Life

The Epic Shopping Excursion

My adventure this week was a road trip to buy things for my house. One downside to the place I’m living now is that it’s a smallish, fairly remote town without a lot of the big stores. And one downside to my house is that the rooms are small and the doors are narrow, which limits the furniture I can get. I haven’t been able to find a loveseat or chair for my den that I can get through the door, whether the sliding door from the deck or the interior door (and the interior stairs are narrow). So I had to resort to something like Ikea, where you can assemble the furniture inside the house. I didn’t want to buy a loveseat without trying it out, which meant a road trip to the nearest Ikea, which is in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., more than two hours away (more or less depending on traffic). There were also decorative items that I wanted from another store they don’t have here but that’s near the Ikea.

The weather yesterday was good for a trip, so I loaded up with road snacks and headed out to drive across northern Virginia. It was actually a lovely drive, following the Blue Ridge Mountains much of the way, then crossing the mountains. I was surprised by how little traffic I ran into. The route my phone sent me on had me mostly driving through the woods, even after I got off the freeway, and suddenly I was at the mall where Ikea was. The traffic was a little worse on the way home because it was the beginning of rush hour, but it still wasn’t as bad as I feared for the D.C. area. The drive from my house in Texas to the Ikea there was shorter, but this longer drive was much less stressful.

I have a loveseat on order — the one I liked was the one people seemed to gravitate toward to sit on while the people they were with were shopping, which is a good sign — and after a break to have a Swedish meatball lunch I bought a bunch of organizational things. After that (and picking up some cinnamon rolls), I headed to the other store to get throw pillows, kitchen canisters, and a footstool. Now I have just about everything I need to set up my house, and it’ll be a lot more homey once the loveseat is delivered (I could have fit it in my car, but even if I opened the boxes and moved pieces one at a time, I didn’t think I could get the main piece up the stairs by myself, and I didn’t want to count on drafting a neighbor to help without checking with him first, so I had it delivered).

My living room color scheme is navy and ivory. I’ve already got a navy and ivory patterned rug. The sofa is a sort of ivory color, and I’ve got navy velvet throw pillows, footstool, and curtains. With all that velvet, it should be nice and cozy.

But today I’m giving myself permission to not do any work on the house (unless I really want to). I’m doing some writing work and putting my feet up because yesterday was a long, tiring day, not just the driving, but also pushing a very full cart through an Ikea, then loading and later unloading the car. I am looking forward to having it all done so I don’t have to think about the house, though then it will be time to focus on the yard. Today it’s a month since I started living in the house, so I figure I’ve done pretty well. I’m the sort of person who likes to be settled within a week or so, but I had to get so much furniture and organizational stuff, and I had to figure out where things would go, which took me longer.

TV, movies

Revived Obsession

In addition to being distracted by trying to get my house set up to the point that it’s a livable space I can actually work in, I’ve had an additional distraction because the final season of Andor has been on, starting the day after I moved in. It ended this week, and I haven’t quite recovered because it’s reawakened and re-energized my Star Wars obsession that started when I saw the first movie in the theater when I was 9. It’s waxed and waned over the years since then, but this series is hitting me where I am now in a big way. It’s very much Star Wars for grown-ups.

There’s been a belief, promoted by George Lucas himself, ever since the prequel movies came out that “Star Wars is for kids,” but that’s as much of a retcon (retroactive continuity, when you decide something and claim that it was always true) as the fact that Darth Vader was Luke’s father and Leia was his sister (the idea that Darth Vader was Luke’s father was initially brought up as a joke by a friend at a dinner party when Lucas was outlining The Empire Strikes Back, then once they brainstormed it a bit, they decided it worked. The fact that Leia was Luke’s sister came up when outlining Return of the Jedi when they needed a reason Luke would drop his refusal to fight Vader, and protecting a sister was what they decided on).

