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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
The fifth Tales of Rydding Village book, Pottery & Peril, is now available for pre-order at the major online retailers. There will be a paperback, but you can’t set those up for pre-order. You can get all the info on the book’s page.
Our main romance in this one involves two newcomers to the village, so I did something different and started with these new characters when they’re outside the village, showing how they get there. So don’t worry if you start reading and have no idea who any of these people are. They’ll get to familiar ground and meet our regular characters soon enough.
This is essentially the “Halloween” book of the series. It takes place in late fall, around the transition to winter. I call it “Wintereve” in this world, but it has a lot in common with celebrations of Halloween and Samhain (in Celtic cultures). Making up festivals and figuring out how to celebrate them is one of my favorite things about writing this series. I do some research about folklore and traditions, then mix and match and make up my own. They almost all seem to involve a bonfire. That’s accurate to the way a lot of real-world festivals go, but also I love a bonfire or campfire. There’s a campfire ring in my back yard that I hope to use this year, if I can dig it out of the raspberry bushes that took over that part of the yard. If not, I’ve got a mini firepit that I can set up. There’s something magical to me about a fire at night, with the smell, the sight of the flames, and the warmth contrasting with the coolness of the evening.
There is a bit of spookiness in this one, but it’s more atmosphere than anything even approaching real horror. More like a ghost story than truly scary.
This is the book I took a pottery class for so I could better understand the process and how it feels. I hope I conveyed that accurately in the book.
I’m already at work on the next book. In fact, I started writing it yesterday. I don’t have it fully outlined yet, but the opening scenes came to me, so I wrote them down. I’m hoping to get it released sometime this winter, since it takes place around Midwinter (yes, another festival).
I’ve been trying (and, to be honest, mostly failing) to post more on Instagram, since supposedly that’s where a lot of people find out about books. But even though I mostly just post about my books, what Instagram gives me in my feed are mostly crafting videos. There’s a lot of “look what you can make with stuff you get at Dollar Tree” or “why throw these things away when you could make this out of them?” type videos. A few of them are moderately useful things. Most of them have me wondering why you’d want to make that thing, or it seems like a lot of effort to go to for something only mildly attractive or useful. For instance, there’s a lot of hot glueing wooden beads to the bottoms of cutting boards to make little display stands, or turning soda cans into little vases you stick on your refrigerator with magnets. I guess it’s the process of making it that’s fun, if you’re into hot glue guns and spray paint.
But I think those videos are infecting me. A couple of weeks ago, I was getting ready to throw away one of those bins that dishwasher pods come in and thinking, as I always do when throwing one away, that they really should sell the pods in bags that you could use to refill the bins because it seems like such a waste to have to buy the bins every time and yet only really small quantities come in bags. Then it occurred to me that this bin would make a perfect countertop trash/compost bin.
I keep a grocery produce bag handy to put small bits of trash, mostly stuff like vegetable peelings, tea leaves, etc., in as I cook. The city is encouraging people to compost, and if you don’t have your own compost pile, there’s a bin you can put your compost stuff into at the recycling center, so I try to keep compost-type trash separate. But I don’t like having that bag on the counter and have been looking for some kind of small bin or can that would close. Most of what I’ve found is way too big. But the dishwasher pod bin is perfect. There’s a lid that lifts off for pulling out the bag, and then you can flip it up and down to use it. It just didn’t fit my decor.
So I went into craft mode. I peeled off the label, spray painted with white primer, then used craft paint to paint the lid and paint stencils on the side, and I then covered it all with a sealer. The paint job isn’t great because I’m not very practiced at it, but I figure I can always make another the next time I empty a dishwasher pod bin. I did it in the blue and white color scheme that matches my kitchen. If you squint and stand at a distance, you can pretend that it’s blue and white porcelain. It works pretty well to contain any odors and doesn’t look too bad.
See what I made! It’s even useful.
This was what I did last weekend after I finished proofreading a book. I was in between writing projects and trying to do fun stuff away from the computer.
