15 - Ends & Odds

Fiction writer Nancy SM Waldman's Archived Newsletters

Dec 06, 2025

Hi! Welcome to Nancy’s Subtle Shadings Newsletter Archives

This was first published in November, 2025.

Read my newsletters here, after the fact, or get them via email fresh each month with subscriber perks and better formatting. Sign up here: https://nancysmwaldman.eo.page

Please note: the book promos only run for the month this newsletter was first published. I’ve left the book images and info in so you can look them up if they interest you, but the offers have expired.

November 2025

Ends & Odds

Artful arrangement

by Cadi, shows Fall’s beauty

and our shared gene pool

Greetings,

I ended the last newsletter with a “scorecard.” But at that point my more than a month-long trip wasn’t over, and things happened in that last five days, so here’s an updated version:

::SCORECARD::

Airports: 5
Flights that didn’t go as planned: 0
Flights that went as planned: 6
Provinces / States: 9
Mountain ranges: 5ish
Islands: 2
Deserts: 2
Good Surprises: 20 23
Bad Surprises: ~~3 - maybe 4~~ 5
Missing Credit Cards: 1
Found Credit Card: 1 (included in good surprises*)
Falls: 1 2
Broken Bones: 0 X 2
Colds: 0
Covid: 0

::THE END::

The last destination on this long trip was Vermont to see my granddaughter, who’s been living in Burlington. This was my first time there, and I loved it. It’s a quintessential college town: beautiful hardwoods line streets with charming houses, and it sits right on massive Lake Champlain with the Adirondack Mountains in the distance.

Lake Champlain looking toward the Adirondacks

We went to a cat lounge where we entertained a dozen cats. I found it very relaxing.

We had a late-night keep-away game in the motel pool (and were followed back to our rooms by a creepy security man).

I saw this at The Cafe Hot, where we had brunch. I sent it to my friend Brent Spiner. He totally appreciated it.

::ODDLY OKAY::

I fell for the second time on this trip on the last night in Maine.

It had taken us all day to drive from Vermont. It was dark, drizzly, cold and windy. I was hungry, tired and stressed. I still had miles to go before I got to my motel room. I hadn’t eaten an actual meal all day and was worried that I wouldn’t find anything decent by the time I got to my destination.

My son and I dropped my grandson at his mother’s house. I was going to stay in the car, but decided I should make the effort to go in and say hi. As I walked up the two very small steps to her deck, the toe of my shoe caught in the stretchiness of my wide-legged pants (that’s just me attempting to be fashionable while always being at least three years out of date especially with pants). I couldn’t stop my forward motion. Down I went on my right knee followed by a bullseye slam onto my very new right hip.

So scary.

I lay there in the wind and rain and dark and tried to cry. But I couldn’t because though my knee definitely hurt, the hip didn’t. I eventually sat up and was on my way to deciding that I might be okay when my son found me. He helped me up, and we went inside.

I was fussed over for a few minutes while I warmed up and gathered my wits. Then, I got the biggest, good surprise of the trip. Jonah’s mom said she’d just made a big pot of gluten-free soup and would be happy to give me some to take with me if I was hungry.

I mean…come on! An immediate and unsolicited offer of the one thing you currently need the most? The one problem that, when solved, takes most of your anxiety away? I had fallen and was still worried about lingering effects, but I no longer had to go hunting for a decent meal in the cold, windy, drizzly weather when I was hurt and tired and only wanting to climb into yet again one more hotel room bed for the night.

It was the best beef and vegetable soup I have ever eaten! Making food for people is sometimes the most appreciated thing we can do. There were more good surprises: the gal at the desk of the motel brought me ice packs and offered (though, ironically, I didn’t need it) chicken soup! When has that ever happened to anyone?

I suffered no ill effects from the fall other than taking several layers of skin off my knee. I wasn’t even bruised! So proud of this old body. I did learn from my falls. From now on, I will pay closer attention when I’m tired, angry, hungry or anxious. If I am more than one of those, I will take care of myself before using stairs at all! And I will try to stay away from wide-legged stretchy pants.

Two days of driving through perfectly gorgeous weather with a plethora of magical skyscapes and three vivid rainbows brought me safely home to Cape Breton!

Writing awaits me. I am feeling the drive to make new words.

I’ve published two of my novels in the last two years, and though I have another one that’s almost ready, I need to make progress with my unfinished work. After I got back from my trip, I re-read my handwritten notes about The Kindest Chaos, the sequel to Every Rule Undone. It reclarified the overarching ideas and character arcs that I set out to write.