The original movie was pure Boomer (and Silent Generation) bait. It drew on all the space adventure serials that played before Saturday matinees when those generations were kids, as well as tropes from the Westerns that were popular for those generations. It wasn’t kids clamoring to see that first movie. They were brought by their parents (like me — my family will never let me forget that I emphatically did not want to go see it). It was very kid-friendly in that the violence was fairly sanitized (in spite of having one of the highest body counts in all of movie history, given that an entire planet is destroyed). There’s no on-screen blood or gore. When Obi-Wan Kenobi is killed, we don’t see a decapitated body. He just vanishes. There’s comic relief from the droids, and Luke is young enough to be relatable and aspirational to kids without being an annoying kid character. But the main appeal to kids was that it was an adult movie we could see and enjoy and feel grown-up about seeing. It didn’t pander to kids. In today’s entertainment language, it’s “four quadrant entertainment,” which means that all the demographic groups can enjoy it together — fun for the whole family!

It wasn’t until later that they realized they had something kids loved. It took them nearly a year after the original release of the movie before they started making Star Wars toys. The Empire Strikes Back was even more mature and actually less kid-friendly. There was more on-screen violence that wasn’t the sanitized “pew, pew, pew” of blaster fire. Characters got injured and bloody. Han was tortured. Lucas was criticized for the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi for being ready-made merchandising, but I believe his rationale that it was about the story, that he wanted something small, primitive, and innocent helping bring down the Empire (and bonus if they’d make good toys). Even if there was a cute factor seemingly aimed at kids, the thematic issues in that movie are pretty deep.

It was only when they came back more than a decade after the original movies with the prequels that they went all-in with that “Star Wars is for kids” line, with elements that were deliberately aimed at child interest, and they then made animated series that were clearly targeted toward kids (even though they ended up going rather dark and with some heavy themes).

But when we got to Rogue One, there was nothing child-friendly about it. The funny droid sidekick is a snarky killer, and that’s really the only comic relief. I’ve called it the Saving Private Ryan of Star Wars. It’s serious, dark, violent, and brilliant. It stood to reason that the prequel series leading up to it would be similarly serious. It’s about surviving under an autocratic regime, the stirrings of rebellion, and just how hard and dangerous revolution is, requiring great personal sacrifice by some so that all can live free. It’s very heavy, and the deep political themes probably wouldn’t be of much interest to most kids. I doubt it would have caught my imagination the way the original movie did when I was a kid. It’s about sneaking around and conversations rather than space battles and the action sequences are riots that turn into massacres.

But it’s an in-depth look at the Star Wars universe and the ordinary people who live there, not just the princesses, politicians, and Jedi Knights that we’ve seen in other movies. It’s the mechanics, shopkeepers, farmers, bureaucrats, and other people trying to get by in an increasingly hostile galaxy, and it’s about the people who have to keep to the shadows to try to build their movement. We get a sense of daily life in that galaxy. We see their homes, their kitchens and bedrooms, where they go on vacation. It’s a chance to really wallow in that universe and see multiple aspects of it.

And that’s made the rest of that universe more interesting. It all has more depth and texture, and that’s why I’m getting back into it the way I was when I was 9-14 and the original movies were coming out, and it was all fresh and new to me. After this week’s Andor finale, I’ve rewatched Rogue One, which is even more heartbreaking now, and tonight I’ll go back to that original movie that started it all, knowing what happened to set up that whole situation and just what was sacrificed along the way.

Now we’ll see if this current wave of obsession has the same effect the first wave had, since that was what kicked off my wanting to be a writer and tell stories. Maybe it’ll inspire even more story ideas.

 

Life

Office Optimism

I was rather overly optimistic to think I could have my office set up by Monday. I spent all day Friday putting together the new office furniture. Saturday I shelved some books but mostly took it easy because I had a dinner party to go to that night, and I was really tired from the previous day’s work. Sunday I painted my filing cabinet. It was that dull beige government office color, and I painted it to fit better with my new office decor, in an “oil-rubbed brass” color that matches the door hardware in my house. I’ve spent the past couple of days arranging my office stuff. The new bookcase I bought has drawers, so I’ve been moving things out of the plastic drawers I used with my old desk and into the bookcase drawers.

I thought I purged about six years ago when I reorganized my office in my old house and then again before I moved away from Texas, but I still had more stuff than I realized. I seem to be hoarding memo pads and paperclips. Memo pads are a standard writer gift, so they tend to come in the goodie bags I get when I speak to writing groups or libraries. Then there are the promo giveaway pads from conventions and conferences. I also can’t seem to resist hotel memo pads. When I have a meeting at a hotel and they have a memo pad at each place, I can’t just leave it behind when I’ve written on one page. I should never again need to buy a notepad for making grocery lists.