I recently saw an interesting workshop on getting yourself to write, how sometimes you resist doing even something you want to do and enjoy doing. That’s a weird problem I sometimes have. Once I get started, it’s easy, but sometimes I have to drag myself to work. It’s not so much that I dread it. It’s making the transition from what I was doing to writing. I enjoy sitting on the deck or on the sofa with a cup of tea in the morning, and I don’t want to leave my comfy spot to get to work. Or I find it difficult to get back to work after lunch.
One of the things the speaker said that caught my attention was the use of intrinsic vs. extrinsic rewards. An extrinsic reward is something that comes from outside yourself and that isn’t really related to the task, like getting a treat for doing something. An intrinsic reward comes from within the task, like the satisfaction of a job well done or the enjoyment of doing the thing. Intrinsic rewards are far more motivating, so the best way to get yourself to do something is to find the intrinsic reward. The trick is that you have to start doing the thing before you can find and experience the intrinsic reward that will make you want to do the thing again. You can use extrinsic rewards to get to that point, but they work best if you use them as a reward for starting to do it, not for finishing. If you give yourself the reward for finishing, you may miss feeling the intrinsic reward.
That was a big lightbulb moment for me because it explains something I’ve experienced. When I was struggling to get back into a writing routine after all the disruption from moving cross-country, house hunting, moving to the house, and getting the house set up, I bought myself some chocolate to use as rewards. The plan was to give myself a small square of chocolate if I hit my minimum goal, and on days when I hit my “crushed it” goal, I got a truffle.
But I found that I almost never ate the chocolate. I forgot I had it. By the time I got there, the thrill of hitting the goal was enough, so I didn’t need the chocolate and I forgot to eat it most days. So now I need to rethink the reward system to get myself to my desk in the first place. I don’t want chocolate first thing in the morning, but I could use that as a way to get back to the desk after lunch. To get my lunch dessert, I have to sit down at my desk. In the morning, maybe that’s the way I get a second cup of tea. The speaker also suggested a pleasant ritual, like lighting a candle, having a cozy pair of socks you only wear while writing, or listening to certain music. The candle doesn’t work for me in the summer because of the ceiling fan, and I can’t even see the candlelight in the morning because one of my office windows faces east, but I like the idea of finding some pleasant “ah, I’m at my desk, this is nice” routine. I just need something that will get me at my desk and writing the first words. After that, I get in a groove and enjoy it.
When I’m drafting or brainstorming and I don’t want to come in from the deck, I work outside, though that works less well while editing or proofreading because the glare on the screen makes it hard to see details. I’ve also had some success with not letting myself get to the deck or sofa. I finish reading the newspaper at the dining table and go straight to my desk. I do miss the outdoor time, though.
This hasn’t been a huge problem for me lately because I was finishing a draft and eager to write, but it’s good to have in mind when I’m in the middle of a book, it’s starting to feel like a slog, and I want nothing more than to sit on the sofa all morning.
I may have a story idea brewing. I don’t yet have specifics like characters, but I have a setting and situation. It started with a house I walk past on my way to downtown.
On the main street through town, my end of town has Victorian mansions on one side. They’re uphill looking downhill, and when they were built they must have had a mostly unobstructed view of a valley and the hills beyond. In the early part of the 20th century, they built smaller houses across the street, more packed in and without much in the way of front yards, and the valley got filled with houses. Most of these mansions are now apartment buildings. There’s one in particular that calls to me. It’s a gorgeous brick Queen Anne house, complete with turret, and it seems like a good setting for a romantic comedy series. There could be a story for each of the tenants in the building, and then if the earlier main characters move out when they get married, new characters could move in to keep the story going. I find myself pondering this idea every time I walk past, so maybe eventually I’ll come up with some specific characters.
This mansion-turned-apartment building looks like the kind of place where quirky rom-com heroines might live.
