Books

Hallmark in Space

One difference between my old house and my new place is that I no longer have a separate “library” room. Now, my bookcases are in my living room, which means that when I sit on the sofa (actually a chaise, as I don’t have room for an actual sofa) to watch TV, read, or work on my laptop, I’m looking at my book collection. That’s led to me getting the urge to reread books that catch my eye.

The one I’m reading right now is Promised Land, by Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice. Back in the 90s, these two authors teamed up for several books that are essentially science fiction romances. They have a lot of the tropes you’d expect from a romance novel, but they take place in science fiction worlds.

Promised Land is basically a Hallmark movie set on another planet. We’ve got the city girl ending up in the country when she inherits a ranch, complete with the trope of her being entirely inappropriately dressed for the environment in high heels and a short skirt. She even has a purse dog (or something like one). Then there’s the local guy she has to be married to for a year or they’ll both lose their land. Except it’s all on another world. It’s a backwater planet colonized fairly recently, and that’s the reason for the weird inheritance laws to keep the land with colonists rather than speculators. They found that the size of the plot they were given wasn’t enough to make it viable, so neighbors combined theirs, and to ensure that the plots stayed together, they married their children, with the marriage becoming legal upon the death of the last of the original owners. The heroine was sent off to boarding school on another planet and hasn’t come back. Oh, and the “purse dog” is a bug-like alien creature.

Then they throw in some trappings of historical romances. There’s a “wagon train” across this planet to get to the ranch, only the wagons are being pulled by solar-powered vehicles rather than oxen. I got on a weird kick about the westward expansion last summer, and I recognize some things in this book as being related to some specific incidents from history. Knowing how Connie Willis does research, I bet she read the same accounts I did, or at least read about the same incidents. And then there’s the “settling in the homestead and learning how things work while having to work as a team with the husband she didn’t initially want” part of the story, which is right out of historical romance.

However, it doesn’t really read like a romance, even though it’s absolutely a marriage of convenience romance (there’s even a “there’s only one bed” situation). The emphasis is more on the heroine getting over herself to recognize the good in her situation and in the husband she hasn’t seen since they were children, and the attraction is much more emotional and mental. There isn’t the emphasis on sexual tension that you’d get in a genre romance.

The funny thing about this hitting all the Hallmark movie tropes is that this book was published when “Hallmark movie” meant “Hallmark Hall of Fame,” so award-winning literary adaptation starring actors who usually work on the big screen rather than on TV, not cheesy romance. A lot of these same tropes did tend to come up in some of the Silhouette romance novels, which were fond of “save the ranch” type stories, and I think some of those “show up in the country in high heels” bits came up in rom-com movies (though the one that came to mind came out more than ten years later).

Still, if you like those “city girl has to go to the country and meets a hunky farmer” type stories, but you wish they involved spaceships and aliens, you might like this. There’s kind of a Firefly space western vibe (there’s even a character mentioned named Kaylee) but this was several years before Firefly. I’m having a lot of fun reading it. No one writes screwball comedy-style chaos in novel form like Connie Willis does.

Life

Changes

I’ve been living in my new home a little over a month, so I have some basis for comparison in how things are different here than they were back in Texas.

A big one is temperature. We’re having a “heat wave” here this week, which means it might get close to 90 degrees. It is pretty humid, probably more moist than it would be at these temperatures in Texas, but I still find it fairly comfortable. At this time of year in Texas, I’d barely be able to go outdoors. Here, I spend most of the day outside. I work on my back porch until mid-afternoon, and then I only really need to come inside because the angle of the sun hits a point where it puts a glare on my computer screen. If I’m not working on the computer, I can stay out until later in the afternoon, when the sun begins to hit the porch directly and it gets a bit uncomfortable for a few hours. The community band has concerts in the park every Monday night, and this week’s concert was the first time I didn’t have to put on a sweater during the concert. Last week, I was wearing a sweatshirt and still had to put on a sweater.

The nice thing is that even if it’s hot during the day, it cools off a lot at night. During this week’s “heat wave,” they were talking about how the overnight lows being high is the real problem, but it’s still getting into the 60s overnight. Back in Texas in the summer, it often doesn’t get below 80 at night. I finally turned on my air conditioner last night, but only for humidity purposes, as it was only about 74 degrees inside. I had to put on a sweater while the AC dried things out a bit. Until the current “heat wave” began, I was still using the electric blanket on the couch for watching TV in the evenings.