I’m not sure where all the paperclips came from. I don’t even use them anymore. I might have bought one small box, but I practically have a crate. They must be reproducing. I wonder if I can put some of them in metal recycling. Or I could string them together to decorate an office Christmas tree.

I also have a surprising amount of stationery. When I was in junior high and high school, I had some long-distance friends I corresponded with (pre-email), so I have a few sets of notepaper from that, and I know I got some stationery sets as gifts. For some odd reason, I have two sets of Garfield stationery, and I was never a big fan of that comic strip. I don’t remember the last time I wrote a snail mail letter (probably when my grandmother died. I used to send cards and letters to her when she was in a nursing home). I have used some notecards for thank-you notes, but that’s about it. I have a few sets of notecards with frog princes and high-heeled shoes that were gifts from people who associated that with my Enchanted, Inc. books (some of these may have been speaker gifts). I guess I need to find someone to write letters to, or else I’ve got even more stuff for making grocery lists. I’ll roll into the store with my Garfield note paper.

My old office had an entire wall of closets, and this one doesn’t really have a closet. There’s an alcove for a closet, but they removed the door and clothes rod when remodeling the house, so it’s just an alcove with a shelf. One of my bookcases slotted into the alcove. A lot of the stuff I used to store in the office closet will go in the basement, but I still have office stuff with no home. I may pick up some bankers boxes and put them on that upper closet shelf.

I have got all the office furniture and equipment in the office, and I put up the last set of blinds in that room so I’m not visible from the street while walking between my bedroom and the bathroom (not a huge concern, as there’s nobody directly across the street and there are trees in front of that window, but still it’s nice to have total privacy). I mostly need to finish shelving books and then sort out the other stuff. Then I may have a more or less functional office. I may need a couple of smaller bookcases, one to hold my CD player and some CDs for my working background music, and it’s possible I’ll need one more place to store copies of my books.

After the office is done, I need to finish setting up the den and deal with the clothes, which will help me know what I need to do in the spare room, which is going to be mostly storage, with what I hope will be enough open space in the middle for a yoga mat or an inflatable bed if I have guests. I still need a sofa/loveseat for the den. I’ve been sitting in my patio lounger to watch TV. I’m hoping to make a trip to Ikea next week to round out what I need. I’m looking forward to having everything all set up so I can just live and work without spending my days unpacking and setting up.

Life

The Office Project

My project for the day is getting my office set up, and that means assembling furniture. I’ve been wrestling with a large bookcase, and later today I’ll get to work on my desk. My office is really small. It’s the smallest room in the house (other than the bathroom), but it’s the room with the best views (mountains!) and the most electrical outlets, so it makes sense as an office. I had to get creative with furniture. The desk is like a hospital tray table and it’s on wheels so it can move around. It’s not very big, so all the usual stuff that would go on top of a desk, other than the computer and maybe a pen and notebook, will have to go on the bookcase behind the desk.

I think I’m actually going to have shelf space for all my books — until I stumble across another box I forgot about. The spare room is gradually gaining floor space as I get books on the shelves. I put off dealing with the books because I didn’t need them for daily life, but getting them on shelves clears out so much space and makes room to do other things, so it was worth taking care of that.

I hope to have the office totally set up before Monday so I can maybe get back into a regular working routine. I’ve fallen into some bad habits during the move, and I’ll have to get back on track. I’m hoping that if my office is all set up, I’ll be able to focus instead of getting distracted by all the things I need to do.

Sunday it’ll be a year since I arrived in this town, so it’s been more than a year since I’ve had a dedicated office instead of a combined living room/dining room/office/kitchen. I still managed to write a book and revise a couple more, but it’ll be nice to have a real working space again.

Then I’ll have to avoid getting distracted by staring at the mountains.

Books

Regency Magic

Before my life became consumed with moving and getting my house set up, I read a book that was a fun mix of two things I like, the Regency/Victorian house party comedy of manners and fantasy. A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher is what you get if you love Jane Austen type books but think they could use more magic.