The town is also a good setting for this sort of thing. It’s very “Hallmark movie,” or, as a lot of people here call it, Stars Hollow, as in the TV series The Gilmore Girls. We’ve got our quaint little local shops and restaurants, our quirky characters, and our unique festivals (so each book could take place during a festival). But I might have to tone it down a bit because if I wrote the way the town actually is, I’m not sure anyone would believe it.
For instance, the quirky characters. I’ve mentioned our local Spider-Man, the guy who dresses up in a Spider-Man costume to do good deeds. He’s a big force behind charity work in this town and has a way of rallying people to solve problems and get stuff done, even while he’s wearing a costume and doing parkour around downtown. Spider-Man is currently the director of the downtown cooling shelter, a place people without access to air conditioning to go on hot days. It’s hosted at a church, and it offers drinks, snacks, games, books, and WiFi. Since he took it over, they also have things like resume-writing clinics and job fairs.
Then there’s the dapper gentleman who dances his way around town while carrying tambourines. He wears pleated trousers, a dress shirt, waistcoat, tie, and a flat newsboy cap, and he doesn’t just walk anywhere. He dances as he walks while playing the tambourines. And he walks everywhere as his main form of transportation.
The shops and restaurants tend to keep what I refer to as “whimsical” hours. There’s the really cute coffee shop that has a beer garden in back — that closes at 2 in the afternoon. Yes, a beer garden that closes in the early afternoon. There was a cupcake and cookie bakery near a school that closed before school let out. It’s a private school, so kids with money, and the bakery closed before dozens of kids with money would be passing by after school. That one went out of business and there’s a bagel shop there now that’s actually open for the hours when they’re most likely to sell bagels (it’s open for breakfast). There’s a waffle shop that’s closed on Saturdays, when there are people downtown looking for brunch. Business hours here tend to be “whenever I want to be open.” A lot of the downtown shops are side hustles, so the owners have regular jobs and open their shops or restaurants when they have free time.
There are a surprising number of actors in a relatively small town, since there are two professional and semi-professional theater companies, and there are a lot of musicians of all genres. There’s a big folk/bluegrass scene and apparently a really thriving punk and metal scene.
So, lots of opportunity for characters.
Then the festivals. This week has been the classical music festival, and I work as an usher for that. This festival is like a small town went “hey, gang, let’s put on a major classical music festival” and pulled it off. They bring in musicians from all over, and they sort of function as a repertory company, being mixed into various ensembles, depending on the music being performed, for several concerts a day. They get put up in homes of people around town (putting the extra space in the Victorian mansions that aren’t apartment buildings to good use). That’s necessary because all the hotel and vacation rental space in town gets taken up by festival goers, many of whom get season passes and spend a whole week and a half here, going to every concert. The old churches in town serve as concert halls, with my church being the main one, as the biggest with the really good acoustics you get in a building built before amplification. They don’t just do the standard classical repertoire of the biggest hits. At the concert where I ushered Sunday afternoon, there was a world premiere orchestration and two pieces with the composer present. Monday’s concert had a Chopin piano concerto (played on fortepiano) and an avant garde piece.
Then there’s the fantasy festival. It started as a Harry Potter festival and has grown beyond that (this year’s theme is on The Wizard of Oz/Wicked). There actually aren’t that many real activities (part of the way they keep the lawyers at bay). It’s just something like ten thousand people coming to town to wander the downtown area while wearing costumes. It’s basically an open-air comic con without panels, with the vendors being the regular downtown shops.
There are also festivals in the park, lots of arts events, concerts at the old-timey bandstand, etc.
So I think I could have fun with a series of humorous romances set in a town like this, with the heroines all living in this one apartment building (until I have to branch out if it’s successful enough). To be on-brand, I think I need some kind of magical element, and I have some ideas in mind. I just need to come up with specific characters and stories. Then I may run it by my agent, since this sort of thing is hot right now.
The fifth Tales of Rydding Village book, Pottery & Peril, is now available for pre-order at the major online retailers. There will be a paperback, but you can’t set those up for pre-order. You can get all the info 
