I’ve finished work on Rydding Village book 4, Weaving and Wyverns. I’m just waiting on a cover, which is supposed to come in the next few days.

Now I’m going to get to do what I’ve been saying I want to do for years: take October off. I won’t be entirely off, but I won’t be doing work that chains me to my desk at my favorite time of year. I’m not going to be writing a first draft, editing, or proofreading. I’ll mostly be doing some planning, plotting, and brainstorming for future projects. I also have some business and promotional work I need to do and some projects I want to get started in that area. But the working time will be flexible. I’m allowing myself to take time off. If it’s a lovely day and I want to go for a hike, I will. If it’s a cool, rainy day, I’ll spend the day baking and curled up on the sofa with a book. There are a couple of day trips I want to take. There’s an old logging train in West Virginia that now does excursions into the mountains, and I want to do that. I also want to visit Monticello. On weekends, there are so many festivals around the area to visit.

I guess I need to work on the house, as well. I need to organize the basement, and now that things aren’t growing so furiously, I might be able to catch up on getting rid of weeds in my yard. I’d like to unearth the fire pit so I can have a real bonfire night or two. Right now, it’s full of weeds.

But this weekend will mostly be for rest. This morning I had a meeting in a nearby town and did some shopping while I was there. I may hit the community garden market later in the afternoon and try to time it to coincide with the steam train that will be coming by. Saturday is supposed to be cool and rainy, and I’m going to spend a very lazy day with tea and books.

It’s already starting to feel like fall. The first hints of gold are showing in the trees, and when there’s a gust of wind, leaves fall. It’s been pretty chilly overnight, so it’s still cold in the mornings, gets warm in the afternoon, then it’s cool again as soon as the sun sets. I started regularly wearing my lightweight hoodie in August. This was one of the main reasons I moved away from Texas. I wanted more fall. In Texas, it’s warm through October, then sort of starts looking and feeling like fall around Thanksgiving, aside from spurts of cool weather that last a day or two. Here, we had “Texas October” in August, and fall-like weather will last through Thanksgiving.

But we’re about to get another warmish spell, close to Texas October, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s hitting the weekend we’re having a church and choir retreat up in the mountains. There’s an Episcopalian retreat center that apparently started as a camp-type place, but then it ended up incorporating what was once a Victorian spa resort, the place people went from Washington, D.C., to “take the waters” and get away from the heat and humidity on the coast during the summer. Now the old Victorian hotels are part of this retreat center. It may be a bit warm for hiking, but it’ll be nice for sitting around a bonfire at night.

Since I finished this round of revisions on Rydding Village book 4, I’m making a day of the trip up there. Along the way I’m planning to visit the New Market battlefield and the Civil War museum there. I just watched the Ken Burns Civil War series from PBS, so now I’m trying to get around to some of the related sites in this area. The house three doors down was used as a military hospital during the war (the person who lives there now says there are blood stains still in the wood floors), and I can see a cemetery with a war section from my front windows, so since I’m surrounded by this history I figure I need to learn more. That was never an era in history I was that interested in.

There’s also a regionally famous potato chip factory near the museum, where you can watch them making the chips, get samples, and buy some, so I may do that while I’m nearby.

Then we’ll see if my voice has recovered enough to do three days of choir rehearsals. We won’t be rehearsing the whole time. There will be other activities and a lot of free time. I’m bringing books to read and some notebooks to write in, since there’s no Internet. It’ll be a good time for an online detox. Then I’ll be ready for a round of edits.

Last night was my first choir rehearsal in about four years. I’ve been singing in “summer choir,” where you just show up on Sunday morning and learn a simple piece, but this was the start of “real” choir, with rehearsals and with everyone there. This choir sings for the Episcopal church services, but it also functions as a kind of community chorale, with several concerts of big classical pieces every year, so there are people who come to rehearsals and who sing in the concerts who don’t sing for church services. There are several who go to other churches. The cantor of the town’s synagogue sings with this choir.

