Next week is a holiday week, and I’m making a grand expedition across the country to Texas, so I won’t be posting next week. After seeing the weather forecast that called for a big thunderstorm to cross my path on one of the days I’d be driving, I’ve moved my travel plans up a day, so today’s planned big thoughts will have to wait until later because I have to cram two days of to-do lists into one day. Eep! I got a lot of it done yesterday when I started thinking I’d have to adjust plans (the chance of thunderstorms and tornadoes in Arkansas was not encouraging), so I should be able to do it, but my rough estimates come down to about six hours of work today. I hope I’m overestimating, but better to overestimate and have extra free time at the end than to underestimate and run out of time.
Normal posting will resume the week after Thanksgiving.
I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails lately full of praise for my books. Unfortunately, they’re not from real people. The scammers have discovered AI and are using it to try to get money out of authors.
It used to be that the low-effort scams were obvious because when someone e-mailed you to tell you how great your book was and how it deserved to find an audience (something they could help with if you paid them), they kept it generic and didn’t mention your book by name or say anything about it. That way, they could send the same e-mail to hundreds of writers.
Now, AI “writes” the e-mail for them, based on information available online (usually from the Amazon listing). You’ll get an e-mail talking about the specific things that are great about your book, then saying it’s a pity it has so few Amazon reviews or so few people know about it. From there, there are three main things that might be offered. They might represent a large group of rabid readers who are eager to spread the word about your book by reviewing it on Amazon (for a suggested “tip” per reader). Or the person writing to you might represent a book club that wants to feature it. Or they might be selling marketing services.
I started getting these for Weaving & Wyverns before the book was even published, so I knew that this group of rabid readers couldn’t have fallen for it. Or there was the D.C. International Affairs Book Club that was interested in featuring Tea and Empathy. I guess they needed a break from all those serious books on international affairs. The writing style in all of them is pure ChatGPT. It’s very salesy language and doesn’t sound at all like what a real reader would write to an author, and the way they praise the books falls into a template. It’s like a Mad Libs, with blanks filled in with specifics for your book.
Even if it hadn’t been pretty obvious that the D.C. International Affairs Book Club was unlikely to read a cozy fantasy, the other clue that this was a scam is that this isn’t how book clubs work. I’ve met with and spoken to a number of book clubs, and I’ve been a member of several book clubs. Most book clubs don’t involve the author at all. They choose a book they want to read and then they discuss it. If they do contact an author to speak to them, they treat it as a favor from the author. They don’t ask for money from the author. Mostly, the contact has come from someone I know who’s in the group, and they invite me to meet with them. Having an author is a special treat for the group. I know there are some big groups that bring in authors, but they pay for the author to come, not the other way around.
The scammers seem to have scraped MeetUp to find book group information, and they’re pretty insidious about it because they even include the link to the MeetUp page to show it’s a real group, and they send the e-mail under the name of the group’s organizer. You have to look to see that the e-mail address is different. The book groups must be hearing from a lot of authors because I saw that several of them now have something on their pages about how they are not contacting authors and if you hear from someone claiming to represent their group, it’s a scam.
There’s another scam going around in which the scammer impersonates a famous author who contacts less famous authors, at first just to discuss publishing and writing and then to sell courses/training/services. Some authors I know have been having fun with this when they know the famous author and write back about the crazy weekend they just had together, which baffles the scammer.
Someone who’s been investigating this has found that if you do bite on the scam, you’ll get an invoice from an entirely different person who’s based in Nigeria, and you don’t end up getting any of the promised services, since they don’t really have anything to do with the famous authors or the book clubs, and if it’s the group of readers eager to review the book, even if they did review, it’s against the terms of service to pay for reviews, so you could lose your Amazon account.
I’m now at the point where any e-mail with a subject line praising my book gets deleted. They present very differently from real fan mail, but there is a chance I’m going to be so skeptical that I miss some real e-mail. If anyone does invite me to their book group, they’ll have to make it really clear up front that they aren’t going to charge me and know that they’re asking me to do a favor and otherwise keep me from assuming it’s a scam.
In entirely unrelated news, the paperback version of Weaving & Wyvernsis now for sale. It’s at Amazon for now but the listing should spread through other retailers. Maybe it’ll be a good pick for your book club!
