Life, exploring

Over the Mountain

Last Friday’s adventure involved a lot of driving in the mountains. I need to get a topographical map because the road map doesn’t tell the full story or adequately prepare me for the road I’ll be driving on. I think the map might even straighten the roads a bit instead of showing every twist and turn. I’ve learned that if an otherwise straight road on the map has a section that suddenly shows a lot of zigzags, that’s a sign that the road is going through mountains, and those zigzags are switchbacks and hairpin turns. I’ve been reading about going through mountain passes all my life but it turns out my impression of what that meant has been inaccurate. I’ve pictured a cleft between mountains, a simple up and over in a relatively low spot. But that turns out to be an inaccurate impression because that relatively low spot is still up pretty high, so you have to climb to get to it, and that often means going along the side of a mountain with a lot of switchbacks.

So, I set out heading west on what amounts to the major east-west road around here. I don’t know how old this road is, but there’s a coaching inn on it that dates to 1812. That’s before you get to the mountains, but there’s nothing much past it until you get through the mountains, and the town past the mountains was pretty old, so I think the road through the mountains may be that old. It was definitely built before they did things like dynamite mountains to put roads through. It was actually kind of a fun drive, if sometimes a bit harrowing. I was very glad I was driving my Subaru, which has all-wheel drive and is built for that sort of thing. While twists and turns were kind of fun with the stick shift in my old car, this might have been a bit much for that car to handle.

At the top of a mountain, there was a scenic overlook at a Civil War battlefield, where the Confederate army dug in to defend the pass (which suggests the road through the mountains may date back at least that far). They’ve preserved one of the trenches, but you can also see where there are terraces dug into the side of the mountain. There’s a short hiking trail with signs along the way containing excerpts from letters sent by a soldier who was there, talking about his experiences. On a sunny autumn day, it was chilly up there, so I can’t imagine spending part of a winter there (they got snow around there early this morning). It did make for a glorious vantage point for viewing the valley and more mountains beyond it. The mountains here are in waves of ranges with valleys of varying size in between, so it’s a bit of harrowing mountain driving, then flat valley, then more mountains, then flat driving, etc.

Rows of gentle mountains, covered in a patchwork of green, gold, and red trees. There are pine trees in the foreground and there's a bright blue sky above.
Rows and rows of mountains, with a little valley between each row and some interesting driving along the way. This is looking west, so probably West Virginia in the distance.

After a couple more harrowing mountain passes, I reached a valley with a little town that’s close to the West Virginia border (if I’d known how close it was, I might have driven on a bit just to add another state to my list). They were having their fall festival. I walked around a bit and got some tourist information. This area is a big producer of maple syrup, and they have a syrup festival in the early spring that I’ll have to go to. In this area, the trees were all red and gold, and it was beautiful, but I didn’t manage to get a good photo because the angle of the sun was wrong.

Elements of the festival were scattered around the area, and I headed off the main road to get to where they were supposed to be doing more stuff, but that road turned out to be a tiny byway that really twisted around the mountains. The place I was heading seemed to appear out of nowhere around a bend, right at a time when I had two trucks behind me, so I couldn’t stop abruptly or turn back. It’s a place that’s part of the syrup festival, so now I know what to look for when I go back. I ended up making a loop and going what the locals call “over the mountain” at a different pass, one my friend calls “the one that’s not scary,” and now I know what she means. It’s a bit more straightforward up and over drive.

A view from a mountain pass, with lower mountains and the start of fall color in front and the blue ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains in back, with a bright blue sky overhead.
Looking east from the “not scary” pass, the leaves are just starting to turn, and you can see how the Blue Ridge Mountains got their name. That’s the blue ridge in the background.

In all, I saw some beautiful fall color and found several places I’ve read about that now I know how to get back to for more in-depth exploration. A lot of the driving was through forests, in places where the trees arch over the road and form a tunnel. That’s one of my favorite things, to drive or walk through a tunnel of trees. I opened my sunroof so I could see the trees over my head.

This weekend’s adventure is going to involve an open house day at the Mennonite Heritage Farm. I hope to learn some stuff I can use in my books. I may also visit an apple orchard that’s nearby as I continue my quest for apple cider donuts.

