Archive for January, 2025

writing

Adding to the Process

This week, while I’m between drafts on a book and letting it rest before I do the final proof (so it’ll feel more fresh and I won’t be reading what I expect to be there), I’ve dug out an old book that’s been backburnered for a while. I love the story, but I’ve never been happy with the ending. I’ve gone through about four wildly different versions of an ending and haven’t been satisfied with any of them.

I reread the whole book again, and I think I’ve figured out part of the problem, so I’ve outlined an ending that might work. Now I’m doing something I haven’t tried before that I may end up adding to my regular process. I’m writing summaries of the whole book from the perspective of each of the viewpoint characters. I’m starting with the backstory leading up to the story, then writing the events of the story from their point of view, as well as things they’re doing in scenes that aren’t in the book (like what they’re doing when the story is showing a different character) and their perspective on scenes that are told in another character’s point of view.

This is my way of testing the character arc to see how it flows when I’m not shifting perspective or going to a different part of the action, but it’s giving me ideas for what’s going on with these characters that I can then incorporate into the parts that are in the book. It’s also showing me where things get repetitive, like when a character keeps having similar realizations or when events are nearly the same in different parts of the book.

I think I may try this for my next book, but before I start writing it. This forces me to go into more detail than an outline does, so I can’t get away with handwaving “and then stuff happens,” and it’s a lot easier to rewrite and rewrite a few paragraphs of a summary when it’s not working than it is to rewrite several chapters (or a whole book). There’s still room to discover things along the way and change plans, but I also discover a lot of stuff while I’m doing this kind of work.

I need to write out the parts of my process and what I’ve figured out works for me so I can remember it for the next book.

It’s my favorite kind of writing weather today, cool and rainy, but above freezing. That means most of the snow is finally being washed away. My yard is almost entirely green again, and much of the snow on the north-facing lawns across the street is going. It’s a good day to drink tea and curl up in my chair to scribble in a notebook. I’ve got bread rising to bake this afternoon. Now it’s time to create.

movies, fantasy

Cursed Romance

Last weekend I got around to the previous weekend’s planned movie viewing, with some fantasy from the 1980s.

First up, I tried watching The Dark Crystal but didn’t make it very far into it because it hit some serious uncanny valley stuff for me with the hero, who at times was very puppet-like but then was a bit too human for comfort. I also couldn’t follow all the story that was infodumped by a narrator at the beginning. So I gave up and ended up watching the US figure skating national competition.

Then on Saturday night, it was Ladyhawke. I have really mixed feelings about that movie. On the one hand, I love it, but on the other, it’s pretty seriously flawed.

In case you’re not up on 80s fantasy, this is the story about a young thief (a rather miscast Matthew Broderick, who half the time sounds like he’s doing Ferris Bueller—before he was Ferris Bueller—and half the time sounds like he’s trying to do a fantasy European-ish accent), who escapes from an evil bishop’s prison, then is rescued from recapture by a mysterious knight (Rutger Hauer) who wants his help getting back into the bishop’s citadel so he can kill the bishop. It turns out that the bishop used dark magic to curse the knight and his love (Michelle Pfeiffer) so that the knight is human by day and the woman a hawk, then the knight is a wolf by night while the woman is human. They’re always together, but also always apart. Then the priest who unintentionally betrayed them finds a way to break the curse, but the knight can’t bring himself to trust him. Can the young thief scheme to help his friends?

The main flaw is the score, which doesn’t fit at all. Whoever thought it was a good idea to put an electronic disco-style score on a fantasy movie needs counseling. There are moments in the movie that have a lovely traditional soundtrack, and they really work well. There’s a part when the hawk is flying over the water and the music is gorgeous, perfect for the scene. Then there’s another moment when the lady is next to the wolf when the transition happens, and for a split second they can almost see each other. It starts with the disco score, but then the synth pulls out and it becomes more traditional movie music, which works so much better. You can hear the orchestral line that should be there in the disco stuff, so it’s like we’re getting the disco remix of the real score. It’s mostly in the action scenes (and sometimes goes off into wacky cartoon-style music for a chase scene that should be tense), and it throws me right out of the movie every time.

