Both of the Karen Maxwell mysteries are now available at Amazon and other retailers.
What's next for the series?
Not what I'd originally planned, but I think it will be even better in the end.
Click here to learn more
_________
Headers
by
Henry thor Straten
Photograph
by
Stephen Purcell
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It’s pretty hard to write while riding a roller coaster. Not impossible, because if you have a good zipper pocket, you could carry a small notepad and a pen with you and write while you’re going up the first incline, but you wouldn’t get more than a few words done before you’d have to zip up the tools of the trade and hang on for dear life.
So that’s my excuse for why I haven’t written much over the course of the last year. Admittedly, it’s not a very good excuse. The amount of time I actually spent on a coaster (or waterslide or other ride not conducive to writing) was probably quite small. But it was my priority that was it issue here, and for the most part, it wasn’t on writing.
I’m not sure if this was a good or bad thing, really. My choice to spend as much time as I could playing with my kids certainly made for a fun summer, and spending time planning for next summer is certainly a way to make the dreary mid-winter days more bearable. But I think I need to be a bit more disciplined about this. For example, if we’re going to spend the weekend driving to western Maryland to go snow tubing and ride the alpine coaster (like we did last weekend), then when I get home, I can’t spend half of Monday morning trying to come up with a name for our new rabbit. (We’ve had her for over three weeks now and still don’t have a name the family can agree on. I really want to use something from Watership Down. But none of the names seem to suit her. Just what is a “cowslip” anyway? And why will she let my sister pick her up but not me?)
So much for the first day of my new plan. I was going to spend the first hour AC (after coffee) writing or revising some fiction. Then an hour working on promo stuff such a website work, emails, blogs, etc. Then I could do some of my contract work for an hour. And in three hours, I would have accomplished probably more than I managed all last week.
It didn’t happen. Instead, I spent the first fifteen minutes AC just staring at the calendar trying to get a handle on the new month. That was too much to contemplate. I looked at the whole week and settled for just figuring out what I needed to do that day. Then I spent the next half hour trying to get a DVD of last year’s dance recital to work. No, that wasn’t part of the plan, but the DVD had been sitting out by the TV for six months and I had try it sometime. But I only wasted half an hour on that. Probably. Then I went up to my office and started reading email. Some of it was writing related, but did I REALLY need to look up the registration information for the jump rope festival right then? Then my sister came in to feed the rabbit and I tried to decide whether I needed to go into the office for my contract job and before I knew it, it was almost noon. I decided I did need to go into the office.
How much writing got done today? Nothing but this, which I write while sitting at the gym, watching gymnasts flip, tumble, twirl and strike strange poses in floor routines. My daughter is way in the back corner struggling to do a decent cartwheel. If she gets that, she’ll be farther along than I ever got. I thought the gymnastics class would help her posture. After nearly a year (the cartwheel is looking better, I swear) I’m not sure it’s helping her posture at all. But it may give me my only writing time during the week.
Sigh.
Footnote about the alpine coaster:
My daughter chose to write her first science research paper about the sensation of flying out of your seat on a roller coaster. So we checked out every available book in the county on roller coasters. And before we got to the science, we had to read the descriptions and pictures of coasters we’ve been on. One that we had seen but not ridden was the Mountain Coaster at Wisp Ski Resort in western Maryland. This is a apparently a common type of ride in Europe, but pretty rare here, especially on the East Coast. So when we were at Wisp this past weekend, we had to try it, purely for research purposes, of course.
You sit in a little car that’s like a go-cart without wheels. A chain drive pulls the car up the mountain and when you get to the top, you ride the rails down in a series of twists and turns that you can take as fast as you want - the driver controls the brake.
We rode the coaster three times (research requires repetition!) Though it didn’t give us the “flying out your seat” sensation, it was quite thrilling, but I felt like my eyebrows were going to freeze off. Now I know why they invented ski masks, and it has nothing to do with hiding your identity on closed circuit camera.
You can read previous columns by clicking here.
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Coming Soon:
Toto's Tale
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art by Patricia Innes Pray
We don't have the cover art yet, but my next release will be Toto's Tale, which tells the Wizard of Oz story from Toto's point of view. As my daughter says, "this time a dog is telling the story, and we don't lie."
She should know - she co-wrote the story with me.
Click here for more details...
Oz Trivia Question
The last question was: What were the slaves called who served the Wicked Witch of the West?
Answer: In L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the creatures who serve the witch are Winkies. They are described simply as "not a brave people." The witch gives them spears and orders them to destroy Dorothy and the others, but when the lion roars, they run away.
They're depicted with a little more backbone in the movie.
In our story, the slaves who serve the witch are lickloes, creatures from a magical experiment gone awry. They have the body of a lion, human hands and the head of a penguin.
Next Question:
How did the Woodsman end up made of tin?
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