An evil sorceress whose previous benefactor has proven unsatisfactory is on the hunt for a husband, and she settles on a wealthy squire, contriving a situation that gets her and her browbeaten teenage daughter invited to come stay with him and his spinster sister. The daughter, experiencing the kindness of good people for perhaps the first time in her life, can’t bear to let her mother hurt these people, and she joins forces with the squire’s sister to try to thwart her mother. And part of the scheme is a house party, as the sister invites her friends to come meet their new friends (and have backup).

The book reminds me of the movie Love and Friendship, which was (loosely) based on some of Jane Austen’s short fiction that wasn’t published in her lifetime. In fact, I kept picturing the villain as Lady Susan from that movie, as played by Kate Beckinsale. Just give that bitchy, manipulative woman magical powers that allow her to control others, and you have a similar situation.

A lot of the Regency romance tropes are present, including the awkward teen with the marriage-minded mother, the handsome old flame of the older woman, and lots of drawing room intrigue, but all with the awareness of magic at work and non-magical people having to figure out how they can stand against powerful magic. The book was both fun (and funny) and scary, and it was rather moving at times. It held my interest at a time when my brain was beginning to spiral with distraction.

I haven’t been able to read much since then because I get very easily sidetracked by things I feel like I should do, or else I get an idea for solving a problem in the house and get lost in online research to see if the products I need exist. I try to read a little bit before bed, but I fall asleep within a few pages. It seems that a day full of physical activity is good for your sleep.

I have my downstairs great room (kitchen, living/dining room) more or less set up, though there are some things in there that will need to be put away elsewhere when I have the way cleared for them. My new office furniture is supposed to be delivered tomorrow, so I can get my office set up. Then next week I’m going to make a road trip to the D.C. suburbs to hit Ikea and see if the loveseat I like online will actually work, plus I’ll pick up some organizing and storage stuff for my clothes and some pantry shelving. That will make it easier to finish unpacking. I’m hoping once everything is more or less where it belongs and there aren’t piles and boxes everywhere it’ll be easier for me to focus on both reading and writing.

StoryBundle News

I’m still trying to get settled in my new house. There’s been lots of shopping to get stuff to make the house work. I keep saying I need to get back to work, but I keep finding things I need to deal with. I don’t think well amid chaos. But I have bought a pop-up gazebo to put on my deck for writing outside. I’ve got weights to keep it steady in the wind, but it’s really gusty today, so I’ll have to wait to play with it. My office is one of the rooms where furniture didn’t need to be put, so it’s currently full of piles of books and file folders, and other things. No work will be happening in there for a while.

While I was moving, I’ve missed making an announcement. My Interview with a Dead Editor is part of a StoryBundle full of cozy mystery books. The way this works is that you can pay what you want and get a bundle of e-books, and as you pay more, you unlock more books. It’s a great way to load up your e-reader for a small amount of money, and it benefits the authors who are involved. You may find a new favorite author.

You can find more info on this bundle here, but it’s only good for about another week (it launched during moving week, so I didn’t manage to get the word out).

In case you missed it while I was on hiatus for the move, book 3 in my Tales of Rydding Village series is now available in e-book and paperback. Audible isn’t keen on audio for it right now until they get better numbers on the first two books, so those will have to do better in audio for the rest of the series to get picked up.

I’m trying to think of what other news there is, but my brain is currently consumed with shelves, storage bins, and all the work I need to do in the yard. I may have to schedule designated work time so I can focus.

Life

Moved!

I’m back from my moving break. That doesn’t mean I’m through with moving. I have finished physically relocating from one home to the other. I turned over the keys to my apartment yesterday, and all of my belongings are in my house. But I am far from being truly moved in. There’s still a lot of unpacking and arranging to do. Everything is in piles or boxes.

I more or less have the bathroom and kitchen set up, though the kitchen is still somewhat cluttered. It’s downstairs and near the front door, so it’s where a lot of things got dropped before I tried to take them any farther. I have things in the cabinets, but I need to get a few organizational items to really finish setting up. The bedroom is set up to be able to sleep. My clothes are in various suitcases and bins in different rooms. The closets are tiny, so I’m figuring out other things I can do. I’m putting hooks on the closet walls for some things. My knit clothes are all getting folded and put in cubes that go on shelves. I’m probably going to get a couple of zip-up wardrobes at Ikea to go in the basement for out-of-season clothes. In the meantime, getting dressed in the morning can be a bit of a hunting expedition.

