Rethinking policing for Rana Station

Rethinking policing has always been an important part of my world-building  for the futuristic world of my science fiction novels. Recent protests and calls to abolish or defund the police have given me fresh material to work with. 

But they haven't changed my plans for the series.

At the time this post went live, these were the "XK9 books" available. Cover art for The Other Side of Fear is © 2020 by Lucy A. Synk; Cover art for What's Bred in the Bone is © 2019 by Jody A. Lee.

Balancing reality and fiction

One of the joys of speculative fiction is that you get to make up your own world. That makes it possible to explore all sorts of thought experiments. How would this or that work out, if this or that other thing happened? The challenge that comes with the joy is making your world believable.

I wanted to combine my love of science fiction, dogs, and mystery stories into a science fiction series. 

But I couldn't assert spontaneously sapient, talking dogs (sure, that's believable . . . or is it?). No, they'd need to be engineered and equipped. Most people probably wouldn't do that for a pet. Contemporary smart dogs are already sometimes too smart for their own good. Plus it would be expensive, and take a long time. 

My fictional dogs needed a job that required the development. I already knew I wanted to write a mystery in this futuristic setting, so K9s--police dogs--were a natural choice. 

They aren’t using computers yet, but dogs are smarter than we think. (GSCSafety/Donna Clayton/Pinterest)

I set my story on a space-based megastructure built on designs actual rocket scientists thought might work. My canine-cognition, robotics, and other research led me to other extrapolations. I hoped I'd figured it out so my readers could suspend their disbelief, and enjoy the story.

Reality and fiction in policing for Rana Station

But how to portray the police? I knew from the start that TV and movies were no guide. They tend to show cops as good-guy protagonists. They're frequently wildly erroneous. They often glorify, erase, or excuse terrible misconduct for the sake of drama. 

My original goal was to portray a style of policing that a real police officer could read and think, "yes, this is right. This is how it really works." 

Never having been a police officer or worked in that world, I had a lot of learning to do. But the more I've learned about the way it really works, the less I think it fits with the rest of how Rana Station is conceived. 

The more I learned about how policing really works today in black and brown communities, the more I found myself in sympathy with concerns reflected in recent protests (Uncredited/The Hill)

The society on Rana Station is yet another thought experiment. This one is steeped in my roots as a teacher in urban schools. I built it on understandings from working on my Master's degree in Multicultural Education. As one of my characters says in a later chapter of What's Bred in the Bone, Rana's "governmental aim is to support the realization of each and every inhabitant-being's full potential."

The rest of the surrounding universe looks more like systems we're unfortunately familiar with. In some ways Ranans themselves don't live up to their ideals. In others, they do better. Part of the fun is speculating about what might happen when social systems, values, and priorities collide.

Rethinking crime 

One thing about humans: crimes happen. People screw up. They fight. Greed gets the best of them. Con artists run their scams. Passions rise, and sometimes people die. There are plenty of cases to solve, even on Rana Station. 

But a society built on respect for everyone, and dedicated to supporting their achieving full potential, isn't going to criminalize many of the things our society uses the police to address.

When murders occur, they must be investigated. Members of the Pinellas Sheriff’s Department Forensics Team and St. Petersburg Police gather evidence at a murder scene in St. Petersburg, FL in 2017. (Uncredited/Tampa Bay Times)

Addiction isn't illegal on Rana Station. People can have small quantities of controlled substances. But authorities regulate potentially dangerous substances and try to stifle smuggling. Sapient-trafficking is illegal pretty much everywhere (but which beings are sapient?).

Digital thievery plagues everyone. Rana's "second-story men" (and women) sometimes intrude on residence towers. As in Chapter One of What's Bred in the Bone, people sometimes get mugged.

Assaults, rapes, and murders do still occur (although there are lots more conflict mediation efforts on Rana Station than in the USA right now).

And the XK9s, along with their human allies, are on the case.

Rethinking policing in more ways than one

But a social system designed to support every inhabitant-being reaching their full potential would not look like our reality. That means not only is the agriculture different. The schools are different. Ranan mental and physical health-care infrastructure is different (to name just a few).

