Archive for June, 2024

TV, movies

Bi-Starial

Earlier in the year, the New York Times crossword puzzle had a clue that was “the better of two science fiction franchises,” and it worked whether you answered Star Wars or Star Trek (there were two possible answers for the crossing words). I actually had to waver between them and ended up doing the thing where you put both letters in the square, showing it could be either. I’ve never really understood the whole Star Trek vs. Star Wars thing because I’m very much on team Why Not Both. I guess you could say I’m bi-starial. I have a long history with both franchises and my obsession has swayed back and forth, depending on what’s more prominent in my life at any given time.

My mom says she used to nurse me as an infant while watching the original run of the original Star Trek (yes, I’m old), so I guess you could say I’ve been a fan since birth. I have vague memories of seeing episodes as a child, and I watched the animated series. But then I saw the original Star Wars when I was nine and became utterly obsessed with that for about six years.

The Star Wars obsession faded somewhat after Return of the Jedi, I think in part because the story seemed to be over and there was no more speculation about what would happen next to keep me occupied. Also, none of my friends seemed to be into it (I later found there were a lot more closet geeks in my hometown than I realized, but we were all keeping quiet about it and it took us thirty years to find each other), which gave me nothing to keep the obsession going. But then one of the local TV stations started showing Star Trek reruns every afternoon, right around the time we got home from school (my parents worked at the school, so we all commuted together), so it became a family routine to get home from school and watch Star Trek. We’d gone to see the movies, and I knew enough about it to know who the characters were, but I hadn’t really watched the series in any depth, and when I did, that obsession hit. I found some of the novels at the used bookstore and finally appreciated the stories in the movies.

The Star Trek obsession was reinforced when I got to college and the gang on my dorm floor gathered every afternoon to watch before trooping down to the cafeteria for dinner. I was the journalism major surrounded mostly by engineering and computer science majors, so Star Trek was one of the things I could talk to them about and sound reasonably intelligent. The Next Generation came on while I was in college, and we also gathered to watch that, usually after dinner on Saturday nights. I got really into that show and even bought the novels as they came out. We did watch the Star Wars trilogy on our movie nights every so often, so the Star Wars thing was still lurking. It just wasn’t top of mind during those years.

There was a slight resurgence in the Star Wars interest after I graduated from college when the original Timothy Zahn novels came out, actually continuing the story, but I didn’t much like most of the Expanded Universe books that came afterward. Then Deep Space Nine came on, and I was back to Star Trek obsession. I started watching both Voyager and Enterprise, but I didn’t finish those series (I did come back to watch the Voyager finale, though). The Star Wars Special Editions came out during this phase, and I did go see those with friends from work, but The Phantom Menace didn’t revive the Star Wars obsession too much. It was Attack of the Clones that did that, and that came after Deep Space Nine ended, so there was no Star Trek at the time. This was the first new Star Wars movie to come out when I was in a place in my life when I could see it as often as I wanted to, and I actually wanted to, so one of my friends and I went to see it three times that summer. Revenge of the Sith is oddly paired with Enchanted, Inc. in my mind, since they came out at around the same time. Revenge of the Sith came out the week before Enchanted, Inc., and then I saw it a second time the day I had my author photo taken (I saw the movie in the same dress that I’m wearing in that photo).

There was then a dry spell in between, when there wasn’t any new Star Wars or Star Trek. I mostly drifted to Doctor Who during that time. The Clone Wars animated series was on, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time. I picked up on Rebels about halfway through its run. Then the Star Wars firehose opened and we started getting tons of new Star Wars stuff with all the new movies, and then the various TV series. I’m back to being that nine-year-old kid who’s utterly obsessed, but there’s a lot more material to immerse myself in. I don’t have to just reread the novelization of one movie while listening to the soundtrack in order to get my fix.

At the same time, though, they’ve also started giving us a lot of new Star Trek. I didn’t have Paramount+ so I hadn’t seen much of it. I saw part of the first episode of Discovery when they showed it on CBS during the pandemic, but that station wasn’t coming in well for me and I gave up after getting mostly glitches. The one I got into was Strange New Worlds, when they had the first season on Prime Video as one of their “free this month” previews.

