Midsummer update
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!
Cat break:
Mister Pips makes a better door than a window.
Okay, so, being honest, I will admit that not ALL of my time the last 13 days was spent buried in maps and manuscripts doing doublechecks and cursing Past Me for giving singular people two or three different names in the course of the drafting process.
A shocking number of hours have been spent playing a silly phone game called Cats And Soup: Magic Recipe. It’s a merge game. It’s ridiculous. And yet. It’s a soothing brain-free pretty close to stimming, the graphics are pretty, and it offers LIFETIME zero-ads for purchase, which is the one micro-transaction that will always sucker me in—if I like the gameplay. Which I do. Obviously.
The initial frenzy of “FIGURE IT ALL OUT” hyperfocus is receding now, leaving me with energy and mental bandwidth to do things like, oh, write this post.
In an “hours of entertainment per dollar” basis, this beats almost anything else available. Except, a’course, free books from the library.
Speaking of books, if you want to buy print copies of my books in person at a brick & mortar retailer, (and you’re in Chicagoland) you can find them on the shelves at Games Plus, my Friendly Local Game Store.
In other life events:
I did not have to go in for Jury Duty this week. I was on standby status, so it was a question mark until this evening. Since my last name does not now and never has been between P and W, I get the day off!
My teeth have had their semi-annual cleaning and inspection, and I don’t have to have major work done for at least another few months.
We’re slowly getting ahead of the annoying drain gnat population that we’ve been fighting since spring thaw. (It’s apparently a known consequence of cracked sewer lines, so I didn’t bother tackling it until the pipe was fixed.)
I am running out of T. Kingfisher novels to read, and that makes me sad, because I am adoring the vibe of “classic fantasy but with hope and romance elements, plus some horror-adjacent gruesomeness conquered by snarky humor and slapstick action.” There’s lots of other things on the TBR to keep me occupied, though.
Lessee. Where to wrap up. Ah—how’s about a yard & wildlife report?
Lettuces are on their last harvest before they bolt. They’re in the boxes, so I can’t let them go to seed like I do with the volunteer mustard greens in the patch beside the patio. The tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and pumpkins are all loving the hot weather much more than I expected. (the pumpkin vines are growing 8 inches a day and I need to trellis up the tomatoes before they escape the raised bed.) The only transplant that isn’t doing well is a fancy phlox cultivar I stuck in a patch where very few things thrive.
We saw our first flicker of the year this morning bugs—it was hopping around on the ground picking bugs out of the dry streamed rocks. There are many finches, of various colors, and of course cardinals, robins, and little brown birds by the dozen. None of them seem to care that I’m only filling the birdbaths and not the seed feeder. They’re snacking away on the helianthus and mustard green blooms and (judging from all the peeping noises) nesting in our wonderful neighbors’ arbor vitae hedge.
And now, a final Pippin pic, because I always have lots of those.
He has found himself a new place to sit. He could fit on the couch, but he prefers to lounge half-off it. I do not know why.
That’s it until later.
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)