Another issue is the fact that the difference between day and night is extremely important to the plot, but it’s hard to tell the difference because it looks like they did “day for night” filming using blue filters to make it look like night, but half the time the woman is human, it practically looks like broad daylight. They’ve gone overboard in making things dark these days, so you can’t see what’s going on, but there has to be a middle ground, where you can see what’s happening but you can also tell that it’s night.

As much as they like remaking things these days, I wouldn’t mind a remake of this one. The story is quite good, but this isn’t such a perfect movie that it would be blasphemy to make a new version (like, say, The Princess Bride). I was pondering what would need to be changed other than the score and the night filming, and maybe some of the casting (Matthew Broderick was the big name in the cast at the time, but he’s also kind of a weak link because he’s just a bit too extra. Even when I was a teenager seeing this before Ferris Bueller existed, he made me cringe). Not that this cast is bad, but the accent inconsistency is weird. The main characters speak with (mostly, in Broderick’s case) American accents, including Rutger Hauer, who only occasionally has a slight inflection that suggests this isn’t his native language. Everyone else with a speaking role (which isn’t a lot—they must have been careful to keep the speaking parts to a minimum) has a British accent. But they’re all from the same place. I like that they didn’t try to show the transition between animal and human forms with any kind of special effects. They just used editing and framing the shots, and I wouldn’t want them to try to morph using CGI now.

I think if I were given the assignment to update it, I’d make the thief a girl and create an unrequited love triangle, not for the romance, but for the moral dilemma. If it’s a girl who gets rescued by a handsome knight, she might develop a crush on him before she learns that the hawk that travels with him is the woman he loves. Then when they learn there’s a way to break the curse and the knight rejects it, wanting to go through with his plan to kill the bishop (which will result in the curse being permanent), the thief would have to decide whether to do what the knight wants, thus making him happy and essentially getting him for herself, or to go behind his back to help break the curse and thus make him angry if it fails and lose all hope of being with him if it succeeds.

Then I started trying to think of a way to file the serial numbers off it and write that story. I could make the way to break the curse better and more of a dilemma (in the movie, breaking the curse involves being in the same place as they’d be to kill the bishop, so I don’t see why they didn’t try for the breaking, then have killing the bishop as plan B or a follow-up. I’d make it a true either/or where having both would be impossible). The trick is coming up with a “always together, forever apart” curse that’s not obviously a ripoff of Ladyhawke.

I’m actually writing a similar triangle now, with a woman traveling with a man who’s on a mission to save a different woman, and as she falls for him, she’s torn between helping him save the woman he loves and holding back to maybe win him for herself, but she never meets the other woman and he’s never been involved with that woman. It’s been a crush from afar on his part and he’s hoping this heroism will help him win her. It’s not like Ladyhawke, where the thief becomes friends with both and passes messages between them and they were in an established relationship before they were cursed to keep them apart. Mine is a bit more like Stardust but with the woman he’s trying to win actually being in danger. He’s not just doing this to win her.

The trick with the more Ladyhawke situation would be resolving the triangle. If the thief is the viewpoint character, then we’d be pulling for her to win the knight. It would be disappointing to go through the whole thing with her sacrificing her own happiness for the man she loves, only to be left aside as he goes back to his love, but he looks like a jerk if he ditches the woman he was cursed for because of a girl he just met. The whole idea of Ladyhawke is that these were people and animals who mated for life but were kept apart, so they were doomed to be alone. You’d have to make the thief realize it was just a crush and she wants them to be together. Maybe she finds a more suitable love interest along the way.

Actually, if they could digitally make night more night-like and replace the score, they wouldn’t have to remake Ladyhawke. I think it would hold up pretty well with different music. Other than that, it doesn’t scream “80s!” too badly. They did a decent job of making it a fantasy world that didn’t look obviously made in the 80s.

