With the new storage stuff I bought this week, I’ve managed to finally get all my books, DVDs, and CDs shelved. I was surprised to find that I even had room left over. I guess I really purged the books before I moved from Texas.

Putting things on shelves forced me to look at what I have, and it’s an effort not to get sidetracked. When I’m putting books on shelves, I catch myself thinking about how much I enjoyed a particular book, and the temptation is to open it and start reading. If I’m not careful, I’ll find myself a couple of hours later sitting on the floor with a book, still surrounded by the books that need to be shelved. CDs work the same way, with being reminded of everything I have and how long it’s been since I listened to that music, but at least there I can put a CD on to play while I continue to work. It’s not like reading, where I have to stop what I’m doing to read.

I’ve noticed that it was good for my budget when the movie theaters and music stores stopped being so common in malls. I seemed to have had a habit of seeing a movie, then going straight to the music store to buy the soundtrack. I listened to the soundtrack a lot for a couple of weeks, then totally forgot about it (and sometimes about the movie). I found soundtracks for movies I hardly remember. For a lot of them, it wasn’t so much that I loved the movie as it was that the soundtrack functioned like a mix tape, combining songs I liked in a way I wouldn’t have been able to buy together otherwise. Romantic comedies tend to use jazzy standards on their soundtracks, so that was a good way to buy that kind of music, whether or not the movies were memorable. Still, there are one or two CDs I found that had me wondering why I felt compelled to buy them. Now that most of the music stores have closed and most theaters don’t seem to be in malls anymore, at least I have time to calm down after seeing a movie before I’m in a place to buy a soundtrack rather than having a music store right there while I’m still on the emotional high from the end of the movie.

I need to organize my CDs better so I can find what I want right away instead of going through all the shelves in two rooms. I’ll need to move most of the CDs I use as writing music to the office and keep out the CDs I tend to sing along with, since those are a distraction. Then again, the writing music tends to be good reading music, but the den is only a few steps away from the office, so it’s not a major effort to move a CD from one place to another, but I want to shelve them where I’ll know I can find them.

Shelving the To Be Read books reminded me of things that have been lingering there a long time. My recent reading has been the Timothy Zahn follow ups to his early 90s Star Wars trilogy. I wasn’t crazy about all the Star Wars books that came out during that time, but I liked those, and I bought his other ones, but for some reason never got to them. I’ve been doing a project to rewatch all the Star Wars movies and TV shows in storyline order, so I guess I had Star Wars on the mind when I was packing and I pulled out those books to read during the move. Of course, that whole timeline has been erased by the sequel films and the new continuity created around them, including all the TV series that take place at around the same time that these books would have, but it’s interesting seeing where it was all going. I was a guest of honor at a convention with Timothy Zahn and had a chance to get to know him. Oddly, when I think of him now, I think of knitting because I was frantically working on a baby shower gift during that convention, and he helped me search for my cable needle when I dropped it. He was fascinated with what I was making and how it all worked, since the blanket I was making had a lot of fancy stitches. It’s weird reading Star Wars while thinking about knitting.

My next task is getting all the clothes put away. I’m getting new ideas for outfits, since I’m seeing pieces in different contexts, next to things I wouldn’t have normally put with them. I have to put together a couple of portable wardrobes that will go in the basement for off-season and rarely worn things, and then I should have room in the closet for clothes I wear regularly.

I hope to be done with the bulk of the setting up by the end of the month. There will be fine-tuning as I adjust to living in this space, but I won’t be spending the bulk of my time on it, and I can get back into a work routine. I’ve fallen into some really bad habits while normal life has been suspended.

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

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

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

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

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

I’m going to do something new this weekend that I hope will be fun. I’m going to play Dungeons & Dragons for the very first time. A group of women in town are meeting at the library Sunday afternoon for a one-shot campaign (so a short one that can finish in one sitting instead of an extended adventure that requires multiple sessions).

I’ve wanted to do this since I was in 8th grade and first learned about D&D. It sounded like what my friends used to do in elementary school when we ran around the neighborhood acting out various scenarios — we’re pioneers, space explorers, detectives, etc. — only more organized and set up so you couldn’t just claim you defeated someone else. I think the idea of sitting around a table with friends, doing something cooperative, also appealed to me. I tried playing regular board games but I don’t like competition. Something similar, but where it’s more about making up a story together, and it’s the whole group winning together rather than competing against each other seemed like a good compromise. Unfortunately, the friends I had at school who played lived in a different part of town.

