Two nights ago I finally did what I had been avoiding for months: I looked for a blogging friend’s obituary. The sad news is I found it. Some of you might know Nancy Jo Anderson aka Zazamataz on WordPress. Her blog is still up at zazamataz.wordpress.com, but she has not posted since December 11, 2024.
According to her obituary, Nancy died on March 14, 2025. She was only 62. Nancy was open about her illness. In her post of April 24, 2024 (“I’m back. Again.”), she explained that she had both COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and CHF (chronic heart failure). My oldest sister Charlotte had both of these conditions, and it was the COPD that killed her. I imagine it was the same with Nancy.
I hadn’t known Nancy for long. I “met” her through Ally Bean’s blog The Spectacled Bean, and quickly came to cherish her friendship, her stories, her humor, her openness. She didn’t shy away from writing about being sad and depressed, her struggles to get proper care, and her many “visits” to the hospital.
Her humor was a gift. She would write about her hospital stays with such comedy that I’d often laugh out loud, forgetting for those moments the fear and pain she most likely felt while it was happening.
And she was generous. In May 2023, she organized the “the great moose giveaway.” It was a clever way to clear out her house and send out a little love to the world. I was game for anything that involved yarn (naturally). But what I got from Nancy was so spot-on, I was speechless when I saw it.
This ceramic bluebird is more precious to me than anything else Nancy could have sent me. I have it sitting on a desk next to the loveseat where I usually have my morning tea. Seeing the bluebird, remembering Nancy, is a nice way to start my day.
I could have “looked for” Nancy long before Saturday night. I thought of it often, but sometimes you don’t want to confirm what you already know.
Although she’s physically gone, I hope some of you might visit her blog. Her spirit lives on in her writing and in each of us whose lives she touched.
I often joke that now that I’m retired (since April 2021), I feel I have less time to do all that I want to do, not more. I don’t have the surplus of time I thought I would get by giving up my “day job.”
On the upside, I’ve been busy with living, which for me means knitting a lot and working on our gardens when the weather allows. Lately, the weather has accomodated outdoor work here in northern Florida. Also, I’ve started bicycling again, about once a week. And I still go to yoga classes twice a week and the gym twice a week.
Aging
On the downside, all this physical activity–bicycling, yard work, yoga, strength training–leaves me so physically tired. And achy. I take Gabapentin, I put menthol patches on my aching joints. I drink wine to either dull the aches or make me care less about them.
I don’t complain to my doctors because they will simply say it’s an aging thing. My body is breaking down, more or less. Ironically, the resumption of bicycling has resulted in the reemergence of bursitis in my left hip and left knee. (Ironically because bicycling is supposed to be easy on the joints.)
Does that stop me? No. I get too much joy from the ride.
Last week, an older man (well, he was probably around my age) passed me going the other way and called out, “Hi, young lady!”
I waved but was too slow to respond as I wanted: “Hah! I’m 68 years old!” At that moment, I felt like a kid.
Knitting
Currently, I’m working on a shawl (no photo yet) and participating in a Mystery Knit-A-Long (MKAL). The MKAL is hosted by Laura Nelkin, the same woman who organizes the Knit for Food Knit-A-Thon.
This is my first MKAL. We have a choice of six hoods to knit in either one color or two colors. Sight unseen and pattern unknown, I chose the two-color hooded scarf. For four weeks, once a week, Laura provides a clue to the project’s pattern. I don’t know what I’m knitting until Laura provides that part of the pattern. That’s the mystery. It really messes with my comfort zone, and I think that’s a good thing.
This is clue 1:
Knitted black and blue rectangle. Work in progress.
I presume this is the top of the hood. As always, I made a couple of boo-boos. Since this is my first MKAL, I’m giving myself the grace to just continue knitting and, worst-case scenario, I’ll keep the hood for myself.
Thanks to Laura, I’ve learned two techniques that are simply life-changing. How could I have been knitting for over 50 years without learning these tricks? It’s only recently that I’ve been participating in knitting workshops, hanging out with other knitters. Knitting, like writing, is a solitary act; but also like writing, we learn so much from each other when we come together.
Before I forget, I also knitted my husband a pair of socks.
