Archive for January, 2026

Books

Back to Narnia

On Christmas, when I finished the holiday-themed book I was reading and didn’t have another library book handy, I pulled The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe off the shelf. The movie kept showing up in the “Holiday” collection on Disney+, so I thought it would work as a seasonal book (mostly I think the Christmas association comes down to the brief appearance by Father Christmas). From there, I ended up going through the rest of the series. I hadn’t re-read these in at least 20 years, so it’s been a fun nostalgia trip.

I just finished with The Silver Chair, which was my entry into the series, in a way. I’d actually read The Horse and His Boy a few years before during my horse phase, when I went through the library systematically checking out every book with “horse” in the title or a horse on the cover, but since that’s the one book entirely from the perspective of someone from that world so that there’s no portal travel, it reads like just another talking horse book if you don’t have the context, and I didn’t read any other books in the series then (they didn’t have “horse” in the title and I moved on to the next horse book). But I got a copy of The Silver Chair when I was 11 and became utterly obsessed with Narnia.

Looking at it now, I can see why it particularly got to me in a way that I don’t think would have worked if I’d read the first book first. I like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but I don’t think it would have grabbed me. The Silver Chair is one of those books that feels like it was written just for me in a way the AI bros wish their machines could do for them if they could just come up with the right prompt. And yet, the book was written long before I was born and the author died before I was born.

At that age, I was most interested in books that had a girl I could relate to as the main character, someone similar to me in some way and around the same age. They never actually give Jill’s age, but she seemed to be around 11 to me, not fully a child but not yet a teenager. I found it easy to identify with Jill, who ended up being buddies with a guy (I was the kind of girl who easily made friends with boys without being a tomboy). I was fascinated with the idea of British schools where they wore uniforms because the older sister of my best friend at the time went to boarding school in England (we were living in Germany), and she’d come home on breaks wearing her school blazer (which was pretty pretentious, now that I think about it, but at the time I thought it was cool). I thought it would be great to get to wear uniforms to school. In fact, I signed up for Girl Scouts that year mostly because I liked the idea of wearing a uniform to school at least one day a week. But I also loved the idea of dressing up like a princess, so a book in which a girl around my age started the book in a school uniform and ended up in a princess-like dress while hanging out with a boy was sure to catch my interest.

Then there’s the story. It’s a quest in a way that none of the other Narnia books are. They have a clear story goal and go on a journey to get to it, with adventures along the way. I love a quest/journey story. The fun thing about this one is that it’s a girl who’s sent on a quest to rescue a prince, flipping the usual fairytale dynamics. So, we’ve got a girl from out world who gets to journey to a land right out of a Disney movie and rescue a prince from an evil witch. That’s like all my favorite things thrown together.

From there I went on to read the rest of the series, and that was when I realized I’d actually read The Horse and His Boy, only this time I understood the significance of those visiting kings and queens in that book. The Silver Chair is still my favorite, though. I wish they’d gotten around to making that movie when they made the others. The budding romantic in me had always imagined that Jill and Eustace would end up together, and since the actor who played Eustace would have been a teen by the time they made the movie at the rate they were going, they could have played with some subtle subtext there. He was so good in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, so I really wanted to see how he’d do in The Silver Chair. I guess we’ll have to see how the Netflix version goes, though I’d have to get Netflix to see it. The BBC version wasn’t too bad. The special effects were absolutely awful, but Tom Baker as Puddleglum was brilliant.

In a case of what might have been, not long after the horse phase came the witch phase, in which I read all the books with “witch” in the title (all the girls in my neighborhood were obsessed with reruns of the series Bewitched), but I got sidetracked when I hit the Nancy Drew book The Witch Tree Symbol (which turned out to be about the Pennsylvania Dutch and not about witches at all) and went on a mystery kick, abandoning the witches. That would have been about one library shelf before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Would I have fallen into Narnia then, or would I have been disappointed because it was the wrong kind of witch?

