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You are here: Home / Blog / Rainy Day Post

Rainy Day Post

Blog, Just Life, Knitting etc POST A COMMENT July 15, 2026 by Ilona

View outside the front door, with rain and drenched oaks.

Oh no, two posts in a row. This is what happens when we are not furiously writing.

It is a very blustery day in Texas. The world is soaking in the downpour, and the thick rain hangs like a pale haze. The fat raindrops bubble up as they strike the ground and drum a steady, comforting hum on the metal roof. It is cozy. The two dogs of Andrews household are sacked out, the cats are sleeping, and the outside critters are hiding from the rain.

Nykie and Tubby sleeping on separate doughnut pillows

We need the rain. I have to say that, or they might kick me out of Texas.

1,000 sets of borderless vellum arrived yesterday, thankfully packaged in plastic and safe from the rain. I am going to finish the customer queries today, the sticker sheets have been printed, and I am excited to get our dining room back.

Tuna sniffing at a sticker sheet.

I also have to mail several packages. And I hope to do little mundane things like cleaning the house.

For those of you who asked what I was knitting – it’s a shawl. I did so much crochet that I needed a palate cleanser. I scored this gorgeous Volcanic Eruption Estrelitta colorway from Miss Babs, and I paired it with S’mores Yummy 2 ply. I thought it might tone down the sparkle.

Pictures of the two yarn colorways, the orange and brown on the left and brown and grey on the right.,

The joke is on me, because the pattern I picked calls for distinct stripes, and these two yarns blend flawlessly.

Striped side
Reverse side

I had to frog it, because the narrow stripes the pattern needed faded completely. This is not the right pattern for this yarn, but I started and I am going to keep going. Often wrong but never in doubt!

I decided to call this mess Fireside Ember project.

Some of you noticed that the book linked in the previous post, This Monster of Mine by Shalini Abeysekara, has been dropped by her publisher. When that happens, sometimes people decide to boycott the publisher. Just in case anyone is considering it, please don’t. Shalini is entitled to royalties, so the best revenge here would be to buy this book, so she can get all the moneys.

Publishing is not for the faint of heart.

We’ve been writing for almost a year, non-stop. Vacation is not in the cards this year, so we will end up doing a staycation, and right now it honestly feels so soothing to just not have the enormous pressure of a past due deadline. People have been asking what’s next, and we don’t know yet. Right now we are going to decompress by filling all these orders, and then we will see.

A small request: please stop making threads and commenting about all of the books we have not written and demanding to know when they will get here. It doesn’t help. It makes more pressure, and more pressure will not make books happen. It will just give me a massive writer’s block, and since it takes two of us to write the books, the HA machine will grind to a halt. To create, we need room to breathe.

Well, it’s almost 10:00 am, and I have a list of things to take care of.

Oh, and ARRA has a cool announcement.

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