Life

Off on an Adventure

via GIPHY

 

This weekend is supposed to be peak fall colors for the mountains along the border with West Virginia, but Saturday is supposed to be windier and will likely be more crowded, so I’m switching my Friday and Saturday, taking today as a “weekend” to head west into the mountains and see if I can see some leaves. Supposedly, there are some Civil War battlefields that are now parks that have good views, and the farthest west county in Virginia is having a festival today and tomorrow. I may find some apple cider donuts. I hope to have a full report next week.

In the meantime, if you like cozy fantasy like my Tales of Rydding Village series, Monday, October 14, is the Cozy the Day Away sale, where you’ll find a whole bunch of cozy fantasy books cheap or even free. Tea and Empathy will be one of these books, but I’m sure if you’re reading my blog you’ve already read it, right? If not, here’s your chance to try it cheap. I’m looking forward to loading my tablet up with good books to enjoy on cool nights with a cup of cocoa. On Monday, you’ll be able to find the list of books on sale here (but you won’t be able to see anything until then).

Life

Milling Around

I had a big day of exploring on Saturday, and I think some of it may count as research for my books.

The main event was Mill Day at a nearby preserved historic farm. They were going to be running their restored 18th century water-powered mill, and I was very excited about this. I’ve been fascinated by water-powered mills since I was a little kid. We had a print of a water mill — I think it was even in my bedroom at one point — and there was something about it that made me want to crawl into that picture. There might also have been a Captain Kangaroo episode about a mill (I think a lot of my lifelong interests can be traced back to either Captain Kangaroo or Mister Rogers). I saw one water wheel on a trip to England, but it wasn’t a functioning mill. Otherwise, I’d never seen one before.

A grist mill made of logs and stones with a water wheel. There's a weeping willow tree in the foreground, and the sky is a bright blue.
A water mill! I was so excited to see this.

So, when I got to this farm after a pleasant country drive and the first thing I saw when I got out of the car was the water wheel turning, I got way too excited. I was practically shaking with glee to watch the water wheel turn. Then I got to go inside and see the millstone turning and the meal coming out. It’s a pretty noisy operation, which was a detail I need for potential scenes in the Rydding Village books, in case we visit the mill during working hours. This place also had a nature trail along the mill pond, which I walked, and some other demonstrations that were mostly for kids, but they also let me work the water pump.

My original plan had been to drive home via the Blue Ridge Parkway, but the whole parkway is closed for a damage survey after Hurricane Helene. I don’t think our end, the very northern part, was damaged all that badly, but they got hit a lot worse over there than we did here, so there might have been some trees down. I checked on the map for other things I could do on the way home, and it turned out that there was another mill nearby, and this one has been in continuous commercial operation since 1750. They still mill different kinds of flour and corn there. So I drove over to that mill. You can go around inside it and even go out onto a walkway that overlooks the water wheel. You can buy flour and meal in the shop there. I chatted a while with the miller and got some buckwheat pancake mix and some corn meal (both ended up being really good).

A big mill made of golden-toned wood, with a water wheel on the side. The sky is a bright blue.
Mill #2. They actually mill grains here.

The next stop was the Enchanted Mushroom Festival in a village just down the road from where I live. They had some interesting educational displays about fungi and mushrooms, but otherwise it was the same festival vendors you see at all the local events, so I didn’t stay too long there.

But I realized that once I was in that village, I was pretty close to the mountains to the west of my town that I haven’t visited before (the ones I can kind of see from one corner of my back yard), so I drove in that direction. I saw a sign for a recreational area in the George Washington National Forest and turned off down a narrow road up into the mountains, where I found this small lake/large pond with a picnic area nearby. I’d brought some hot tea and cookies and had my afternoon tea in the picnic area, then walked around a bit. There’s a hiking trail there, but I hadn’t brought hiking boots and it was pretty rugged, so I decided to do that another day. That spot is only half an hour from my house.

A mountain lake surrounded by trees, some with a hint of autumn color. There are mountains in the distance. The sky is blue with wisps of white cloud.
This beautiful spot is only half an hour from my home.
A cluster of orange and white mushrooms right out of a fairytale grow among dry leaves on a forest floor.
I found the enchanted mushrooms!

Ironically, that area was where I saw the true enchanted mushrooms. These were right out of a storybook. Apparently, mushroom foraging is big around here and the people putting on the mushroom festival are professionals at that, teaching classes. I’m wary enough to stick to eating what I buy in stores, but I now know to look for interesting mushrooms when walking in the woods.