This is one of the main reasons I moved. I wanted out of my living situation but I couldn’t afford a house in that area. I figured if I was going to have to move outside the area, I might as well go to a place that would be more comfortable, since I couldn’t bear the thought of another Texas summer. We’ll see how I feel this winter, but it didn’t look like the winters were that bad here, and I don’t mind huddling under an electric blanket. You can bundle up to stay warm, but it’s harder to stay cool when it’s hot. Summer here is basically September and October in Texas.

I’m also adjusting to smaller-town life. I was living in a major metro area, and this is a town of about 25,000. Since I come from a town that had a population just about 2,000 when I lived there, I don’t really think of this as a small town. It has multiple grocery stores, a lot of bookstores (more than in the city I just left), and plenty of things to do. The difference is that I don’t have to get on the freeway to do most things. Oddly, although this is a smaller town, in a lot of ways it feels more urban than where I used to live. When I was researching places to live, YouTube started recommending channels on urbanism, and this smallish town actually ticks a lot of boxes for what these people talk about for good urban fabric. It’s dense enough that things are close together. You can walk to a lot of things. There are more streets than “stroads” (the unholy mix of street and road, so everything’s built around cars, which makes everything be more spread out). Aside from the major commercial roads between the freeway and the city center, most of the streets here are two lanes, and the houses and businesses are right on the streets rather than set back by driveways and parking lots. It feels a lot more like a real city than the suburbs did.

It’s funny how my perception of traffic has already changed. I used to live next to a six-lane boulevard that was constantly full of traffic. A week or so ago I was walking around, looking at houses and neighborhoods and found myself rejecting one house that I otherwise liked because it was on a “major” street. It is one of the main thoroughfares, but it’s a two-lane road with a 25 miles per hour speed limit, and there’s maybe one car going down it every minute. They do need more sidewalks around here, though. My street has sidewalks, but a lot of neighborhood streets don’t.

That lower traffic means it’s so much quieter. I can hear the leaves rustling in the trees and birds singing. I could hear birds in my old house, but even when I sat on the patio with trees nearby, I never heard the leaves rustling in the wind. That’s one of my favorite sounds. Sometimes I just sit on the porch here and listen to the wind in the leaves. I think the air is also a lot cleaner without all the traffic and traffic jams.

Things are also a lot older here. I had one of the “old” houses in my old neighborhood, and it was built in 1984. Here, one of the old houses was designed by Thomas Jefferson. Most of the houses in the central part of town are pre-World War II. A lot are Victorian. There are some newer (1950s-60s) mixed in, possibly filling in on formerly large lots or rebuilt after a teardown, but most are the kinds of houses with front porches and deep eaves. I’ve always wanted to live in that kind of neighborhood, and it really didn’t exist in the Dallas area, other than in the historic districts near downtown that were extremely expensive. I can afford to buy one of these houses, and the same house in the same kind of neighborhood in Dallas would be close to a million dollars. I love all the history. I’m looking forward to exploring the various historic sites.

I’m at a higher latitude, so the daylight difference is fairly striking. Sunset isn’t too much later than it was in Texas, with it staying fairly light until after 9, but sunrise is a lot earlier. It’s light around 5 a.m., just about broad daylight by 5:30 (official sunrise is a bit later, but it’s light long before then). Even though my bedroom window faces west, and even with blinds and lined curtains, the sun was waking me up before 5:30 every morning. I ended up buying a sleep mask, and that works pretty well. I’ve even been oversleeping a bit, or maybe catching up on sleep from all those early mornings. I’ve pretty much stopped my movie night habit because by the time it gets dark enough to watch a movie with the proper theater ambience, it’s getting close to bedtime. I’ve just been watching episodes of TV series instead. In the winter, it’ll be the reverse, so it’ll stay dark a lot later and the sun will go down earlier. I guess that’s when I’ll catch up on the three-hour epics.

Another big switch is the local media. I was used to reading a major daily newspaper and watching major-market TV news. Here, the local paper is essentially a USA Today with a few local stories (but the local reporting is good enough that the cheap digital subscription is worth it). I ended up getting a digital subscription to the Washington Post to get substantial reporting with content that’s still somewhat local. The local TV news isn’t too bad, even though the staff are mere children. I still sometimes stream the news from the station I used to watch back in Dallas, just to see the familiar faces and laugh at the weather.

