I bought a bunch of books with the proceeds. I like reading way more than I liked marriage. I mean, I guess it’s fine for other people, but.

I know that’s not very romantic coming from someone who has written a lot of romance novels over the years, but I’m perfectly capable of making things up without believing in them, at least not for myself.

In fact, one of my favorite things to do is make things up that I don’t believe in. Lucinda, the main character in The Wanderer series has a kind of earth magic that allows her to manipulate stone, and yet you can really only manipulate stone that way with a jackhammer or a bulldozer.

And I don’t really believe in magic that way it appears in The Mage of Motor Avenue series – you won’t see me flying above the streets of Los Angeles, courtesy of a magic spell.

But I do believe magic is everywhere around us all the time.

I mean, look at how I converted a piece of jewelry into a pile of books.

The post The Power of Magic appeared first on Jennifer Lawler.

Well, there is one reason but during this conversation, I do not remember that it exists. I just wonder how a person’s feet can fall asleep when she’s not doing anything that would cause it.

“Hmm,” I say. “Does it hurt?

“No. Just numb. I can’t really feel them.”

“That doesn’t sound like fun,” I say.

“I don’t like it.”

“I wouldn’t, either.”

We finish our stir fry and she does the dishes and a day or so later, we are sitting together, reading a book in Spanish, one about a magical cat, and she says, “My feet are numb again.”

There is no reason for her feet to be numb, except for that one reason, and this time that one reason inconveniently jams itself into my mind.

You know what’s happening, fuckwit, my brain says to me and I do, all at once, and I see that this is what my daughter is asking me about.

I say, “hmm,” again and then, “It’s happening a lot,” a foray into a minefield I don’t really want to traverse.

“Yes, it is,” she says.

Neither of us says a word about That One Reason. We both edge carefully away from the minefield and later, I tap keywords into Google and I confirm what I already know: her degenerative spinal cord disorder is progressing, when I thought it might not. Would not. I thought maybe it would be ten more years before it came to this, but it is not ten years, it is barely two.

A few days later, we are reading more about Trece, the magical cat, when Jessica leans over and puts her head on my shoulder.

“Is it happening again?” I ask her and she takes my hand and grips it in hers and I juggle the book awkwardly but I don’t lose my place;  I am good at not losing my place in books.

“Trece is very sarcastico,” she says.

“Very.”

“And un poco malo.”

“Maybe more than a poco.”

Her hand grips harder.

“Is this the last book in the series?” she asks.

“No,” I say. I kiss the top of her head. “There are plenty more. There are lots of adventures left.”

The post On Reading Aloud appeared first on Jennifer Lawler.

I remember holding the check from his estate in my hands and thinking, “I wish I’d never received this. I wish he’d taken me to the movies instead.”

When I was a child, I was enthralled by books and movies—stories of any kind. I could walk to the library and check out books, but I couldn’t get to the movie theater on my own. Someone had to take me.

My father used to talk about how, when he was a kid, he went to the movies every Saturday morning. I remember the longing I had when I heard him talk about Buck Rogers and John Wayne. I wished with all my heart that he would still go to the movies every Saturday morning—and bring me with him.

But money was always tight so we never went.

Here’s the thing: it wasn’t really the movies I wanted. But he was a person so focused on the long-term—would he have enough for retirement, what would happen if he got sick before retirement age, what if he lost his job before he became eligible for a full pension—that he never gave the present moment much thought.

This is probably why I am one of the most present-oriented people you will ever meet. I don’t think much about the future and I rarely remember the past.

But I’ve been thinking a lot about that moment when I received the check. I don’t want my daughter to ever think, “I wish my mother had taken me to the movies.”

The post On Legacies appeared first on Jennifer Lawler.

While there, I noticed a sign about the importance of protecting the endangered tortoises. One of the threats to their survival is ravens.

And the thought popped into my head that I personally like ravens way more than I like tortoises, so why should I care about the tortoises?

Before you worry that I am some callous freak, let me hasten to add that I do in fact care about tortoises because I care about endangered species, but what are we supposed to do, start murdering the ravens? I wanted to ask the zoologists to at least give me a reason why tortoises are more important than ravens.