It was on the way back that I realized how far into the mountains I’d gone because I had mountains ahead of me. I guess the road goes up gradually in elevation but also through a pass so I didn’t realize I’d gone through mountains on the way to that lake. The mountains are smaller than I thought, so they’re closer than I realized. I think I prefer these ancient, sort of worn-down mountains covered in trees to the more rugged, snow-capped mountains like the Rockies and the Alps. The Appalachians are so old that the mountains in Ireland, Scotland, and Norway are all part of the same range because the range was formed before the continents split apart. Maybe that’s why I feel so at home here. My heritage is Scottish, Irish, and Norwegian, so I’m living in the same mountain range that’s in my ancestral lands.

Supposedly, this weekend will be peak fall color in West Virginia, so I may head over there. I might take Friday off and go then so that it will be less crowded, then work on Saturday.

Publicity, publishing business

Marketing Ideas

I’ve been on a learning binge lately, as it seems the latest marketing trend for people offering services to writers is to put on “summits.” These are generally several days worth of recorded presentations or interviews with various people related to writing, usually “book coaches,” marketing people, editors, and sometimes writers. All of these people promote the event to their mailing lists. They’re free to attend, but you have to sign up to get access, and you usually only get access to the sessions for 24-48 hours after they’re posted, but you can upgrade by paying a fee to get longer access (usually lifetime), and there are usually some other bonuses for those who upgraded. And then they usually have it set up so that to get the handout for the session or whatever other thing the speaker refers to, you have to sign up for the speaker’s mailing list, which means you’ll get invited to even more summits, and it increases exponentially.

I can’t resist the opportunity to learn or to get free things, so I’ve been doing a lot of these. I’ve yet to find one that would have been worth the upgrade, but I’ve picked up a few tidbits here and there, including a lot of promotion and marketing ideas. I guess I’m always looking for that golden nugget that will really make a huge difference.

It really seems like I should be doing more video. I hate to dive into Tik Tok, in part because of security concerns and in part because I just don’t want to deal with it, but supposedly it can really sell books. I don’t know if I should revive my YouTube channel and do more videos, like possibly some “vlogs” to talk about my writing and give updates, in addition to the writing how-tos. I keep coming back to the fact that I’m trying to target readers, so would they really watch videos? But it does seem that when I post a lot to Instagram, my sales go up.

I’ve started doing a little advertising on Amazon, but I haven’t noticed a huge difference in sales. Then again, this is usually about the time after a recent release that sales tend to drop, so maybe the sales staying about the same is actually an increase over what it would have been.

Of course, here I’m preaching to the choir. If you’re reading this, you’ve already found me and probably already read my books. My challenge has been in reaching more people and convincing them to try my books. Once someone reads something, they tend to be hooked. The trick is getting awareness in the first place, especially when what I like to do is write, not make graphics or videos. I’ve heard that most of the promo stuff does no good, so you should just use that time/energy to write more books, but at some point you do need to reach new readers to make all that time spent writing worthwhile.

Are there ways/places you hear about books? The best marketing is word of mouth from other readers, so the best way to keep me writing is to tell other people about my books. Otherwise, I’ll have to find a day job, which would really cut into my writing time, so fewer books, released more slowly.

Life, fantasy

A Magical Village

I’m still recovering from last weekend, when I was not only very busy but also more social than I’ve been in years. It was the weekend of this city’s big festival, the Queen City Mischief and Magic Festival, which started as a Harry Potter themed festival but they’re now calling it a general celebration of all fantasy fiction. Thousands of people descend on this small city and fill the downtown area. Apparently, hotels for miles around are sold out for the weekend, and people make their reservations for the next year the moment they become available. It’s pretty wild.