My day-to-day routine is more or less the same, other than me spending more of the day outdoors. I eat both breakfast and lunch on the porch and I work outside as much as I can. I have to drive farther to run errands, but there’s not as much traffic and the stores aren’t as busy. I spend Monday nights at the band concerts in the park, and next month there will also be jazz concerts. That means I’m getting out a bit more than I used to, which was one of the reasons for the move. There was a lot of stuff to do in Dallas, but most of it required driving on the freeway for at least half an hour. Here, I can walk ten minutes and go to a concert, walk 20 minutes and be downtown at the farmers market on Saturdays.

Now that I have my routine somewhat settled, I’m getting back to a better working routine, so I hope to get more writing done. In Texas, I seemed to do most of my writing in the summer because I was huddled indoors during the hot weather, and there wasn’t much else to do. Here, there are more summer temptations. Winter may become my major writing time.

My Books

Rydding Village Update

Today is Tales of Rydding Village Status Update day, it seems.

I’m just about done with editing book 2, so I’ll soon start getting the publication part lined up. One thing I need to settle on is a title, so I can get a cover made. I thought I had one that I came up with when I was outlining it, but I’m wavering on it.

So, I’m looking for feedback from readers. This isn’t a vote, and I retain the right to decide for myself, but I am looking for opinions that might help me make the decision.

This book focuses on Lucina, the baker, and Nico, the new apprentice smith who came to town at the end of the first book. He’s from the same land as Lucina, which brings back some bad memories for her, since she didn’t leave her homeland in the best of circumstances. Things get more complicated when there’s a wave of burglaries in town, and since Nico is new in town, he’s the most obvious suspect. Lucina worries that if he’s accused, she’ll be tarred with the same brush, as the only other person the villagers know from that land, and she’ll be a refugee all over again. She and Elwyn set out to solve the mystery.

So, my working title has been Bread and Burglary. That follows the pattern of the X and Y title established in the first book (which also seems to be a trope in the cozy fantasy genre). I imagine some of the little symbols on the cover might include something like a loaf of bread and a smith’s hammer.

But a pivotal part of the story takes place at the village’s midsummer revels. There’s a lot of talk about “midsummer madness,” which leads people to take leaps they might not otherwise take. That’s made me wonder if I have to stick with that same title pattern and if Midsummer Madness might make a good title. Though, to be honest, there isn’t much actual madness, just some temptation and a few magical things happening.

Which do you think would be more interesting/appealing? Or do you have other ideas? I generally hate coming up with titles. If I don’t have one that pops into my head at the very beginning, I usually struggle with titles until the last second, then just stick whatever comes to mind then on the book so that I can get it published.

In other Rydding Village news, Tea and Empathy is now available on the hoopla library system. If your library offers this service, that means you can check the e-book out as a library book. It doesn’t cost you anything, and I get paid if people check it out, so win-win. It’s a good way to try out new authors or series at low risk. It’s also on the Overdrive library system, but in that one each library has to purchase a book to add to their e-book collection, so you’d have to request it from your library, and then they can decide to add it, either as a one-time thing (so you can check it out, but it doesn’t become part of the collection) or just as a permanent part of the collection so everyone can check it out.

Books

What’s Your Lane?

One of the most-repeated bits of advice in the independent publishing world is “find your lane and stay in it.” In other words, narrow down on the kind of thing you want to write that has an audience and focus on it. Write in one subgenre — maybe even in one series. So, not just stick with, say, contemporary romance, but small-town contemporary romance, maybe even small-town contemporary romance with veteran characters. And they should all be connected, set in the same small town, so that the secondary characters in early books will be the main characters in later books, and the main characters in early books will still be around as supporting characters in later books.

There’s nothing wrong with that advice. In fact, people who follow it are making a lot more money than I am. But I get twitchy around book 7 of a series, and it’s unlikely that I’ll want to keep writing in the same subgenre. Twenty years ago, I was enjoying the chick-litty tone of the Enchanted, Inc. series and couldn’t imagine writing a book that wasn’t set in contemporary New York. Now I can’t bring myself to write something with a contemporary setting.

What I think is more important about having a “lane” is offering readers a similar experience, no matter the subgenre or series. It’s about voice and vibes, the way a book makes you feel. For instance, one of my favorite authors is Connie Willis. She writes science fiction, but in subject matter she’s all over the map. She’s written books about time-traveling historians, a rom-com about implanted communications devices that link you with your true love, a road trip with an alien, adventures on distant planets, and a whole book on near-death experiences and the afterlife. But they all tend to have a certain kind of humor and worldview, they don’t have a lot of sex or violence, and her main characters tend to be practical, down-to-earth people even if they’re in crazy situations.

