OK – a titch over halfway through the year, and it’s been shaping up very well for me personally, all things considered. I made the last payment on the 30-year mortgage for my personal Patch of Paradise and received all but the last 2,000$ or so of the insurance payout for the accident that destroyed poor little lamented Thing the Versa. (A certain amount held out by the law firm to cover the final invoice on the medical scan which verified that yes, I had some bone damage to go with the simply awesome collection of bruises. Which payment invoice is lagging and lagging … yes, Big Government Medical matters proceed at the stately pace of a drugged Galapagos tortoise.)

These developments ease the necessity for tight budgeting and even allow for some frivolous expenses – a thing which hasn’t happened since the year that I spent in Korea doing outside voice-work. Some of those frivolous expenditures include being able to pay for overnight accommodations for distant-from-home book events. Alas, one of the big local book and music celebrations which I liked participating in was the West Texas Book and Music Festival in Abilene; and it seems that yearly event died the death during the Covidiocy. I can’t find any trace of it left at all in current social media, which was a pity, as I enjoyed getting there at least as much as I like participating. But the Giddings Word Wrangler is still a going concern, and I was invited to this fall. I hope to hear soon about Miss Ruby’s Author Corral in Goliad, too.

With luck, I think I will have finished Hills of Gold, the sequel to West Towards the Sunset by the end of the year. I have projected this as a YA historical adventure series relating the sequential adventures of the Kettering tweens and teens during pre-Civil War days on the western frontier: California and Nevada mostly, during the various gold and silver rushes there. The second in the series, focusing on Jon Kettering (a small boy in West Towards the Sunset, which focuses on his older sister, Sally), is about two-thirds completed in draft. I also had a glorious inspiration for writing a further adventure concerning a younger sister in the Virginia City, Nevada silver rush. Oh, and Jon Kettering himself becomes a Pony Express rider, during the crisis year that the Pony Express was a going, yet ultimately economically crushing concern.

I also have the long-promised final volume of the contemporary Luna City chronicles about half-done, and several notions to round out the various plot threads/story arcs:  the wedding of Richard and Kate, the eventual disposition of the legendary Mills Treasure, what happened to Joe Vaughn at the end of Volume 11 … all sorts of little things in the Most Perfect Small Town in South Texas. In the Luna City time line we are also coming up on the start of the Covidiocy. Also a couple of real-life people who I based characters on have since passed away … so it just seems like a good place to wind up the story. Not for good, though – I still have half a mind to do another YA series, with Letty, Douglas, Stephen and their other friends as kids in the 1930s. I’m seeing it as sort of an Americanized Emil and the Detectives, with their little group helping Chief McGill and Sgt. Drury solve small rural mysteries. But that has to wait on me finishing the Kettering series, of course.