I’ve described it as an open-air ComicCon, but without the panels and with the downtown shops being the dealers’ room. Or it could be like a Renaissance festival, but fantasy-themed instead of historical and in a Victorian downtown setting instead of a festival ground, and with shops and restaurants instead of booths, with various activities and shows. Except it’s free to get in. Thousands of people roaming the town in costumes, shopping, eating, and seeing the sights. There were costumed characters roaming and doing meet-and-greets and photo ops. They set up some backdrop vignettes for taking photos. The characters made arrivals at the train station a few times a day. The Shakespeare theater did wand dueling choreography and dance classes, and there were Victorian-style dances being taught in the middle of one of the streets that was blocked off for the festival. I saw Morris dancers performing, Elizabethian dancers in costume dancing, and a bagpipe band. There were a few wildlife rescue shows, one with reptiles and one with owls and raptors. There were a few scavenger hunt-type activities. You could collect charms from the characters to go on dragon pins, beads to make friendship bracelets (found at various shops), or little dragon figures (at some shops or from police officers patrolling the streets). At one point, the carillon at one of the downtown churches was playing themes from various fantasy movies.

My job was running character meet-and-greet areas. On Saturday, I had Professor Sprout and Professor Trelawney, and a few others came and went. They had little areas set up that looked like their classrooms. People could talk to them and they had some kind of interactive activity, and they could get photos taken with them or of themselves in that setting. That one was on the side of downtown near the farmers’ market. Sunday I got to be on the main street, where they had a bunch of scenes set up in an old furniture store. The front display windows were big enough to be rooms, and in one they had the potions lab and in the other Professor McGonagall’s office. In the rest of the space they had common rooms from each of the houses set up, as well as some other settings for selfies. I mostly welcomed people in and managed crowd control, but I ended up also serving as an information booth. Sunday I was also Official Dog Petter. For some reason, all the dogs would drag their people over to me. I got lots of good puppy snuggles.

The people watching was amazing. It was mostly families, and most people were in some kind of costume. Some were really creative. A lot were related to Harry Potter, but there were also a lot of Disney princesses, dragons, and general fantasy-type stuff, like Renn Faire outfits with fairy wings. It was so fun watching the kids react to things.

An old-fashioned bank vault full of treasure is guarded by a dragon so large that only its mouth with glowing red teeth shows.
The vault in the downtown bank’s basement is well-guarded.

I did manage to get away from my post briefly on Sunday to see one of the really cool things that was set up. There’s an old bank downtown that’s basically the perfect old bank, right out of a movie (in fact, they do film movies there). They turned it into Gringott’s bank from Harry Potter, but they didn’t have to do much to it. High school kids dressed up as goblins worked at the teller windows, and then down in the basement they had the old vault open, filled with treasure, and guarded by a dragon. There was a long line to get in, guarded by cadets from a nearby military academy. The woman working with me dragged me down there and got us in past the line, since we were wearing staff shirts and her daughter was one of the goblins. I’d been wanting to see the inside of that bank, anyway. They use it for special events like concerts and balls, and it’s absolutely gorgeous.

We didn’t get hit as hard by Helene as they did farther south, but we got a lot of rain on Friday and there was some flooding in the area. Saturday, it was nice and sunny, so we were fortunate. It started raining lightly late in the day on Sunday when the remnants of Helene came back. The lady at the gift shop across the street from where I was working ran over and gave me a plastic rain poncho, so I didn’t get too badly drenched when I walked home.

By Monday, my body was a bit mad at me, given that for two days in a row I’d walked a mile, walked around a bit more, was on my feet for three hours, mostly standing, then I walked a mile up a high hill. And then there was the introvert battery drain. I really enjoyed all the social interaction, but after years of mostly solitude, I was around thousands of people, interacted with hundreds of people, and had extensive chats with a few people. But it was enough fun that I’m definitely doing it again next year. I love seeing how the whole town comes together to put this on. There are all the shops and restaurants and community groups, plus all the volunteers, and then there are the property owners who let them use the empty spaces like the bank and the furniture store. Plus the church that puts on a feast in the church hall and plays music on the bells.

I should be recovered by this weekend, when there are more festivals, but I’m just going, not working. The main one is a farm day at the Virginia Tech Agricultural Extension farm near here with historic farm buildings. They’re going to be demonstrating an 18th century water-driven grist mill. I’ve been fascinated with water-driven mills since I was a little kid, but I haven’t seen one in active use in person. They’re making a whole festival of it, with hayrides to tour the farm and a nearby volunteer fire department selling barbecue. Then a nearby town is having a mushroom festival. I may do some touring in between, depending on what roads are passable by then. The weather was worse closer to the mountains east of me, so they had more damage.

TV

More on The Office

I’m still rewatching The Office, watching an episode after listening to the podcast episode from The Office Ladies, and I’m noticing character details that even they don’t seem to have registered. The one that’s hitting me in this go-round is that Jim is what Michael is trying to be, while Michael is what Jim is in danger of turning into.

