Well, that was exciting!

Note to self: When the forecast includes a flash flood watch the day before you’re supposed to go home, leave early.

That creek normally has a few inches of water this time of year, and sometimes it’s dry. On the plus side, the last time we were flooded in, we were tent camping. That was the trip that made us decide to buy our camper, so our shelter was more substantial this time.

In the end, we were only delayed one day. By the following morning, the water had receded enough to safely get a grader in there so we had a clear path to get out. But waiting wasn’t easy. We had power and water, but I’d planned food almost perfectly, which didn’t take a delay into account. So that’s the other note to self: make sure to take some canned food and extra snacks, or plan on fasting for as long as it takes for the water to recede.

Change of Scenery

The view from the door of my camper

Like all of you, I’m sure, we didn’t travel last year. I like going to different places, but last year I didn’t mind it. We hadn’t been in our new house that long, and it was nice to hunker down and stay home, pandemic notwithstanding.

Now that we’re well and truly settled in, and life has settled down, we’re taking some time to go camping near my dad’s cabin in Indiana. We haven’t seen them since before the lock-down, and it’s been great to work in a different space. It’s a shared space since the hubby is also working from home (away from home), but we make it work.

This place was a refuge for me before we moved. It was important for me to get away from the noise and bustle of the city to a place where I could hear bees buzzing, and watch a woodpecker in action.

Where’s your go to place when you have to get away from it all?

Rolling along

Photo credit: Nataliya Vaitkevich on Pexels.com

I’m hip deep in rewrites. It would go faster if I didn’t have to stop occasionally to world build, but here we are.

While you’re waiting, check out Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse. I found it through the Netflix series, Shadow And Bone. You’ll get the gist of the story if you watch it, but the books, as usual, are so much better. And they’re Young Adult books, so they’re an easy read. Her world-building in incredible, and unlike many fantasy books, they’re set in a Russian-based society rather than western Europe, which was refreshing. Let me know if you check it out!

Here there be dragons

photo credit: www.pexels.com

First, that’s not me. You can tell because the office is far too organized. Color coded folders? Not in this lifetime.

I’m STILL working on book 2. I’m not going to lie. It’s been a struggle. The editors have ordered me to stop writing and plot. The book is too broken. Just one problem. I write by the seat of my pants. Plotting has never been a thing I’m good at. The ideas come as I write. But they’re right. This project is too big for that.

I’ve started by summarizing everything I have so far. I hate to admit it, but it’s helped me find weak points. Today I start fixing they summaries—moving things around, deleting and adding scenes, maybe drinking at some point. I also have a story board started for book 3. As I have ideas, I’m adding to that so I can lay groundwork in book 2. I have no idea how long that will take. This is new ground for me. I’ve expressed my displeasure, but we all know it’s a skill I have to develop, and to do that, you have to work on it. Will I gripe? Every step of the way. But I’ll take the steps. Stay tuned for updates.

Anybody there?

Hello again!

I’m trying to get a feel for how many people read this. If you’re here, I’d appreciate it if you’d drop in a comment to let me know, and it would be helpful to know if you get my email newsletter, too.

We’re all bumping along here. It hasn’t been smooth sailing, but it’s snowing here today, so it’s all good. The best part of St. Louis snow is it doesn’t hang around like it does in Chicago. Or maybe the best part is there isn’t a sidewalk on my side of the street, so I don’t have to shovel anything more than that part of the driveway we use. If we need to use it. With both of us working from home, we could, in theory, hunker down and stay inside until it takes care of itself. We do have a few things to keep us busy, so that would be a blessing.

I’ve been spending a quite a lot of time in Balphrahn. It’s the middle of autumn there, but they’ll be dealing with winter soon enough.

I hope you are warm, well-fed, fully caffeinated, and Covid-free where you are.

Repurposing

I've made a little indoor garden. The biggest south-facing window in my house is over the master bathtub. Since neither of us are bath people and we have a separate shower, I've repurposed the space. If you get my newsletter, you already know this story, but I couldn’t get the picture to load. I’m still not entirely sure what the problem was, but I did manage to get it figured out to post here.

