In the Weeds: A Review of Kamala Harris’s 107 Days

Posted on October 26, 2025 by Gabriella West

107 Days, Kamala Harris, Simon & Schuster, October 2025, $14.99 on Kindle

Former Vice President Kamala Harris is doing the rounds of her book tour right now. This book came out remarkably fast, given that she lost the election to Donald Trump less than a year ago, as we all know. The publishing world isn’t geared to moving fast unless they know they have a financial winner on their hands, which they clearly did with this book. In fact, in the Acknowledgments, amongst many other people, Harris fulsomely thanks Bryan Lourd, a powerful Hollywood agent/player. Lourd was the one, apparently, who encouraged her to do the book. And… she listened. Let me say that I voted for Kamala Harris last November and was deeply disappointed by her loss, so I was a good audience for the book.

This is one political memoir that bucks the trend. It isn’t stodgy. It’s written in short, snappy chapters, each covering a day in Harris’s short, doomed, but initially dynamic campaign. People who watch a lot of cable news will remember many of the beats mentioned here. It is revealing to see them from Harris’s point of view. Loyal to Joe Biden, at least publicly, she has to wait for an agonizing length of time for him to drop out after his ghastly debate with Trump in June of 2024. Then there is the painful transition to her own platform, which she admits was rushed and half-baked, given the time constraints she was facing. In the end, Joe and Jill were not supportive, and his resentful team actively worked against her. Pretty strong stuff!

Particularly fascinating, actually, was the run-up to the only debate she had with Donald Trump (his choice) in September 2024. Harris allows herself to fully express the exhaustion and sense of overwhelm she was feeling during those tense days of preparation. And there are traces of her somewhat biting humor throughout that make the book more palatable and make Kamala herself more relatable.

Doug is always there as her touchstone:

When the debate ended, I genuinely had no idea how I’d done. I felt like the survivor in the aftermath of a bomb blast, barely able to hear what was being said to me for the whooshing in my ears. I could see Doug’s face, swimming in front of me as he came up on the stage. He was talking, but I couldn’t take in what he said. I registered the fact that he was smiling.

But then early the next morning she has to attend a 9/11 memorial in Shanksville, PA, where Joe Biden insults her by accepting a MAGA cap from one of the firemen there and putting it on! The fact that the firehouse was unfriendly territory to her is painful, and makes painful reading. It’s clear they were more comfortable with Joe, an elderly white man. And Kamala has to suck it up.

Inside, the volunteer firefighters and their families milled about or sat at tables. Many wore MAGA hats and Trump T-shirts. Some refused to shake my hand; others offered me their backs.

Ultimately, I found Harris to be a curious person, a political animal, obsessed with optics (as you have to be as a woman running for president, unfortunately). What I didn’t like overall was her rather dismissive attitude towards policy—she explicitly says that she left it to her “team” to be “in the weeds” about stuff. They are constantly prepping her behind the scenes as she rushes around, giving scripted soundbites. She candidly admits that she messed up on TV show The View when she said woodenly, in response to a question about whether she would have done something differently from President Biden during the last four years, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” But it’s annoying and not inspiring to see all the damage control going on behind the scenes. The endless calculation.

Kamala Harris’s first task as candidate was to get ready for the August Democratic convention and pick her running mate, a crucial choice which she somehow muddied. I was offended by the offhand way she treated Tim Walz in the book. She doesn’t quite say “I wish that I never chose this loser,” but she implies it. In the end, he gets a cursory mention in the Acknowledgments, and it’s clear that they spent little time together. Doug didn’t like him, she says:

Doug and I went back and forth. He had known Josh longer and leaned that way. It was always going to have to be my decision.

Then she writes rather off-puttingly: “It was my idea for the campaign to lean into Tim’s brand as coach, a role that conveyed both strength and caring.”

Again, the emphasis on brand and optics, with a hopeful appeal to both men and women. But this nice Minnesotan ended up disappointing her by not having been entirely truthful and accurate about his past, which the Republicans eagerly jumped on, and she coolly nails him for messing up in the debate with J.D. Vance by being too passive:

But J.D. Vance is a shape-shifter. And a shifty guy. He understood that his default meanness wouldn’t play against Tim Walz’s sunny disposition and patent decency. Throughout the debate, he toned the anger and the insults way down. …When Tim fell for it and started nodding and smiling at J.D.’s fake partisanship, I moaned to Doug, “What is happening?”

I can only imagine Tim and Gwen Walz’s sense of hurt on reading this.

