[As usual, three weeks lag here, if you aren’t reading this on my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/blazeward). If you’d like your news fresher, and the monthly Anti-Stodgy/Redneck Chef newsletter, all I ask is a buck to help keep the lights on around here.]

Weather up in this corner of the Cascades has been weird this year. Not bad, but weird.

In the spring, we had a two week stretch of warm and dry where everybody’s allergies went insane from the tree sex. I ended up with three trees FULL of cherries instead of a handful. Good.

Been warm but not hot that often, which I prefer. Moved up here for 62 and drizzly, y’all.

Had a long stretch of wet last week to the point we wondered if fall had come early. Usually Oct 1, BTW.

Harvested all the grapes saturday and am making various wines and brandies now. And a lot of wind last night is bringing in hot today. Supposedly 85-90 down in the valleys, so maybe 5 degrees cooler up here. Got apples and aronia left to harvest. And maybe some mowing for the first time in 6 weeks (when it gets dry, it gets really dry.) Lots of green today and various dandelion variants flowering for the late season bees packing away honey for what promises to be a cold and kinda wet winter. I’ll apologize when I mow it all off.

Books. I am going to finish RAN Stormhawk this week and rotate into the third Scattered Tribes. Picked up my old omnibus edition of the Black Company (first three books) and might only reread book one just for the epic fantasy feel to the language.

I find that WAY too much Epic Fantasy these days tends to be Tolkien with the serial numbers (mostly) filed off and that just bores the shit out of me. I want action. Motion. Stakes and emotional growth. Scattered Tribes I’m leaning into a lot of things, and trying to keep the reader engaged without any long chapters of food porn that do not serve to do anything except infodump all the research the writer did on an obscure topic.

Still writing several shorts in my spare time. Think I have four stories open right now, but all on that spare phone and backed up regularly. Plus I know where each is going and just have to get there.

First Reader finished Ollie 4 and assured me that the ending didn’t work, so I’ll write Ollie 5 after that so I can bring it all home. That gets me through November next year. Lots to publish, and probably two kickstarter campaigns next year as well. The Make 100 is coming into shape nicely, and I might just go ahead and KS the first Scattered Tribes. Dunno.

Not a lot past that, save that it’s tuesday and autumn will be here soon enough.

shade and sweet water,

b

West of the Mountains, WA

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