I think I’m pretty similar, but with fantasy. It may be contemporary fantasy, alternate history steampunk, small-town paranormal mystery, or secondary-world cozy fantasy, but you’ll get a touch of humor, not a lot of sex or violence, a practical heroine, and an adorkable wizard. There are readers who only want to read one particular genre or series, but I think most readers who like an author are willing to give other books a shot.

I felt like my views became validated by a book I read recently. I’m not going to name names because the point here is not to drag the author. Back in the early days of the chick lit craze, I took a couple of trips to England, and I ended up mostly buying books as souvenirs, since they had a lot of chick lit books that hadn’t been published in the US. There was one I particularly liked that was in the same vein as Bridget Jones’s Diary, only instead of just having diary entries, it also had e-mails between friends, notes left on the refrigerator door from roommates, and other bits and pieces of written material, and it told about a year in the life of a young woman living in a small town in the Cotswolds who was figuring things out and looking for love.

While I was going to a lot of bookstores signing books as the early Enchanted, Inc. books were being published, I found a book by this author in the bargain books section of a Barnes & Noble. It was a UK publication (the only price printed on the cover was in British pounds, with the American price just on a B&N bargain sticker). It was a bigger book, but it also involved women living in a small town in the Cotswolds. I never got around to reading it because I was so busy at that time, but I rediscovered it in my stash when I moved, so I finally read it, and I got a massive case of whiplash.

While it seemed to cover a lot of the same subject matter as that other book by this author and might have been considered staying in the same lane, it was incredibly different in tone. Instead of sweet and funny, it was rather raunchy. All the characters were horrible people, and a painfully toxic relationship was depicted as being true love. It was a very different reading experience (and I need to find a little free library to donate it to, or I’ll hand it over for the library’s book sale because I won’t be re-reading it). I’d have been happier with a mystery or a fantasy with a similar style and tone to that first book of hers I read than I was with the book that had a similar subject but that was so different.

The tricky thing about making your lane be about the voice and vibes is that you have to have a strong voice and know what your vibes are. What is it that readers like about your books? Then you have to make sure you can communicate that to readers and teach them to trust you enough to go wherever you go. You may not make quite the same amount of money as someone who can produce a 40-book series that keeps readers hooked, but I think you’ll be a lot happier. At least, I will be. I’d rather get a regular job than write the same sort of thing forever.

Life

Hitting the Trail

I had a post for today drafted, but I got excited about preparing for my grand excursion today and totally forgot to upload it. So, I’ll save it for next week.

This is where I was instead of posting a blog:

A view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, covered in trees, against a blue sky with puffy white clouds.
This view of the Blue Ridge Mountains was worth hiking a mile to get to.

One of the reasons I wanted to move here was to be close to the mountains. I can see them in the distance when I run errands. Since I hit my writing goals for the week and the weather was nice, I decided it was time to hit the mountains. The beginning of the Blue Ridge Parkway is about 15 miles from where I live, so I went out there, and then the guy at the visitors center suggested a short hiking route for me. I walked about a mile on the Appalachian Trail then took a short side trail to get to the overlook site where I had that fabulous view. I had a picnic lunch there, then walked back.

So I can now say I’ve hiked the Appalachian Trail, though just a teeny portion of it. It was all so beautiful, but I need to get in better shape. I slacked off from my regular exercise while I was going through the move, then didn’t get back in the habit once I stopped having the intense physical labor of packing/unpacking and carrying things around. I’ve done some walking around town, but if I’m going to do real hiking, I need to build up to it. Today was just enough to get a taste of it and see some scenery, and I suspect I’ll feel it tomorrow.

Now I’m going to get a tall glass of cold water and put my feet up for a while.

Life

My Story Arc

Whenever I talk to someone about having moved recently and they ask me why and I have to say that I just wanted to, they always say something like, “You’re so brave!” as though it’s a big deal to move halfway across the country to a place you’ve visited once and have no ties to, just because you felt like it and the opportunity arose. And I guess it is kind of crazy. Every so often, I find myself astounded that I actually did this, and I wonder if I made the right move.

And then I look at the weather report and the crime reports from my old home and I’m pretty sure I did make the right move.