“This is not a genteel profession,” Harris concludes the chapter. “You must be ready to brawl.” A brawler she may be, but self-aware she is not, and I fear that Doug’s instincts were better than hers. At least if she had chosen Pete Buttigieg as she says she wanted to, she would have had a stellar, formidable team. But optics got in the way. Josh Shapiro, too, would have been a formidable running mate, but he would have crowded her out.

What a roller coaster. In perhaps the most self-revealing moment, Harris writes: “I tend to be task-oriented and rarely allow myself enough space or time to reflect, and a marathon campaign run at a sprinter’s pace leaves little time for reflection.” A few days before the election, when an old friend tries to pamper her, she admits: “At this point in the campaign, I was in fight mode, and I needed to stay there. I couldn’t let down my guard, couldn’t take off my armor. If I unclenched, if I remembered what it was to be normal, I might not be in shape to handle the next blow. And there was too much at stake to risk that.”

And this is why she was ultimately the wrong candidate for 2024, I think: too armored, too scripted. And why I hope she doesn’t run again. But kudos to her for shedding some light on what became one of the most distressing and disappointing events of most of our lifetimes. And to be fair to her, she reacts with genuine panic too as it suddenly slips away. By the end, as she waits for the election results in a house filled with family and friends, she’s in this weird state of denial/autopilot. It must have been devastating.

Yet she couldn’t wait to concede fast enough, concerned for her own dignity. Perhaps she did the only thing she could, but if it turns out in hindsight that 2024 was a stolen election, as I fear it will, Kamala’s quick concession will be seen as a historically massive blunder, given what we are all facing now. And so the book, I think… a way to explain her actions, make some money too, and hold on to power in a certain way. Perhaps she’s looking for a role in the next Democratic administration. I wouldn’t doubt it. Let’s just hope there is one.

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Loma Prieta—36th Anniversary

Posted on October 17, 2025 by Gabriella West
Loma Prieta Memory: Reading Pinter by Candlelight
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Characters for the Win

Posted on June 22, 2025 by Gabriella West

Switching gears a bit, I have had my lesbian historical novel Time of Grace up on Radish for a while now. Radish describes itself as a “serialized fiction app,” and it has been around for ten years itself. They are LGBTQ-friendly and offered me a Pride promotion. I decided to post the answers here since I’ve no idea when it will appear onsite. And it’s short and sweet.

A quirk about Radish is that it does not allow authors to upload their original cover art for their books, so I had to make do with an image of a red-haired woman holding a lamp. It’s certainly different from the image of Grace that I had in my head, but it was nice that I was able to find something out there that corresponded to a pivotal scene in the book, where Caroline and Grace meet on the steps of Thornley Hall.

Here is the Q&A that I completed for Radish.

What inspires you to write the stories that you do?

I think I draw from experiences in my own past, but what often ends up happening is that one of the main characters is drawn from a part of myself that I know well (e.g., in Time of Grace, Caroline is a shy young woman who is recovering from a terrible loss; it was easy enough to put myself in her shoes). The other main character is similar to the people I’m often attracted to. So Grace, for example, is sensual, confident, and caring. She wants to help Caroline, to protect her. She has a lot of extra energy and charisma but is slightly unknowable: she has secrets. She has a past. I love bringing characters together who complement each other. Caroline gets to feel more alive, but also slightly tortured by this new relationship. They change each other.

What character did you enjoy writing the most?

Oddly enough, two middle-aged female characters play a huge part in the story. One is Lady Wilcox. She is a totally fictional character who is the mistress of the house that Caroline is sent to as a governess; she holds a lot of power and it was immediately obvious to me that she would be the one to threaten Caroline and Grace’s budding relationship—and destroy it if she could. I enjoyed creating this rather outrageous woman. Mrs. Grimsby appears at the beginning of the story and the end; she helps Caroline relax on the ferry to Ireland and at the end reveals her own secret, which shows that she has connected to Caroline all along and is much wiser than we knew. Women have this dual power to destroy or to save. I enjoyed writing both characters, but Mrs. Grimsby surprised me the most!

***

It makes me happy that almost 25 years after the book was originally published, these characters are still strong and vivid to me.

Time of Grace is available for 50% off during Smashwords’ Summer/Winter Sale (July 1-31, 2025), which is ongoing! The link for the book page is here.

Update: Radish has announced to its writers that it is closing down at the end of the year. This is a very transient business! Stories, including my books Elsie Street, The Pull of Yesterday, and Time of Grace, can be read at the site until December 31.

