish Druid
Start writing the adventures of our D&D characters and publish as a serial (I honestly didn’t expect it to be such a good story, but it is. Hopefully my daughter -who is also an author- will write her own character’s parts). I’ll post chapters here and in places like Scriggler and Wattpad. I’ve been doing some art related to the campaign, so will be posting that on IG with publication notifications. I might get the first chapter out as early as tomorrow.
Have all the book covers redesigned. Angie and Davis are both persons of color and the cover doesn’t reflect that. This was a bad choice on my part and needs to be rectified. Finances are limited, though (because I don’t have a paying job), so I’m researching options.
Update all social media sites to reflect my chosen author name. I’ve always hated both my first and middle names, am seriously thinking of having them legally changed, and I love my nursing nickname “JDunn.” So that’s what I’m going with.
Write on this blog weekly (at least). Blogging is hard because I’ll think of things to say and then not write them because I think nobody cares. However, I care, so I’m going to get over it and just do it.
Update the Druid Chronicles website. I’ll have to hire someone because my coding skills are archaic and it’s time-consuming. I do have someone in mind who is very good and can help with social media. I write because I love it but it would be really nice to have some income from it.
Read 30-60 minutes every night. As Stephen King has said, one cannot be a great writer without being a great reader. This is the other big reason I haven’t been doing well at writing. I haven’t allowed myself to read. I love reading. It has been a lifelong passion, so I don’t know why I quit, but I will allow myself that intense source of pleasure once more.
Buy an Apple Pencil and start using the how-to drawing bundle I bought from StackSocial months ago. I loved comic books when I was a kid and used to draw my own characters and imaginings. I also drew lots of horses. So many horses. SO. MANY. I also think that the D&D campaign would also make a great web comic. I’m subscribed to a few comics on WebToons and love them so much. However, my drawing skills aren’t up to that level and I need to learn to use digital art programs. I’d also like to make drawings of my beloved druid characters and scenes from the books. They might also make a good web comic (see what I mean about being realistic with this list?
Fix the adrenal fatigue.
Work out with the MindPump MAPS Anywhere and MAPS Prime programs to get stronger and more flexible. Y’all, I’m tired of feeling old and weak. My husband is an athlete who is in great shape, and I want to be able to keep up with him. I don’t want our future fun to be limited by an old, broken-down body.
Pick up longsword training and archery again. I dabbled in both several years ago and both my training sword and my son’s little recurve bow are is sitting around collecting dust. Okay, so the bow and quiver are actually hanging as decorations in the D&D dining room, but I want to do mounted archery at some point.
Take weekly riding lessons. I haven’t been riding enough and I need to ride a solidly trained horse to help me regain my confidence (and build my muscles) so I can ride my own horse.
Move my horse to a new barn. I’ve been thinking of doing this anyway because Peregrine seems so fearful of the arena at our current barn. I love our barn owner and didn’t want to hurt his feelings by leaving (sue me, I’m a loyal person). Just before Christmas, however, he told me he’s selling his farm, so now I’m free to go and can probably even ask him to transport Peregrine for me.
Use the Organize 365 program to declutter the house and get organized. I bought it last year and still haven’t made good use of it. My house is a fucking disaster (except for the living and dining rooms, which we renovated and I have somehow managed to maintain). We decluttered a bunch of junk from the basement in 2020 but there’s still a lot more. Our house doesn’t have much storage and I have pack rat tendencies, so I will be cleaning house big time. Having less stuff to take care of will help me greatly in focusing on the important things.
Hire an electrician to re-wire the house. Seriously, this house was wired by either the cheapest or most insane electrician the builder could find. The breaker box is in the master bedroom. Who does that??? We cannot change out light switches because then they don’t work anymore, and changing out light switches isn’t rocket science. Half the electrical sockets in the house don’t work, and none of the outside sockets work. The garage doors are stuck open. It’s fucking ridiculous.
