Hopping in my Time Machine

I need to get out of my own headspace. I need to take a trip somewhere away from here. Sadly, I can’t afford a vacation. If it was springtime or summer, I’d find myself a path in the woods and go for a walk. Recently, the temperatures have been down in the single digits, and that just doesn’t seem like an enjoyable walk to me.

I’ve been spending a wee bit of time in Ireland as I’ve been listening to The Searcher by Tana French at work this week. I’m really enjoying the local characters and wishing I could hop a plane. I’d likely never return. (Cal, the main character, is a yankee starting over) I lack the funds to buy a house in need of repairs and then just dive into the repairing. I envy Cal his abilities to do so. Probably helps to be a fictional character.

Where’s a girl to go when she can’t get out of the house because the winter is pounding at her door? How’s a girl to get warm as the cold wind blows across her eaves? Watching my husband hunt gators on Red Dead Online only leaves me feeling wet. However, watching the landscape roll by as he drives his wagon lulls me into a peaceful sort of place.

That’s where Mary and Jesse reside. Not quite the same place or time as Red Dead‘s Arthur finds himself these days, but the beautiful landscape of Red Dead Redemption had been a pleasant companion as I’d been working on Once Upon a Time in Iowa and my husband helped Jon fight his way back home. The beautiful terrain of Online really is quite stunning, too.

All of this is how I find myself heading off to those hot summer days of 1872. Off to Calhoun where life moved at a different pace. Off to nurture and grow young love and see where it might lead the two of them. If things go wrong, I could accidentally write myself right out of existence. (I don’t know how all this works. I’ve never turned my own ancestors into the stars of my book before.)