A bear visited my yard

What you can and can’t control

💻 what I'm up to 💻
A few days after my last newsletter I came home from errands in the late afternoon, went outside to chase a trilling blue jay off the bluebird nesting box (blue jays sometimes eat small nestlings), and looked up. The blue jay was making its alarm chirp because a bear was sleeping in a tree in my yard. It was up high and looked so small that I thought it was a cub. We live in black bear country, but this was the first time I’d seen one in our neighborhood.

Since mama bears often send cubs up trees while they get food, I left it alone. Black bears aren’t aggressive or that scary, but I do not mess with mama bears. But reader, it was not a cub. It came down into the yard to investigate our bird feeders and I could see it was a young adult. I think it’s probably this bear’s first summer on its own and I definitely didn’t want it to establish territory in our immediate area It pulled down a feeder pole, ignoring me banging on a pot lid with a spoon through an open window from inside. Eventually it fled back up the tree and the next morning I cleaned up and brought the bird feeders in (I take the feeders out in the morning and bring them in at night now because bears have a long memory when it comes to food sources).

Seeing a bear so close was wild. Wild. 

And more than anything else, a reminder that there are some things I can control. Many things, like the presence of a determined bear in my yard, I cannot. I can only do so much to affect that, so that’s what I did. It was hard to accept because it felt like I should have been doing more? It’s dangerous for bears to get used to human food and to get comfortable in human neighborhoods. But I couldn’t, like, chase it away or bodily remove it.

Control what you can. Leave the bears alone.

📘 my book things 📘
Balancing a schedule as an author is always precarious. It’s knowing what to prioritize and knowing yourself well enough to understand how you work and when you work best. I make schedules and plans and then things shift, and I scrap those plans and start over, but I’m very good at pivoting. Anyway, I’ll be hitting another milestone when I turn Thrill Ride back over to my editor next Monday after a second round of edits. I’ll be close to wrapping up one licensed IP project by the middle of the month, and I’ll be about halfway through another. My summer goal is to finish rewriting my middle grade fantasy. I’m very grateful to have stories and books to work on.

You know last time I said I’d have a preorder link for signed copies of Hulk Not Smash? Here it is! I’ll go sign the books as soon as Malaprop’s has ‘em in October.

📺 what I'm watching 📺

Ambient Worlds
I’ve not been feeling much TV recently, so if the TV is even on, I probably have a Lord of the Rings ambient video pulled up to have a nice background to work, read, or cross-stitch to. Ambient Worlds has a whole LOTR playlist.

📚 what I'm reading 📚
Kilt Trip by Alexandra Kiley
1) I love a romance novel where the setting and place plays a big part. 2) Scotland is my favorite place that’s not Asheville. So when I saw Kilt Trip on the shelves at my local book store’s anniversary sale? Forget about it. It’s a story about a family tourism business based out of Edinburgh and the consultant who comes in to try to increase profits and this a near and dear trope to me. I read this right after finishing my first round of edits for Thrill Ride and it was an excellent reward that made me want to go back to Scotland ASAP.

The Daevabad trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty
I’ve had this epic fantasy trilogy on my TBR cart since it debuted in 2018. It took me until this year to start them and now I’m about ⅕ of the way through the last book. The series starts with The City of Brass and the world is gorgeous, blending our world with that of the djinn and Daevas. I've become so attached to Nahri, Ali, and Dara. No summary I write here is going to encapsulate the delicate, transportive story, but this is the kind of fantasy that makes me believe in magic. The prose is so vivid, the characters so rich, and it's just the kind of story you want to luxuriate in.

I’ve also read and enjoyed Abby Jimenez’s Just for the Summer, Sarah Adams’ When in Rome, and Alexandria Bellefleur’s Truly, Madly, Deeply.

🐳 something whalesome 🐳
I like wholesome things and the whale emoji is cute so: whalesome!

When last I wrote, I had just discovered bluebirds were nesting in a box in the yard. I monitored the nest every few days. Put a chicken wire fence around the bottom to keep the neighborhood cat who visits my yard out of their business. The five baby birds grew up so fast! They started sticking their heads out begging for food in the two days before they fledged and it was unreal. So cute they looked fake. Mom and pop are still coming by the feeder so I hope to see juvenile bluebirds sometime this summer.

🍃 creativity corner 🍃
Here I’ll share tips and tricks that are helping me write, imagine, and/or stay productive.
Get specific now in your draft now, save yourself later. Anything you hand wave away because you are too lazy to explain it will come back to haunt you at some point during editing. Describe your characters internally and externally more. Explicitly spell out the thing you think everyone just knows. If you don’t want to get into it while you’re drafting, leave yourself a note to come back later. Don’t wait until multiple drafts later to be like “ohhhhh right.” 

Why yes, I am speaking from experience. Editing a whole novel is so much different than editing the non-fiction licensed IP work I’ve done.

📃 quote of the month 📃
“A page of a book, he noted, cannot be absorbed in one stare; you need to go word by word.” - Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci

Isaacson pulled this bit, I believe, from one of da Vinci’s many many notebooks, and I find it helpful in reminding myself that everything is a process. It’s especially relevant right now as I’m trying to slow down in my current editing pass.

How are you? Please reply or comment and let me know what you’re reading and how you’re doing!!