One of the latest issues coming up in the book world is fan fiction being sold and promoted as such by major publishers. Fan fiction is stories fans write using characters from existing works or set in those worlds, and authors writing fan fiction isn’t at all new. Many authors get their start in writing with fan fiction, whether actually writing it or just making up stories or playing out scenarios in their heads. The impulse to write often comes from reading or watching something and wanting either to fix it or to explore that world further. That leads to learning how to write and plot, which leads to writing their own stories. Sometimes a story that starts as fan fiction may get developed to the point it’s no longer actually fan fiction but is about original characters in an original world, or the author may be inspired by a character from another world and base an original character somewhat on that character, but with the author’s own spin. You’d only know the origins of the story if the author told about it or if you knew both the author’s interests and the fictional world that inspired them very well.

My first deliberate attempt at writing was something that spun off from mental fanfic. I’ve always entertained myself by making up stories in my head, often based on whatever TV show, book, or movie I was obsessed with at the time. Since there was only one girl in Star Wars, the girls in the neighborhood fought over who got to be Leia when we played Star Wars, and those who didn’t win had to make up their own characters. I had a lot of mental stories about my character, and along the way the stories focused so much on her and less on the Star Wars universe that they became original stories, and I then realized that if I wrote down these stories, I would have a book. I never actually finished that book because I was good at coming up with characters and situations but didn’t yet know how to plot a book, so I had a fun chapter one and nothing much more. I’m sure there are a lot of other authors who’ve done similar things. I know of a few works that started as something connected to another fictional universe, but I don’t know how open those authors are about it (some of it came up in personal conversations), so I’m not going to name names here.

What’s different is that now not only are the authors being open about the origin of their works that started as fan fiction, but the publishers are promoting these books as being essentially fan fiction, actually naming the characters and series they’re based on. That already happened with Fifty Shades of Grey starting as Twilight alternate universe fan fiction (putting the characters into different lives), but I don’t think the publisher actually pushed that connection. It was an open secret, but the publisher wasn’t promoting it with “It’s Twilight, but what if Edward was a kinky billionaire and Bella was a grad student.” Now there have been a number of books that started as fan fiction that changed the character names and details of the world and are now being published as original books, with the publisher actually promoting the fact that they’re really about those other characters, targeting fans of the original series.

I’m not going to get into the legality or ethics of that. My concern is that it’s extending the growth of the “franchise” mania to books. It’s already getting to the point that it’s nearly impossible these days to get a movie made that isn’t part of some franchise. It’s either a sequel or a remake of something that’s already been a hit or it’s based on something else, like a comic book, novel, or videogame. Books, at least, had to be original. There were tie-in novels, of course, but you don’t break in with those. Those are things that established authors get chosen to write. But are we getting to the point where your book has to be connected (although unofficially) to some established franchise in order to get it published? It used to be that if you submitted a book to a publisher and said that it was really about Han and Leia from Star Wars, even if they have different names and the names of the places are different, it would be an automatic rejection. Now that seems to be what they’re looking for, something they can market as being for fans of those other series.

I haven’t read any of the books in question, but the reviews I’ve seen mention that they don’t make a lot of sense out of context unless you’re reading them with fan fiction in mind because they’re so based on that other world that you have to know the original characters and their backstories from that original world for the story to make any sense. If you don’t know it’s fan fiction and aren’t familiar with the source material, the stories don’t work.

I haven’t tried to publish traditionally in a long time, but I hate the idea that in order to sell a book, I’ll have to write the story in which Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor actually survive the battle and run off together to fight in the Rebellion, but just changing their names and fudging the details enough to not be a trademark violation.

Actually, I’d love to write that story, and I might weave something similar to the concept into my own original world, but if I do it right, no one will know that’s where I got the idea. By the time I’ve developed the characters and their world, with a history for the conflict they’re fighting in and a fleshed-out setting, there will only be the tiniest seed of the original idea left. I just don’t want to get to the point where you can’t sell a book without it being fan fiction with the serial numbers filed off enough to appease the lawyers, while still being obvious enough that the publisher can market it to those fans. Even if we can’t get original movies or TV, we should be able to get books that aren’t part of a franchise.

