Five Things - December 8, 2025

Welcome to my blog titled ‘Five Things’ where you can expect just that - five random musings or reflections from the previous week or so. I’ll also share a quote I find meaningful as a point of focus for the week. For a photo gallery of our life on the road, our pets, and miscellaneous things I find interesting, you can follow me on Instagram @tabithalord.

So here are this week’s five things, starting with the quote of the week…

1. "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." - George Orwell

2. I just passed the 100k mark on my thesis novel, and I’ve got about 10k more to go before the end. The longest book I’ve written in my writing career thus far has been 85k, which equals about 320 print pages, so this new one is going to be a beast. It’s a good thing fantasy readers don’t mind an epic tome! I’m really excited to be writing the final few scenes, and I’ve been doing a bunch of writing sprints with my classmates. With a solitary endeavor like writing, it’s fun to find a way to build community and encourage each other as we race to the finish line.

3. At this time of year, I’m in the habit of reflecting on the past year, both personally and professionally. It’s a concrete way to take stock of where I’m at, celebrate my accomplishments, and begin to set intentions for the coming year. Sorting through all this, I realize how much life happens in one year! In this culture of hustle, taking time to breathe and reflect feels essential.

4. As we transition from our time as nomads to making our home in Pasadena, I find myself reflecting not only on this past year, but on the last three. Scrolling through the pictures on my phone, it’s a little disconcerting to realize how much I’ve forgotten already until I prompt my memory banks with a visual cue. I feel like we’ve seen more of this country in the last few years than some people see in a lifetime, and I am so grateful we had this unique opportunity. I’m planning to make a photo book featuring the highlights of our adventure, which I think will be a fun journey down memory lane!

5. For our final few weeks on the road, we’ll be heading to Indio, just south of Palm Springs, to celebrate Christmas, and then back here to Northridge as we furnish our new place in Pasadena and move ourselves in. One of the things I’m going to miss about our nomad life is waking up somewhere different, but still being in our home. I will miss the freedom and adventure of this lifestyle. At the same time, I’m really excited to make a more permanent home again. I know I already shared my ‘quote of the week’ above, but this one really seems to reflect my personal state of mind:

   “Everything has seasons, and we have to be able to recognize when something's time has passed and be able to move into the next season. Everything that is alive requires pruning as well, which is a great metaphor for endings.” - Henry Cloud

Five Things - November 10, 2025

Welcome to my blog titled ‘Five Things’ where you can expect just that - five random musings or reflections from the previous week or so. I’ll also share a quote I find meaningful as a point of focus for the week. For a photo gallery of our life on the road, our pets, and miscellaneous things I find interesting, you can follow me on Instagram @tabithalord.

So here are this week’s five things, starting with the quote of the week…

1. "Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe." - Frederick Douglass

2. It’s November already, and that means I only have about eight weeks left of school for the semester. It also means that’s how much time I have to finish both my thesis and a novella for my short forms class. I’m excited to see the finish line on the horizon, and I’m also hyperventilating a little bit at how many words I still need to write! My thesis novel, The Dragon Dancer of Krysh, is the longest book I’ve ever written, topping out at over 100k words. When this semester ends, I’ll be breathing a big sigh of relief.

3. Ray and I are currently in Orange, California, where we spent Halloween at Disneyland with our oldest son and daughter-in-law. Halloween has always held special meaning for us since it’s the anniversary of both our first date and the day we got engaged! We’ll be here through Thanksgiving, where we’ll be cooking up a storm with the kids. Our oldest will be hosting, the first time one of our kids has had a holiday at their place, which feels like a family milestone!

4. One of my favorite things about staying at this particular RV park in Orange is that there are citrus fruit trees all over the property. Anyone can pick the fruit! Whenever we’re here, we collect bowls full of fresh oranges, grapefruit, lemons, and limes. It’s an urban RV park, right in the middle of the city, so it was really a pleasant surprise the first time we were here.

5. This week I am traveling to Folsom to hang out with my sister and brother-in-law. I haven’t had a ‘sister’ visit in a while–one where I just stay at her house and we work at the kitchen counter together then crack open a bottle of wine at the end of the day and catch up on life, and I’m really looking forward to it!

Five Things - October 13, 2025

Welcome to my blog titled ‘Five Things’ where you can expect just that - five random musings or reflections from the previous week or so. I’ll also share a quote I find meaningful as a point of focus for the week. For a photo gallery of our life on the road, our pets, and miscellaneous things I find interesting, you can follow me on Instagram @tabithalord.