But it’s struck me that this is the kind of thing people write memoirs about — in middle age, uprooting and starting life all over again in a new place. I just need some kind of arc beyond simply moving and continuing with life in order to make a sellable story out of it. I’ll have to find some new passion, new direction, romance, or something really funny. So far, though, it’s mostly been just continuing with life, but I haven’t even been here a month yet. I’ve barely learned my way around to major stuff like the grocery stores.

I have started trying to do some of the activities that are the reason I came here. I’ve gone to the farmers market, and this week they started the weekly band concerts at the bandstand in the park near my house. This is apparently the oldest continually operating community band in the nation. They do concerts at their bandstand in the park every Monday night during the summer. This week’s concert was music from Disney movies (including Star Wars and Marvel). It was a lovely evening sitting out in the park, listening to music and watching the kids run around. Then I saw fireflies when I walked home. It’s nice to have things to do within walking distance or just a short drive. There was a lot to do in the Dallas area, but most of it required getting on a freeway and driving for half an hour in bad traffic through areas prone to road rage or drive-by shootings.

So, what kind of story arc do I need to look for so I can write a bestselling memoir about uprooting my life? I don’t think I want to start a bakery or coffee shop or bookstore (there are so many already here). This is basically a town out of a Hallmark movie, so maybe I need to find a flannel-wearing local guy. I’m not a typical city girl, though. I’m not likely to freak out because there’s wildlife in the town (I saw a deer just down the street last week) or try to teeter around on the hilly streets in high heels. I want to do more outdoorsy stuff, since I’m so close to the mountains. Maybe my arc is going from city girl to nature-loving outdoorsy person — from the red stilettos to hiking boots. Except I owned hiking boots before I bought the stilettos, and I haven’t worn the stilettos in nearly a decade because I messed up a knee and can’t wear heels (and haven’t had a good occasion to wear them).

I have promised myself that I will go to the mountains later this week or this weekend if I get my work done. I see the Blue Ridge mountains off in the distance when I go shopping, and as I come home I can see the Shenandoah mountains. I’m so close to the Blue Ridge Parkway, so I need to go there soon. I’m also really close to the Appalachian Trail (but the memoir about that has already been written).

I could do one of those history travel memoir things, exploring the early years of this country and putting that in context with my life. There are sites from the Civil War and the Revolution nearby, and I could contrast all this history with life in the Texas suburbs.

Or I could stick to writing fantasy novels. This basically is a larger, newer version of Rydding Village. I’m even surrounded by mostly single women. It’s just food for thought to imagine what difference in my life this move can mean.

Amusements

I developed a weird new addiction while I’ve been unpacking, a YouTube channel that seems to have a lot to do with reviewing theme parks. I saw people I follow online talking about a review this person posted about the now-defunct Star Wars hotel at Disneyland and was curious enough that when it popped up on my “recommended” list, I started watching it. It’s something like 4 hours long, and it made the perfect background noise for unpacking, as it wasn’t something I had to pay much attention to and the visuals beyond the person talking to the camera were only occasional, so I didn’t have to look at the screen often. Then after that one, her review of the now-defunct fantasy theme park in Utah (I’d read an article about it) came up, so I watched that one, too.

The funny thing is, I’m not really a theme park person. I’ve never been to any of the Disney parks and have no particularly strong urge to go. I don’t like crowds or lines. I’ve been to Universal Studios in both Orlando and LA, but for special events (parties — a publisher party during a conference in Orlando, the Serenity premiere party in LA), so I only saw the places where the events were held and didn’t see anything beyond that. The only big amusement park I’ve visited is Six Flags Over Texas, and I haven’t been there in about 30 years. I mostly went there during the time when they were actually going with the Six Flags theme, so there were sections of the park built around each of the entities whose flags have flown over Texas. Now I think they’ve scrapped that idea and are focused more on cartoon and comic book characters. I think this would be considered more an amusement park than a theme park, as there’s now no real attempt at immersion or creating a themed environment (they did sort of do this in the old days, but not to the degree of something like Disney).

