It feels like only yesterday that I started the most recent version of a website blog. On the other hand, it feels like centuries since I first logged onto Usenet in the 90’s, and decades since I first set up a LiveJournal account. Oh, wait. that was decades ago. Ha. In any case, here we are, many thousands of posts into recording my life and thoughts, and 100 posts into the current edition of my online headspace.

Whatever shall I talk about? The usual, of course. Sharing…

TL;DR summary:

• Plans for creating an introvert-& neurodivergent-friendly gathering space.

• sale reminder

• flower pics

• Discord update

• Pippin health update (with pics of COURSE)

Firstly, I have for years wanted to start a book club, only without all the guilt, stress, pressure, queen bee politics, and friendship fractures I hear about book clubs causing. Like, I want people to come hang at my house for a few hours once a month or so to do A Fun Thing together. Being a Book Person, I naturally think hanging out with books is the most fun thing possible. The problem was, book clubs are built on Discussion And Analysis, which inevitably turns into unfun judgy gatekeeping of other people’s opinions. Worse, book clubs require everyone reading the SAME book, with all the inevitable conflicts over which book, and who gets to decide. Worst, the foundation bedrock is “required reading,” which is inherently unfun.

It also couldn’t be a book club because book clubs “meet,” and a “meeting” is too close to a “party” for my comfort. (the idea of inviting people to a party gives me hives and panic nausea. Hard pass.) So I turned the idea upside down and shook it hard, figuratively speaking.

Out dropped “Bring Your Own Book” Club. Heck, members wouldn’t even have to bring a book. Bring a craft project, a computer or tablet, a recipe and ingredients, whatever.

“Parallel Play Open House Club” would be a more accurate name, but that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. Basically…

I started the previous post talking about the things I’d forgotten in the post prior to that, but only got two of them recorded before I promptly digressed into a grumpy little introspection post. I hereby resolve to Not Do That this time, I promise. So. Overview List first, so if I get too far off the trail, I have a guide back to the original point. Points. Whatever.

• Garden update

• Writing Progress

• THERE ARE NEW (old) ART PAGES HERE ON THE WEBSITE. Check out the Whimsies tab.

• July Reading record

• July Viewing record

Garden: Funny how I never forget to talk about the yard, huh? That’s because….

I forgot to mention a couple of things in the last post. Interesting stuff, of course. I blame the weather for m. Blaming the weather is still a thing, isn’t it?

A cold front swept down from Canada mid-week, broke the heat wave down to spectacular, summer perfection with lows cool enough for hoodies & highs warm enough for shorts. Unfortunately all that cold air came with a whopping huge load of smoke particulates from the “Holy fuck, is ALL of Manitoba going up in flames?” fires. So the windows stayed shut with the AC on, the air filters got cranked up, and I wore N95s outdoors. Because your lungs never EVER forgive you for pneumonia.

ANYway. One writing thing I forgot to mention: I have put Relics From a Traveling Show on sale for 99 cents in ebook form during August. Why? BECAUSE I CAN. Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. Tell total strangers. (JUST KIDDING. Not really.)

The longer answer to “why sale now?” is this…

There’s lots going on, and most of it happened against a blazing-hot backdrop of “HOW humid is it out there? UGH.”

This week started weird but is getting better. Monday in the wee hours of the AM, a friend’s accounts got hacked, and in the way of such things, the hacker immediately started contacting everyone in their network. Since I don’t have FB or Insta, they contacted me via Discord.

The only thing that saved me from losing money to them was that after I responded to the initial 2AM weirdly-worded “hey, wyd? Can I ask a favor?” message with “sure, what do you need?” I did the ADHD squirrel thing, got distracted by a long walk, a bunch of garden work, a shower, and some reading before I sat down to brunch to read the urgent request for money.

By which time there was a ton of group chat activity and scamhackster warning alerts from the fraud victim & others, as well as worried message queries from mutuals who’d also been targeted for cash but didn’t have direct contact information for the victim.

Then followed a flurry of blocking & reporting & purging & discussions. I feel so bad for the person who got hit. They’re having to redo EVERYthing. I was only on the periphery & that wasn’t fun…

It’s been busy. The power was out all day one of them due to tree trimming, and it was way too hot to sit around inside a house with no AC AND no fans. Spouseman & I turned it into a “Fun Day Out,” walking to brunch and then driving to the Botanic Garden, visiting the Butterfly exhibit where I used to volunteer and walking all the parts of the park we often don’t get around to strolling.

