Thought Bubbles Jan 5
It’s a gray and dreary Sunday. The cat is asleep on the countertop in his basket, Spouseman is gaming, and I’m starting Leverage: Redemption season 2.
The winter Tree Of Lights is lit, the house is warm, and I’m puttering away at a Rollover story where Izzy & Natalie…whose name may turn into Eleanor…get to meet. There’s a cat involved, and an annoying neighbor, and low-stakes shenanigans, because we all love shenanigans.
I also still want to finish Serena & Parker’s adventure with dogs & cats, but I think I started the story in the wrong place, and also it may end up being a lot longer and not about what I thought it was.
It won’t happen soon. This one is my “stare into space instead of surf on my phone while Waiting For Other Things To Happen” activity, so there’s lots of thinking and rolling story blocks around in my head, and zero writing. I’m just not ready to tackle writing it right now.
Part of my reluctance is that I’d rather write Rollover stories about activists fixing the world than Restoration ones about people surviving in the world their grandparents demolished. (That’s hitting ever closer to home what with us sliding towards disasters I kinda hoped wouldn’t happen in my lifetime.)
The other part is that I know from extensive experience that I cannot switch between multiple writing projects, not even when they’re at different stages.
Lucky for the Serena story, when I’m only at the stage of thinking about a story, it’s productive daydreaming, not writing.
Health update: coming up on Day 28 since surgery. I’m chafing against the 10 lb lift limit, and definitely noticing lost arm strength (It’s boggling how fast that declines when I can’t lift things) Energy is better, although I still get tired faster than usual and need naps, which is not usually A Thing for me.
All the glue bits have fallen off the incisions, they’re are just little hard bumps with little red lines, and the bruise around the top one is faded to a bare hint of green. They twinge occasionally and sometimes I get weird itching under the skin.
So I’m pretty close to “back to normal” and happy to be there.
What’s on your bookshelf?
This is the part where I talk about my books.
Relics From A Traveling Show
The newest of the new! A collection of all my short fictions in one handy volume, available now from your favorite booksite or local shop.
Or! OR! if you like your local library, you could request a purchase. Free for you, sale for me, everyone wins.
Most libraries need the following info for ordering print books:
Title: Relics From A Traveling Show
Author: K. M. Herkes
ISBN: 9781945745201 (paperback)
Every library system does things a little differently, but most want their collections to serve their communities, so most of them are very responsive to patron requests.
If you like novels more than short stories, I recommend my series The Rollover Files for hopepunk tales of about an alternate world where moms with midlife crisis superpowers have been saving the world and making the military nervous since 1943.
I also have a completed, quirky slow-burn science fiction thriller duology with a romance chaser: The Stories Of The Restoration.
All my titles are available from Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Hoopla, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Overdrive and many other fine booksellers.
Support your favorite independent bookseller! Find a local shop via Indiebound
Be a potato.
" Fear is strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground."
Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)