It’s possible that the explanation is self-evident to someone who isn’t me, but I have been mulling this over for literal years and I still can’t see it.

As a developmental editor for fiction, I’m constantly asking authors to show the motivation for characters’ beliefs and actions, as this is what helps create the kind of conflict that engages readers’ attention. In this case we have ravens versus tortoises and we’re supposed to be on the side of the tortoises. But why?

Sometimes I wonder if I take my work too far when I’m out in the real world, which has consistently shown itself resistant to the type of editing that would make it a lot easier to understand.

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Naturally, talking about “to be” requires a lot of discussion about people’s characteristics – “soy profesora” uses ser to say that I’m a teacher whereas “estoy muy ocupada con el trabajo” means that I’m very busy with my work (at the moment).

And then my teacher surprised me by saying, “Tu eres alta.” (“You are tall.”)

This is not something anyone has ever said to me before. I’m the shortest person in my family, not to mention that shortest person of all my friends, and possibly even the shortest person in the entire city of Los Angeles.

I felt my mouth drop open. My teacher said, “Alta means tall. You are tall.”

“Here I’m tall,” I said. (“Aquí soy alta.”) “But in the US ….”

“Eres baja,” she finished with a smile. “I see.”

“So I feel like I should be using estar rather than ser.”

“But that would be confusing to Spanish speaker, so don’t do that.”

That evening, on my way home on the Metro, it was standing room only. I noticed that I am tall and I could actually see over many people’s heads, which has never happened to me before.

This conversation showed such a clear point about perspective. We were both right, even though we perceived my height in opposite ways.

This difference in perception is something I play with in my novels. Different characters will experience different story events differently and this often creates conflict. No one is wrong, no one is in error, but still … conflict. These dichotomies have always interested me.

What stuck with me, though, is another interesting aspect of perspective: I still think of myself as short and my teacher still thinks of me as tall. It’s very difficult to change a perception about yourself once you’ve thought it often enough.

Which means I’ve just discovered another tool for the writing toolbox.

The post A Matter of Perspective appeared first on Jennifer Lawler.

I’ve always said that if you ask me to write a story about a woman in a red dress sitting at a bar, I can do that without batting an eye, but ask me to write a story about whatever I want, and I can feel the panic setting in.

So, here are a few of my favorite ways to generate ideas:

1. Consider what you’re reacting to. If you have an opinion, maybe you have a story idea. When someone posts an update on social media that makes my eyes roll, I often find that there’s a story there.

2. Be mindful of your ideas. Ideas flit into your mind all the time. They just flit out again if you don’t pay attention. So, start paying attention.

3. Think about markets. It’s easier for me to think of an idea for a personal finance story to pitch an editor I know at Bankrate.com than it is for me to think of an idea.

4. Respect the idea. If an idea comes to you, pin that sucker down. I was sitting at a beachside diner a few summers back, chatting with my daughter and waiting for a storm to pass when I had an idea. I grabbed a pen and some napkins and caught that idea before it went away.

5. Listen and watch people. I do a lot of work in coffee shops and not just because I get tired of my living room. People spark ideas all the time. Be open to finding story ideas in everyday life.

6. Keep a journal. I have vivid dreams about all kinds of things, and I’ve written several books based on themes or feelings that arose when I was dreaming. I wrote those ideas down before I forgot them.

7. Think about what you know. For years what I knew about was martial arts. I tried to find ways to talk about martial arts that not everyone was already doing.

8. Research. Sometimes we think that ideas should just come to us out of the blue, but they don’t. They have context. So, if you have an area of interest, try reading the newest studies about it. Take a class. Talk to a teacher. Go to the library.

9. Develop a habit. Look for ideas. Look for them everywhere. Write them down.

Pretty soon your problem won’t be not enough ideas but too many ideas to ever be able to write about in this lifetime. That’s a good kind of problem to have.

The post Story Idea Generator appeared first on Jennifer Lawler.

I can only grieve it years later, as I am grieving the lost promise of other lives, my daughter’s, my own.

I dreamed about my son again last night; in the dream, he is tall and quiet with sandy brown hair like his father. We’re at a table at a friend’s house, eating a meal. I’m so glad he’s here.

