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.

Life

Off for the Holidays

For an update to Wednesday’s post, I still don’t have my package. I got to the end of the delivery window on Wednesday without it coming, they said it would come by end of day, and then they gave me a Thursday delivery window. The same thing happened again. They then gave me a delivery window for this afternoon, so we’ll see what happens. I’ve noticed that they haven’t given me the name of a driver and said he’s on his way, so I wonder if it’s actually left the distribution center. They may have loaded it onto a truck or set it aside to load onto a truck, but it may not have gone anywhere. If it is actually on a truck, you’d think their logistics system would have to give the driver a route based on the packages in the truck, and that would give them an idea of what could be delivered in a day. They might be a little outside the delivery window, but not miss delivering entirely. They keep saying they’re not delivering because of “dangerous weather,” but the last dangerous weather was nearly two weeks ago. Today’s the day when Wayfair said to contact them if I haven’t received my order yet. We’re nearly at the start of the delivery window and it’s not shown as being on a truck yet, so I’m not optimistic about today being the day.

I was hoping to finish setting up my office before Christmas so I can start the new year ready to go, but that may not happen. I bought a hospital tray-type table to go alongside the desk I have so I’ll have more working space. The desk and table are on wheels, so I can reconfigure to meet my needs. I’m not sure which I’ll use as the computer desk until I see how it works/feels. I want to replace one of my office bookcases, but I need to know how the desks are going to lay out before I order anything. Then the old office bookcase will go in the spare room and I’ll move the metal bookcase from the spare room to the basement. I need to get the basement organized to finish putting away the stuff I brought from where I was storing it at my parents’ house. So this delivery is the domino that needs to fall so I can get my life in order.

I’m taking the next couple of weeks off posting for the holiday, though it’s possible I’ll do a year in review post on New Year’s Eve or the following Friday. Right now, my Christmas Eve and Christmas will be busy. The church where I sing in the choir does a big Christmas Eve service, and fortunately this year they moved it an hour early so I should be done by 11 rather than having to stay up until midnight. Then there’s a service on Christmas morning, and then there’s a community lunch for anyone who needs a Christmas lunch. I volunteered for that last year and am doing so again. It seems to be mostly homeless and seniors. They have drivers go pick up older people who are alone for the holiday, and it’s a big, festive occasion. I’ve been invited to join someone from choir for Christmas dinner, but I think the lunch will overlap and it’s possible that I will be peopled out and exhausted by that time, so I’ll just want to come home, put on my snowflake pajamas, and watch Christmas movies while eating cheese and crackers (what I did last year — they sent me home with a plate of leftovers from the lunch, and that was my Christmas dinner).

There’s supposedly a neighborhood New Year’s Eve party at my next-door neighbor’s house, but I haven’t heard any details yet.

I’ve been weirdly lax in preparing for the holidays. I did all my shopping in October and early November and not much since then. My tree is up, but I haven’t put decorations on it other than lights. Fortunately, my new neighborhood isn’t big on decorating outside, so my wreath on the door is enough (besides, I’m near the end of a dead-end street, so no one will see it). I put a lighted garland on the stair rail this week so there’s something festive downstairs. Maybe I’ll finish decorating the tree tonight. I think I’ve gone full Episcopalian and am doing Advent, with Christmas starting on the 25th and going through until January 6. That’s when all the parties I’ve been invited to are.

Anyway, happy holidays and a joyous new year, and I’ll see you in 2026.

Life

The Great FedEx Meltdown

Santa may be struggling around here this year. I present to you the saga of the local FedEx meltdown, in which there is apparently a mountain of undelivered packages, with more arriving every day, so they can’t keep up with it. This crisis has taken over the town Facebook group, as people are bonding over sharing stories of failed deliveries. I’ve met so many people through this. We should organize a potluck.

It all started the Friday before last, when we got snow that made the roads difficult (school was cancelled), but it cleared up quickly. But then there was another round of snow on Monday, and roads didn’t get cleared until mid-day Tuesday. This apparently threw FedEx off because packages didn’t get delivered Friday and Monday, but more packages kept coming in, faster than they could deliver, until it got out of control.