That series follows the Enterprise under the command of Captain Pike (the one in the wheelchair-like device in the episode that was repurposed from the unaired original pilot), with a very young Spock and Uhura. A young Kirk shows up from time to time. I feel like this series captures the vibe of the original series, but in an updated way. They even manage to get the aesthetic so that it feels like it could be from the same era, but somehow without it looking too dated (the way they manage to get Andor to look like the original Star Wars without it screaming that it’s from the 70s). My brother gave me Paramount+ at Christmas, so I’ve been able to catch up on watching the rest of that series.

I’ve also picked up on Lower Decks, an animated Star Trek series that’s both a good Trek show and a spoof of Star Trek. It follows the ensigns who don’t work on the bridge, who do the grunt work, on a ship that isn’t the flagship of the fleet. They’re on the “second contact” ship, the one that comes in to handle the paperwork after a ship like the Enterprise has made first contact. It’s set after The Next Generation (Riker is captain of his own ship, finally). The show pokes gentle fun at all the Trek tropes by showing them from the point of view of the crewmembers who are just trying to do their jobs. For added fun, there was an episode of Strange New Worlds that had the characters from this animated series be transported back in time to the Enterprise and converted to live action (using the same actors who voice the roles). The episodes for this series are only a half-hour long, so this is what I watch when I don’t have time for anything longer.

I started watching Picard with my brother at Thanksgiving, but I haven’t had a chance to finish it. I also want to revisit the original series, since I know I missed a lot of connections and references on Strange New Worlds.

I feel like we’re in a golden age of Stuff Starting With “Star.” I could watch nothing but Star Wars and Star Trek and fill all my entertainment hours. With there being so much of both, I’m kind of teetering between the Wars and Trek obsessions. I may be leaning closer to the Wars, just because I think I’m more emotionally engaged with that universe and it’s essentially fantasy in a science fiction setting, which is more my jam, but I don’t feel like it has to be a competition. It’s more like “Yay, lots of fun stuff!”

Life

Summer

One fun thing about this move is that I haven’t needed to do my annual “I hate summer” post. Summer here is quite different from back in Texas. It’s still somewhat hot, but it’s more like May or September (or even October) weather in Texas — and this is apparently a bad heat wave.

I will admit, on the days when it’s really muggy, it does feel kind of nasty. I wouldn’t want to be outside in it for long. But I’m still having breakfast and lunch outside on the porch most days. I just come inside for the afternoon when there’s more direct sun on my porch. Most mornings, I at least start with a sweater on. Up until about a week and a half ago, I was still wearing sweatshirts most days. I did have to turn my air conditioning on last weekend, but more for the humidity than the heat. Even without the AC, it’s never gotten as warm inside as I used to set my thermostat in Texas.

And that means I’m actually getting a real summer. When I lived in Texas, it felt like we missed out on summer because it was too hot to go outside and do summer things. I thought of the typical summer activities as fall activities. Here, you could actually go camping (since it gets cool at night even when the day is hot), have picnics, go to outdoor concerts and festivals. Every Monday night, I go to a community band concert in the park, and they’ll start doing weekly jazz and bluegrass concerts in the park next month. I generally need to put on a sweater toward the end of the band concerts as the sun starts going down. It’s quite pleasant sitting outside in the park, watching the fireflies come out and listening to music. In Texas, it would still be in the upper 90s and you wouldn’t want to sit outside.

I’ll be able to go to the July 4th festival without worrying about having to be outside in 100-degree temperatures. I may not stay there all day, but I live a block or so from the park, so I can come and go throughout the day, and I may as well go to the fireworks, even if they are later at night than I usually stay up, since they’ll be close enough to keep me awake, anyway.

I probably won’t be hitting the swimming pool, as I’m a weenie and used to only go swimming when it was over 100 because I don’t like being in cold water and I don’t like being in the city pool with all the kids screaming and splashing (one good thing about my old place was that we had a community pool that almost no one used, so I usually had it to myself, especially since I liked to go swimming when it was really hot). But I can hang out in the park, especially in the shade, which is abundant, as the park is full of huge old trees.

