September 17, 2024 by Jill

Picking Teenaged Brains

I know there are many very responsible parents out there putting their kids on the internet, but that is very much not my jam. When my kids start building their own online presence, whatever that’s gonna look like, I want it to be all theirs, not mine.

Now, that said, I really feel like my kids—and all humans—have meaningful contributions to make to the literature conversation, both as potential readers and potential writers. And so, for the first time ever, I thought it would be interesting to interview one of my boys. Without further ado, I give you my well-beloved Boy, a fifteen-year-old high school student in middle class America.

Mom: How many books would you say you read in a month?

Boy: Oh, gosh. Um…

Mom: (laughs) Your honesty is appreciated.

Boy: Too many to count?

Mom: Give me your best guess.

Boy: (big pause) Uh… fifteen?

Mom: Fifteen books a month. And to be clear, these are pretty thick books, right?

Boy: Mostly. I read comic books and things in between [the thick books].

Mom: What is your favorite thing about reading? What makes it so compelling for you? I know you’re a very heavy reader.

Boy: It’s fun, it’s entertaining, it’s a thing to do. With reading, you can carry a book around and you’re able to pull it out and read it for an hour.

Mom: You could say that about knitting, though.

Boy: Yeah. I don’t know, I guess reading is just… immersive. Yeah.

Mom: Have you ever not finished a book once you started it?

Boy: Yes.

Mom: What made you put it down?

Boy: I got kind of bored. It was a dry start, and it just kept getting drier, and yeah. I just wasn’t enjoying reading it and I moved on to something else.

Mom: Does that happen often, or do you mostly finish?

Boy: No, I mostly finish.

Mom: If you had the money and space, do you think you’d turn into a book hoarder like your mother, or are you happy with your libraries?

Boy: I think I’m fairly happy with my libraries. I mean, I like having my books that I can just go to whenever, but I have access to enough books to last me probably a lifetime.

Mom: Do you think that preference for libraries will continue once you’re out of school and it’s less convenient to get to them? I find that the distance to the library is a deterrent for me.

Boy: I don’t know. Buying books can be expensive and it’s not necessarily easier to get to.

Mom: True.

Boy: But I don’t know. Libraries just seem pretty convenient.

Mom: You cite costs of books. Do you ever try ebooks or audiobooks or are you pretty much a physical book kind of person.

Boy: Physical books. Really my only experience with audiobooks was third grade tumblebooks.

Mom: Mm. Tumblebooks are great! Okay, so you walk into a library. Describe your book selection process. Are you more of a browser or do you lean on the librarians for recommendations? What’s your process?

Boy: When I first walk into a library, I think I’m more of a browser. I’ll head to a section that interests me at the moment that I’m looking, but that’s usually fantasy. And I’ll just start looking at books with interesting titles and reading the back or inside cover, and I can sometimes spend a lot of time doing that. Pretty much until, alright, time’s up. Make a choice or just go. And I’ll be like, ugh, okay, fine, I choose this one. Or if I’ve just gone through enough, I’ll just choose one and sit down and start reading.

Mom: So if you are in a library and there are a bunch of books there and you don’t know anything about them, how do you decide which ones you want to pick up and read the flaps on? Do you like cover art? Are you looking for interesting titles? Are you looking for authors you’re already familiar with? What are you looking for?

Boy: All three of those, really. Yeah. I think I… I mean, you always hear ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’, but it’s hard to not, you know? I think usually a cool title will catch my eye. Because it’s on the shelf, you just see the title, you don’t really see the cover and when I pull it out—

Mom: Because you only see the spine.

Boy: Yeah. You only see the spine. When you pull it out, I think the cover makes a pretty big difference. And it’s always cool seeing a book by one of your favorite authors. Definitely plays a part.

Mom: What kind of cover design do you go for? Do you like photorealistic, or really stylized? Do you like bright colors? Or is it just super varied and you couldn’t pick. I kind of have a book type. Like an art style kind of thing that I gravitate toward.

Boy: I like relatively accurate art. Kind of Disney lifelike.

Mom: Okay, a little cartoonish?

Boy: Like vaguely cartoonish. Like you don’t have all the individual hairs, etc., but it’s still pretty detailed. I definitely like bright colors. Those definitely, you know…

Mom: Mm. I tend to go for really dark colors.

Boy: Yeah, I- not necessarily bright or dark but like-

Mom: Rich.