I’ve got to say that even as a huge Star Wars fan, that hotel sounds like my worst nightmare. It was an immersive game, so you pretty much stayed in the hotel and did planned activities, aside from a controlled excursion to the Star Wars part of the theme park. I’m claustrophobic enough that no windows other than fake “portals” with space views and not being able to leave the hotel would freak me out. I also don’t like being overly scheduled. I do thrive on routine when I have the opportunity to set the routine and have flexibility not to follow it, but I chafe at tight schedules created by someone else, and it sounds like they had guests tightly scheduled from morning to bedtime, without any free time to just hang around. I’m also not a fan of forced activities. When I was nine and utterly obsessed with Star Wars, I might have enjoyed the chance to play Star Wars like that, but nothing much about it appeals to me right now. It might be fun to stay in a Star Wars-themed hotel for a visit to the theme park and to be able to hang out in a lobby that’s made to look like a star cruiser lounge, but it doesn’t sound like the “game” stuff was very interesting to participate in. We did a better job of playing Star Wars when we rode our bikes around the neighborhood, pretending they were X-Wings and TIE fighters. Considering what they charged for this experience, I’m not surprised it didn’t survive, but I am surprised they folded so quickly without any effort to retool it or reboot it into something that might work.

On the other hand, that fantasy park in Utah kind of intrigues me. I enjoy things like Renaissance festivals, and this seemed along those lines, though with less emphasis on shopping, more emphasis on the characters, and with the inclusion of magic/fantasy elements. Unfortunately, it sounds like this park was rather half-baked, a big idea that wasn’t really executed. They poured a lot of money into elements that made little difference in the experience while not finishing elements they started. When this reviewer went there, they didn’t even manage to open a gift shop (she wanted to buy a t-shirt and couldn’t ever find a way to do so), but they’d decorated the churchyard with authentic antique tombstones. If someone could build something like that and do it right (and if it were in a place I could get to and would want to go), it’s something I could consider going to, especially with the right group of people. It’s like a big game of let’s pretend that grown-ups can enjoy. I don’t really care about participating in an actual game or anything where my choices change the story I experience. I just enjoy the ambience and seeing the world play out around me.

I suppose the park I went to last weekend kind of counts as that sort of experience, only the focus there is on real history. I don’t know if they have the costumed guides and interpreters there all the time or if it’s just for special events or weekends (the way they have it phrased on the website, they’re not there in the winter, so maybe they are there the rest of the year). However, I doubt they’re keen on visitors dressing up in costumes and participating too intently, especially since the emphasis is on history, and you wouldn’t want guests to be confused between who the actual guides are and who are the random people just hanging out.

Life

Time Travel Weekend

I’ve started trying to explore my new area. This weekend, I walked downtown to go to the farmers market and an art fair, but my big expedition was to the Frontier Culture Museum. This is a big, open-air exhibit on the edge of town that showcases the history of this region, from back when it was the American frontier. They’ve relocated actual historic structures and set up small farms for different historical areas. There’s a Native American farm, a cabin from the 1700s, an 1820s farmhouse, an 1850s farmhouse, a frontier schoolhouse, and an African-American church from around the end of the Civil War. It’s basically an opportunity to travel in time.

But the museum also gets into the cultures of the people who settled here, so there’s an Old World section with an Irish tenant farm from the early 1700s, a German farm, an English farm from the 1600s, and a West African farm. Part of these exhibits is not only the culture of the people who came from these places, but the reasons people left those places. For instance, the English farmhouse is a place a yeoman farmer would have lived, and that sort of person wouldn’t have had a reason to leave, but it was the kind of thing tenant farmers and laborers without land might have aspired to, so they’d have taken the opportunity to become indentured workers in the Virginia colony so that after their indenture time was up, they’d have their own land and would be yeoman farmers (and when the big landowners realized that they were going to run out of land if they kept having to give it to their workers, they turned to slavery for labor).

They grow flax there, so they can demonstrate the process of what it takes to process it into linen, and they raise sheep that they shear and then demonstrate wool processing. I also saw some cattle, pigs, chickens, and goats (and a barn cat).

They were doing a special Memorial Day event, so they had some historical reenactors and special experts on hand doing presentations. I went to the session a member of the Shawnee tribe did about Native American life in this area. They also had a smith working in the 18th century Irish forge, a demonstration of muskets by Revolutionary War reieactors, and a reenactment of the Enclosure Riots in England in the early 1600s.

A half-timbered English farm building from the 16th century, with reenactors wearing costumes from the early 1600s standing in front.
The English farm at the Frontier Culture Museum., just before they reenacted the Enclosure Riots.

There were some other activities, but I spent a lot of time in the forge, since one of the main characters in the next Rydding Village book is a smith, and I had to pet the dog the Shawnee man had because he looked so much like a dog I used to have (even acted exactly like my dog used to act when someone petted him) and I chatted with him for a while. I didn’t take a weapon and join in on breaking down the enclosures (I figured I’d let the kids have that fun), but I did watch and join in on the songs and cheers they taught us.