Then we moved to a farm outside a small town in a very conservative area during the Satanic Panic when I was in high school. They had seminars about how all rock music was satanic and would lead you to the devil at churches in town, and they were convinced that D&D was worshipping satan and would lead to demonic possession. (These same people thought that yoga was satanic, said meditation was leaving yourself open for demons to take over, and later thought reading Harry Potter books would lead to kids practicing witchcraft.) If anyone in that town played D&D, I wouldn’t have heard of it, and I still would have had a transportation issue in meeting up with anyone.

In college, a lot of my friends played, but they were all pretty hardcore and weren’t at all open to dealing with a newbie. There was an ongoing game in the study lounge every weekend, but these guys had been playing the same characters since high school, and they were doing a really involved campaign. Some of them were into it enough that they wore costumes. They didn’t even like spectators. I got kicked out of the study lounge when I tried to watch.

As an adult, I ran into similar issues. There was a group at my old church that played regularly, but they’d been playing together since high school and didn’t have room for anyone else. Most people I hung out with either had enough scheduling issues that they didn’t want to try to get anything started, or they had a longstanding group. At conventions they sometimes did intro one-shot campaigns, but since I was at conventions as a speaker, I didn’t have time in my schedule to do anything like that. I seldom had more than an hour free at a time.

I get a bit jealous when I read about people’s gaming groups—the food they make, the funny things that come out of their games. Sometimes it sounds kind of like a lot of book groups I’ve known, so the game is secondary to getting together with friends to eat and talk, and I think maybe that’s what I’ve always wanted to do. In a way, writing fantasy novels is a kind of solo D&D, but without rules or dice to govern how things should go.

Someone started a Facebook group for women in this town who are looking to make friends, and most of the activities people have come up with haven’t appealed to me. It seems to be younger women who want to go to wineries or concerts. But then someone mentioned this, and I thought it would be fun. They do a D&D night once a month at a local brewpub, and there’s a gaming store downtown, so I figured there would be people in town who played, but I didn’t know how to find them, and I didn’t know if they’d be newbie-friendly. This group is mostly newcomers. I’ll probably be the grandma of the group, but at least I’ll have a chance to see what I think about it. It may be weird to me as a fantasy writer, dealing with someone else’s world and someone else steering the plot. At the very least, I’ll get to meet several other women in town, and maybe I’ll get even more of the jokes in that Dungeons & Dragons movie. Maybe I should rewatch that episode of Community to prepare myself. I also need to come up with a character. I wonder if I could base it on a character I’m brainstorming now and see if I come up with any ideas I can use.

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.

I had another one of those “this is a thing I like!” experiences with something I was watching last week, so I’ve got a new plot element to add to my list. I’m not sure if I’d call it a trope because it’s pretty specific. I’m calling it “in another life.”

This is a situation in which two characters have known each other and maybe even were in love, but then meet again in different circumstances and one or both doesn’t remember, or else they’re different people, so things have changed. It really only works in a science fiction or fantasy story because you need something that doesn’t generally exist in reality to create the situation — things like time travel, alternate universes, memory spells, clones, etc. The only thing that might make it work in a non-SF story is amnesia, and real-world amnesia doesn’t really work that way.

Some examples:
Farscape had one of the best TV romance stories ever, possibly because they made use of this trope to extend the “will they/won’t they” phase while also still having a relationship. Spoilers ahead. The main relationship started as enemies, then they became reluctant allies, then allies, then friends, and then they spent a long time in what I call “affection” (another reason I think this relationship worked — it was a slow burn, and most of the “Moonlighting syndrome” relationships go from animosity straight to bed without passing through a transitional phase). While they were hanging out and having long talks while snuggled against each other but weren’t yet lovers, some science fictiony thing happened that made a duplicate of him. One version went off to have other adventures while one stayed on the ship, where the relationship continued to progress, and they eventually became lovers. Then he died heroically and tragically, and then the other version returned and it was weird for them because he wasn’t the same person she’d fallen in love with. He was the same up to the point of the duplication, but he hadn’t had the experience of becoming her lover and had gone off and had a lot of other experiences. He was someone she could fall in love with, but it was painful for her to see this person who was just like the man she lost, so it reset their relationship. Eventually, they did end up together.

The series Haven had something like this. We learned later in the series that she kept getting a new personality and memories and getting sent back to this town. Thanks to time travel, he kept getting sent back and meeting her past identities, and they always fell in love. So by the time they met, she’d already fallen in love with him a couple of times in her past, but that was still in his future. She didn’t remember it, but she was drawn to him.

