Hello, friends!
Wow. It’s been a long time (way too long) since I’ve written an update. Deb says the last one went out 11/23. I was embarrassed to learn that—I admit it. That said, 2023 was a tough year (2022 was just as difficult, as I’ll explain). 2024 has been much better so far, at least in terms of not so many life-changing, grief-promoting, writing-slowing happenings. We did move houses once (back to the old one) in the early spring this year, so that was a bit of a distraction, but the worst is over.
I won’t bore you with all the details, but Deb and I moved out of our house of many years to move into my parents’ house in the time after my mom died, to help take care of my dad, who not long afterward decided to move to an adult living facility (what we used to colloquially call an “old folks’ home”). Then he too died in the summer of ’23, and Deb and I saw that we’d have to move out again so that my parents’ house could be sold. So, eight or nine months after moving to Palo Alto, we moved back to our house near Santa Cruz, which we had held off on renting because of the uncertainty, and thank goodness for that!
Thus, in the midst of much sadness and chaos, Deb and I and the dogs returned home, and now I am back with my trees. I really missed them.
I grew up in the suburbs, and I have absolutely nothing against suburban life. In many ways it remains a kind of American Dream, to have a house with a yard, to have places around you for kids to play, dogs to be walked, but with shops and suchlike things close by. And I had a lovely childhood in Palo Alto, where my parents were still living in the same house sixty years later. But it wasn’t my house anymore—I hadn’t lived in it since the 1970s—and when Deb and I and a couple of our young ones moved in and then my dad moved out, my parents were no longer in it either, which made it doubly strange to me.
But even more, I realized that over the last twenty-something years of my life, I had become more and more addicted to being surrounded by trees, really surrounded, not just with a few of them growing nearby. Nature in all its forms, actually—Deb and I love the birds and insects and animals that visit or live on our property. And it isn’t just the trees I missed. We live on a hillside, and we are surrounded and sheltered on all sides by trees—redwoods and oaks, mostly. The redwoods get their water, I’m told, not through the roots, but by filtering the fog that floats in at night from the ocean, some three miles away. You can certainly see it coming in: as the sun starts to set, the farthest trunks and crowns disappear into gray, then the nearer rows are swallowed, and at last the whole hillside is enveloped in mystery. I never cease to love it.
And I really missed that. I missed this place, where I am writing now, in my still-disorganized, move-confused office. I have never been particularly sentimental about houses, but I am about this one, the oddness (it’s oddly shaped and full of wonderful angles) and the comparative rusticity of its location. Yes, it was a bit of luck getting to spend time in my folks’ house again — to say goodbye, in effect—and since it has now been spruced up and sold, it’s a chance I won’t get again. But much as the Palo Alto family home was suffused with memories, strong, strong memories, it was no longer the home of my heart. Instead, this place, with its noisy jays and shy finches, with a pool that we have allowed to turn into a frog-pond full of mosquito fish and shimmering, darting dragonflies, with sprawling blackberry and other wild cover where all kinds of critters lurk, and across whose expanses big dog Johnny can run far enough to exercise himself while still being safe…this is now the place I will think of in my last hours when I reflect on what home means.
At least that’s what I think now. But, of course, life may have a few surprises still in store.
The Navigator’s Children will be published very soon now—November 12th for the English-language editions. I’m working on The Splintered Sun, which has its own copious requirements for research, even though it’s another Osten Ard story (it’s set in Hernystir a couple of hundred years before the events of The Dragonbone Chair), and I’m still marveling at all the different directions it (TSS) might go. The early process of a book is exhilarating, because almost anything is possible. Then you have to start getting rid of those lovely, wild ideas that no longer fit with the growing reality of the story as it creates itself.
And, in the wake of losing not just one but both of my parents, which (as Lady Bracknell once suggested in Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”) begins to look like carelessness, I’m of course thinking about legacy, both as a writer and a person. And after reviewing all the ups and downs, the strangeness and surprises, that I have experienced so far, I can only say one thing for certain: I will never write a book that I don’t love writing. I will never publish a story that isn’t the best I can do. And also that I am incredibly lucky, both in my family, my friends, and my readers, and I will never take any of them for granted.
I hope you all are well. I will strive—yes, strive—to be more timely with newsletters in the future. Sorry to take so long for this one.
Best wishes, as always, and love from our house!
Tad
The Navigator’s Children – publication date, USA and UK/English language: Tuesday November 12, 2024.
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