This weekend I went to a talk on the history of bookselling in the United States, given by Evan Friss, author of The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore (a book on the topic), and it brought up so many thoughts. He led into the talk by telling about a particular bookstore that sounds pretty much like the Central Casting vision of a bookstore, all cozy and quaint, run by friendly people, with customers and staff who are like a community, the staff knowing the customers’ tastes and knowing books well enough to recommend just the right book to them. He talked about how there’s an emotional bond between customers and bookstores in a way that there isn’t with other retail, like hardware or grocery stores. After his book was published, he got a lot of letters from people telling him about their local bookstores (dismayed that he hadn’t mentioned them).

I realized while listening to his talk and seeing the pictures he showed of bookshops, that, as much as I love the idea of that kind of bookstore, I haven’t really had that kind of relationship with a bookstore. The closest may have been a used bookstore in the city near where we lived when I was in high school. That area was something of a book desert when I was a teenager, which was a huge culture shock to me (we moved there just before I started high school). The small town we lived just outside of didn’t have a library at that time. The school library was pretty much pointless. Of course, there was no bookstore. I don’t think we even got Scholastic book orders (we definitely didn’t have a book fair). We eventually found that we could buy a membership in a nearby town’s library, which was better than nothing. In the nearby city, there was a B. Dalton in the mall, where you could get current releases and bestsellers and a small selection of mass-market paperbacks. And there was a pretty big used bookstore.

Up until around the time I graduated from high school, it was located in an old strip mall. It occupied a couple of the storefronts, and they seem to have also moved into what would have been the back part of one of the shops. That meant there were multiple rooms, with little passageways and steps in between sections. It was the kind of bookstore where you could easily get lost, possibly even find yourself in a magical realm. The man who ran it looked like Santa Claus, but sometimes his wife (who would have made a good Mrs. Claus) was working. I don’t recall it being the kind of bookstore where the booksellers knew their customers’ tastes and hand-sold books or made recommendations. They did know their customers, but they let customers browse on their own and make their own discoveries. The shop was near the hospital district, so whenever I went to the doctor and found that I would have to stay home from school, we’d make a stop at the bookstore on the way home to stock up on reading material. I remember one time when I’d completely lost my voice due to a tracheal infection and was being sent home to rest after seeing the doctor, we stopped for books, and I found a book that was a sequel to one I’d read, but the only copy they had was a trade paperback, which was out of my price range. I was disappointed, but then Mrs. Claus declared that it had water damage and marked it down.

It probably did have some water damage, as the old strip mall was located just under a hill and tended to flood. Late in my senior year of high school, they got a new building in a different part of town. It was nicer, but it was less convenient and less atmospheric. I understand it closed a few years ago. The owner died, and the people who took it over said they weren’t getting in a lot of books. I guess the rise of e-books meant a decline in books being sold to used bookstores.

I know we’re supposed to hate the big chain stores, but I loved it when Barnes & Noble came to town. They felt like cozy bookstores, with their big, comfy chairs, but they were big enough to have a lot of stuff. And they had coffee shops! I don’t like coffee, but I really tried so I could properly hang out in a B&N cafe. I used to take my copyedits for the first few Enchanted, Inc. books to my neighborhood B&N to review. I could spread out on a cafe table, have a cup of tea, and it was near the reference section in case I needed to look something up. Alas, that store got closed down and later demolished so they could expand the nearby Kroger.

Now, I live in a town with one of those “right out of a movie” bookshops. It’s in an old downtown shop, complete with the display window in front and wood floors, but I don’t spend a lot of time there. Mostly, I don’t have room for more books in my house. I mostly get my books from the library or as e-books. I only buy print books I’ve already read and know I want a “keeper” copy of. Books are too expensive for me to do my exploring in a shop rather than a library.

However, our library is also pretty atmospheric. It’s in an old (early 1900s) elementary (or possibly junior high) school building, with those front steps like in movie schools, tall windows, and the wooden floors on the main level. When you go up and down the stairs between levels, you can almost hear the ghost footsteps of kids running up and down the stairs.

I’ll have to read this book about bookstores when I finish my current stack of books. It sounds like good cozy fall or winter reading.

