Books

Copying Worlds

I recently went down an odd little reading/viewing trail. Before Christmas, I discovered that The Magicians was on the CW app. I never saw the last two seasons because that was when I lost cable, but I didn’t remember what happened in the earlier seasons, so I started rewatching from the beginning (and then, wouldn’t you know, they dropped it from the app right after I got to the parts I hadn’t seen, so I still haven’t seen the final season).

That series is basically Hogwarts meets Narnia, so when I finished the book I was reading on Christmas day, I pulled The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe off the shelf to reread it. And then when I finished rereading the series (mostly, since I generally avoid The Last Battle), I figured I’d reread the book of The Magicians.

I read the first book when it was relatively new and had no interest in continuing the series. It was only after the TV show came on that I read the whole trilogy between seasons, and now rereading the first book right after having reread the Narnia books reminded me of why that book didn’t grab me. Mostly, it’s not original enough to be very interesting.

I think the concept of mashing up the Hogwarts-style magical school and the magical land concept of Narnia has a lot of fun potential. The book’s story is basically about a nerdy guy who was obsessed with a Narnia-like fantasy series who thinks he’s going to a university interview and ends up getting into a magical school. Then after he’s graduated from school and bored with being back in the “real” world, one of his friends finds out that the magical land from those books is real, and they can go there, but it’s nothing like they expected.

The problem I had with the way the book was executed was that the school may be an American university, but it’s basically Hogwarts on the Hudson. It functions pretty much like a British boarding school, a la Hogwarts (particularly as it’s depicted in the movies). In the book, the students wear uniforms. They’re sorted into Disciplines, which are kind of like majors based on aptitude, but they’re chosen for the students rather than them getting to choose them, so it might as well be a Sorting Hat. The students from each Discipline hang out together in the Discipline’s cottage, so basically a Common Room. There’s a wacky magical sport with complicated rules. The main difference from Hogwarts is that it’s a university (they age it up more in the TV show to a grad school), so we get a lot more drinking, drugs, and sex.

Meanwhile, the magical land of Fillory is basically Narnia. The author didn’t even try to hide this, since a lot of it is about the main character’s relationship with the “Fillory” books, and we’re supposed to relate it to our relationship with the Narnia books to understand his attachment to this world. Like Narnia, Fillory is largely populated by sentient talking animals. There are also all the magical creatures based on Greek mythology, like centaurs, fauns, naiads, dryads, etc. You can get to Fillory through a gateway world with various fountains, each of which leads to a different world, which is right out of The Magician’s Nephew, which had the pools that lead to different worlds. In the Fillory books, there are four siblings who travel there, and there are four kings and queens who have to be from earth, just like in the Narnia books.

I found this frustrating on multiple levels. For one thing, it felt like shallow worldbuilding that started by taking the inspiration and just barely changing it to suit the story. It would have been far more interesting to be inspired by the idea of a magical school and then starting with the idea of an American university and making it magical. Have magical fraternities and sororities that you have to rush. Have students who were recruited mostly to play magical sports that are the basis of serious interscholastic rivalries. Have Homecoming weekends with the alumni coming back.

As for the magical world, I think we can grasp the idea of being attached to the world of a portal fantasy, dreaming of going there, and being shocked to learn that you can, whether or not that world looks exactly like Narnia. The really enraging thing there to me was that after basically ripping off Narnia and expecting us to see Fillory as a non-copyright infringing version of Narnia, the author had the author of the Fillory books be a child molester. If C.S. Lewis were still alive, he might have grounds for a lawsuit because it was so obvious what was meant by Fillory, which meant the author in the book was basically him, and then he was defamed.

There’s also some weird structure to the book, with the first half being their time at school, which was mostly classes, studying, and hanging out, with no real plot, then there’s a whole section where they’re just bored and drunk, and then they finally get to Fillory. I liked the TV series a lot better. The TV series was like the writers had bought a model kit but used the pieces to make something entirely different. You can occasionally recognize a piece from the picture on the model kit box, but it’s in a different place and serving a different purpose. They moved up the action and wove it into the school stuff. The book has them graduate halfway through the book, and then they have their adventures, while the TV series has them discover Fillory and start having adventures while they’re still students, so it weaves together the magical school plot and the magical land plot.

I will confess that the initial germ of the idea that became Enchanted, Inc. was “Bridget Jones meets Harry Potter,” but I never really went back to those things in building my world or my characters. It was more of a concept, adding magic to a chick lit type story, or else moving the secret magical world existing within our world into adulthood, with a magical corporation instead of a school. From there, though, I was drawing on my work in corporate America for ideas, and I was looking at chick lit and rom-coms as a whole rather than actually taking anything specifically from Bridget Jones. That was more of a pitch line to describe the vibes, not the real basis of the book.