With the end of January approaching, I’m trying to decide what my next movie theme should be. I’m not really in the mood for rom-coms or romances for Valentine’s Day. I’ve been thinking of doing a big Star Wars rewatch to build up to Andor season 2, which would include rewatching Clone Wars and Rebels, so I’d need to start with the prequel movies, then it might take a month or two to get through all the animated stuff that comes in between. Or I could extend fantasy month. I haven’t seen the extended editions of the Hobbit movies, but those are already so bloated. Are they like the LOTR extended editions, where the extra stuff is all the character development that makes things make more sense, or is it just more swarms of orcs?

My Books

In the Cold

I somehow lucked out and managed to move north and into the mountains in time for the coldest winter in fifteen years. The temperatures have been below average for almost the entire month. There’s been snow on the ground for nearly three weeks. This week it was below freezing all week, with temperatures in the single digits overnight.

It hasn’t been too bad, aside from the fact that I live in a basement where the cold comes up through the floor. I’ve dealt with that by covering as much of the floor as possible. I don’t want to buy carpets for a place that’s meant to be only temporary, so I’ve used things like exercise mats, beach towels, and the big moving blanket my mover left with me. The walls are more than a foot thick, and they’ve put new windows outside the original wood-framed windows, so the place is pretty well insulated. The weak spot is the back door, which is the original 100-year-old door with a window in it. I resorted to “redneck weatherproofing” there, stuffing plastic bags into the gaps around the door and stacking the cushions from the patio furniture against the door to block the drafts, as well as putting a second layer of curtains over the window. That seems to have worked pretty well.

I’ve spent the week bundled up in warm clothes under an electric blanket, so I was pretty comfortable. There was also baking (since the oven helps warm the house while producing something to eat). I did not try to venture out because I don’t have the clothes for this. My coats and sweaters are fine, but I need to get better pants or find a good base layer. I got some snow boots last week that should help keep my feet warm, but I haven’t tested them yet. I’d rather endure this for a few weeks than have 105-degree temperatures for a month and around 100 for another couple of months.

Much of the snow is gone from my front yard, aside from the places where it got piled up by the snow plow, but the back yard is still totally covered in snow. It looks like a different world depending on which window I look out. I got the fun experience of shoveling snow last week. It took a lot of effort to dig my car out enough to move it from behind the wall of snow left by the plow.

But it’s going above freezing this weekend, and I’m hoping to get outside a bit more. I like cool weather, I just am not crazy about freezing weather. We had a reasonably warm day last Friday, and I went out to the Frontier Culture museum to go walking. There was snow on the ground, but the paths were clear. It was fun walking around looking at the snow without being too cold.

The other thing I did this week was update my website. I’ve added some photo galleries to the pages for the Rydding Village books, with some visuals of my inspiration for the village and some looks at the crafts mentioned in the books. I got to see a wood-fired brick bread oven in action, and I put the photos on my site. Maybe that will help you visualize the things happening in the books.

Tea and Empathy

Bread and Burglary

movies, fantasy

Barbarian Fantasy

I ended up changing my weekend movie-watching plans. I didn’t get around to a movie on Friday night because I spent the day out and about instead of working (taking advantage of a nice day before the next deep freeze hit) so I had to catch up on work in the evening. Then on Saturday I’d noticed while looking up 80s fantasy movies that Conan the Barbarian was leaving Peacock soon, so I watched that.

I could have sworn I’d seen it. It was the kind of thing they showed during movie nights in the dorm big-screen TV lounge or that my group of friends watched either in the study lounge on our floor or in someone’s room. I can quote lines from it. And yet it was utterly unfamiliar. I didn’t recognize most of the characters, had no idea what would happen, didn’t know the plot. Usually if I saw something once decades ago, it starts to come back to me when I watch it again. This was all new to me.