So here are this week’s five things, starting with the quote of the week…

1. “Cruelty is a terrible thing. I believe it is the worst human sin.” - Jane Goodall

2. I had a nasty cold over the weekend, and it totally interfered with our plans to do all the fun things. But sometimes I think getting sick is our body’s way of telling us to slow down and pay attention, so that’s what I did. I slept more this weekend than I probably do in a whole week normally, and I’m happy to report I’m on the mend.

3. I’m well into the murky middle of my thesis project. With every manuscript, I’ve had moments when I feel like I’ve totally lost the plot, or I just feel stuck. Over the years, I’ve developed some tried and true tricks to help me navigate this part of the process. For my thesis, however, I did something a little different than usual and wrote a full synopsis of the story before I started writing the manuscript itself. A synopsis is a two page summary of the entire story, from the main characters, to the plot action, to the end–with spoilers. It’s a document most agents and editors require, and it is absolutely no fun to write. But, I’ve discovered that my synopsis is acting like a pretty solid roadmap, and it’s helping to keep me on track. So, the murky middle of this book isn’t quite as murky as others have been at this point, which is a good thing since the deadline is looming!

4. The other class I’m taking this semester for school is on short forms, from flash fiction to novellas and everything in between. I just finished writing one for class titled “Red Riding Hood Redux,” and it’s a subversive, feminist retelling of the traditional fairy tale. I’ve submitted it to an anthology for publication, and I should hear back in a few weeks. Whether or not it’s accepted, I really like this piece. I find when I’m exploring short fiction, I lean in hard to writing horror, and this story is no exception. I can’t wait to share it with you!

5. It’s storming like crazy outside right now, but I am cozied up with my kitties and a cup of tea writing all the words. As I sit here thinking up imaginary worlds, characters, and conflicts, I’m reminded what a privilege it is to have the freedom to express myself creatively. I wrote an article recently for another blog titled “Writing is Radical Resistance.” As storms of all kinds rage around us, I thought I’d share one section of that article that gets to the heart of why telling stories is so important.

   As much as I want to entertain and connect through my stories, I am also often grappling with big questions in a lot of my work. With my first science fiction series, the underlying questions I posed were, “When confronted with hatred and injustice, who becomes a hero? Who defends their neighbor? Who turns a blind eye?” These questions are as frighteningly relevant today as they’ve ever been. The characters I created for that series had been tossed into the fray, so to speak, and it was satisfying to explore all the various ways they responded to the catastrophes in their world and watch them evolve. I think maybe we creative types are constantly processing what we’re seeing around us – the oppression, the injustice, the inhumanity, and we’re practicing our own responses to it.

   “Writing in itself is radical resistance, a triumph - people can try to stop you from speaking your truth, but no one can take your words from you.”― Eternity Martis

Five Things - June 24, 2025

Welcome to my blog titled ‘Five Things’ where you can expect just that - five random musings or reflections from the previous week or so. I’ll also share a quote I find meaningful as a point of focus for the week. For a photo gallery of our life on the road, our pets, and miscellaneous things I find interesting, you can follow me on Instagram @tabithalord.

So here are this week’s five things, starting with the quote of the week…

1. “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.” - Dalai Lama

2. I think I’ve mentioned here that I wrote a horror flash fiction story for school, workshopped it with my class, and sold it to Tales to Terrify, a fun, creepy podcast. Well that story is finally live, and you can find it here: MONSTER. A couple of things… It’s short. Flash fiction work is generally under a thousand words, and even the audio version is only three minutes long. But it’s brutal. This is a Frankenstein’s monster story with an AI twist, and in the end, everyone’s really a monster. Approach with caution, or skip if it’s not your thing.

3. My second summer session of grad school is underway! The month of June is considered a ‘reading period’ in preparation for our time together on campus at residency in July. But this year’s schedule is a little different since we have a lot to prepare for residency in addition to the completed reading assignments. I’m currently working on a synopsis, which is a two page summary of the entire novel and the bane of most writers’ existence, an outline, which is just what it sounds like, and the first five thousand words of the manuscript. While it’s a lot, it’s also really exciting to be working on my dragon story.

4. We’re on the road again for the summer, currently camped out in Las Vegas where it is very, very hot! We flew back to Rhode Island for a quick weekend full of events, and now I’m back with my nose to the grindstone working on the above mentioned school work. We’ll be heading to Moab, Utah next week to check out some of the National Parks we missed our first time there, and then on to Colorado for about a month. I’ll try to remember to post more pictures!