Life

Digging out

I finished my draft on Friday, then I got my car shoveled out yesterday, so that’s been my recent accomplishment. I am now allowing myself to rest a bit and do thinking type work. Getting through all that ice was a real challenge.

This is what my car looked like before I was able to dig it out.

A blue Subaru Forester sits surrounded by what looks like fluffy snow but which is actually a thick crust of ice on top of snow. The snow comes up past the bottom of the doors.
My car encased in its icy prison. That’s a Subaru Forester, to give you a sense of how high the ice goes. This car is pretty far off the ground.

And this was the end of my driveway Monday, after I’d been shoveling at it for days. I was using a garden hoe to hack the ice into blocks. And then my neighbor brought over a tool he’d been using. It’s designed for breaking up tile flooring, and it works amazingly on ice. There’s a narrow blade on the bottom and it’s heavy. You just let it drop onto the surface, and it shatters it. I went from clearing maybe a foot or two a day to getting the rest of the driveway and my car freed on Monday afternoon. Tuesday morning I finished a good path to my driveway and cleared space around the car so I could get to the door and open it, plus cleared a path to the mailbox and freed the trash bin. It was easier work with this tool, but still tiring because you have to keep lifting this heavy thing, and you still have to move all the blocks of ice. That’s why I’m resting today.

A cliff of ice shows a steep drop-off from the ice to the gravel driveway below.
The end of the glacier that was my driveway. I’d managed to cut about three feet into it at this point.

This is just part of the piles of ice blocks I moved from my driveway. I’ll have to track to see how long it takes to melt. We actually got above freezing yesterday, and that actually made it a bit harder to move more ice because when it got slushy, the tool no longer worked and I couldn’t just move chunks at a time. I had to actually shovel.

A pile of ice blocks.
This is about half of what was covering my driveway. There’s another pile on the other side and more piled up beside the driveway.

After a day of rest, I may do a little more work on paths. The path I dug from the porch to the driveway doesn’t follow the actual walkway (I’ve been thinking of moving the walkway, which is stepping stones, and this path might be a good option because it’s what made sense at the time, especially because the snow/ice drifted deeper on the real path). I may try to dig out the walkway. And I may move some of the slush from my deck so it doesn’t melt and flow toward my basement. Plus, this is a great workout and I’d like to maintain and maybe even build on some of the fitness I’ve developed from doing all this, so I need to keep working instead of just sitting now.

Once I freed my car, I was able to restock on groceries and run by the library. The city streets are somewhat cleared, but side streets are mostly one-lane. They had crews out loading chunks of ice into dump trucks because clearing the streets had created walls of ice around the town. I don’t know when all of this will melt.

 

writing life

The End is in Sight

I’m almost at the end of the draft I’ve been working on, which I’m pretty proud of, given all the distractions this week. You’d think that being iced in would be good for productivity, but I’m spending a couple of hours a day chipping away at the iceberg that is my driveway. They got the street cleared yesterday, using a front-end loader to break up the ice, scoop it up, and carry it away, but that left about an eight-inch high cliff from my driveway to the street, and there’s ice/snow up to the bottom of my car, all the way around it. I generally gear up and run outside just before lunchtime, chip away at the ice while it’s in direct sunlight (though still well below freezing), then run inside when my hands start to hurt from the cold and warm up with hot soup. I do another session in the afternoon. I’ll make hot tea and put it in a thermos, then go outside and chip away at some ice until my hands hurt, then come inside and have hot tea. I have a pathway from my door to the mailbox, a good chunk off the iceberg at the foot of my driveway (where the loader left edges that give me some leverage for breaking it up), and most of the slabs of ice off the top of my car.

I normally don’t get a lot else done when I’m on a first draft. I know it’s always like this, and yet I never seem to take it into consideration when I’m planning. I always think I can spend an hour or so a day on promotion and take care of little projects to organize my house because it’s not as though I spend all day writing. And yet nothing else seems to get done. After this draft is done, I need to do some serious house organizing work because I never finished setting up the basement after I moved in and I need to do that to get the rest of the downstairs in shape. I also had some marketing projects I wanted to work on, and those haven’t happened. So, that’s February’s work. For the next month I spend working on a draft, I’m going to plan better and just admit that the bare minimum of everything other than writing will happen that month.

Now I have about two more scenes to write, and then I’m going to let myself collapse, other than doing more shoveling, if it’s not snowing again.