On the window sill are a Christmas cactus and a scruffy little mint. In front of them is a Kalanchoe I'm trying to nurse back to health, and two rosemary plants. We found out earlier this year that rosemary helps get rid of the hubby's migraines, which is not surprising because that's one of the plants I consistently kill. In order to beat the odds, I have several of them, including one still outside in the garden that may or may not survive the winter. We're a bit north of the zone they like to be in, so it depends on how cold and snowy winter is.

As we near the end of what has been an interesting year, I hope you are able to find joy in the different. I hope you're able to adapt your traditions, repurpose what can be better utilized, and discard what isn't working. I don't think any of us expect drastic changes in 2021, but maybe we can all be a little kinder.

Except to our characters.

Until next time, enjoy your coffee!

Organization help

A couple days ago, I watched a free webinar about how to get organized and stay that way. It was what you probably think it was--a little useful information with a push to get you to buy their program. (Full disclosure—-I didn’t buy the program. Right now, that’s more than I can manage.)

A lot of what they said were things I've been doing, but they tweak it in a way that has been helpful. In particular, you make a master list of projects, choose a couple a week to work on, and break them into small pieces. The pieces are what go on your to do list, which is arranged in categories like home, work, phone calls, errands, etc. Really, they can be whatever works for you. By putting baby steps on your to do list, you’re less likely to get overwhelmed, and because you’ve listed all the steps you need to do, you always know what should come next, so it decreases procrastination.

It translates to writing, too. I'd been doing something like it already, but I hadn't been taking it far enough. That part is going to be a work in progress for a while.

If you want to watch it for yourself, you can find it here. It's about 75 minutes.

Benefits of testing

I know it goes without saying, but I’m saying it anyway. This year has been a humdinger. We totally needed a pandemic in an election year, right? We won’t even get into how the Gulf Coast has been pummeled this year.

This morning, I read the Parable of the Barren Fig Tree in Luke 13. It reminded me of a sermon preached by a friend of mine a year or so ago. If you’re not familiar with the story, it’s about a land owner who has a fig tree. He goes to get fruit, but it never has any, so he tells the gardener to cut it down. The gardener asks for one more year so he can dig around it and fertilize it. In simple terms, he’s going to break up the soil to get closer to the roots, and then dump poop around it. If 2020 was a parable, I think this would be it.

When I heard the sermon, I thought, “Yeah, that’s what Chicago has done to me.” Then I realized I was the fig tree. It’s not a secret that I didn’t love living there, but I did find my purpose in my writing, and I grew in other areas, too. The gardener piled a lot of poop around me, but now I bear fruit.

Hard times come for everyone. It’s inevitable. Being open to it, figuring out what you’re supposed to take from it, well, that feels more productive to me than complaining and posting “If 2020 was a _____” memes. You can get bitter, or you can get better.

Ho Hum :-)

We’re finally getting into autumn here, although you can’t tell by looking at my garden. We should still have a month or so of growing time left, although we’re already making plans for next year. We’ve reached the time of year when we’ve just about eaten everything we want to out of the garden and have gone into preservation mode. Mostly it’s canning tomatoes or tomato sauce, but I’ll probably make some salsa, too. We may have a frost tonight, and that might kill off the tomato flowers I saw yesterday.

There hasn’t been a lot going on here. I’ve stopped plotting and started writing. Red Sky In Mourning is coming along nicely. We’ve seen a lot of our son and his wife, and visiting with friends. All in all, it’s been quiet and maybe a little boring. I’ll take that. Our stress levels are significantly lower than they were a year ago, when Eric had been laid off and we didn’t know what would happen. We are loads happier here, but I’m not sure we’ve fully recovered from those stressful months. Of course, the pandemic hasn’t helped much, nor has the election cycle. Right now, boring doesn’t seem like a bad option.

Contest winners!

Congratulations to Stephen B. Bagley, Kay Watt, and Bruce Betker! Your prizes will be en route this week.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about being stuck from what I thought was over-plotting. I got some writing done, and then I worked on backstory for a while.

In the last couple of days, I’ve re-read the end of Awakening In The Dark and realized I’d started writing Red Sky In Mourning before editing was finished. The changes I made to the end of the book didn’t match up with the beginning of the next book, so I’ve started again. This is why plotting hasn’t worked well for me, but there is still a lot I can use. It’s likely the parts I’ve changed can be repurposed for future scenes. If nothing else, they can be used in the Cutting Room Floor feature for the newsletter.