Archive for September, 2026

Life

Needing a Recharge

I’ve had a busy few days and am now in introvert recharge mode.

Friday through Sunday was the church and choir retreat. We go to this retreat center in the mountains that used to be a Victorian spa town. There are these huge old hotel buildings that look like something out of Somewhere in Time, plus little cottages. When the spa went out of business early in the 20th century, the Episcopal church bought it and has been adding on to it. We had three days of huge meals together in the dining hall, choir rehearsals, hiking, a church service in the outdoor church (I think it’s now officially designated as a cathedral shrine), and the Saturday-night entertainment was an 80s dance party. Though there were a few of us older folks who remember the 80s, it was the teenagers and college kids who were really into it. They knew all the words to all the songs. It was a teenager who was DJing, using music from his phone. That would have been like my peers knowing all the Glenn Miller music. I did because I was a weird kid, but we didn’t have 40s dance parties and sing along to all the music. I found an old dress I had from high school, and since it fit, I wore authentic 80s attire. It was funny how different my real 80s clothes looked from the costumes others had put together.

I got home Sunday afternoon and collapsed, but then I had to get up and out again because I was volunteering for an event. There’s a community garden that a group of sisters got started. Their main goal is to provide fresh, healthy food to people who might not be able to afford it, and they deliver to seniors and families with children. But they fund this by also selling produce at a market stand. The market is about a 10-minute walk away, so I go on most weekends during the season to buy whatever they have and see what I can make with it.

Meanwhile, there’s a bakery/restaurant building just down the hill from my house. The back of it would be across the street from me if the ground were flat, but there’s essentially a cliff. Apparently, it was a really good bakery, but it closed during the pandemic and has been empty the whole time I’ve lived here. Recently, the owner donated the building to the community garden, and they’re going to turn it into a kind of cafe/bakery/grocery/community center, where they’ll have cooking classes and educational seminars in addition to serving food and selling produce and groceries. Monday night was the initial fundraiser to get this started, a farm-to-table throwdown. Area farmers donated ingredients, then some of the top chefs in the area had to create dishes using these ingredients. Three did appetizers, three did entrees, and three did desserts. A panel of judges evaluated the dishes and picked winners. The tickets for the dinner sold out almost instantly (and they were expensive). Since I’m in favor of having a restaurant a block away (since there’s no chair lift, so I have to walk down the street and back down the next street), I volunteered for the event.

They had an interesting setup for carrying out each flight of dishes. There were these thin boards that they piped dots of icing onto. The servers would pick up a board and go to each station in the kitchen, where someone would press a small plate onto the icing (so the plates wouldn’t slide). Then we’d carry the board out and set it in front of a diner, then hurry back to get another one. We had about 30 servers doing this, most of them high school students but a few adults. I pretty much spent the evening running laps. We’d go until everyone was served, get a brief break, during which we got to eat any food the chefs had left, then we’d run bring in the boards (which went faster than serving because we could stack them), and then it was time for the next course. In between courses, the chefs went out and described their dishes.

It was a lot of work and my feet and knees were mad at me by the end of the evening, but it was a lot of fun. I knew a number of the volunteers, either from other events in town or from running into them and chatting at the garden market. My next-door and across-the-street neighbors were there as diners, and one of my neighbors was doing logistics and hauling things in his truck. The guy two doors down was part of one chef’s team, and one of the pastry chefs has his bakery in the neighborhood. It was nice seeing everyone come together. One of the entree chefs was running behind getting her dish plated, and one of the pastry chefs pitched in to help. There were teenagers from the volunteer group getting drafted to help the chefs (I think the organizers knew them and knew they were interested in restaurant work). I met a lot of interesting people. One of the women I was working with turned out to have lived in the same general area of Germany I did when her husband was stationed there (he worked at the hospital where I went to the doctor when we lived there).

I mostly didn’t get to try the full dishes as they were plated, so I couldn’t really judge anything other than the desserts, where I did get a full plate of all three (another volunteer and I split it, but we got all the sauces and toppings the way it was plated for the dinner). My favorite was a goat cheese cheesecake. It wasn’t too sweet and had just a bit of tang.

