Roses, Part 1

 As they headed in from the loading area, past piles of mulch and tangles of yard decorations, Jenna looked at Gunny, and back at AJ. “Thank you for coming with us. I know you hate plants.”

Gunny snorted. “Doesn’t matter if he hates them or not. He’s the one who’s going to be doing the grunt work of digging the bed and putting them in. You get to do all the maintaining afterward, unless the chore requires enough muscle you need to call in backup. That’s what husbands are for.”

Jenna thought about that, and put a hand on Gunny’s arm. “I thought you liked roses? You grow such beautiful ones!”

“My late wife’s fault. I just put them where she told me, like he’s going to do for you.” Despite the disclaimer, there was a smile sparkling in his eyes that was working its way down to his mouth.

“I like plants fine. In their place. Properly controlled.” AJ replied. He was not a fan of mowing the lawn, but that came with the house, and damned if he’d let strangers go poking around and leaving gates unlocked for them, just because he didn’t want to deal with it. As they walked through the crowded shop, full of scents of earth and loam, pottery and greenery, he fought not to sneeze to clear his nose. And then they walked through the doors beyond. Warm, humid air wrapped him in its welcome, filled with the vibrant smell of lush growth and blooms. Light poured in from the translucent roof and wall panels, high overhead and braced with a minimum of framing, with dangling water lines run along the bracing… it felt like home, like the hydroponics sections of the larger space stations and mining habs, right down to the tables with all the greenery in their proper trays. “Oh. This is magnificent. Look at all the constant-g adaptations!”

An employee who’d come in on their heels giggled at him, and paused with her cart of things being returned. “Can I help you find anything?”

“Are you doing hydroponics sets on the tables? There aren’t nearly enough water lines…” AJ was still caught up in the overwhelming infrastructure, so very like what he knew, but so very different.

“No, no, they’re set in potting soil. Very controlled soil, lighting, and water mixtures, but not pure hydroponics. Are you looking for your ship’s greenbox? We cater to the general public who’s planting on planet, but our sister nursery specializes in spacefaring strains.”

“No, we’re here because my wife wants roses in her yard.” He looked up at the roof. “That’s cleverly passive. You don’t even have to run diurnal cycles, because the planet does it for you! How do you handle seasonality?”

“Carefully extended with heaters, but when it’s winter, we’re resting, too. Roses are this way! Do you want tea roses, rosebushes, or climbing roses?”

Jenna looked utterly confused. “Roses climb?”

AJ laughed. “Oh, do they ever! Given the faintest hint of the wrong genetics, and low gravity, and they will promptly try to take over the entire greenspace, and the tendrils, they get in everything…” He shook his head. “Given physical space and usefulness constraints, we never should have taken them to space in the first place. They’re finicky, prone to molds and blights, eaten by every bug out there, and will wilt at the drop of a degree. They’re volume hogs, picky with their chemical mix, and utterly inedible. They also all have thorns, to rip you open when you’re trying to maintain them!”

“Um…” Jenna was looking like she was questioning the wisdom of the whole madcap gardening adventure now.

As they came around the side, to another door, AJ’s nose told him what awaited beyond. His voice got soft. “And then they bloom, and you realize we no more could have left them behind and called ourselves human than if we hadn’t taken our shipcats and dogs.”

Before them was an entire greenhouse full of roses, in all their multicoloured, fragrant glory. And the look on his wife’s face… he knew why Gunny kept the yard full of roses alive. He’d learn, even in as messy an environment as in-atmo could be, to do the same.

(This is not in the next book. This is purely spawned by one of my alpha readers claiming that AJ hates plants. AJ, I protested, does not hate plants, when they’re in their proper place and controlled. Now I have two chapters, of which this is an excerpt, in which Jenna, AJ, and the resident expert on roses (well, Gunny has them, and they’re not dead) go shopping. He may have consulted with a certain widow hastily before the madcap adventure commenced. Something about digging in rosebushes recently because he lost a bet… but that’s a different story for another time.)

Rules for domestic disputes (salvaged)

These were gleefully lifted from a couple whom I love and respect, and who survived The PCS From Hell (Not only was it in 2021, but along the way, their personal vehicle broke down. Twice. Was broken into, and everything inside stolen, including the kid's clothes and the servicemember's uniforms. Snowstorms. Landslides. Fires. Illness. The housing reserved for them unavailable when they arrived, so no place to stay, but a quarantine order for staying where they couldn't. You name it.)  They arrived on my doorstep with an intent to RON, and it turned into a bit longer than that as they took a breather.

Despite everything, they were still bearing up well under the challenges, loving each other, and working together to parent their very bright and energetic littles. As I was working on I Didn't Sign Up For This at the time, we got to talking about rules for relationships. Theirs aren't much different from ours, but they'd actually taken the time and trouble to formalize, codify, and write them down. So I gleefully had 'em write theirs down. 

Unfortunately, despite writing them down, it appears that this was one of the pieces of paper the cat was enthusiastically chewing when he got into my filing cabinet. So, here's what I can salvage of the rules:

1. Speak only for yourself. (Say what you have observed, and how those actions make you feel, but no putting words in other parties' mouths or affixing motives.)