One of my ongoing struggles is planning. I love to plan, but I tend to be very unrealistic about the plans, so they fall apart once I start implementing them — if I implement them. I get a lot of satisfaction out of planning, but then often my brain decides it’s done, so I have a plan but feel no need to carry it out. I also tend to get enthusiastic about something and overestimate what I can get done when I’m impatient to dive into it.
I had an old story idea (really, more of a concept/situation) lying fallow for a long time because I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Then I had a burst of inspiration about it and came up with the right thing to do with it, and it’s something that would be pretty marketable right now. I got very enthusiastic about it and planned to get it developed and outlined before Thanksgiving and then write it during December.
Meanwhile, I was feeling overwhelmed because I dove into working on something else as soon as I was done with Weaving & Wyverns, since that was the start of a quarter and I was eager to get going on my plans for the quarter. I didn’t do a reset/regroup like I usually try to do, getting caught up on housework and taking a mental break. I thought that the time I took off for fall exploring would count. But it didn’t. I’d stalled on some of my setting up my house when I dove into writing the book, so the basement, spare room, and office are still in chaos, and that bothers me, but I haven’t been allowing myself to take the time to deal with it.
I had a burst of realism yesterday when I realized how soon Thanksgiving is and how soon it will be before I travel for the holiday. This story is nowhere near ready to write. I have the backstory and setup, but the characters are still vague, and I have only a broad idea of what the plot should be. It needs a lot of thinking time. Even if I devoted the entire next week to full-time story development, it wouldn’t be ready to write after Thanksgiving. As such, I’m letting myself take the rest of the year to regroup and think. It may take me all that time to develop the new idea, and then I also want to outline the next Rydding Village book. Then there’s planning for 2026. And getting the house in order. The to-do list I came up with is pretty hefty. And since I’m in the choir and we have a number of big events in December, I need to account for that, too.
I’m planning to do a lot of writing next year and not a lot of publishing, since I want to stockpile some books and try to get farther ahead of the publishing schedule. That means getting some systems and schedules in place, which is also on the to-do list for the rest of the year.
I feel a lot better about giving myself permission to take time to breathe and think. And clean. I’ve been trying to work during the week and then I’ve been exploring on the weekends, so the house is getting cluttered. It’ll be nice to finish my office so it’ll be a pleasant place to work. I want to get enough of the new idea figured out that it can develop in the back of my mind while I write the next Rydding Village book, and then I can dig into specifics and it might be ripe for writing.
Today, though, may be an out and about day because my neighbors are getting a new roof installed, and after two days of hammering, I need to get away because I can’t take it anymore.
Last weekend I found a festival that wasn’t just shopping. They had a cider festival at the Frontier Culture Museum, and it was mostly about learning. And drinking. Though, ironically, I didn’t have any cider at the cider festival.
I guess they were trying to keep it focused on learning, so instead of you being able to buy drinks, to drink you had to buy a tasting ticket, which got you 5 4-ounce drinks from all the various cider breweries who were there. But that’s way too much for me. If I drank that much, not only would someone have had to drive me home, but they’d have had to carry me to the car. There didn’t seem to be an option to get just one drink (probably because if you could buy single drinks then there would be people buying many, many drinks). I may send a suggestion to have a mini tasting option the next time they do this, with amounts that really are just a taste.
So I didn’t have cider, but they had presentations on growing apples, different kinds of cooking with apples, the history of cider making in this area, etc. There was also a gentleman talking about traditional basket weaving. The only shopping was cider (you could buy bottles and cans from the breweries, but you’d get a ticket to pick it up on the way out), apples, the basket guy had baskets, and there was a book shop (books on apples, cider, regional travel, and plants/gardening). They had food trucks, and I got my annual serving of apple cider donuts.
Mostly, it was just a nice day out. The weather was perfect, just warm enough that I didn’t need a jacket, but with enough of a nip in the air to feel like fall. The fall color in the trees that still had leaves was so bright and intense, and there was the scent of wood smoke from the cooking fires, with a hint of cinnamon from the cider donut stand.
The next day I was inspired to make my annual batch of apple butter with the apples I got at a farm stand last weekend. I think I finally got it right. It takes a lot of time to cook it down properly and I usually get impatient and stop too soon. At the apple butter festival, the old guys cook it overnight in big cast iron kettles over open fires. I cheat by using the Instant Pot to pressure cook the apples, which speeds up the initial breakdown of the apples. But then you have to boil for a long time to get it to thicken up into butter. I made myself be patient and let it cook, then cooled it and refrigerated it overnight and cooked it some more the next day before canning it.