The one that made me realize that I like this sort of thing was a show I won’t name to avoid spoilers (it’s pretty recent). A character found herself in a different timeline where history had gone differently and she was the only one aware of the change. She and a person from that timeline ended up going back in time and had to set things right, stopping another time traveler from trying to change history. They developed feelings during the mission, but they realized that if they were successful, he wouldn’t exist. There would be a version of him, but he would be different because he would be from a different world. After the mission was complete and she was back in her time, which had returned to the timeline she knew, she encountered the version of that person, and of course he didn’t know her and he wasn’t the person she’d fallen for (but maybe he could be …)

I’m less a fan of reincarnation stories, and there usually neither of them is aware of what’s going on, so it’s all on the audience to feel the angst of their past selves, but something like Dead Again also gives some of the same vibe.

I’m trying to figure out why this is a story line that has me going “ooh!” I think part of it is figuring out what aspect of a person makes that person who they are. There’s bound to be some element of their personality that would be the same, no matter what, but then people are also shaped by their experiences. This kind of story with alternate timelines or artificial personalities or memory wipes or duplicates, etc., is like having a control group to study which changes will have which effects and which things remain constant.

But as a fan of slow-burn romances, I think it’s also that it’s fun to have a bit of a reset button. You can have a relationship come to fruition and then send it back to square one to start all over again. It’s a fun way of avoiding that problem in a series of having a relationship work out and then not knowing what to do with it. You can also have a dramatic, tragic death and still have your lovers get together eventually in some form. You get to have both angst and a happy ending, having your cake and eating it, too.

And I think there’s that element of “meant to be” if people keep falling in love with each other in multiple timelines or versions of themselves. You know you’ve got a truly epic romance when these same people fall for each other every time, no matter what’s changed about them.

I haven’t tried using this yet in my work, though I come close in the Rydding Village books. Now I need to see if I can come up with a plot that goes all-out with this.

The new book is out! The paperback should now be available on Amazon. It may take time to get out through the extended markets. I was a little late in getting it set up and uploaded because I decided to celebrate getting the book done by going on vacation and I was on the road when I got the paperback cover.

This was supposed to be a trip to the mountains to enjoy a real fall, but they got hit with a heat wave, so I’m seeing what summer would be like here, only with glorious fall color.

One thing that’s weird about going on vacation right after finishing a book is that I haven’t started working on another book, so I don’t have anything I’m mulling over in my head. There are a few backburnered projects that I’ll get back to when I get home, but I’m not actively working on anything, and that’s a bit weird. Usually the way I get myself to sleep at night is by imagining the “movie” of the next scene I need to write, but I don’t have anything like that going on now. I’m having to pull up potential scenes from some other projects. It’s probably good for me to take this kind of time off, but it feels like the end of a semester, after finals, when you have this weird, nagging feeling that you should be studying and it’s a bit unsettling not to be studying or doing homework.

I’m staying at a historic inn, so there’s no TV in the room, just really good wi-fi. That means I’ve been reading a bit and catching up on Internet stuff in the evenings when I collapse after a day of intense walking. I logged more than 18,000 steps yesterday, many of them up steep hills. All that exercise is good because the food in this town is amazing and I’m thoroughly enjoying it.

So, I’ll be back home and talking about books again next week.

I’m in the middle of rewriting the book I wrote earlier this year, and I’ve reached the part that’s going to take some pretty serious rewriting, not just revising. I changed my mind about what should happen in the middle of the book. I think this version is going to be a lot more fun, but it’s going to take work. I’ve been super diligent all week, spending a lot of time on writing work, both on this project and another one (one mostly in the morning, the other in the afternoon). I figure I might as well buckle down now, since it’s super hot outside, so there’s not much else to do. I may as well sit in the air conditioning and write, and then in the fall I can go outdoors and enjoy myself some.

This is another reason I don’t try to do National Novel Writing Month in November. That’s prime outdoors time around here. Our weather will be what other places consider early fall weather.

Meanwhile, my ever-cooperative brain has come up with yet another new story idea. There’s a genre I’ve been wanting to play in, but I didn’t have any ideas for actual stories in it. Then one struck me. I’m doing a little brainstorming every day to work out the characters and plot, so maybe it’ll be ready to write when I get done with the current projects.

That should keep me busy until about November, so it’ll all work out, I guess.

I should have news in the next couple of weeks about one of these projects.

Also, I keep forgetting to post about the Smashwords July sale. My books in the Smashwords store are half off in July. There are also a lot of other deals, in case you already have all my books. You can find the discounted books at https://www.smashwords.com/shelves/promos/

I’m typing to you from my new computer! I’d been needing to get a new one for a while. I bought my old one in 2016, and it’s at about the five-year mark when they tend to get glitchy with the kind of heavy use I give mine. I’d reached a point where I couldn’t update my browsers without updating my operating system, and some of my critical websites wouldn’t work with my browsers. But at the same time, I have some tech that wouldn’t work if I updated my operating system. I was having a lot more crashes, so I wasn’t sure updating the operating system would solve my problems — or even work. Then I found a sale on the kind of computer I wanted and took the plunge to buy a new one.