Boy: Yeah, rich. Like, dull or vibrant. That’s what I tend to gravitate toward. Like, newer style books, because those tend to have brighter colors.

Mom: More pop.

Boy: Yeah. More pop, less fade.

Mom: Okay, very cool. What are your three favorite books and what do you like—I know that’s a hard one to answer! (laughs)

Boy: (sighs dramatically) Oh my gosh…

Mom: I know, do your best! And what do you like about them? What makes them stick in your brain as favorites?

Boy: (groans) It hurts me to answer this question.

Mom: I know it hurts.

Boy: (sighs) Okay. (Big pause) I think… top three are Words of Radiance, Mistborn, and Arcanum Unbounded. All three-

Mom: Alright! A Brandon Sanderson fan.

Boy: Haha, I don’t deny it.

Mom: And what makes those books stick in your brain, what it is about them? Like, I know he does really cool worldbuilding-

Boy: Yes!

Mom: -excellent magic systems…

Boy: Yeah, it’s amazing worldbuilding.

Mom: Yeah. That’s what gets me, too: the worldbuilding. I want to be transported.

Boy: He has this level of creativity and in-depth… Like, talking about these experiments, about all these little details on this amazing, totally different, fundamentally shifted system of magic on a different planet that always is like… that makes sense.

Mom: Yeah…

Boy: Why does that make sense?

Mom: Yeah! It shouldn’t make sense but it does. It’s like baked into the world that he’s created.

Boy: Yeah…

Mom: I’m really into the worldbuilding, too.

Boy: So, Arcanum Unbounded… it’s not a classical book. It’s a collection of short stories from different worlds across the Brandon Sanderson multiverse.

Mom: Tolkien has a book like that. It’s like Unfinished Tales or something like that and it’s just little snippets from all over Middle Earth, all throughout the history, and I think it’s fascinating.

Boy: Yeah.

Mom: But everybody thinks I’m a terrible nerd for reading this waaaay backlist Tolkien thing.

Boy: Yeah. It goes into every single one of the worlds. They all have different magic systems, but then it talks about why they’re different, how that came to be, the history of the multiverse, and how that spread out into these different worlds and how their geography and parts of the gods in them—

Mom: You’re deep into the worldbuilding.

Boy: It goes so deep in the worldbuilding and it’s amazing. It’s like, that’s why that’s happening?

Mom: So if you were gonna write a book, what would you write about? (Pause) You’re like, it would be a Brandon Sanderson fanfic…

Boy: (laughs) Yes. It would. Multiple book ideas. One here, one here, one here, one here, one here, one here, they’re everywhere. But I can never really get around to putting them on paper.

Mom: Do they tend to be fantasy, like Sanderson writes?

Boy: Yes. Mostly.

Mom: Would you do heavy worldbuilding, or something a little more close to home?

Boy: Sort of medium, I’d say. That’s not a great answer.

Mom: Not quite to the Sanderson masterclass level?

Boy: (laughs) No.

Mom: Alright, well, thank you for granting me this interview, Mr. Marcotte.

Boy: (laughs) You’re welcome, it was fun. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about books.

Isn’t he great? I just love this kid. I’m gonna go hug him again. Happy writing!

September 11, 2024 by Jill

Ixnay on the Cliché

As a person who writes a lot of fairy tale retellings, cliché is a thing that rests heavily on my mind. I’m not talking about small, tired phrases with broadly understood meanings that are largely divorced from their original contexts: good as gold and right as rain, beating a dead horse, red as a rose, and dime a dozen. Rather, I’m talking about the larger clichés that span entire stories: the archetypes, the motifs, and the tropes. And fairy tale retellings tend to be pretty full of them.

Just because these kinds of clichés are bigger than their fun-sized cousins doesn’t mean they can’t be absolutely deadly to a story. Whether you’re attempting a character cliché (boy next door, damsel in distress, the Chosen One, etc.) or a plot cliché (love at first sight, the villain monologue, the big misunderstanding, etc.), the most common advice is don’t. The internet is full of lists of clichés to avoid at all costs. Don’t do it, don’t write it, just don’t.

But what if you really, really, really want to anyway?

Well, then you need to be careful. The thing about clichés is that they’re not very original, which can be pretty boring for readers. Clichés can act as a sort of formula, but when writing is formulaic, readers can feel like they know where the story is going well before it gets there. Stripped of that desperately-curious gotta-know-now feeling, it’s easy for readers to lose interest and put the story down. Maybe forever.