I was supposed to have a package delivered last Tuesday. They gave me a delivery window. I went out to shovel my porch and front walk so they could deliver. Then the delivery window passed and the status changed to delivery by end of day. When it started getting dark, I turned on my porch light. At about 6:30, the status changed to delivery by end of the next day. The same thing happened again on Wednesday, with a delivery window that passed, delivery by end of day, then delivery by end of next day.

Thursday, with the delivery window I got the name of the driver who was on his way, and the scan record showed that it had been put on a truck (which suggests that those previous days it never even made it onto a truck and was never actually out for delivery). After the delivery window passed, the name of the driver changed and it said by end of day. Then I got a bright orange flag on the delivery, saying it would have to be rescheduled because of dangerous weather and they would notify me when they were able to schedule the delivery. Mind you, this was a day when even I, the weather weenie who won’t drive if it’s raining, was out driving. The package was scanned back into the FedEx facility.

The next update came Sunday morning, when it was scanned on a truck and out for delivery. They gave me the name of a driver. And it was stuck there until this morning, with the only update being that it went from delivery by end of day Sunday to “we’re actively trying to find a delivery time for you.” It wasn’t scanned back in, and it still said that my driver was on his way. We had a really bad cold snap, and I worried that this poor guy had frozen by the side of the road, since he was still on his way days later.

Now the package was supposedly scanned onto a truck this morning, for delivery this afternoon. I’m not holding my breath since it doesn’t say anything about a driver being on the way. This is just something for my office so it isn’t crucial. I just get frustrated with the constant changes. If they’d simply said that they were backed up and they would deliver next week, I’d have been fine with that. I get annoyed when it’s day after day of being told it will come and then they don’t show up. But there are other people in town who have perishable items like food or medication that was shipped in dry ice or in cold packs, and it’s now been out too long to be safe. There are people waiting on Christmas gifts that they ordered in plenty of time and that got to town more than two weeks before Christmas but that may not be delivered in time. Businesses haven’t been able to receive items they need for their businesses, and they apparently aren’t making scheduled pickups for businesses trying to send things. One of the pharmacies in town isn’t getting shipments of medicines. There are people expecting packages that require a signature who have taken off work to wait for the delivery, only to have it not show up.

People who work for FedEx say they’re completely buried after getting backed up. When people offered to go to the facility to pick up their packages so they wouldn’t have to deliver them, they said that wouldn’t work because they couldn’t find the packages in the pile of backlog. The only way they’re able to chip away at it is to just load packages on trucks as they can go. I’m picturing something like that episode of I Love Lucy where she’s working on the chocolate conveyor belt and it all starts piling up, but with packages piled everywhere and still coming in.

There are other things I want to order to finish setting up my office and kitchen, but I may wait until after Christmas to see if they get settled down rather than adding to the pile-up.

This might make a fun Christmas movie plot, with the delivery service overwhelmed with packages and a bunch of people from the community dress up as Santa to come help them deliver so that Little Timmy in the cancer ward can get his present on time. I doubt FedEx would allow that, but in Christmas Movie World you could make it work.

movies

Transformation Stories

First, if you’re looking for cozy fantasy to curl up with on cold winter days (and nights), today (Dec. 12) is the Cozy Up With Fantasy sale, with a whole bunch of cozy fantasy reads on sale for .99. Tea and Empathy is included in this sale, and this is probably the last time I’m going to discount it until late next year, so if you haven’t tried my cozy fantasy series, this is your chance. You can find the list of participating books, with descriptions and keywords, here.

Meanwhile, we still have snow on the ground and it’s going to be a chilly weekend, so I want to start watching Christmas movies, but I never seem to actually get started watching one because I’m torn between rewatching old favorites and trying something new. My problem is that I’m very picky about these. I love the ones I love, but most of them end up making me feel just a little depressed. But I never know when watching a new one if it will be one I love that gets added to the rewatch lineup or one that will make me feel like I wasted an evening.

I’ve come to the conclusion that what I really like are the hot mess/stagnant person gets their life together (with maybe a bit of romance along the way) stories a lot more than I like the more straightforward romances, especially the career woman goes to a small town and saves the Christmas festival sort.

