Welcome new readers and thank you to everyone who’s still reading. We appreciate it. We really do.
It’s hard to believe that this is my sixth newsletter for Peschel Press. It is, sadly, easy to believe that I’m late since I should have gotten this written back at the end of October for a publication on 1 November.
What have we been up to since my last newsletter, dated September and October? We enjoyed car follies: repair work, estimates, wrestling with the insurance company, learning what a salvage title is, and all because the landlord next door refused to cut down the whomping willow.
The tree was not really a willow. It was a Norway maple, pollarded until the poor thing died a slow, agonizing death. It looked just like the whomping willow in the Harry Potter movies right down to the immense crack splitting it in two allowing you to put an entire arm inside it.
Larry the Landlord could have cut that tree down any time in the last ten years. He chose not to and the inevitable happened. It fell over on Sunday, 8 September, and we spent weeks of time (that could have been spent writing) getting the household back to where we were on Saturday, 7 September.
The whomping willow decided to fall over (not even a breeze that day) taking out ten feet of our chain-link fence, part of the privet hedge, and landing on the rear passenger side of our one, lone Ford Focus resting comfortably in our driveway. The car suffered dents, scratches, and a broken taillight.
Fast forward through weeks of aggravation, lengthy phone calls and emails to USAA, homemade fence repairs (the estimate was $900; we patched it for $50), and finding out how salvage titles work in Pennsylvania.
The car was totaled. But it wasn’t, not at all. The damage, other than the broken taillight, was entirely cosmetic. But USAA declared it a wreck and authorized a payout. By paying for the repairs and acquiring a salvage title, any prospective buyer will know that the vehicle had been in an accident. Since we don’t plan on replacing our ca, a salvage title was far less expensive than trying to purchase a new car with money we don’t have. The insurance payout wouldn’t even come close to the cost of a replacement 2011 Ford Focus with 86,000 miles and the maintenance done faithfully by the dealer just like the owner’s manual decrees. Not even close.
But eventually we worked it out. I can now find both the notary public in Elizabethtown and the specialty auto inspection yard outside of Harrisburg. I also got to experience the high-tech dashboard of the 2020 car we got as a rental for a day. I’ll stick with my old Ford, thank you. Having a TV screen built into the dashboard is asking me to have an accident, it was so distracting.
As you might imagine, the whomping willow episode took up plenty of my and Bill’s writing time. And yet, it was relatively minor as these things go. No one went to the hospital. We’ve arranged our lives so we don’t need a car that much (which is why we have one car for four licensed drivers). It was a problem that could be solved with money and time and effort and plenty of anxiety sauce over it all.
I am deeply grateful that no one was hurt, particularly the next-door neighbor’s kids. The whomping willow could have fallen on his kids at any time and everyone knew it. It got our car and fence instead which I think is a good trade.
New Publications
Despite our schedule being thrown off, we accomplished a few things recently.
The big one is publishing Sew Cloth Grocery Bags: Make Your Own in Quantity for Yourself, For Gifts, and For Sale.
Bill did a fantastic job doing the layout. My beta sewers were vital, helping me turn a mess of instructions into something coherent. Years of work went into this work and now it is done! Hurrah.
My next sewing book should be faster, or at any rate, it won’t take three years. It’s going to be about “NotQuilts.” That’s a word I made up because it looks and functions like a quilt but it isn’t. It’s a patched blanket. (It’s also not foundation piecing for you experienced quilters out there.)
This is a method I worked out, starting with the blanket I was given with cigarette holes burned into it. I patched it and one thing led to another and I ended up with something that looked like a quilt. I made a bunch of them, working out my techniques, and blogged about it on PlanetPeschel, Bill’s personal website.
Making NotQuilts taught me a lot about design. When I started one, my goal wasn’t to make it look like something, but to use up scraps and produce a warm quilt that will hold together in the wash. I do not know what it would look like until I’m done.
So even if the final design didn’t look like what I imagined, I do not consider any of my NotQuilts to be failures. They function, they hold together in the wash, and they use up scrap. What more do you want? This is a very different mindset than what I see in quilt books where the appearance of the finished product matters more than usability and cost.
Sewing a NotQuilt is an exercise in designing on the fly, and it can feel like a high-wire act if you’re afraid of making something less than perfect.
In other news, The White Elephant of Panschin is still being posted on Wattpad and Archive of Our Own. It will end with chapter 41. I have to make my beta reader corrections, send it to Bill who will edit it down, and hopefully, get it published prior to Valentines Day of 2020.
If you’d like to check it out go here: https://www.wattpad.com/story/181751952-the-white-elephant-of-panschin
Or here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18144470/chapters/42902963
The story is the same; it just depends on which site you prefer.
I’m working hard on The Vanished Pearls of Orlov, also set on Mars. When The White Elephant is finished being serialized, I’ll start posting The Vanished Pearls. I’ll be about 20 chapters ahead of the readers, giving me a comfortable margin.
Bill is slaving away on The Complete Annotated Murder on the Links. We had expected it would be finished by now, but well, the whomping willow threw everything off schedule. That also means his annotation of The Man in the Brown Suit will be delayed, too.
We do hope that he’ll be able to publish his own novella Man Out of Time before the close of the year. Christopher Marlowe is thrown forward into modern-day Manhattan. Manhattan may never recover, although Kit will do just fine.
We did several shows in October. We were at Indian Echo Caverns Fall Fest in early October and then in Wellsboro, Pa in mid-October for From My Shelf Books’ annual book festival. We had never been to Wellsboro, tucked up almost at the PA/NY state line. The town was gorgeous, the festival very good, and we will be back.
I’m so late with this newsletter that I can talk about our regular stop at Hershey’s own Winter Arts and Crafts Festival on Saturday, Nov. 2 and then on Sunday, Nov. 3, we went to Shippensburg again for their book festival. We did well at both shows, talked to loads of people, handed out cookies, and even sold books.
We’ve got some upcoming shows through to the end of the year if you’re in the area:
* Sunday, Dec. 8 at 2 p.m., Odessa Moon will join other authors for a reading and meet-and-greet at Mechanicsburg Mystery Bookshop in Mechanicsburg, Pa.
* Saturday, Dec. 14 from noon until 2 p.m. at Cupboard Maker Books in Enola, Pa.
* Saturday, Dec. 21, from 3 to 5 p.m. at Cupboard Maker Books pop-up shop at Colonial Park Mall in Harrisburg, Pa.
As for 2020?
I won’t forecast any book publication dates. Whomping willows will fall on my car if I do. What I plan on is writing the newsletter on a monthly basis instead of a bi-monthly one. I hope to keep all of you, dear readers, more up to date on what we here at Peschel Press are doing.
In the meantime, cut down those dead trees if they are located near driveways or houses. Otherwise, let them rot in place, fall, and become nurse trees for new life in the forest.
Just don’t park your car near one.
See you in January of 2020!