And I liked it more than I expected to. I haven’t generally been a big fan of the barbarian-style sword and sorcery fantasy, and I thought this would basically be big-budget Fantasy Cheese. But it was at least a bit deeper than that, with stronger characters and a more coherent plot. It was surprisingly enlightened, given the era in which it was made. Yeah, there were a lot of topless women, but the woman who got dialogue was a strong character without fitting the Strong Female Character trope (they didn’t just put a sword in a woman’s hand and declare that this made her strong, and she wasn’t Rambo in drag). The romantic relationship is relatively non-toxic, based on mutual respect and trust. The cast is rather diverse, especially for that era. Aside from a few special effects and the ages of the cast members (or the fact that they’re alive, RIP James Earl Jones), this could have been a movie made today, and you can’t say that for a lot of 80s fantasy movies.

I think it helped that they were very restrained in the dialogue and let the action tell the story. I didn’t do a count of lines, but it seemed like James Earl Jones’s character had the most lines, even with much less screen time, and that was a good decision because he managed to make lines that probably were pretty corny on paper sound like Shakespeare. He elevated the material to the point of transcending it, and he was utterly mesmerizing. It made me wish I’d had the chance to see him do Shakespeare. He was menacing enough here that I managed to forget the warm smile and infectious giggle he had in person (he was the guest speaker at the opening of a new library where I used to live).

One thing that was familiar to me was the soundtrack. A friend gave me a copy of the soundtrack on cassette, and even though I’d never seen the movie, I loved the music, and it became my background music for reading fantasy books throughout my teens. As a result, I had very different mental images associated with that music. I haven’t listened to it in ages (I’m not sure I even still have that tape), but I listened to it so often that as soon as I heard the music again, it all came back to me, and it was a little disconcerting hearing it in context with the movie while also getting flashbacks of mental images from things like the first couple of Shannara books or the Katherine Kurtz Deryni series. The CD doesn’t seem to be available anymore, but you can get a digital version, so I may have to do that and burn a CD because it does make good reading music and would probably make good writing music.

I don’t think the movie is going to go into my regular rotation. I enjoyed watching it, but I also had nightmares about beheadings afterward. It’s definitely not a repeat watch comfort movie. There’s no part of that world I would want to live in, so it’s not a place to revisit, and I don’t particularly want to hang out with those characters. That’s generally why I like rewatching movies.

On an entirely unrelated note (aside from the thing about places you’d want to live and people you want to hang out with), the first two Rydding Village books are now available on audio. Here’s the first one.

movies, fantasy

A Golden Age of Fantasy?

In January, my movie-watching (and often my reading) theme tends to be epic fantasy. I think it’s because cold nights are perfect for burrowing under a blanket and immersing myself in some other world. It gets dark early, so I have time to start a really long movie after sunset and finish it before bedtime. Plus, it seems that a lot of epic fantasy movies have at least one sequence involving snow, so it seems seasonal.

I did a Lord of the Rings rewatch a couple of weekends ago, this time the extended editions, which I hadn’t seen before. It was hard for me to tell which material was new because I have mental images from the books, and I’ve seen clips of extended edition scenes. There’s a YouTube series I’ve been watching in which someone compares the books to the movies, chapter by chapter, to show what was changed in the translation between book and movie, and he uses the extended edition versions of the movies, so I’d seen a lot of those scenes up to the point where he is in the series. It seems like the extra stuff is mostly character moments that weren’t critical to the plot but which flesh out some of the character arcs. We do get the trudging through snow sequence in the first movie. If only I’d known that would be my life a couple of days later!

Last weekend, I rewatched The Huntsman: Winter’s War, mostly because of the winter imagery. I thought Snow White and The Huntsman was a total mess, but this prequel/sequel that plays with the Snow Queen fairy tale is actually a decent fantasy movie. Then I rewatched Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which is rapidly becoming a Happy Place movie for me. Everyone in this movie knows exactly what movie they’re in, and they managed to walk that fine line between spoofing the genre and taking it seriously. This is a rare movie that’s a brilliant and hilarious spoof of a genre while still being a good representative of that genre. And we get some trudging through snow.

I think this weekend is going to be about the 1980s fantasy. I discovered that Ladyhawke is available through the library Hoopla service, and I haven’t seen that one in ages. And then there’s The Dark Crystal, which I never managed to see.