Finish reorganizing and redecorating the basement. Frame the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings posters and hang. Donate the extra books. Get a non-slip pad for the rug. Murder whoever keeps leaving empty soda boxes on the floor instead of throwing them away.
Get wall mounts for our new lightsabers (omg they’re so amazing, Savi’s Workshop was the best experience ever). Edit: found out what kind to get on Reddit and ordered some. Can’t wait to hang them!
Scan all printed photographs and 35mm negatives (yes, I still have those and most are 30 years old). Send my old external hard drive to recover the digital pictures on it (finances permitting).
I’m going to go read Traveler now. Happy New Year!
Just went over chapters 1 through 5 and am extremely pleased to find that they are GOOD. I even laughed at the funny parts, which I never do. I was wondering why I wasn’t excited the other night when I finished the first draft, and I guess it was because the whole thing was such a slog that I figured it was all complete dogshit. But it’s not – at least the first 5 chapters aren’t – and I’m happy.
Before I get started with the endless list of excuses as to why it took me forever to finish this book, I feel the need to relate that I scared the shit out of myself this evening by trying to log in to WordPress and receiving a message that my account had been deactivated.
Now, I have decided to drop my hated middle name “Paige” and just go with J. Dunn, which of course wasn’t available, so had to go with authorjdunn. Annoying that it has to be all one word but I’m sure it’s just me being picky and OCD. Anyway, as I was going through emails from 2012 (no inbox zero here!), I realized that I also changed the account email address, which was the real problem. So I was freaking out a little bit, but only because I can’t stand to lose anything I’ve ever written. You just have to see all my writing folders with titles like “Traveler cuts” and “Warrior extras” and “Druid quotes” to know that.
So.
After not writing for MONTHS, I finally started feeling the mojo again. I wrote for 2-3 hours every evening, last Friday through Monday, and then finished last night.
Yeah. Finishing three chapters was literally all I had to do. Sorry.
And gosh, all it took was two vacations, carpal tunnel surgery, and quitting my job. Oh, and then I saw this on Facebook:
I think it took longer to find, resize, add, and center this pic than write this post.
It hit me like a five-ton hammer that it was me and this book.
I hate to blame everything on the ADHD and/or the pandemic, but they did have a lot to do with my stalling out. My husband and I are both nurses and while he works in a hospital and I don’t, we both began working a lot more hours. He bumped up to 60 hours a week from August 2020 until June 2021 with a break for December (he LOVES those winter holidays). I was working 24 hours on weekends as a private duty nurse, which gave me time to write and play with my horses as well as do important household stuff like cooking and cleaning. However, in August 2020, I bumped up to 40 hours a week and from then on we were in survival mode. We had clean dishes and clean laundry, and everything else went to shit in a handbasket.
On top of that, we found out we had termites in August 2020 and had to deal with getting one living room wall, part of a dining room wall, and part of a man cave wall gutted and repaired. Contractors are super busy and said they couldn’t get to it for 3-6 months, so I hired a handyman I trusted and he handled it. Because our house was a fixer-upper when we bought it 10+ years ago, we decided to make lemonade out of lemons and put in new flooring. Of course, it only escalated from there until we also repainted, put in a new fireplace, closed the passthrough between the kitchen and dining room, and took down the living room popcorn ceiling. I knew the DIY popcorn ceiling thing was a terrible idea but my husband really wanted to. I’m always the naysayer who pisses on everybody’s fun ideas, so after saying “This will be a lot of work and probably is a bad idea,” I decided to be a nice and supportive wife by letting Edward do what he wanted. As usual, I was right. It was a god-awful mess and we’ll probably have to have a professional fix the corners if we ever want to sell the house, but it looks okay. I never look at the ceiling anyway.