Another day I did my seasonal hair, bleaching and coloring…

Hey, world, here I am cluttering up my little corner of the interwebs with the chronicles of My Doings. The days have slipped through my fingers once again, so it is Wednesday night, not Friday night when I originally and dutifully intended to write this post, only I fell asleep on the couch with the laptop AND the cat in my lap. This was as much a surprise to me as it was to the cat. (The laptop had no opinions, AI hype notwithstanding.)

It is also not Sunday night, when I watched a movie with Spouseman instead of writing blog, or Monday, when I had my biweekly watch Leverage with my buddy night, or Tuesday night, when I chatted with people online and then did the fall-asleep-on-the-couch thing again after work. So this has reached Monty Python castle sinking into the swamp levels of ridiculous, and I am determined to post TONIGHT.

Things I did this week included…

Prologue: this isn’t the post I sat down to write, but it’s the one that come out, so it’s the one the world’s getting.

The weekdays have settled nicely into Hot Summer Routine. My internal alarm clock wakes me between 7 and 8 AM, which means I can have tea & do morning puzzles outside on the porch or patio before the sun hits them. Then it’s time for breakfast, upcoming calendar/scheduling consultation with Spouseman (don’t picture anything exciting, I’m talking stuff like laundry, grocery needs, meal ideas) and then it’s up to the office with tea and determination.

Summer is storm, fire & flood season, so, I do my Big Disaster checks first: the Airnow.gov air quality map, Accuweather, NHC.gov and Watch Duty. If I’m feeling brave, I read the day’s 1440 report & the previous day’s WTF Just Happened post. If I’m not feeling brave (most days) I leave the human news for the end of the workday…

It has been, as usual, a busy week. Weekish. Week plus? One of those. There was (another) heat wave, I dug a trench in my backyard, we had a visit from a fox, the fireplace had its annual maintenance inspection, a noisy holiday occurred, and—big shoutycaps achievement here—I HAVE FINALLY COMPLETED A REAL MAP OF MY FICTIONAL TOWN, along with a numbered list key for all of the important locations in both present-day and ghost-occupied states. It took a lot of drafting and I kept getting distracted by research into things like street naming conventions, and the history of Illinois, and picking up Proceate and spending time playing with digital pens and pencils.

(I totally don’t need Procreate, but it was fun to draw dopey little sketches of cats and dragons on my iPad as a break from squinting at the map.) ANYWAY. Onward…

I’ve been doing some blog housekeeping, repairing or deleting old, broken links, removing reviews of indie books that aren’t available anywhere anymore, and fixing formatting glitches that happened when I exported from the janky old Wordpress site. And in the course of that work, I’ve noted some commonalities in my writing over the years.

First, the number of blog posts with the word random in the title was a ridiculously large number I am not going to share. Yes, I’ve been blogging a long time (since 2006, if I count LiveJournal, which I do) but proportionally, It’s still an absurd number of “random” observations. I’ve been recording diary-ish entries and musings since LONG before 2006, but LJ was the first effort in the blogging format.)

ANYway. Second, I like lists a lot. Shocker, I know. And third, I cyclically get in the way of my own writing by making things more complicated than they need to be. I will blame the ADHD, as the complications are almost always tied into me finding a New Shiny Thing. Distractions are real. The worst ones are the Shiny Things I don’t even like but can’t ignore simply because they’re there. Those are usually Shiny Things the Online Success Experts insist are important, so there’s an extra heft to them, mentally, that makes it hard to set them aside.

But eventually I do get disgusted with them, or the annoyance of dealing with them outweighs the Shiny Distraction of poking at them to see how they work, and I get back to the reason I made the bog in the first place…

It’s a few days past midsummer, and I’ve been an absentee blogger.

I spent the last two weeks mostly buried in the worldbuilding for the Ghost Town book and its sequel. I had a great Zoom call with my co-author, going over all kinds of details and continuity issues that needed hammering out.

I have a master list of ALL the character names, present, past, and ghostly. I have a list of all locations mentioned. I have sketches of important locations. And maps. THERE ARE MAPS. Not finished ones, but I’m proud of the progress so far. OH! And character descriptions. Etcetera. So much etcetera.

It feels good to be going into the plotting and drafting stage with a solid foundation of who lives where and who does what. It’s very unpantser of me, but with a mystery that involves a treasure hunt, it kinda needed doing.

And I finally remembered to confirm he’s okay with me sharing specifics here, so expect future infodumps about the world of our small-town cozy fantasy/mystery with ghosts. I do love it a whole lot.

I’ll save shares for the next post when I’m not playing catch-up. Maybe it will even get posted in less than a week. Maybe!

writing, reading, and other happenings around Herkes House

writing, reading, and other happenings around Herkes House

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