In scrolling around, looking for good fantasy movies to watch, I’ve come to the conclusion that the 80s were kind of a golden era of fantasy movies. Some of them look cheesy now because special effects have come a long way since then, but a lot of the classic fantasy films came out in that era, and most of them were at least somewhat original, not based on an existing popular franchise. There weren’t even a lot of sequels. Conan the Barbarian had a sequel, and it looks like there were sequels to The Neverending Story, but were they direct to video? I don’t remember hearing about them, and they were in the 90s. Willow had a sequel TV series, but that came decades later.

Off the top of my head and in no particular order, the 80s gave us:
Excalibur, Dragonslayer, Clash of the Titans, The Dark Crystal, Legend, Labyrinth, Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer, Red Sonja, Kull the Conquerer, The Beastmaster, The Neverending Story, Ladyhawke, The Princess Bride, and Willow.

Fantasy seems to have tapered off in the 90s. There was yet another King Arthur retelling, and there was Dragonheart, and some of the Robin Hood movies in that decade had fantasy elements. Otherwise, I think most of the movies that might have counted as fantasy in the 90s were animated (mostly Disney, but some from other studios).

The early 2000s brought us The Lord of the Rings, but not much else other than the Narnia movies. We were in the age of the franchise. We did get Stardust then. That was also the era of the Harry Potter films, but those were more contemporary fantasy than epic fantasy, as they took place in our world.

In the 2010s we got the Hobbit trilogy. There were a few fairytale movies that seemed to be aimed at the Twilight audience, like Red Riding Hood and Snow White and the Huntsman (and then its sequel that veered away from that vibe). And that was when we started getting all the live-action Disney remakes of their fantasy animated movies. But this was when they started doing more fantasy for TV with Game of Thrones. In a sense, that’s better for the epic stuff based on long series of long books, since you can’t tell the whole story of those sagas in even a trilogy of movies. Ten episodes of a TV series can do a better job of telling the story of a long novel than even a three-hour movie can.

But all this means that I have a hard time finding good fantasy movies to watch when I go into epic fantasy mode. There are a lot of “fantasy cheese” movies with much lower budgets, but they vary widely in quality. I’d love to have more stuff with the production values of the Lord of the Rings movies. I’d have thought that success would have triggered a trend, but it just gave us the Narnia movies and the Hobbit movies. I’m trying to decide if I want to bother with the extended editions of the Hobbit films. The regular versions were so bloated already, but if the extra stuff is the character moments and all the Bilbo stuff, it might be worth it (by the last movie, Bilbo was barely in the movies that were supposedly about him).

I also wouldn’t mind original fantasy that isn’t based on a series of books or an existing franchise, but I guess these movies are expensive to make, so they don’t want to risk it on an unknown quantity without a built-in fan base. I’m glad they didn’t have that attitude in the 80s, or we wouldn’t have had something like Ladyhawke.

 

Life

Cozy or Creepy?

Since I’m hoping to buy a house in the next few months and since I got rid of a lot of my stuff before moving, so I’ll be starting with a clean slate, I’ve been checking books on home decor/interior design out of the library to get ideas. I’ve found a couple of books about decor for a cozy home. That’s what I want to create, so I checked them out.

Given what I’m currently writing, it’s no surprise that the idea of cozy appeals to me. I have a sense of how I want my home to feel, but not a great visual for what that should look like. Thus the decor books. I want to see pictures to see if any of them fit what I have in mind. What does cozy look like to me?

And it seems I’m on a very different wavelength from these authors. Both books turned out to be by “influencers” (I really hate that concept) who had blogs about their homes, so the books were only about their homes. There weren’t a lot of pictures of a variety of homes to show how design principles work. There were just pictures of their homes.

Weirdly, their idea of “cozy” involves lots of white. White slipcovers on the furniture, white walls, exposed brick painted white, white wood, etc. I do like white walls, and my comforter cover on my bed is white with blue embroidery around the edges, but the amount of white in those homes was anything but cozy to me. It looked cold. They both talked about having a lot of natural light, but I tend to think of cozy in dark terms, with candles and lamps to create a glow. Some sunlight during the day is okay, but I don’t like a lot of harsh direct light.

