A Professional Dilettante

Repeating History has a new listing, at Science Fiction Romance‘s website.  When the person who reads the books and vets them for the site responded positively to my request, she said, and I quote, “The romance in it is on the light side, so I flagged it as Love
Story. It was a well-written, historically researched time-travel, though.”

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

“New Year’s Eve in Conconully”, a short story in my Tales of the Unearthly Northwest series, is now available on Amazon, for only 99 cents!  And it includes the first three chapters of Sojourn, so you can sample it as well.

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

Here’s the cover:

And here’s the description:

No good deed goes unpunished.

In a place outside of time, the magic keeping a ghost town alive is beginning to alter. Bringing two newcomers in has caused a welcome renewal of life here. But every action has a reaction, and the consequences are far beyond what Conconully’s accidental magician ever expected.

By the way, if you’d like to have a free copy of this short story, which comes after my novel Sojourn, and does contain slight spoilers for that book, you can join my newsletter at http://mmjustus.com/list and my next edition will contain a link.  I hope to see you there!

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

Tales of the Unearthly Northwest, volume 1.5, a short story called “New Year’s Eve in Conconully,” has a completed manuscript!  One more going-over, it heads off to the copy editor, and once it’s all pretty and cleaned up and the cover is finished, a free copy goes to my mailing list (and if you’d like to join my mailing list for this reason or any other, head to http://mmjustus.com), before it goes up for sale.

Then I can get back to Reunion, which is volume 2!

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

A 7000+ word week last week.  Which counts as one of my best weeks ever.

An idea for a short story in the Unearthly Northwest universe, at three in the morning on Sunday night (after one of the most fun football games I’ve ever watched).  Tentatively titled, “New Year’s Eve in Conconully.”

And a 3000+ (yes, that’s three zeros)-word day yesterday.  Which blows my former record (somewhere under 2000) clear out of the water.  Over 1500 on Reunion (for a total of five and a half chapters — I think a manuscript with five chapters deserves to be italicized like a proper book title, don’t you?) and over 1400 on the short story.

Today, so far?  Over 1300 on Reunion, so six full chapters now, and plans to plow through as many words on the short story as possible this afternoon.

The goal is to have the story done by the 28th, so that I can give free ARCs to my mailing list people.  Who now number more than twenty.  And then to create a cover, see if my copy editor has time to take a look at it, format it, and give KDP Direct a shot with it.  Then we’ll see what happens for ninety days.

Mirrored from Repeating History.

The summer after I turned twelve years old, my parents gave me the best birthday present ever. Ever since my first visit to the Grand Canyon when I was five or six, I’d wanted to go down to the bottom on the mules. But you had to be twelve to take that trip, so I had to be patient.

At last I was old enough. Early one morning we left our tent trailer parked at a campground on the South Rim, met the wranglers at the corral right on the rim, and climbed aboard our mules. Because I was the youngest person on this trip of about twenty people, my mule’s reins were tied to the saddle of the wrangler who rode at the front of our group. My mother was behind me, and my father, whose mule is the only one whose name I remember, because that poor animal was named Baby Doll, was behind her.

We all wore hats bought in the souvenir shop, because the guidelines we’d been given when we signed up said everyone needed to wear a hat to shade them from the sun. Mine had a nautical theme, of all things, and for some reason the decorations on it had my father, who had an extremely warped sense of humor, saying that it looked like a mad beaver.

My mother, who had had surgery just a few months before, remembers telling my father that she was going, that she wasn’t letting her little girl go down there without her.

All I remember is how magical it was. Incredibly beautiful. I really don’t have the words for it. I just remember layer after layer of varicolored rock, decorated with sparse trees and cactus and the occasional wildflower.  I wish I had the photos my father took of our trip, but they’re all slides, and I haven’t been able to have them scanned yet.  So you’ll just have to watch this wonderful National Park Service video:

The trail was narrow and, in many places, several hundred feet straight up on one side and several more hundred feet straight down on the other. The mules, we were told, were trained to face out towards the drop whenever they stopped, because when a mule is hit by something, like a falling rock, its first instinct is to back up. The trail was so narrow that sometimes it felt like the mule only had its back feet on the ground when we stopped like that.

It was an incredibly hot day. We were almost to the bottom when my mother felt as if she was going to pass out from the heat. One of the wranglers stayed behind with her in a shady spot as the rest of us went the short distance on to Phantom Ranch, and she followed a little while later. It was 123 degrees in the bottom of the canyon that day.

