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| The view below my bedroom window. |
There is some risk to setting your
work of fiction in the town where you live. When I started my series, I
thought, ‘Why invent a new town when I have a perfectly good one right here?’
And so I did, with a fair amount of license: rearranging buildings, changing
the name of the roads, moving the middle school, and so forth. My town isn’t a
hotbed of murder, but there are times when reality and the world I’ve made up
blur.
Today after breakfast, I figured it was going to be a pretty inactive day, so I went out for a walk around our complex, only about a mile depending on how much weaving in and out you do.
On the access road into where we live, I spied The Gang standing around idly in the middle, possibly deep in a meeting of whether to go to that side of the road or this one.
I turned around so as not to disturb them – they’d likely be there for a while working that out.
After a shower I set off for the
library, which just like in my books, is accessed under a canopy of four Japanese
maples. Inside, I checked the new fiction shelves and saw a name that looked
familiar. Checking the author’s picture on the inside showed me that yep, I’d
met her at my first literary conference when she was a big cheese and I was a
newbie. Cool.
My next stop was the D’s, to see what
was happening with my books. When I don’t see any of the four, I worry that the
library has finally realized what a two-bit writer I am and tossed them. When I
do see them on the shelf, I worry that no one wants to check them out. Today
three were missing, one still there. Phew.
On my way back to Main Street on this
perfect sunny 78-degree day, an 11ish kid went by on his ebike, imaginings of
race courses in his head. A young mother pushed a stroller down the sidewalk,
another child skipped alongside. And as I waited for an opening to turn, a
truck went by with an ecstatic dog, his tongue flapping the breeze.
Cue the Disney butterflies.