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Grappling with Change

Posted on June 1, 2025 by Gabriella West

I haven’t posted here in a long time, I realize this, and I’m still grappling with the new administration and the changes that have transpired since January. I’m horrified by some of the things that have happened, including the gutting of USAID. DOGE is another matter. Apparently, all our private data is being given to Palantir, so that is another horror show going on behind the scenes. I’ve known about Palantir for some time now. (If you don’t know about it, google it.) At any rate, I expected Trump to cancel Pride Month in a tweet, and oddly enough, he hasn’t. Maybe he’s saving that for next year. Or… I guess the month is still young.

Still, it’s the first day of June and it’s Pride Month. Pride Month in S.F. used to give me a buoyant feeling. There was the Frameline Film Festival at the Castro Theatre. That started mid-month and went on for ten days, culminating in the closing night movie, which was always the same day as the gay pride parade, if I recall. I attended quite a few dyke marches as well. The Castro is closed now for renovation, symbolically, and was bought by Another Planet Entertainment, who are firmly determined to turn it into a moneymaker with concerts and moveable seating. But I wonder if it ever will be.

Grappling with change is difficult. Although I remember June as being pleasant and relaxed growing up in Ireland—with school finally over for the year, I could kick back and watch old movies on daytime TV!—it wasn’t always the case. When I was five, my father suddenly left us in the early morning while I was still dozing. It was the third week of June, 1972. He packed his bags and left my mother a note in his loopy black handwriting. I still have the note somewhere. Diane, it starts, I am leaving you. He took a charter plane back to the East Coast of the U.S. and drove cross-country to California, where his parents lived. Much later I learned we would have lost our old car as well, had it been up to him, since he drove it to the airport that day and dumped it. I never dared to raise this with him. There were so many things I didn’t dare to raise, because I was afraid of what he would say. And then I would have to remember it.

The young woman who became my stepmother fixed the situation by cycling to our flat from the airport and leaving my mother a note through the door slot, anonymous of course. It occurs to me now that she could just have driven the car back, but presumably she didn’t have an Irish license and was afraid to, or maybe she thought my mother would spot her and assume my father was returning! Unaware of these dramatics, unaware that my father had left us for someone else, I had to get used to my mother’s boyfriend suddenly moving in with us. But that wasn’t a hard transition because I was a very adaptable child. I accepted it. No questions asked! At the age of five, you don’t question your parents’ decisions. Later in the summer, my father did return briefly, and that visit caused me a great deal of turmoil, much of it hidden.

This will be the first June without my father, who died last September at the age of eighty. I think he always thought about the way he left his first marriage; I think it stayed on his mind. But for me, that betrayal was too easily put aside. My childhood was filled with many challenges, and I wanted to see my father as “the easy parent.” It was certainly easy for him to maintain a loving relationship from a great distance, but that became normal as time went on. Soon I was flying to the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor each summer, wearing a badge that said UM. Nothing bad ever happened to me on the planes except I would vomit dutifully into the sick bag for a few years. Then my stomach settled. There would be a cheery welcome at the other side. Then things became more complicated and decidedly less fun, but how could I break the routine?

June is the anniversary of my mother’s death from breast cancer too, at age 57, thirty years after my father left practically to the day. He commented on it, seemed stunned. My mother had long gotten over his abandonment of her, but as she was dying she was still ruminating on her choices, on the breakup of her second marriage. She had lost my stepfather to a younger woman a few years before. There had been no divorce. There was no will. She left it all up to my stepfather to sort, and he did, being a lawyer. The first year of loss was rough. I was incredibly emotional. Ever since then, I have distanced myself from people I cared about who were dying. Ironically, that included my father, too. Perhaps he understood. Or perhaps he didn’t.

Where have these traumas gone, I wonder? They have been worked through as best I can. I don’t think about them particularly. And yet I don’t forget them either.

My mother had a traditional funeral, at which I spoke, hard as that was to do. There was also the scattering of a jar of her ashes in Santa Barbara in 2003, for her American family, and one in Ireland, before that. We were actually out on a small ship in Dublin Bay for that one. The captain had to stop because of the choppy waves. He stopped near Dalkey, which seemed right. Her best friend, Harriet, lived there. It was in October, her birthday month. I was nearly seasick and somehow stopped myself from vomiting as the gray ashes poured out of the urn. I watched, aghast, because I didn’t realize that was supposed to happen. Then we all ate at a restaurant in Greystones my mother had long patronized. The staff brusquely asked us for more money at the end. I can’t say it’s a good memory, or one that I ever even think about now. My younger brother had wisely absented himself from the event, but of course, I couldn’t.

