Photo of the Week

Why beets? Because I needed pictures of beets for my alter-ego’s upcoming release, and this one is gorgeous, methinks.

General Discussion: Reading Roots
The novel I’m working on revising right now is a hot mess, to put it bluntly. It’s like I had no idea where to go after I started (which I didn’t – I rarely do), but rather than finding a plot and running with it (like I normally do), it was a painful trial-and-error process wherein I wrote three or four separate stories until I finally found the main plot I was looking for all the time in the second to last chapter.

This is why some people outline.

In any case, I’ve been trying for awhile now to develop a single community where I could base a collection of stories that are all stand-alone, but they share the setting and overlap characters and timelines. I was thinking about how I could connect this story (once I finally get it working, I mean) to another draft I need to revise and edit, and I finally had to ask myself, “what is it about this concept that makes you want to write a collection of stories related to a single setting?”

The obvious answer is laziness, of course, because once I develop a setting, reusing it over and over is much easier than building a whole ‘nuther world. And creating an entirely fictional setting is easier than making sure I get every single element of an existing setting exactly right so I don’t get raked over the coals for a simple omission by the most discerning of readers.

But it’s more than that, and I decided that for me, it goes back to my “reading roots”.

I grew up on sweet romance, westerns (which are basically just romance with cowboys, even when written by men), and dashes of sci fi, mystery and paranormal “flair”. I *loved* sweeping family sagas that span generations through a single setting, small town/ranch dramas and the feeling that something other than wild animals might be waiting in the woods or in the back of a dilapidated barn to help or hinder humans at their pleasure.

Then we started watching “Outer Range” on Amazon, which is a sci-fi western decidedly heavy on the sci-fi, and something clicked in my brain. I don’t want to write something like that, specifically, but I want to write an “off-the-map” family saga series (collection, really, since they won’t need to be read in order) set here in my home state with western and barely-there paranormal elements in a modern wrapper that occasionally looks back at its historical roots.

There’s a mouthful (eyeful?) for ya.

I’m so sure I want to write this that I already bought the domain name of my fictional community – a place even my characters won’t find on any map, and things aren’t always what they seem when you’re there.

I’m going to call the series…well, I don’t know yet.

But the town is called Snakebite, Montana.

Currently Reading
In Defense of Plants by Matt Candeias, PhD (non-fic)
The Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz (Mystery)

Currently Watching
Outer Range (Amazon)
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount)
The Equalizer (Paramount/CBS)
NCIS (Paramount/CBS)

Pop Quiz!
What are your reading roots? Which genres do you most remember from your childhood/youth reading years?

Post Round-up
The Writer’s Desk (last updated: Monday, May 9, 2022)

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