Skip to content

Journal

Nothing left

How to Recover from Trauma: Tip #2 Accept You’re a Victim

March 2, 2019

Bad Things Happen Most of the time there’s nothing we can do about it. When my entire neighborhood was lost in the 2017 Northern California Wildfires, no one saw it coming. I don’t live in the middle of the forest. I’m in a residential neighborhood. That shit just doesn’t happen! I just so happened to…

Read More
Amazon Fresh Donation

How to Recover from Trauma: Tip #1 Learn to Say Yes

February 25, 2019

Amazon Fresh donation from family friends Swallowing Pride I’ve never been good at accepting help. Call it pride, call it stubbornness, but it’s one of my biggest faults. In college, I literally failed courses because I thought that going to my professor to tell him or her that I was struggling meant that I was…

Read More
Tidying Up

Sometimes I want to punch Marie Kondo in the face

February 22, 2019

Tidy This When you’ve lost everything in a fire, you kind of want to punch Marie Kondo in the face. Going through your personal belongings and only keeping what sparks joy? How about when you have to go to Safeway to buy a pair of leggings just so you can have something to wear other…

Read More

Motherhood, PTSD, and the Loss of Optimism

May 22, 2018

Strength and perseverance has always come easy to me. I’ve always been a ‘glass half full’ kind of person. To be fair, I haven’t had the hardest life, but I can usually find a very clear path forward whenever the universe decides to make things interesting. The universe lately has had one sick sense of…

Read More

The Hunt for Sweeny Observatory at Strawberry Hill

April 10, 2018

One of the things I love most about writing historical fiction is exploring the areas that I’m writing about. It’s fun to go to a place in a scene I’m writing and imagine what it must have been like during the period of my story. With historical fiction, I try to be as true to…

Read More
San Francisco Writers Conference

Top 5 Things I Learned at the San Francisco Writers Conference

February 22, 2018

Last week I attended my first ever writers conference, the 2018 San Francisco Writers Conference. I went into it being pretty sure I wanted to make writing my new career. The experience affirmed this decision and then some. Deciding to be a writer, if you’ve ever been there or imagined what it would be like, is…

Read More

Course Correction: I’m a Writer

February 21, 2018

After making a career for myself in web technology, I have decided to make a change. From now on, I will be identifying as a full-time writer. Yes, I said it. WTF? Why?? I’m crazy. I know, you don’t have to tell me. I’ve been making good money building websites at One Day Labs. I’m…

Read More

1 in 100

February 12, 2018

My son Apollo will be 8 weeks old on Valentine’s Day. He has a congenital heart defect – severe pulmonary stenosis with double outlet right ventricle. This week is CHD awareness week, which is fitting for it being February 14th. He’s 1 out of 100 kids born with a heart issue. I was never sure…

Read More