You would assume that I would think about this every October, but I don’t. I don’t remember the date on which we did it, but I suppose it was her birthday. I do think of her on her birthday every year. I’ll think about my father, too, on his.

My one remaining aunt, Joane, sent me a bag of old photos recently. There is one of my parents’ September 1964 church wedding in Santa Barbara, which I have privately dubbed the shotgun wedding. Had I ever seen this? Perhaps, years ago, but maybe not the full picture. The two families are standing together closely, almost huddled together—no one else was allowed at the wedding because my 19-year-old mother was pregnant (she later miscarried). Of my mother’s three younger sisters, only one is still alive. And right next to my paternal grandmother stands Richard, my father’s older brother, who is also still alive at the age of 90. The bride and groom are gone. I said that to myself recently and tears rose to my eyes, just for a moment.

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Review: We All Shine On by Elliot Mintz

Posted on October 27, 2024 by Gabriella West

This memoir by a very old friend of the Lennons is definitely worth reading for the arc of his friendship with John. Mintz has many good stories. As a 26-year-old broadcaster in LA in 1971, he played Yoko’s double album Fly and interviewed her on the radio. She struck up a phone routine with him, calling him at home in hippie-blissful Laurel Canyon where he lived alone with his dog, and soon John joined in, for separate calls that lasted hours. Disarmingly, John always called him Ellie. Their triangular friendship lasted through John’s death in 1980 and continued in a more professional form.

John, Yoko and Elliot standing together

Mintz was a fresh-faced young man, living far from his estranged family in Brooklyn, but actually quite well connected to the LA music scene. He was able to tell John, “I met Phil Spector before you did.” Mintz says he has a photographic memory, and the scenes of his chats and in-life meetings with John and Yoko are fun, quirky, and occasionally hair-raising. Tellingly, during John’s Lost Weekend period, he came upon a completely wasted John strapped to a chair in Lou Adler’s home, where he and May Pang were staying. He tried to calm John down, and John spat a homophobic slur at him. This horrified and hurt Mintz—who had clearly never heard of Bob Wooller. (But the man never married, and you have to wonder… he was close friends with the actor Sal Mineo as well, but claims he never knew he was bisexual!)

The mix of open-mindedness and incuriousness about his friends’ (and perhaps his own) sexuality makes for a fun but clean read. Mintz also was not an addict, unlike John and Yoko, whom he says he met in person when they were traveling across the country trying to quit methadone. So his stories generally ring “true.”

The Lennons summoned a nervous Elliot to meet them in the mountain resort town of Ojai in May of ’72. It was fascinating to read Elliot’s first take on them, his jangled nerves at meeting the famous couple very relatable. Even the meeting seems like an odd kind of loyalty test, for Ojai was a long drive and Elliot had to be back to do his show that night.

Our moment had arrived.

I took a deep breath, stepped out of my car, and tentatively walked towards their vehicle. I noticed one of its rear doors opening and caught a glimpse of a slight female figure dressed from head to toe in black. Behind her, lounging in the back seat, was a taller, lankier-looking male with a long beard and tinted wire-framed glasses.

Yoko climbed out of the car, stood by its door, and, for the very first time, looked me up and down. I did the same to her. She was even shorter and thinner than I expected from her photographs, with her long black hair grazing the base of her spine.

“Go on, then,” I heard John say from the back of the station wagon, “give ‘im a hug.”

Yoko, as I’ve mentioned before, was not a physically demonstrative person. But she stepped forward to engage in something sort of like a hug—let’s call it a light tapping on my back. Then John jumped out of the car. He, it turned out, was a hugger. He wrapped his arms around me so tightly, I was a little startled. John was no giant—he was about five feet ten inches—but I was considerably shorter and he towered over me as he hugged me into his chest.

“It’s good to meet you.”