While we were renovating the living and dining rooms, all the crap that was in there was relocated to our bedroom and the exercise area in the basement. During the big snowstorm, I couldn’t even get out of the driveway, so I repainted the walls and trim in the computer, TV, and library areas of the basement. Then the whole thing was a huge mess, so I spent most of my days off decluttering and cleaning. It’s still not finished, but it’s livable. In fact, the living and dining rooms aren’t 100% finished, but nobody will ever notice that I need to repaint the dining room window trim. Especially not with all the cool nerdy fantasy and D&D stuff in there. 😉 (Book-related side note: I don’t usually let ADHD stop me from doing things, but it’s a fact that there are a lot of not-quite-finished projects around here.)
To go back even further, after obtaining my master’s degree as a family nurse practitioner – and passing the certification exam – I decided that this was not the career for me. I had six months of churning stomach and the worst anxiety of my life after graduation while studying for that exam. Then after I passed, I couldn’t even think about looking for a job without wanting to throw up.
I’ve always believed in following my gut, but it was SO hard giving up on that prospective career. I had spent tens of thousands of dollars on tuition and books, thousands of hours of studying and clinicals, and an untold amount of stress and effort, only to give up on a career before I ever even started it. I felt like an abysmal failure and my confidence in myself was shattered. It has taken every bit of the last three years to heal from that, to get over feeling like a failure in the eyes of society, and finally embrace that I did what I needed to do. Or rather, didn’t do what wasn’t good for me.
That is how I got into private duty nursing. I needed a low-key, very low-stress job where I could recover my confidence and still feel like I was contributing financially to our family. If nothing else, I needed to be able to pay for my own horses, gas, Starbucks addiction, and student loans. For two and a half years, that job was perfect, and I knew I was truly close to being back to normal around June of 2021 and started looking for a work-from-home job. The recruiter, who had sounded so excited to have me because of my ER triage experience, never called back. I took leave to have carpal tunnel surgery, which was on July 23rd (10/10 would recommend). While I was recovering, my husband, who is truly the most wonderful person in the world, suggested that I just quit and stay home. Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking of going back to get my teaching certificate in Fall 2022 so I can eventually teach nursing school. We’ll see.
As I was looking forward to at least a year of spending every morning playing with the ponies, cleaning and decluttering every afternoon, and writing in the evenings, our idiot state legislature voted anti-mask legislation into law. This meant that state could not require the students to wear masks and the decision was left up to local school boards. They did this about a month before school started.
I have an 8 year old granddaughter – let’s call her Pikachu – who is too young to get vaccinated – AND – her mother was accepted into nursing school. Because I want to support my daughter advancing her education and financial independence, I offered to homeschool the kid so my daughter could attend school without worrying about her kid dying from Covid-19. However, Pikachu did virtual schooling last year and desperately wanted to go back to school to be with other kids this year. Yeah, I don’t get it, either. She’s not like anyone else in the family: she’s tall, she tans, she talks a lot, and she loves people. I’m pretty sure she was switched out by the fae at some point, but we’re kind of attached to her now, so I guess we’ll keep her. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway, her bestie’s mom has some health issues and is even more paranoid about getting Covid than we are, so I offered to homeschool her, too. We’ll call her Evee. We got a late start because I had planned a trip to see my sister in L.A., so I just finished the second week of homeschooling two kids with ADHD. It’s actually going better than I thought it would. I can’t set our still-a-disaster house to rights the way I wanted, but I still get my barn time for a couple of hours every morning. Edward calls it my horse therapy, and… yeah, he’s totally right. We homeschool from 11 to 3, and then the Pokémon play while I cook dinner. I watch YouTube with the hubs while we eat and when he goes to work, I go feed the horses supper.
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights are dedicated to writing from 7:30 – 10:30. I come back from the barn, clean up, put on my pajamas, make tea, light a candle, and tell everybody else to leave me alone. Some of that time will be given to rewriting and editing, but you get the idea. And the nice thing is, I actually feel like writing. I’ve always realized that I can’t wait to be “in the mood” to write, that sometimes you just have to saddle that wild horse and sit on it until it behaves. But in all honesty, when I want to write, the passion really comes through and the characters come alive.