Michael wants to be the life of the party, the one who keeps morale in the office up with his hilarious jokes and pranks. He sees himself as well-liked and successful, the hot bachelor who can snag any woman. But he doesn’t seem to have any dreams of moving beyond where he is. He’s found his niche of success as regional manager of a paper company, and he only does anything toward moving beyond that when his position is threatened. He likes being the big fish in a small pond, and his dreams are pure dreams — stand-up comedy, screenwriting, improv, acting, being a secret agent. They aren’t anything he actually does much about. He writes a screenplay, which stays in a drawer (where it belongs, to be honest). He doesn’t seem to have made any effort to improve, so it was merely about playing out his personal fantasy of being a secret agent, not a serious effort to become a screenwriter. He takes the improv class, but considers himself to already be a genius, so he resists any effort at guidance by the instructor and alienates the rest of the class by being a poor collaborator.

Jim actually is the life of the party who keeps morale up in the office with his jokes and pranks, but a big difference is that his morale boosting comes from him paying attention to what the other people want and what will boost them. When Michael’s out of the office and Jim comes up with fun things to do, like the Office Olympics or the screenplay table read, he doesn’t build it around himself. He focuses on encouraging the others and drawing them out, like giving timid Phyllis the role of the sexy girlfriend in the table read or finding a “sport” for everyone in the Olympics. He even often overcomes his own dislike for Michael by soothing his ego, like giving him an Olympic medal in a stirring closing ceremony or joining him for a karaoke duet when Michael crashes his party at his home. Jim is the guy popular with women, managing to win the women Michael wants but turns off with his weird behavior. Michael talks about how cute Pam is (or used to be), but Pam falls in love with Jim. Jim’s the one who takes the hot girl (a pre-famous Amy Adams) home after Michael spends the day trying to impress her.

But Michael is also a cautionary tale for Jim, what could happen to him if he stays where he is. Is the best he can hope for being regional manager of a paper company someday? Will his jokes and office antics go from being a morale boost to making his staff cringe and keeping the HR department busy? Will he continue to have dreams that he never acts on? That’s why the later seasons are difficult to watch for me because he seems to realize all this, himself, but when he tries to act on his pent-up dreams instead of just playing them out in a computer game, he gets cast as the bad guy and it nearly destroys his marriage because it draws attention away from his family and leaves his wife carrying the load. That’s unfortunate because he had supported her so strongly in pursuing her dreams, but at that time they were just dating and didn’t have two small kids to deal with, so the situations aren’t equal. I’m not at that point in the rewatch yet. I’m still in season two, when Jim is pining for an engaged (but clearly unhappy) Pam and avoiding going after other, better jobs because that means being away from Pam.

Last night’s episode was “The Injury,” which may be the ultimate episode of this series. It doesn’t get into any of the ongoing arcs, but it so perfectly represents what the show is about, with Michael being so childish and demanding about his minor injury that he completely misses Dwight’s more serious injury (and then still tries to take the spotlight even after they realize Dwight has a concussion), and Jim having to step up and be the adult in the room to take care of Dwight and deal with Michael (the scene with the spray bottle in the van is one of the funniest things ever on television).

One thing I love about this series is that the documentary format did away with the studio audience/laugh track thing for TV comedy and let the TV audience decide for ourselves when to laugh. I’ve now reached the point where I can’t watch old-school sitcoms with a laugh track.

I found something I wrote back in late 2020, probably for a TV forum, on how various characters on The Office would deal with the pandemic, if you teleported the season 2-3 cast/situation to 2020 (rather than where they’d have actually been in 2020). I may have to post that next week, especially if I still have Book Brain and can’t come up with anything else.

writing

Writing Mode

I’m in big writing mode, about a third of the way through Rydding Village book 3, which means I don’t have a lot of brainpower for much else. It’s been so long since I’ve doing this kind of serious writing, back early in the year, before the move. Since then, I’ve mostly been editing and revising, proofreading, and all the business stuff. It feels so good to be back in the mode of seeing a story unfold. I’ve plotted this book, but I’m still discovering fun things along the way as I write.