One thing that’s really different for me is that they need me to sing alto, since they’re top-heavy with sopranos. I think half the alto section is made up of sopranos. I have a good low register, so I can do it, but it’s definitely a mental shift that I’ll have to get used to. I’m not sure I’d want to sing soprano in this choir, anyway, because they do a lot of Anglican church music that’s written for boy sopranos, and that’s not the kind of soprano voice I have. What little voice training I’ve had has been with opera singers, and that’s a different technique. I’d be blasting them out with a strong vibrato instead of having that pure, sweet sound. In the alto section, I can be rich and lush, though I’ve warned them that I’ve mostly sung jazz in my lower register, so I get pretty torchy. When I sing low, I sound like I should be wearing a slinky dress and leaning against a piano. My low voice has been called “sexy” by people I’ve been in choirs with before.

I had a huge “it’s a small world” moment at the rehearsal when I learned that the woman sitting next to me went to the high school I would have gone to if we’d stayed in that place after I finished eighth grade, went to the same university I went to, and then worked for a while in the part of Texas where I went to high school and where my parents live, so she even knew that small town. This town seems to be full of former Texans. I guess we’re reversing the flow from when Stephen F. Austin came from Virginia (not too far from here) to Texas with a group of settlers. Now they’re all coming back.

I put new batteries in my electronic keyboard so I can do some practicing and get the alto part in my head. Next weekend is a church retreat that includes a choir rehearsal, so I’ll be doing some serious singing (in between hiking jaunts, since we’re going to a retreat center in the mountains). I’m not sure my voice is up for that much, since I’ve barely used it in a long time. I’ll have to do some exercises every day this week to see if I can build up to it.

I made another Ikea run yesterday to the store in the D.C. suburbs. I had an $80 coupon I’d earned from all my shopping to set up the house, and it was expiring this weekend. I also had a set of curtains to return, since I’d bought based on their estimates, but that was apparently for if you were pleating them, and I’m not trying to pleat them. I need to be able to pull them aside enough to open the sliding door to my deck, so one set of curtains was enough. That added up to being enough that it was worth making the trip.

Trying to spend $80 at Ikea without buying anything big (like furniture) was kind of like one of those shopping spree games, where you have a certain amount of time to get whatever you can fit in your cart, though without the speed element. The one big thing I got was a Roman shade for my front door. The front door is mostly glass. It’s a sort of bubbly glass that distorts the view inside, but when it’s dark outside and a light is on indoors, you can see pretty well. I haven’t been too worried about it because I live near the end of a dead-end street and there’s a row of trees and hedges across the front lawn, mostly blocking the view from the street, but I still would feel weird about coming down to breakfast in my pajamas when it’s still dark at breakfast time. Now I can have all the light and visibility through the door in daytime, but I can block it off by lowering the shade when I want to.

But I still had to come up with about $50 worth of stuff, so I got to go through the store just throwing things in the cart. I got some hand towels for the bathroom, a set of small plates (since the “small” plates that go with my dishes are too big for things like toast or a sandwich), a sifter, some food storage stuff, and lots of candles. The candles were on sale, so I couldn’t resist. I used to joke about my Strategic Candle Reserve, but it came in handy during that big power failure we had a few years back in Texas. I didn’t replace the ones I used up then, and I didn’t try to move most of what I had left. Now I have more than replaced them. I’m ready for cozy fall and winter evenings. I even like to light a candle on my desk while I’m writing on cloudy days when I can see the light. And if I lose power, I’ll have plenty of light, with a nice vanilla scent.

I ended up going a bit over the $80 I needed to use the coupon, but I still came out of Ikea with a ridiculously low total.

There’s a mall next to the Ikea, so I did some shopping there while waiting for the Ikea to open. I hadn’t been in a mall since before the pandemic started, so I haven’t done that level of shopping in ages. Wow, prices have really gone up. I did catch some good deals and got some shoes and some boots. Since I’m walking most places now, I needed some “nice” shoes I can still walk in. Even some of my flats aren’t really comfortable for walking a mile or so in. My dressy boots were all high-heeled. So now I have some cute boots that I should be able to walk in.

Then I took back roads back home, so I’ve seen more of Virginia. I still like my area the best. My soul sings at that first sight of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The Ikea and mall are pretty close to Mount Vernon. A lot of it is currently closed for some restoration work, but when it’s open again I may make another trip to play tourist, with a little shopping along the way. I could also catch a commuter train from there to go into D.C. without having to drive inside the Beltway.

