Time to count your blessings–what are you thankful for this year?

Many of us feel we have little to be thankful for, especially with the looming tax increases and prices. However, there’s always someone who has it worse than us, so we should all make an effort and find something to be grateful for.

• Health: are you mobile? relatively pain-free most of the time? able to enjoy things in your life? be thankful for your health
• Mind: are you able to think clearly? enjoy the little things? find something positive? be thankful for your mind
• Friends: do you have any you can contact? spend a little time with, either in real life or virtually? be thankful for your friends
• Food: do you have enough? can you indulge in your favorites once in a while? be thankful for your food
• Home: do you have a roof over your head? are you protected from the elements? be thankful for your home

No matter how small, we can all find something that we can be grateful for. Look for the small things and be happy.

This is Book 3 in a series by Susan M. Boyer, a local author.

In the series, several eccentric Sullivan’s Island citizens meet for supper on a regular basis, sharing lively conversation and alcoholic beverages on the beach. There’s always a mystery to solve, too, and I’m enjoying the characters and the mysteries. If you like beach mysteries, this is a series you should try.

This is a humorous mystery series by Kevin J. Anderson, who writes Dune and Star Wars stories as well.

The hero’s name is actually Chambeaux, not Shamble, but since he is a zombie, people just assume…. Dan has been murdered, only he didn’t die permanently. He came back as a zombie, and his girlfriend, also murdered (presumably by the same hand) is now a ghost. They’re still working though, both at his private investigator’s office, along with a living human lawyer who helps them out.

This is a fun read and I’m looking forward to finding out if Dan can solve his own murder (and that of his girlfriend, of course).

Good Lord, how did it get to be November already?

You know what that means…the holidays are upon us! I’m going to have to schedule some overtime so I can afford presents this year, what with the hurricane claim and the deductible and all. Maybe I can sell a story or two

I’m hoping to have the back porch restored by the end of the year IF I can find a contractor and agree on a reasonable price that’s within my insurance budget. I’ve just got off the phone with a roofing/siding company who’s been contracted to check out the house for possible damage, so that’s one thing going right. Now if I can find someone who can rebuild the porch …

What are some of your holiday traditions? For American Thanksgiving, we almost always have a turkey with all the trimmings (cornbread dressing with gravy, green bean or broccoli casserole, and pumpkin pie for dessert). At Christmas, we usually do something off the wall like barbecue or lasagna. I do like to decorate a little, but not something crazy that I will then have to turn around and take back down to store again. A few Fall tokens, as in the above photo, then a few Christmas items for the porch. We may or may not put up a tree … that depends on our mood at the time and whether or not we have the library floor cleaned off so we can actually fit the tree into the corner. I do like having a tree up, but it’s a lot of work.

Comment and let me know some of your family traditions!

This will be published in only a few days (October 29) so I don’t have to wait very much longer.

This is another Inspector Gamache novel by Louise Penny, about the mystical little town of Three Pines and the inspector who calls it home. I can hardly wait until it downloads into my Kindle (I pre-ordered, of course).

This is one of Steve Hockensmith’s “Holmes on the Range” spin-off series about the AA Western Detective Agency’s other agents.

In this novel, Diehl, Hoop, and Eskaminzim, plus Hoop’s wife (and Eskaminzim’s sister) Onawa, are off chasing bank robbers–or are they? Turns out the robbers have stolen something far more precious than the contents of a tiny town’s bank vault, and they’re after nothing less than the downfall of the Union.

This was just published, and I’m about halfway through, but it’s just as good as Hockensmith’s other novels. I like the characters and, as always, just when you think you’ve got the plot figured out, the author tosses in yet another plot twist. If you like action, mystery, and historical novels, you should pick up a copy of this book (and probably the first one in this series, Hired Guns).

As Han Solo would say, “I have a bad feeling about this.”

Not about this roadblock–they resolved that after a few days. No, it’s StoryFest, the South Carolina Writer’s Association Conference!

We got an email today saying they would be refunding our hotel cost and the price of the special Friday “Master Classes” with the agents/editors/publishers. There is an ominous reference to “donations” further down in the email which makes me think they are NOT planning to refund the $300 price of our conference itself. I don’t know about you, but that kind of money is not something I can just throw around. I’m semi-retired now, living on a fixed income and watching my pennies. I had to save up to pay that money and I need it back!

