This last weekend we drove 100 miles north to the town of Snohomish to visit our oldest daughter and her family. We left our house early to avoid the worst of traffic, so we made it two hours.
Leah and Tom have no spare bedrooms until the remodel is done. So, we stayed at the Snohomish Inn, two blocks away. It’s an older place but clean.
The first thing we did on arriving in Snohomish was to go with our daughter to our favorite lunch place, Grilla Bites. They have a fantastic menu with various vegan, vegetarian, and omnivore foods.
Every diner has a lot of choices in soups and sandwiches, so no one should go home hungry. I certainly didn’t.
Then we went back to the daughter’s house and watched 2 movies I hadn’t yet seen but wanted to. Pixar’s Coco and Soul—I loved them both. The storylines were uplifting and thought-provoking, brilliant storytelling, and brilliant voice acting.
And food? OhMaGosh!
Thanks to my son-in-law, Tom, I seriously overate this weekend. Tom’s hobby is cooking fancy, restaurant-quality foods for us, and he outdid himself. He made a deep-fried chicken fillet and poutine for the omnivores, and a lovely meal for me, with plenty of his amazing homemade French fries. (Chips to you in the UK.)
Whether for the lone vegan (me) or the omnivores, everything was plated beautifully and tasted even better.
Sunday morning began with the best avocado toast I’ve ever had. Everyone who knows me has heard how much I love that particular dish. Tom’s version is incredibly simple: a good bread, toasted and topped with mashed avocado, chopped walnuts sprinkled over the top, and a teensy drizzle of honey. It sounds odd, but wow. That was a divine, filling breakfast. The picture I took doesn’t do it justice.
After leaving Snohomish, we stopped in Bothell to visit our younger son. We met for lunch at the Beardslee Public House. They had several tasty-looking options for me, but the vegan Benedict was my choice. Even though I don’t do hollandaise sauce, I didn’t miss it because the charred avocado, spinach, and tomato were grilled perfectly. Paired with the pub’s signature russet potato hash, it was delicious.
So, while I didn’t get much writing done, we had a great weekend.
One of the good things about living here in the Pacific Northwest is the number of restaurants that also provide a variety of plant-based options for diners of all persuasions. I especially appreciate those chefs who care about all the people who might enter their premises. They don’t lump gluten-free and vegan into one carelessly planned, slightly bland, punishment meal.
Taste is a primary sensory experience, as is texture. I’m vegan, but every person has foods they will or won’t eat. They have good logical reasons behind those choices. Some people are strictly kosher, and others are halal. Others are vegetarian, and still others are omnivores. Every culture has standards of cleanliness and what food is fit for consumption–something you can work into your worldbuilding.
We can’t judge others by our standards, even though that is a time-honored human frailty. My son-in-law loves me, and he gets it. A simple dish like avocado toast goes a long way toward making me a happy diner!
So, what other human frailties did I deal with this week? I’ve been using Excel since 1993 and it still finds ways to aggravate me.
Somehow, Excel got crazy with the word “of” in my World of Neveyah glossary (covering 7 books). It replaced every instance of “of” in column D with random words drawn from the explanations in Column C. Two hours wasted, laughing and trying to straighten it out. Fortunately, it was only fifty or so words out of over 400.
Every time I ran across a new blooper, it cracked me up.
I have no idea how such a weird merge happened, but it was hilarious. It has to be some inadvertent thing I did when pasting a new section into it. I somehow merged column C and column D when I right-clicked to paste the new page of words and meanings. Unaware of that, I sorted the page alphabetically, which mixed the wonky errors all through the entire list.
It’s straightened out now, but it the fact it was only the word “of” that was replaced made me laugh so hard my husband thought I was nuts. See the screenshot below–every time I see this image, I can’t help laughing.
And as a final twist to the craziness–we were finally getting ready for sleep in our hotel room, both of us tired but feeling good about our day. All our toiletries were in a small, dark zipper-bag.
I can only say from personal experience – hydrocortisone cream does not make a good toothpaste.
That is all I have to say on that subject.
And so my friends, may you eat well, write what you feel passion for, and laugh every chance you can.
When you are pantsing it (writing-by-the-seat-of-your-pants), themes are like your drunk uncle. They hang out at the local pub until closing time and then weave their way home through dark alleys. Sometimes, as you are leaving for work in the morning, you find them under the neighbor’s shrubs. Other times they make it home.
I often sit on my back porch and just let my thoughts roam, thinking about nothing in particular. Usually, I will end up considering the character’s quest or dilemma. I ask myself what the root cause of the issue is—if it is a crime, why is crime rampant? Is it a societal problem, such as poverty or war? If the core dilemma is unrequited love, what are the roadblocks to a resolution?
These layers offer us an incredible amount of subliminal information about that surreal world and what is going on in reality, what the Matrix truly is.
Poets understand how central a theme is to the story. A poet takes the theme and builds the words around it. Emily Dickinson’s poems featured the themes of spirituality, love of nature, and death, which is why she appealed so strongly to me during my angsty young-adult life.
But that would be wrong. Poets write words that range far more widely than their physical surroundings. Some poets are constrained by unrewarding jobs, others may be “on the spectrum,” as they now say, and still others are constrained by physical limitations.
Fantasy author 
Even today, her humor shines with sharp-edged wit delivered without condescension. Her most memorable protagonists rise above the trivialities of life that absorb the sillier characters.
Pride is a powerful theme because it is the downfall of many characters in all literature, not just Jane Austen’s work.
Clearly, Mrs. Dashwood feels that ensuring her sisters-in-law are not impoverished would make her only son less rich. Less appealing to other affluent families.
Many of James’s books feature one common theme—lust.
Henry James is famous for his novels and short stories laying bare the deepest motives and manipulations of the society he knew. However, he wrote one of the most famous novellas ever published,
Projection
Why is this so? Let’s look at an example.
So how is social class different from economic class? In some parts of the world, they are the same. In others, social class is inherited, and economic class is acquired.
For instance, I grew up in a financially stable lower-middle-class family. But I never buy pre-distressed furniture, no matter how much the designers on TV love it. This is because, by the time my youngest child left home, all my hand-me-down furniture was distressed. I like my furniture to reflect my life—un-distressed.
February here in my little town was dryer than usual, far less rainy than in other parts of the Northwest. We have seen the sun much more than usual over the last two weeks, which doesn’t bode well for the summer. I can’t help but think of the horrible heat we had last June. We don’t like it when it gets up to 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 Celsius). It’s literally hell when you realize most people here don’t have air conditioning in their homes. Up through the 1980s, we never needed it, as summers rarely topped 80 degrees (26.6).
Edible mushrooms of all sorts abounded. One I hadn’t seen before, the lion’s mane mushroom, was the central feature in the displays of the two local craft fungi growers. It was interesting to look at, but … no.
On the writing front, last week was quite productive. I received the final chapters back for my blended novel from my editor and am now going over the manuscript one last time. This is a merging of the stories of two characters and the events of one overarching plot arc. It’s the parallel stories of two battle mages, a father and son, told from their unique generational viewpoints.
This merger of two novels into one involved cutting a number of chapters out of each and layering the stories so that the timeline moves forward at the right pace and doesn’t repeat what we already know.
Also, I submitted my 2020 NaNoWriMo novel to 
