September was a challenging month. On the first day of school, a fire broke out on the edge of town and we were put on standby to evacuate. The fire ended up traveling north, away from my town, and it decimated two neighboring communities. The damage it did is truly heartbreaking, and it's going to be tough for those communities to rebuild. Several lives, over 2,375 homes, and 100 businesses were lost. These are small towns, so a huge percentage of people were affected.
I got lucky because my town and my home were spared, but that scared the hell out of me. I'm a single mom who lives with chronic pain and mobility issues, and all of a sudden I was faced with the possibility of having to evacuate and potentially losing everything. We were on standby to leave for days, because it took a while to get the fire under control, and conditions were perfect for additional fires to break out. My stress level was through the roof, and to make matters worse, the air quality here was so hazardous from the smoke that we couldn't open a window or set foot outside.
Facing something like that really makes you evaluate your priorities. All I cared about was getting my kid, my cat, and my dog out of the house and getting us all to safety. The only item I wanted to take along was my laptop, because that's where all the books I've written are stored, and it's what allows me to continue my writing career, which means the world to me. Everything else is just stuff.
Before the fires, I'd gotten off to a great start on my next book. It's called Second Thoughts, and it's a fun, lighthearted story about a movie star and his personal assistant. Now that things have settled down, I've been trying to get the book flowing again.
Like I said, we were lucky. But that was truly one of the most stressful times of my life.