The event was in the high school cafeteria (with lots of decoration to make it look like a restaurant), and during the down time between training and the event, I explored a little. I peeked into the auditorium and saw that the drama club was rehearsing a stage production of Hogfather, based on the Terry Pratchett novel. I’ll have to go see that. Based on the bit of rehearsal I saw, I think they’re having fun with it.

I enjoy being around people like that and feel energized while I’m doing it, but it also drains my batteries quickly, and I need solitude to recharge. I was only partially recharged from the retreat before I had to go into public mode again at the dinner, but I have a few days of quiet before next weekend’s fun kicks in. I’ve got a couple of hikes on the agenda, but there’s also a big local festival. I didn’t sign up to volunteer for the festival this year, so I may just pop by, depending on how tired I am after the hiking.

Remember that Pottery & Peril comes out tomorrow! I hope you enjoy it.

My Books

The Countdown Begins

We’re down to under a week before the release of Pottery & Peril, book 5 in the Tales of Rydding Village series. I thought that since I’d actually planned in advance this time, I’d get a lot more promotion done and have my ducks in a row, but I thought wrong. It seems that the next book made its presence known and I got sidetracked by writing it. Next thing I know, it’s almost time for release, and I have a choir retreat this weekend that’s eating up all my time.

Maybe I shouldn’t plan a book launch for the week after the choir retreat in the future.

I suppose it’s a good thing that the next book started coming to me. At first, I thought it was just the first few scenes, but the more I wrote, the more ideas kept coming. I did pause to do some outlining, but when I got back to writing the outline fell by the wayside because I kept coming up with more ideas. Now I’m about halfway done with the first draft.

This book focuses on one new character and one character who showed up in Weaving & Wyverns.

I have the last two books somewhat planned, but I don’t know how many books will come along the way. I just came up with a vague idea for book 7 this week. It helps that there’s a different main couple in each book, so I feel like I’m writing something entirely new, even as I’m still in the familiar setting and checking back in with the old characters. It’s a nice mix of fresh and familiar, and that seems to help with the burnout I tend to get around book seven in a series. I also enjoy playing with various tropes to see if I can find ways to make them work for me. For instance, in Weaving & Wyverns, I sort of did a secret baby, as well as a second-chance love. I’ve always rolled my eyes at the secret baby, but I ended up coming up with a plot where it made sense (and is it a secret baby if the baby is a teenager?). The new book is sort of enemies to lovers, though in this case they never hate each other. They’re just on opposite sides of an issue and they can’t both get what they want. If one of them succeeds, the other fails.

I don’t yet know what will happen with the paperback of Pottery & Peril. There seem to have been some wires crossed with the cover designer because I don’t have the cover yet, though I ordered it and sent the specs, and now I realize I never got an acknowledgment of them receiving that info. I need to check in with them and see what’s up.

Life

Getting Lost

We had a glorious fall-like day yesterday, so I packed a lunch in my backpack and headed to the city park down the street. We have two main city parks (plus a lot of smaller pocket parks). There’s a very manicured one that has a duck pond, playgrounds, the bandstand, a fishing lake, and sports fields. But it doesn’t have walking paths. There’s a road winding through the park that at one time was a carriage path. Now that’s a multipurpose road, which cars, bikes, and walkers all have to share. When I lived in the apartment, that park was close by, and I initially thought I wanted to live in easy walking distance of it. Then I learned that the concerts there get loud and it’s annoying having to dodge cars on the walking path. It’s about a 20-minute walk from my house, so I can still go there for concerts and events.

The other big park is a bit wilder. It has a swimming pool, various sports courts, a few playgrounds, and sports fields, but the big hill in the middle of it has been left mostly forested, with walking paths—real hiking-type paths—winding around the hill. It’s about a 10-minute walk from my house, so I can very easily get to an experience that feels wilderness-like. You can forget you’re in a city. It feels almost the same as being on the Appalachian Trail, though it’s much, much shorter and has a lower risk of bears (since they’d have to go through the city to get there). You can also get the good kind of lost.