My next step will be to re-read the unfinished first draft I wrote last year. I’ve got around 50,000 words, but when I left it, I was feeling overwhelmed and under-convinced that I was on the right track. This is, for me and many others, a normal part of writing the first draft of a novel. I’m hoping the time away from it will have helped to give me some perspective and clarity about what’s working, what isn’t, and what I need to do to finish it. What are the odds?

I think pretty good! I usually enjoy writing in January when—in this cold climate—distractions tend to slow down. We shall see..

The Liminals is getting wonderful reviews from people I know who have read it. Give it a try if you haven’t already. For my local people, it’s now in On the Same Page bookstore and I’m working on getting copies to the library.

In Every Rule Undone news, readers will soon have bonus material on my website! I’m compiling downloadable reference legends listing clans, characters, places, magical curses & remedies/maladies & cures. and special vocabulary.

::LITTLE BOOKS::

One of the coolest things about writing and publishing is that it’s still and always your property to do with as you please. You can sell it repeatedly and in different forms.

In anticipation of my writing group’s first ever bookfair (which was a huge success!), I decided to format some of my treasure trove of short stories into just such a new format. I chose seven of them, did quick covers from free-to-use photos online, printed them in booklet format and bound them with needle and thread.

Of course, it wasn’t that easy. There was a learning curve. Formatting a book with pages that are printed on both sides is crazy-making, but I finally figured it out and have made copious notes and diagrams. Only afterward did Barry tell me that there might be a setting on the printer that can do that formatting for me. We’ll see. Turns out the binding was the easy and fun part, but I was rushed and couldn’t do the tassels or beading that I had in mind.

I call them Little Books. People liked them at the book fair. There’s something endearing about a homemade, small-batch item that will always appeal to some folks. My hope is that people might make this small investment, enjoy my short story, get to know my writing and then feel comfortable investing in a novel or two.

Talk about starting small.

::THANKSGIVING BALLS::

BECAUSE IT SOUNDS BETTER THAN TURKEY BALLS

I mashed up this recipe from several I found online. Thank you to my dear friend Pat for the idea!

Leftover turkey chopped up
Leftover stuffing or store-bought stuffing mix
Leftover mashed potatoes (is there such a thing?) or peeled boiled potatoes mashed with a fork
Dried cranberries
1 Egg for binding

Optional: breadcrumbs, parmesan, finely chopped onions, celery, garlic, fresh or dried sage, thyme, rosemary

Mix all ingredients, add salt if needed. Roll into balls and put on a tray or in a cupcake tin. Bake at 350 until heated through, 15–25 minutes depending on the size.

Serve with leftover gravy (should you be so lucky to have any) or cranberry sauce and a fresh green salad or slaw because you need that after all that fatty food!

::ODD THOUGHTS::

As I named this month’s newsletter, I began wondering about what happens when we read or hear a familiar phrase reversed. My immediate reaction is usually amusement and a newfound curiosity about the original phrase. I pay attention to the actual words and their meaning in a way that I wouldn’t if the phrase were the same ol’-same ol’.

I looked it up. I tried quite a few search terms. But the Browsers-that-Be wanted to tell me about the phenomenon of backward speech. Interesting, but not what I wanted to know about. I used AI. It doesn’t happen often, but I will admit that I’m shifting slightly toward using it when I need to know something specific and not easily extracted from normal searches. I know. I know. That’s what “they” want us to do. Bleh.

When we see a reversal of a familiar phrase, a millisecond mental process engages the error monitoring (anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and control regions of the brain (pre-frontal cortex). First, we note its wrongness, then we discern if it’s purposeful or not, and third, we pay attention to it anew.

This can all be quickly followed by amusement, so I asked a follow-up question about what parts of the brain are activated in that case. This is a screenshot of my answer, proving that wordplay and “funny” are very complicated.

I found this in my search. It contains 9 dramas by the playwright most famous for his enduring play, *Waiting for Godot*

NOVEMBER 30 WAS THE LAST DAY TO GET THESE BOOKS FREE. But check them and many other books at: Liminal Fiction

Free books! — Check out the amazing book selection and support authors at Liminal Fiction.

Do you like short stories? Check out my two volumes of collected stories: As Far As and Rooster’s Dawn
My archived newsletters on Substack
Ends and Odds by Samuel Beckett
For my Little Book covers I searched photos on Unsplash which is still free to use
I used Perplexity AI to answer my brain question because someone i know well uses it a lot. Anyone have experience with one AI product or another?

MORE FICTION FOR YOUR TBR LIST!