One of the books had some good advice about starting a room with a blank slate, then getting the sofa in the position you want it first. After that, position any other seating, then the horizontal surfaces (tables). Then choose and position rugs, then drapes, lamps, and then art and accessories. That made sense. However, in all her pictures, I liked the “don’t” pictures better than the “do” pictures. She said that it’s better to have one big statement piece than a bunch of smaller pieces, and while I agree in not liking a cluttered look with a ton of stuff, it all depends on what the big piece is.

Over her sofa, the “don’t” picture (I guess it was a “before” from before she came up with her new design philosophy) had a gallery wall of a number of smaller prints. The “do” was a giant rack of antlers looming over the sofa. If you were sitting on the sofa and looked up, the prongs of the antlers would be right over your head. The “don’t” for the fireplace mantel was a couple of botanic prints, some small baskets, and some candlesticks. Not entirely my taste, but it didn’t look too busy to be restful. The “do” picture had a big, black sign with the word “Relax” on it in white, scrolling script (what I think of as the “live, laugh, love” font). This was on a white brick (or painted white) fireplace.

Between the giant rack of antlers and the huge black sign ordering me to relax, I’d have to flee that room. Nothing about it was what I’d consider cozy. It was oppressive, especially the “Relax” sign, which would have the effect on me of someone telling me to calm down during a fight. I wouldn’t be able to relax in that room. The antlers might have worked in a more rustic setting with darker colors, and possibly over the fireplace rather than over the sofa, but in a stark white room the look was like something out of Scandinavian horror.

I don’t have a ton of decorative accessories. Most of what I have is stuff I either got as a gift or bought as a souvenir when I traveled. I have a lot of interesting candle-related things, like lanterns, candlesticks, or a candle garden. I have framed pictures of family or places I’ve visited. I mostly fill my walls with bookcases, but the artwork I have is watercolor prints of places I’ve visited. Everything I have means something to me.

I’ll have to see what other books the library has, especially if I drive to the library. I usually walk, and I have to go up a steep hill to get home, so I’ve been choosing the smaller books. A lot of the interior design books are too big for my backpack or for the small collapsible shopping bag I carry with me if I’m running errands around downtown before going to the library. I’ll want to drive up the hill with some of the decor books. I hope they have something written by a real interior decorator with training rather than by self-taught bloggers, especially those who think huge racks of antlers on stark white walls are “cozy.”

My decorating style would probably best be described as “eccentric professor’s study.” I like cushy chairs with soft upholstery, lots of books, dark wood, plenty of soft throws, pillows, and blankets on the chairs/sofa, an antique-looking rug on wood floors. I even have a mini suit of armor. I’ll need to get a rug and a sofa, and I’ll eventually want to replace my wood furniture. Everything except the big bookcases was Bombay Company stuff that I put together myself. I’ll be starting from scratch for my office. I’ve got a chair that I may or may not end up keeping, but I need a desk, bookcases, and any other office furniture, and I have no idea what look I want, whether bright and airy with light-colored furniture and white bookcases that blend with the walls or keeping with the eccentric professor’s study in a castle look from my living room.

But first I have to find a house. There’s nothing on the market right now. I have to hope something will come up between now and May.

Life

Still Snowed In

I’m still snowed in. School here has been cancelled all week. We’re supposed to get more snow tonight, but then it’ll get above freezing over the weekend, so I may be able to get rid of the wall of ice surrounding my car, and I might be able to venture out. I don’t really need anything, but I might need some groceries next week.

Apparently, this is unusual here. It’s been interesting reading the town Facebook group to see how people are reacting. Half are acting like it’s all an overreaction and half are freaking out because the roads are icy. The hills in this town are really steep, so I can see why they wouldn’t want to run school buses full of kids on possibly icy hills.

Meanwhile, they got ice and snow back in Texas, so it’s not as though I’d have avoided this if I hadn’t moved. And I haven’t lost power.