I’ve also been rewatching the movies as I’ve gone through the books. Tonight I’m up for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Life

Relative Cold

Winter is probably my biggest adjustment in my move from Texas to the mountains of Virginia. Summers are humid, but much cooler than in Texas, and spring and fall last longer and are glorious. But winter is colder — sort of. There’s something weird in the way the temperatures feel. We do get truly cold days, where it’s below freezing all day, and we get more snow here, but then on the days when it’s above freezing it doesn’t feel as cold as I expect from the thermometer. As a result, I’m usually overdressed when I go out, or else I resist going out because it’s cold, only to find that it isn’t that bad. Last winter, I shoveled snow while wearing a sweatshirt and leggings, and I wasn’t that cold (I did have on gloves and a hat). I’d gone out bundled up but had to shed layers while working in the sun.

I actually enjoy cooler weather, and I’d rather it be cold than hot, but I generally enjoy cold weather by being inside, wearing a sweater, with fuzzy socks on, wrapped up in a blanket, and with a cup of hot tea. I’ve been slacking off on exercise because I’ll look at the temperature and think it looks too cold to go out, but I completely lost that excuse last weekend. It was a sunny, cold day, but still above freezing, so I walked to church. It’s a little more than half a mile, and it’s not much faster to drive because I can walk right to the churchyard gate, but if I drive I have to go past the church, then go through a couple of stoplights and make left turns to get to the city parking garage behind the church, then walk from the parking garage. It is uphill both ways from my house to downtown, since the road goes up and down hills, but it’s definitely easier heading to church than heading home because I live far uphill from downtown. The main hill is big, but it’s a fairly gradual slope. When I’m driving to downtown, once I get to the crest of that hill, I just coast the rest of the way. Walking home up that hill is a bit of a trudge.

There was a brunch after church on Sunday, and when I left, it was sunny and quite pleasant. No wind, and the sun made it feel warmer. Kids were playing on the church playground. I was enjoying the walk home, thinking about how nice it is walking through a historic district and looking at all the Victorian houses along the way.

Then I got to the crest of the hill, and it looked like I was walking into a dark tunnel. Next thing I knew, I was in the middle of a blizzard. There were dark clouds, the wind was whipping around, and snow was blowing. I’m not sure how far the visibility went because I kept my head down so the snow wouldn’t blow straight into my face. I kept my eyes on the sidewalk, putting one foot in front of the other. The front of my coat was crusted with snow. I was glad I hadn’t driven because the streets in this general part of town are pretty hairy in good conditions. There are all the hills, and the streets were laid out before cars existed, so they’re pretty narrow. On that street between my home and downtown, there’s one particular part that’s treacherous, where there’s a sharp curve on a hill at a point where the road narrows. I suspect they cut into the lawns of the houses to widen the street so there are two lanes (one in each direction) plus room for parking on one side. But at this one spot, there are churches built right against the sidewalk, and they’re historic (one is on the National Register of Historic Places), so there’s no tearing them down, and the road can’t be widened there. There’s no parking in that stretch, but people do the “I’m just running in for a second” thing and park anyway. It’s supposed to be a 15 mph speed limit there, but most people ignore that. I can’t imagine trying to navigate that area with no visibility.

I only had to walk through the blizzard for a few blocks before I turned off to head to my street, and there I was sheltered from the worst of it. Then on my street I was heading away from it, so there was snow falling, but it wasn’t blowing into my face. At my house, if I looked out my front windows it was snowing, but if I looked out the back windows it was sunny. By the time I changed clothes, the sun was out all over and there was no sign that it had ever snowed. I couldn’t even see any dark clouds. It was above freezing, so the snow didn’t stick.

The TV meteorologist calls that a “flizzard.” It’s blizzard conditions but with the scope and duration of a flurry. This one was so small that it didn’t even show up on the radar unless you zoomed in. It covered that one little spot, a few blocks long and barely wider than the street, and it moved past quickly.

But Monday when I was looking at the temperature, around 42, and thinking it was so cold, I remembered that I’d walked to church when it was 33 and walked home through a blizzard, so I had no excuse. That was a pleasant walk, though I may need to find better walking shoes for cold weather. I have Skechers, and they’re ventilated. That’s great in the summer, but you don’t want a cold wind blowing through your shoes in the winter. I was wearing fleece-lined boots on Sunday, and that was perfect, but those aren’t really walk-for-exercise shoes.

