Week 31: Opposite days

It’s week thirty-one of 2026. How’s the writing treating you these days? We’re counting down the weeks remaining in 2026 now rather than counting up. Settle into it—we’ve got a ways to go to see the year through.

I’m writing this from Sydney, Australia, where my daughter and I are visiting my son, who is in his third year of uni. It’s hard to have him so far away—fifteen hours of flying time, seventeen hours of timezones from San Francisco. Neither he nor I had ever set foot in the country before we arrived two and a half years ago to get him set up for his first term. We spent a week figuring things out: A “bin chicken” was to us an exotic-looking bird, but to Aussies a mangy pest as common as a pigeon. A “chicken parmie” was chicken parmesan, minus the prosciutto and pasta and most of the cheese and sauce, served with chips (aka fries). Buying kitchen knives (at the not-dead-here Kmart!) triggered an ID check. The weather and light felt like August; it was actually early February.

When I got back home to San Francisco, to a home with one child instead of two, in February days where the light faded at 5:30pm rather than 8:00pm, I was bereft.

Over two years later, I’ve gotten used to the gap between us. I know that when my still-active mental alarm to pick up the kids from school in the afternoon goes off, it’s now the time of day in Sydney when I can start to reach him. I know that I will see him at the midpoints of the year, and that we’ll have enough time to reconnect and feel like a family again. Most importantly, I know he loves Sydney, has found wonderful friends, and is happy and thriving.

When my kids were little, I came up with the concept of “Opposite Day” during one of the long, slow August days near the end of summer vacation when I had used up my summer parenting energy and the structure of school was still many days away. The only rule of opposite day was that things were, yep, opposite. The most precious rule for the kids was that the screen-time rules were opposite: there was only one hour that they couldn’t be on their screens. But they also loved deciding how all of our daily rituals could be opposite—where we would all sleep, what meals we would have and when. (Dessert for breakfast was the favorite.) Opposite day became a treasured family ritual of its own, and we’d declare them a couple of times a year.

So many things about this trip to Sydney have felt opposite: The seasons and the light, of course. The timezone shift. The exotic-to-us flora and fauna. Stepping back and following my son as he guides us through a city he knows well and I barely know at all. Watching myself become a different kind of parent, one who senses the mood rather than makes the rules, as my kids embrace young adulthood.

And at the same time, we’ve spent the week doing things together we might have done a decade ago. Cooking and eating their favorite meals together. Going to the movies (The Odyssey, which we all loved). Going to the zoo. Playing board games. But this summer (or winter?!), I have only a week of these regular family days with both of my kids together, not a long string of them. All of these days here in Sydney are opposite days, in a way.

I’ve been trying to decide on a word for what I feel when I think about that first opposite day so many years ago. It’s not nostalgia, which includes a yearning to return to some idealized version of the past. I loved my kids at three and six, and I loved how easy they were to surprise and delight. I also remember how tired and lost I was during that period when I was full-time parenting, with a co-parent at the time who was almost entirely absent, physically or emotionally or both.

I think what I mostly feel is pride. I’m so proud of the people my kids have grown into—and continually surprised and delighted by them too. I’m proud of myself for eventually realizing I needed an opposite kind of life from the one I was living then and building it for myself. I’m proud of the three of us together for weathering some really tough days between then and now.

And I hope that they are in the process of building authentic lives for themselves too, ones where opposite days are a fun diversion rather than a much-needed break from an everyday life that might not be giving them everything they need.

I hope that for you all too. If you are still fighting your way toward the life you most want, give yourself the reward of an opposite day or two along the way. What rules and routines do you need a break from, just for one day? What will you forbid yourself from doing and what will you give yourself permission to do? Your answers—and the experience of living them out for a day—might reveal a lot.

In the last issue, I included a short survey asking what you’d like more of in the newsletter as I start to experiment with new kinds of features. Early results are in, and one thing jumped out: sentence study—close readings of how a single sentence or passage does its work—was the runaway favorite. Short craft advice and the kind of memoir-ish writing you’re reading right now weren’t far behind. If you haven’t weighed in yet, there’s still time—it takes about two minutes, and your input will shape what I write in the coming year: take the survey.

And while we’re on the subject of your input, I’ve set up a spot where you can send me your questions—about writing, editing, reading, the publishing world, whatever you’ve been puzzling over—and I’ll answer in a future issue as part of a recurring Q&A feature. Ask me anything here: Ask The Blue Garret.

A revenge thriller in which Nyla Emerson—worn down by a string of unhealthy relationships—finds her strength, her confidence, and her fight through Danny Clements’s underground Revenge Club.

A few favorite things about the book:

⭐️ It’s Fight Club but for feminist women (YES! 👏)
⭐️ The bad guys get exactly what they deserve
⭐️ A deeply satisfying character arc for our protagonist, Nyla – you’ll be rooting for her from page 1

Congrats, Lena! Learn more and buy the book here.

The second Jaz Ryder mystery: when wine entrepreneur Paul Delgado turns up drowned in a vat at his own Kelowna winery, Detective Jaz Ryder follows a trail of stolen barrels and long-buried grudges that winds all the way back to her family’s past.

A few favorite things about the book:

⭐️ If you like wine and winemaking, you’ll love this novel, which is full of juicy details and lots of tasting
⭐️ The company of Jaz, a whip-smart female detective with a passion for justice (and a world-class palate for wine)
⭐️ Jaz’s new love interest, a coroner with a cat named Billie (always trust a man with a cat!) and a habit of delivering deadpan one-liners that made me literally lol

Congrats, Lyle! Learn more and buy the book here.

I love speaking to writers and editors—check out my Speaking page or reply to this email if you are interested in having me speak to your group.

Our Thing of Joy this week is a hilarious mockumentary about bin chickens. (YouTube video) Watching it, I realized this was the bird making the “sick baby goat” sound my daughter and I had been puzzling over all week.

Stay well, y’all, and keep fighting the good fights.

Kristen