Looking at some of my favorites, there’s one of the earliest of these Christmas rom-coms meant for adults (vs. kid-oriented Christmas movies), The Christmas List, in which a woman whose life is stuck in neutral impulsively makes a Christmas wish list and then starts getting everything on it after her friend grabs it and sticks it in the mailbox of the Santa display in the store where they work. There is a romance, but it’s mostly about her realizing that she has the power to grant a lot of her own wishes. She just needs to put herself out there and try. I found a copy of this on YouTube last year, but I don’t know if it’s still there. I found that it still holds up pretty well (though Marla Maples as the villain is an interesting bit of pop culture from that era).

Another one I love is The 12 Dates of Christmas. There are apparently multiple movies with this title, but the one I like was on the ABC Family Channel and is a Groundhog Day type story in which the heroine relives Christmas Eve 12 times, themed on the song. This is another stagnant character who’s so stuck pining over her ex and scheming to get him back that she misses out on all the other things she could be having in life. As she relives the same day, she begins noticing and interacting with the people around her to build a community.

Although I dream of the holiday in the Cameron Diaz side of The Holiday, the story I love is the Kate Winslet side, where she learns to have gumption and be the main character in her own life from an elderly screenwriter, so she’s finally able to stand up to the guy who’s been using her.

I seem to be in the minority, but I loved Last Christmas, which is about a hot mess who learns to get over herself and see the other people around her, thanks to the intervention of someone who has a stake in her life. I think a lot of people were mad because they were expecting a romance and there really isn’t one, but I liked that it was more a vibe than a real romance since that chick was nowhere near ready for a relationship.

I love most retellings of A Christmas Carol because it’s all about the redemption arc. However, I have one big plea: Stop trying to make the Scrooge character a romantic lead. A hopeful ending in which the Scrooge is reunited with the past love and starts to make amends/show the change is fine. You could even do an epilogue showing the following Christmas after they’ve had a chance to rebuild their relationship and we can see that the transformation sticks. But it ruins the story when the Scrooge has been a jerk to the former love right up to the end, then does one grand gesture and then it ends with the Scrooge and the ex-love kissing and the implication that they’re back together for good. I’m looking at you, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. It’s a cute movie, but the guy is such a jerk, ruins everything, then has a last-second change of heart and pulls off the grand gesture, and the ex-love whose heart he broke years ago who has been having to run damage control on his latest antics ditching the hot, kind doctor to dance in the snow with the jerk who has been reformed for maybe five minutes (and who has shown in the past that he can fake “good” long enough to get what he wants) is so outrageous that I end the movie yelling at the screen.

When I tried to write a Christmas movie screenplay and then turned it into a novella, I went with the stagnant woman storyline, where the heroine has been stuck between two “lives” in trying to play it safe and trying to have what she really wants — and then the being stuck between two lives becomes literal. It’s sort of like Sliding Doors, except she’s living each day twice, once in each potential life, and she’s aware of both lives. (Twice Upon a Christmas) This is the kind of Christmas movie/story I want to see more of. Any recommendations for one I’ve missed?

Life

Snowmageddon

Supposedly, last winter was unusually snowy for around here. Everyone kept telling me how unusual it was that we got a big snowstorm in early January, reinforced by another one a little later, and then it didn’t get much above freezing all month so the snow never went away.

And now we’ve already had two big snows this season. We got the first one on Friday, with the snow tapering off later in the afternoon after dropping about three inches of very fluffy snow. Then the weekend got into the 40s and was sunny, so the roads were clear and most of the snow was gone. Then it started snowing very early Monday morning and snowed all day, into the evening. The forecast here was for a trace to an inch, and we ended up with close to five inches. It’s dry, fluffy snow, so apparently it has the same amount of water as what they forecast, but it was colder than they expected, so it was fluffier. Everything’s been shut down. I was supposed to get a delivery today, so I went out to shovel the walk and the front porch, but then they changed the delivery date late in the day. Of course, that meant I got little done because I was so distracted by waiting for the delivery and checking to see if it was here. Then it got changed to today.

It’s warming up, now above freezing, so the snow is gradually going away, but we’re supposed to get another round Friday. Depending on which forecast you look at, we’ll get either a trace or a foot. Since the last trace ended up being five inches, I’d probably better prepare for a foot.