While I’m finished with the first draft, I’m pretty sure it’s really rough. It took so long to write, and the writing was done in big spurts with months between them, that I’m not even sure the plot makes sense. For one thing, Angie’s character is pretty flat and I really wanted her view of the world to be more descriptive. Oh, I wrote it from both Angie and Davis’ perspectives, alternating about every two chapters. I really hope it isn’t super confusing, but we’ll see. Rewriting Angie’s parts will be essential to eliminating any possible confusion because she and Davis have very difference voices. As author Shannon Hale once said, “I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.”
Let’s hope I’ve been shoveling sand and not shit. 😉
Note that I didn’t say “post-pandemic update.” That shit is still going on, so keep wearing your masks. I sure as hell am.
I’ve been meaning to write an update for a while, but as I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m the world’s worst blogger. Mostly I think nobody cares what I have to say outside of storytelling, but also I tell myself that this time would be better used for writing.
I am a nurse and so of course was not forced out of work last year. In fact, I went from working 24 hours a week to a 40 in August 2020. I thought I had it all planned out and that I would have enough time for writing, horses, and personal care, but I was mistaken. I could do it when I was working three 12-hour shifts several years ago, but somehow that extra four hours working five days a week had been amazingly time restrictive.
Also, all three of my kids live with my husband and I, plus my extremely extroverted, talkative granddaughter. So when schools went online last spring, I ended up on babysitting duty. Also, having six people in the house ALL THE TIME meant it’s been tough to find a place to write and not be interrupted or distracted.
In addition, we found out we had termites and had to fix one living room wall, part of a dining room wall, and a wall in the basement. This turned into renovating both the living room and the dining room, and while they are beautiful and wonderful, it was a lot of work. We did hire someone to do the stuff we couldn’t, as my husband (also a nurse but employed at a hospital) started working 60 hours a week last summer. And because the living and dining rooms turned out so well, I decided to declutter, rearrange, and repaint half the basement, which is about 1000 square feet. Luckily, we had that huge snowstorm and I couldn’t get to work for several days, so that gave me plenty of time to paint most of it. I’ve finished all the painting (yay me!) but have the remaining tasks of putting things back where they belong, framing/hanging artwork, and a final decluttering session.
Even if all that hadn’t happened, I’d still have been messed up writing-wise, because the pandemic threw me for a loop just like everybody else. I got stressed out, pissed off, and gained weight like everybody else. Unlike a lot of people, our finances didn’t suffer, we didn’t lose our house or cars, and none of our family members became ill with SARS CoV2. My youngest child finally started driving on his own and even bought his own car! After driving him to work for 2 years, I am still jazzed about that.
I was going to start my new writing schedule this week. However, I am having carpal tunnel surgery in July and will be spending my days off this week trying to get the basement finished. Everything just takes so much longer than I think it will, and that, my friend, is really annoying.
All the writing advice says to write every day at the same time and that just hasn’t been working for me. It takes me a good 30 minutes to sink into that flow state and then it’s time to quit. I told myself not to get hung up on needing three or four hours to write and to give the daily writing thing a chance. I did and it doesn’t work for me. So I’m going to shuffle my life around somehow and go back to how I used to do things.
How is the writing going, you may ask? Well, not fabulous. If it weren’t for NaNoWriMo, I wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much done on it as I have.
Chosen is going to be another whopper like Druid/ I’m already at 612 pages and about 220,000 words. In comparison, Druid around 679 pages and 224,000 words.
Houston, we have a problem, and I just now realized it.
After reading Karen Chance’s blog post about how she was splitting her latest Cassie Palmer novel into two books, I started considering doing the same with Chosen. Honestly, after her comment that she makes zero money on the big print novels, I’ve started thinking maybe I should split up Druid, too. $25 is a lot to spend on a paperback, and I get about $4 of that. This is basically a hobby, so I’d rather my books be more affordable.