Handknitted socks in colors of brown, green and purple.
Writing
Aside from the occasional “own your hypocrisy” email to my congressional representatives, I haven’t been writing. And as I write here, I realize I miss it.
But I often ask myself, Why? Sure, there’s the fiction I’ve played around with, but that’s not what this blog is about. I really don’t know what this blog is about anymore.
When I started writing this blog, I thought to use it as a vehicle to build a career as a freelance editor. But I didn’t really want to work on someone else’s writing. I wanted to work on my own.
So then this blog became more about building a community, a writing community for the most part, but a community of like-minded spirits overall.
And that was all well and good until I felt a “shift.” When my sister Shirley died on July 1, 2022, my worldview shifted. Imagine an earthquake, tectonic plates shifting, creating fissures, cracks in my complacency. A few more earthquakes, and my current world is unrecognizable from before July 1, 2022.
And yet … .
Maybe I just needed a break.
Cats
Wendy is doing very well. No issues with her eating for the past few months.
Wendy during the early days of her recovery.
Wendy doesn’t “pose” for the camera as much as Raji does.
Raji in his happy place.
Thank you for reading, for being here. I’m curious as to why people write blogs.
Questions: What do you get out of blogging? What do you want to get out of it? Are you getting what you want?
P.S.
My paid account with WordPress (WP) will run out in about a year, and I’m thinking about transitioning to Substack rather than renew my WP account. To that end, I’ll be crossposting, testing the waters with Substack. While I would prefer not to change platforms, WP is becoming more complicated and buggy. Life is too short for that nonsense.
Some of you might have noticed that I’ve been absent from the blogosphere for a while. I am (again) attempting to resume blogging, or at least reading and commenting. Right now I’m using my iPad to write. That is important because for some reason, I loathe using my usual setup which is my laptop hooked up to a large monitor. You’d think that would be a more ideal situation; the large monitor makes reading and writing easier. But. After spending nearly a year during the COVID pandemic working from home, my once-ideal writing space triggers a mild form of PTSD whenever I consider sitting down at that space to write.
I’m trying to get past that with baby steps. The first step was to move my fancy, ergonomic office chair (a necessity when my butt had to be parked in place for 8+ hours a day) to the garage and move my old but preferred minimalist office chair back into my room. (This also benefits my husband since he has computers set up in the garage for his astrophotography and my fancy office chair is more comfortable for him.)
I don’t know what the second step will be.
Writing
I haven’t been writing except for almost daily emails to my so-called Congressional representatives. Creative energy goes into those emails although I know they are not read. They are not verbose, but, as any writer knows, short pieces of writing take longer to write. Such writing might be exercises in futility, but I am exercising my First Amendment right so … there.
Despite that daily exercise, I’m struggling with my vocabulary. With the spoken word. I’ve been struggling to find the right word or phrase while in conversation. I have to describe the word I want (if I can) and my husband guesses the word or phrase. Recently it was the word eliminate, but that really wasn’t what I wanted. It came to me some time later: rule out. I was trying to describe a process of elimination, but in a way more commonly used by, say, medical professionals. “We want to rule out cancer,” for example, when your cat is being examined for anorexia.
Cats
Our cat Wendy stopped eating on May 8. Well, her last meal was the night before, and she threw that up. Pretty much undigested. We watched her for a day, having seen similar behavior when she had a hairball forming. When she still refused food on Friday, I called the clinic and got an appointment for that afternoon.
We went in prepared to pull out all the stops. No guesswork, please. Rule out the worst-case scenarios first. If she has cancer, we want to know sooner rather than later.
No cancer, but an x-ray suggested she might have a GI problem, some inflammation. We were sent home with antibiotics and appetite stimulants. Unfortunately, the antibiotics were liquid, and Wendy doesn’t take to liquid medicine. She struggles, fights back, and then doesn’t want to eat because the meds taste so bad.
So the next day we called the clinic and agreed to bring her in so they could feed her through a tube.
Three nights. Wendy spent three nights at the animal hospital. During this time, the vets changed out. The first vet, Dr. S was good, but she wasn’t Wendy’s “primary” vet. The second vet, Dr. C, is her primary, and one of the first things Dr. C did was an ultrasound.