Fall is still my favorite season, and I’m looking forward to that, but I imagine it will feel like an extended fall to me, since summer here is so much like early fall in Texas, and then I’ll be going to Texas for Thanksgiving, so I’ll be there just in time for real fall to finally show up there. For now, though, I’m making lists of “summer” things I haven’t had a chance to do in a very long time. What do you think of as summer activities?

Books

Hallmark in Space

One difference between my old house and my new place is that I no longer have a separate “library” room. Now, my bookcases are in my living room, which means that when I sit on the sofa (actually a chaise, as I don’t have room for an actual sofa) to watch TV, read, or work on my laptop, I’m looking at my book collection. That’s led to me getting the urge to reread books that catch my eye.

The one I’m reading right now is Promised Land, by Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice. Back in the 90s, these two authors teamed up for several books that are essentially science fiction romances. They have a lot of the tropes you’d expect from a romance novel, but they take place in science fiction worlds.

Promised Land is basically a Hallmark movie set on another planet. We’ve got the city girl ending up in the country when she inherits a ranch, complete with the trope of her being entirely inappropriately dressed for the environment in high heels and a short skirt. She even has a purse dog (or something like one). Then there’s the local guy she has to be married to for a year or they’ll both lose their land. Except it’s all on another world. It’s a backwater planet colonized fairly recently, and that’s the reason for the weird inheritance laws to keep the land with colonists rather than speculators. They found that the size of the plot they were given wasn’t enough to make it viable, so neighbors combined theirs, and to ensure that the plots stayed together, they married their children, with the marriage becoming legal upon the death of the last of the original owners. The heroine was sent off to boarding school on another planet and hasn’t come back. Oh, and the “purse dog” is a bug-like alien creature.

Then they throw in some trappings of historical romances. There’s a “wagon train” across this planet to get to the ranch, only the wagons are being pulled by solar-powered vehicles rather than oxen. I got on a weird kick about the westward expansion last summer, and I recognize some things in this book as being related to some specific incidents from history. Knowing how Connie Willis does research, I bet she read the same accounts I did, or at least read about the same incidents. And then there’s the “settling in the homestead and learning how things work while having to work as a team with the husband she didn’t initially want” part of the story, which is right out of historical romance.

However, it doesn’t really read like a romance, even though it’s absolutely a marriage of convenience romance (there’s even a “there’s only one bed” situation). The emphasis is more on the heroine getting over herself to recognize the good in her situation and in the husband she hasn’t seen since they were children, and the attraction is much more emotional and mental. There isn’t the emphasis on sexual tension that you’d get in a genre romance.

The funny thing about this hitting all the Hallmark movie tropes is that this book was published when “Hallmark movie” meant “Hallmark Hall of Fame,” so award-winning literary adaptation starring actors who usually work on the big screen rather than on TV, not cheesy romance. A lot of these same tropes did tend to come up in some of the Silhouette romance novels, which were fond of “save the ranch” type stories, and I think some of those “show up in the country in high heels” bits came up in rom-com movies (though the one that came to mind came out more than ten years later).

Still, if you like those “city girl has to go to the country and meets a hunky farmer” type stories, but you wish they involved spaceships and aliens, you might like this. There’s kind of a Firefly space western vibe (there’s even a character mentioned named Kaylee) but this was several years before Firefly. I’m having a lot of fun reading it. No one writes screwball comedy-style chaos in novel form like Connie Willis does.

Life

Changes

I’ve been living in my new home a little over a month, so I have some basis for comparison in how things are different here than they were back in Texas.

A big one is temperature. We’re having a “heat wave” here this week, which means it might get close to 90 degrees. It is pretty humid, probably more moist than it would be at these temperatures in Texas, but I still find it fairly comfortable. At this time of year in Texas, I’d barely be able to go outdoors. Here, I spend most of the day outside. I work on my back porch until mid-afternoon, and then I only really need to come inside because the angle of the sun hits a point where it puts a glare on my computer screen. If I’m not working on the computer, I can stay out until later in the afternoon, when the sun begins to hit the porch directly and it gets a bit uncomfortable for a few hours. The community band has concerts in the park every Monday night, and this week’s concert was the first time I didn’t have to put on a sweater during the concert. Last week, I was wearing a sweatshirt and still had to put on a sweater.

