This is a virtual hug for anyone who’s been in a state of utter overwhelm.

And it’s an apology in the unlikely event that anyone out there has missed my random ramblings.

I had heaps of things I intended to blog about after I posted the last on 4^th November 2024. Then my mother was offered the chance to move from an upstairs maisonette to a ground floor maisonette and while it was something we wanted to happen, it was somehow the trigger for my life to spiral down an Alice in Wonderland style rabbit hole, passing paint pots, books, carpets, laptops and online forms, without ever seeming to land.

The problem wasn’t the move itself, but the time-frame. Everything I had to organise, including redecorating and recarpeting the new place, had to take place between mid November and mid December. Fair play to local firms: the carpet people, a decorator and a removal company all stepped up and made it happen.

And after twelve years, Mum had finally decided she was ready to part with some of the stuff she’d brought with her when she left the place she’d lived with Dad. So cue days of decluttering while also packing. (A blog post in itself.)

In the midst of this, Liz and I published Death in a Dinner Jacket (the last, so far, of the Booker & Fitch series), and I was supposed to be publicising A Justified Death (book 5 in the Margaret Demeray series), while trying to finish work on the final (so far) Margaret Demeray Book.

On the personal front, my day job part-time project role was finally coming to an end and I had to decide whether to apply for another internal role or let the HR gods decide where to redeploy me (went for the former), and I needed to plan for a family Christmas – catering for seven people for four days at least.

Generally, I don’t mind change as I have a low boredom threshold, but not when there’s too much all at once. Six plus months later, I’m still traumatised by those packed (sorry) weeks of house moving – made worse by two days of heavy snow – and then Christmas itself, which was lovely except for my back deciding to ‘go’ after all the box-lugging just when I needed to do a lot of standing in the kitchen.

It really didn’t help that it was midwinter too, when the short dark days add (if you suffer with Seasonal Affective Disorder as I do to some extent) an extra layer of gloom and general fog.

I thought I’d manage to get a grip in January, then February, then… you get the picture. At work, my former team disbanded at the end of March – much emotion all round as we were very close – and I started a new job on 1^st April. As that was a Tuesday, it was a very odd week.

It wasn’t until May that I started to feel back on top of things a bit, but between my last blog post and now, the following have somehow happened and looking back, I’m not quite sure how:

• DP Publishers took on the publishing of the Margaret series apart from the audiobooks. They have republished all the ebooks with new covers, and will ultimately republish all the paperbacks with new covers.
• I finished the sixth Margaret book and handed it off to DP. It will come out hopefully on 18^th September and be available for pre-order hopefully from 16^th July – and I will actually do a post about it, because in theory, book six is the last in the series unless of course, readers want more (tell me if you’re one of them in the comments)!
• I moved all my audiobooks from exclusivity with Amazon/Audible and i-Tunes to a wider range of audiobook outlets, and just to let you know that the first three Margaret audiobooks are on 60% reduction until tomorrow (10^th June 2025) at Kobo, LibroFM, GooglePlay and Nook. Madeleine Brolly, my narrator, is currently working on Murder Saturnalia. If you want to know about my audiobooks then check them out here.
• I started writing a new mystery series set in the 1920s – not Margaret related at all – and somewhat inspired by one of the postcards in Postcard Whisperers.
• Liz and I finished the first book in a COMPLETELY new project – a cozy romcom set in a world just like ours, only in which there’s also some magic. We had HUGE fun writing it and really missed the characters when it was finished. Needless to say, I miss the dragons the most. One in particular. More info soon and out hopefully this summer.
• And finally, I decided to publish a book which has been finished and waiting for me to do something with it for a very long time. It’s called The Incomer and will be out on 1^st July. Again, this is something completely different – a world like this one with paranormal elements, albeit not cozy. I’ll write separately about it soon because there’s something of a story behind the writing of it but perhaps a taster of the story rounds this blog off nicely. The main character’s world has overwhelmed her, so she’s moved to hide away as much as she can – but the locals have other ideas, and she has to fight back.

And so shall I.

I am still inundated with deadlines and pressures (some self-imposed) and as you no doubt are too, overwhelmed by helplessness in the face of current affairs. But I looked at my June ‘to do’ list yesterday, and after a moment of panic, broke it down into:

• Must be done
• Can wait
• Outside my control

and re-wrote a manageable list which made me feel a whole lot better.

If you’re feeling like everything has got on top of you, I hope you can do the same.

After all, as someone once said in an office meeting (stopping the conversation dead for a few moments) ‘You have to eat the elephant in the corner a bit at a time’.

Words Copyright (c) 2025 Paula Harmon. Not to be used without the author’s express permission. in any way, including the training of Artificial Intelligence.  Image credit: ID 116632158 © Jozef Micic | Dreamstime.com