2. Relationship is more important than "winning", and being right isn't worth damaging the relationship.

3. No fair being mad about something that isn't their fault.

4. Silent mode is stupid and not an option. If something is bothering you, you have to deal with it and fix it.

5. You pick your words on purpose, assume they do too. (Take what they say at face value without "interpreting.")

6. Each party gets a turn to speak / lay out their case. No interruptions during this! At the end you give a readback of what you understand them to mean, and allow corrections if there is a mistake.

7. No name-calling or insults. No pet names, either; those are for in bed during the make up process.

8. No superlatives or absolutes; they are nearly never correct. 

Will there be future stories of the hijinks and hilarities of  Lee, Bet, and their kits? (Or from his point of view, the trials and tribulations of Chief Smith?) ...possibly. I don't have anything planned right now, but I hadn't planned on this story, either! (There's more than one reason I shot it off to Jim Curtis with the title I Didn't Sign Up For This.) 

Right now, I'm working on more AJ & Jenna, and then there's a sorta sequel to Shattered Under Midnight that's 14K in, and waiting in the shadows. And then there's this story about a vineyard, that I want to get back to... but other things keep creeping in.

New Tales For A New Year!

 

Joining such other awesome people as Alma Boykin and Cedar Sanderson, Old NFO and my husband, I have a story in this new anthology!

It's the tale of cross-cultural communication (and miscommunication), unexpected consequences, research, hilarity, and a navy chief being told he can't have any more coffee... May also contain honeypots and pirate machinations, as well as embarrassed newlyweds.

And that's just my story. There are many not at all like it, but this blurb is mine!

Tales Around the Supper Table - Volume 2!

It's okay, I get it.

A friend shared with me that my name had come up in a group chat. Once I finished laughing, I asked the person who made the comment if they were okay with me sharing it publicly. So, anonymized to protect the guilty chatterbox:

Trying to make pies with 13yo.  He's been up for twenty minutes and I swear he hasn't inhaled once.

Having just read Dorothy Grant's novels yesterday, I wish to trade 13yo for AJ.

This is really cool

Some achievements in life are ephemeral. Climbing mountains, for example: you can't stay at the peak forever, but you sure can enjoy the moment while it lasts. Fortunately, that's why there are photos. Or, in this case, a screenshot.

#1 in new releases in the category! Isn't this cool? 

I love this man

I got home from a very long shift, only to be greeted by Calmer Half... and a box of chocolates.

He noticed my Emergency Chocolate Cache was low, and decided to buy something random and special in chocolate for me. So he went to the store and acquired Belgian chocolates in the shape of seashells, with marbled dark & milk & white chocolate shells and and hazelnut ganache filling. 

...in full knowledge of, and undeterred by, it being the day before Thanksgiving. 

I got a better man than I deserve. He's nuts, but better than I deserve!

Yes, you can't go home again and it's partially my fault

Like anybody else, I like to share really nifty, really useful, and really good things with friends.  Sometimes it's wine, or spices, and those close enough gleefully partake of the dishes offered. Sometimes it's the butterfly garden at the nature center, and Calmer Half is trying to figure out why the grown women including his wife are acting like 12 year old girls let loose in a store full of shiny, sparkly things when the air around us is full of bugs. (He prefers elephants, at a comfortable distance.)

Then there's the confounded look on his face as a certain senior NCO and I are making excited noises over her teaching her baby sailors the life hack of dance company hair clips (designed for holding despite serious movement) and mini (figurine) paints at the game store to match their hair colour and be invisible on inspection. Granted, he comes from a country with an all-male draft, so the very idea of how best to twist and braid hair to stay out of the way even with serious PT activity and long days is... well, quite literally foreign. 

Often though, especially with friends who are widely geographically scattered, it's books. So when a book I've been anticipating comes out, I read it, and if it's as good as hoped, gleefully share it. Sometimes this is fiction in genres they don't read, or nonfiction in subject matter areas they don't care about, and they usually roll their eyes and humour me, knowing I do the same to them.

And then there was Arsenal of Hope. 

In retrospect, while my friends are from all walks of life, none of them are anywhere near the sheltered end of the spectrum, and they've all picked up their own assorted scars along the way. So when I was enthusing over the joy of finding an even better working definition of PTSD than I'd used for years, and a whole lot more treatments, therapies, approaches, and coping techniques with a cheerful, rueful look at how they had or hadn't worked... Perhaps I should have anticipated that my friends were actually paying close attention instead of humouring me. 

Look, I'm still not comfortable applying the PTS label to myself. But the first step to understanding even better what makes Calmer Half tick, much less most of the men and no few of the women in my life, was also the extremely uncomfortable first step to realizing why I do certain things. Or don't do certain things. Or have so much avoidance of doing certain things that it was plain as day to the people around me, and they figured I was perfectly well aware and just didn't want to talk about it. 

I'm working on it. 

It's led to more than a few raw, but cathartic conversations, as friends have taken my own struggle to bare their own emotional wounds in turn. This adult version of "You show me yours and I'll show you mine" sucks, you know? But better than not talking about it, and far better than suffering alone and in the silence behind the facade of everything's under control. 