The nice thing is that even if it’s hot during the day, it cools off a lot at night. During this week’s “heat wave,” they were talking about how the overnight lows being high is the real problem, but it’s still getting into the 60s overnight. Back in Texas in the summer, it often doesn’t get below 80 at night. I finally turned on my air conditioner last night, but only for humidity purposes, as it was only about 74 degrees inside. I had to put on a sweater while the AC dried things out a bit. Until the current “heat wave” began, I was still using the electric blanket on the couch for watching TV in the evenings.

This is one of the main reasons I moved. I wanted out of my living situation but I couldn’t afford a house in that area. I figured if I was going to have to move outside the area, I might as well go to a place that would be more comfortable, since I couldn’t bear the thought of another Texas summer. We’ll see how I feel this winter, but it didn’t look like the winters were that bad here, and I don’t mind huddling under an electric blanket. You can bundle up to stay warm, but it’s harder to stay cool when it’s hot. Summer here is basically September and October in Texas.

I’m also adjusting to smaller-town life. I was living in a major metro area, and this is a town of about 25,000. Since I come from a town that had a population just about 2,000 when I lived there, I don’t really think of this as a small town. It has multiple grocery stores, a lot of bookstores (more than in the city I just left), and plenty of things to do. The difference is that I don’t have to get on the freeway to do most things. Oddly, although this is a smaller town, in a lot of ways it feels more urban than where I used to live. When I was researching places to live, YouTube started recommending channels on urbanism, and this smallish town actually ticks a lot of boxes for what these people talk about for good urban fabric. It’s dense enough that things are close together. You can walk to a lot of things. There are more streets than “stroads” (the unholy mix of street and road, so everything’s built around cars, which makes everything be more spread out). Aside from the major commercial roads between the freeway and the city center, most of the streets here are two lanes, and the houses and businesses are right on the streets rather than set back by driveways and parking lots. It feels a lot more like a real city than the suburbs did.

It’s funny how my perception of traffic has already changed. I used to live next to a six-lane boulevard that was constantly full of traffic. A week or so ago I was walking around, looking at houses and neighborhoods and found myself rejecting one house that I otherwise liked because it was on a “major” street. It is one of the main thoroughfares, but it’s a two-lane road with a 25 miles per hour speed limit, and there’s maybe one car going down it every minute. They do need more sidewalks around here, though. My street has sidewalks, but a lot of neighborhood streets don’t.

That lower traffic means it’s so much quieter. I can hear the leaves rustling in the trees and birds singing. I could hear birds in my old house, but even when I sat on the patio with trees nearby, I never heard the leaves rustling in the wind. That’s one of my favorite sounds. Sometimes I just sit on the porch here and listen to the wind in the leaves. I think the air is also a lot cleaner without all the traffic and traffic jams.

Things are also a lot older here. I had one of the “old” houses in my old neighborhood, and it was built in 1984. Here, one of the old houses was designed by Thomas Jefferson. Most of the houses in the central part of town are pre-World War II. A lot are Victorian. There are some newer (1950s-60s) mixed in, possibly filling in on formerly large lots or rebuilt after a teardown, but most are the kinds of houses with front porches and deep eaves. I’ve always wanted to live in that kind of neighborhood, and it really didn’t exist in the Dallas area, other than in the historic districts near downtown that were extremely expensive. I can afford to buy one of these houses, and the same house in the same kind of neighborhood in Dallas would be close to a million dollars. I love all the history. I’m looking forward to exploring the various historic sites.