Still no cancer, but now we had a diagnosis: Inflammatory Bowel Disease. It’s not really a disease but a syndrome (and I don’t know why they don’t just call it Inflammatory Bowel Syndrome). It’s indicative of a possible underlying issue. In any case, Dr. C wanted to treat the IBD aggressively. Steroids, two antibiotics, and three types of appetite stimulants. And Dr. C wanted her to eat on her own before releasing her.
The third night we visited Wendy. It broke our hearts to see a thin tube curling up through her nose, a small cone around her head. We brought food but she wasn’t interested. She was pissed. She growled and stumbled around but eventually started focusing on our laps, first moving to Greg’s lap, then mine, then settling down between us while we petted her and scratched her head. She purred.
She was calm by the time we left, and even the technician said that such visits really help the animals. I didn’t know.
The next morning, we got the happy news that Wendy had eaten a bit on her own, and Dr. C wanted her to go home where (hopefully) she would recover more quickly.
We brought a pharmacy’s worth of drugs home, thankfully only one of the medications being liquid this time. (Still was a supreme and messy struggle to dose her.)
The appetite stimulants really work. We’ve had to lock up our Brazil nuts and raisins because Wendy was breaking into the bags if we left them out.
Wendy’s been home for almost a week now, and she’s finished with the more difficult to administer drugs. The rest can be given to her in Pill Pockets which she gobbles up like treats. We have to isolate her when we’re having dinner otherwise she’ll walk all over us, trying to get at our food. That behavior should diminish as she finishes her remaining meds.
Wendy leaning in a piece of my breakfast sausage which she did not get.
We’ll take her to Dr. C on Thursday for a recheck. It’s possible Wendy will have to be on the steroid indefinitely, a small price to pay to keep our girl with us for another several years. Wendy is at least 14. We had to euthanize Maxine in December 2021 and Junior in September 2023. It’s much too soon to let go of another kitty.
Our two kitties—Raji and Wendy. May we have many more years with them.
Knitting
When I haven’t been writing emails to my reps or administrating drugs to Wendy, I’ve been knitting. Recently I finished a pair of socks that I had started at the outset of the Knit-A-Thon. I randomly selected one of my generous Knit-A-Thon donors and sent them on their way.
I do love knitting with this kind of self-striping yarn, and they are fun to wear. I always get compliments when I wear my hand-knitted socks.
More Writing
Before I go (this post is longer than I usually write, but I have some pent-up thoughts to share), another thing about writing.
Earlier I complained that I’m having difficulty coming up with words or phrases that I believe I should have no trouble conjuring. One theory is that I’m not writing enough, that my lack of blogging, my lack of creative writing has dulled part of my brain and so I need to write more. Here. On my blog. Writing might well stimulate my brain and open up my vocabulary.
Meanwhile …
I’m also inspired by what other people are writing. Here’s a post from Summer Brennan’s Substack newsletter, A Writer’s Notebook: The List.
I love what Summer does with this post, this listing of all the loves across her life. She urges the reader to make a similar list and think of it as a kind of self-portrait.
While I think that would be a lovely exercise for some, for me it would be painful. And yet, in thinking about my past loves, I can see how I matured through those experiences. Before my husband, my longest relationship lasted roughly three years. Now my longest relationship is over 35 years.
Digging up the past is fodder for a writer, but perhaps that’s why I veer toward fiction. I can look back and find a story, but rather than write the truth as I remember it, I want to make a few corrections. I’ve done things that I’m ashamed of, that I will never forgive myself for, but I can reimagine those abuses through the lens of many decades. I can be honest, but spare the whip.
Thank you for reading! Tell me:
Do you struggle with finding the right word or phrase? I’m wondering if there are any exercises out there that can help with retaining vocabulary. Please share if you know of any.
What do you think about making a list of your past loves? Would it painful or fun or both?
One of my most favorite bloggers, Ally of The Spectacled Bean, happens to like zinnias. Actually, I believe she likes them a lot. A couple of months ago, I bought a pair of zinnias from a local nursery. They were in the same pot, a mix of yellow and pink. Sadly, the yellow zinnia did not survive, but the pink one has and it is quite a showy flower.