So if you’re a writer who really wants to write, oh I don’t know, a fairy tale retelling for example *coughs*, there are a few things that you can do to make sure that that story you’re retelling (which has been retold over and over and over for centuries) doesn’t turn into just another lazy regurgitation. Say I want to write a retelling for Sleeping Beauty, the ultimate damsel in distress. (Speaking of distress, it is a little distressing how long it took me to think of a fairy tale that I haven’t already done or at least planned a retelling of.) There are a few ways I might go about making it more interesting than a straightforward copy of the plot.

Mix and Match Yeah, I’ve already got the damsel in distress trope in play. But what if I mixed it with another cliché for a new angle? Maybe I could take that damsel in distress and mix in some villain-in-disguise; maybe the prince, desperate to take over a neighboring kingdom and make it his own but not having the resources to invade, hatches a plan with a powerful sorceress to make himself a hero and win the heiress as his bride. But when the princess herself finds out about his treachery, a little vengeance cliché might be in order, too, and the spinning wheel (magical artefact, anyone?) can be put to her own use. By blending more tropes together, you get the best of both worlds (ha, cliché spotted)—an old story told in a fresh new way.

Get Specific Specificity is the lifeblood of the writer’s craft. Fairy tales, at least the watered-down versions that we have these days (because the originals are often specific and brutal), tend to be a little bland and light on motivation. Disney has been all over this game with its endless parade of live action remakes, for better or for worse. While I really do wish they would opt for more original content once in a while instead of churning out endless reboots, remakes, sequels, prequels, and offshoots (pretty please?), it is interesting to watch how they revamp the motivations of traditionally more two dimensional characters. Villains are more than blandly evil. Princesses are more than weakly pretty. Princes are more than boringly brave. And I can respect that. (But seriously, can we get some originals, please?)

Subvert Expectations There is nothing more delicious to me than having my expectations set up for a particular cliché and then having the rug giddily yanked out from under me in some delightful new direction. So maybe in Sleeping Beauty, instead of playing it straight with the damsel in distress trope, I could try to find a way to subvert reader expectations. Instead of passively lying around waiting for someone to come rescue her, maybe Sleeping Beauty could… I dunno, sleepwalk? Acting on her dreams and nightmares, Sleepwalking Beauty wanders out of the castle, becoming a spreading plague on the countryside as the sleeping curse follows her across the land. (Okay, that might actually be fun, haha.)

Do It All Why pick just one method to put those clichés to good use? Blend multiple tropes, subvert them at will, and dig into the details all in the same story. Maybe I could start a story setting up the traditional expectations of a damsel in distress and then add a time loop and make Sleeping Beauty a time hopping sci-fi where a renowned chronometrist must stop her own murder without accidentally bumping into herself, opening potentially infinite branching timelines in the search for her own survival. Multiple clichés engaged? Check. Damsel in distress trope subverted? Check. Specific juicy sci-fi tech and highly motivated characters? Check.

Clichés became clichés for a reason. Although the shiny new originality has worn off, most of these ideas still have a lot of appeal for writers and readers alike. That’s why we keep using them! (And I gotta say, time travel Sleeping Beauty and nightmare plague Sleepwalking Beauty are both weevilling their ways into my brain. This might have to happen sometime in the future, haha.) Just make sure that when you’re using these classic ideas, you’re also taking the time and effort to make them your own, something equal parts familiar, fresh, and fun.

How about you fine readers, any fun ideas for jazzing up clichés? Let me know in the comments below! And until next week, happy writing!

September 5, 2024 by Jill

Exploring Book Formats

Some time ago, I was at a friend’s birthday party. The folks jamming away on the patio had long since surpassed my ukulele abilities (or lack thereof) and so I slunk inside to examine the cracker selection next to a mountain of beer, and there was a mutual friend. He, a significantly better ukulele player than me, went outside to take over my stool and uke, but his wife stayed within arm’s reach of the crackers, so I started chatting with her. I didn’t really know her at this point–I think this was the first time we’d exchanged more than like four words–but after bonding over our love of oatmeal and of roasting her husband, we very quickly landed on reading as a discussion topic, as I tend to do. She admitted that the current book she was working on was an audiobook, asking with a wince, “Does that count as reading?”

Anyone who knows me in real life knows that I’m a diehard physical book reader. I love physical books. I crave physical books. I stockpile them and riffle through them and consume them. However, I have to be reeeeeally desperate to resort to an ebook, and audio books just aren’t happening. Doesn’t matter how badly I want to read the book. No audio, no way, no how.