The weather’s even cooperated, giving me some good rainy days, which are good for writing. I don’t really have an office in my current home. The living room, kitchen, dining room, and office are all one big room. I set up a little sliver of space between the living room area and the kitchen/dining room area, with a laptop stand and a desk chair facing a window. I can sit there to write and look out the window at some trees. One handy thing about everything being one room is that snacks and drinks are easy to get to. In my old house, I had to go down the stairs to get to the kitchen instead of taking a few steps.

A laptop computer, a lap desk, and a red composition book sit on a metal mesh circular table in the foreground, with a green lawn, trees, and a wooden fence in the background.
The back porch office for brainstorming mode. If I’m actually writing, I’ll bring out the laptop stand so I can get it to the optimum height.

When it’s not raining, I take the laptop stand to the back porch and sit outside to work, though I’m likely to get distracted by the antics of the squirrels, especially now, when they’re running around with acorns and nuts in their mouths, looking for places to hide them. If I’m sitting really still other than my fingers moving on the keyboard, they seem to forget I’m there and will run across the porch, sometimes even under my chair, which startles me. There’s nothing like having a squirrel run under your chair and between your feet to jolt you out of your writing flow.

Writing these books makes me want all the tea, which is another nice thing about having my office essentially in the kitchen. I can get up to make a pot of tea, write a little while the kettle boils, then write a little more while the tea steeps.

Now, back to the writing!

 

Life

Fall Festival Time

A single branch on an otherwise green tree is bright orange. There's a small lake in the background.
The trees are just starting to turn autumn colors.

For years, around this time of year I would find myself researching other places to live. I was getting impatient for fall, while it was still in the 90s and felt like summer in Texas. I’d read the fall issues of magazines and dream of being in a place where September was time for warm beverages, walks in woods where the leaves were starting to turn colors, and the weather was getting cooler.

And now, I’m in a place like that. The trees are just starting to turn. The mornings are chilly — I have to put on a sweater to sit on my porch — and the afternoons are pleasantly warm. I’m getting baking urges, and I want to drink All the Tea. It keeps blowing my mind that I’m actually getting September in September, not the upper 90s that they’re having back in Texas.

This week we’ve had both kinds of my favorite fall weather. It’s been rainy and cool, and today it’s cool and sunny (now that the morning fog has burned off) but will be warm in the afternoon. It’ll be rainy again tomorrow, which is nice because I’m getting my flu shot this afternoon, and a good rainy afternoon is great for huddling under a blanket with a book while feeling icky in the aftermath of the shot. Even if I’m not feeling icky, I’ll pretend I am so I can have a proper wallow.

Then next weekend, all the fall festivals seem to really get going. I’m volunteering for the one in my town, since I can walk there and it will make traffic nasty enough that I won’t be able to get around, as close as I live to downtown. After that, I’ll have to look at the calendar and prioritize which ones I want to go to. There’s an apple butter festival, a mushroom festival and a couple of harvest festivals, that I know of. They’re putting decorative scarecrows in the park, and there’s going to be a pumpkin float in the lake at the park.

Yes, I do seem to have moved into a Hallmark movie. Still haven’t found the flannel-clad woodworking guy yet, but maybe at one of these festivals …

I’ve been making good progress on my writing, so I should be able to get away enough to really enjoy my surroundings. I’ll be picking up Instagram fodder, so it kind of counts as work.

Life

My Hero Identity

I recently read a book that was about creating some kind of superhero persona or heroic alter ego as a way of motivating yourself to do things, so for instance, you’re not just exercising, you’re training yourself for some heroic task, like going on a journey to Mordor or being a secret agent. (I actually thought the book would be about something different when I checked it out of the library, but I read it anyway) Along the way, you’re supposed to also be planning grand adventures that you could actually do, finding real-world ways to live out the kind of adventures you might read about or see in movies.

That got me started wondering, what would my alter ego be? I don’t have too many grand adventures I want to carry out. I’m old enough that my idea of fantasy travel right now would involve first-class flights and either nice hotels or interesting bed and breakfast type places. I have no desire to bungee jump over gorges or parasail, or anything like that. If I just focus on what kind of character I might “play” in order to get more fit and do the kind of exploring that interests me, I might be some kind of wandering druid/bard who goes exploring to see more of nature and learn about plants and trees and pays my way by telling stories.