Amazon’s print on demand need to be limited to under 700 pages due to issues with books falling apart if they’re bigger than that (understandable). Chosen is probably going to end up being 900 pages. So I either need to have a fifth book or chop the hell out of it. Or make the print smaller (10 point instead of 12), which might be weird in a trade paperback? I’ve considered Warlord for a title and could start it after the Finns get to Ward the first time (trying to avoid spoilers here) and end it somewhere in Chosen.
Ideas and suggestions welcome! Let me know what you think!
I made a fun and lighthearted gift basket for my mom and sister to celebrate Mother’s Day this year. Included were the ubiquitous candy and flowers… but also my homemade cloth masks, toilet paper wrapped in ribbons and bows, and hand sanitizer with “Corona Killer” written on it in red Sharpie.
Pandemic gift basket :p
I put the basket on the front porch and rang the doorbell before backing away to a safe distance. We shared laughs and both Mom and my sister really enjoyed the gift.
I don’t think of myself as a sentimental person, and I do just fine without a lot of social contact (as long as it’s meaningful when it occurs). I was a tomboy in my elementary years and a survivor of various emotional traumas (many due to my own poor choices). I’m a tough girl ™️
I didn’t expect to feel that sudden pang and tears threatening when I had to leave without giving my mom a hug.
Several months ago, she offered to go through all three Druid Chronicles novels and help with editing. Since I’m an indy author who primarily writes and publishes for fun, I can’t justify spending thousands of dollars on a professional editor. So I’ve done 95% of it myself. I’m good at grammar but editing one’s own material is tough simply because I’m so familiar with the material. Catching errors and typos requires a fresh eye that is extremely difficult for an author.
I had more or less forgotten about it, assuming that my 3 year old nephew, work, and the pandemic had eaten up all her spare time. I was wrong.
Today, Mom gave me two quarts of local strawberries and her copy of Traveler, complete with what looked like a million sticky notes scattered throughout its pages.
I guess we all want our parents to be proud of us, but I’ve spent decades becoming significant to myself so that compliments are lovely, but icing on a delicious cake.
Her words to me today, however, were a precious gift. She said that while she was going through Traveler, she was reminded of what a “wonderful writer” and “excellent wordsmith” I am.
She’s told me before that she likes my books, but your mom is supposed to say nice things about your creative endeavors. My mom especially, since she sometimes takes “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” to an extreme. She is truly one of the nicest, kindest people you will ever meet. She only gets sweeter and.more loving with age.
But today I really took her words to heart, and I find myself on the verge of tears again. I’ve had such difficulty finding time to be a writer in the past several weeks. I can’t seem to find the time to fix the things that I know need fixing, and to finish the fourth novel. For once, I haven’t been beating myself up over it, but there has been a gentle daily reminder to get back to my laptop.
This pandemic has us all in a tailspin, trying to figure out how to juggle kids, jobs, and staying safe. My daughter is an essential worker, so my granddaughter has been with me anywhere from 15 to 25 hours a week since schools closed. What with riding and training my horses in the morning (so they don’tget wild), having Rory in the afternoons, and preparing supper and spending time with family in the evening, my schedule is packed. Unlike a lot of people, I am busier than before the shutdown.
It has been a valuable lesson in how much time I really had before all this started, and how much of it I wasted. It is a lesson I am constantly learning, as I’m sure many of us are.
My mom told me she’s going back to work in the morning. She’s a church secretary. I told her to put some tape on the floor to keep people from coming too close. She’s over seventy, and while she’s in good health, too many people around here seem not to be taking COVID-19 seriously.
I need to write and edit tomorrow. But I’ll probably spend the time making her some more masks.
As Arkansas is one of the few states without lockdown orders, our parks are still open. The playgrounds, picnic tables, and workout stations are cordoned off, but the walking trails are open.