It’s a long-drawn-out episode that concludes with John and Yoko presenting the gobsmacked Elliot with an acetate of their brand-new record, Some Time in New York City… which promptly gets him fired once he plays the radical, strident lyrics on air. Being Elliot, he simply goes on another trip with them, to San Francisco, and then gets a better radio job. But you do get a sense of the fateful nature of the friendship for him—that he stepped out of his lane and into their lane, and could never get back. Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans…

The day/night of John’s murder is harrowing, of course (Mintz jumped on a plane to NY immediately, sensing that something terrible had happened, and was given the news by a distraught flight attendant). My takeaway is that he was very fond of Yoko, but loved John. As many people did. Anyway, this was a refreshing read, and explains why John and Yoko weren’t desperate to make new friends in their last years… they had Ellie. The only thing I didn’t like was that he was disparaging about May Pang‘s importance to John, saying that John never mentioned her name. Pang has always claimed that Yoko sucked John back in by hiring (or pretending to hire) a hypnotist to get him to quit smoking. Mintz proffers a quirky anecdote about this as well, along the lines of “I hired the hypnotist… and he was a diva.” (Sometimes it seems like his agenda for writing the book is to normalize Yoko, and this is one of those times. He certainly does humanize her as much as possible.)

Collages and images of letters from John & Yoko to Elliot round out the period charm of the book. Mintz did go work for Yoko as a publicist after John’s death, so this is something to keep in mind. I’m glad he ended it when he did, for it’s clear that John’s erratic but intense friendship is what he valued most.

Elliot Mintz, We All Shine On: John, Yoko, and Me, Dutton, 2024, $32

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A Few Writerly Things

Posted on August 15, 2024 by Gabriella West

I recently did a free book promotion for my 2015 novel Elsie Street on The Fussy Librarian site after many years… and was delighted to see that for free ebooks at least, it’s worth it. I made back my investment and there was a nice little “tail” on the second and third books in the series. When I thanked the owner, Jeffrey Bruner, he replied warmly and wrote, “Please tell any authors who write LGBT about us — we would love to have more books, especially lesbian romance. That’s one of our top requests from readers.”

I was pleased to see that, and decided to pass it on…

I looked back at my recent review of Molly Giles’s Life Span and realized that I had forgotten to link the book to a sales page on Amazon! I fixed that. It’s ironic, too, that I would notice that sort of glitch during Mercury Retrograde.

Well, August has never been a favorite month of mine, but nothing too disastrous has happened yet. Here’s a nice discovery. I was published way back in 2006 in Sinister Wisdom #68/69; the double issue was called Death, Grief and Surviving, edited by Judith K. Witherow. I checked on the site a few times to see if it was available as a back issue. It never was. But now, it is available as a free PDF here. You just have to scroll down to page 194 in the thumbnail menu on the left side.

The piece was entitled “Gorse Lodge, Greystones,” and it’s an essay about my mother’s unexpected death from breast cancer in June 2002.

Here’s how it starts:

It was the summer of 2002, and my plan was to return to Ireland for
my sister’s wedding. I had originally left Ireland for California at the age of
twenty-one. I was going back at thirty-five as an overweight, stressed-out
legal word processor who identified as a lesbian but who had not been in a
relationship for four years. I hadn’t seen my mother for five years, and the
guilt was beginning to weigh on me.

Despite the sad circumstances and turbulent family dynamics, the essay is somber and restrained and reads quite well, I think.

https://www.sinisterwisdom.org/sites/default/files/Sinister%20Wisdom%2068%20and%2069.pdf#overlay-context=archive

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Life Span by Molly Giles: A Review

Posted on June 20, 2024 by Gabriella West

life span by molly giles image of Golden Gate Bridge

Molly Giles is best known as a gifted short-story writer, but this late-in-life memoir produces a different kind of sparkle. It’s a more vulnerable tale than her polished fiction, and the flashes of rage and ambivalence that reoccur throughout the book make it a gripping and sometimes unsettling read. The format is economical and brilliant—each year since 1945 is given its own anecdote, and the years flash by, often centered around Giles’s crossing of the iconic Golden Gate Bridge from Marin into San Francisco or vice versa. The bridge becomes a touchstone, not always reassuring. In the beginning of her life, when she is just three, her family makes a momentous move to Marin from San Francisco. It’s just across the bay, but a very different “scene,” and Giles grows up in a rather stultifying 1950s family akin to Anne Lamott’s, with the same backdrop of alcoholism and zero emotional support. But Giles’s overly dramatic mother was a real writer—she published a novel, just one, in the late 1940s, and seems to have spent the rest of her life bewailing the fact that she couldn’t manage to write another. Giles learned to keep a lot inside, that’s clear.