But now I have to recover before going out tonight, and I need to get to work on book revisions. I did a lot of thinking while I was driving and now I need to look at how my ideas fit into the book.

One of the funny things about my move from a large metro area to a much smaller city is that I actually have a much more urban experience here. I live a ten-minute walk from a thriving downtown area full of shops and restaurants, plus a movie theater and one of the nation’s leading Shakespearean theaters. This town also hosts a number of other arts events.

This week has been a big classical music festival. It’s about a week and a half of classical concerts in venues all over town (mostly in historic churches), with a variety of music in each concert, ranging from Renaissance to Baroque, romantic to modern, and everything in between. A lot of the concerts are free, but there are also big evening concerts that are ticketed. Apparently, it almost sells out every year with season passes, and there are people who take their vacation every year to come here and go to all the concerts.

I got recruited by a friend who’s involved with running the festival to be an usher, so I’ve spent part of this week doing the free noon concerts. I’m also ushering for one of the ticketed concerts this weekend, so I’ll get to see one of the paid concerts for free. One of the people I worked with this week is really involved with the Shakespeare theater (her husband is a retired Shakespeare professor, so the theater is the reason they retired here), and they have extra tickets for events, so they’ve invited me to the dress rehearsal and reception for the production of Romeo and Juliet next week. Between them and my neighbor who’s the costume designer, I’ll be set for theater tickets, it seems.

This is the second big classical music event of the summer. There’s also a summer institute for string players that brings in young musicians from around the world to study with top musicians, and there’s a full schedule of performances with both the students and the guest instructors.

I have a much busier calendar in this small city than I had in the big metro area, but it helps that I can walk ten minutes (or drive in less than five minutes if it’s going to be late at night) to do things instead of having to drive 45 minutes on a freeway across a major city. I also seem to have met all the people who are involved in these things, which means I keep getting drafted to get involved.

But after two days of walking downtown and then being on my feet a long time, and then a meeting with a creative group downtown this morning, my legs are currently mad at me, so I’d better rest before having to be on my feet again Saturday night.

Meanwhile, this weekend is the Narratess Indie Fantasy Sale. August 23-25 you can get a huge variety of fantasy e-books (including my Tea and Empathy) at discounted prices. When the sale opens, you can find all the books here.

According to my parents, once you get to my age, you get to celebrate your birthday all week, so I’ve had a birthday week. Wednesday after I got my car serviced, I went shopping for birthday presents and bought myself a few things. Then late that afternoon I walked downtown to see the new Superman movie. There’s only one movie theater in town, a vintage 1930s theater downtown. They have upgraded the seats to cushy recliners with footrests and the projection and sound are modern, but when you see the front of the theater and the lobby, you feel like you’ve gone back in time. One other modern touch is that they show the movies with captions. The state school for the Deaf is here, and we have a large Deaf population, from the students to faculty to the former students who decide to stay in town, so I guess it makes sense to show movies with captions. I don’t know if it’s every show or if I happened into a captioned one. For once, I actually caught all the names of the characters because I could read them. I’ll discuss Superman more once I’ve had a chance to process it.

For my actual birthday, I did more shopping (mostly errands, but I bought some fun stuff, too), then spent the afternoon reading on the deck before walking downtown to have dinner at a bistro with a sidewalk cafe. We’ve been lucky to have had a cool snap this week, so it was a perfect evening to dine outdoors. When I got home, I sat on the deck and read some more.

Today I’m easing back into “normal” life because there are chores that have to be done. While it’s still cool, before a heat wave hits next week, I spent the morning working in my lawn, cutting the grass (the lawn is small enough and hilly enough that I use a weedeater instead of a mower) and digging up some bad invasive plants. When I heard the church bells from downtown chime noon, I figured it was time to come in and take a break.

I’m waiting on a delivery from one of my birthday gifts to myself, a new desk chair. The one I have is so uncomfortable that it limits my writing time, so I got a fancy one with an adjustable lumbar pillow and a softer seat. It also looks like it should be on the bridge of the starship Enterprise, so I’ll have to start my writing sessions by saying, “Engage!”