The last book I read hit so many of my buttons that it might as well have been written just for me, with a favorite trope executed in just the way I like. I checked it out of the library, but I bought the e-book before I was even done reading it so I could have a copy to keep. I suspect this will become a comfort read, something to turn to when I need to feel good.

The book is Dreadful by Caitlin Rozakis. A man wakes in what’s clearly a dark wizard’s workroom in the aftermath of a spell gone wrong, with no memory of who he is, how he got there, or what happened. At first, he’s afraid of what the dark wizard will do to him, but then he comes to realize that he’s the dark wizard. The more he learns, the more disturbed he is by the kind of person he apparently is. He’s got a princess in his dungeon, his staff is terrified of him, and he’s part of some ritual being planned by another dark wizard. He’s not sure how he’s going to get out of it without his memories, but he also isn’t sure he even wants to be himself anymore, and he can’t rely on what he thinks he knows because nothing is as it seems.

I’m a total sucker for the plot trope I call “who would you be if you didn’t know who you were?” It’s a subset of the amnesia plot. The standard amnesia plot usually focuses on the character trying to find out who they are, but in this one the character learns fairly quickly who they are, and they don’t want to be that person. Minus the memories and baggage, they try to make a fresh start, but they still have to deal with the consequences of past actions that they don’t remember. That’s exactly what this story is about, with the character horrified of who he apparently used to be, trying to set things right, but still having to deal with the fallout from what he’s done. It reminds me a lot of the Moist von Lipwig books in the Discworld series, with a reforming rogue who’s developed a conscience.

There’s also an element of found family here, as he bonds with the castle’s staff, who are oddly loyal, considering how he seems to have treated them in the past, and then there are the villagers, who seem proud of their local dark wizard, even though he must have menaced them. Dealing with the other dark wizards requires putting together a wacky coalition of people he hurt in the past, and all the while he’s trying to figure out what kind of man he really is and what kind of man he wants to be.

The book is funny at times, but also gets serious and emotional. I ended up loving all the characters, and the ending was so satisfying. This seems to be a standalone novel (her next one is entirely unrelated), but it looks like there’s room to follow some of the characters as they have further adventures. They just wouldn’t be adventures related to this core conflict, so maybe it’s best to leave them alone to go on with their lives. I do want to know what happens to them, though.

I think my readers would enjoy this story because it’s fairly humorous fantasy with fun characters you enjoy spending time with. I guess you could even say there’s an adorkable wizard.

A few weeks ago when I was wondering if anyone had used Dickens as a foundation for fantasy books the way people use Shakespeare, the book A Far Better Thing by H.G. Parry was recommended both here and on Blue Sky. I read it last week, and it was so good.

This book is a retelling of A Tale of Two Cities, told from Sydney Carton’s perspective, with the premise that Charles Darnay was his changeling. Carton was abducted by fairies as a small child, with Darnay left as his changeling, then Carton was returned to the mortal world and given a new identity, but he’s still under the command of the fairies as a mortal servant. Mortal servants aren’t ever supposed to meet their changelings, but a court case brings them together, and Carton starts to suspect that there’s something going on in the fairy realm. When the French Revolution happens, Carton finds himself dealing with a family history he’s just started to discover, multiple factions of fairies and their own conflicts, plus the effects of the fairies interfering in the mortal world, along with the woes of the mortal world.

I haven’t read A Tale of Two Cities since I was in high school, so I don’t know if this meshes perfectly enough with it that you could read A Tale of Two Cities and imagine that this is what’s going on in the background and behind the scenes, but that’s the feeling I get from it, that the two books would mesh pretty well, with this one explaining things in A Tale of Two Cities, like two entirely unrelated people being so identical that they can pass for each other. I was the weird kid in high school who actually enjoyed reading A Tale of Two Cities. We were assigned a certain number of chapters a day, but I ended up just reading through the whole thing, and I remember crying at the end. Now I want to re-read it with this book in mind. I was on team Charles Darnay because I tend to like the nice guys rather than the bad boys, and the drunk wastrel of a lawyer held no appeal for me. This book explains why Carton’s a drunk — the fairies have a harder time finding him and knowing what he’s up to when he’s drunk or when alcohol’s around. I also now have a very different view of Carton based on this new backstory.