I’m at a higher latitude, so the daylight difference is fairly striking. Sunset isn’t too much later than it was in Texas, with it staying fairly light until after 9, but sunrise is a lot earlier. It’s light around 5 a.m., just about broad daylight by 5:30 (official sunrise is a bit later, but it’s light long before then). Even though my bedroom window faces west, and even with blinds and lined curtains, the sun was waking me up before 5:30 every morning. I ended up buying a sleep mask, and that works pretty well. I’ve even been oversleeping a bit, or maybe catching up on sleep from all those early mornings. I’ve pretty much stopped my movie night habit because by the time it gets dark enough to watch a movie with the proper theater ambience, it’s getting close to bedtime. I’ve just been watching episodes of TV series instead. In the winter, it’ll be the reverse, so it’ll stay dark a lot later and the sun will go down earlier. I guess that’s when I’ll catch up on the three-hour epics.

Another big switch is the local media. I was used to reading a major daily newspaper and watching major-market TV news. Here, the local paper is essentially a USA Today with a few local stories (but the local reporting is good enough that the cheap digital subscription is worth it). I ended up getting a digital subscription to the Washington Post to get substantial reporting with content that’s still somewhat local. The local TV news isn’t too bad, even though the staff are mere children. I still sometimes stream the news from the station I used to watch back in Dallas, just to see the familiar faces and laugh at the weather.

My day-to-day routine is more or less the same, other than me spending more of the day outdoors. I eat both breakfast and lunch on the porch and I work outside as much as I can. I have to drive farther to run errands, but there’s not as much traffic and the stores aren’t as busy. I spend Monday nights at the band concerts in the park, and next month there will also be jazz concerts. That means I’m getting out a bit more than I used to, which was one of the reasons for the move. There was a lot of stuff to do in Dallas, but most of it required driving on the freeway for at least half an hour. Here, I can walk ten minutes and go to a concert, walk 20 minutes and be downtown at the farmers market on Saturdays.

Now that I have my routine somewhat settled, I’m getting back to a better working routine, so I hope to get more writing done. In Texas, I seemed to do most of my writing in the summer because I was huddled indoors during the hot weather, and there wasn’t much else to do. Here, there are more summer temptations. Winter may become my major writing time.

My Books

Rydding Village Update

Today is Tales of Rydding Village Status Update day, it seems.

I’m just about done with editing book 2, so I’ll soon start getting the publication part lined up. One thing I need to settle on is a title, so I can get a cover made. I thought I had one that I came up with when I was outlining it, but I’m wavering on it.

So, I’m looking for feedback from readers. This isn’t a vote, and I retain the right to decide for myself, but I am looking for opinions that might help me make the decision.

This book focuses on Lucina, the baker, and Nico, the new apprentice smith who came to town at the end of the first book. He’s from the same land as Lucina, which brings back some bad memories for her, since she didn’t leave her homeland in the best of circumstances. Things get more complicated when there’s a wave of burglaries in town, and since Nico is new in town, he’s the most obvious suspect. Lucina worries that if he’s accused, she’ll be tarred with the same brush, as the only other person the villagers know from that land, and she’ll be a refugee all over again. She and Elwyn set out to solve the mystery.

So, my working title has been Bread and Burglary. That follows the pattern of the X and Y title established in the first book (which also seems to be a trope in the cozy fantasy genre). I imagine some of the little symbols on the cover might include something like a loaf of bread and a smith’s hammer.

But a pivotal part of the story takes place at the village’s midsummer revels. There’s a lot of talk about “midsummer madness,” which leads people to take leaps they might not otherwise take. That’s made me wonder if I have to stick with that same title pattern and if Midsummer Madness might make a good title. Though, to be honest, there isn’t much actual madness, just some temptation and a few magical things happening.

Which do you think would be more interesting/appealing? Or do you have other ideas? I generally hate coming up with titles. If I don’t have one that pops into my head at the very beginning, I usually struggle with titles until the last second, then just stick whatever comes to mind then on the book so that I can get it published.

In other Rydding Village news, Tea and Empathy is now available on the hoopla library system. If your library offers this service, that means you can check the e-book out as a library book. It doesn’t cost you anything, and I get paid if people check it out, so win-win. It’s a good way to try out new authors or series at low risk. It’s also on the Overdrive library system, but in that one each library has to purchase a book to add to their e-book collection, so you’d have to request it from your library, and then they can decide to add it, either as a one-time thing (so you can check it out, but it doesn’t become part of the collection) or just as a permanent part of the collection so everyone can check it out.