So clearly, I immediately answered her, “Of course it counts!”

Books are books, and the variety of formats out there increases the availability of books in the world. It does not diminish their value. Just because I prefer to read print books doesn’t mean that any format is more or less valid than any other! There’s nothing innately noble about reading a physical book that can’t be gotten in ebooks or audiobooks as well. (The only time I might caveat this statement is when people are building their literacy skills. In that case, I would say that audiobooks—while still great for students to listen to—have to be accompanied by text for students to keep building their reading fluency and skills. But that’s it! Unless you’re trying to learn how to read, books is books!)

Of course, that doesn’t mean that all book formats have all the same advantages and disadvantages. Some definitely fill certain niches better than others. So if you’re thinking about which format you want to try out next, consider what your life is like and which format would fit into it best. After all, if any task becomes too inconvenient, we’re just not going to do it. Humans are lazy like that. So make it as easy for yourself as possible and pick the format that best suits your values and lifestyle.

Audiobooks	eBooks	Print Books
Pros
Won’t melt your eyeballs with blue light. More accessible for people who struggle to read (illiteracy, vision problems, etc.) Easier to ‘squeeze into’ the schedule while commuting, doing chores, exercising, etc. Significantly less expensive than print.	Can be customized for background colors, text size, etc. to increase ease in reading. Thousands of volumes can fit neatly in one small device. Increasingly equipped with ability to annotate. Significantly less expensive than print.	Can be shared with friends and passed down to children. Can be marked up, doodled in, annotated, etc. and personalized. Won’t melt your eyeballs with blue light. Book smell, book feel. *Highest level of comprehension and knowledge retention.
Cons
Requires a charged device to read and apps/accounts that may be deleted, rendered obsolete, etc. Files may become corrupted, render incorrectly, etc. *Format most victim to wandering thoughts and poor retention.	Requires a charged device to read and apps/accounts that may be deleted, rendered obsolete, etc. Files may become corrupted, render incorrectly, etc. *May melt eyeballs with blue light.	Can be expensive and take up a lot of space. Can be easily lost or destroyed, especially if that friend you lent it to has a dog. *Least convenient to procure of the book formats.

So which book format should you be reading? There’s really no right answer here. For some educational purposes, there may be an edge to be utilized here and there, but overall, especially when reading for pleasure is the purpose, any format that gets a book in someone’s brain is a good format. The doctors and dentists I know uniformly love audiobooks, listening to them on the way to and from work. The busy stay-at-home parents love the compactness, transportability, and affordability of ebooks. And I love the way my book hoard looks clogging the doorways of every room in my house. Any book that is opening minds and teaching lessons is a good book, regardless of the form it takes.

(Also, if you’re ever at a party and chatting with your husband’s weird cracker-oatmeal-and-book-obsessed friend who can’t really play ukulele well but is willing to poorly pretend in public, you hold your head up with pride while declaring that you’re reading a book, no matter the format. If they wanna be a snob about it, you probably don’t want to hang out with them anyway. Just grab that Triscuit and move along.)

So until next week, keep reading those fabulous books of all stripes, and happy writing!

August 28, 2024 by Jill

The Worst Comic on Earth

Sooo… I don’t think I’ve mentioned this on here yet, but I dislocated my thumb a couple weeks ago. On my dominant hand, of course. And it turns out, when the doctor tells you four to six weeks to heal, he really means four to six weeks to heal. My repeated attempts at drawing a reasonable comic for the month just aren’t panning out, so unfortunately, you’re going to have to settle for… whatever this is. I should–fingers crossed–be all healed up for next month. And maybe I’ll try to have some backup art on standby for the next time something like this happens.

So until next week, when I can speech-to-text my way out of the corner, happy writing! (And thanks for bearing with me, guys. Seriously.)

August 21, 2024 by Jill

Itinerant Scribblings

Hello, denizens of the internet! One of the things I wanted to write about in the wake of my vacation was making time for writing. To be completely honest, when I put this in my schedule, I was kind of hoping that I would have made more time for writing than I did (hahaha *cries*) but maybe this is also a good opportunity to talk about the things that impeded my writing as well. (And this is going to be the last time I write a full post about my travels for the foreseeable future, I promise.)