I found this book to be utterly engrossing. Even though I knew how it would end (unless it somehow changed the ending), I kept turning pages to see what happened. The depiction of the fairy Realm was interesting (and somewhat reminded me of my version from my Fairy Tale series — we seem to have used some of the same folklore source materials, though I never got into changelings and related topics and I took it in a very different direction). Really, the whole thing is a clever and fresh kind of fantasy.

Though I still think it would be interesting to take the plot of something like Bleak House and put it in a fantasy world. It might also be interesting to see what this author could do with Our Mutual Friend, set in this same universe, since that one also involves unrelated people who are identical enough to be mistaken for each other. That one might be a bit more challenging, though, since the double who’s not the book’s main character gets killed early in the book, so it would have to be a prequel leading up to the events of the book to give much of his point of view.

I seem to have overcome my reading slump. I’ve read several books since I started doing more pleasure reading a couple of weeks ago. Some weren’t the best, but were easy, fun reads. I did bail on a couple because I could tell I wasn’t going to enjoy them, for reasons related more to me than to the books themselves. One I really enjoyed sits right at the intersection of fantasy and romance, being both a good fantasy and a good romance. This book is Wooing the Witch Queen by Stephanie Burgis.

It’s the story of a young archduke who’s been under the control of his “advisors” since he took the throne as a child. Even as an adult, he’s essentially a prisoner and a puppet ruler with things done in his name that he would actually oppose. His only hope is to escape and throw himself on the mercy of the queen of a neighboring kingdom, a powerful witch. But there’s a bit of a mix-up when he arrives at her castle because she’s expecting a new librarian to come organize her library for her. He can do that, so he settles in. She really likes the new librarian, who’s sweet and a bit geeky, but good at what he does, and he finds that a lot of the stories about the dreaded witch queen are exaggerated, other than the extent of her power. There’s just the problem that she’s sworn to kill the archduke she believes is a threat to her kingdom, and then there are internal threats she’s battling, as well, as she tries to secure her throne after taking it back from a usurper. And his “advisors” who really run his land are gearing up for a terrible war.

This is more of an intimate fantasy than an epic fantasy, as it focuses mostly on a few characters and one location, but it digs deep into those characters. I loved the hero of this book. He’s exactly my “adorkable wizard” type. It’s so nice to read a romantic hero who’s kind, smart, and gentle, not a blustering jerk. The relationship developed not just based on physical attraction but also because these two people had common goals and values at heart, and they both had overcome trauma in their pasts.

There are fun little touches of humor, especially in the interactions with the sidekicks. It’s not quite a romantic comedy, but there are elements of that, and it’s not too dark. This really is the perfect book for a relaxing weekend when you want to escape to a magical world.

A few weeks ago, one of the things going around social media was discussion on the terrible novel you wrote when you were fourteen.

I didn’t really write a novel at fourteen. I scribbled a lot in spiral notebooks, but it was more story ideas and character development, with very little actual writing. Most of what I worked on during my teens was an epic fantasy novel a long-distance friend and I were “writing” together. Again, there was little actual writing. We made and mailed each other cassette tapes (talking into a tape recorder like we were talking to each other) brainstorming characters, situations, and scenarios, but I don’t think we actually wrote very much. I guess you could say it was kind of like a roleplaying game, but without the rules and dice. The main characters were two princesses forced to flee the palace for some reason (I’m now fuzzy on the details). She had her character and I had mine, and they split up to have separate adventures, so it ended up being basically two books that might weave in and out with each other. I came up with ideas for my character’s adventures and she came up with her character’s adventures.

The only thing I really remember about my part of the story was that my fugitive princess ended up in the woods (I guess I’ve always had a thing for forests) where she ran into a mysterious young man who took her home to where he lived with his mother, who was a kind of sorceress who lived in a cottage in the forest. Somewhere along the way we learned that he was actually the twin brother of the enemy king. The mother had been worried what her husband would do with a twin who might complicate the succession, so she had one of her advisors, a sorceress, smuggle him out of the palace and raise him in hiding. He was basically a male Briar Rose (from Sleeping Beauty), only there was still a prince at the palace. I think part of the resolution of the plot involved this princess marrying him, and it ended the war when he took his place as king (maybe they got rid of the other king and he pretended to be his brother?). I don’t know that we ever got as far as figuring out the actual ending because I didn’t learn how to plot a book until years later. I’d come up with characters, situations, and maybe an inciting incident and some scenes, but then it all fell apart.

