Editor’s note: hi, it’s me, I’m the editor. The content of this series is adapted from the Memoir That Never Was, which I wrote last year. The themes centered on identity-making and my relationship with secondhand stuff), but in writing it, I ended up synthesizing ideas that have been pivotal to my growth as a person since turning 40. Although I decided to shelve my Memoir That Never Was indefinitely, I decided that there are parts of it I would like to share here on the blog. It will get pretty personal/vulnerable at times, but I think the community we’ve created here is a wonderful (and safe) space, and I hope that these posts will inspire reflection and conversation. Cheers!

Years of walking through thrift stores, looking at things people have discarded or left behind has taught me that beauty can be found in unexpected places, and that I should look for it wherever I go. And once I started looking, I did begin to see it – everywhere I went. Our society has an obstinate tunnel vision about what beauty looks like. But the human desire for beauty is much greater than that, and it imbues everything we make and touch and use. There is beauty in a well-loved wool sweater, in a handmade quilt, in a porcelain cup. There is beauty in the way a woman wears that sweater, in how she displays that quilt, in how she pours tea into that cup and drinks it. Being able to see that beauty – in what society calls mundane, especially – is a wellspring of gratitude, amazement, and wonder. You know the saying, “life is beautiful”? Its simplicity seems almost ridiculous once you grasp the full truth of it; once you feel the truth of it in your bones. Society gives us little room to grasp it. It’s like being in the most extraordinary museum ever built, and being pushed and jostled along at breakneck speed by a guide who gestures vaguely in every direction, “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, let’s keep moving, so beautiful, marvelous, extraordinary, this way, please keep up”. You know you’re in the vicinity of beautiful things because someone is telling you that you are, but you see practically nothing, and have no time to decide how you feel about any of it.

Pause. Breathe.

There are no guides at the thrift store. You have to look, and stop, and look again. Touch things, turn them over, really have a close look. What do they look like? How do they feel in your hands? What do they remind you of? How do they make you feel? You might start to wonder. Who made this? Who used this? Do I have a place in the story of this object? Does it have a place in mine?

I’m not gonna lie. I’ve bought a lot of things in thrift stores over the years. I’m a Taurus Rising, I like pretty things, ok? At least, that’s what I told myself for a long time: I just like beautiful things. Call me materialistic, I don’t care. Guilty as charged. I am the person that picks a material thing over an experience most of the time.

(As a sidenote, it’s funny to me how society says we should value experiences more than material things, while constantly whispering in our ears “but do you have enough stuff yet?” If society really wanted us to value experiences more than things, it would stop overproducing things. But what society actually wants is to sell us something, anything, experiences or things, it doesn’t matter – preferably both.)

Recently, I began to reevaluate this self-belief and I eventually arrived at the conclusion that, for me, experience and object are inextricably linked. When I buy a book, I’m not simply buying an object. I am buying the experience of reading it – for the first time, and a second and a third – and losing myself in a new world or learning something about the one I’m living in. I am buying the experience of owning my own library and being surrounded by books at home – a feeling I find deeply soothing. The experiential value of clothing is pretty obvious, of course. But even the objects I buy simply for display are part of various experiences: the experience of finding the object (I have so many good thrifting stories!), the experience of looking at it on a shelf at home and enjoying its beauty in harmony with its surroundings, the experience of creating an indelible record of the person I am in that moment. If you look around my house, at the objects I have accumulated – and I mean, really pause and look, not simply allow your eyes to glide over like you’re watching Uncle Frank’s 2016 holiday pictures from Puerta Vallarta again for the 20^th time – you can “read” my story: what I like, what I value, what I dream. I was recently visiting the house of an old friend I hadn’t seen in a few years, and we spent most of the time going around her house looking at various objects that she had added since my last visit. She wasn’t “showing off” her material possessions to me; we were catching up on her life. Each object had a story, which connected to other stories, which connected to others, and so on. I got to hear about her trips, her new hobbies, her plans for the future. All of that was possible because she’s a person who sees the beauty in objects, who values them, who allows them to have meaning. Buying something doesn’t make it meaningful; value isn’t determined by cost. Beauty, value, meaning exist in a relationship between the person and the object.