A thick layer of snow covers the top of a patio table, patio furniture, and deck railing.
The “trace to an inch” of snow we got on Monday.

I put up my Christmas tree on Friday, but I haven’t decorated it other than the lights. It’s a tabletop tree that came with pine cones and red berries on it (I suspect whoever made it doesn’t know how pine trees work. They don’t have red berries) so it looks festive even without ornaments, but I may do the real decorating during Friday’s snow and call that my “office party.”

All the snow does help me feel festive. Unfortunately, it kills my productivity. Maybe someday I’ll be used to it, but I can’t seem to do anything when it’s snowing but look out the window and watch the snow. On Monday, I spent the whole day looking out the glass doors in my den. In addition to the falling snow, there were swirls of snow when wind picked up the dry, fluffy snow and blew it around. It was utterly mesmerizing.

I did get some quality thinking done, though. I’ve started developing the next Rydding Village book, and now I have a pretty good idea of the main characters. I guess that counts as productivity, since book brainstorming is what I planned to do right now. I can do that while watching the snow fall.

movies

A Christmas Movie or a Movie Set at Christmas?

During my Thanksgiving visit, my brother and I were talking about Christmas movies. He’s something of a traditionalist who has to watch White Christmas and It’s a Wonderful Life every year. I’m okay with It’s a Wonderful Life because I adore Jimmy Stewart and find that it gets a little more depth from the fact that he essentially used making that movie as a way to deal with the PTSD from his experiences as a bomber pilot in the war, but it’s not something I want to watch regularly. I could be happy never seeing White Christmas again. I remember being horribly disappointed when I finally saw the movie after having heard the song all my life.

I definitely disagree with my brother about his assertion that Die Hard is the best Christmas movie. If it makes you feel holly and jolly and gives you all the warm Christmas feels, then that’s great for you and enjoy it, but I tried watching it as a Christmas movie last year, and it didn’t work that way for me. I think it’s stuck in my head as a summer movie because it was a summer release and I saw it at the theater on my birthday in August.

But thinking about that, I came up with a test for whether a movie is a movie that happens to be set at Christmas or a Christmas movie: Could you move it to another time without changing the story? If you removed the Christmas elements, would the story still work? By that standard, Die Hard would not be a Christmas movie. All you’d have to do is give him another reason to be traveling — say, his daughter’s birthday — and another reason for the office party — like some kind of company milestone. That would even increase the tension with the wife if she had him come to the office so she could manage his reunion with the kids and then he found out she was staying late for a party rather than prioritizing the daughter’s birthday. But most of the action wouldn’t be affected at all and it would take only minor rewriting to change it from Christmas.

By this standard, one of my favorite Christmas movies, The Holiday, also wouldn’t actually be a Christmas movie. I used to watch this one every year on the evening before Christmas Eve, and a few years ago it struck me how small a role Christmas actually plays in the story. Christmas itself is mostly skipped over, with a brief montage of both women eating pasta alone while “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” plays. Most of the movie takes place in the week between Christmas and the new year. The main reason it needs to take place at Christmas is that you need a time both women are able to be away from work to travel for a couple of weeks, and the holiday time has to start for one of the women with a company-wide event. It being winter does help give the contrast between Los Angeles and England, but you’ll have at least some contrast year-round. Christmas is the most obvious, easiest time of year to do that. It would take some handwaving to set it up at another time of year. But the plot itself has nothing really to do with the holiday season. They don’t even do seasonal stuff. It mostly comes down to the vibes in the England side of the story, with the snow on the ground and the cozy cottage. I think I mostly enjoy that movie because a pile of books in a cozy cottage near an English village is my dream vacation. It was a little disappointing to learn that the cottage was a fake shell they built to film the exteriors and the interior was a set in California.

I’ve since moved this one to watch after Christmas. It’s a good thing for that dead week between Christmas and the new year when there’s not much going on and you can kick back and relax after the holiday craziness.