I would argue that the above photo doesn’t do the flower justice, but I do like how you can see the various stages of life on this plant. The following photos are more to my liking.
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They are such a delight when the sun is shining directly on them! The challenge for me is whether I should transplant them to a sunnier venue, which would likely be off my deck and outside my range of vision when I’m sitting at my computer, OR keep them on the deck and repot them as necessary with hopes that they will survive the winter.
I believe zinnias are annuals, but in my climate, I’m hoping these might become perennials.
Wendy
Wendy is doing quite well after our (not hers) brief scare. She’s doing all her cat things normally, including swatting at Raji now and then. [One night, when they were both gathering around my legs while I was reclined, watching TV, she swatted at Raji when he got too close. He punched her back. Seriously, he punched her. Chaos ensued.]
Writing
I have been writing. For the first five days of November, I was quite earnest in my writing and found some nice support from other participants in Summer Brennan’s Essay Camp. [By the way, Summer is starting a series of essays on essays which I’m looking forward to reading. If you’re interested in learning more, she has an free introductory post here: Introducing the Essay Series.] I have been using NaNo to track my word counts, but not much else. I feel myself sliding into a rut. Unfortunately, I’m preoccupied with a family issue, and I thought writing about it would help clear my head, but family issues are the gifts that just keep giving, aren’t they?
On the bright side, refocusing on my writing has made me think about the stories I’ve already written and what (if anything) to do with them. Some have been published so rights have reverted back to me. I don’t have much enthusiasm for finding new publishers for them, but I want to share them “with the world.” One idea I’ve had is to have booklets of my short stories printed, along the lines of Creative Nonfiction Foundation’s (now defunct) True Story series, and then I can gift them to interested readers.
Does anyone reading this post have experience with printing booklets of their stories? Please share if you do.
I’d also love to have some recommendations for printing services to narrow my search. So far, it looks like it might be expensive.
Meanwhile … last night I saw an interesting contrail from my Adirondack chair … no filters on this photo.
According to WordPress, I registered on WordPress.com 15 years ago. I wasn’t planning to post anything today, but when this image popped up in my notifications, I took it as a sign that I should write … something.
Alas, words do not pour out of me, at least not onto paper or my computer screen. They whirl around in my head like a cat chasing its tail. As soon as I sit down to write, they vanish, not even giving me a chance to corral some or even a few.
When I do manage to write, it’s with a clean slate and is almost always prompted by something I read.
I am by nature a mimic. I can’t seem to help myself. For example, many years ago when I was a quickly-going-insane-doctoral student, I had a professor whose speech was quite distinctive. She had a smoky drawl that, without intending to, I started to mimic for the pleasure of my husband and other students. One evening I was talking on the phone with another student, relating to her something that this professor had said to me. Before I could finish, the student exclaimed, “My god, Marie, you sound just like her!”
Oops. Unaware of what I was doing, I had slipped into the professor’s speech. From that night forward, I put all my efforts into suppressing my mimicry. This particular professor did not have a sense of humor and at the time, she also held the purse strings of my research assistantship.
My mimicry is not limited to speech. When I’m reading and I’m taken with a particular format or wordplay, I naturally try to imitate it. Not intentionally. I don’t say to myself, “Hey, I really like how that writer develops a sense of urgency with a series of run-on sentences so I’ll do the exact same thing.” No, I think I’m just inspired, but, still, I have to be careful to not mimic the writer. I want my writing to be original … at least as much as it can be given that my slate is never completely blank.
Things are changing around here. Just baby steps right now, but so far I’m enjoying the process. As I’ve already written about here and here, I’m trying to give my blog a more professional appearance. At least more organized. I’ll settle for that. I’ve added a page for my publications (few though they may be) and a page for links to the book reviews I’ve written. I’ve revised my About Me page and my Contact Me page.
Whew, organizing always tires me out ;)
Some of you may be aware that I also write on Medium, a place to read and write big ideas and important stories (their words, not mine). If you’re a Medium member, or even if you’re not, you can find me there at @marieannbailey. So far writing on Medium has been an interesting experience. I’ve made some new friends and read some really interesting and well-written essays, stories, and poems. Recently, I was published in P.S. I Love You, a Medium publication: “Bonita: A Short Story.”
