This newsletter is going to be a little bit shorter due to me putting off some boring stuff I had to do for…um, 11 months, until the exact date I had to have it done.

 

This week’s tea is a sheng pu-er from white2tea called “tuhao as fuck.” One of the things I enjoy about white2tea is a certain…shall I call it irreverence? Sure. That. Irreverence about tea. “Tuhao” is a Chinese word that means “wealthy” but now has the added implication of “tacky about wealth.”

 

This is one of the teas I got for tasting purposes, and it smells delightful and tastes…um, kind of meh, actually, at least for my purposes. It’s one of those teas that I think I would like if I enjoyed bitter tastes, but I do not.

 

My husband, by contrast—who drinks his coffee black and likes beer that tastes like it’s been brewed in asphalt—thinks this is extraordinary. Go figure!

When I started writing the Suffragette Scandal, I had some difficulty because I was writing a book set in the 1870s, and from the vantage point where I stood, I knew that women would not get the right to vote for decades to come. How could I come up with a satisfying, victorious ending?

 

The answer was to think about what winning looked like. It doesn’t always look like legislation passed or enemies vanquished. Sometimes, winning means that in the moment, someone gets something they need. It can be helping an individual access care; it can be making sure someone doesn’t go homeless. It can be about changing one person’s mind.

 

We are in the transitional times of history, and we can choose to help form what the world will be, or to let ourselves be formed by it.

 

Let’s do the work and get this done.

Buy The Suffragette Scandal on:

My husband and I have an election tradition. In Colorado, we have universal mail-in voting. So we each mark our ballots, and then we take them to a ballot drop box together. Our closest ballot drop box also happens to be near an open space park, so we head over with our dog, drop the ballots, and then take Pele for a walk.

 

It is perhaps the best way to vote I’ve ever encountered. Colorado has a lot of ballot measures, and this gives me time to research and think about things. It’s also extremely easy, and because of this, Colorado has a very high rate of ballots returned compared with many other states.

 

There is a lot of doom and gloom about the upcoming elections, and usually, my anxiety feeds on that kind of energy. For some reason, though, this year I’m feeling optimistic. It’s not that I don’t expect losses—I do, and I think the gerrymandered districts that have been delivered kind of make some level of loss inevitable.

 

But I nonetheless believe that this year, things are going to be okay. I think we’re going to have some wins that are important. In 2016, I didn’t think the polls were telling the whole story. I thought Trump was a bigger threat than many others believed.

 

In 2022, I don’t think the polls are telling the whole story. I think the vote is going to be bluer than people think. I have some reasons why I think this, but mostly it’s just gut instinct about the things that make polls wrong. I think the electorate has changed.

 

But in order for anything to happen, we have to vote. If you are a US citizen, please make a plan for how to vote in the upcoming midterm elections. If you have a chance, please vote early. If you can vote now, do it now. 

 

I am a horrible procrastinator, and so I understand the urge—but if you have the chance, make the time to vote early. Don’t put it off. Let’s get this done.

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