I’d planned to do work around the house this weekend, but a hiking group I’ve been following on Facebook and saying I wanted to get involved with is doing a walk around town. I think I’ll join them because it’ll be a less intimidating environment for meeting them (and I can easily peel off if I don’t like it) and it will be a walk I know I can do. I need to get in better shape for some of their hikes, but with this I can see what kind of pace they set before I head into the mountains with them.
I had a minor adventure yesterday. I finally went “over the mountain,” as they say around here, to go to Charlottesville, our nearest real city (it’s not really a big city, more of a mid-sized city, but it’s bigger than all the small cities around me). You have to cross the Blue Ridge Mountains to get there. I’ve actually crossed the mountains before to go to an event just on the other side of the mountains, and I drove past Charlottesville on my way home from my last trip to DC, but I hadn’t made it into the city itself before.
It’s only about a 45-minute drive from my house to the place I went shopping, probably less time to get downtown or to the tourist attractions, like Monticello. This was a shopping trip, so I didn’t hit any of the touristy spots or see anything that suggested the character of the town. I was strictly on the main shopping center road where the big box stores are, which is pretty much indistinguishable from anywhere else in suburban America. I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to doing this. I guess it feels like a bigger trek than it really is, since it does involve crossing a mountain, but I used to drive farther than that to go to things around the Dallas area. Now that I have a proper mental image of it, I’m less intimidated and may go more often.
My main goal was hitting a big shoe store and buying some black boots I can walk in. It’s supposed to get cold next week, and I wanted to be ready. I usually walk to church, and I wanted to be able to look somewhat dressy while staying warm. What I had in mind was something like a riding boot, but none of the ones that they had in my size were very comfortable. When your feet hurt walking around the shoe store, it’s a bad sign. I ended up getting something different, some soft suede-like boots with a decent tread on the bottom. They look dressy, but they should be good for walking, and they’re washable. They probably aren’t waterproof, but if there’s snow on the ground I’d wear my snow boots and maybe throw a pair of ballet flats in my choir bag to change into at church.
In the same shopping center was a nice used bookstore. They didn’t have any of the specific things I was looking for, but they had a lot, so if I’m over there again I’ll make time to browse. They actually had a huge chick lit section full of all those books from the early 2000s, including a copy of Don’t Hex with Texas. I didn’t notice anything I hadn’t read by any of the authors I used to follow, but I’ll have to take more time to look in the future. I also hit a housewares shop and found a small saucepan with a pouring spout, something I’ve been looking for to make cocoa.
Then I found the fancy grocery store that has a nice cheese shop and bakery, so I know where to go when I need something that I can’t find in our town. Then I ran out of steam and hit something like museum fatigue, only it was shopping fatigue, probably because I delayed eating lunch until I got “hangry,” then couldn’t find anything I wanted to eat that I could get to easily, so I ended up just stopping at another grocery store and buying something at the deli (after having a chat in the parking lot with the kids running the Wienermobile that was parked outside) to eat in my car before I headed home.
I found a few more shops I want to get back to in the future, and now that I know where everything is and that getting there isn’t a massive ordeal and is actually a rather pleasant drive with stunning scenery, I may make more excursions in the future when I need something I can’t find locally. I’ve heard that you want to get home well before rush hour because there are a lot of people here who commute to Charlottesville, so the traffic can get bad, but the fact that people do commute shows that it’s not that far. I guess my brain is still thinking in Texas terms, so I look at distances on a map and think it’s a lot farther than it really is. It’s not a run grab a loaf of bread distance, but it is a good I need an ingredient or kitchen tool they don’t have here distance. Next time, maybe I’ll do some of the touristy stuff and go downtown or to Monticello. I’ll just have to be sure to avoid windy days, because the wind is pretty intense on that mountain pass, and there are lots of warning signs about fog on the mountain. The road goes up high enough that my ears popped on the way up and down.
One interesting feature of my new neighborhood is that it comes with cats. There’s a colony of feral cats that makes the neighborhood home, and they wander from house to house. My house seems to be a highway between two of the houses that leave food for them, so even though I don’t leave food out, they still pass through my yard or across my deck. The neighbors say the cats hung out on my deck while this house was abandoned.