The living room (or I guess it would be considered a den) is mostly set up, though I still need to shelve all the books. I also need to get a rug and a sofa, but it will have to be a small sofa and something that you can take apart so it will fit through the door. I was looking at one at a furniture store here, but the door would have to be six inches wider to get it into the room (it’s not even all that narrow a door. It’s a modern sliding glass door, so I don’t know who could buy this small sofa and get it into their house). So I may end up doing Ikea for that, too. In the meantime, I’m using my patio lounger as a recliner for watching TV.

My office is pretty much a lost cause for now. I’m going to get all new furniture for that room, so the books will be mostly unshelved for the time being. I’m trying to get back into a writing schedule, but I’m using a laptop desk and migrating around the house until I get the office figured out. I think I’ve found a desk that will work, and if I key off that, the office will end up being kind of steampunky.

Then there’s the yard. I learned from a neighbor that this house had been abandoned for years until the people I bought it from got it at auction and remodeled it. I guess they got it early in the year and were working during the winter, so there wasn’t much going on in the yard. Now it’s exploded as spring has hit. It’s been allowed to run wild. They took out a few trees that were dangerously close to the house, but they didn’t get rid of any plants. There are a lot of flowers out there. But there are also a lot of weeds. I’ve discovered some poison ivy, and I’m trying to identify what else is out there so I’ll know what to dig up or kill and what to encourage. In the meantime, it looks kind of wild. My neighbor has offered to let me use some of his power tools, but I’m not sure you could get a mower through the yard because it’s a pretty steep hill. I’m planning to get rid of what grass there is and replace it with ground cover.

I know I have a few redbud trees, a plum tree or two (but I don’t know if they’re ornamental or if they bear fruit), and a maple, but I’m not sure of the other trees. There’s a huge bush that turned out to be a lilac. There are a lot of plants that seem to be various kinds of lilies, but they haven’t bloomed yet. I discovered the “identify” feature on my phone that looks up what you’ve taken pictures of, and that’s helped me figure out some of the plants, but I know some of their identifications are wrong, so I’m not sure how much I trust it. I may have to take my phone to a garden center and play “kill or keep” before I decide what plants to buy.

I’ve been living on frozen dinners for a couple of weeks since the kitchen has been too disorganized for cooking. I think I’m going to graduate myself to convenience meals this week. The stove has a glass top, so I’m going to have to learn how to use that at least enough to boil pasta. Then maybe next week I’ll move back to real cooking, of the sort that requires chopping and measuring. Right now, things are too chaotic for that.

I do love the house, though. It’s much quieter than the apartment. I’m near the end of a dead-end street, so there’s next to no traffic, and I don’t have an upstairs neighbor’s kid jumping up and down and screaming. Supposedly, shaking up routines and doing things in different ways is good for creativity. If so, then I should become wildly creative because the house is so different from anywhere I’ve ever lived that I can’t just put things in the obvious places that correspond with where they’ve gone before. I’m having to come up with entirely different organizational schemes that involve entirely different routines.

I’m trying to get back to writing instead of spending all day unpacking and organizing. I’m alternating a little work with a little housework. We’ll see if I can focus enough to get anything done.

Life

Moving Break

It looks like I’ll be closing on the house either Thursday evening or Friday morning, and I’ll start moving soon after that, with the furniture going on April 21, so I think I’m going to take a break from posting for a week or so. That’s just one more thing to deal with when I’m already pretty overwhelmed.

Yesterday morning I had the final walkthrough to make sure they’d done the repairs I asked for. That also meant I got to see the backyard redbud trees in full bloom. I hope they’re still pretty when I get there. Today has been the Getting Stuff Done day. I’ve set up electricity, water, and Internet at the new place. Now I just need to finalize the insurance and the wire transfer for the purchase.

I’ve already boxed up a lot of books, probably at least a carload. As soon as I close, I’m going to try to get a load over. I don’t want to get a bunch of new boxes, so the plan is to fill up all the boxes I’ve got, take them to the house (it’s about a 5-minute drive), unload the boxes in the spare room that won’t have any furniture in it yet, then bring the empty boxes back and fill them for another trip. Almost all the fiction is boxed up. I just have the reference books and other nonfiction and the “brag bookcase” of the books I wrote. That’s still a lot of books. Since the earliest I could get movers was the 21st, I hope to have just about everything but the furniture and the daily life essentials (the bedding, some clothes, enough dishes to eat breakfast that morning) at the new place by then. And then I’ll just need to clean the old place and get the new place properly set up.