It took me a while to get around to getting the new one set up and all the files transferred. I put it off because I was dreading it. And then I had another crash and knew I needed to deal with it, so I took care of it last weekend. I still don’t have it exactly the way I want it, and for some weird reason my e-mail files didn’t transfer, so I’m going to have to figure all that out. I’m also going to have to buy the new version of one bit of software and eventually get some external drives. But it’s more or less functional now.

The new one is a lot faster. It gets going faster, it loads things faster, and the keyboard is really nice, so I feel like I’m typing faster. Maybe that means I’ll write books faster. Unfortunately, it doesn’t speed up my brain.

One nice thing is that I’ll finally be able to load music onto my new phone. The new phone the phone company made me take a couple of years ago when they changed their network wasn’t compatible with my old operating system, so I’ve been using my old phone as a music player. I may continue doing that (one reason to keep the old computer the way it is), but I can also put music on the new phone so I can have it either way.

I guess this means I have to write a few books to make this computer pay for itself.

The last couple of weeks, there’s been a nature documentary series on PBS called Wild Scandinavia, and it’s made me realize what’s missing in the fictional world I’m working on: wildlife.

My characters have horses, but those are the only animals in the story, aside from one kitten, a mention of bees, and I think a mention of hearing birds. I completely forgot to include wildlife. The characters don’t have to swat at flies or mosquitoes. They don’t hear wolves or coyotes. No lizards or snakes cross their paths. I don’t even know what lives in that world.

Which is weird because I tend to pay attention to that sort of thing in real life. Even just sitting on my patio, I take note of the different kinds of bugs and spiders. I have what I call the “patio lizards,” the anoles who live around my patio and the patio fence. They’re so used to me that one’s even learned to ask for water. It waits for me to water the plants and splash water, then comes to drink what I’ve splashed on the ground, and if I haven’t watered the plants at the right time, the lizard will sit and stare at me until I give it some water.

My neighbors have a bird feeder, and I watch the birds that come to it—including sometimes even ducks. It’s a dish of seeds, not a real bird feeder, which means it also attracts squirrels and rats. I hadn’t noticed any squirrels or signs of rats in a while, and then I heard a hawk and later spotted it, which may explain the lack of rodents. I guess that bird feeder is feeding birds both directly and indirectly.

When I go walking, I notice all the water birds that come to the canals in my neighborhood, like the geese, egrets, herons, ducks, and cormorants. We have a few families of Canada geese who winter here. I know they have a reputation for being nasty, but our guests are rather well-behaved. Then there are the turtles in and around the water. I’ve also seen rabbits and armadillos.

I’m not sure why I’ve left out this aspect of my fictional world. I guess I’ve been focused on the plot and there are no wildlife encounters that affect the plot. But I can at least mention them swatting at flies, seeing birds, and hearing sounds.

It’s been a month since I finished the first draft of the book in progress. I’ve re-read it and have done some brainstorming about what I need to fix. I don’t have a lot of major surgery to do. I think the basic structure is good. But what I have is essentially a 125,000-word outline. The scenes and plot points are there, but I think they may not be done in quite the right way. I’m going to have to analyze each scene and figure out how I could do it better.

That analysis is what I’ve been working on this week, though I’ve had some difficulty concentrating. You may have heard about the recent shopping mall shooting. That happened in my area. I don’t live close to that mall. It’s on the other side of the metro area. But I have a lot of friends who live around there, so as soon as I heard the news, I jumped online to see if my friends were safe. I found that one friend’s son was just across the road from that center when it happened, so I narrowly escaped having had two friends who’ve had children gunned down (just one is already too many). I’ve shopped at that mall. In fact, I bought a dress I wore for a lot of my Damsel Under Stress book events there. I got chills when I saw the reports that the shooter had researched the busiest times there because the time I shopped there was during that peak window. It was years ago, but it still felt like a close call. I guess I had a closer call last year when someone was shot on the street behind my house and I heard the gunfire. I’ll never forget that sound.

I’m heartbroken about the lives lost and the lives broken — that poor little boy who lost his whole family, the mother who lost both daughters, the young woman celebrating her birthday, and all the others. It’s hard to believe that someone could have so much hate as to want to indiscriminately wipe people out. Even sadder is when you see the number of people online who try to excuse or justify it. Maybe they’re all just trolls or bots trying to stir things up, but it’s still scary.

So, no wonder it’s been hard to focus. It does help that this is a “secondary world” book, so it’s an escape from here and now. I’ve figured out how I need to fix the first scene. That will be my work for today. It’s a rainy day, so it’s good for writing.