back home, cough cough

The house is rockin'...  Cheap Trick is blasting quietly as Bob and Bud are sleeping, but I'm awake, showered and dressed and Grape-Nutted.  Tea is in my mug, and as the rock and roll eases into my veins alongside the caffeine, the tissues are flying.

Yes, I have a cold.  (Long post as I tend to ramble when unwell...)

It was a great trip, so much to say, to sniffle, to put into a blog post.  For one, Thea really does live in Southern California.  It's not a myth or legend; my NorCal born daughter, raised in Yorkshire, England, now truly resides in SoCal.  All a geographic perspective, as she's the same lovely Thea who treks north as often as she and Brian can arrange, but yes, she really lives down there.  Bob used to, a long time ago, but that's the only family I have who has sailed that far south.  Yet Thea has her life established, school and her routine in place.  My little girl isn't really a little girl, she's getting married for goodness sake!  This trip was in part to get away with Bob, also to share in Thea's SoCal living.  On those fronts, it was a complete success!

Overall it was a fab trip, all but coming home with Bob's cold, and being flustered by allergies to Thea's cat.  Her roomies' cat, named Cat, is a gorgeous creature with the most stunning amber eyes, but so perilous to my nose, and that was before the cold hit.  We trekked around Los Angeles on Wednesday, mostly for one specific purpose, Jenette Bras.  I don't often go to LA, but when I do, I shop at Jenette Bras.  (Think Dos Equis beer pitchman with that sentence for full effect.)

Jenette Bras on Melrose; Bob snapped this while Thea and I enjoyed ourselves.  Plenty of parking just around the corner on N. Berendo Street.

Now, this is a blog about writing, it's also about my life.  When we helped move Thea south last summer, Bob and I made a stop at Ms. Goldstein's Melrose location, her only shop at the time.  Since December, a Pasadena branch has opened, but I love the downtown feel of Melrose and Heliotrope in East Hollywood.  If you are, as Jenette puts it, one of the overdeveloped and underserved, and if LA or Pasadena, California are in your sights, please please please do yourself a tremendous favor and visit Ms. Goldstein and her fantastic staff.  Needless to say, but I'll say it anyways, I left there a very satisfied woman and Thea did too.  And Bob?  Let's just say he sat in the waiting area, happy to let us have that mother-daughter moment.  Later he was quite pleased with all I purchased.

Okay, so back to the trip.  It rains in Southern California; it rained on us all day trekking to Jenette's, then around Southern California.  But traffic wasn't bad, and precipitation left the skies clean and bright for Thursday.  Bob and I had many good meals, of which some were shared with Thea; lots of Italian and I even splurged on a root beer float.  Southern California has different flora than up north; we have palm trees too, but down there they look natural, they look...  Like Los Angeles, like all my notions of SoCal living.  California should be two states, at least, because our half is nothing like that half, especially after the whole SOPA thing; entertainment rules the southern counties while tech roars up here.  Now, that doesn't include the REAL NorCal, which rests above the state capital of Sacramento, so maybe three states should be this enormous stretch along the Pacific.  But that's for others to debate; all I know is last night when we flew away, bright lights shining in the darkness, I thought of my daughter down there somewhere.  Thea lives in SoCal, she really does.

Southern California...

I however live here, which is so much for the best.  (All the money I'd spend at Jenette's for instance, would make Bob's bank balance ill, although he wouldn't mind personally.)  Even in the morass of Silicon Valley, life is so much simpler; fewer freeways, less palm trees, more weather (relatively), smaller population.  WAY smaller population; LA is America's second largest city, San Diego just to the south is the eighth.  Around here San Jose just tops one million folks, San Francisco hovering around 800K, Oakland at 450,000.  Our entire Bay Area hits 7 million, which includes all the east bay cities, peninsula and north bay locales. The Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana metropolitan area boasts twelve million, kicking our butts, and that doesn't includes San Diego, Riverside, San Clemente, San Bernardino, and Oceanside, which I as a NorCal girl add, probably making LA-types roll their eyes.  SoCal is SoCal is SoCal, and the best parts are my daughter and Jenette's.

So...  Now I'm home, and all that seems very far away, even if a plane trip is just an hour.  I'm glad to be home, easier to blow my nose loudly here.  But it was great to get away, see Thea, think about things other than writing, editing, and plots.  I thought about my family, those close, then Bud watching the house and Jay as our airport ride.  My kids aren't small, not like the toddler dancing in the back of Jenette's as her mum tried on bras.  I thought; Thea was just that age, really she was!  Now she's twenty-three, nuptials on the horizon, living in an enormous spread of lights that never dim.  The shine of that entire area knocked my socks off as our departing plane settled along the coast, miles and miles of twinkling buildings, inhabitants as far as I could see.  Then the sparkles lessened as central California emerged, darkness interrupted by a few random bursts of light.  Bob and I had the exit row with no window seat; in the usual middle spot, my view was unimpeded, and I gaped as if flying for the first time.  Honestly, I haven't flown to SoCal since I was a kid, going to Disneyland, less than ten years old.  Those lights were probably smaller back then, but not by a discernible amount.  Southern California has always been vast; nearly three million people back in 1970, almost four million forty years later.  Acres and acres of sprawl, such a strange place.  Yes I live in a fairly large community now, but Yorkshire wasn't like NorCal or SoCal, and my hometown's but a speck on the proverbial landscape.  Yet, here I am, living in the big city, but not as big as where Thea dwells.

Big city in SoCal...

So LA, bras, California population counts, my cold; what am I missing?  Bob feels better, realizing that was probably the last occasion he would spend a significant amount of time with his girl before she marries Brian.  As the MOB (mother of the bride), I have plenty of opportunities ahead, but not Bob.  They walked together, talking math/physics, hurling witticisms left and right.  She is so much her daddy, maybe even more now with their shared Southern California link.  He grew up there from the age of eleven, a Midwestern boy thrown in the maelstrom of the West Coast; dude!  Thea's introduction wasn't quite as jarring, but still an experience.  My small sojourn reminded how happy I am in my little life; I missed work, but was glad to get away from it for a bit.  Publishing is an ongoing process, so is the getting used to publishing.  For four years all I did was write and edit, a smattering of querying thrown in for good measure.  Now it's all changed, like going from NorCal to SoCal, which is actually very apropos, when I think about it.

I went from north to south in my writing, a HUGE transition.  Thea has done well subtly altering her way of life, but she's young.  I'm creeping toward forty-six, and let's face it, I'm pretty set in my ways.  However, change is beneficial; I'm wearing the correctly-sized bra after all these years and am lovin' it!  Publishing my novels even in my small, quiet manner is a massive undertaking, but there's no map for indie novelists other than just taking the steps, seeing where we land.  I've incorporated a few modifications, probably more to come as the years pass.  I'm in this for the long haul, unlike Thea and Bob's tenures in Southern California.  Those were for set periods of time, but the writing and publishing are now organically entwined, nothing separating them.  As long as Thea lives in SoCal, a part of me dwells there too, nothing I can do about that either.

Taken by Thea on Thursday afternoon...

Well, Thea and Jenette.  If Ms. Goldstein ever opens a San Francisco or San Jose store, oh goodness...  I might start charging for ebooks just to keep myself in pretty undergarments!  And if that's TMI, well, I do apologize.