So let’s start with the negative factors. There were a lot of things that made writing difficult, much of them strictly equipment related. The utter death of my laptop battery made it hard for me to write at any time that I wasn’t sitting down in a rental at the end of the day. Most places didn’t have plugs available for me to use, which really limited my ability to hop on my computer and pound out a few words while we waited for a train. Also, the fact that my computer doesn’t sleep–it is either on or it is off–made it a little trickier for me to be able to just open it up and jot out a few words, since it takes some time to wake the poor old girl up, which means I have to have a fairly sizeable chunk of time to make it worth it.

Other factors were a little harder to predict. These limitations included things like what the schedule was like for the day, whether a given train or bus had outlets, how much homework I had that week, stuff like that. They were pretty different day to day and weren’t always very easy to plan around. Sometimes we would plan for an hour at a site only to get there and realize it’s a two-hour wait just to get inside. Or maybe we would be expecting a twenty minute bus ride, stand around waiting for forty minutes, and eventually realize that that line didn’t run on the weekends and we would have to walk for another half hour to get to a different bus stop to get to where we were supposed to go in the first place. Or maybe I would open up my school folder for the week and find that I had hundreds of pages of reading that needed to happen before I could do my homework that week. All of these moving parts made sneaking in writing even more difficult than it already was.

Despite these difficulties in writing, there were other factors that went really well while we were traveling. We kept a lot of time free to just wander around places. Although it made it harder for me to spend actual time at the keyboard writing, these experiences allowed me to notice little snippets of daily life that I might have otherwise missed, talk to people that I might have ignored if in a greater hurry, and favor small and meaningful experiences instead of constantly hustling from one big touristy hot spot to another. Free time left me available to notice instead of chase.

At the very beginning of our trip, my exceedingly insightful husband purchased a small journal for each member of the family. We tried to set aside a little bit of time each day for everybody to write about their daily experiences, and what we ended up with at the end of the trip was a set of really fun memory books full of sketches and ideas and experiences unique to each member of our family. I had so much fun writing an entry in my little journal for every day of the trip. I glued in tickets and bookmarks and memorabilia, sketched, scribbled, and recorded. I love my little journal. Having a journal from our vacation not only helps me to keep track of where we were and what we did each day but also helps me to remember what things felt like in the moment. Having that reference to look back on–especially with all the little drawings and photos and ticket stubs to go with the experiences–makes for a really fun resource when recalling all those memories.

For people planning to write while traveling, there are three easy things that you can do to make that a little more likely to happen regularly and fruitfully.

Have appropriate writing equipment. Now we can’t always have the Ferrari of laptops along with us. Not everybody can afford that. But do bring along the equipment that will make your writing happen. Maybe that’s a nice notebook. Maybe that’s your favorite set of pens. Maybe that is a recording app on your cell phone. Maybe it is your janky laptop. Whatever it is, make sure it gets packed. You’re not going to write if you don’t have your writing implements. And similarly…

Take notes. Definitely spend the bulk of your vacation time vacationing. It’s what you’re there to do! See the sites, taste the foods, smell the weird alleys, bask in the weather, do all the things that you came to do, but also take notes on your experiences as you travel. You never know when you’ll come across a site that inspires a cool setting idea, or a little cultural nuance that sparks some thoughts for worldbuilding, or a bit of history that would make an awesome story premise. These little flashes of inspiration are easy to lose once you step away from what inspired them in the first place and while traveling, especially in a culture or place that is very different from what you’re used to, it can be a bit of a drinking-from-the-firehose experience. If you don’t have something to record these thoughts, they’re easy to forget.

Schedule regular writing times. This is true whether you’re writing at home or on the road. Scheduling time to write just makes it that much more likely to happen. If you don’t schedule it–if it isn’t baked into your day–it’s so much easier to get pushed further and further back in the day until the day is completely gone. If you have a day or two that is really truly packed, that’s okay; just make sure that you have a little makeup time built into your schedule later. Prioritize your writing or it will get sidelined.

Implementing just these three practices took my likelihood of writing from zero up to at least a three, haha. There is so much more that you can do if you are truly dedicated, but I absolutely am going to reemphasize the importance of free time. I could have spent some of that free time sitting with my laptop in my hotel room instead of out on the street and I probably would have had more words on the page as a result. but I definitely think those words would have been less fulfilling and less inspired, and have made for a lesser vacation. If you can write and travel, again, I absolutely recommend exploring new cultures, new languages, new diets, all that stuff. It’s a good way to feed curiosity about the wide variety of humankind and to inspire more stories of more interesting people!