Books

What’s Your Lane?

One of the most-repeated bits of advice in the independent publishing world is “find your lane and stay in it.” In other words, narrow down on the kind of thing you want to write that has an audience and focus on it. Write in one subgenre — maybe even in one series. So, not just stick with, say, contemporary romance, but small-town contemporary romance, maybe even small-town contemporary romance with veteran characters. And they should all be connected, set in the same small town, so that the secondary characters in early books will be the main characters in later books, and the main characters in early books will still be around as supporting characters in later books.

There’s nothing wrong with that advice. In fact, people who follow it are making a lot more money than I am. But I get twitchy around book 7 of a series, and it’s unlikely that I’ll want to keep writing in the same subgenre. Twenty years ago, I was enjoying the chick-litty tone of the Enchanted, Inc. series and couldn’t imagine writing a book that wasn’t set in contemporary New York. Now I can’t bring myself to write something with a contemporary setting.

What I think is more important about having a “lane” is offering readers a similar experience, no matter the subgenre or series. It’s about voice and vibes, the way a book makes you feel. For instance, one of my favorite authors is Connie Willis. She writes science fiction, but in subject matter she’s all over the map. She’s written books about time-traveling historians, a rom-com about implanted communications devices that link you with your true love, a road trip with an alien, adventures on distant planets, and a whole book on near-death experiences and the afterlife. But they all tend to have a certain kind of humor and worldview, they don’t have a lot of sex or violence, and her main characters tend to be practical, down-to-earth people even if they’re in crazy situations.

I think I’m pretty similar, but with fantasy. It may be contemporary fantasy, alternate history steampunk, small-town paranormal mystery, or secondary-world cozy fantasy, but you’ll get a touch of humor, not a lot of sex or violence, a practical heroine, and an adorkable wizard. There are readers who only want to read one particular genre or series, but I think most readers who like an author are willing to give other books a shot.

I felt like my views became validated by a book I read recently. I’m not going to name names because the point here is not to drag the author. Back in the early days of the chick lit craze, I took a couple of trips to England, and I ended up mostly buying books as souvenirs, since they had a lot of chick lit books that hadn’t been published in the US. There was one I particularly liked that was in the same vein as Bridget Jones’s Diary, only instead of just having diary entries, it also had e-mails between friends, notes left on the refrigerator door from roommates, and other bits and pieces of written material, and it told about a year in the life of a young woman living in a small town in the Cotswolds who was figuring things out and looking for love.

While I was going to a lot of bookstores signing books as the early Enchanted, Inc. books were being published, I found a book by this author in the bargain books section of a Barnes & Noble. It was a UK publication (the only price printed on the cover was in British pounds, with the American price just on a B&N bargain sticker). It was a bigger book, but it also involved women living in a small town in the Cotswolds. I never got around to reading it because I was so busy at that time, but I rediscovered it in my stash when I moved, so I finally read it, and I got a massive case of whiplash.

While it seemed to cover a lot of the same subject matter as that other book by this author and might have been considered staying in the same lane, it was incredibly different in tone. Instead of sweet and funny, it was rather raunchy. All the characters were horrible people, and a painfully toxic relationship was depicted as being true love. It was a very different reading experience (and I need to find a little free library to donate it to, or I’ll hand it over for the library’s book sale because I won’t be re-reading it). I’d have been happier with a mystery or a fantasy with a similar style and tone to that first book of hers I read than I was with the book that had a similar subject but that was so different.

The tricky thing about making your lane be about the voice and vibes is that you have to have a strong voice and know what your vibes are. What is it that readers like about your books? Then you have to make sure you can communicate that to readers and teach them to trust you enough to go wherever you go. You may not make quite the same amount of money as someone who can produce a 40-book series that keeps readers hooked, but I think you’ll be a lot happier. At least, I will be. I’d rather get a regular job than write the same sort of thing forever.

Life

Hitting the Trail

I had a post for today drafted, but I got excited about preparing for my grand excursion today and totally forgot to upload it. So, I’ll save it for next week.

This is where I was instead of posting a blog:

A view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, covered in trees, against a blue sky with puffy white clouds.
This view of the Blue Ridge Mountains was worth hiking a mile to get to.