What’s not to like about all that?!
Well, Medium is a different experience from blogging on WordPress. Not a better experience, just different. I’ve been casting about for a way to describe how they differ when it finally hit me.
1WriteWay on WordPress is my home, mi casa, where my friends, mis compañeros, come to visit (mi casa es su casa). Likewise, through WordPress, I visit my friends’ blogs homes and hang out for awhile.
Medium is like the Barnes & Noble in my town, where sometimes I meet up with friends for coffee and to browse magazines and books. It’s like a community center where you can learn about writing or programming code (or writing programming code), photography and travel. Or listen to read ideas about politics, relationships, and sundry other topics.
Some writers use Medium as their only platform, the one place they express themselves. Medium does most of the work; the writer just needs to learn the different but limited formatting styles.
I believe in diversification, both in my finances and in my personal life.
On WordPress, we get to decorate our houses (or renovate as in my case here). We share ideas on themes, plugins, whatnots, and thingamajigs. We get to express our individuality in ways other than writing.
I was relieved when I thought of WordPress, or more specifically 1WriteWay, as my home and Medium as a community center. It fits with the introvert that I am, the homebody that I tend to be.
1WriteWay es mi casa y ustedes son mis compañeros.
In other news: my girls are driving me crazy.
Maxine has a chronic urinary infection that seems resistant to antibiotics. I’m grateful that she still has her appetite and seems no more cranky than usual for a sixteen-year-old cat with arthritis and in the early stages of kidney disease.
Ah, the life of a southern cat in summer.
Wendy went in for a regular checkup and came out with a diagnosis of bladder stones. She shows no symptoms of a urinary tract infection, no crying or straining when she pees. But we saw the x-ray and it’s there. Our vets tend to be conservative so we’re starting with a special diet but today she decided to go on a hunger strike. Sigh. War of the Wills. I’m hoping she’ll give in because our only other alternative might be surgery. Double sigh.
Wendy stretching her legs.
Fortunately (as I knock on wood), Junior (our toothless one) is disease-free and just happy to hoover the girls’ food bowls when they leave bits behind.
Junior can’t seem to keep his tongue in since his remaining teeth were removed.
How do you cope when your furred kids change their behavior and won’t say why?
In the past, I’ve known some writers who wrote both on WordPress and Blogspot so I’m not an anomaly. What are your thoughts on writing on different platforms?
We are fine. Irma was still a bitch but in lowercase letters. We prepared for the worst and it didn’t happen, at least not to us. We have power and some minor debris to clean up, but that’s it. So, now, please turn your attention back to those are still suffering from Harvey and Irma, from the wildfires in the West, from the earthquake in Mexico, from the monsoons and floods across the globe. There is still plenty of suffering going on.
I had hoped to be more active on my blog since our return from our road trip. Unfortunately, Irma (no friend of mine) has other ideas. As many of you already know, Hurricane Irma has torn up islands in the Caribbean, leaving devastation in its wake. Its path is set on Florida but still we’re not exactly sure where in South Florida it will make landfall. Just that it will sometime late Saturday. The latest report (as of 10 AM, 9/7/2017) is Irma is expected to go straight up the center of Florida and then veer out west.
At this point, we can only hope that those who should evacuate heed those orders and take shelter. Irma is a B-I-T-C-H. This one hurricane is likely to be more devastating than the combined impact of the hurricanes that criss-crossed Florida in 2004 and 2005.
My heart is heavy with worry for my fellow Floridians. I live in north Florida, near the border with Georgia. At worst, we’ll have tropical storm conditions and power outages.
That’s why I’m posting this now and why I’m turning off scheduled posts for the time being. Why post when I might not have the power (literally and figuratively) to respond to comments?
In meantime, please enjoy what a few of my friends are up to.
Finally, friend and fellow blogger/writer Phillip McCollum has been setting writing goals and keeping them, to the delight of his readers: https://phillipmccollum.com/let-us-write/
Okay, this should keep y’all busy for awhile. Cheers and stay safe wherever you are.