And until next week, happy writing!

August 14, 2024 by Jill

Beaucoup des Belles Bibliothèques

(There is absolutely no reason for that title to be in French other than that is makes an alliteration. Although—oh. oh no.—as I am typing this, I realize I could have just done Lots of Lovely Libraries and it would be way less pretentious. Oh gosh, and now I’m torn about which one to stick with. Aaaahhhh~!)

Anyway! I’m back! We had a really great trip and it’s probably a good thing it took us a decade to save for it because I would probably want to go back every year if I could. One of the things I loved the most about Europe was all the gorgeous bookstores and libraries just absolutely everywhere. There wasn’t a single town we went to, no matter how teeny, that didn’t have bookshops or stately old libraries on what seemed like every street. Folks love their books!

I couldn’t possibly list all the shops, libraries, little free libraries, book fairs, and streetside book stands that we saw all over the continent. They were everywhere! However, there were just a few standouts that I thought were worth a share. So without further ado, here are the three most memorable bookish establishments that I visited in Europe.

Shakespeare and Company currently rests just across the River Seine from Notre Dame Cathedral. It is an English language bookstore, but the building itself has much older roots as an early 17th century Parisian monastery. A hub of literary life for American expats, the shop owner frequently invited readers and writers alike to stay in his shop; many of the benches that customers sit on during the day double as narrow beds at night. (Even to this day, bibliophiles can stay there as part of their Tumbleweeds program–check it out here if you’re interested!) The bookstore is meandering, packed, and full of character, with an abundance of side rooms smooshed together in unexpected ways. It was an absolute delight to wander through with my nieces until we found a perfect little under-the-stairs reading nook to share a picture book in.

Livraria Lello has been described as the most beautiful bookstore in the world (by Livraria Lello, haha). Apparently J.K. Rowling would hang out there on the weekends while she was teaching English in Portugal, and this bookstore was the inspiration for some of the settings in her Harry Potter universe. It being one of the oldest bookstores in the world, and perhaps because of the Harry Potter angle, this bookstore has become a tourism hotspot in Porto, Portugal. So of course I dragged my family there in the incredible summer heat and found a line that would have taken us about 3 hours to get through just to get to the shady part of the line (still outside). So instead we walked back and forth in front of the building–line guard lady knew exactly what we were up to, haha–to catch little peaks inside. I am a little sad that we weren’t able to go in because what we saw from outside was really stunning, buuuut my children were dying of heat stroke, so it was not meant to be. Saving the full tour for next time.

Biblioteca Joanina is part of the old campus of Coimbra University, which is one of the oldest continually operating universities in the world. The library itself is a relatively new addition. Completed in 1728, it stayed in regular use for the next two hundred years plus, and was designed in just bonkers over-the-top Baroque style. Guys, it is gorgeous in there. And still functioning as a library. You–with a really compelling reason, probably, haha–can go in there and flip through the books on its shelves for references. As awesome as the entire library was, I think the thing that stuck with me the most about the place was the staircase that we walked down to get in. The stone stairs had been worn down in the center, creating a smooth divet in each step, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about the hundreds and hundreds of years of students and teachers coming up and down those steps in the hope of building their knowledge base through the books there. It was very humbling.

If you ever get the chance to visit any of these establishments–or even just sneak a peek through the doors from the street–I recommend you go for it. Story hearing and telling is such a universal human craving and being able to see that through the lens of other countries and cultures only cemented my own love of books. And so of course, one of the first things that I did when we got back in the country was to take my boys to our own newly renovated local library. The updates to our library are the product of many years of hard work on the part of many people, and the new facility is just so bright and lovely and full of life. I’m so glad to be able to share these beautiful stories with my children, as well as the community ties that come of sharing them.

So until next week, hit that local library and happy writing!

August 7, 2024 by Jill

Home Again, Home Again: Week 9

Well, we finally made it home again! Other than requiring a wheelchair to make it through a couple airports (apparently my knees do not appreciate sitting folded and still for thirteen hours and then being expected to function), it was a perfectly boring trip home. We stayed the night with a brother and then drove north to Fairbanks the next morning and have been in the slow recovery process ever since. It’s lovely to be back home (and to have my parakeets again, who I missed, the little buttheads). Now it’s time to start gearing up for school!