I forgot where I read it, but there’s apparently some benefit to your mind from getting mildly lost—not to the point of needing a rescue crew, but going through some time of not being exactly certain where you are or not heading for a particular destination. It does something to spur creativity and problem solving. This park is perfect for that. The trails are marked, but the markings aren’t always clear, there are trail spurs that aren’t marked, and the trails intersect with each other, so you may find yourself on a different trail, with the markers far enough apart that you don’t realize you’re on a different trail. The trail map on the website is fairly vague. It is very easy to get on these trails and not be entirely certain exactly where you are within the park. At the same time, it’s impossible to get truly lost. If you stay on a trail, it will eventually come out at a parking area, a sports field, or a picnic area, though it may not be the one you were aiming for. You might walk a bit longer than you planned, but the longest trail is only a little more than two miles. It’s a great place to just wander and feel lost while knowing that you’re not really lost.

The getting a bit lost thing is only bad when you’re aiming for the picnic area at the top of the hill and you’re starving for lunch, but you made a wrong turn and realize you’re heading away from the picnic area instead of toward it, so you end up walking about 20 minutes longer than you planned before you stop for lunch. Not that I have any experience with this. Ahem.

I do have to say, though, that the getting lost definitely seems to help with creativity and brainpower. Figuring out where you are, where you went wrong, and how to fix it is like solving a puzzle.

Now that the weather’s cooling off, I need to do this more often. I can take a notebook and do brainstorming and planning while I eat lunch. It’s great exercise. And I enjoy watching the way the forest changes with the seasons. When I was house hunting, I didn’t consider trying to look for a house close to this park, but I think I ended up with the best of all possible worlds. I can walk to the “nice” park for events. I can walk to downtown. If I just want to walk for exercise, there’s the cemetery across the street. And if I want to go for a hike without driving half an hour to the Appalachian Trail, I can walk ten minutes to this park. I may even start making a point of scheduling these outings, picking the best day of the week based on schedule and weather and planning around it.

I’ve found some groups for more serious hikes, and I’m trying to do more of that, as well, since the outdoors opportunities are a big reason why I wanted to move here. Instead of having to drive 3 hours to get to Oklahoma mountains, I can drive half an hour in either direction and be in more serious mountains.

Books

Cozy Inherited Old Buildings

A few weeks ago, I mentioned playing with the idea of a cozy fantasy rom-com series involving an old Victorian mansion split up into apartments, with each book focusing on a tenant in the building. It seems there is a viable market for this sort of thing because I just found a couple of books at the library along those lines.

The first one I read was Books & Bewitchment by Isla Jewell (a pen name for science fiction/fantasy author Delilah S. Dawson). This one involves a young woman who receives word of the death of the grandmother she never met (due to a conflict between her mother and her mother’s mother) and an inheritance in the town her mother swore never to return to. Our heroine has no reason to stay where she is, since she just lost her job when her boss wanted to hire a relative, so she goes to check it out. It turns out that she’s inherited several buildings in the downtown, but only one is viable and has a currently operating business, a video store. She also discovers that her grandmother was magical, and distributing her ashes somehow gets her spirit into the heroine’s pet bird. As she sets out to turn the video store into a bookstore, she learns more about her magical heritage and what happened with her family, as well as about the conflicts her grandmother had with other magical people in town, including the family of the handsome contractor who’s helping her renovate the video store into a bookstore.

This one is very cozy. There’s no real antagonist. It’s more about mediating conflict than overcoming it, which makes for relaxing reading. It looks like it’s the setup for a series, since the heroine has two sisters and there are two more buildings with non-functioning businesses in them.