This coming Sunday, it’s supposed to be in the 20s for a high and may be in the teens in the morning, so I’m going to plan to drive. By any standard, that’s a bit cold for a comfortable walk. Getting from the parking garage to the church will be bad enough.

writing life

New Photo, New Me?

My big excitement for the week was getting a new author photo taken. I got the notice that I’d been selected for a library book festival in an adjacent town (I’d applied a couple of months earlier, after battling the warring impulses of “Why would they want a has-been like me?” imposter syndrome and “Do they know who I am? They’d be lucky to have me” ego trip), and they asked for an author photo as part of the things I needed to send in to participate.

That was when it struck me that the photo I’ve been using is more than twenty years old. I had it done soon after Enchanted, Inc. came out and my agent told me I needed a professional photo (I’d been using one I took with the timer on my camera). I’d just had my hair done, since I had some booksignings coming up, so I found a photographer and scheduled an appointment. Based on suggestions from some writer friends, I looked for a photographer who did headshots for actors.

Then I got to the appointment and found that the studio was in an … interesting … location, and the actor headshot thing was his sideline. His main line of work was taking what we can call “professional” photos for the sort of women who advertised on the back pages of weekly newspapers, if you know what I mean. He kept trying to make me look sexy, and most of my expressions were mean and scary. Maybe that’s why I’m still single. When I try to look sexy, I look like I’m plotting murder. We finally found one shot in which I didn’t look like I was about to shoot lasers out of my eyes.

To tell you how long ago this was, after the photo session, I went to see Revenge of the Sith a second time since I was on the side of town that had the theater with digital projection (at that time, there was just that one theater in the area, adjacent to the Texas Instruments campus where they developed that equipment).

I kept using that same photo because I didn’t think I was changing that much. I still had the same hairstyle and my skin was pretty good. I even still wear the same dress. I wasn’t doing as many booksignings after I stopped doing traditional publishing and my books weren’t in stores, and then I backed off doing a lot of other public events. I wasn’t putting my photo in my books, since that adds to the delivery fee of e-books. The photo just lived on my website, so it didn’t seem worthwhile to go to the effort of getting a new one.

Also, I’m not crazy about getting my photo taken, which is funny because I was a notorious camera hog as a small child. There’s a family story about toddler me sitting on my grandparents’ front porch, and when there was some cloud-to-cloud lightning in the distance, I posed and asked, “Is someone taking my picture?” But as an adult, I’m better at staying out of pictures. I especially don’t like posed pictures, and my irritation with the photographer is what comes through in the picture. That made finding a photographer something to dread.

But I figured that with this book festival in a new place, I should probably update the photo. I knew I’d be needing a new photo eventually, so when someone posted to the local Facebook group looking for a photographer, I’d follow the links in recommendations and was bookmarking people I liked. That meant I knew who I wanted to contact, and I was able to get an appointment.

The studio was in a nearby town (where the book festival will be), just off the courthouse square downtown. It’s a family business that’s been around since the early 1900s, and the storefront and sign were like something out of an old movie. The photographer was a lot less sketchy than the last one. She understood my reluctance to get my picture taken and did good poses that kept me at ease, and she didn’t even try to make me look sexy.

It’s interesting to see how I’ve changed. Some of the differences come from having a photo taken in January vs. June. My hair’s darker without having any highlights from the sun and my skin is lighter (though some of that is a makeup difference and difference in lighting/backdrop). My hair is more or less the same, since it styles itself and I don’t have a lot of choice there. My skin is still pretty good and I don’t have a lot of wrinkles. But the flesh seems to have melted off my face. When I was younger, my body was thinner but my face was still a bit round and chubby. Now I actually weigh more and my body’s a little thicker, but my face is so much more hollow. I can see why people get fillers in their face. I have to admit that I look different enough to make it worthwhile getting a new photo.

 

Old photo
New photo

And while I was there, I got a new passport photo taken, since my passport expires soon and I need to renew it. Due to the photo requirements there, all my inner murder demon tendencies come out in that photo, but it’s probably accurate to how I’d look after an overnight flight.