And Ranan policing is different, too.

Today's "defund" advocates demand some changes that already were planned features on Rana Station. Even before our collective consciousness raising on police use of force. For instance, police won't be the first responders called for most mental health crises. Mental health professionals called "Listeners" will. Many current "de-criminalize" issues are handled outside of the justice system on Rana.

The criminalization of poverty reaches an extreme when it comes to people experiencing homelessness. Police prepare to clear a “homeless” camp in San Francisco, in 2017. (Judith Calson/San Francisco Public Press)

RReaders of What's Bred in the Bone may recall that the Orangeboro Police Department has a STAT Team (for "Special Tools and Techniques"). I originally called them a "SWAT" Team, but "Special Weapons and Tactics" recalls the old-fashioned militarized unit of contemporary practice. That's not what I intend to portray.

In very special circumstances some SWAT-like tactics may be needed. Think sharpshooters, or psychologist-trained negotiators. But Ranan STAT teams also embrace what we think of as search-and-rescue,  bomb squads and communications and surveillance specialists. They're known for saving lives, not kicking doors.

Rethinking police mental and physical health

One major area where my police research appalled me is the real world of police officer/first-responder stress. Rather than write in generalities, I'll share a summary of an all-too-typical case study. This one's from the March 2016 AA Grapevine, but unfortunately none of it seemed unusual, or out of step with other cases I've studied. 

Erika J.'s story

The writer was a young woman who'd wanted to be a police officer since she was in high school. Right at the start of her first rookie year she had a "suicide by cop" call. Although it was devastating, she felt compelled to "lie my butt off" to the department psychologist so she wouldn't lose her job. 

There are so many wrong things, just in that one element of her story.

From the beginning, this young employee understood if she was honest she'd be fired (like most people, she needed her job). She didn't feel supported, and that pattern continued. Later promoted to detective, she was "the only police officer in town assigned to juvenile cases." Not surprisingly, the caseload overwhelmed her. She asked for a reassignment after six years, unsure how many more autopsies of abused babies she could handle. Her request was denied.

So she "boarded out" and qualified for a promotion. Later, as a now-sergeant with a 3-month-old breastfeeding infant, they denied a reassignment that would make it easier to care for her baby. "I was told to quit whining and do my job." There's more. But if you're like me you've seen enough already. It's really not surprising this woman developed a problem with alcoholism. The way she was treated--by her brothers (and sisters?) in blue--ought to be criminal.

Stress and feelings of isolation can build up for cops if they’re not given adequate support. Mitchell, SD Police Officer Mici Bolgrean does paperwork. Only 5% of South Dakota officers are female. (Sean Ryan/Republic)

So many wrong things

Instead, it's not uncommon. She probably got more grief because she was a woman (way to diversify, people!!). But male officers don't get much less pressure. That old-school police culture is toxic, no matter who's on the receiving end. As other pressures in society build virulence, police officer suicides have hit an upward trend.

Cops also work long hours with few breaks and little access to healthy food. That's why you see so many fat officers after they've been on the job for a while. They're usually not so much lazy as stressed-out and overextended. You won't be surprised that police officers are at 30-70% more risk of sudden cardiac arrest than others, when thrown into stressful situations.

It's not an acceptable reason, but it's easy to see how some officers grow jaded, callous, or abusive. That kind of job environment is practically a formula for inappropriately-displaced aggression. Give that human powder-keg a racist system to work in, a history of oppression and a gun, and you have a police brutality offense just looking for some "uppity" brown-skinned person to trigger it. 

Rethinking policing in a better way

Ranan culture doesn't put up with any of these ways of doing things. They are stupid, counter-productive, and deeply destructive. Excuse me while I'm "unrealistic," and explore a better way.

We need to ask why our own contemporary society puts up with those stupid, destructive ways of doing things. Must we abolish the police and start over from scratch to get rid of rampant, racist old-school police culture? If so, it might be a better way of rethinking policing than many people believe.