5. If any of you follow my alter ego Maggie Clare, and read the steamy stuff I publish under that pen name, you may have heard I just finished writing a contemporary rom-com. Usually my romance novels have a suspense sub-plot featuring serial killers, cartels, stalkers, or some other nasty bad guy mucking things up for our couple. But my latest story features an emotional support dog, a runaway bride, a hot firefighter, some angsty heartbreak, and a happily-ever-after ending of course! The story evolved from a piece of short fiction I wrote for school. I liked the bones of it so much, I decided to try writing a long form version. If you’d like a sneak peek, head over to my Dear Maggie blog and check it out!

Five Things - May 26, 2025

Welcome to my blog titled ‘Five Things’ where you can expect just that - five random musings or reflections from the previous week or so. I’ll also share a quote I find meaningful as a point of focus for the week. For a photo gallery of our life on the road, our pets, and miscellaneous things I find interesting, you can follow me on Instagram @tabithalord.

So here are this week’s five things, starting with the quote of the week…

1. "If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters." - Alan K. Simpson

2. It’s graduation season around here! In the last two weeks we’ve celebrated RJ who graduated from Loyola Marymount, Nick who graduated from the MFA program at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film, and Noah’s girlfriend Anjali, who received a Masters from USC. It was a whirlwind of activity and very exciting. Congratulations to all!

3. We’re back in Orange for a couple of weeks before we launch into our summer travels. Since it’s baseball season, and we love to visit as many parks as we can, last night we went to an Angel’s game. While they lost to the Yankees, of all teams, there’s nothing like watching game on a spring night under the lights with a cold beer.

4. We also went to dinner with Nick and Leslie at this cool place called The Hobbit. There’s only one seating per evening for this five course extravaganza, and we opted in for the wine-pairing. The food and experience was outstanding! We’d tried to get reservations here the last time we were in town, but it was booked solid, so we were thrilled to finally check this off our list of things to do in the OC.

5. I can’t believe classes start up again next week! This break has gone by quickly, but I’m ready to dig into my thesis, which will be the second half of my romantasy novel titled The Dragon Dancer of Krysh! I left this manuscript at the halfway point and put the project on hold when I started school. It was my hope to use this novel as my thesis project, but it needed to be approved by a mentor willing to work with a slightly longer than usual manuscript. I’m thrilled to say I have an incredibly talented and flexible mentor, and she’s truly excited about this book. If all goes as planned, the draft will be finished by winter break!

Five Things - April 28, 2025

Welcome to my blog titled ‘Five Things’ where you can expect just that - five random musings or reflections from the previous week or so. I’ll also share a quote I find meaningful as a point of focus for the week. For a photo gallery of our life on the road, our pets, and miscellaneous things I find interesting, you can follow me on Instagram @tabithalord.

So here are this week’s five things, starting with the quote of the week…

1. “Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened.” - Billy Graham

2. We’re on the road again! This week, we’ve set up camp in Newport Beach, CA. It feels so good to be near the ocean again. For a girl who grew up on the coast, the desert never felt quite right. Like if I drove far enough, I should run into the beach. Anyway, we’re near the coast for a while now, and we look forward to spending time with our kids, watching a few of them graduate, and enjoying our continued adventures.

3. This is my last week of class, and next week marks the last week of the semester. Once I turn in my final assignments, I will have officially finished my first year of graduate school! My final paper in the survey class is a reflective piece. It asks where we were as writers when we started, how we hoped to grow, and what practical things we actually learned. I’ll be thinking about this over the next two weeks, and as soon as I have my thoughts together, I’ll share some of the highlights here.

4. I’ve been matched with my thesis mentor, Cindy Skaggs, and I’m really excited to work with her! She and I will have a kick-off meeting next week to discuss which project makes the most sense to focus on. I’m particularly pleased to have Cindy as my mentor because, in addition to working on this thesis, she’s eager to discuss industry stuff with me as well. It will be great to have someone else to bounce ideas off of, and to ask advice about publishing pathways for different projects. I’ll keep you updated as we get going.

5. I haven’t mentioned Milo, or any of the pets really, in a while, but all is well with our furry friends. Milo is sixteen and requires a little extra daily TLC, and I’m truly happy to do it. She’s such an affectionate little love, and I think her monthly arthritis shot, her daily thyroid meds, her extra calorie treats, and her calming pheromone collar truly make a difference in keeping her happy, comfortable, and as healthy as possible during her twilight years. It honestly makes me feel really good to take care of her after all the joy she’s brought, and continues to bring, to our family. Also, Daisy turns four next month, so happy birthday to our tiny travel dog!

