What I Did While My Laptop Was in the Shop for 3.5 Weeks

Walking through Costco, River asked me to take a picture with the trash can. No idea why :)

Between being sick for almost a week, being up in the mountains with limited service, and having my laptop die, I went 6 weeks this summer with minimal time on my laptop. That's the longest break since I started my online ventures about 3 years ago.

It was a bit stressful not being able to work much, but there was literally nothing I could do about it, so I embraced it. I did a small amount of work on my phone, but I really detest typing on tiny phone screens, so I didn't do much.

Instead, I did lots and lots of reading, which I don't usually have time for. A lot of what I read was historical fiction, and I realized there's a lot of poorly written books out there with poor research and glaring anachronisms. Not to mention all the tired tropes that kept popping up.

I don't know about you, but things like that make me think, 'I could write a better story than this'. Which turned my thoughts to my book ideas. I've had the basic plot lines for 3 books floating around in my head for the last 12 years. Well, the first book has been there that long, the other two have made their appearance in the time since.

While I've got the basic plot lines and every once in a while I'll think of some more details, I've struggled to pin things down enough to really get started. So I've just let it simmer in the back of my head.

The ideas are solidifying and I now feel like I've got the major plot details down, but there's a lot of minor details I want to iron out before I start writing. Since I don't have time to devote to writing novels right now, I'm not concerned about how quickly I can get started. But I do want to have as many details (including character backstories) as possible, the main story arc across the books, and the minor story arcs figured out before I get started. That way, when I do have time to write, I'll be able to jump in and know where things are going from the get-go.

In the meantime, I want to find a course on writing dialogue. I don't feel like that's a strong point for me, and I've read enough bad dialogue to not want to be lumped in that group.

My reading experience led me to think about what I did, and didn't, want to include in my books. This got the creative juices flowing and I had some ideas I wanted to research, so I checked out stacks of books from the library. Since anachronisms are a huge pet peeve for me and there are historical elements in my stories, research is a must.

A lot of the books weren't what I was looking for (I requested them online using my phone, so I didn't have the opportunity to flip through them before checking them out), but I did find a few that were helpful. The most interesting books I read were two books written by a guy who wrote for a newspaper in a small town in our county. The books contained lots of details about the early 1900s: families pushed off their land to make room for Shenandoah NP, stills in the mountains, families farming in the mountains where we've hiked, and so on. Trees have taken over in the last 90 years, but it's still hard to imagine farming going on in some of the spots where old homesteads were. So interesting though.

Another book that grabbed my attention is about the genetics of England, Scotland, and Wales and tracking genetic markers through mothers and fathers. It talks about the science and statistics behind those charts you can get when you send in a swab to 23 and me or ancestory.com. I took a genetics class in college and find it fascinating what they can track and how they're able to determine where people lived years and years ago. I haven't finished this one yet since it doesn't actually have anything to do with my novels and I had to set it aside so I could go through the rest of the books, but I will soon.