Life

Holiday Catch-up

I’m back from the holidays and diving into the new year. To update what’s been going on since my last post:

I finally got my new desk delivered. Once I had it set up, I ordered a new bookcase for the office and got it just before Christmas, so rearranging my office was my big project for the week between Christmas and the New Year. It also involved rearranging my spare room because I moved the old office bookcase in there. I still need to set up the basement with the shelves from the spare room, but that’s a project for later in the month. I also have some fine-tuning to do in the office as I decide exactly where everything needs to go, but it’s at a point where I can comfortably work in it. I took my old desk chair to the Habitat ReStore, which cleared a lot of space. The spare room now has enough floor space that I can do yoga in there again.

While I was ordering stuff, I bought a small chest freezer. I got tired of wrestling a frozen pizza out of the way every time I opened the freezer part of my refrigerator. It’s the drawer kind on the bottom of the fridge, and it doesn’t handle large things well. When I cook, I like to freeze portions of leftovers and stock up, and I’ve never really had enough room for that, and I also run into the situation where you only get good deals on meat when you buy the family pack, so I freeze the meat in portions. The little chest freezer is clearing space so I can actually find things in the fridge freezer, and I’ve got room to shop sales. Now I can bake a casserole and have room to freeze the leftovers. It paid off for me yesterday when I found that Aldi had the frozen German hard rolls on clearance. They were in large bags that I wouldn’t have been able to fit in the refrigerator freezer, but I was able to buy a bag and just drop it in the chest freezer. I also picked up some frozen entrees that were on sale for those days when I’m too busy writing to bother with cooking dinner.

The other thing I bought that has improved my life in surprising ways is a little milk frother, as I’ve gotten into making tea lattes. I’ve had chai lattes at coffee shops but usually drink my chai plain at home. Then I ran across a recipe for a London Fog latte, which is a latte made with Earl Grey tea. The recipe called for a lavender simple syrup, but I have some Earl Grey tea with lavender in it, so I thought I’d give it a try, using my immersion blender to froth the milk. I’m not normally a huge fan of Earl Grey tea, but this was really good. I then tried making a chai latte and enjoyed that. So, when I saw that milk frothers were pretty cheap at TJ Maxx, I got one. I got one that has an eggbeater attachment, as well, and that makes scrambled eggs a lot easier without having to get out the mixer. I don’t necessarily make a tea latte every day, but it’s a fun way to make a little afternoon treat, especially when I want to reward myself for getting a lot of work done. (I know that lattes are supposedly a breakfast thing in Italy, but in the morning I want the tea full-strength, with just a splash of milk, and I don’t have time or brainpower to mess with heating and frothing milk.)

After we had snow for the first half of the month, we had a fairly warm Christmas week. I went on a hike on Christmas Eve, and it wasn’t too cold for the late-night church service. Then I was able to walk to church for the Christmas morning service. I served drinks for the community Christmas lunch open to all who need it (mostly homeless and seniors) and then ate some of the leftovers afterward with the other volunteers. I then came home and collapsed and put my feet up for a nice afternoon of reading.

During the holidays, I got to work in earnest on developing the fifth Rydding Village book, and now I’m about to start writing it. One of the main characters is a potter, and while I was developing her, I saw a notice that a pottery center near me is offering a four-week intro to clay class on Saturday mornings. You get to try several techniques, like hand-sculpting and working with the pottery wheel, and you end up with some finished pieces. So, I signed up. I figure it’ll be fun, I’ll learn stuff, and I’ll meet people, and it counts as work because I’ll be getting details to use in the book. I’ll be able to describe how the clay feels and smells and have a sense of the process. And since I’ll be getting to know the teacher, I’ll have someone I can talk to if I have any specific questions. The class starts a week from Saturday. I’ll also be getting exercise because I can walk to the class.

Meanwhile, I’ve found myself re-reading the Narnia books. I’m not sure what got that started. I finished the library book I had on Christmas, and I guess I saw The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe on the “holiday” list on Disney+, probably because of the snow and the Father Christmas scene, so I pulled it off the shelf to reread, and from there I was sucked back in like I was when I discovered them as a kid. I’ve been on a portal fantasy kick lately, looking for stories about people traveling from our world to a magical land.

Now I’m trying to be good about being focused on work but also finding fun things to do when I’m not working. That’s going to be my priority this year. We’ll see how long it lasts.