While they talk in terms of superhero secret identities, the characters they describe seem to have more to do with D&D character classes, so maybe they just mean that this is your secret “super” self, not necessarily that you’re a superhero. Oddly, the town where I live now does have a superhero. There’s a guy who dresses up like Spider-Man to do parkour and good deeds around town. He’s a local celebrity. People in the town Facebook group will respond to missing pets posts by commenting that they saw Spider-Man out looking for that missing pet. When there were some car break-ins at the town swimming pool, he started patrolling the parking lot (presumably either to be a deterrent with his presence or to call the police rather than shooting webs at anyone breaking into cars). There’s a big local festival coming up, and I’m volunteering as a way to get involved in the community. Last weekend, there was a Zoom meeting for volunteers, and Spider-Man was in the meeting, because of course he’s volunteering. He’s apparently an integral part of all local events (he was the grand marshal of last year’s Christmas parade). He wore the mask, and his Zoom name was “Spidey.” So, if I did want to actually go around dressed in a hooded cloak and tending to the trees while telling stories, it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing in this town. People probably wouldn’t blink. There are people who hang out at the farmers market dressed in fantasy/medievalish clothes and hand out quests to find the dragons hidden around town. People would assume I was with them.

It sounds kind of silly, but I did find my mindset changing when I started thinking of myself as that character. So, instead of sitting down at my computer to write, I’m crafting stories I’ll share with my adoring public in Ye Olde Amazon Tavern. Going on long walks in the mountains would be exactly the sort of thing I’d do, though I’d come home at the end of the hike instead of camping out or staying at an inn (one nice thing about living in the mountains—I can hike the Appalachian Trail for a few hours and then come home).

Now I just need to figure out why a druid/bard would be doing housework and cleaning the kitchen because that’s where I really need the motivation. Maybe not enough people tossed a coin to me after my storytelling session, so now I have to wash dishes to pay for my night’s stay at the inn.

I do have a few big adventures I’d like to do, though they’re less on the “adventure” side. I want to get back to Europe to hit a few of the places I haven’t visited and revisit some of the places I’ve lived or visited. Staying in a real castle is on my bucket list. I also want to see New Zealand and Alaska. For now, I hope to start really exploring this area. I think my big fall vacation will be to Yorktown/Williamsburg/Jamestown. It’s only a few hours away, the hotels aren’t expensive this time of year, and in addition to all the history stuff, there’s a big outlet mall with the shops they don’t have here, so I can replace my comfortable nice shoes (comfortable enough to walk downtown, but nice enough to go to concerts/theater/church) and maybe pick up some winter clothes that will be suited to this climate.

I also have some day trips planned. There are so many festivals in the fall, and there’s what looks like an interesting event at the Mennonite heritage center. Then there’s hiking and some drives to look at the autumn colors. The leaves have already started turning, and it feels like fall.

So I guess I’ll put on my druid/bard persona and get out there and do stuff — in addition to writing, of course. The bard has to tell stories to pay the bills.

writing, My Books

Starting the Next Book

I started writing Rydding Village #3 this week (title remains to be determined). I did the character development for the new characters last week and started plotting, then got a bit more into plotting this week, but then I decided that I needed to really “meet” the main characters for this book before I made more plot decisions, so then I started writing the first scene. I don’t know if it will remain the first scene or if this scene will even remain in the book, but it’s my current starting point.

The main couple in this book is made up of a character who appeared briefly in the second book and a character who has been mentioned but who has not appeared. At the moment, I know a lot more of their backstories than I know about what’s going to happen in the book. I’ve worked out a whole story that happens long before the book, which made me feel like I knew more about this story than I really did, so when I set out to outline this plot, I realized how vague it was. Maybe I’ll write that story and use it as a newsletter subscriber bonus at some point, but for now it’s mostly for my own benefit to explain why things are the way they are now.

This book is also going to start getting into the mystery of what’s going on with the village, why it’s abandoned and why it seems to be a magic magnet.

I don’t have a publication date planned yet. I’m a bit behind schedule because I always get overly optimistic about what I can get done. The plotting/planning took longer than I expected. As I said, I thought I had the whole book in my head, but when I started actually outlining, I realized that what I had was all backstory, not story. That often happens with my “shiny new ideas,” but this time it’s a book I need to write, not a distraction. I hope it means these characters will feel really vivid and come to life for me as I write them.

Next week is when the writing will begin in earnest and I start with things like target word counts.