One of the reasons I wanted to move here was to be close to the mountains. I can see them in the distance when I run errands. Since I hit my writing goals for the week and the weather was nice, I decided it was time to hit the mountains. The beginning of the Blue Ridge Parkway is about 15 miles from where I live, so I went out there, and then the guy at the visitors center suggested a short hiking route for me. I walked about a mile on the Appalachian Trail then took a short side trail to get to the overlook site where I had that fabulous view. I had a picnic lunch there, then walked back.

So I can now say I’ve hiked the Appalachian Trail, though just a teeny portion of it. It was all so beautiful, but I need to get in better shape. I slacked off from my regular exercise while I was going through the move, then didn’t get back in the habit once I stopped having the intense physical labor of packing/unpacking and carrying things around. I’ve done some walking around town, but if I’m going to do real hiking, I need to build up to it. Today was just enough to get a taste of it and see some scenery, and I suspect I’ll feel it tomorrow.

Now I’m going to get a tall glass of cold water and put my feet up for a while.

Life

My Story Arc

Whenever I talk to someone about having moved recently and they ask me why and I have to say that I just wanted to, they always say something like, “You’re so brave!” as though it’s a big deal to move halfway across the country to a place you’ve visited once and have no ties to, just because you felt like it and the opportunity arose. And I guess it is kind of crazy. Every so often, I find myself astounded that I actually did this, and I wonder if I made the right move.

And then I look at the weather report and the crime reports from my old home and I’m pretty sure I did make the right move.

But it’s struck me that this is the kind of thing people write memoirs about — in middle age, uprooting and starting life all over again in a new place. I just need some kind of arc beyond simply moving and continuing with life in order to make a sellable story out of it. I’ll have to find some new passion, new direction, romance, or something really funny. So far, though, it’s mostly been just continuing with life, but I haven’t even been here a month yet. I’ve barely learned my way around to major stuff like the grocery stores.

I have started trying to do some of the activities that are the reason I came here. I’ve gone to the farmers market, and this week they started the weekly band concerts at the bandstand in the park near my house. This is apparently the oldest continually operating community band in the nation. They do concerts at their bandstand in the park every Monday night during the summer. This week’s concert was music from Disney movies (including Star Wars and Marvel). It was a lovely evening sitting out in the park, listening to music and watching the kids run around. Then I saw fireflies when I walked home. It’s nice to have things to do within walking distance or just a short drive. There was a lot to do in the Dallas area, but most of it required getting on a freeway and driving for half an hour in bad traffic through areas prone to road rage or drive-by shootings.

So, what kind of story arc do I need to look for so I can write a bestselling memoir about uprooting my life? I don’t think I want to start a bakery or coffee shop or bookstore (there are so many already here). This is basically a town out of a Hallmark movie, so maybe I need to find a flannel-wearing local guy. I’m not a typical city girl, though. I’m not likely to freak out because there’s wildlife in the town (I saw a deer just down the street last week) or try to teeter around on the hilly streets in high heels. I want to do more outdoorsy stuff, since I’m so close to the mountains. Maybe my arc is going from city girl to nature-loving outdoorsy person — from the red stilettos to hiking boots. Except I owned hiking boots before I bought the stilettos, and I haven’t worn the stilettos in nearly a decade because I messed up a knee and can’t wear heels (and haven’t had a good occasion to wear them).

I have promised myself that I will go to the mountains later this week or this weekend if I get my work done. I see the Blue Ridge mountains off in the distance when I go shopping, and as I come home I can see the Shenandoah mountains. I’m so close to the Blue Ridge Parkway, so I need to go there soon. I’m also really close to the Appalachian Trail (but the memoir about that has already been written).

I could do one of those history travel memoir things, exploring the early years of this country and putting that in context with my life. There are sites from the Civil War and the Revolution nearby, and I could contrast all this history with life in the Texas suburbs.

Or I could stick to writing fantasy novels. This basically is a larger, newer version of Rydding Village. I’m even surrounded by mostly single women. It’s just food for thought to imagine what difference in my life this move can mean.