Actually, the Old World farmhouses were a lot like what I imagine for some of the houses in Rydding (though I picture more of the Cotswolds honey-colored stone), so the whole thing was very useful for giving me mental images and sensory details. I guess the excursion counted as work.

I ended up getting an annual pass because this is the kind of place you can’t really see all of in one visit, and they have a lot of really interesting sounding special events throughout the year. It’s also just a pleasant place to go walking, with some footpaths through wooded areas, and it’s near the Aldi, so I could pop by for a walk when I go grocery shopping. The history is one of the reasons I wanted to move to this area, so I’m going to have to explore all the historic sites. Later in the year, once I’m more settled, I’ll have to head to the coast and check out Williamsburg. I also need to plan a visit to DC and to see Mount Vernon, plus they’re getting pandas back at the National Zoo.

Books

A Big Fat Fantasy

I’ve mentioned before about how long books can languish on my To-Be-Read pile. My move actually gave me a chance to do some catching up. I tried to mostly read books from that pile before I moved so I could get rid of them. But there was one book I’d been saving for the right occasion to read. I got a copy of The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson years ago at a WorldCon. I’d met Brandon a couple of years before that when we were on some convention panels together. I’ve read a couple of his shorter pandemic projects, but this book was so huge that it was daunting. It’s something like 1300 pages in mass-market paperback. I tried starting it a few times but always had to put it aside because I just didn’t have the time to dive into it.

But I figured that if I was going to have to spent a week or so without my furniture and without TV or Internet, that would be the perfect time to read a Big, Fat Fantasy, so I brought it with me when I moved. It turned out to be the perfect thing for the occasion when I had days without anything to do. I set up my lounge chair on the back porch and read for hours on nice days. When it was a rainy day, I set up the lounge chair in the living room and read for hours. On the day my furniture was supposed to arrive, with a delivery window between 8 and 10 later changed to between 1 and 4, and then it showed up at almost 5, I had nothing really to do but sit and read. I think I actually finished the book in a week.

And now I need to get the sequel, but there’s a waiting list at the local library and the e-book at my old library (where my card is still good for electronic stuff for another couple of months) is checked out.

Because this is a Big Fat Fantasy that sets up a whole series, it’s hard to explain what the plot really is. I guess it boils down to the fact that a war has been raging for years as one kingdom tries to get revenge against an enemy kingdom for assassinating their king, but the war has gone nowhere because it’s turned into a chance for profit and political maneuvering among the various princes of the kingdom, who are all out to further their own positions and can’t trust the other princes to actually work together with them against the enemy. In this war, there’s one prince who’s begun having visions that are either of the past or the future and that warn him of actions he needs to take, but he can’t get anyone to listen to his advice. Meanwhile, there’s a soldier turned slave who finds himself in the worst position possible in this war, but he might be able to make things better if he can get the rest of his crew to listen to him.

I really like the characters in this book and got caught up in their stories once I got into it because the main characters are good people doing their best in difficult circumstances. I’m a sucker for that kind of person, the one who tries to not only raise himself but bring others along with him. One thing I like about a big epic fantasy with multiple perspectives and storylines is seeing the collision coming, when you know it’s going to be interesting if these people ever run into each other, and you can see them getting closer to that intersection throughout the book.

Sanderson is known for his worldbuilding, and I would have to describe this as a fantasy novel taking place in a science fiction setting. It’s not in the generic medieval-ish Europe that’s so common in fantasy. It’s an alien planet with its own kind of plants, animals, and weather. If people were going around in spaceships and landed here, it would work as science fiction. But instead a fantasy plot is what plays out, with swords, armor, horses, and magic. That made it feel very different from most epic fantasy I’ve read. I have to confess that I love the quasi-medieval European fantasy world, but it’s fun to have a world that’s utterly alien.

If you love the plot complexity, political maneuvering, and multiple points of view in something like A Game of Thrones but could do without the excessive grittiness and want something a bit more uplifting, this might be a good read if you’ve got the time for it. Or if you’re a science fiction reader looking to try fantasy, this might be a good transition.

I’m really late to the game with this, I know, as the rest of the world has already discovered these books, but I’m not sure if all my readers are aware of what they’re all about, so I thought I’d share my perspective.

Life

Adjustments

I’m continuing to settle in to the new place. Oddly, it’s all the little adjustments that are harder to make than the huge one of having moved halfway across the country to a place I’ve only visited once. I feel quite at home already, but there are a lot of little things to get used to.