In contrast, most versions of A Christmas Carol would be Christmas movies because it would be difficult to move the story to another time. Scrooge’s attitude is a sharp contrast to the Christmas spirit and is fully illustrated by the way he reacts to Christmas. The ghosts take him to specific Christmas celebrations. There’s an emotional weight to the fact that it’s Christmas and there are societal expectations around it that you don’t get with other holidays. You’d have to do some serious rewriting to set it at any other time.

Now I’m going to be watching Christmas movies with this in mind to see how they measure up. Today would be a good day for Christmas movies because it’s snowing. We were supposed to get maybe three inches, with snow ending in the early morning, but it looks like there are at least four inches and it’s still snowing steadily at 11 a.m. I don’t know how it can clear before the weekend, but fortunately I can walk to the things I need to do. I’ll get to break in the snow boots I bought last winter.

Life

The Journey

I’m back from my Thanksgiving journey, which involved traveling across four states (parts of two, completely crossing two). It’s a two-day drive each way, which is kind of draining, but for Thanksgiving travel it’s probably less draining than flying would be, since I’d have to either change planes multiple times or spend a lot of time driving at each end of the trip. Travel is one thing that was made worse by my move, since I went from living a two-hour drive from my parents’ house and 15 minutes from a major airport to living a two-day drive from my parents and living near a small regional airport that currently only offers flights to one city (they’re adding a city next year). Since my parents also live near a small regional airport or else a long drive from a major airport, that complicates travel. So, I drive.

It’s actually mostly a pleasant drive. There’s some beautiful scenery. It gives me a lot of time to think. I brainstormed a book while I drove and came up with some good ideas. I sang along with my driving playlist and got in some good vocal exercise. The tricky part is planning the trip. Since it’s two days and driving all day, it can be challenging to find a good time to travel. I had to head out a day earlier than I planned because there were storms forecast, and that meant I had to rush my preparations. It was a good thing I did it, though, because I’d have been driving through heavy thunderstorms a whole day if I’d stuck to my schedule. Then on the return trip, I had to fit my travel in between a big storm front that brought heavy rain and a front with freezing rain. The heavy rain/thunderstorms were a day ahead of me as I traveled and the freezing rain was a day behind me, but I had perfect travel weather. I just had to deal with some nasty traffic because I was driving on the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

For that, I thought my navigation system had lost its mind. I left early in the morning and was making good time when suddenly it moved my estimated arrival time to half an hour later. Then a little later it moved it 15 minutes later than that, with nothing changing about my driving. There was a small traffic slowdown from a wreck, and I thought it might have been accounting for that, but it added 10 more minutes (it also told me the wreck was 900 feet ahead right after I passed it, so I was losing faith in my nav system). I got to where I was 50 miles from my destination and it told me I’d be there in two hours, so I thought it was nuts.

Then I saw the brake lights ahead. There was apparently a wreck, according to the highway signs, but it must have been cleared by the time I got there. We started moving again, and there were signs for another wreck, and there was another slowdown but no signs of the wreck. Then another slowdown with no explanation. Because they’d cleared the wrecks by the time I got there, the slowdown must not have been as bad as the travel time had originally estimated because the arrival time flipped back by half an hour and I was only about 40 minutes later than the initial estimated arrival time.

Still, that was better than the freezing rain I’d have had if I’d waited a day. We got snow and ice overnight after I got home. They even cancelled schools on Tuesday, though it did warm up, so it would have been clear by the time I got here.

It’s good to be home. Now I need to do the house cleaning I was planning to do in my initial travel prep schedule. I like to have everything ready a day early then spend the last day tidying everything that got messed up while I was packing and then have time to relax before travel. The cleaning and relaxing didn’t get done when I changed plans.

Since it was icy and I was tired, I did that relaxing yesterday on my first full day home. Now to tackle the cleaning so I’ll be ready to put up my Christmas decorations. It’s my first Christmas in my new house, so I’ll have to figure out where to put everything. The house is really tiny and full of furniture (and books), so there isn’t much space for a tree. I bought an artificial tabletop tree, and I have the garland I used to put on my loft railing and stairs that I’ll have to position. I don’t have as much stair railing, so maybe some can go on the old chimney in the kitchen or on the bookcases in the living room and office.