IMAGE CREDITS:

The covers of my books are from my Jan S. Gephardt’s Artdog Adventures website. Many thanks to Greater St. Cloud Public Safety Foundation, via Donna Clayton’s Pinterest Board, for the K9-making-a-report meme. I’m grateful to The Hill, for the photo of the “defund” protesters. Many thanks to the Tampa Bay Times for the photo of the murder scene investigation. I am grateful to Judith Calson of the San Francisco Public Press, for the photo of the police outside the "homeless camp." and thanks also to the Mitchell (SD) Republic and photographer Sean Ryan for the photo of Mitchell, SD Police Officer Mici Bolgrean at work. 

 

Creative amusements

Will you invent creative amusements, or run screaming berserk? I'm sure that's a real question for many people confined to quarters until further notice. Pandemic lockdown is a challenge, no matter who you are.

Families confined together get into each others' space and onto each others' nerves. Telecommuters struggle to balance work and family--or work and utter solitude. 

Essential workers don their masks each day like armor, then venture into a dangerous landscape where one thoughtless cough, like a ticking time bomb, could kill them this or next week.

Desperate times, they say, call for desperate measures. Or, sometimes, for creative amusements.

Above: Brooklyn's 7 Train and traffic below in pre-pandemic times. (uncredited photo from Medium)
Below: Almost the same scene, but with empty streets during the lockdown (Juan Arredondo for the New York Times).

A recipe for . . . ?

Creativity happens when divergent thinking runs up against a problem to solve. And oh my, do problems ever abound right now. I'm blessed to be one of the back-bench folks on this lockdown. I cheer from the cheap seats, but stay well out of the way while the real heroes do epic battle on the front lines. 

And I have plenty of creative work to do--I'm deep in final revisions on A Bone to Pick, the second book in the XK9 "Bones" Trilogy. And when I want to take a break there's always paper sculpture. But what about people confined to their homes or apartments, whose creative work is based somewhere else?

Our first three books are just the beginning. I'm working on A Bone to Pick now. (Weird Sisters Publishing).

I recently discovered two examples of just such people, and two very creative amusements. In each case they "made lemonade" from their less-than-ideal situations. I thought you might enjoy what they came up with.

A wedding photographer with no weddings to shoot

Chris Wallace of Carpe Diem Photography needed a wedding to photograph, but he had none. So he made up his own. Out of LEGOs. 

The resulting photo shoot not only gave a grown man an excellent excuse to play with plastic bricks and miniature figures, but when he posted the photos on his website he garnered memorable media and social media attention.

From his account of Florence and Fred's "magical day," and the assortment of wedding guests (who include, among many other notables, Chewbacca and Eleanor Twitty, the Library Ghost from Ghostbusters), it's clear Wallace had as much fun creating the event as we have viewing his photos.

See all these LEGO Wedding photos and many more by Chris Wallace, from My Modern Met and Carpe Diem Photography.

An artist, a museum curator, and two very cosmopolitan gerbils

It started as a Sunday project to mark a London-based couple's 14th day of quarantine. Before they were finished, artist Marianna Benetti and independent curator Filippo Lorenzin had turned it into an elaborate little gerbil-sized museum gallery.

They even created gerbil-centric masterpieces for the display (Oddly reminiscent of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Munch's The Scream, Klimt's The Kiss, and Da Vinci's Mona Lisa), and posted a highly futile "Please Don't Chew" sign.

Their two gerbils, Pandoro and Tiramisù, found plenty of interesting things to inspect, as documented in both still photography and a cute short video. 

Rude gallery patrons that they were, however, they not only chewed up a chair, but briefly gnawed on the "Don't Chew" sign itself. After all, gerbils just gotta chew.

These four "gerbils in the gallery" photos are from Marianna Benetti and Filippo Lorenzin, featuring their gerbils Pandoro and Tiramisù, via My Modern Met.

What creative amusements have you invented?

Here in Kansas City, we just got the word that we're probably going to continue on lockdown another three weeks beyond its original end-date. Schools are closed on both sides of the state line through the end of this school year.

