Sorry I was not able to get back here to post more yesterday, but I was hard at work on 1954 Powder Blue Pickup for another 12 hours.

However, it is DONE, gang! And I just love it. I really do.

It’s 62 pages, about 35,000 words. I will go over the whole thing a final time today and then send it off to the new publisher tomorrow. And then we shall see.

For me, personally, it’s my most favorite thing that I’ve ever written. And I have written a whole heck of a lot of stuff, gang. But I just love this one.

And as is par for my usual course, it’s a love story with an implied “happily ever after” ending — but before we get to that happy ending, it’s indescribably filthy as hell!! And it’s totally hardcore and pushes every boundary of “questionable consent” imaginable. (As all good love stories should, in my happy opinion! Yay.) Okay.

So, golly, I am exhausted here. But I’m just really, really happy.

I’m going to dash into town to get the groceries here in a minute, and then spend the whole day doing the final edit on the book, because tomorrow, I absolutely must  prune back the hydrangea so that the dead blossoms, etc., can be picked up for yard compost when the truck comes by on Wednesday.

All of my neighbors now have their autumn mums on their porches, and their various pumpkins and decorative fall squashes and even Halloween lights!

And yet I still have all my summer petunias out, and all my happy little summer bird ornaments, and yard angels and summer “Welcome” signs and mosquito-repelling candles, etc., so I have to sort of kind of get with the program somehow — although I’m keeping my petunias until the frost comes and kills them.

Still, I’m going to gather all the various flower boxes onto the kitchen porch, so that at least the rest of the house & barn look like they’re appropriate for fall.

And then I guess we’ll get ever onward to the close of another year.

Well, I have not been able to actually speak to Valerie yet about her mom’s death. It will probably be several days before she’ll be taking any phone calls.  It has just been a really, really rough year for her. Big changes now for her, too. She is the last one left in her family now. Her younger brother died a very long time ago (he used to be my computer guy, back in the Dark Ages), then her dad died a few years back, and now her mom.

I tried to find a photo I have of her and her mom and one of her aunt’s heading off on a trip to Ireland many years ago, but I can’t find it. But they are all super-NYC Irish-Catholic blue-eyed blondes, and they all looked exactly alike. It was sort of uncanny.

Anyway, I feel very sad about that.

Okay, well, while hunting for that photo of Val and her mom, I saw that Nick Cave sent out a new Red Hand File just now. It appears to have something to do with magic, but I have not read it yet. Perhaps we can all follow this link and go over there and read it together!! Yay!!

Other than that, folks, well, I honestly have nothing going on over here. I have just been in another world, trying to get that novella written.  And it looks like I am gonna close this now, scoot into town, and then get right back to work on it so that I can officially say it is done!

I leave you with, like, the very first thing I saw on Instagram, the moment my eyes opened today. So I played it at breakfast. Rather intense breakfast-listening music; I’m not sure what the cats thought of it. (They do tend to prefer Broadway show tunes, frankly.) But it was Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ version of an old Leadbelly song “Black Betty.” As far as I know, it’s only on their B Sides & Rarities album (2005), but was recorded (as a B-side) in 1986.

So I leave you with that, oh, and I guess, in honor of my cats, I’ll also leave you with my hands-down favorite Broadway show tune of all time — “Letters” from the ill-fated Broadway fucking  amazing show, “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.” It was based on a lesser-known Tolstoy novel (just kidding — it was based on War & Peace), and I had tickets to see it in September 2017, when I went to NYC to work with Sandra on our other play. And I was so FUCKING excited to see it but the darn thing CLOSED before I could get there. (It was really, really unfortunate why that show closed, but I won’t go into it here.)

Okay, enjoy and thanks for visiting, gang. Have a terrific Monday, wherever you are in the world! I love you guys. See ya.