It’s been a good week for work since there wasn’t much else to do. I re-read all of the book I just finished writing, made a revision plan, and did the major surgery revisions. I did the major rewriting midway through when I realized something was wrong and went back to fix it. That meant I didn’t have a lot to rewrite. Mostly, it involved deleting a couple of paragraphs so that a piece of information got revealed later. I didn’t have to add that info later because it turned out it was discussed a couple of times. I then had to fix who knew it later in the book.

Next up, I’ll do the fixing the words edit. That’s the nitpicky part when I read out loud to make sure the words flow well and the character voices sound right. I also find where I use the same words too frequently.

I’m not going to try to put a release date on this book until I get with the cover designer and see how this round of edits goes, but February seems doable unless the designer is really backed up.

In other news, if you like the idea of an all-you-can-read subscription service but aren’t keen on giving Amazon money for Kindle Unlimited, Kobo has a similar service called Kobo Plus. This one’s a bit more author-friendly, in that they don’t require exclusivity. Amazon doesn’t let authors sell their e-books anywhere else if they’re in Kindle Unlimited, but with Kobo Plus you can sell your books wherever you want. I put all my independently published books in Kobo Plus. Here’s a group of cozy mysteries that are available in Kobo Plus, including mine. (And it would help me get credit for this promo if you click on the link, even if you aren’t interested in Kobo Plus.)

Life

Starting with Snow

I had grand plans to get off to a serious start to the year on Monday — and then we got hit with about 6 inches of snow Sunday night.

This really shouldn’t make any difference to me. I work at home. But there’s something about a snow day that takes over the brain. It’s a mental state that says normal operations have ceased. I’ve actually managed to hit my work quotas, but it’s been a struggle because all I want to do is bake and curl up under a blanket with a book.

A view of a back porch and yard on a snowy day. The yard is covered in thick, fluffy snow, like a generous coating of whipped cream. The patio furniture is bare black metal mesh.
Looking out through the window of my back door at the yard. I won’t be sitting on the porch anytime soon.

I’m glad I went out for groceries on Sunday because otherwise I’d have been in trouble. As much as people in more northern states tease Texans about shutting down at a hint of ice or snow, I can’t tell that it’s much better here. The entire area shut down on Monday. City offices and some businesses opened part of the day on Tuesday. Schools have been out all week. They do plow the streets. My street is cleared of snow, but I bet it’s icy today because we got a lot of sun and were around 30 degrees yesterday, and now today it’s really cold, so there was probably melting and re-freezing. The thing about the snowplow is that it cleared the street, but it left a wall of ice and snow on the sides of the street, so my car is pretty much walled-up. I tried clearing out some of it yesterday, but my plastic snow shovel wasn’t up to the task. I may need a jackhammer. So, I could drive on the roads to get somewhere, especially since I have all-wheel drive and even a special setting for driving on snow, but I can’t get to the road.

One thing that’s better than in Texas, aside from snowplows, is that I haven’t lost power. The last time I was in weather this cold, I had no electricity — and no heat. I’m nice and warm inside, and it didn’t even feel all that cold when I went out yesterday to shovel.

The original forecast, up until Friday evening, was that we’d get a light snow and then it would be above freezing later Monday and on Tuesday, so it would all melt. So I didn’t go grocery shopping since I wasn’t close to running out of anything. Tuesday would be a good day to go shopping. Then they changed the forecast to say it could be bad, and I decided to head out Sunday morning, just in case. That was when I bought the snow shovel and I stocked up on milk, bread, and some things I could eat in case we lost power, like cheese and crackers. I’d have run out of milk today, and we haven’t made it above freezing, so the snow and ice aren’t going anywhere. We might make it above freezing on Sunday. Then I may be able to dig my car out.

