When your professional life comes home to roost… by SW Hubbard

LUCY BURDETTE: I'm delighted to bring back my pal and fellow author SW (aka Susan) Hubbard with her latest installment of household politics...

SW HUBBARD: Are we drawn to our profession because of our disposition, or does our disposition morph after years in the same profession?

As with any chicken-or-egg question, the answer is a little of both.

Most nurses are naturally compassionate, and I’ve never yet met a happy-go-lucky lawyer unconcerned with details.



But spending many years in one profession changes the way you view your personal life, and the skills you use in the office tend to come home with you to be rolled out on the home front.

Take my husband.

Kevin spent forty years in international supply chain management and lean manufacturing, retiring right before Covid, the crisis that made “supply chain” a household term. Having just missed what would have been the career challenge of his lifetime, Kevin now runs logistics at our house.

If I overbuy at Costco, he informs me that I’m violating the first principal of lean manufacturing: Just In Time inventory. That means we’re only supposed to have enough on hand to meet our immediate needs. But if he wakes up to find the Cheerios box empty—the dreaded stock out!—I’ve violated the KanBan Two-Bin Replenishment System. In other words, if I kept two boxes of cereal, and bought a new one every time one was used up (always rotating my stock to use the older box first), I’d never run out. This, of course, assumes that I maintain a shopping list, which I don’t. And after 37 years of marriage, that’s unlikely to change.

Every January, we hold a Kaizen Event, aka, an improvement project. This involves purging anything we haven’t used in four years. Surplus material moves into the Red-Tag Area for disposition to donation sites or the trash. Now, when I put something of Kevin’s into the Red Tag Area--say, a 25-year-old printed road atlas of our county which doesn’t show several interstate extensions—he edges it out into what I call the Pink Tag Purgatory, where he performs extended farewells and a little mourning ritual. However, disposition of my unused items is short and brutal. As some of you who follow me on Facebook know, I recently had to bake a large lemon bundt cake to save my bundt pan from the Red Tag Zone.

But Kevin’s professional life skills and mine as a mystery author intersect when it comes time to find new homes for all the stuff we purge. Ten years of researching and writing the Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series has given me a very solid knowledge of what common objects have increased in value (1970s and 80s lunch boxes, Corning Ware, Bakelite jewelry) and what once valuable items are, sadly, worthless today (large china cabinets, fur coats, silver-plated anything). “I can sell that!” is my rallying cry as I save stuff from the dump and sell it on Facebook Marketplace or Craig’s List. My heroine, Audrey Nealon, of Another Man’s Treasure Estate Sales, would be proud of me!

Do you see traces of your professional life showing up at home? Tell me about it in the comments.

Click here for more information on my Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series, including the pre-order for Book 10, Unholy Treasure, coming in December.

How Hard Could it Be? by S. W. Hubbard

LUCY BURDETTE: I've loved my friend Susan (S.W.) Hubbard's books since her first Adirondack mystery. When I heard that she was making the big leap to try women's fiction (as I am), I knew we should hear all about it. Welcome back to JRW!

SW HUBBARD: Have you ever looked at a photo and said to yourself, “I bet I can do that. How hard could it be?”

I had that experience twice recently.  First, my college friend Elliot posted pictures on Facebook of him and his family hiking around Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps. Every photo showed glorious scenery in the background with a happy Elliot and his family beaming in the foreground.

My husband Kevin and I both love to hike, so I showed him the pictures. “We should do this!”

Kevin did the research and reported that the trip would require us to hike nearly one hundred miles in nine days, starting in France and hiking through Switzerland to Italy and back to France. “I’m not sure we’re up to this,” Kevin said. I knew he meant, “I’m not sure YOU’RE up to this, Susan.”

Oh, pish! How hard could it be? After all, Elliot had done it. He and I are the same age, and he’s never been a hard-core athlete. Indeed, Elliot is more of a bon vivant. He and I once took a hike in college in which all we packed was a bottle of red wine, a baguette, and some brie.

No water.

I assured my husband I was up to the challenge, and we booked the trip. I steadfastly ignored his exhortations to do some 10-mile practice hikes in New Jersey. Who wants to hike ten miles through nondescript woods when it’s buggy and hot? 

In July, we departed for the French Alps.

Okay, I would never, ever admit my husband was right on a blog with a wide international readership such as JRW. However… hiking the Tour du Mont Blanc is harder than it looks. I’m very glad I went (and I DID cross the finish line), but it was challenging. As in, I thought my heart would explode out of my chest climbing up those trails.

Which brings me to my second, “how hard can it be?” moment. Earlier this year, I decided I wanted to break out of the mystery genre and try my hand at women’s fiction. Readers are always telling me how much they love my characters, so maybe I could  write a book that’s all about the character development and leave out the mystery altogether. Why, I bet I could whip out a novel like that in no time, freed from the pesky clues, red-herrings, and plot twists of mystery-writing. How hard could it be?

Hmmm. About as hard as hiking a hundred miles in the Alps, as it turns out. 



You see, mysteries come ready made with conflict because of that dead body in the first fifty pages. In women’s fiction, an author has to work to keep the conflict strong enough to move the story along. 