The present tense narration makes everything vivid, funny, shocking, but doesn’t allow for too much reflection. I would have loved to know more about her parents’ background, for instance. It seems purely Irish American (her younger sisters are called Bridget and Nora). Pregnant, Giles leaves college and marries early, to her steady boyfriend, Dan, who remains a handsome enigma. Her penchant for handsome, masculine men who seem either empty or needy is thoroughly explored throughout the book, as she enters a series of long relationships with men who don’t seem to listen or care, or care but can barely function. Meanwhile, Giles embarks on an initially part-time career as a creative writing teacher (where I met her in the late 1980s), first at San Francisco State, then at the University of Arkansas. Her mainstay remains her home in Woodacre, California, though her three independent daughters soon leave to build lives of their own. When Giles’s writing career seems to stall and her romantic life does as well, she enters a difficult period of questioning her past. There is a dark revelation early in the book; later on, she reveals quietly that she has begun attending AA meetings for alcoholism, a shock to me.

I can attest that Giles was a brilliant teacher at State, much appreciated by her students and clearly “a grown-up.” But it is the primitive, needy, private parts of her own personality that she dares to delve into in this book. Luckily, and characteristically, her students are spared any kind of ridicule. But it’s the family closest to her that sometimes comes in for harsh scrutiny, as well as the men who failed to live up to her expectations. While some chapters are exquisitely polished (the vibrant, almost comic account of her mother’s death, for example), others are more quietly revealing. For example, an encounter with a distinguished doctor on an airport shuttle—an old friend of her parents who scolds her for portraying them harshly in her novel Iron Shoes—provokes this devastating insight, even as she frantically denies the accusation: “The parents in my novel were cruel to their children, two-faced to their friends, casually hateful to each other. They were the parents I knew. But they were not the parents [he] knew, or needed to know.”

And then, in her seventies, Giles meets a man who seems to be both a keeper and a guy who doesn’t need caretaking. There’s a genuine relief and expansiveness in the final chapters, where her grandchildren, too, are clearly the apples of her eye. Still crossing that bridge, for her partner lives in S.F. and she maintains the house in West Marin, she reaches a kind of equilibrium. I loved Life Span—and was startled at the intersections between my life and hers. One thing is for sure, Giles has been a restless spirit, and the constant moving between places in the book, while natural to her, may have somehow preserved her as well. (This back-and-forth movement jumps out at me, because I have stayed in the same city for thirty-six years. And there’s a danger in that.)

But this is not a complacent or nostalgic book and may shock acquaintances who know Giles as a kindly lady, a supportive friend. The female struggles to survive and thrive explored here are universal, but will particularly resonate with women born in the 1940s. I thought of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and my own mother’s life, where she belatedly found her vocation but spent her last years twice-divorced and lonely, hiding the secret of her cancer from everyone but a few.

When I met Giles back in the day, in my early twenties, I had no idea of the life she’d led, the intense effort it must have taken to get where she’d got. I thought her view of men was rather skewed, at the time, but then I wasn’t dating men myself. The courage it took for Molly Giles to fully “show up” in this book must have been immense, too. But I hope it was cathartic. It reads like it was.

Life Span was published in June by WTAW Press. Available in e-book and paperback.

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It’s March, so… Read an Ebook Week Starts Again!

Posted on March 3, 2024 by Gabriella West

Happy Read an Ebook Week! To help you find a book to celebrate, you can find many of my books at a promotional price of 50% off at @Smashwords from March 3-9. Find my books and many more at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/gabriellawest #ebookweek24 #Smashwords

I’m happy to say that I woke up this morning to a few sales, which was a nice surprise. Bargains include A Knight’s Tale: Kenilworth, A Knight’s Tale: Montargis, my lesbian historical Time of Grace, and my contemporary stand-alone, Once You Are Mine, set in West Marin, California, at the time of the pandemic. Once You Are Mine is a special deal at only 99 cents through March 7.

California is still stuck in the winter blues. I plan to do a more personal post soon! But I just wanted to note that it was so sad to lose Flaco, the Eurasian Eagle-Owl, last month. There was a memorial for him in Central Park today, which I’m sure was like a big group hug for all the people who followed Flaco and recorded him with their cameras. Had I been there (unlikely though that is), I would have gone. Rest in peace, Flaco, you were great.

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Flaco Says…

Posted on January 3, 2024 by Gabriella West

(Image courtesy @JacquelineUWS on Twitter)

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Seasonal Reminder

Posted on December 14, 2023 by Gabriella West

Yep, Christmas is coming up, and so is the Smashwords End of Year Sale! This year all my novels will be 50% off, to keep it simple. Just scroll down from the top of the Profile page to see bargains. The sale runs Dec. 15 thru Jan. 1st.

I haven’t published a book this year and have had to take time away for health reasons. But who knows what 2024 will bring? For one thing, it will bring a bruising U.S. election (sigh).

To all my blog readers, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

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