We should have lots more time to get cabin fever, go stir crazy . . . and maybe think up some creative amusements, too. How about you?

IMAGE CREDITS: 

Many thanks to Medium for the view of Brooklyn's 7 Train and traffic below, pre-pandemic; almost the same scene after the lockdown photo is from the New York Times/Juan Arredondo.

The three Weird Sisters Publishing book covers (with artist credits) are from Weird Sisters Publishing's Our Books page.

The four photos of "Florence and Fred's" LEGO wedding are by Chris Wallace of Carpe Diem Photography, via My Modern Met. Many thanks!

The four "gerbils in the gallery" photos are from Marianna Benetti and Filippo Lorenzin, featuring their gerbils Pandoro and Tiramisù, via My Modern Met. Deepest gratitude!

I've been published again! "The Other Side of Fear" is out!

This is a re-blog of a post about my book The Other Side of Fear, that went live yesterday on The Weird Blog. It's from my publisher, Weird Sisters Publishing.

We've teased you about The Other Side of Fear for the past couple of weeks--first with a front cover reveal, and then with a sample from Chapter One. 

Today Weird Sisters Publishing is proud to announce the arrival (sort of) of Jan S. Gephardt's new book, The Other Side of Fear!  It's now available in the Kindle Store. Other outlets may still "processing" it.

But we can give you more glimpses.

What's it about, anyway?

Here's the official book description for The Other Side of Fear:

Does she have what it takes?

Orangeboro police officer Pamela Gómez took her own dare. Now she’s headed planetside, to meet the challenge of her life.

XK9s are the newest, most powerful tool in law enforcement, but these super-dogs need human partners. The Orangeboro Police Department has purchased ten XK9s. Only an elite corps of officers will be chosen as their handlers.

Pam’s never had a dog, never left her home space station, and never thought of herself as an “elite” anything, but she took the courses, passed the tests, and made the cut. Now she’s an XK9 partner-candidate, bound for Planet Chayko, despite all her fears.

Does she have what it takes to handle an XK9? The answer to that will take her places she never dared to dream about.

Here's the complete cover for The Other Side of Fear

The Other Side of Fear cover art © 2020 by Lucy A. Synk.

You already know how we worked with artist Lucy A. Synk on this cover, developing the concept and sweating the small stuff. Right down to "What does an ashasata look like?" and "Who are all the people in the background?"

It's a book--but a book with a really tiny spine. The spine width on this wraparound cover art provided an exercise in miniaturization. The book only weighed in at 100 pages (after all, it's a novella, not a full novel). For those who haven't read What's Bred in the Bone, there's also a preview of Chapter One at the end.

But our Art Director hates to see a blank spine on a book, even if it's a skinny one. Wait till you see her tackle Deep Ellum Pawn. That's next up. If all goes well, Deep Ellum Pawn will be available in paperback and wide release by this time next week!

The Other Side of Fear Is now available!

The Kindle Store now has this title available. Keep checking your Barnes & Noble account, or hop onto Jan's Amazon Author Page. You should find it there soon!

IMAGE CREDIT: Many thanks to artist Lucy A. Synk for the cover artwork, which is © 2020 by Lucy A. Synk, all rights reserved.

The Capricon Project

Let me tell you about The Capricon Project. As I noted on this blog Feb. 1, I'm planning to attend Capricon 40 this week (God and the weather willing).  While I'm there, my publishing company and I hope to join forces (and blogs) to cover the event.

As you may know, I'm the Weirdness Manager for Weird Sisters Publishing LLC (I'm half of the partnership. The other half is my sister, G. S. Norwood).  As Weirdness Manager, I also write most of our posts for The Weird Blog, and I'm in charge of preparing and posting all of them. But I can only split "me" into so many fragments.

Image courtesy of Capricon 40.

What is The Capricon Project?

Artdog Adventures and The Weird Blog will join forces for The Capricon Project. I propose to take lots of photos and do a lot of things at the convention (followers of Artdog Adventures are familiar with my process).

I like to highlight things I've seen, people I've met, and panels I've attended or helped present. We plan to cross-post the short profiles, photos, and other items I generate, to both blogs and some of our social media.

