Adventures at Home and Abroad

The truth is, I have no writing update. I've put Elvira on the shelf. For how long, I'm not sure. It may be forever, or I may revisit her after I move past the genealogy that's been sucking the life out of me. Every time I visit Dad, I ship myself more of Memaw's files and books. I promised him I'd go through everything at my own pace, and determine what we want to keep and what I can toss. Honestly, I can sit at the computer for hours staring at Ancestry.com and trying to match their crowd-sourced records with Memaw's work. And I must say, her work is better, more exacting. I'm so impressed at her labors. That woman spent 50+ years traveling to a gazillion county courthouses to look up land records, wills, and birth/marriage/death certificates. It was always a labor of love, but it obviously kept her engaged in her world for a lot longer than most people. So far, I've learned two things: 1) don't ever trust the family trees on Ancestry...peopl...

This piece is one of my very first creations. I found the pattern online and made it on my own, with a little help from the guys at the Vinery in Madison. I love Charles Rennie Macintosh, and this design echoes how he makes hearts and flowers. I may remake it one of these days, just for fun.

I started going over to D&L Glass for open studio for stained glass work and it's been fun! Becky is a fabulous teacher and some of the old Glass Warehouse gang has reappeared. I spend way too much time trolling Pinterest for ideas, and thought I'd see if I liked creating objects that were more free-form. Some of the ones I saw, particular by artists from Japan, were lovely. I thought I'd like the "mobile" aspect of what I made, but it feels to "crafty" for me. I suppose if I ever wanted to sell at craft fairs, objects like these would be nice sellers. But I don't want to sit in a tent all weekend and wonder why people aren't buying my stuff!

It's been a challenging time for my hobby...with Glass Warehouse closed, I just work by myself. Which, 90% of the time, is just fine. But every once in a while, I need help or advice...duh. Becky MacKenzie from GW is organizing an open studio series at D&L Glass, which sounds exciting. I don't love the idea of driving to 52nd and Pecos, but I'll do it anyway. I found this design (the left side of an antique English window) and decided to try it. My challenge was to combine multiple shades of the green glass for the leaves, so that it looked somewhat organic. I think it worked!

I've switched from writing to stained glass lately. Here's one of my early projects. I love the color.

I'm struggling to begin Chapter 1 of the second story in my Elvira Grey series. I've thought through a possible new story, thanks to hours wasted down the rabbit hole called newspapers.com (LOL). I do love reading the Woodland Daily Democrat, circa 1892-1893. It's painful for my eyes and I feel like I need cheat er glasses for my bifocals, but one gets the sense of the language, the happenings in the community, and the topics that seem important. And the advertisements are extremely helpful! In fact, I think I've come up with a great idea, and it's based on an actual situation. This book will  focus more on women of that era: Elvira and Ada, of course, but also other women of different classes and ethnicities. And prostitution. And religion. And flawed people. Now if I could just type a few words into Scrivener.

I'm polishing my completed manuscript of A Certain Deceit so I can send it to editors and agents. I was incredibly fortunate at HNS-2017: I pitched to two editors and they both want to see it (one partial read and one full read). I've gone through a hard copy, looking for nits, correcting grammar, and identifying any holes/issues to correct. I've had two other people read parts as well. It has taken me almost a month--I wanted to be careful and precise, not gloss over things. I bled a lot of red ink all over my text, then went into Scrivener and made my revisions. I copied my updated text from Scrivener to MS Word, chapter by chapter, and scrolled through each document, so I could see Word's editing function. This feature is handy and points out things I might have missed. I thought I'd done everything carefully. Then, as I'm preparing to send out the partial request, I saw an error! A big one, in the scheme of things, because it was on the third page (...