But thinking about this long-abandoned story during the week in which we in America celebrate our break from being ruled by a king made me think about how royalist the old-school fantasy that influenced and inspired this story idea was. Fantasy authors seemed to take the concept of the divine right of kings and the belief that there was actually something different and special about royalty to extremes, making kings somehow magically ordained for their position so that having the rightful king would fix everything. That’s where we got all those farmboy who turns out to be the rightful heir stories, and it was better for a farmboy who had no experience in running a kingdom to be on the throne if he had the right bloodline than for someone without the bloodline but who was experienced in administration. The villains were often the viziers or royal advisors who seized power, then everything fell apart because they weren’t the rightful heirs, but the kingdom could be healed if the guy with the right bloodline showed up, even if he had no clue what he was doing.

Some of that might come down to the idea that anyone who actually wants power isn’t suited to have it, so the power-grabbing vizier is bad but the innocent farmboy who’d have been content herding pigs is good, but it still has to be the right farmboy who has the magical bloodline. They can’t just grab a clerk who knows how the kingdom is run but who doesn’t want to be in charge and make him king.

I suspect some of this comes from fairy tales, where there’s often something magical that sets royalty apart, like The Princess and the Pea, where only a true princess would be so delicate that she’d feel the pea under piles of mattresses. There’s also the Authurian mythology, where only the rightful king can pull the sword out of the stone. The British class system probably also plays a role. There seemed to really be a belief that the upper class was actually physically different from the lower classes. Even writers who were progressive for their time have hints of that showing up. In a couple of her books, Charlotte Bronte has her teacher heroine be surprised that the coarse peasant girls she teaches are actually capable of learning (instead of realizing that peasants were only ignorant because they were denied the kind of education the upper classes got and had to spend their days working in order to survive, so didn’t have time to sit around reading poetry and history and translating things from French and Latin).

Tolkien gets into the rightful king story with Aragorn, and how things are going to be better now that he’s shown up and the right bloodline is on the throne, and I suspect that was a huge influence on the fantasy of the 70s and 80s that influenced my teenaged self. In the very early 80s there was also the big royal wedding and Princess Di, so royalty was on the brain. Americans may have broken away from having a king but a lot of Americans are still fascinated with royalty and bloodlines, so it found its way into even American-written fantasy. Maybe there’s some fantasy to the idea that instead of having messy elections, there would be a way to know for certain that someone was the proper leader who could make everything better.

I think more recent fantasy has veered away from the idea of the rightful king who makes everything better because he’s meant to be on the throne. If there is a ruler who makes things better, it’s because he’s a good person who makes good policy (like The Goblin Emperor). Terry Pratchett had fun with the trope by having the rightful king who has all the usual signs not want to be king, and the people who could put him in power don’t want a king. He just steps up when there’s a crisis and provides leadership, then goes back to being a member of the guards. Still more recent fantasy focuses on people away from the throne. It’s ordinary people or people who have trained for a role having adventures, and the goal isn’t about putting the right king on the throne. Writers are also exploring forms of government other than monarchies in fantasy worlds.

I have to admit that there’s still something fun about the idea that the person nobody would notice is actually the person destined for greatness. That’s where a lot of the story my friend and I worked on as teenagers came from. In fact, it started as a portal fantasy in which her character was whisked away from her high school to a fantasy world where it turned out she was a princess, and only as we worked more on the story did we remove that part of it. When you’re feeling overlooked and outcast in high school, it’s fun to pretend that you’re royalty and no one knows about it.

This realization has made me think about my own fantasy worlds. The more history I read, the more it seems like European royalty was actually genetically inferior rather than superior. There was way too much inbreeding going on.