The other book was The Only Purple House in Town by Ann Aguirre. In this one, a young woman inherits a huge old house from the great aunt she barely knew (I’m sensing a theme here). She’s utterly broke, so she decides to live in the house and take in renters, and she ends up with a quirky found family as she starts to learn more about her own origins. The fantasy twist is that this happens in what I guess you could call an alternate present in which magical beings have come out into the open. Witches, vampires, and shapeshifters are just ordinary people, and in the “island of misfit toys” group of outsiders who find themselves in her house, there are some of those. But not everyone’s happy about this, including the next-door neighbor.

This is a big found family kind of story, and I think it might actually have worked better without the fantasy elements, which sometimes went over the top to be a distraction. You could almost remove all the fantasy elements without drastically changing the core of the story. Still, it was a fun read, very cozy and comforting. The romance is relatively subtle and very sweet.

I don’t know if there being so many of this sort of thing means it’s been done or that there’s a clear market for it. I still need to come up with some specific plots before I have enough to even discuss it with my agent.

movies

Fixing the Past

Last weekend, I was in the mood for a romantic comedy movie, but I didn’t have time for a long movie, so I found a made-for-Hallmark movie on one of the streaming platforms. It was an older one, so from before “Hallmark movie” was such a known quantity. Before they made the standard-issue Hallmark Christmas movie (high-powered career woman goes to small town, meets small-town guy, decides to give up her career and stay, ditching her high-powered city boyfriend for small-town guy) their brand, they actually made some decent rom-coms. I remember one in particular (don’t recall the title), starring Meghan Markle, long before she became royal, that I liked, in which the heroine was a high-powered businesswoman who stayed in her job in the city. It was more about wacky dating hijinks as her sister tried to get her out of her toxic dating patterns by making her follow the advice in a dating book, only for her to meet a great guy who didn’t fit any of the book’s criteria. During this time period, they also had a Christmas movie that was a retelling of A Christmas Carol, but set in modern Chicago, and with Carrie Fisher in the role of all the ghosts, as a young woman’s late mentor comes back to help her see where she went wrong.

Anyway, if you get a Hallmark movie from before about 2015, it will be very different from what we think of as a Hallmark movie now. The one I watched was from about 2009, Before You Say I Do. It was sort of a time travel twist on His Girl Friday, in which the ex tries to keep the woman he still loves from marrying an obviously wrong guy. In this case, the guy is her boyfriend in the present, who wants to marry her, but she’s too messed-up from her disastrous first marriage. She missed all the red flags and doesn’t trust her own judgment, so she breaks up with the boyfriend she really does love. After making a wish, he ends up ten years in the past, just a few days before her first wedding. He gets a job at her newspaper and sets out to stop her from marrying her first husband so she won’t be so scared of marriage in the future.

It’s a fun little movie while you’re watching it. The cast is actually pretty decent. No one ever suggests she leave her job (she still has the same job in the future). It takes place in a city. It almost feels like a big-screen rom-com.

But the time travel part had me scratching my head. There will be spoilers ahead, though most of them focus on the fairly obvious outcome of a rom-com.

The guy and his girlfriend seem to be about the same age in the “present,” which in the movie is 2009. He goes back in time to 1999 and meets her then. Which would make him about 10 years older than she is. Not that you can tell, since it’s the same actors in both times, and they don’t seem to do anything to age her down when she’s 10 years in the past. She’s not too long out of college, and a mid-30s guy would seem pretty old to a recent college graduate. But this never comes up.

Presumably, he was around in 1999, but there’s no mention of where his 1999 self is. He gets a job and has to do employment paperwork, but no one notices that his photo ID has an impossible expiration date. He doesn’t seem at all interested in checking in on his past self or getting his age-appropriate past self to be the one to run into the 1999 girlfriend. It also doesn’t seem like he’s found himself in his 1999 body/life, getting his own do-over (like in Peggy Sue Got Married). Once he realizes that he’s in 1999 and isn’t working at his 2009 job, he doesn’t think to go to where he was in 1999.

