What I'm writing in YEAR OF THE DOG

I just finished writing Year of the Dog! It had a massive plot hole that I had to fix which turned out to be more work than I expected. Here’s a snippet:

“Hey, Auntie Nell.” He wrapped his arms around her, bussing her on the cheek and breathing in pikake flowers and shortbread cookies. And suddenly he was nine years old again, and her solid presence had made his chaotic world stable once more. “What are you doing here?” He usually took her to dinner on Wednesday nights, but today was Tuesday.

The edges of her smile faltered a little before brightening right back up again. “What, I can’t visit my nephew?” She angled around him to enter his home. “Is this your new house? Looks lovely.” Which was a blatant lie, because the fixer-upper was barely livable, much less acceptable to a neat-freak like his aunt.

She also left four matching pink and purple floral suitcases on the stoop behind her. Only then did Ashwin notice the cab driver standing slightly to the side of the walkway.

“Can you pay the driver, Ashwin?” His aunt’s voice drifted to him from the depths of his living room.

After giving the poor man a largish tip for lugging the four brocade-covered elephants all the way to his doorstep, Ashwin sweated through bringing them inside. “Auntie Nell, what’s in the suitcases?” An offshoot of his brain wildly tried to convince himself that if he just pretended ignorance, his fears wouldn’t come to pass.

No such luck. “I thought I’d stay for a little while. Ashwin, did you know your bathroom is unfinished? You’ve got tile everywhere.”

He paused in the act of shutting the door. Auntie Nell stating the obvious meant she was more upset than she let on. He very carefully said, “You’re always welcome to stay for a few days, Auntie Nell, but is everything okay at Yuina’s?”

“Yuina is fine.” Snippy. And avoiding a direct answer.

Uh, oh. “Did you have another fight with her?”

Auntie Nell’s petite form barreled back into the living room. “I have always gotten along with your cousin, but I swear, she could annoy the cockroaches out of a shed.”

“Auntie Nell ...” Actually, Auntie Nell hardly ever got along with her daughter, Yuina. The two were simply too different.

“She actually ordered me—ordered me, Ashwin—out of her kitchen when I was just trying to help her out like any good mother.”

He could imagine what Auntie Nell’s version of “helping” looked like. Hoo, boy. The two women had very different ways of cooking and cleaning. He would guess it was the cleaning part that the uptight germiphobe Yuina objected to.

Auntie Nell continued, “But if I just relaxed around the house, Yuina just did her own thing and barely spoke to me! I felt like a hotel guest.”

A headache started pounding right behind the bridge of his nose. Yuina lived for her engineering job and often got so caught up in work she didn’t even remember to sleep or eat, much less “waste” time in stilted conversation with her bored mother. If only Uncle Ramsey were still alive to mediate between the two strong-willed women. Yuina was usually too clueless to deliberately pick a fight with her mother, but Uncle Ramsey would always somehow keep them from rubbing against each other too much.

And now, all they had was Ashwin and Dusty. No wonder they fought like cats and … madder cats.

Year of the Dog releases in the anthology Danger in the Shadows in May 2025. So you won’t have to wait very long to read it!

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