Moving soon?

This is too late to help the people we know who are moving this week (whose van broke down on some pass in Idaho on the way to Virginia, and who are stranded at the moment while waiting for the company to open and fix their truck). However, if any of you are moving any time soon and your job is not paying a full moving service to move you: I recommend U-Pack. Caveat: you have to move at least 500 miles. But, the price is comparable to U-Haul when you figure in gas (which the U-Haul estimate doesn't). AND YOU DON'T HAVE TO DRIVE. The company ships commercial freight, but they sell the extra room in their trucks for people who are moving. They drop off a trailer (you may have seen them--they are marked ABF and are all over the freeways) at your house, and you have a couple days to pack it yourself. You put up a bulkhead and can even padlock it shut. Then you call them up and they take it away. They drive it, and drop it off at your destination, and you do the whole thing backwards. Friends recommended them to us, and we have used them four times now. We're sort of serial customers. We are not into brand name anything and have little loyalty to any company, but this one is a good one.

More snow

My neighbor is worried that all the snow will melt and we'll have a green Christmas. Um. Not gonna happen! My menfolk just shoveled the driveway of the two inches from last night, but it's still coming down fast and furious. This is on top of everything we got during the week. It's reeeeally slippery out there, and yet we technically have one day left of school before vacation. This is a snow makeup day, because apparently we have to have so many days between major vacations?? I really hope it gets cancelled tomorrow, though. I don't want to drive in this to pick up Little Sweetie from kindergarten!

It's quite pretty out, actually. And a nice atmosphere for the Christmas program. I'm the choir pianist, and it went well, although I admit I'm glad it's behind me! Some of the music was not easy. Nice, though--I always like it when the congregation can join in during a choir number, like the version of Angels We Have Heard on High we did today. I like having everyone singing all around.

Now we're making stuff with chocolate, and reading. (Tyger, Tyger, by Kersten Hamilton, which isn't particularly Christmasy, but which is good, and then I think I'll reread Crossing to Paradise by Kevin Crossley-Holland, as it IS very Christmasy.) I hope you are all enjoying 4th Advent and that you are not stuck in snow anywhere!

Writing

Whoa, can this be happening already? I think I've already got my next WIP. I just finished a book this week! And it's Christmas, and I have a real life! And I need to revise this new book. I don't have time to get involved in new characters! But they are whispering to me...brought on by the snow or something, I don't know. Some kinds of weather are more writing-friendly than others, you know? We'll see how long this sticks with me--it might be only a short-term infatuation. But I've already come up with the first chapter/inciting incident/major characters/backstory...um, yeah. Scary, like I said. But kind of nice. There was that ten months of just revising and trying to come up with new ideas and failing...maybe it's all suddenly pouring out now. Plus, I like to explore new things. That's the nice thing about being unpublished--you can try out all kinds of things and no one is there telling you to stick to the brand you're supposedly developing. My first one was sort of a cross between southern gothic and something more like Madeleine L'Engle...my second, a genre cross between contemporary and paranormal (ie, not just paranormal happening in today's world), my third, a boy MG action adventure, and now a historical fantasy with a girl audience in mind. And the writing process has been somewhat different with each as well. I think it just helps me to do a radical change to something new when I switch to a new project--it gets the old characters' voices out of my head.