My recent reevaluation of my relationship with material things led me to another realization as well. For me, the value of an object is not just a question of beauty or experience: I love things that look like they have history. It’s not just an Old Money thing. At, least, I don’t think it is. W. David Marx writes that “all status symbols require alibis – reasons for adoption other than status seeking.”[1] I don’t think of myself as someone who needs alibis, but one should never underestimate one’s capacity for self-deception. So, ok: maybe enjoying nice things that are a bit shabby – that look lived in, well-loved – is, in part, a question of showing off my cultural capital, acquired not by birth but by “absorbing the tastes … and preferences of high-status people”[2] through my thrifting habit. I don’t love this take, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not true. Still, several things can be true at the same time, and I do think my taste in interior design is more than Old Money cosplay. I’ve never wanted a house that looks like an expensive showroom. I want a house that reminds me of my grandparents’ house, with its books and its rugs, its knickknacks and its piano, its opera vinyl records and its porcelain-tiled fireplace – all of them belonging to an era that had vanished long before I was born. I want a house that evokes that same sense of wonder and happiness I felt as a child in a space that filled my imagination like a combination of museum, time machine, and magical refuge. I want, most of all, a house that looks like a layer cake, bringing together the stories of many generations.

And here we have arrived at the crux of the matter. Because, of course, as an immigrant in a new country, I have no material history from which to build my layer cake. The vast majority of my family’s belongings had to be left behind when we moved to the West; we couldn’t take much with us, and what we took were mostly functional things. Most of my grandparents’ possessions are gone too; for various reasons, there was no opportunity to save more than a few sentimental items before their respective houses were sold. I have my memories of those houses – islands slipping a little farther into an ocean of oblivion with each passing year – and not much else to help me piece together my families’ stories. When my dad is gone, I will lose the last person who is also a keeper of those stories. It is an incredibly lonely thought – hard to bear now, harder to bear later, I’m sure. It’s the same for my husband, who left a war-torn country with pretty much the clothes on his back. Between us, we have precious little in the way of what you might call heirlooms. I don’t have my grandmother’s hand-embroidered tablecloths; he doesn’t have his grandpa’s watch. All we can do is create our own heirlooms.

It might sound silly, in this context, to say that I buy things because they have history. Why does it matter if they do, if it’s not my own family’s history? Can someone else’s grandma’s handmade quilt replace my grandmother’s tablecloths? In a literal sense, of course not. But I like to think of it in a different way. My memories, my family stories, are an inextricable part of my relationship with the world around me. When I look at an object and find it beautiful, it is not a judgment made in a vacuum; it’s a judgment that speaks, among other things, of my memories. I’m not buying a Japanese vase because I think my mom would have loved it; yet, my taste was shaped, in small imperceptible ways, by who my mom was, and her mother before her, and her mother before that. And so, even though you won’t see their possessions when you look around my house, I like to think that you can still catch glimpses of them here and there. There are glimpses of my husband’s ancestors too. There are glimpses of the people we are, of course, and the people our children are becoming. It feels a little less lonely to think about it that way.

Thrifting brought a sense of wonder back into my life by helping me notice the beauty in everyday objects. I think it can do the same for others, which is why I am always excited to hear about people giving it a try for the first time. It also inspired me to start paying attention to how I engaged with the objects in my life. To acknowledge a relationship. That, to me, is the core of mindfulness. I used to think that mindfulness required meditation, and meditation required somehow dumping out the contents of one’s mind and focusing on a single thing like breathing or a mantra — a practice as fundamentally incompatible with the way my brain works as riding a bicycle is to a fish. I was wrong. There are many paths to mindfulness, and also many facets to it – some more accessible than others. I’ve always lived inside my own head, so inward-facing mindfulness came relatively easily once I figured out how to put myself into a flow state (or, as I like to call it, meditation for people who can’t meditate). Outward-facing mindfulness is different; it’s not like plugging in an antenna and tuning in to the right station, but more like putting on a pair of glasses and seeing what we couldn’t see before: that we live in relation to the physical world, not wholly separate like starships moving through space. Mindfulness requires us to acknowledge that we exist as part of a relationship, but that is only the beginning. The relationship is something each of us gets to define for ourselves, and in doing so, create meaning.