There’s a lady the next street down the hill who is the primary caretaker. She has little insulated houses for them and feeds them, and it’s apparently a gray area of whether she “owns” the cats. She considers them hers, but I don’t know that she’s providing veterinary care or has any kind of registration. Some of the cats have tipped ears, indicating that they’ve been trapped, neutered and given some vaccinations, and then re-released. They aren’t friendly or cuddly cats. They usually bolt at the sign of a human. The neighbors say we don’t have a problem with mice or rats around here, so that’s a good thing.
Even though the cats aren’t friendly and run at the sight of me, I enjoy observing them. I’m not really a cat person in the sense that I’ve never had a cat, though I don’t dislike cats. If I see one, I want to pet it. But I’m pretty allergic to them. Whenever I’ve spent the night in a house with a cat in it, I’ve come down with a bad case of bronchitis, so I will not be adopting a cat to live with me. This is almost the next best thing, aside from not getting to pet the kitties.
This visitor is a bit friendlier than the others, but it still runs away if I’m outside.
Among the regulars is this gray one. It’s a bit less skittish than the others. I was easily able to get a picture through my glass door, even though it spotted me. I leave a dish of water on the deck, and this one will come meow at me through the door when it’s had a drink or when I need to refill the dish (though it will flee if I go outside to fill the dish).
The main regular, though, is the elusive white cat one of my neighbors said she thinks is haunted or possessed. I don’t know about that, but I know that the squirrels are less skittish around me than this cat is. It will flee if it even sees me through the window. I’ve been calling it The Magnificent Floof because just look at how fluffy this cat is. I’m amazed that a stray manages to stay this white and clean. Although it looks pretty magnificent much of the time, this cat is kind of a dork.
The Magnificent Floof finally sat still long enough for me to take a photo from inside the house.
For instance … There was one day when I was sitting on my deck. I had music playing and was reading something on my computer, so it wasn’t a surprise that I was there. This cat must have wanted to travel the highway, going from under the fence, up the steps to my deck and then down the stairs that go from my deck down the hill to the street level (my house is built into a hill, so the deck is off the upstairs, which is ground level in back), so it was trying to sneak past me, going between the table and the deck railing. I glanced over just as the cat was trying to sneak past, and the expression on its face made me laugh out loud.
The Floof looks a little less majestic when it realizes it’s been caught drinking. The cats prefer any water in the watering can over what’s in the dish, so the watering can is always knocked over.
Imagine a teenager coming home after curfew to find that all the lights in the house are out. They think this means if they sneak in quietly and get in bed, no one will know they came home late. When they’re halfway through tiptoeing across the living room, the lamp next to their dad’s recliner suddenly comes on, and they realize their dad has been waiting up for them. They’re so busted. That was exactly the look on this cat’s face when I looked at it. It froze for a second, then it backed all the way to the steps down from the deck to the back yard before turning and fleeing.
This morning it was trying to sneak past while I was sitting in the living room, and when it passed the glass door, I said, “Hey, kitty.” It stopped, looked around, then finally spotted me inside the house, jumped in fright, turned, and ran. When it got down the steps into the yard, it turned back to look at the house, and when it saw me through the window, it turned and ran away.
This cat is also obsessed with the groundhog that lives in a hole on the side of the hill (the hill my house is built into continues to rise behind the house. There are few flat surfaces in this whole town). The only time the cat doesn’t bolt if I appear is when it’s waiting outside the groundhog’s hole. Sunday I was watching the cat as it seemed to be making laps around my yard, then started nosing around the groundhog hole. Just then, the groundhog emerged from the hole, and I swear, that cat teleported across the yard. It was in one place, there was a moment of confrontation, and next thing I know, the cat is on the opposite side of the yard. It waited there a second, eyeing the groundhog like it was trying to decide what to do, then turned and walked away like “I meant to do that.” The groundhog stood outside the hole for a while, looking smug and radiating “King of the Mountain” energy. The cat has gone back to the hole a few times since then, but is being much more cautious about it. It seems to like stalking the groundhog, but it would rather not actually encounter it.
Aside from not having to worry about mice, one other nice thing about the neighborhood cats is that I finally have cat pictures to post on the Internet. That seems to be the key to engagement. I wonder if I could leave out one of my books and get pictures of one of the cats with it. It’s tricky to get pictures. I have to take pictures through the glass door and do it quickly before the cats notice me and flee. Or I could edit cats into pictures with my books. Cat pictures in general are the key to getting attention online.
