My newest book will be released on May 8, 2025. It’s my first nonfiction title, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with you. In light of that, I’m sharing a short chunk of text from The Funny Side.

This section is from Chapter 1:

Brain loss.

In terms of my intellectual capacity before children, I was brilliant. After children—heavy sigh—there was no end to my stupidity. This was another thing nobody talked about, or warned me about, before I got caught in a baby-brain moment for the first time myself.

Hello? This would have been useful information!

I’m going to be honest because I wasn’t able to find anybody willing to be honest with me: It doesn’t get better. Those brain cells are just gone. I don’t know where they went, but they aren’t where they used to be.

To make matters worse, some days, my brain—once a trusted advisor—joined the chorus in teasing me about this loss. It was as if my brain and the creators of pregnancy were sitting on the sidelines of life, pointing at me, and laughing. “Look at her! She forgot her words mid-sentence and is just sitting there with her mouth open, trying to get them back!” Or “Ha-ha! Her five-year-old dresses better than she can! Underwear inside out, two different socks, and pyjama pants with a dress shirt, and she actually feels like she got it right this morning! Completely clueless.”

My finest moment, in which I had no choice but to give into my brain and laugh along with it, involved my morning coffee. I was using one of those little VIA ready-to-brew coffee packs from Starbucks. I cut it open, and I stood smiling—yes, smiling—over the garbage can as I poured the coffee grounds into the trash. With my smile lacking any signs of intelligence, I then returned to my coffee cup on the counter and added hot water, stirred, and left it while I completed some other morning tasks.

(No, not pooping.)

When I returned to my mug for that first mouth-watering sip, I was stunned to find that it contained only hot water. As if to emphasize of my confusion, I even scanned the area to see who had taken my coffee. No doubt, someone was playing tricks on me. As I stood there baffled, the trickster revealed itself in a slow-motion playback memory of myself, wearing a clueless smile while pouring the coffee grounds into the trash.

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For readers who prefer to read fiction, here is a brief excerpt from chapter 2 of my prequel novel Vizard:

Juniper Berry wakes to silence. The world around her is dark. Startled, she sits up fast. Her head cracks off something above her. She feels with her hands, finding the clingy, sticky threads of spiderwebs coating the coffin-like walls. She stretches her toes down to find a wall there too. Her nose detects the musty evidence of old wood and freshly disturbed dust.

Her foggy brain works to fight the panic. She closes her eyes, drawing deliberate breaths the way her mother taught her to. Juniper Berry’s memory jolts as if she’s hearing the softness of her mother’s voice at that very moment. She glimpses her mother’s face, with brown eyes and soft wrinkle lines in the corners, peering into her own as sparkling particles drift over her, tickling her skin. Through the sparkling particles, Juniper Berry sees love foremost in her mother’s expression.

Her mother put her in the hidey. Hidey is what Juniper Berry’s parents call this secret space, a crawl space between the interior and exterior walls of the house. The angle of the roof creates a low slanted ceiling in this section of the upstairs, which allowed for the inside wall to be framed with a small pocket of undetectable space behind it. As she lies in the hidey, everything floods back into her memory. The particles were a sleep charm­—eternal sleep—one so strong that it slowed Juniper Berry’s heart rate to a point somewhere on the brink of death. It’s a dangerous charm. Few Spellbinders can enact the charm without killing the subject; eternal sleep hasn’t been actively taught in hundreds of years.

Vizard is available in ebook and print format but will be available as an audiobook soon.

I wrote this post for letter E of the 2025 A-to-Z blog challenge.