And this leads me to the thing that really had me baffled: the ending. He does succeed in getting her to recognize the red flags and break up with her past future husband and run off with him. Then he wakes up back in 2009, where they’re celebrating their 10-year anniversary. Everything is now awesome. He married the woman he loves long ago and he and his work buddy started their own successful company instead of toiling away at a place they hate (the way it was originally — he intervenes to help his past work buddy’s career by stopping a jerk from stealing credit for his ideas). But since he apparently just arrived from 1999, he doesn’t remember any of this.

I’ve always hated this kind of ending for a “travel to the past and fix things” story, where he returns to an entirely different present that he doesn’t remember. It strikes me as tragic that the character managed to fix things, but then missed all the key parts. This guy would have no memories of his own wedding or his early married years. If they’d had kids, he wouldn’t remember them being born. That’s all rather sad. I guess it depends on whether you’re a process person or an outcome person. The outcome person may care more about having the great life that’s the result of the changes, but a process person wants to experience all the steps on the way to the great life because they’re what makes that future life great.

But the baffling thing is, he hadn’t met the woman in 1999. She ran away from her wedding and got engaged to the future version of him. So if they’re celebrating their 10th anniversary, that suggests that he stayed in 1999 and they’ve been together all this time, so there was no need to do the jump to the present, and he should remember the past 10 years because he was there.

Which means the past version of him probably never met this woman and is still out there. Do they have problems from both having the same Social Security number? Did the future version who stayed in the past have to create a fake identity?

I know, nit-picking time travel as unrealistic is a little nuts, but it’s getting the details right that makes an outrageous story work.

I think I’d have had him find his past self and coach him in wooing this woman so that they would have fallen in love earlier, before she married Mr. Wrong. That then avoids the age issue and the issue of there being two of them. Maybe the future version takes on a fake identity to point out the red flags for Mr. Wrong, and then clears the way for her to meet his past self, serving as his own matchmaker.

And now I want to come up with a plot where I can play with this and do it right.

TV

Renegade Nell

I recently came across a fun series streaming on Disney+ that I somehow missed for the past few years, Renegade Nell. It’s a fantasy historical adventure show. A young woman who ran away with a soldier and followed him to the continent for a war in the early 1700s returns home after losing him, but she seems to have picked up something along the way. When she gets into a tough situation, she basically goes all Matrix. She can dodge or even catch bullets and has super strength, speed, and reflexes. This ability comes up when the son of the local lord is harassing her sister, but then it gets her in trouble when the son frames her for his murder of his own father (so he can get the title and estate). Now an outlaw, she goes on the run with her younger sisters, becomes a highwayman (briefly), and tries to clear her name, but everything she does to clear her name only seems to make matters worse, until she learns of a plot against Queen Anne that she feels obligated to stop. But she doesn’t realize just how sinister and powerful the forces against her really are.

I’m going to have to watch it again to pick up on everything because injustice can be hard for me to watch, and I had to watch this while I did other things, like knitting or crossword puzzles, to be able to tolerate it. It’s definitely “put your characters in a tree and throw rocks at them” writing, but now that I know how everything works out, I may be able to watch. I loved the main character, who manages to be a badass who’s very different from the girls around her without being “not like other girls.” She’s learned a lot in her adventures, and knowing what to do in a crisis means she can’t let herself turn her back on a crisis, even though getting involved may get her in even more trouble. A lot of her predicaments are self-inflicted, but mostly because she can’t seem to stop herself from doing the right thing, in spite of it being difficult and dangerous.

I don’t think we see a lot of things set in this particular time period, during the reign of Queen Anne, and the costuming is spectacular. It’s a time of highwaymen, broadsheets, and murder ballads. And yes, there is the Ballad of Renegade Nell, who becomes a notorious figure because of the rumors about her.

It’s a one-season series with a definitive ending, though it was left open enough that there was a possibility for more stories (and, unfortunately, it wasn’t picked up for another season). I’d call it a swashbuckling adventure with a lot of twists. But it does get pretty tense along the way, so if you’re a weenie like me you may be watching from behind a sofa cushion.

Books

The Return of Chick Lit?