When I was getting ready to move about this time last year, I was doing a massive purge, so I had to make a lot of decisions about what to keep, and then I had to take things to the various donation places, and that took a lot of time. For this move, I don’t have to make decisions and I probably won’t be getting rid of things (I may pare the wardrobe a bit further now that I know what I haven’t worn in the past year, but I may not worry about running things around to thrift shops before I move). It’ll be a lot easier to just throw things in boxes.

While I was out yesterday, I stopped by a couple of furniture stores, and I think I may have found the sofa (loveseat) I want. I’m going to wait until I get my furniture in the house before I make any decisions, though. I also need to get a washer and dryer, some blinds, and lots of storage stuff. I will be breaking my personal record for most money spent in a single month, given that I’m buying a house, plus getting all this stuff.

But this will be the view from my living room. It’s glorious at this time of year, and the redbuds will also have lovely fall color. Which reminds me, I’ll also be getting more plants for the yard and deck while I’m shopping. But that will wait. I never put out plants until after Easter. We’re still getting freezes at night. I’ll be planting morning glories as soon as the weather is right.

A hilly backyard full of trees just starting to leaf out. Among the trees are some bright pink redbuds

Now to tick the last few tasks off today’s epic to-do list.

Life

Online Window Shopping

Since I’m in the process of buying a house (should be closing next week) and since I got rid of a lot of my stuff before I moved last year, I’m going to be doing a lot of shopping for house-related items in the near future. I planned to essentially start over when I found a house, which means I’ll be replacing a lot of things, like kitchen gear, linens, etc. Plus I’ll need some living room furniture and office furniture. And I’ll need area rugs, since my old house had wall-to-wall carpeting and the new house has the original 1945 hardwoods upstairs and vinyl plank downstairs.

Which means my biggest distraction lately has been online window shopping as I look for ideas. An idea will pop into my head, and then I’ll find myself searching for that thing. In fact, I just got distracted by an idea for what to do about curtains for the sliding door in the living room. I can spend hours browsing websites for various stores, picking out things I like. This reminds of when I used to read the Sears catalogue for fun when I was a kid. I made a game out of mentally decorating my imaginary future home by picking out things from the catalogue. Or I would choose my favorite item on each page. I didn’t much care for the toy catalogue, but I loved looking at the housewares, all the bedspreads, curtains, rugs, dishes, and the like. I don’t think I’d like most of what I picked out then (it was the 70s, so I probably wouldn’t like anything that was in that catalogue), but I still enjoy the game, only now I play it on the Ikea website and I have a specific house in mind.

This is making it hard to write because things to look up will pop into my head while I’m working and I get so distracted that I just give up and look it up, but then that starts a rabbit trail of thinking of something else, and so forth, and next thing I know, I’m looking up how to install curtain rails on the ceiling and wondering if a two-track system that would allow me to have sheers for daytime privacy and blackout curtains for movie/TV viewing would work, and which ones would I want.

I’m not buying anything yet, though. I have furniture I can live with, though I’ll be using my zero-gravity patio lounger in the living room until I get a sofa. I want to live in the house some before I figure out what I want. I want to see where the light falls and how it feels with the furniture I have, then I’ll figure out what storage items I need and what rugs, curtains, and furniture will give me the feeling I want.

Buying all this stuff may be a challenge, as I live in a smallish town without most of the usual big-box stores. Even in larger areas, all the places where I used to shop for house things are now gone, like Linens and Things and Bed, Bath & Beyond. Sears is a memory. I don’t know what other department stores still exist. We have a Belk here, but about 90 percent of their stuff is online only, and I want to see and touch things before I buy them so I can be sure of the feel of fabric and what the color really is. I may have to do a road trip to the DC area where they have more stores and I can do some serious shopping.

I may look around here at antique shops, and there are a few places around here where you can get Amish and Mennonite-made wooden items. One nice thing about being in a “historical” area is that the place is loaded with antique malls. I don’t necessarily need anything of great value, but I may find interesting vintage pieces that fit with the character of the house.