Five Things - April 1, 2025

Welcome to my blog titled ‘Five Things’ where you can expect just that - five random musings or reflections from the previous week or so. I’ll also share a quote I find meaningful as a point of focus for the week. For a photo gallery of our life on the road, our pets, and miscellaneous things I find interesting, you can follow me on Instagram @tabithalord.

So here are this week’s five things, starting with the quote of the week…

1. "I've been fascinated by the idea that evil is the absence of empathy." - John Connolly

2. It’s our last month in the desert! The winter flew by, and we are ready to hit the road again. I’m really excited about our itinerary, which includes checking off the last four states in the lower forty-eight (the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Idaho) in order to fill out our map, another trip to Utah for more National Park fun, a stay in Gunnison, Colorado during my residency, a trip to Chicago for Chicago Fan Expo, and more. I’ll start taking photos again, so be sure to check out my Instagram page!

3. This week, I have to submit my thesis proposal for the MFA program. Next year, most of my work will be focused on completing this project to earn my degree. Conveniently, our thesis is a full-length novel, and I’ll have a personal mentor assigned to me. If you read my alter ego’s blog last week, I discuss the fact that I have four novels about halfway complete. I’m generally a work-on-one-thing-at-a-time kind of writer, but being in school has been disruptive, in a good way! You can read more about why I think this year is an anomaly, and what I’m currently working on HERE. Regardless, in a couple of weeks, my mentor and I will have chosen a project. It may be one of the books already underway, or something entirely new. I’ll let you know!

4. Our oldest son had his birthday last weekend. Nick truly embodies the ‘oldest child’ persona in all the best ways. He’s responsible, accountable, sensitive, and genuine. We’ve watched him navigate his young adulthood with an open heart, a willingness to grow, and deep compassion and empathy for others. He is earnest, hard-working, loyal, and kind, and he is the person you’d want in your corner if you needed a friend. Happy birthday, Nick. We are so proud of you!

5. I had a great time visiting my sister and brother-in-law last week. My trip coincided with Persian New Year, Nowruz, and I was so excited to celebrate with them. Held on the vernal equinox, the holiday is meaningful and well-timed, and wow, the food is amazing! Happy New Year and Welcome Spring!

Five Things - March 3, 2025

Welcome to my blog titled ‘Five Things’ where you can expect just that - five random musings or reflections from the previous week or so. I’ll also share a quote I find meaningful as a point of focus for the week. For a photo gallery of our life on the road, our pets, and miscellaneous things I find interesting, you can follow me on Instagram @tabithalord.

So here are this week’s five things, starting with the quote of the week…

1. “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” - Elie Wiesel

2. In honor of Women’s History Month, and in keeping with my own love of all things nerdy, I encourage you to read about Vera Rubin, an astronomer whose research proved the existence of dark matter. Dark matter is a mysterious substance that’s believed to make up more than a quarter of the universe. It outweighs regular matter, and it plays an important role in galaxy formation and the evolution of the universe. Born in 1928, and coming of age in the ‘40s, Rubin faced extraordinary challenges as a woman working in a male dominated field. Her life and accomplishments are well-chronicled in this article on the National Women’s History Museum webpage. Check it out here: Vera Rubin. In honor of her achievements, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in Chile has been named the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

3. Looking ahead to March, I’ve got a lot of school work to complete before spring break, so I’ll have my nose to the grindstone, so to speak. After break, it will be time to narrow down my thesis project ideas. For this MFA program, the thesis is a full-length novel, and I’ll need to present a minimum of three proposals to the program director. It’s exciting to know I’ll have the backing of my classmates and a thesis mentor as I work on this project, but per usual, until I have the idea locked down and the outline solid in my head, I’ll be a little stressed!

4. I’m also currently writing a synopsis for a novel work-in-progress. When I went back to school, I left this particular project at the half-way mark. Now, I have to think it through and outline the second half of the book. I’m excited to do it, but it’s also daunting, especially when my creative energy is taxed to the limit at the moment. I am really excited about this particular story though, so wish me luck!

5. We had our first real taste of a wind storm here in the desert. It didn’t happen with a big burst of energy, but rather it was more of a sustained, day-long gusty event. We had to make an emergency leaf-blower purchase to clean the dust and dirt from our outdoor living space, which had about a half inch of accumulated grit on every surface. Mother Nature does her thing pretty much everywhere!