It’s the week after I finished a book and am emerging from my cave to deal with everything that didn’t get done and it’s my birthday week, so it’s a week of errands and housework but also some fun stuff. Today’s fun (which is interrupting my usual posting schedule) is getting my car maintenance done and doing some shopping. Then I might do something crazy like go to a movie. My plan is to do my main work for the day while I’m waiting for my car and then use most of the rest of the day for fun.

I got a start on emerging from the cave last weekend when we had a block party. I live on a short dead-end street that’s one block long, and it’s a fairly tight little community of mostly creative people. We have artists, fashion designers, and a theatrical costume designer who does shows all over, including the local Shakespeare theater. And me, the writer. There’s also an international flight attendant, who took care of the bar. All the liquor was in tiny bottles, and I’m not going to ask where that came from. The neighbor who organized the party also invited people from around town and who are visiting the town, including a couple of musicians here from the Netherlands for the big classical music summer institute they have here.

My social life has definitely increased since I moved to this house. It’s also reached the point where it can take me longer to walk down the block to my house than it takes to walk from downtown if people are out in their yards. But since so many people are artists, they understand when I say I’m working on a book and need to focus on it.

I think my main plan for my birthday is to take myself out for lunch at one of the downtown restaurants, but I may also do some shopping, depending on how much I get done today.

I’m gradually getting into a sense of what my “normal” is going to be in this house and what my daily routines will be, now that I’m mostly settled (I still need to organize the basement where a lot of stuff got stashed). This week, I’ve tried to get back into taking morning walks, and I’m figuring out what a good walking route may be.

One good place to go walking appears to be the big Victorian cemetery across the way (it’s across the street from the next street over — I have a good view of it from my front windows). A cemetery may seem like an odd place to go walking, but this one is a lot like a park. In fact, it reminds me a lot of Central Park in New York. It has a similar kind of landscaping, and some of the buildings are a lot like the ones in Central Park. There’s even a stone bridge over one of the paths that looks a lot like the bridges in Central Park. Think of a really hilly Central Park and fill it with tombstones, and you get the idea. The cemetery apparently dates to the 1840s, when the graveyard at the church downtown filled up, and this was on the edge of town at the time. It’s still in use now, but a lot of the graves are the ornate Victorian style, and there are a few mausoleums and monuments. There’s a whole Civil War section I haven’t walked around because it’s at the top of the very steep hill and I’m working up to that.

So, why walk in a cemetery? In this park-like space, there are walking paths winding throughout, and there’s no traffic, so you don’t have to dodge cars. No dogs are allowed on the grounds, so you don’t have to worry about the “it’s okay, he doesn’t bite” idiots letting their dogs run loose while they carry the leash. It’s very peaceful. There are a lot of trees around the paths. And it’s interesting. I like trying to read the stones (some of the older ones are too weathered to read well). I’ve recognized names that are now attached to streets around town. The people who used to own the land where my house is are buried there, but I haven’t found them yet. You definitely see the impact of modern medicine and vaccinations in the huge number of infant and child graves from the 1800s. There are stories in every one of those stones. I’ll avoid the place if I see a setup for a funeral, but early on weekday mornings, it’s a nice, quiet, safe place to walk and think.

When it’s not as hot or when the sun’s at a different angle, I’ll probably walk downtown sometimes, too. I love walking around a downtown area early in the morning when the shops and businesses aren’t open yet. There’s also a park nearby that has good hiking paths, but that may be best to drive to. It’s in walking distance, but if I’m going to do a serious hike, I don’t want to use up my energy walking through the neighborhood to get to it.

I’ve also had to rethink the way I do things around the house, like where I put my shoes. In my old house, I had one of those shoe caddies you hang from the closet rod. Here, I have very little hanging space in the closet, so there’s no room for that. Then it occurred to me that I don’t wear my shoes inside the house, so why do I need to store them in my bedroom? The “basement” of this house is the back half of the first floor (the house is built into a hill, so that part of the house is underground). It’s just through a door in the kitchen, and the closest part to the door is the part used as the laundry room. I put a garment rack there so I can hang things up to air dry, and I also have a few coats hanging there. I hung my shoe caddie there. I can put on my shoes just before I leave the house and take them off before I go upstairs when I get home. That was a big mindset shift, going from the way I’ve always done things to the way it makes sense to do things now. In my old house, my bedroom was right off the entry way, so having the shoes in my closet was the easiest way to put them on just before I left. Here, that’s the basement.

