So, after Left Coast Crime 2024: Seattle Shakedown last year, I hit a serious writer’s block. The collaboration that my writing partner an I were working on had gone nova just before the convention and I wasn’t sure that the 30+ year friendship was going to survive. (It did, we talked a lot during the con and figured out what had gone wrong during the project – different writing styles and expectations primarily, which is a really big thing to overcome. We’re still friends, which is the important part.)

The other part, besides me being given the IP rights to the project so that I could continue it, was that I set it aside to try and figure out where it was going from there, and how I was going to get it there.

In April, I launched this website, AshleighWritesBooks.com, from the previous website for RenDuvallBooks,com, which had been the collaboration website, which was, naturally, no more. And it was pretty empty. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, or the book.

They both sat for months.

And, for months I didn’t write anything. I couldn’t. I did piddling things, some book reviews on Amazon, which were initially posted there and on our Coven’s website (yes, I’m a Witch, if you didn’t know that, you possibly should, in case it makes some kind of difference to anyone. I don’t think it should, but it does for some people. But if it does, then they are the kind of people I’m inclined to be overly concerned about, because they mostly aren’t *my people*.)

Anyway, at the end of August, I opened up the draft that had been sitting for roughly six months and began reading it. I posted on the website blog at that time:

“I’m still rereading it, and see a lot of places that need improvement, and think I know the way forward on revising where it needs to go and flow as opposed to where it was initially intended, as those plotlines were too entangled with Other Things that are no longer within my capability for a number of reasons, which need not be gone into.

But I can acknowledge that, and having done so, and begin the process of moving forward. I expect I will begin working on it in earnest by mid-September, unless the characters take over my life again as they did in the early days, and insist that I pick it up sooner.”

Well, September came and went, and “Good Bones” did not resume work…but in November, I did say that I was hoping to resume “in about two weeks” — and the next thing I knew, it was April 2025 already.

Sigh.

I wrote some poetry, some song-based short fiction (“songfics”), posted some of my old fanfic from back when I was minorly involved certain fandoms “back in the day” over on Archive of Our Own/”AO3″ – several members of our family had been early participants in the mega-fandom-spanning “Sylum Clan” back then.

I really wish I could find the backup copy of the novella I was writing back then called “Clair de Lune“. Sadly, it’s likely lost and gone forever, due to multiple computer failures and drive crashes. It was a Potterverse fanfic, as many of mine were at the time, set in seventh year, but completely different from the AU that She Who Shall Remain Nameless wrote, and much, much, better, because it was mine. It ws also approaching 50,000 words at the time, so pushing the limits for a novella and encroaching on novel-length. But I had written myself into a corner with only one way out, and I wasn’t quite ready as a writer to take that route.

It was also the last fiction that I wrote for a very long time. In fact, the last I wrote until someone twistd my arm enough to convince me to join them in a collaboration on a murder mystery set on an island in th Puget Sound… 

Moving on… 

Towards the end of March the characters who are related to the Good Bones saga (and yes, it seems to have morphed into something akin to a multi-generational family saga at this point) began talking to me. No, lecturing me.

More specifically, Brooke Morningstar’s grandparents, Anastzia and Józef, both survivors of the Holocaust – she, Roma, and he, Ashkenazim – sat me down one evening and began telling me their story.

How Anastazia’s family was removed from their home in Brno and taken to the Romani “Family Camp”, first in Lety, where both of her brothers died, and her baby sister was taken from them on arrival. Of their removal from there to the Romani “Family Camp” at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and its liquidation in August 1944, and her harrowing escape from that liquidation. How she was rescued by a group of Jewish women and hidden among them, and taught “to be a Jew”, hiding in plain sight. While an unknown number of the Roma were executed the night of August 2, 1944 during the liquidation.

How  teenaged Józef was detailed to make repairs to their barracks – not because of the actual need for the repairs, but because the lack of repair inconveinced the kapos and the Blockführerin. Which when he first observed the girl who did not belong there. Józef, who like a tailor, counted every button, every thread, and knew who should and should not be there.

Over the following months the two youths only had moments near each other, but they built a bond that continued beyond Birkenau.

Józef’s death march to Dachau and what he endured there.

The liberation of both camps and the struggles to recover their lives, eventually  fulfilling a promise made in Birkenau to find each other “in Prague when the gates finally open.”

Their wedding. Emigration to New Orleans, where their only child, Miri, named after one of he women who rescued Anastazia and gave her the name “Chava” while in hiding, was born.

Miri grows up, meets a man from Appalachia named Finn. They move off to California during the “Sumer of Love”, she winds up pregnant and the get married. His parents disown him for marrying beneath them,  he changes his last name to “Marningstar” and never speaks of his birth family after that to anyone again. They name their daughter Harmony. Some years later, they have another daughter, Brooke.

In need of a mental health break from the three-part saga that’s been monoplozing my brain since March, I returned to Good Bones this past week, annd wrote the scenes that entails the Sheriff’s murder. That’s not really a spoiler, it’s hinted at fairly well almost from the beginning of the book as he’s been missing since the first chapter. Best part is that these do not appear in the final book, so theye’re “deleted scenes”, so to speak. I’ll be posting them in the Discord in a few days, after I finish polishing them a bit more.

Yeah, murder as a mental health break. That must say something about my own mental state, no? Good thing I have an excellent therapist! (Not to mention the medication that I’ve needed for the ADD/ADHD which was contributing greatly to the writer’s block for the past year and far longer to other issues. Nothing quite like finally being diagnosed for what was a life-long condition at age 70. Imagine what American health care might be like if the medical profession actually listened to the patients’ concerns instead of just ticking boxes on the insurance company/HMO’s metrics.)