[1] Marx p. 57

[2] Marx p. 41

First of all: THANK YOU! The response to my last post was amazing, and I am so grateful to have this community behind me as I embark on this leg of my writing journey. It’s starting to feel extra real, y’all! This week, I made a big decision (egged on by my husband, who is the best cheerleader a struggling writer could ask for) and reached out to a graphic designer to collaborate on my book cover. I can’t wait to share more soon, but suffice it to say that I’m super excited. I know I’m basically setting myself up to take a big loss on publishing A Party to Murder, but I’ve decided it’s more important for me to feel like I am making it something I can be truly proud of.

I’ll just have to do a little less thrifting over the next little while, LOL!

It shouldn’t be too hard. Between prepping one book for publication, writing another one and, oh, you know, juggling the day job, life, and everything in between, I think it’s safe to say I’ll be pretty occupied for the foreseeable future. Plus, we are moving into that time of the year when I always hunker down and turn into a housebound hermit. I mean, can you believe it’s almost the middle of October already? I can’t. And I say that as someone who was ready to give up on 2025 sometime around April. I’ll say it: 2025 is the trashcan fire that just keeps getting trashier.

Speaking of which, I finally stopped procrastinating and went to see my dermatologist this week about a weird spot on my face that hasn’t budged in a few months. Turns out (and no surprise, honestly) that it was in need of looking at. The good news is that it was pre-cancerous and only required a minor procedure to take care. [Burning. Literally. Right in the middle of my face, in case you’re wondering.] This is your reminder to always listen to your gut and seek out professional care if you feel like something’s off.

October is breast cancer awareness month, so let me also remind you to get those tatas checked – even if you don’t think anything is wrong, if you’re due for a check-up (whether by reason of age, family history, or other risk factors), go! It’s important. Don’t put it off. Trust me; here, too, I speak from experience.

In happier news, it’s Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada coming up, so I am now officially enjoying my 4-day weekend (I have Fridays off, yay!). Thanksgiving is not as big of a deal up here as it seems to be in the US (at least not in my family), so it’s going to be a pretty chill vibe. Family time, writing time, sleeping and eating and couch-surfing time. Just the way I like it!

Have a great weekend!

I’ve made little secret (especially on IG) of how much I’ve struggled with the query process, which is the first step in the traditional publishing journey. At the risk of indulging in a little bit of hyperbole, I would say that it’s a miracle I haven’t packed up writing altogether because of it. I recently had something of an epiphany about this when I realized that what was most soul-crushing to me about the process wasn’t even the constant rejection. [Although that hasn’t been a lot of fun, it’s at least good practice for a writer.] It was the fact that it made me feel like I had no control over my own writing journey.

Now, it goes without saying that, in life, control is often and mostly illusory. We don’t, and can’t, control nearly as much as we like to think. At the same time, having a sense of control – at least over some aspects of our lives, particularly the more meaningful ones – is necessary to our well-being. Without it, we risk falling into despair. Well, I do, anyway. With age, I’ve accepted that there are, indeed, many things I cannot control. My mom’s sudden death and my own brush with cancer were stark proof of that. But this has made it all the more important for me to feel in control of some things. Work-life balance was a big one. Another one should have been obvious to me, but wasn’t … until very recently.

My creative work is one of the things that gives me a sense of purpose. [Purpose, too, is fundamental to well-being, imo.] Writing is the core of my creative life. Ergo, to be happy, I need to feel that I have (some) control over my writing journey. That I am directing it, rather than being a largely passive participant. When I put it like that, it’s pretty obvious that I was always going to struggle with trad publishing. In that sphere, success is largely dictated by external forces – and that includes the definition of ‘success’. This, by the way, is not meant to denigrate trad publishing, or suggest that it’s not a viable and desirable path for many writers. It has pros and cons, which are very much determined by the individual writer’s goals, needs, and strengths.

In my case, I came to realize that there was a misalignment both in terms of goals and needs. I decided to pursue trad publishing for what was, for me, the wrong reason. I thought I wanted or needed professional validation of my worth as a writer. For someone with ‘authority’ to bless my writing, as it were. This is not, in and of itself, a bad goal or desire. Fundamentally, though, it’s not what I actually want to get out of publishing. [Not that I would not enjoy the ego boosting, but it’s not what really, truly matters the most to me.] I write because I love to write – not to have people praise my writing, not to make a pile of money. I want to publish so that other people have the opportunity to read what I write. To be a story-teller, one must tell stories to someone. But nothing more. Publishing, for me, is about finding my audience, not about winning at publishing.

