There and Back Again
I am finally back from my vacation. We had loads of fun, but, as the tomatoes are getting ripe and the old lady is aching in places she never knew existed, it is nice to be home.
The weather was beautiful in New Hampshire and Cape Cod, but hot. Both places broke temperature records while we were there. The most impressive was Cape Cod. For those who don't know, the Cape is a peninsula which curls out into the North Atlantic from the northeastern US state of Massachusetts. We were staying at the house we rented from the sister-in-law of my partner's co-worker, in the middle of the Cape, where summer temperatures rarely break 80 degrees Fahrenheit. While we were there, it hit 98 during the day, with a nighttime temperature in the low seventies. Try that on for size, in a part of the world that has only a passing acquaintance with air conditioning.
It's even better when the ocean you're swimming in is about 57-61 degrees F. The shock I felt on submerging myself is indescribable. But at least I felt refreshed for a change, not freezing, when I got out of the water.
I have a few pictures behind the cut. Unfortunately, they're only of New Hampshire, because I think my partner got water on the memory card when she tried to take pictures at one of the ponds we swam in on the Cape. It was a new card, and I had taken the old one out and stored it in the tiny plastic case that came with the new one. I'm not really an expert with these cameras, so I was wondering if anybody reading this knows whether it's OK to try putting the old card back in the camera. As far as I know, the old card is in good shape.
The woods.
The view from a cliff.
From the summit of Mount Washington.
I'm doing pretty well on Into the Fold and actually got a fair amount of writing done in my notebook during my vacation. I'm nearly done with Chapter Five, which is long and was rather difficult for me, because it's got some regional dialect in it. So my betas and Brit-pickers, Anne, Lyras and Panamdea, will soon be in for some fun (easy for me to say, right? *g*).
I think I'll also submit the dialect parts of the chapter to hp_britglish. I love that group, because they seem so enthusiastic, and their replies to a post will often go off on very helpful (not to mention entertaining) tangents.
Chapter Four is ready to go, but I won't post it yet, because I like to stay a little ahead in my writing.
I haven't posted much about my original novel lately, but I thought I'd mention that too.
It's coming along, but, needless to say, I didn't make the end-of-winter deadline I set for myself. I'm writing the climax, and I think I know now what the problem was. This story is not going to have a happy ending. It's not going to have a satisfyingly tragic ending, either. It's going to have a rather unsatisfying, real-life ending, in which the heroine does what she has to do, but ends up as lonely as she was before. I can hold out some hope at the end that things will get better for her, but it won't happen soon enough for me to incorporate it into the story--at least, not as I see it now, near the end of the first draft.
I've always known the story would end this way, but I didn't know this sort of ending would be so difficult for me to write. It doesn't help that a pivotal character, whom I've really grown to love, has to die to make the story work.
Ah, well. Enough for now.
The weather was beautiful in New Hampshire and Cape Cod, but hot. Both places broke temperature records while we were there. The most impressive was Cape Cod. For those who don't know, the Cape is a peninsula which curls out into the North Atlantic from the northeastern US state of Massachusetts. We were staying at the house we rented from the sister-in-law of my partner's co-worker, in the middle of the Cape, where summer temperatures rarely break 80 degrees Fahrenheit. While we were there, it hit 98 during the day, with a nighttime temperature in the low seventies. Try that on for size, in a part of the world that has only a passing acquaintance with air conditioning.
It's even better when the ocean you're swimming in is about 57-61 degrees F. The shock I felt on submerging myself is indescribable. But at least I felt refreshed for a change, not freezing, when I got out of the water.
I have a few pictures behind the cut. Unfortunately, they're only of New Hampshire, because I think my partner got water on the memory card when she tried to take pictures at one of the ponds we swam in on the Cape. It was a new card, and I had taken the old one out and stored it in the tiny plastic case that came with the new one. I'm not really an expert with these cameras, so I was wondering if anybody reading this knows whether it's OK to try putting the old card back in the camera. As far as I know, the old card is in good shape.
The woods.
The view from a cliff.
From the summit of Mount Washington.
I'm doing pretty well on Into the Fold and actually got a fair amount of writing done in my notebook during my vacation. I'm nearly done with Chapter Five, which is long and was rather difficult for me, because it's got some regional dialect in it. So my betas and Brit-pickers, Anne, Lyras and Panamdea, will soon be in for some fun (easy for me to say, right? *g*).
I think I'll also submit the dialect parts of the chapter to hp_britglish. I love that group, because they seem so enthusiastic, and their replies to a post will often go off on very helpful (not to mention entertaining) tangents.
Chapter Four is ready to go, but I won't post it yet, because I like to stay a little ahead in my writing.
I haven't posted much about my original novel lately, but I thought I'd mention that too.
It's coming along, but, needless to say, I didn't make the end-of-winter deadline I set for myself. I'm writing the climax, and I think I know now what the problem was. This story is not going to have a happy ending. It's not going to have a satisfyingly tragic ending, either. It's going to have a rather unsatisfying, real-life ending, in which the heroine does what she has to do, but ends up as lonely as she was before. I can hold out some hope at the end that things will get better for her, but it won't happen soon enough for me to incorporate it into the story--at least, not as I see it now, near the end of the first draft.
I've always known the story would end this way, but I didn't know this sort of ending would be so difficult for me to write. It doesn't help that a pivotal character, whom I've really grown to love, has to die to make the story work.
Ah, well. Enough for now.