In the meantime, I’m doing a lot of looking around online. Ikea has a lot of storage and organization stuff, which is giving me ideas for dealing with this house’s tiny closets (one downside of a cute older home). I’m reading books on home decor and doing Internet searches.

I may just have to decide that I’m not going to get much work done until the move’s over. If I do something, then great, but I won’t expect it of myself, and I can use this time to think. If I’m thinking about decorating as I try to write, then maybe I’ll start thinking about my story ideas while I’m packing and moving.

writing, Books

Tired of Tropes?

One of the hot topics in the writing world lately has been tropes. These are familiar story elements that you see in many works. They’re the sort of thing you look at as a reader and say, “Oh, I like that.”

Some examples include things like friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, marriage of convenience, grump/sunshine (in which one member of the couple is kind of a grouch and the other is more sunny, often bringing about emotional healing for the grump).

Most of the more common examples come from the romance world, but some fantasy ones I can think of include the Chosen One (the hero is the subject of some sort of destiny or prophecy), the Lost Heir (the farmboy/kitchen assistant who’s the rightful heir to the throne, sometimes also a Chosen One), the Unlikely Hero (ordinary person is in the wrong place at the wrong time and has to carry out some heroic task), You’re a Wizard! (person discovers they have magical powers), and Portal to a Magical World (people from our world visit a fantasy world — think Narnia).

There’s been a lot of discourse among writers about whether this emphasis on tropes is good or bad. They’re a big part of “writing to market,” in which you find out what things are popular and write that, and in marketing. Letting readers know that the things they like are in your books helps them know what books they might want. Tropes are a big element in what’s hot on TikTok, but book graphics showing the tropes in a book have been popular all over social media, like this one I did for Tea and Empathy:

Shows book cover for Tea and Empathy on the screen of an e-reader being held by hands. Text around it with arrows pointing to book reads "Amnesia, Found Family, Mysterious Village, Grump/Sunshine"

On the other hand, there are starting to be complaints about books that feel like they’re basically a bunch of tropes stuck together without any depth and about readers who treat the trope list as a checklist, so they only read the books with their chosen trope. There are writers who focus their writing one one popular trope, since that’s what their readers want.

I like the idea of getting information to help me find books that have things in them that I like, but the things I’d look for tend to be a lot more complicated than you can get in one of those trope graphics. For instance:

  • The road trip/quest adventure in which characters gradually become friends or fall in love as they face adversity together.A
  • December-set romantic comedy that’s not explicitly a Christmas book, but that just happens to have some of those vibes as a backdrop to the story.
  • The Worst/Best Thing — the worst thing that can happen in a person’s life may also be the best because they wouldn’t have reached their full potential otherwise (think the movie Titanic. Being on the Titanic was probably the worst thing that could happen to Rose, but if it hadn’t happened, her life would have been very different)
  • In Another Time/Place — people meet in different timelines/realities and are always drawn to each other, though in some of these there are complications (this isn’t the same as Fated Mates because it’s not really about fate or destiny in which they have no choice about being together, but rather that they’re so perfectly suited for each other that no matter when or where they meet, they’ll fall in love)
  • So Bad at It That They’re Actually Good — when someone who seems like a failure at something (usually magic) turns out to actually be really good at some related thing, and they were only failing because they were trying to do something that didn’t fit their abilities. In fantasy, it’s usually the failed student wizard who turns out to be able to do a rare kind of magic no one else can do that uses a different kind of power and skill than regular magic.

Try fitting those into a hashtag!

I don’t think there’s any harm in fitting things you and readers love into your books, in letting readers know about the elements that are in your books, or in looking for elements you love when choosing what to read. I just worry about readers who only want to read one thing or writers who feel constrained into writing only one thing because that’s what their readers want. I can barely write one subgenre for more than a few books without going stir crazy. That may be why I’m only moderately successful rather than making the big bucks. Of course, people are free to read what they want to read, but it seems weird to me to not only limit yourself to one genre, but to one kind of story in one genre. That would be like reading the same book over and over again. I’m also not fond of the idea of boiling a whole story down to one element. I have a list of things I look for and get excited about when I find them (sometimes it’s a pleasant surprise when they come up in a book and I wasn’t expecting them), but that’s not all I read.