And that brings me to the other key reason why trad publishing isn’t probably my best fit. Over 15 years of blogging, one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that the content I love to make is, in relative terms, niche content. It doesn’t have a mass market appeal, but the people who appreciate it, REALLY appreciate it. I am not saying this in a self-deprecating way, or to invite compliments or consolation. Personally, I have learned to look at it as a value-neutral statement. [This required some doing, because in a capitalist society, mass market appeal is the highest good.] Actually, I like to think of myself as a person of niche tastes – which is a nice way of saying ‘oddball’, a term I am also prepared to own, thankyouverymuch – so it makes sense that my output as a creator and writer would be similarly niche. I am okay with this.

Trad publishing does not cater to niche interests and/or content. It is a business, operating within late-stage capitalism. Broadly speaking, it needs to sell as much as possible to as many people as possible. The growing popularity of self publishing has contributed to this dynamic, too. There is now more competition for audiences’ attention than ever, and trad publishing can’t afford to bet on anything except ‘sure things’. Self-publishing authors who are not answerable to shareholders can afford to take risks – i.e. create niche content – to an extent that trad publishers cannot.

I’ll confess that, when I first started writing A Party to Murder, I truly believed that it had mass market appeal. People love Agatha Christie, right? And people who love Agatha Christie (like me) are looking for similar books to branch out to, once they finish all the OGs. You see where I was going with that. Turns out, I probably overestimated the market for historical murder mysteries. By, like, a lot. Cozy mysteries are popular, but it seems more in the contemporary genre. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I wrote the books I wrote. Also, and very importantly, having written them and then re-read them, months later, I still love them. I still think they’re fun and funny and entertaining – to the right (niche) audience. And I still want to put them out into the world, even if no one else is willing to help me do it.  

So, yeah: self-publishing.

A Party to Murder, hopefully coming to an Amazon near you in January 2026. Eek!!!

Now that I’ve blathered on about how I realized that self publishing was my answer all along, let me also throw a bucket of cold water all over myself. One of the reasons why I didn’t pursue that route in the first place is because it’s bloody hard. The practical realities of it don’t align as well with my strengths as trad publishing does. I know nothing about how to get a book physically ready for publication, cover design, marketing, etc. etc. etc. I have zero budget to hire professionals to help me along (at least for the time being), so I now have to figure it out on my own. I’ve got my husband in my corner, and he’s far more savvy with some of this stuff than I am, which will be a huge help. But overall, while the end goal and overall direction of self-publishing fits my needs, the process doesn’t fit my strengths. It will be a challenge, no less than querying … but with one key difference.

I will be in control of the process.

I might fall on my face, but at least it will be my doing. And I will try very, very hard not to.

I should probably stop now because, wow, this is a long time to navel-gaze, but I’m going to be cheeky and close this post with an ask.

I need a favour.

If you have enjoyed my content over the years, I would really, really appreciate your help in getting A Party to Murder to connect with its audience. Millions of books get (self)published every year, which means that getting eyes –and especially the right eyes – on your book is extremely difficult. Positive word of mouth and reviews, especially in advance of publication, help a TON. As do pre-orders, which help push a book higher in Amazon’s algorithm and, in turn, make it visible to more buyers. I am going to be writing more about this in the coming months but, for now, if you are interested in supporting me, please consider doing one or more of the following:

• Leave a comment to indicate if you would like to be added to my mailing list to receive updates on the book. I promise not to spam you (mostly because I will have absolutely no time to do so, lol). I will use the email address attached to the comment (which is only visible to me). Alternately, feel free to email me at bluecollarredlipstick(at) gmail (dot) com.

• Let me know if you would be interested in receiving an Advanced Reader Copy of A Party to Murder. For those not familiar with ARCs, their purpose is to generate advance word-of-mouth and reviews in preparation for publication. [Although, feedback on the book itself is always welcome.] So if you’re active on Goodreads or similar bookish spaces and would be inclined to share about the book (assuming you end up enjoying it, of course), please consider requesting an ARC. I am hoping to be in a position to send those out by late November.

• Follow my writing account on IG [murders_she_writes] and share my content with friends whenever it resonates.

OK, that’s it!! Thank you so much for reading this – and always – and I hope you will stick around for the rest of the journey.