Still on Vacation

Trivia:  The end-of-draft happy dance for Emma still keeps popping out of the back of my mind.

Got the recycling done.  The junk mailed to the New Yorkie kids.  Coffee where I enjoyed my usual side-show:  the old man trying to put the lid on his coffee cup.  (My bad.)

Lessons from My Reading:  Just finished watching all the Lord of the Rings last night ... actually this morning.  So, haven't been reading much ... except research for Maren.

Bought a couple books at the grocery story since #1 daughter is coming up on Sunday.  (No bookstore browsing this weekend.)  A romance and a paranormal.  The romance was one of those short story compilations by popular authors (I never heard of).  Got half-way through the first story with its trite plot which I think Georgette Heyer used a couple times.

Okay, I used to read romance, especially Regencies since it was the time when "modern" thinking (aka education) reached a significant portion of the population.  Also, women started to noticeably think for themselves ... publicly.  Think Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft.  Maybe the thinness of plots comes from that fact that the number of romances written equaled the number of the "10,000" long ago.  It's like there're probably more fictional British dukes than ever existed in history.

Will skim the short stories to see if any catch my interest.  Doubt it.

Progress:  Outside of "Emma Kloken, Hero" having an ending.  heh, heh, heh.

Emma's resting quietly while I think about baking the first batch of koulourakia ... perhaps.

Maren has a prequel.  I thought it might be a short story, but the plot line is too mundane.  Probably would be too much work to change the telling to showing. -- Not that I'm against telling.  Sometimes, it's the quickest way to get from here to there.  Besides the "#####", that is.

Even have a rough draft of the opening paragraph:

"The accident dominated the news for a week.  Five cars blasted into melted slag on the highway without a hint of a vin number.  The charred body parts of the locals were identified by DNA. (check if possible).


"Police combed the missing persons data banks to identify the one survivor -- a teen-aged girl with amnesia.  The detectives were hopeful.  How many thin, almost six-foot teens with long silver hair could there be?"