Newsletter - September 6, 2022

We traveled to Houston to visit in-laws over Labor Day weekend, and I had a chance to finish up Edith Pawlicki’s Trials of Fire and Rebirth.

I thoroughly enjoyed her story and I’d recommend it to any of you fantasy readers (but it’s probably better if you read the other two books in The Immortal Beings series first, even thought it is focusing on different characters).

I had to run to Walmart Monday evening and encountered all kinds of horribleness that makes me feel inexplicably colder (ok, it’s explicable). Similarly, our grocery store is carrying plenty of pumpkin beer, declaring the nearness of fall. (Yay!) My favorite pumpkin beer comes from Oregon. Come on, Texas! Get it together.

Walmart capitalizes on Black Friday shoppers “too slow to get out of the way”

I pounded out a few chapters of Mother of Trees over Labor Day weekend. I’ve got a little pickle of a problem trying to pull a couple of threads together, but I’ve found, at least for me, it is better to bulldoze my way through it, then go back and repair it, or tear it down and rebuild. Waiting for it to all come together before clicking on the keyboard just doesn’t work for me. That said, my friend and editor, Marla, cut 30k words from my first book, and I might be setting her up for a repeat maneuver! 😬 I’m actually hoping, for her sake, that her new books are a smashing success, and she never has to spend time editing my work again. Go, Marla!

For the record, I don’t plan to read any more books until my work project finishes—it’s been a bit much.

Here’s a little clip from this weekend (unedited):

My mother closed her eyes hard, then rolled her shoulders and stretched her neck from side to side like she prepared for battle. “What if we journey to Baledor?” Baledor was a Salt-run city at the mouth of the Witless, known to house a more… reckless… breed of elves than the norm. A town of runaways and criminals. I knew mother had no intention of going there—she’d yelled at me quite vehemently when I’d brought home the idea from a book, thinking that in a town of runaways, I might fit in. “You’ve committed no crime,” she’d barked. Then she'd softened her tone. “Besides, you have a heart of mother browntail frelling.” I’d half smiled at her reference—those small, cute furballs with the long tails were known to get stupid over their children, starving themselves to bring their children food. But her tone had turned dark again after that. “They’d eat you alive.”

Still, that had been twenty years before. She’d told me in our previous conversation that she thought I could handle Cal-Edhil. I’d toughened up… grown up. Was she serious about Baledor, or just testing the Warder’s conviction?

“Then Baledor it is,” the Warder answered. “By land or by sea?”

My mother pondered a second, then picked, “Sea.” She turned to me. “Unless you wanted to see Cal-Edhil?” she asked.

I did. But going by sea meant we would follow the Flawless out to open waters. And the Flawless went through the Heartland and Alenor, the capital of the High Elves… an even grander prize than Cal-Edhil.

o To-Do list for writing last week: