Something Blue: The Shop with the Lights Off

October 21, 2026

Some writing days are about word counts. Others are about a single decision that changes how the whole story feels. Today was one of the second kind, and it came in two parts.

The first was the shop.

In my novel, my heroine Mags has a grandmother named Blue, and Blue had a craft shop. For a long time it was just "the shop" in my notes, a placeholder waiting for its real identity. Today I finally named it: Something Blue.

The moment I wrote it down, I knew. It's the kind of name a grandmother would choose, a little playful and a little sentimental, a nod to old traditions and to her own name all at once. It sounds like a place with ribbon spools on the walls and a bell over the door. It sounds like a place people loved.

But here's what makes it ache. By the time Mags comes home to Calloway, Blue is gone, and Something Blue sits dark, with half-finished projects still on the table, waiting for a hand that isn't coming back.

It isn't really the shop that Mags regrets, though. It's Blue. Blue raised her, and when Mags grew up and moved away, the visits got fewer. There was always a reason: work, the long trip, the easy belief that there'd be time later. Then dementia took Blue a little at a time, until she no longer knew the granddaughter she'd raised, and then she was gone. Every dusty shelf reminds Mags of the visits she didn't make while her grandmother still knew her. Grief is hard enough on its own. Grief with a side of "I should have" is a special kind of weight.

And she doesn't carry it alone. Mags's mother, Judy Lee, is Blue's daughter, and she's grieving too, in her own guarded way: a pack of spearmint gum in her apron pocket and not many words to spare. This story belongs to three women, a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter, and to everything that passed between them and everything that didn't.

I think a lot of us know that feeling. We love people in our own way, and then they're gone, and we wonder if we showed up enough. I wanted Mags to carry that honestly. I don't want her to be perfect. I want her to be someone who has to walk back into that shop and figure out what it means to her now, and to find out that grace was waiting there before she was.

The second decision was smaller, but it made me smile all evening. I gave Mags a middle name: Wren.

Mags is what the people who love her call her. But Wren felt like it belonged to her alone. A wren is a small bird with a big voice, easy to overlook until it sings. That felt true to who she is underneath everything she's carrying. She may not know it yet, but there's a song in her.

It's funny how a middle name can make a character more real. Most people never use it. It's tucked away, almost private, the name your mama says when you're in trouble or the one that shows up on official papers. Knowing it is like knowing a secret about someone. Now I know Mags a little better than I did this morning.

That's the thing about writing a book. You don't build a character all at once. You find her piece by piece, one name, one fear, one closed door at a time. Today I found a shop and a bird, and both of them made her feel more like somebody I could pass on a small-town sidewalk.

I can't wait for you to meet her, and Judy Lee, and to step inside Something Blue, even with the lights off. Especially with the lights off.

Thank you for sitting a while. If you'd like the next letter from home in your inbox, along with news about Bluebonnets and Magnolias as it comes, you're welcome here.