So, morning walks in the cemetery and shoes in the basement. Just a couple of ways my life has changed.

I had a big realization last week: I can sing in the shower now.

My whole life so far, I’ve either lived with other people or lived with walls that connected to other people’s homes. My house in Texas was a townhouse, and because builders like to put all the plumbing together, the bathroom walls always seem to be where units intersect. I could hear when my neighbors flushed or had the shower on, so I was hesitant to sing in the shower.

At least in that house the living room didn’t connect to anyone else’s home, and I was my own upstairs neighbor, so I didn’t have to worry much about TV volume, and I could generally sing in my living room or the upstairs loft without worrying about bothering neighbors.

Then I moved here and spent a year in an apartment where I could hear every sound my upstairs neighbors made, so I was hesitant to make any sounds at all. I didn’t dare sing (unless the neighbors were being particularly noisy and obnoxious), and I didn’t even say anything when talking on the phone that I wouldn’t want them to hear.

But in this house, my walls don’t touch anyone else’s walls. There’s a good 20 feet between my house and the neighbors’ homes on either side, with trees in between. I can’t even see the house behind mine because it’s up such a steep hill that their floor is about even with my roof, and there are a lot of trees in the way. While I was in the shower, I realized that I could sing and no one could hear me. It was so liberating to just let myself cut loose and enjoy the acoustics from a small space with all that tile, plus the warm, moist air that’s good for the vocal cords. Now I try to remember to sing when I’m in the shower.

I’ve started singing in choir again recently, so this is good for helping me get my voice back in shape. I’d started drifting away from choir even before the pandemic. I’d missed choir for a month or so after a bad cold that left me with a lingering cough, and the director didn’t seem to notice, so I wasn’t exactly feeling the love, and I wasn’t enjoying a lot of the music we were doing. Then the pandemic hit, and I hadn’t felt motivated to go back before I ended up moving. I’ve had to switch denominations because there’s really only one church in town that has a big music program and a lot of activities, but it’s an Episcopal church and I’m Methodist. The Methodists are actually an offshoot of the Anglican/Episcopal church and the services aren’t that different from what I’m used to. It’s a historic church. The congregation pre-dates the American Revolution (and there are graves that old in the churchyard), but the current “new” building dates from around 1850. It’s a local tourist attraction, largely because of the architecture and the fact that the stained glass windows are from the Tiffany workshop, with one even signed by Tiffany himself. The choir loft is in the rear of the church, in the loft with the pipe organ, and it’s like sitting inside the organ when it plays. The acoustics are amazing, and the church is often used as a performing arts venue for classical concerts. Buildings designed before there were microphones tend to work that way.

For the summer, they have a “just show up Sunday morning” choir, and I’ve been going to that, and I think I’ll ease into choir when it starts up in the fall. I’ve had to switch parts because they have too many sopranos and need altos, and I’m the kind of soprano who can sing alto (both having a good low range and the ability to read music and find notes).

So, I’ve started singing again, whether singing around the house or in the shower, and I’m getting back some of the joy I used to find in it that I’d lost.

One other fun thing I’ve realized about this house: It’s the first time in my adult life that my address has been just a street number without a unit number attached to it. I’m having to be careful when filling out online forms to change my address to be sure to erase what’s in the “unit number” field because the autofill doesn’t necessarily do that, even as it changes the street address.

This is also the first time I’ve been responsible for yard work, which is its own story. We’ve been having daily afternoon storms, so the grass is growing like crazy, but the grass is also never dry, making it harder to trim it. As soon as the sun dries it enough, it starts raining again. I call it the Daily Deluge. I’m planning to spend the fall and winter getting rid of weeds, then plant something to replace the grass in the spring, but I still have to get through this summer with the patches of grass I have among all the weeds.