Welcome to the park!You have to pee in the woods! Sorry!
Overall, people seemed to observe social distancing rules, with the notable exception of Runner Dude, who ran up behind me panting from a foot away, and Dog Momma.
The scooter lasted about 15 minutes. Then we had to walk back and put it back in the car.
Rory loves animals and exhibited a phenomenal amount of self-control by oohing and ahhing over all the cute dogs instead of running over and begging to pet them.
Unfortunately, after she exclaimed over one dog’s cuteness, Dog Momma – who was carrying the dog – invited Rory to pet it. Of course the small child forgot all else and rushed to pet the poochie, but I grabbed her, saying “Nope!” I gave Dog Momma an apologetic smile and told her thank you for offering.
To Rory’s credit, the reminder snapped her back to the rules and she didn’t even complain about not getting to pet the dog. We continued our walk, looking at the lake, ducks, geese, turtles, and fish.
This is what I get when I ask for a smile.
Overall, she had a great time, said it was very peaceful and relaxing. Exercise is always good and keeping the kid entertained is even better, but I felt like I had to constantly watch out for numbskulls who don’t know how far 6 feet is – or who simply don’t care.
And honestly, it doesn’t matter whether they agree with the governor’s decrees or not. If people don’t distance themselves appropriately, we’ll lose the use of our walking trails, too.
We got a taste of that last weekend when an EF3 tornado ripped through the middle of town. Jonesboro is a small city with a population of about 76,000. The tornado didn’t travel a straight path, obviously, but this map approximates its path. I’ve marked some of the places that were hit. The map doesn’t show where it went after the airport, when it hit a furniture store, an ambulance base, damaged another neighborhood of houses, and knocked a train off its rails before continuing north to Paragould and beyond. I heard that flyers for Aldi (where the tornado dropped) were found in Rector, MO, approximately 150 miles away.
“Homes destroyed” should have been above the mall, not below it. Sorry!
My two favorite lines from this video are “What are we even doing???” and “Well, did not expect this today! This is great. The apocalypse is AMAZING.” Arkansans are awesome. 🙂
This video shows an aerial view of the path of destruction in reverse, starting at the northeast side of town and ending up where the tornado started.
Magic Touch dry cleaner. German Auto Tech, the mechanic that fixes my car, was behind it and was also wiped out. If anything happens to my car, I guess I’m buying another vehicle because nobody else works on Saabs.
Gateway Tire
Post office
View from the VA Clinic on Red Wolf Blvd
You can see the post office in the upper left
Tacos 4 Life is just east of Kohl’s and Ashley Furniture.
Without a doubt, the coronavirus pandemic is bad luck for all of us, but on this day it was a silver lining in the storm clouds. There normally would have been more cars on the roads and people eating out and shopping. While our population isn’t that large, Jonesboro is encircled by many small towns. People from 50 miles around come into town to shop and there would have been hundreds of people at the mall.
But not that day. Because of the coronavirus, the mall was almost empty.
Door’s open, come on in. :p
Dillard’s
Inside Barnes & Noble
The entrance to Best Buy
View from inside the mall, looking toward the front of Best Buy
The mall interior pictures were taken by a friend who is a paramedic and first responder.
Inside the mall
Foot Locker doesn’t have an external entrance
Street sign from Red Wolf Blvd, which is several hundred feet from the mall.
Wow.
Neighborhood behind the mall
Jonesboro Municipal Airport
Southern view from NEA Baptist Hospital
The train derailed and fortunately, the worst chemical that spilled was ethanol.
Because of the coronavirus, there were no fatalities from this tornado. Twenty-two people were injured and only two of them were hurt badly enough to stay in the hospital.
Every dark cloud has a silver lining.
Almost forgot: it took a few days to get the results back, but my mother was negative for COVID-19. Yay!
the scriptorium of author J. Dunn 