Life

Thanksgiving Break

Next week is a holiday week, and I’m making a grand expedition across the country to Texas, so I won’t be posting next week. After seeing the weather forecast that called for a big thunderstorm to cross my path on one of the days I’d be driving, I’ve moved my travel plans up a day, so today’s planned big thoughts will have to wait until later because I have to cram two days of to-do lists into one day. Eep! I got a lot of it done yesterday when I started thinking I’d have to adjust plans (the chance of thunderstorms and tornadoes in Arkansas was not encouraging), so I should be able to do it, but my rough estimates come down to about six hours of work today. I hope I’m overestimating, but better to overestimate and have extra free time at the end than to underestimate and run out of time.

Normal posting will resume the week after Thanksgiving.

publishing business

AI Book Club Scams

I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails lately full of praise for my books. Unfortunately, they’re not from real people. The scammers have discovered AI and are using it to try to get money out of authors.

It used to be that the low-effort scams were obvious because when someone e-mailed you to tell you how great your book was and how it deserved to find an audience (something they could help with if you paid them), they kept it generic and didn’t mention your book by name or say anything about it. That way, they could send the same e-mail to hundreds of writers.

Now, AI “writes” the e-mail for them, based on information available online (usually from the Amazon listing). You’ll get an e-mail talking about the specific things that are great about your book, then saying it’s a pity it has so few Amazon reviews or so few people know about it. From there, there are three main things that might be offered. They might represent a large group of rabid readers who are eager to spread the word about your book by reviewing it on Amazon (for a suggested “tip” per reader). Or the person writing to you might represent a book club that wants to feature it. Or they might be selling marketing services.

I started getting these for Weaving & Wyverns before the book was even published, so I knew that this group of rabid readers couldn’t have fallen for it. Or there was the D.C. International Affairs Book Club that was interested in featuring Tea and Empathy. I guess they needed a break from all those serious books on international affairs. The writing style in all of them is pure ChatGPT. It’s very salesy language and doesn’t sound at all like what a real reader would write to an author, and the way they praise the books falls into a template. It’s like a Mad Libs, with blanks filled in with specifics for your book.

Even if it hadn’t been pretty obvious that the D.C. International Affairs Book Club was unlikely to read a cozy fantasy, the other clue that this was a scam is that this isn’t how book clubs work. I’ve met with and spoken to a number of book clubs, and I’ve been a member of several book clubs. Most book clubs don’t involve the author at all. They choose a book they want to read and then they discuss it. If they do contact an author to speak to them, they treat it as a favor from the author. They don’t ask for money from the author. Mostly, the contact has come from someone I know who’s in the group, and they invite me to meet with them. Having an author is a special treat for the group. I know there are some big groups that bring in authors, but they pay for the author to come, not the other way around.

The scammers seem to have scraped MeetUp to find book group information, and they’re pretty insidious about it because they even include the link to the MeetUp page to show it’s a real group, and they send the e-mail under the name of the group’s organizer. You have to look to see that the e-mail address is different. The book groups must be hearing from a lot of authors because I saw that several of them now have something on their pages about how they are not contacting authors and if you hear from someone claiming to represent their group, it’s a scam.

There’s another scam going around in which the scammer impersonates a famous author who contacts less famous authors, at first just to discuss publishing and writing and then to sell courses/training/services. Some authors I know have been having fun with this when they know the famous author and write back about the crazy weekend they just had together, which baffles the scammer.

Someone who’s been investigating this has found that if you do bite on the scam, you’ll get an invoice from an entirely different person who’s based in Nigeria, and you don’t end up getting any of the promised services, since they don’t really have anything to do with the famous authors or the book clubs, and if it’s the group of readers eager to review the book, even if they did review, it’s against the terms of service to pay for reviews, so you could lose your Amazon account.

I’m now at the point where any e-mail with a subject line praising my book gets deleted. They present very differently from real fan mail, but there is a chance I’m going to be so skeptical that I miss some real e-mail. If anyone does invite me to their book group, they’ll have to make it really clear up front that they aren’t going to charge me and know that they’re asking me to do a favor and otherwise keep me from assuming it’s a scam.

In entirely unrelated news, the paperback version of Weaving & Wyverns is now for sale. It’s at Amazon for now but the listing should spread through other retailers. Maybe it’ll be a good pick for your book club!