And given the number of friends who are authors, when we bare our wounds to each other, and finally let it out, we bleed fiction. Stories are, after all, a way of talking about pieces of the truths you can't say out loud with the actual names and dates, re-arranged for places that never were and people who are creations of a mind trying to process far more than our surface consciousness is aware of. 

All fiction is a conversation - with our own subconscious, with friends, and with things that came before that we agree with, or more often violently disagree with. Alma Boykin can blame me for the running text conversation we had that took a orthogonal turn at "spell check", riffed from there into proofreading terribly-written academic textbooks on magic if magic actually worked, and... well, I have a weakness for bad puns and song lyrics. And in the first of her urban fantasy Familiar Tales, I can see some of both that we bounced off each other worked in as story and worldbuilding prompts. 

CV Walter and I had a long, grousing conversation about the utterly toxic relationships that are being promoted as the ideal in much of current romance and urban fantasy (pet peeves of both of ours. We've also been in too many fights to have any patience for waif-like female characters easily winning hand-to-hand combat with heavily muscled, well-trained men twice their size.) She's currently writing a steamy scifi romance series... with competent women and men, And honest communication. And females wearing outfits with useable pockets. (As one reviewer said, the last is how she knows it's a fantasy, not scifi.)

After we both read Arsenal of Hope, Cedar Sanderson and I had long conversations about PTS from sources other than combat, which while it doesn't manifest in exactly the same way, it certainly rhymes. And so, too, does the process of healing. Including the suck of dealing with the demons in your head, that you can't cut off or leave behind like twelve inches of hair or the exes in another state.

And somewhere along the way, one or the other of us groused about the lack of honest representation in fiction of what PTSD's actually like... and of fiction that showed moving forward, and getting better. 

Mind you, more than half the reason the last two books of mine got written was not only my subconscious chewing over dealing with the ways damaged people making the world, and themselves, and each other better, but also because 2021 has been very rough on my friends. Okay, I kicked the year off by catching LungPaoSicken for a second time, but at least I didn't have the PCS from Hell (Long story, not mine to tell), or another friend who was trying to accomplish all her duties while recovering from WuFlu with her husband in a medical coma from complications of same. (She has a really good command, thankfully, who takes care of their own.) That's not even counting civilian-side the nurses, EMTs, pediatric docs, and emergency dispatchers whom I love dearly, whose last two years have been... yeah. 

And Cedar? Well, this was the year of "You're a civilian chemist, so you haven't hit this before. Welcome to what's essentially a deployment, when you have to hold it together for months on end and you don't know when he'll be back with you. I understand what you're going through, though the terms I use include acronyms you may not know." (She's quite fond of SNAFU, FUBAR, BOHICA, and FIDO now... In fact, 2021 may personally go down as the year that I taught Sarah Hoyt, the least military person on the right you'll meet, to know and love FIDO.) 

So I've been writing things full of hope, and designed to make them laugh, or at least forget about their cares for a little while. (Yes, writing about the proper use of a sap in close-quarters combat was not only plot-appropriate, it got a certain twitchy gent to get this grin... "You paid attention!") But I can only write so fast. Of course I opined that more people, other people, should write more stories, and hopeful ones!

I didn't mean for Cedar to commit anthology! I felt even worse that after she took our conversation and explicitly set out to get more people writing realistic stories of PTSD, and the anthology call explicitly demanded they be stories of hope... I had nothing to contribute. 

I tried. It refused the idea of short, and is working on becoming yet another novel. One of the hardest ones I've tried to write, especially because the running theme is about how much home changes while you're away, and how much it's not just them, it's you, when you've been Out doing Things. It's going to get finished, no matter how hard it gets, even if only because I have two retired mustangs and an active senior NCO giving me that look, about when am I going to give them another chapter. I may be a civilian, damnit, but I am not immune to the look. Even transmitted over text at distance.

...I can't go back home. It hasn't been home in years, and, well, many of the places, and some of the people, they're only alive now in my head. My home is people, and wherever Calmer Half is, that's my home now. But the land is still in my blood and bones, and I miss it. 

And that left me having instigated an anthology without actually contributing. Worse, Cedar understood. I think I'd have felt better if she'd thrown something at my head. (Okay, she did also politely, pointedly "not-demand" I finish the novel. Encouragement, that's what we'll call it.) Jim Curtis (OldNFO) understood. And wrote something for the anthology, and tossed it at me to beta read. LawDog understood, and wrote a story of his own for it. 

The last surprised me. But LawDog often does. He's quiet and sneaky and caring like that. 

But Cedar felt I'd already said what I needed to, and it was hopeful, and if it wasn't a fictional story, it was a catalyst to getting other stories out there. In the resources at the back of the anthology, she excerpted part of the blog post wherein Calmer Half maneuvered me into reviewing Arsenal of Hope, and All Secure, and talking about PTSD and our marriage, in the first place. 

So if you came here looking for the rest of the story, here's the link to the story that's not in the anthology, because it's not fiction: On Post Traumatic Stress, marriages, and two truly awesome books

And if you're looking for the anthology, it's here: You Can't Go Home Again