January 2021

Grief. Outrage. Horror. Anxiety. Relief. Hope.

January was a month of emotional extremes. The first anniversary of my dad’s death. An attempted coup. The horrific milestone of 400,000 dead in this country from COVID. The more personal fear and anxiety when the illness struck close to home, and the relief when loved ones received the vaccine.

Since I was a kid, my MO has been to hide myself in books, and wowza did I hide a lot in January. Thank goodness for Christmas cash and curbside pickup at my local indie — the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas — plus the Hoopla digital service provided by my hometown Tonganoxie Public Library. 

What I’m reading

I filled two empty spots in my William Kent Krueger collection with Thunder Bay and Manitou Canyon. I adore Krueger’s Cork O’Connor series, a passion I shared with my dad.

A trio of novels by Deanna Raybourn — Silent in the Grave, Silent in the Sanctuary, and Silent on the Moor — offered a sexy escape into the past. Less sexy, more gritty, but just as entertaining were Alafair Burke’s The Wife, Ivy Pochoda’s These Women, and Laura Lippman’s Charm City.

In a break from my beloved mystery genre, All This Could Be Yours by Jami Attenberg, with its tale of a seriously screwed up family, was a delight. Attenberg’s weekly newsletter on writing and publishing, Craft Talk, is a must-read for me. Most weeks, I feel like she’s looked over my shoulder and offered precisely the advice I need at that moment to get me writing again.

In nonfiction, I finished Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane, a book I’ve been reading in bits and pieces over a couple of months, savoring every word. In contrast, I devoured the excellent My Life as a Villainess by Laura Lippman in two sittings.

What I’m writing

Despite the turmoil of the month, or maybe because of it, I hit a couple of important self-imposed targets in writing in January. I finished a manuscript and sent it to my agent, finished and submitted a short story, roughed out a second short story, and began to sketch the foundation for a new novel-length project.