I had a great hook: a young woman marries a much older man and when she finds herself a widow at age 45, she sets out to recapture the endless possibilities that life offers at age 25. And I had a familiar setting: Palmyrton, NJ, the fictional town where my estate sale mysteries take place. Some of the characters from the Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery series make cameo appearances in this new novel, Life, Part 2. But the story belongs to Lydia Eastlee. She trades her big McMansion for a funky starter bungalow, adopts a rescue dog, and launches into a new career she’s unprepared for. And did I mention the sexy young carpenter remodeling her kitchen? No one gets murdered, but there’s plenty of laughter and tears along the way as Lydia rebuilds her life.

As with the hike, I had fun, learned a lot, and tested my stamina as I wrote Life, Part 2. But I sure didn’t save time. Maybe on the sequel. 

When’s the last time you launched into something that was harder than it looked?

S.W. Hubbard’s newest novel is Life, Part 2, the first installment of her new Life In Palmyrton women’s fiction series. She is also the author of the Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series and the Frank Bennett Adirondack Mountain Mystery Series. Visit her at http://swhubbard.net


And here's how to order the books:

Life, Part 2

Palmyrton Estate Sale Series

Frank Bennett Series

How I made my life nice and easier by SW Hubbard

LUCY BURDETTE: I don't have a thing to add to today's blog from Susan Hubbard--I just know you're going to love it!

SW HUBBARD: I feel the woman’s gaze boring into me as I browse the housewares aisle at Target. I glance her way. She quickly averts her eyes. 

A moment later, I feel a tap on my shoulder. I know what comes next.

“I love your hair,” the staring woman says. “I just had to tell you.”

I’ve been getting that a lot lately. Ever since I made the radical decision to stop dyeing my hair.

I started going gray at the age of twenty-five, while I was still a single girl in Manhattan.

Horrified, I used henna to make the gray strands look like tiny red highlights. 

By the time I was thirty, the henna wasn’t doing the trick anymore. I turned to permanent dye: Nice and Easy 118A, Natural Medium Brown, which matched the color I’d been born with. By then I was married, and my husband, complaining that I smelled like a toxic waste dump after the application, begged me not to color my hair.

“Your mother dyes her hair,” I answered. “I’m damned if I’m going to have more gray than she does.”

The next twenty years found me periodically locked in the bathroom, shivering for half an hour in a ratty old bathrobe with a pile of brown 118A glop on my head. To pass the time, I’d read although it was hard to turn pages wearing plastic gloves. Sometimes I’d get absorbed in a novel, and my hair would come out Ronald Reagan black. Sometimes I’d cut the time short to referee squabbling kids, and patches of gray would show through. Inevitably, I’d splash dye on the tile grout, the paint, or my library book.

Despite his reputation for thrift, my husband implored me to go to a salon. Thus began ten years of spending two hours every six weeks at Trendz in the capable hands of my colorist and my stylist. I’d leave evenly colored but $140 + tips poorer. Within two weeks, a white skunk stripe would appear along my part-line. Covering that up before the next dye job required two more products: brown spray-in color and root touch-up solution.

One day I floated an idea to my stylist. “I’m thinking of letting my hair go natural.”

He was horrified. Said I’d look old. Assured me I’d hate it. (Of course, my decision would halve his income.) But over the next weeks I kept studying my silver roots. They were kind of pretty.
 And I was tired, so tired, of the struggle to stay brown. 

More than the money, I really resented the time I had to sacrifice to this Sisyphean battle. So I returned to the salon with my mind made up. “How long do you think it will take? My hair grows so fast.” (I wasn’t willing to cut my hair short.)

“A year.”

“No way! Well, let’s strip the brown dye out of my hair.” 

“That takes six hours and costs $800.”

Stunned, I went home and bought two hats to cover the increasingly visible skunk stripe. And, positive my stylist didn’t know what he was talking about, I applied my mystery author research skills to find a product to rush the process along. Google had plenty of advice about fading the brown dye: a paste of citric acid and Head and Shoulders shampoo was the least toxic; a product called Color Oops, which produced a chemical mushroom cloud that brought me to my knees, was the most. 

The brown never disappeared, but gradually the hard lines of the skunk stripe softened, and I achieved an ombre look: silver on top tipped with brown ends. A young man at REI told me my hair was foxy. I know what I wanted to believe, but I’m pretty sure he meant I resembled a small forest animal.

Finally, after a full year, my stylist snipped away the last of the brown. I was totally silver. We both stared at me in the mirror.

“I gotta say, I like it,” he admitted. 

So did I.

Yesterday I was in CVS when I felt “the look.” This admirer strode right up to me. “I love your hair. What do you use to get it like that?”

I pivot from the hair products aisle empty-handed.

“Absolutely nothing.”

***

Do you color your hair? Would you ever stop? If you’ve stopped, do you toy with going back?


S.W. Hubbard writes the kinds of mysteries she loves to read: twisty, believable, full of complex characters, and highlighted with sly humor. She is the author of the 5-book Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series and the 5-book Frank Bennett Adirondack Mountain Mystery Series. Tailspinner, the latest Frank Bennett Adirondack mystery, is available for preorder now.  With all the time she’s saving by not coloring her hair, she hopes to release a new estate sale mystery, Treasure Built of Sand, in early 2019. She lives in Morristown, NJ, where she teaches creative writing to enthusiastic teens and adults, and expository writing to reluctant college freshmen. She LOVES book groups and would be happy to visit yours in person (in NJ) or via Skype. 

Read the first chapters of her novels

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