For one thing, the time zone. Most of the time, I don’t notice the difference. It helped that when I got here, I was utterly exhausted and slept late, so I was instantly on the new time. Where I have to adjust is with TV programming. My routine was always to eat dinner while watching the national news at 5:30, then the local news came on at 6. Here, the local news still comes on at 6, but the national news is at 6:30. I find myself wanting to eat dinner at 5:30, even though that’s 4:30 in the old time. There’s not a lot of radio here, so I’ve been streaming the Dallas classical station, and I have to mentally adjust for the various programs. They play a “march of the day” at 7:35 a.m., Dallas time, and I tried to be making or even eating breakfast by then, but here it comes on at 8:35, so I should be done with breakfast when it comes on. My signal to finish breakfast was the “road rage remedy” at 8:20, but that’s 9:20 here. I don’t watch a lot of prime-time TV, but that would also be an issue with everything on an hour later.

I’m still getting used to parallel parking. It helps that I learned how to do that in a Bronco and practiced in a 1981 Impala. That makes doing it in a Subaru Forester with a backup camera fairly easy, but I still haven’t managed to do it smoothly in one move without a lot of backing, inching forward, and adjusting. I really hope I don’t have to take a driving test to get my Virginia drivers license.

I’m a lot farther north than I used to live, so the days are longer here at this time of year. The sunset seems to be close to the same time as it was back in Texas, but the sun comes up a lot earlier. I used to say I preferred Standard time over Daylight Saving time, but if it were Standard time now, the sun would be up before 5 a.m. My bedroom window faces west, and I have blinds and lined curtains, and still it’s hard to sleep past 6 a.m. I may just have to give in and go to bed earlier and get up when the sun wakes me.

Then there are all the little things about being in a new house — where are the light switches, and which one turns on which light? Where did I put that thing when I unpacked it? This place is configured so differently from my old home that there was no way to just put things where they used to go. I have to find different places to put everything.

I’ll also have to get used to Target being a 15-minute drive away rather than being in walking distance. The Target is actually in the next town over. It’s closer than the nearest Target used to be before they built the one on the edge of my neighborhood, and it’s a much more pleasant drive, but now it has to be a planned expedition rather than a quick run down the street to grab something. Ditto with Home Depot. On the other hand, there are a ton of great restaurants and several little brewpubs, including a cider brewery, within walking distance here.

I’m gradually learning to find my way around. I got a bit lost while running errands earlier in the week, since the streets twist and turn so much that it’s easy to get turned around. But I managed to get to where I needed to go between the compass in my car, the map on my car’s screen, and the road signs. It turned out I was on the loop around the city. In Texas, any loop around a city is a busy road with lots of businesses on it, and that was what I was expecting. Here, it truly is a bypass that goes way out into the country, so I didn’t have a good sense of where I was.

Doing laundry is kind of an adventure. This apartment has a space-age all-in-one unit. It works as a washer, then you hit a different control and it also dries the clothes. The previous tenant here said she had problems with it. I found the manual on the manufacturer’s website, and I had to have that open on my screen in order to figure out how to work it. It takes more than three hours to do a load, start to finish, and I can only do one load at a time (no throwing something in the washer while the previous load is in the dryer), so I’ll have to plan for laundry days. I’ve figured out some of the tricks already, so I may get used to it — probably at about the time I’m ready to buy and move into a house.

I’ve got my bedroom more or less set up the way I want it, with everything put away. The kitchen is almost there. I’ve managed to do actual cooking. Aside from getting the books properly shelved, the living room part of the living/dining/office room is the way I want it. I have the TV set up with the antenna and the streaming devices, and I have the chaise I use as a sofa with the side tables. I can sit and read or watch TV/movies. I also have my back porch set up. I need more plants, but the table and chairs are there, and I’ve even strung my lights. The office area is going to be the real challenge. I got rid of my big desk and will be using my laptop stand and some tables as a desk replacement, and since it’s not in a separate room that’s supposed to be a bedroom, I don’t have a closet for office stuff, so I’ll have to figure out where to put some things.

I’m trying to get back into my regular working routine. I’ve been working on writing stuff in the morning and unpacking in the afternoon and evening. I still have a lot of admin stuff to deal with around the move. There are so many things I need to update with my new address, and I need to get a local drivers license and register my car, but the DMV website has been down.