Blog Feb 25
I should not have mentioned spring in my last blog as winter was listening and we had two weeks of crampons on the boots, salt on the steps, and heavy sweaters under parkas. Snow and ice were followed by relentless rains and a 4.1 earthquake. I have hopes that the weather gods are through with us for now.
The chickadee is whistling his spring song and a couple of the neighbours are whistling back. The eagles are redecorating last year’s nest, although they are so high up in the tree, I can’t see what they are doing. Perhaps they’ve already started this year’s family. They are certainly making enough noise about it.
Molly, at aged fifteen and a half had her final visit to the vet and is no longer with us. She was feisty to the end. Carly misses her as I do.
However, I am planning a research trip to the Nicola Valley here in BC and I plan to take Carly with me. We’ve never done a road trip. Providing I have enough food with me in the car, we should have fun. Carly’s patient on a two-hours trip. I’m not sure how she’ll take a six-hour trip, but we may have to stop a few times.
I am planning a new mystery series set in the Nicola Valley. I need to see it again as it has been many years since I visited there. The characters are already crowding my mind, and I have a rough idea of the plot for the first and second books. I am trying to convince myself to take a few days off before I dive into another series. Fiction is more forgiving of plot and characters than non-fiction. I have just come off a year of discipline that made me keep the character true to the evidence she left about her life, true to the chronological order in which her life unfolded and true to the vocabulary and ideas that were around her in the nineteenth century. It takes imagination to do that, but I am not free to adjust, change or invent situations or actions that didn’t occur. It had its own satisfactions in the excitement of finding evidence that no one else has discovered, but I am looking forward to being free to invent whatever I like.
I hope everyone is looking forward to spring. Sorry about you people up north. I know it’s not due for a few months yet.