Following is a post from May 24, 2008. I had had my blog for several months, but was still finding my way. [And, frankly, I’m still finding my way but the journey is fun. I don’t know that I really want to make my destination.] I’m re-posting for two reasons: (1) to remind myself how quickly time goes by; (2) to remind myself (and perhaps others) that first you write for yourself. Cheers!
***
This is my new “slogan” for my blog. I know it’s not original, that you can find this phrase in use on thousands of websites (albeit with varied punctuation and case); but, I think the sentiment of the phrase captures why I write, or rather, why I cannot not write. I’ve gone through periods of not writing. I’ve had my dry spells, and, during those times, my sense of self would suffer. I’d feel lost and anxious. Lost because without writing I have no bearings. Anxious because words would still be welling up inside, waiting for an outlet.
My writing really dried up while I was a doctoral student in the social sciences (long story short: I bailed out of the program once all my miserable coursework was completed). Although I was considered a good writer by my professors, I hated the kind of writing I was expected to do. It was tedious, monotonous, one-dimensional. My school was neck-deep in quantitative studies, the kind of studies that attracted federal funding, the kind that reduced hundreds, even thousands of people into one data point. Any student who proposed a qualitative study, one that might involve in-depth interviews of a handful of subjects, would be encouraged to seek their degree elsewhere.
For a fiction writer, this was a lousy place to be, and because I had to struggle so hard to not tell stories in my papers, I eventually became depressed. I knew I had to drop out of the program when I found that I was no longer able to write, that every time I sat in front of my computer and tried again to work on my “specialization” paper, I’d break down and cry. I could never get past the first paragraph.
So I dropped out (unofficially, of course). My road to recovery involved one English course with a wonderfully encouraging professor, two years with a writing mentor, and now this blog. Now I find it difficult to not write whenever I’m on the computer. Now I feel more fully myself than I ever have in my life . . . because I am therefore I write.
What’s your story? What was the worst dry spell or writer’s block that you ever experienced? How did you recover?
Hey, everybody, I feel like I’ve been so deep in NaNoWriMo land and posting the progress of my WIP, Clemency, that you all may have forgotten what I look like.
Yes, I now have blue hair as well as pink. In the right light, my husband says I look patriotic. It’s just a streak of blue, but it goes well with my favorite bathrobe, don’t you think? Oh, and this is what my hair looks like when I don’t use a flat iron. Kind of all over the place. Amazing how much work I have to put into my appearance just to be able to leave the house.
Okay, enough about my hair (although it is my favorite subject). The point of this post is to let all my steadfast readers of Clemency–all five of you–know that the last chapter will be posted on December 2. And, yes, all will be revealed for those of you who keep insisting that Mrs. Whitebread is guilty. She’s guilty, but … enough said.
A word of warning: You may feel like you’ve missed something once you get to the end. And, yes, indeed, you will have missed quite a bit because I am not posting the whole novel on my blog. Yup, whole chapters are being left out. Why? Here are my excuses reasons:
I didn’t want this WIP to go on indefinitely. I have other things I want to write about beside the novel that threatens to go forever.
I’ve tried to keep the posts to 1,000 words or less, but obviously (that is, if you’ve been reading), that’s been near to impossible.
Even more truthfully, posting these chapters have seriously cut into my writing time, more than I thought it would.
So I went ahead and wrote the ending, put it up on the scheduler and then just filled in with what I think are the most crucial chapters.
So in the remaining chapters, if you are reading along and find yourself exclaiming, “WTF. When did that happen?,” just know that it’s not you, it’s me, it’s the work in progress. Besides, if I posted the whole novel, would there be any reason for anyone to buy it if and when it gets published? “But, Marie,” you cry, “you’re giving away the killer’s identity!” Yeah, so? Some readers (myself included) don’t mind knowing the end as long as we have fun getting there (especially if your idea of fun is reading about people being tortured and killed).
Also, after Clemency has been raked over the coals by a series of revisions and an editor or two, the writing should be much better and, who knows, the killer’s identity might even change. It would be just like me to do something like that.
I hope you enjoy the remaining posts on Clemency. Looking forward to seeing you all on the other side.
P.S. I’m past the 40,000 mark in NaNoWri as of this moment. Still a ways to go but I can almost taste the sweet finish.
Marie at 1 Write Way 