So here we go, everybody. First working week of the New Year for many of us. Even in retirement, I find myself still holding to the work week schedule--and where I'm at, that's frequently a four-day schedule because all of our local schools run on a four-day schedule. Cost-saving measure for rural schools.

We've not had a lot of snow this winter in this northeastern corner of Oregon. Oh, it's snowed, but then we get an atmospheric river that melts it all and causes landslides elsewhere in the state. I'm grateful for not needing to drive the Wilson River highway over the Coast Range like we were doing for business purposes last year, because it washed out one lane in a section that visibly was sinking even during the summer last year. Granted, that highway has A History of slides, but all the same...and I guess that assorted driving apps did not inform users of the delays and then closures. TripCheck for the win--that and local Facebook travel groups are what I use. When you aren't in the big city, you aren't going to hear what you need to know about highway conditions, unfortunately.

Supposedly, though, we're going to get snow this week. We shall see if it makes it over here or not.

Anyway.

I'm settling in with lots of reads. After much hassling, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien finally showed up (I ordered it in early November!), on JRRT's birthday, nicely enough. Between that and making my way through the annual Discworld read, plus finally getting around to reading about the Mitford sisters (along with Jo Walton's Small Change series), digging out my book of Anthony Trollope's editing stories, and eying the big Earthsea collection once I'm done with Discworld, I'm looking forward to just plain spending time reading. I want to get new reading/computer glasses because my current frames don't have pads, and they just don't sit right on my nose. That happens week after next, and I swear I will never ever get near-vision glasses without pads EVER AGAIN.

Vision of Alliance is finished and ready for beta reading--feel free to drop me a line if you're interested in looking at it. I started out with doing chapters strictly in POV order (alternating points of view) but threw that out in favor of a more linear structure. Fixing that also required some tweaking to make it smooth. I've been starting to plot out the next book in Goddess's Vision, Vision of Chaos, and should get started on writing it in a couple of weeks. Part of that plotting and prep includes writing 2000-4000 words about each major character's perspective at the beginning of the story. Well, that will provide nice giveaways and promotional reads...stay tuned for that. But it's also giving me some good material for worldbuilding, which is nice.

At this time I don't have any appearances planned, but I expect that to change as I line things up this month. I'm also considering adding hardback versions of my books and setting up links to them through Bookshop or my website, which...I'm running a Netwalk Winter Special special on Itch.io, in hopes that I'll make enough off of it to hire someone to update my horribly out-of-date site. Otherwise, it's gonna be me doing it...and I've been putting that off for over a year now. Link is below.

​https://itch.io/s/173144/netwalk-winter-special

Other than that, not much else to report. Other than I keep hoping for snow, and I might just start dragging out old ski movie DVDs (after I get the necessary converter from Apple because Sequoia appears to have borked that external tie-in) as part of ye olde snow dance. We shall see. So much of our summer water depends on snow, and...we're short here in Oregon.

That's it for January. Onward.