What's the plan?

I have a pretty ambitious schedule for Capricon 40. I'm scheduled for eight programming events, including five panel discussions (three of which I moderate), an autograph session, a reading, and the Indie Author Speed-Dating event.

Photo by Jan S. Gephardt. This is my Art Show display at Archon in Collinsville, IL as it looked October 6, 2019.

I also have two display panels reserved at the Art Show. I'll have a few copies of What's Bred in the Bone with me, available for sale at the con (reduced at-con price is $13, or almost $2 off the regular trade paperback price).

I also plan to attend other panels and readings, and tour the Dealers' Room. If they agree, I'll take pictures or short videos of dealers whose work I can recommend, and post them on my social media (Artdog Studio is on Facebook and Pinterest. Jan S. Gephardt-Author is on Facebook and Twitter, and Weird Sisters Publishing is on Facebook), as well as collect them for possible blog posts.

I hope you'll follow my posts, and see how well The Capricon Project turns out!

IMAGE CREDITS:

The half-header for Capricon 40 is courtesy of the Capricon Website. 

The photo of my book display at the May 24, 2019 "Mad Authors' Salon" at ConQuesT 50 is by Ty Gephardt, and used with his permission. 

Looking forward to Capricon 40

My "sf convention year" kicks off in February. I'm looking forward to Capricon 40 on Valentine's weekend, Feb. 13-16, 2020, in Wheeling, IL. And I'm already preparing for panel discussions and the Art Show.

My first Capricon was Cap 30, when my friend Lucy A. Synk was their Artist Guest of Honor. She invited me to attend as her guest. I had a lot of fun, but wasn't able to go back for several years after that.

Montage by Jan S. Gephardt, to represent her Blogging a Panel post from the Capricon 37 she wasn't able to attend.

Blogging a panel

I tried to go back in 2017, but a combination of countervailing events forced me to cancel so late in the process that I'd already been scheduled for panels. Unfortunately, one panel for which I'd been scheduled, Writing about Forensics, only had two panelists. The other, Jen Haeger, also had to cancel late in the process, so Writing about Forensics suddenly also got scrubbed.

Jen and I had been communicating online, and we decided that even if we couldn't go to Capricon and present the panel in person, we still could present the panel virtually. This led to Blogging a Panel on this blog (I think it was paralleled on Jen's blog and also that of Capricon's parent group, Phandemonium).

Since then, I haven't had to resort to such drastic measures.

This blog has followed my adventures at Capricon 38 and my Artwork, travel follies, and reflections upon Capricon 39.

Image courtesy of Capricon

Looking forward to Capricon 40

I plan to have my artwork in the Art Show, and of course I'll be on panels. I even have my schedule already! So I'm really looking forward to Capricon 40.

There's one set for Thursday at 5:00 p.m., called Detectives in the Wild (I moderate). We'll talk about detectives in science fiction (as opposed to urban fantasy, where they more often turn up).

Photo by Ty Gephardt, taken May 24, 2019.
Books, badge ribbons and bookmarks at the
Mad Authors' Salon co-hosted by Jan S. Gephardt,
Lynette M. Burrows, and Dora Furlong, at
ConQuesT 50 in Kansas City, MO.

On Friday my panels are Pronouns and SF/F at 2:30 p.m., and Weird Hobbies for Immortals at 4 p.m. (I moderate that one, too). I'm also scheduled to participate in the Indie Author Speed-Dating event on Friday at 5:30 p.m., which should be interesting (I have badge ribbons and bookmarks to hand out!)

Saturday starts early (for me). I'm scheduled to autograph at 10 a.m. and read from What's Bred in the Bone at 1 p.m., sharing the time slot with Dorothy Winsor. That evening at 7 p.m. I'll facilitate the Creating a Tropical World workshop.

Finally, on Sunday at 10:00 a.m. I'll participate in Religion and Ethics in an Age of Artificial Intelligence, which also ought to be an interesting discussion. I promise I'll come with coffee in hand, so I'm coherent.