As you might have been able to tell from the Enchanted, Inc. series, I was a big fan of the “chick lit” genre back in the early 2000s. Those books were a breath of fresh air to me and helped me realize that while I want a love story in a book, I don’t necessarily like romance novels, and that explained why I was having trouble writing and selling them (I managed to sell 5 romance novels, so I guess I did okay, but it really wasn’t the right genre for me). Back at that time, the expectation was that a romance novel would be primarily about the relationship of the couple. The main story conflict would be between the hero and heroine. They would meet early in the book, be strongly attracted but also have some reason not to want to be with that person, and the story would be about them having the push/pull between the attraction and the conflict until they got through or over the conflict so they could be together. Chick lit was more about the process of finding the right person. It might involve a lot of bad dates on the way to Mr. Right, and those bad dates would be what helped the heroine figure out who Mr. Right was. The story was more about the heroine’s journey and might also get into her friendships and relationships with her family or with her career. Those things could show up in a romance novel, but they would be secondary to the romance plot.

Basically, chick lit was like a romantic comedy movie in book form. Bridget Jones’s Diary is generally credited with being the book that kicked off the craze, though what’s funny is that it was a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, which is generally considered to fit in the romance genre (though I once wrote an essay about how it was really a chick lit book, since Lizzie has a brief attraction with Wickham and has to fend off Collins, Darcy is mostly offstage, and Lizzie’s relationships with her sisters and her parents are a big part of the story). Old-school, hardcore romance authors were outraged when chick lit became popular and didn’t want it included in anything that Romance Writers of America did because it wasn’t really romance. The genre burned hot for a few years, got glutted, and then crashed and burned dramatically a few years later, taking the Enchanted, Inc. series with it. It sold and was published as chick lit because that was what was hot at the time. Today, it would probably be published as cozy romcom romantasy.

I’ve missed this kind of book, but it seems to be coming back under the guise of “rom com.” I just read a recent one that could have easily been published in about 2003, with only the detail about smart phones having to be changed, and it was so much fun to read that I need to dig around to see if other books called rom coms are more like that or if they’re more like romances.

The book was Skip to the End by Molly James. Our heroine has an odd gift that gives her a vision of how the relationship will end the first time she kisses a man. It’s allowed her to dodge a few bullets when she sees abuse or cheating, but knowing that a relationship is going to end unhappily makes dating pretty difficult. Why bother dating someone when you know it’s not going to end well? At a friend’s wedding, another friend dares her to kiss at least three men. The wedding gets wild, she drinks a bit too much, and she wakes in the morning with no memory of the night before. Her friend says she told her that she did kiss three men. Two of them gave her disastrous premonitions but the third was the One, someone she would grow old with. But she doesn’t remember who she kissed or which one was the One.

So she sets out to uncover what happened at the wedding, looking at her phone log, text messages, and pictures taken at the wedding, then she tries dating the candidates to see if she can figure out which one might have been the one she could grow old with. Since she already kissed them, she won’t get the premonition again, so she has to learn to rely on her own judgment to figure out what she’s looking for and what makes a good relationship.

This book would make a great rom-com movie because there are a lot of funny set pieces with the wacky dates. She’s also got an amusing set of friends and family members. It was so much fun to read and I tore through it quickly, then was sad when it was over too soon. It left me wanting more of that kind of thing, so I either have to return to my bookcase for old books or see if I can find something else. I tried going through the “real alike” listings on the library website and I’ve checked out a couple of those, but they aren’t quite the same feeling.

The book was labeled “contemporary romance,” but in structure it wasn’t what would have been considered romance back in the day. I wonder if things have loosened up some in the past 20 years. I know that independent publishing has changed things because publishers saw what was successful and that readers generally didn’t care about the strict rules the publishers used to live by (for instance, I remember when it would have been impossible to sell a romance novel involving a hockey player, but that’s the hottest thing going right now). I would definitely recommend this book to fans of Enchanted, Inc., though it’s perhaps a bit spicier (but not graphically so).