These days I find myself living the in-between. In a few weeks I’ll be packing up my life in Snohomish and heading to Belgrade, Serbia for a while. It’s both thrilling and disorienting. Every day brings small reminders that the ground beneath my feet is shifting: sorting clothing into donation piles, deciding what to pack, what to store, and what is most precious to carry into the next chapter.

Transitions have a way of exposing how little we truly know about the future. I’m someone who loves stories because they promise meaning—arcs, patterns, resolution. Life, however, rarely offers that kind of tidy structure. Instead, it asks us to move forward, trusting that the path will reveal itself step by step.

As the saying goes, we don’t know what we don’t know.

In some ways this uncertainty feels familiar. Much of my writing has grown out of that same in-between space—between cultures, between histories, between the past and the present. Perhaps that’s why the idea of “home” has always felt less like a location and more like a moment of attention: the room we’re sitting in, the conversation we’re having, the story unfolding right now.

Sightings In The Wild

Paris France, US Virgin Islands, Rovinj Croatia

One of the fun aspects of being an author is what I’ve come to think of as “sightings in the wild.” Every so often a reader sends me a photo of one of my books turning up somewhere unexpected. Paris, US Virgin Islands, Rovinj, Croatia!

A book begins as a solitary act of writing, but once it leaves the desk it starts a life of its own, moving through the world in ways the author can never quite predict.

If you happen to spot The Foreigner’s Confession, The Worth of a Ruby, or The Thirty-Fifth Page out in the world, I’d love to see it.

Book Club Gratitude

 

Author’s Life – New Novel Alert!

Between packing boxes and saying goodbye to familiar places, I’ve also been deep in the early stages of a new novel. The working title is The Bone Flute, set in Seattle’s music scene in 1983.

Yes, I’m finally writing about that era of my life!

The you-tube link on the photo is to a video we made MANY years ago…. The band name was Horns of Lure.

 

The story begins with a group of musicians trying to find their sound in the city’s raw club scene, but it slowly opens into something stranger. A mysterious musical phrase begins to ripple outward through their lives, suggesting that sound itself might be more than music—it might be a doorway.

Physicists tell us that everything in the universe is vibration. Matter, energy, even time itself exists as patterns of resonance. The Bone Flute explores that idea through music, asking what might happen if a note—or a sequence of notes—could shift perception and reveal hidden layers of reality.

In other words: everything vibrates, everything echoes, and sometimes a single note can change the way we understand the world.

 

 

Thank you, as always, for reading and for being part of this journey.

Warmly,
Lya