Of course I'll also have paperback copies available from Weird Sisters Publishing. Certainly I'll bring copies of What's Bred in the Bone. If all goes well, I'll also have paperback copies of my sister's Deep Ellum Pawn novelette (as I write this, it's still only available via Kindle)!

With all of this, I hope that you, like me, will be looking forward to Capricon 40--either at the convention in Wheeling, or perhaps here in follow-up blog posts.

Photo by Jan S. Gephardt. This is my Art Show display at Archon in Collinsville, IL as it looked October 6, 2019.

Please note: My next XK9 story, a prequel novella titled The Other Side of Fear, will be available in March 2020. The second novel in the XK9 "Bones" Trilogy, A Bone to Pick, is set for release this fall.

IMAGE CREDITS: 
The "Blogging a Panel" header is by Jan S. Gephardt, with images courtesy of Reference,  Belleville News-Democrat,  National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Criminal Justice Degreelink. 
The half-header for Capricon 40 is courtesy of the Capricon Website. 
The photo of my book display at the May 24, 2019 "Mad Authors' Salon" at ConQuesT 50 is by Ty Gephardt, and used with his permission. 
I took the photo of my art display at Archon, October 6, 2019 myself. you may re-post or re-blog any of them with correct attribution to the creators and a link back to this post.

The Library Liberation Project

Some Artdog Images of (possible) Interest

My son and I (with occasional help from my Beloved) have embarked upon a project we've long dreamed about. We call it the Library Liberation Project. When we moved into our current home (30 years ago come June 1), I declared that a back room addition the previous owners had used as a rec room was to be the Library.

Some of the family couldn't imagine what we'd do with a whole room just for books, but others laughed and said, "It's perfect!" And for many years, it was a good study and writing space, with my office tucked in a back corner amongst the stacks.

Here's a corner of the Library in 2004. Yes, it usually looked a lot more lived-in, but we were getting ready for a party, so I even dusted and vacuumed! Sixteen years later, the lamp, the chair and the coffee table have passed on, but we've added lots more bookshelves. And loads of other stuff.

Some days I'd walk into my library, take a big, blissful sniff, and revel in the scent of being surrounded by books. Somehow ebooks just don't smell the same. The Library was a place of liberation back then.

Tragedy strikes

About a year and a half after I took the picture above, our family began a sad but inevitable process. My brother-in-law Warren died, at way too young an age, at the start of the summer of 2005. Before the end of that season, I'd also lost one of my aunts.

By 2007, stuff had begun to pile up.

I went to California with my father to settle my aunt's estate. It was small and relatively simple to handle, but I would benefit from that apprenticeship in the years to come. Aunt Betty was also a writer, and I brought a few of her things back home with me.

They took up a small corner in the Library, but that would only be for a little while. Till I got photos digitized and organized, and went through her papers. The books from Warren found homes on the expanding board-feet of bookshelves. The art supplies and fun boxes and bags . . . well, I'd figure out a good place soon.

The next year my mother died. Gigi and I struggled to get her house cleared out and ready to sell. Not sure what to do with all her stuff--and too heartsick to face sorting through it--we hauled it all to Kansas City.

Some went into storage, and some to my house. Gigi didn't have room. She was still cleaning out the home she'd shared with Warren, and struggling to deal with abrupt widowhood.

By 2009, the burgeoning piles of stuff in the Library were accumulating at a much faster rate than I could keep up with it. The Library was beginning to need Liberation, but I already had too much to do.

My mother also had a library in her home. She'd managed to confine it to one long wall of floor-to-ceiling books in her house, but when she passed away, my library suddenly had a whole new wall's worth of books to assimilate. Yes, I got rid of a few. But Mom had some really cool books!

I only discovered later that some of the stuff from Mom's house had originally belonged to my grandparents. And some of that had belonged to their parents or siblings. I had unwittingly joined a grand family tradition of accumulating inherited boxes full of stuff.

The year after that, my father-in-law passed away, and my mother-in-law began to downsize. More things arrived at our house, bit by bit. Year by year. And the Library took the brunt of it.