Yes, I’m going to be fighting if they don’t give me at least part of that money back. I wonder how much a lawyer costs…

So I was all set to go on my mini-vacation to Columbia, for the South Carolina Writer’s Association StoryFest Conference. Had my bags packed and everything. Sure, we were supposed to get some rain and maybe a little wind from Hurricane Helene, but we’ve had storms before. We’re not on the coast so we don’t worry about things like storm surge and flooding. I figured the power would probably go out and sure enough, we woke up to a dark house.

However, Helene had other plans. She swerved and hit Greenville dead on. Right before the eye came overhead, I heard a god-awful clatter from the back of the house. Yelled at the roomie to see if he was all right because it sounded like he’d fallen somehow. He said he was fine but the back porch was gone.

We were lucky in that we didn’t have any big trees to fall on the house, but when I tried to get out of the subdivision to head for my conference (I paid a lot of money for that thing, darn it! And when I got hold of the conference chairwoman, she said Columbia was fine, they were still having it), there was a gigantic oak down across both lanes of the main highway out.

So I came back and sat in the dark until around 2:00. We could hear chainsaws, so I was hoping they were clearing the highway. One of my local writing buddies said a tree fell on her car and she was desperate to get out of Dodge so would I give her a ride to the conference? I maneuvered past the half-trees the road crew had left scattered along the route and met her at the grocery store. On the way to Columbia we found most of the traffic lights out (thankfully, the really bad intersections seemed to be OK–or the crews were concentrating on getting those back online quickly). There were trees down all along the interstate and we were stopped for about 15-20 minutes once, waiting for the road crew to clear one lane. We even ran over some downed power lines in one spot.

When we got to Columbia, however, it looked promising. The traffic lights were on. The gas station was open and busy. The Cracker Barrel was hopping.

Then we got to the hotel. They were running on emergency generators. The Friday night dinner we’d all paid for was canceled and we were told to find something on our own. Adrienne and I met up with Barbara, another from the Greenville group, and we opted for the Cracker Barrel 3 minutes down the road. The wait wasn’t horrible (we’d left fairly early for the dinner hour) and we had a nice meal and a lovely waitress with a good sense of humor.

After that, the keynote speaker for the evening gave us an interesting speech on AI and Screenwriting in the lobby (no overhead lights in the conference rooms), after which everyone went to their respective dark rooms to try to sleep. It was hot and stuffy but I dozed off.

When we woke up, we learned the conference had been canceled at 6:00am (which was too late to prevent some of the coastal people from leaving for the Midlands, so they had the same problem we had, of driving all that way only to turn around and head home again). We still don’t know for certain that they are going to refund any of our money.

Back home, I maneuvered to Adrienne’s street and got as close to the downed tree as I could because there were power lines wrapped in its branches. I actually dropped her at the neighbor’s house across the street. Then it was back home to the dark, stuffy house and some non-perishable food items. The local grocery store didn’t get power until Sunday afternoon so we were eating totally junk food until then.

My boss tried to open the store Tuesday because the office next door called and told him they had power and internet. Well, we had power, but the internet would not come on, so he closed it up again and sent me home. I did work Thursday because he figured out how to run the internet through his phone. Seemed to me it would blow up his cellphone running that much data through it, but it was fine. We’ll be doing the same thing Saturday (today was the other pharmacist’s day to work).

Duke Energy swears we will have power by midnight tonight. I’ll believe it when I see it. At least Starbucks came back online so I have WiFi if I drive down to the store every day.

This is the drive headed back towards our subdivision. It’s on the right where the car is turning onto State Park Road. You can see the Road Closed block up ahead, where a sinkhole developed when the tiny creek underneath the road was flooding around the culvert.

Final batch of writing quotes:

• “Description begins in the writer’s imagination but should finish in the reader’s.” (Stephen King)
• “Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.” (Joseph Joubert)
• “It is perfectly OK to write garbage as long as you edit brilliantly.” (C.J. Cherryh)
• “Write your first draft with your heart. Rewrite with your head. (Mike Rich)
• “It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.” (Robert Benchley)
• “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” (Douglas Adams)

Here are some more inspirational quotes on writing for you:

• “Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.” (William Faulkner)
• “You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.” (Octavia E. Butler)
• “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” (E. L. Doctorow)
• “I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” (Shannon Hale)
• “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” (Stephen King)