Due to a random chain of events, I ended up rewatching the Bleak House miniseries over the last couple of weeks. There was an article in the paper about a man who learned that his ancestors were involved in one of the legal cases that inspired the book. Meanwhile I was reading a Star Wars book set nearly 20 years after Return of the Jedi, in which Wedge Antilles was a major character, and it occurred to me that the actor who played Wedge had one of the leading roles in Bleak House, though I think he’s older in that than Wedge was in the book. Anyway, I was in the mood for that sort of thing and it made for good background noise while I measured and pinned up some curtains I’m hemming.

But watching that made me wonder if anyone has used the works of Dickens as an inspiration or basis for a fantasy novel. There are a number of fantasy retellings based on the works of Shakespeare, whether directly and obviously or more subtly. For instance, Rachel Caine’s Prince of Shadows is Romeo and Juliet told from the perspective of one of the secondary characters, giving background info that doesn’t appear in the play, like the fact that Romeo and Juliet were under the influence of a love spell (which would explain a lot). On the other hand, the Kingfountain series by Jeff Wheeler draws upon some Shakespeare plays, but set in a fantasy world. I don’t think he hides the inspiration, but it’s not too obvious. I remember reading one, getting midway through it and going, “Oh, he’s doing Richard III.”

But has the same thing been done with Dickens? It would seem particularly suited for epic fantasy, given that his books often cover long stretches of time and have large casts of characters. The setting is so much a part of the story that it’s practically a character, so it has tons of worldbuilding (even if the books were set in the real world, the details chosen to convey that world so that it’s vivid even to people who never saw that setting require the same sort of effort as portraying an imaginary world). The plots would translate easily into court intrigue. There are several of his books that fit the “farmboy with destiny” type trope of fantasy, with obscure young men who rise in the world and turn out to have some kind of inheritance. Fantasy might even make some of his plots make more sense, like his fondness for entirely unrelated people who look so much alike that people mistake them for each other.

I’ve learned that a fantasy retelling of A Tale of Two Cities has just come out, which uses changelings as the explanation for the two unrelated people who look the same. I’ll have to find that one. But is there a fantasy Great Expectations or Our Mutual Friend? I could have fun figuring out how to put Our Mutual Friend in a fantasy world, with the inheritance being a crown instead of the proceeds from a dust heap. Bleak House is just made for a gothic retelling with sorcery.

And now I want to rewatch the miniseries of Our Mutual Friend. I don’t think I’m going to try to delve into reading Dickens right now. I’ve managed to ease my way out of my reading slump by reading shorter, more straightforward books without a lot of subplots. Trying to read Dickens right now would probably be a lost cause. That may be my winter project.

I’ve been in a weird reading slump since I started the moving process. I’ve only read about two novels (I’m almost done with the second) since I started packing back in early April, and that’s slow for me. I might manage to read a few pages at night before I go to sleep, but if I sit down to just read, I get distracted and restless and end up getting up to do something.

I checked a bunch of books on gardening out of the library, but I couldn’t even focus on those other than flipping through and looking at the pictures. I realized I’m nowhere near being ready for that, and what I need now isn’t a book that tells me what to plant but rather a book that tells me what to kill. I gave up and returned them all to the library.

Now that I’m finishing that second novel, I need to find something new to read. I have plenty of books on the to-be-read shelf, but if it’s languishing there, I’m probably not super interested in it. I need to make a library trip to find something that makes me want to sit down and just read.

Fortunately, I don’t seem to be in the kind of slump where I’m not interested in any books. It’s mostly been a distraction issue. But I probably need something that really captivates me and that isn’t too complicated to get over the distraction. Summer tends to be my chick lit/romcom phase, and I can usually tear through one of those pretty quickly. That might make a good thing to get for a starter book for getting back in reading mode. I have a few more curtains to hang and a piece of furniture to put together, and then there’s that crazy yard, but otherwise I’m getting to a point where I should be able to allow myself to sit and read and relax on a Sunday afternoon instead of working around the house.

I don’t think I have anything particular on the schedule for the weekend unless my next-door neighbors throw another spontaneous party like they did last weekend, other than church Sunday morning and an outing Sunday evening, so I think I’ll hit the library on Friday when I go out to run errands and then plan to spend some time during the weekend just sitting and reading and see if I can get back into the swing of things.

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.