Early tomorrow Gary and I will pack up and start our drive to Illinois. Tomorrow is also the opening of deer season. We should be safe driving down the interstate, yet there is always a fear that some incompetent hunter will be shooting in our direction. It is another source of danger in our lives.
We will celebrate Thanksgiving there by stopping at a local restaurant but that's it for the day. My Thanksgivings are never as bad as the one in my current short story at Black Coffee Fiction http://blackcoffeefiction.blogspot.com/2013/11/thanksgiving.html but I still like the idea of quiet at the holidays.
In that farmhouse I will have days and days away from the Internet, away from writing, away from the busy life I have here. I will be in town once in a while, but it is very possible that I will not be posting every day.
My apologies but everyone needs a vacation.
I will be reading. These are the books I am taking along.
Friend of My Youth, a collection of short stories by Alice Munro, who won this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. I am always looking for short story writers to study.
Open Season, by C. J. Box, the first in the Joe Pickett murder mysteries. I continue to read mysteries for pleasure but these days I also am looking for technique as I consider writing about violent death.
I saw Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner's Handbook on a Wisconsin television University of the Air segment. I am thinking of using poison in my next mystery, so I need to read up on the subject. Gary does not seem to find this upsetting.
If reading those books seems like a busman's holiday, I have a few others:
A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick, written by a Wisconsin author. In some ways, that is work related, too, because I want to write a novel about homesteading.
A non-fiction choice is Thomas Jefferson, by Jon Meacham. It's unlikely I will get that one finished by the end of the week.
Farewell to the East End is a memoir by Jennifer Worth, whose tales led to the PBS series, Call the Midwives.
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