Barely before we’ve had a chance to take a bite, he gets up from the table.

“Do you have to go so soon?” I ask him.

This is the question I have always asked him. He never answers. He smiles and is gone.

Even outside my dreams, I can see him sometimes, the son I never had; I catch a glimpse just outside the corner of my eye. He is twenty-eight now, tall, like in the dream, with that gentle smile. I think he plays the guitar. I think I have sometimes heard him.

They call a child like him the vanishing twin and that is what happened to him, he vanished one day, between one heart beat and the next.

No one talked about it to me, not after the first discovery that he once existed. I never named him.

He was my son.

The post The Vanishing Twin appeared first on Jennifer Lawler.

I provide pillows and hot chocolate but, as Jessica points out, it´s otherwise strictly BYOB: Bring Your Own Blanket.

Most Spanish homes on the Costa del Sol are built to stay cool in the summer, not warm in the winter, so we have sweaters and jackets and blankets drifting across all the flat surfaces in every room of our apartment.

The Cola Cao (hot chocolate mix) displays are prominent in every supermercado, and every variety store has stacks of space heaters on sale near the front of the shop.

But here in Spain the true warmth comes from your vecinos, your neighbors, who try to work out the right English words to say to greet you, while you are working out the right Spanish words to say to greet them; and the smiles of the families in the calle, hurrying from one place to the next but never too busy to stop for a chat, standing and shivering under an umbrella; and the camerero, the waiter, who brings you a warm tapa with your glass of wine because you look a little cold.

The post BYOB appeared first on Jennifer Lawler.

When I visited Spain in 2022, the rate was about 1 to 1. One dollar was about the same as one euro.

But now? Now I watch the exchange rate in horror. In November 2024, when we moved here, $1000 was about €1000. Now $1000 is about €850 on a good day.

Since I earn all my money in dollars, this is a horrible situation for me. I´m working just as hard as ever to earn fifteen or twenty percent less. And it could have been avoided except … well, you know what happened in November 2024.

Of course the exchange rate isn´t the only consequence of that election, it´s just the one that applies to me personally.

I think about that a lot. If you´re not an expat, you probably don´t worry about the exchange rate much at all. And yet it is vitally important to me.

I resent this crappy exchange rate. It should never have come to this.

I´m angry about the exchange rate. None of us who care about each other caused it but we´re suffering it.

I´m furious that the people who have power, even limited power, are doing nothing about the exchange rate.

I cannot believe that this is where we are, this powerful country with so much potential to do such good, with such a dismal exchange rate.

I´m not talking about the exchange rate.

The post The Exchange Rate appeared first on Jennifer Lawler.

That worked because their characters were the kinds of people who would have a recipe and it would be a good recipe that people would want to make.

I’m trying to imagine what recipe Lois, the Mage of Motor Avenue, would write (urban fantasy, animal sidekick). It would be something along the lines of, “Buy a Lean Cuisine, follow package directions.”

Or what details Lucinda, the Wanderer (epic fantasy with strong female lead), would share. “First, build a fire. Then take a small pot and fill it with water from the nearest stream…”

And then I started my current work in progress, which is about woman who lives on a farm, which is perfect—farm-to-table recipes galore! Except she doesn’t like to cook.

Here in Spain I’ve noticed that many of the kitchens in the apartments where I’ve stayed don’t have ovens, including my current long-term apartment.

They have stovetops, fridges, freezers, and microwaves but no ovens. I suspect this is because there’s a bakery with delicious baked goods every fifteen meters, so who needs an oven.

But a lot of the meals I’m used to cooking get popped into the oven – roasted vegetables, a casserole made with bechamel sauce. I got an air fryer and while it’s not up to cooking the casserole it does roast vegetables and I’ve learned to adjust what I cook.

A quick stir-fry on the stoveotop does’t heat up the apartment too much, which, in Spain, in summer is genius.

S0 here’s my go-to stir-fry sauce recipe:

• 3 tablespoons lime juice
• 3 tablespoons sweet chili sauce

Mix together. Good for one head of broccoli or the equivalent.

I am not a complicated cook but unlike my characters at least I do cook.

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