The last time I wrote a blog post, I was living in an Extended Stay hotel in a new state, with no address of my own. I felt forced out of my previous home by the unwillingness of insurance companies to accept the fact that their business is, in essence, gambling. They chose to jettison all bets that appeared likely to lose, including mine. Don’t worry – I landed on my feet in Georgia, and stayed there for five and a half years.

And during those five years, several unexpected things happened.

A Plague

The hubby and I moved into a house in early January of 2020. He flew back to California in mid-late January to pick up his truck and some stuff we’d left in a storage space. He called me from a motel to tell me about something weird he’d seen at the airport. They were pulling Asian people out of the security line and taking their temperatures. He is not Asian, he was not stopped, and the incident was quickly forgotten when his headlights stopped working somewhere in Arizona.

We all know what happened next.

A million people died, but most people around us seemed more angry about being asked to wear a mask and keep their kids at home.

I have no kids. I fired up my sewing machine to make a mask, and we put a bottle of hand sanitizer in the car to use after every grocery trip. We started watching Italian real estate videos and wondering what it would feel like to be able to travel again.

But we didn’t travel again, even when all restrictions were lifted. Something about sheltering in place and working from home at the very moment when we’d moved somewhere new stunted our normal excitement about discovering somewhere new. We went to Savannah twice, drove to Florida once just to see the ocean, and turned right back around. The Atlanta metro traffic made anything else a living nightmare. I have never feared for my life as much in a vehicle as I did there. People seemed to enjoy switching multiple lanes at once without signaling, while truck drivers seemed to enjoy blowing past you at 85 miles per hour, changing lanes to avoid sane people going oh, you know, the legal speed limit. I have a fair amount of driving PTSD after my 2018 accident, and Atlanta made it all worse.

Suffice to say, I became a near shut-in. I worked from home. I ran in our neighborhood. I did not venture further afield than the downtown brewery and the imaging office.

A Terror

The single most terrifying moments of my life so far have been in an imaging office, where I was ordered to show up for ultrasounds multiple times a year because I have so many cysts that, according to my ultrasound tech, “The more I look, the more I find.” Shitty insurance and a shitty healthcare system (and, to be fair, my shitty understanding of both of them) meant that I paid thousands of dollars to develop a paralyzing fear of my own body and what it was doing to me.

After a particularly distressing experience, I came home and told the hubby I was through with the medical-industrial complex. This was after the first hospital I could no longer afford stalked me with certified mail asking me to confirm I had followed up on my bad mammogram. I had gone to someone else, but what business of it was theirs? Oh, right, this is America – their business is profiting from me. They wanted me to come back and, presumably, give them more thousands of dollars for a procedure that cost maybe $200 outside the U.S. Nope. I was done paying to be afraid.

I turned to the hubby and said, “We need to renew our passports. Now.”

We renewed our passports, but we didn’t go to Italy.

We sold our house and left the state instead.

A Minor Miracle

I still don’t know how it happened.

I followed none of the advice you’ll find in YouTube guru videos.

I started slowly and badly. I’m not proud of those early video efforts. But I *am* proud of the fearlessness that helped me post videos literally made with PowerPoint animations. I’m not sure I’ve ever been that fearless before in my life. In the ICU, after the car accident, I was relatively unbothered even when I started to code that one time, but I was also high on Norco.

I had started a YouTube channel for GirlInTheTiara before leaving California. But while everyone was home during Covid, I guess they had more time to scroll and watch. Because suddenly, my videos on royal women were getting major views. Like, tens of thousands. So I started making more. And those did well, too.

And then I did the classic Jenni thing. I started overthinking everything, taking it way too seriously, trying to be better than I needed to be. And it took longer to produce videos. And I fell out of the algo. And then I got discouraged and gave up for awhile. And then I went back, and the views weren’t as good, but there was a collection of people who cared. And commented. And commented again.

So I kept going.

And this channel and those commenters are what gave me the courage to try something I probably had no business doing. I started to think I was going to write a book.

A Failure. No, Wait – Make That Several Failures

I’d mentioned before on this blog about wanting to write a book about Grand Duchess Hilda of Baden. I still do, but that book would never be possible without travel and archival work. I can’t afford my own healthcare (see “Terror” above), so spending time in Germany wasn’t in the cards. My options were to do a shitty job, or to set it aside for a more well-equipped future.

I set it aside.

But the desire to write a book was still there. Truthfully, it will always be there. I am ride-or-die for books, novels, and long-form content. I take actual physical damage watching a 10-second video. I know short-form content is what runs the world now, but every fiber of my being craves more knowledge and depth than you can get in a 3-minute video. It would take me more than three minutes to explain the context that makes most royal tidbits or anecdotes fascinating to me. I know that’s not normal. But I never was normal in the first place. I’m finally learning to accept that.

So, setting aside Hilda, I looked at some of the stories I’d stumbled across while researching her. I love Russian history, so I decided on the story of her father’s first wife and her cousins: a collection of six grand duchesses, all looking for love and husbands at the same time. Great idea, right?

Well, yes, actually. It’s an amazing story.

But I did the Jenni thing again. I started a draft, then worked harder on the research. If I were going to write HISTORY, I needed context. I needed depth. And what I got was over 100 pages of notes on the 1825 Decembrist revolt, an event that seemed like a fun place to start even though my protagonists were either in utero, not born yet, or still in pre-school. I wrote an entire chapter, 20+ pages, before I realized I had let the story run away with me. In search of the plot, I had lost it entirely. My options were to do a shitty job, or to set it aside for a more well-equipped future.

I set it aside.

Cue Britney Spears ’cause oops, I did it again.

My So-Called (Mid)Life

And then came 2023. I was unhappy with nearly every aspect of life. Stuck in my career, stuck in my writing life, stuck in Georgia. I’d stopped making videos, but I still read royal biographies and memoirs like crazy.

One day, I was scrolling through a digital copy of Walburga Paget’s memoir. And a single sentence changed everything.

I looked up something she mentioned there, a throwaway anecdote. Hmm, I thought. This is weird. No one online seemed to know much about it, if they knew it happened at all. So I kept looking and kept pulling threads. (I’m being deliberately vague about this process because I’ll go into it more in future posts.) I bought books. I translated books. I scoured newspaper archives. I wracked my brain for what I remembered from high-school French.

Then I wrote a draft.

Today, that draft has become a book – coming in 2026 from Pen and Sword History.

Do you guys realize how crazy this is? I’m a fiction writer turned royal history blogger turned YouTuber turned history book writer. It boggles the mind. This should not have happened. But it did happen.

I can’t pretend to offer a life lesson here. Don’t give up? I gave up on a bunch of stuff in order to get here. Everything happens for a reason? I’m not convinced. Bad stuff happens to good people all the time and I refuse to believe it happened to make me re-evaluate my life and decisions. It just happened, period.

Well, you’re all caught up with my life to this point. I live in a new state now, neither Georgia nor California, and I’m about to see my name on a book published by someone else. I still have all the same worries about money and health and just the other day, the hubby said he was thinking about this being the last third of our lives. In my mind, I still feel 25 so that was a horrifying thought. But I can’t deny he’s right. And that’s going to take some more thinking through.

At least I can promise it won’t take me another five years to write a blog post.

In fact, I cheated. I’ve already written it. In it, I’m going to tell you more about the book and the moment I decided to chase that particular story.

P.S. A 1,699-word blog post. See what I told you about long-form content? I despair.