I’ve learned that off-street parking would be really nice when I get a permanent house, so I might have to clear a driveway but my car won’t be buried by the snowplow. I need some boots that will work in snow (my waterproof hiking boots do okay, but aren’t tall enough to do much good in deep snow — fortunately there’s a crust of ice on top of the snow, and I’ve managed to walk on top of the snow, only sinking in a little). I need a metal snow shovel. And if they forecast any kind of winter weather, go to the grocery store, even if they’re saying it’s no big deal.

Books, TV, Life, movies

2024 in Review

Happy new year!

I’m still considering this to be a semi-holiday before I plunge back into my regular routine (or my new, improved routine) next week, but it’s a good time for a year in review and a look at what’s ahead.

The big thing for 2024 was my cross-country move. That was a major change of scenery and lifestyle, and it really disrupted things for a while. As a result, I didn’t get as much written as usual, and I had the fewest books read of any year since I’ve been tracking.

It was kind of a reading slump year, probably for a lot of reasons. I know I didn’t read a lot during the prep/packing/moving/unpacking phase. I also didn’t have a lot of work-related reading. I wasn’t doing serious book research, so I didn’t have any reading that fit into my working time. Usually that accounts for a lot of books every year. I think I’ve been getting out a lot more, too. During the fall, I was out exploring most Saturdays, time when I might have been reading. In the summer, there were concerts in the park in the evenings.

But, if I’m being honest with myself, I wasn’t really prioritizing reading time. One issue with not having a dedicated office is that I have the computer right in front of me all the time, and it’s easy to fall into the habit of surfing the Internet or doing online puzzles and not pick up a book. One of my intentions for the new year is to be more deliberate about how I use my time. It doesn’t help that now I’m getting my newspaper online. When I get a house with an office, I may see about getting a larger tablet to use for things like newspaper reading so I can keep the computer in the office — and I won’t set up the tablet to access any of my social media accounts. I have a tablet, but it’s a small one the size of a book, which isn’t great for reading newspapers.

I think my favorite find of the year was the Seven Kennings books (first book is A Plague of Giants) by Kevin Hearne — a really different approach to epic fantasy with a very fun narrative style. I read those early in the year, before the move, so I was surprised to check my records and see that I read them in 2024. It seems like so long ago.

I didn’t really watch TV in 2024 other than on streaming, and there I was mostly catching up on older things I missed. The transition to the eastern time zone has messed me up for network TV because everything’s on so late. I enjoyed the Star Trek series Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds, and I’m loving the Star Wars Skeleton Crew series. I’ve been rewatching The Office. I’ve just started The Day of the Jackal.

I don’t recall what movies I’ve watched. I need to start writing down what I’ve watched. I haven’t gone to a theater, so I haven’t seen anything truly new. I’m not sure what I’d say my favorite of the year has been.

The early part of this year may end up being a bit chaotic, as I’ll be house hunting and then moving again. I have this apartment until early May, so I really hope I find something by then. I’d said I wanted to experience at least part of a winter before I make the decision to buy a house, but even though it’s colder than I’m used to (and I need warmer clothes), I can’t think of any other place I’d prefer to live. This area really seems to be a Goldilocks zone for me, just right on the metrics that matter to me. I would like to meet more people, and I’m gradually getting involved in the community. I think getting permanently settled will help.

I normally set outcome goals for each quarter of things I want to accomplish, but for work I’m going to be focusing on behavior and dedicating a certain amount of time each day to my main work tasks. That should lead to some outcomes, and once I’ve established the habit (or re-established, since that was what I generally did before the move disrupted everything), then I can worry more about outcomes. I’m also trying to get back into some exercise habits. That should be easier once I have a house. I don’t really have good space for yoga (I have to adjust to fit in some of the exercises without bumping into things), and the place is too small to get in steps just moving around. But I do get a fair amount of walking just going around town, since I can walk downtown. I walk to the library, to church, to the farmer’s market, to the bank, and to concerts and other events. I live near the top of a very steep hill, so walking anywhere involves some climbing to get home, and since I’m on the other side of the hill from downtown, I have to walk up first before I walk down the hill to town, so it’s literally uphill both ways.

Speaking of walking, I have to get to the library to pick up a book while it’s still above freezing and before it starts snowing.