Piled higher and deeper

My kids went off to college and took some of the excess furniture--but a few years later they came back. With all of the same furniture, plus lots of new books. Then my other aunt became ill. My daughter went out to California to care for her, but eventually that aunt, too, died.

And left us all her stuff. This time I went out to stay with Signy in my aunt's condominium for several months, while we sorted through decades of accumulated wonderful things. Yes, she also had a full wall of books, but I was out of space and then some (of course, I still brought some of them home).

I read all I could, and wrote several blog post book reviews while I was at it. If you'd like to read them, I reviewed The Keepsake by Tess Gerritsen,  The Sentry by Robert Crais, as well as The Innocent and The Sixth Man, both by David Baldacci. We donated a large trove of hardback thrillers and mysteries by well-known authors to the local public library (they were delighted) before we left town.

These are most of the books we donated to the local library, so they'd find good homes and we didn't have to haul them across literally half the continent. (Photo by Tyrell E. Gephardt)

That wasn't all we donated. We never found a good auction company or estate liquidator, and the Realtor was eager to get the place emptied so it could be staged. So we made lists and lists and lists of donations for tax purposes, and then we donated stuff. Clothing by the bales and bags, some of it designer items. Household goods till the local donation center personnel began to recognize us. We even found a place to donate much of the furniture.

But we still had to rent a 16-foot box truck to get the rest of it out of her place. Who knew a three-bedroom condo could hold so much stuff? We hauled it to Gigi's place first. She didn't take exactly half of it, but she took a lot. Even so, what was left was enough to swamp the remaining clear spaces at our house.

When we arrived home from California, emptying the truck loaded up our living room. It deluged our dining room. And let's not even talk about what it dit to the Library. Except, not talking about it didn't make it go away.

Stop! Stop!

But wait. There's more! My mother-in-law moved into a nursing home. My father moved from his large home at the lake to a smaller place, then to a condo near us. In both cases a select few cherished or useful objects arrived at our place, along with other stuff that "needed to be gone through."

We kept trying to live our lives, throughout all of this. To build businesses. Write books. Deal with medical emergencies, and my daughter's chronic illness. We kept intending to go through all the stuff, but there was never time.

Well, now it's time.

The Library Liberation Project is ON. We broke down and rented another storage unit last October. The one from last decade, after my mother died, had long been cleared out and closed, and we'd hoped to handle further inflows "in-house." So, yeah, we caved.

At this point, it's hard to find any floor space at all in our once-spacious Library (the pet fence is up to deter the dogs). If ever a Library needed Liberating, it's ours!

But we needed some slack. We were like one of those sliding-tile puzzles, but with no empty space to slide a tile into. The rental's not cheap. When I say "we caved," I mean that literally as well as figuratively. Not far from our house is an underground storage facility in a repurposed mine. The good part is that it's naturally temperature-controlled. You may also have seen it featured on my friend Lynette M. Burrows's blog.

In 2020, we hope to reclaim our Library for real. We got a slow start in the last quarter of 2019, but we're determined. But The Artdog needs a better Studio, Weird Sisters Publishing needs a real office, and the Gephardts may not be as reliant on the "dead-trees versions" of books as we once were, but we want our Library back! And the Library Liberation Project will (eventually) get us there. We hope.

You may periodically receive updates on our progress in this blog space. You may also periodically see fewer or shorter entries, as I juggle the time requirements to factor in the Library Liberation work. We didn't get into this situation overnight, and it'll take a lot of time and hard work to get us out.

I hope by talking about my quest, I may perhaps inspire you to tackle any accumulating problems that may be developing in your life (before they get this bad!). Or perhaps you may just enjoy laughing at the crazy woman with a knack for inheriting mounds of interesting stuff. Either way, I hope it's interesting.

IMAGE CREDITS: Most of the photos in this blog post were taken by me, Jan S. Gephardt. The one of my late aunt's collection of thrillers and mystery novels was taken by Tyrell E. Gephardt. Feel free to reblog or re-post any you may find helpful, but please only do so with an attribution and a link back to this post. Thanks!