Life

Iced In

When I was living in Texas, I noticed that whenever we got hit by an ice storm (and it was usually ice rather than snow), people in more northern climates mocked us because it paralyzed the city for days. They didn’t seem to understand that we didn’t have the infrastructure for dealing with that kind of weather (and it wasn’t cost-effective to develop the infrastructure when it was something that happened once every few years) and that you really can’t do a lot about ice other than wait for it to melt.

Now that I live in a more northern place and in the mountains, I get snow more regularly, and they still shut down. They’re good about getting the streets plowed, but the school buses are too risky on the steep hills until the roads are truly clear. This weekend, though, we got a storm that was more like what Texas gets. It started as snow and turned into sleet. Now we have a crust of about 3 inches of sleet on top of about 4 inches of powdery snow, and the whole city has been shut down for three days. They can’t plow the ice (and broke some snowplows trying). They’re now going out with heavy construction equipment, the kind they use to break up asphalt to resurface roads, to break the ice up so the plows can then go through and move it out of the way. That’s slow going, so my little one-block side street that’s on the bottom of the priority list is still solid ice. One neighbor tried going up and down it with a snow blower, but that did no good.

To make matters worse, it’s getting single-digit cold at night, sunny and in the 20s (F) during the day, so the top layer is melting slightly while in the sun then freezing hard at night, so it’s like a skating rink. If you look at it, it looks like the kind of snow that looks like mounds of fluffy whipped cream, but I can walk across the top of it without leaving footprints. Well, I could on Monday before it slightly melted in the sunlight and refroze to be very slippery. Now I can’t walk on it. I was able to shovel a path to the street Monday by breaking through the top layer and flipping it to the side, but now that top layer is even harder and my shovel does nothing, so I can’t clear the driveway. I may get out the garden hoe to see what I can do today. I can’t do much at any one time because it’s very cold and my gloves aren’t up to the task. I have to come inside when my hands start hurting. I tried to buy some better insulated gloves last week before the storm, but they were clearing out their winter gear and setting out spring gardening stuff, so they didn’t have any heavy gloves that would fit me. I’m going to try knitting some mittens to wear over the gloves I have.

Once you get that top crust of ice off, the rest is light, powdery snow that’s easy to move. I’ve been able to clear much of the ice/sleet off my car, but the area around the car is still pretty solid, and there’s a wall of snow at the end of my driveway from when they tried to get ahead of the storm by plowing during it, which only made matters worse because it shoved the snow aside so the sleet was directly on the street. I don’t think I’ll be driving anywhere anytime soon. Fortunately, I stocked up at the grocery store last week. If I do need something, my neighbor has chains on his car and has been able to get out, and he’s offered to pick up anything I need.

We had a storm kind of like this in Dallas in 2014, and we’ve been paralyzed here just as long as we were in Dallas. The bright side is that I haven’t had to worry about the electrical grid crashing the way it did a few years ago in Texas during a winter storm.

I’ve been able to keep up with writing in spite of the distractions. I should theoretically have more writing time because I can’t go anywhere, but my brain has other plans. I’m close to the end of the draft, though.

writing life

Pottery Research

After just one pottery class, I already have information that will affect the book I’m working on with a character who’s a potter. Last week, we were doing hand building, working without the wheel. We made bowls using molds and “slab clay,” a sheet of clay sent through a wringer-like device to flatten it out. Then we made vases using coils of clay.

One thing I learned was that this takes a lot of upper-body effort. I was more sore the next day from the pottery work than I was from the eight-mile hike I did later in the day. You’re bending over a work bench, so your back gets stiff if you aren’t careful. You have to “wedge” the clay to work out any air pockets and make sure the moisture is evenly distributed. It’s a lot like kneading bread, but the clay is much stiffer than bread dough, so it takes more force and strength. Then there’s a lot of control while doing the shaping.

I also learned that working with clay really dries out your hands. My hands were so rough and dry after the class. I had to keep slathering my hands with lotion the rest of the weekend. They finally started to get back to normal in the middle of the week. It looks like I’ve got a scene with Elwyn I can add, where she comes up with a balm for the potter to use.

I’m having to adjust the timeline of the book based on something else I’ve learned. It’s important to the plot that my potter makes a certain piece that has to be done before the end of the book, but pottery is a slow process. A piece has to be completely dry before it can go into the kiln, and that can take weeks, especially if the piece is thick. The pieces we make during this class won’t be fired until about 2-3 weeks after we made them. We’re doing the glazing in the last class, so they’ll have gone through a preliminary firing by then. If there’s any moisture in the clay when it goes into the kiln, it will boil and make the piece explode. Today’s kilns have some temperature controls, so they can raise the temperature gradually and reduce the risk of explosion, but I’m dealing with a wood or charcoal-fired kiln in the book, so there’s a lot less control. That means I had to find a way to insert at least a week into the timeline so that the item the character makes early in the book is ready by the time it’s needed.