I finished up my summer class the day after we got back, right when I finally had the time to work on it, haha. So being home and having a few class-free weeks and not having work just yet, I have had plenty of time for writing! It’s been nice having the freedom to sneak off for an hour here and there to chip away at this edit. I did manage to meet my NaNo goals for July, and it’s been nice having the opportunity to keep the momentum up.

Next week–right about when school is starting up again–I should have my feet sufficiently under me that I can get back to normal updates. Hopefully I’ll have gotten around to unpacking by then, haha. Thanks for sticking with me as this writing blog turned into a travelogue. And until next week, happy writing!

July 29, 2024 by Jill

The Paris Games: Week 8

We are back in France this week, and the Paris 2024 Olympic Games are on. (Also, sorry about the lack of photos from this week. I got up this morning and realized that nearly every picture I took this week had my kids’ smiling faces plastered on it!) We blitzed up from Porto, Portugal to Paris, France and got to watch some men’s rugby pool play, which was aaaaabsolutely fabulous. Packed house, great games, all awesome, loved it. And some rowdy Argentinians kept things in the stands interesting, too. I even got a questionable beverage dumped all over me from the balcony above! What fun! The next night, we hustled down to Nice for a women’s soccer game, USA vs. Zambia, where there were more Americans than I’ve ever seen outside the US, haha. Also a good time. We kicked around Cannes for a day, paddled in the Medditeranean Sea, and then meandered north again to Paris, where we will be flying out in just a few hours. Wish us luck!

Unfortunately, on top of the games, there was also a little bit of travel and accomodation madness that complicated this week’s productivity. I actually just barely finished my homework before posting this, and have done hardly any writing this week. Hopefully I’ll find opportunities on the way home and can still pull off a win in this month’s Camp NaNoWriMo. It’s still possible!

So until next week, which will hopefully see me safely home, happy writing!

July 22, 2024 by Jill

Into High Gear: Week 7

The wave pool at the Complexo Aquatico de Santarem

Again, apologies for missing last week. School was kicking my butt. I barely got my project done in time and it’s kind of frustrating because I know it wasn’t my best work (and my teacher will probably know that too), but it was the best I could manage during what has been a bonkers couple of weeks.

The chill part of the trip is officially over! We bid Fécamp a fond adieu (although hopefully an au revoir, we’ll see) and trained down to Toulouse where we rented a car, which was a bit of a debacle. Then we drove out to a small town, found out our rental didn’t exist, and slept on the side of the road–also a debacle. Then we hiked up a mountain and watched the Tour de France, which was super fun. Then back to Toulouse to swap cars, and finally across Spain into Portugal, where we’ve been for nearly a week now. We weren’t able to head out to rural Alentejo–my family’s old stomping grounds–but have been mainly sticking along the more accessible coast. We celebrated a birthday a few days ago and are celebrating another today. Hooray for my summer babies. Felizes aniversários, kiddos!

Given the school situation, I haven’t done any writing at all since my last report, so I’m getting pretty behind in Camp NaNo. I’ve been getting up every morning at 6:30 and going to bed pretty late some nights just trying to keep ahead of deadlines, so hopefully I can keep that burning-the-candle-on-both-ends-self-destruction going until I catch up in NaNo, too. Wish me luck!

And until next week–when we’re back in France again–happy writing!

July 8, 2024 by Jill

Kickin’ in Fécamp: Week 5

It’s been a nice week chilling in Fécamp! This is such a cool town and a nice change of pace from running all over the country. We’ve been checking out the town, hiking the bluffs, toodling around the super rocky beaches. It’s been lovely. And we also got to track down and visit the home that some of Robert’s ancestors were born in (back in the 1600s), down along the Rue des Frères Marcotte, although I do not imagine that was its name back when they were born, haha.

We are into Camp NaNoWriMo at this point, so I’ve been working on bookish things more regularly. I’m shooting for editing at least a half hour a day six days a week, but I’m giving myself a little fudge-space to make up days if I miss some. So far, I’m staying right on target. But we get on the move again this week, so I’m crossing my fingers I’ll be able to keep up the consistency! My biggest worry is that, in addition to having no internet access unless we’re connected to someone’s wifi, my janky old laptop now has absolutely no battery capacity. So it’s a desktop at this point. But that means I can’t use it anywhere without an outlet, which really limits my ability to use it while out and about. I’m getting more and more on board with breaking down and getting a new computer as a graduation gift to myself. We shall see.

But I hope everyone is having a good summer and killing all your awesome endeavors. If you’re doing anything fun, let me know in the comments below!