Phantom Ranch is an oasis, with Bright Angel Creek flowing nearby and the lovely little stone and wood cabins (each with its own evaporative cooler, which my mother, especially, greatly appreciated). I spent most of the late afternoon in the creek, until they rang the bell for supper.

I remember it being much cooler the next day, but maybe that’s because by the time the heat of the day had arrived, we were several thousand feet higher up, almost all the way back to the South Rim.

I do remember being sore for days after that trip down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, but it was one of the milestones of my childhood. I’ve been back to the canyon as an adult, and I still look down on the trail stretching across the Kaibab Plateau and think, “Did we really do that? Did we really?”

Yes, we did.

Mirrored from Repeating History.

The knee could have been worse, I suppose. I won’t be doing any hiking today, at any rate.

But I head north to one of my favorite places in the Okanogan Highlands, the little half ghost town, half hamlet of Molson, which has the name of a Canadian beer because when the town was first founded, its settlers thought they were north of the 49th parallel (as it turns out, they were a couple of miles south of it, but oh, well).

It’s kind of a drive up there, another hour or so along the Okanogan River, past the little village of Riverside and through the slightly larger town of Tonasket, up to Oroville, along the southern shore of long, narrow Lake Osoyoos, which is cut in half by the U.S./Canadian border. There’s a huge grocery store just south of the customs building, with a parking lot always full of cars with British Columbia license plates. I guess groceries are cheaper in the U.S.?

At Oroville I turn east on a little two-lane called Chesaw Road (you know you’ve made the correct turn when you see the sign saying this way to the Sitzmark Ski Area, a little rope tow out in the middle of nowhere about forty miles out of Oroville), and head up through a narrow canyon, gaining quite a bit of altitude in the process before I come out on top of an undulating plateau. These are the true Okanogan Highlands, and are mostly ranchland where they’re not part of the national forest. About twelve miles east of Oroville is the lefthand turn on Molson Rd.

This is beautiful countryside, in so many ways. If you love rolling hills, larches and pines, golden brown grass, and wide open spaces, or you have a thing for wondering who lived in the occasional old, abandoned building out in the middle of the meadow, or even if — in spite of being absolutely in love with the thick Douglas fir forests on the west side of the mountains — you’re simply enthralled with the enormity of the bright blue sky, then the Okanogan Highlands are a balm.

And the little town of Molson is well worth the drive. In the first place, it’s the home of the Molson School Museum I mentioned a couple of posts ago.

In the second, the citizens of Molson have preserved about an acre’s worth of historic buildings, which are open all the time so you can go in and explore.

And in the third place, they have Harry the pig.

Now, I don’t know if the plaster pig in the abandoned store window in ‘downtown’ Molson actually has a name — I never asked. But in my novel Sojourn he’s Harry, and he’s very important to my fictional Conconully. As a matter of fact, the town might not even exist without him. So I love him. He’s just such a whimsy for a place like that.

After a couple of hours exploring and a pleasant picnic lunch, and a gravel lane that eventually leads me back to Tonasket, I reluctantly head south again. I need to be home by tonight, and it’s a good five-hour drive if I take the bit of a detour into the Methow Valley that I have planned.

At the town of Okanogan I turn west, and less than half an hour later I realize that I ought to have checked the road conditions first. Unfortunately, as I mentioned in my last post, this past summer Washington state experienced its largest wildfire ever, which covered over 250,000 acres in the north central part of the state. The Carlton Complex fire caused damage that the area will still be recovering from years from now, and part of that damage was to U.S. Highway 20 between Okanogan and the Methow (pronounced Met-how, pronouncing the T and the H separately) Valley. The traffic was down to an alternating one lane for over a mile, and I lost a good half an hour by the time I reached the valley.

That was just my first check. The second was that State highway 153, which runs south down the valley towards Wenatchee, was also closed due to fire damage. Fortunately, a backroad runs parallel to it and a detour was set up. But I lost another hour by the time I got to Wenatchee.

Still, it was worth it, although I don’t think I’d have made the detour had I known. U.S. 20 climbs up over a magnificent pass and descends into the scenic Methow Valley, and the backroad down the valley was spectacular, crossing and recrossing the Methow River in the shadow of glorious mountains. And I found a non-crowded fruit stand just north of Wenatchee and loaded up on apples and pears.

I didn’t get home till well after dark that Sunday evening. I was tired and my knee was sore. But it was all so worth it. I highly recommend a weekend in the Okanogan country.

Mirrored from Repeating History.