I did learn from the instructor how clay can be recycled and revived, so my scenario of the person trained as a potter coming across an abandoned workshop and being able to use the clay that’s been dried out is viable (I told her what I was writing and gave her the specific scenario, and she told me how it would work). I have to play with the timeline a bit on that, but I found a way to do what was needed more rapidly.

This week, we’re working on the pottery wheel. I had a toy pottery wheel as a kid that used air-dry clay, and I never managed to make anything viable, so I’m a little anxious about how big of a disaster this can be. I keep telling myself that it’s about the process of learning and getting information and I don’t need to make a pro-level piece my first time. I just don’t want to send any clay flying across the room.

Life

More Weekendy Weekends

I’m trying to be more mindful about how I spend my free time. I especially don’t want my weekends to feel too much like my weekdays, which tends to happen when you work at home. Even if I’m not writing over the weekend, I have a bad habit of spending a lot of time online or otherwise sitting at my computer. So, to encourage myself to spend weekends in a way that feels like a weekend, I came up with three main categories of kinds of Saturday, and I try to plan in advance what I’m going to do, so I don’t get into a round of “What do you want to do? I don’t know, what do you want to do?” with myself.

One category is work. That can include writing if I need to catch up after having other stuff come up during the week. It may also include things like workshops, conferences, conventions, book festivals, etc. It also includes projects around the house or in the yard, like organizing or gardening.

Another category is adventure, which is what I’m calling activities that involve leaving the house. That can include classes, touring and exploring, hiking, museums, and that sort of thing.

And then there’s cozy/creating. This is good for rainy or snowy days and involves things that are good to do on a cozy day at home. I added the “creating” so I’d have to do something other than just read. It may involve baking, cooking (especially trying new recipes), sewing, embroidery, knitting, coloring, music and stuff like jigsaw puzzles.

I pondered a social category, but that usually involves leaving the house, so it could be “adventure,” or else it’s something like a block party that involves work or creating to prep for. A few weeks ago, there was a choir party, so I spent the day baking before the party. Generally, social activities are an add-on to a weekend, and if they’re a focus of a weekend, like the church retreat, then they’re also an adventure.

I imagine I’ll have a lot more cozy/creating Saturdays during the winter, more work in spring and summer when I have yard work and gardening to do, and more adventure in the fall, when there are all the festivals, looking at leaves, hiking trips, and that kind of thing.

I generally try to save Sunday afternoons for rest. I have church and choir in the mornings, and I usually walk there, so that gives me some exercise. In the afternoons I read and maybe cook. Sometimes I have things scheduled that would fit into my other weekend categories. The church does field trips and the pastor leads prayer walks (meditative hikes) once a month.

The Saturday before last was a cozy/creating day because it was rainy. I baked bread and read. But there was also some work because there was an online seminar.

Last weekend was a mix of all of them. I had a pottery class in the morning, which counted as adventure, creating, and work (since it’s research for a book and I asked the teacher questions that have come up in my writing). Then in the afternoon the hiking group did a city walkabout hike. Between walking downtown and back for the class and the hike, my phone says I walked more than 9 miles that day. It’s a good thing I had a restful Sunday afternoon planned because my legs were tired and my upper body got a workout from the pottery.

This coming weekend I have another pottery class on Saturday, then a committee meeting after church Sunday and then one of my neighbors is having a party Sunday evening, but we’re also expecting a big winter storm, so I don’t know how much of it will end up happening. It’ll be really cold Saturday morning but the snow isn’t supposed to start until later, so the pottery class may happen (I’ll drive instead of walking if it’s that cold), but we could get about 10 inches of snow overnight Saturday, so there’s a chance the Sunday stuff won’t happen. I don’t know if the neighbor will cancel the party or just assume we can fight our way through the snow across the street. After the pottery class, I plan on going full cozy. There will be baking, soup, and cocoa. If it’s going to snow, it would be nice if some of it would happen while I can watch it. I’ve found that it tends to snow overnight here. You wake up and there’s snow on the ground but you don’t get to watch it fall very often, and I only really like snow when it’s falling. I love to watch it fall but could do without it once it hits the ground.

The local weather people started off all “don’t buy the hype” about the storm but are now saying to make preparations, so that means grocery shopping today to beat the rush.

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.