Farrah Wethers:

Feeling Pins and Needles (book 4)

#NANOWRIMO2020

AMBER LOVE 02-NOV-2020 My work is supported by monthly backers at my tip jar on Patreon.com/amberunmasked. I wasn’t sure it was going to be possible for me to participate in another National Novel Writing Month since last year I was so busy expending my energy on daily yoga classes, still taking the cats on adventures, and writing weekly cat detective stories for Patreon. Then this whole pandemic nightmare started and it’s the biggest election possible this week.

Allow me to preface that with saying I have a lot of privilege so that I’m allowed to be in my pandemic comfort zone as a hermit not leaving the property. People do my shopping and I’m able to collect unemployment. However this week, the very week NaNoWriMo is beginning, things are changing.

A lot of people including myself have already dropped off our paper ballots. Tomorrow is the official “Election Day” and my anxiety is exactly where it was four years ago. Although I will say, I was filled more hope because I was desperately looking forward to a highly qualified woman being in the White House instead of the shallow bloviating caricature that got in with his equally plastic, shallow, and racist wife and kids.

Then I saw a lot of already successful authors (Hank Phillipi Ryan, Alex Segura, Kellye Garrett and many others ready to give pep talks even if they aren’t using the month for 50k words) tweeting how they were going to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. It’s also got the support of Sisters in Crime — and since I was in a position this year to do so, I finally renewed my membership dues.

The Plan:

I’m working on the fourth Farrah Wethers mystery novel. Since I’ve self-published three, I don’t think there’s any chance of querying it. It’ll end up self-published like the others. I’ve also been querying Witches at the White House and getting rejections.

In this book, a few more characters come into play closer to Farrah’s immediate circle. Her daughter Nova is finished with college. Lenore Lexington is still around and living with Farrah and June, but Lenore will have a small arc compared to her role in Miscarriage of Justice. Both ex-husbands, Frank and Jackson, will be part of this story because their special effects business ties into one of the “service roads” as mystery writer and professor Jane Cleland calls them. You can find Cleland’s books and other writing advice books in my Amazon influencer list.

The setting for this book is a county fair. If you’ve never been to one but you’ve seen Parks & Recreation’s episode on the Harvest Festival, it’s kind of like that. Only the county fairs around here (when we had them annually) were more like Bob’s Burgers Wonder Wharf with tractor pulls, equine events, and the fair queen pageant.

The first diversion of the main plot, Service Road 1 mentioned earlier, is about the quilting exhibit and competitions. I don’t know anything about quilting so I was doing some light reading over the summer about categories and styles that would be useful for judging. Service Road 2 is the Fair Queen Pageant: I also don’t know anything about beauty pageants except what I learned from Sandra Bullock’s Miss Congeniality. It grosses me out that little children are put through these pageants even if they do include a “natural” event where they aren’t given fake teeth, makeup, wigs, etc. It’s just gross. My contestants will all be 18-25.

Progress:

If you want to follow along with the daily progress, I won’t be making daily entries here this time. I’m going to update my word counts and make posts only when the mood strikes (like I’m sure after Tuesday’s nightmare election).

Right now, Gus is really upset that the winds are ridiculous today from the tail end of a hurricane so even though it’s sunny and bright, we can’t go out.

I was lucky that those first two days were great for my word count because after that I had three days of not enough. Well, technically one of them was the daily minimum but not enough to make up for the day before. Then I had a modeling day so when I came home, I walked the cats, took a pain reliever and didn’t budge from bed. This happens to be during the days the world is watching key states in the American election and there are idiots rioting at buildings and protesting that votes shouldn’t be counted. Just watch VEEP’s “Nevada” episode and it’s the same thing but with a lot more people wearing flag garments, masks, and waving hideous large blue banners (Why did Trump make his banners blue anyway?).

Speaking of masks, they work if you use them correctly which most people aren’t doing. They go over your nose and mouth. I also believe that the initial panic that had actually gotten people to wash their hands and be mindful of hygiene in public is no longer in the mass mentality. People are fighting to gather in public places and that includes mass transit, bars, and pounding on the doors of polling centers. Those folks are touching their faces, their assault rifles, each other, and every surface around. There’s a massive surge in plague cases. Yeah, I’m calling it what it is. A plague.

There’s a lot of content under my Writing tag here. Interviews/Podcasts, tips, fun things to check out, and NaNoWriMo survival posts. One that everyone might need whether you’re writing or not, is a little bit of yoga.

HELP A WRITER OUT:

Praise like this DM are extremely uplifting for a writer or artist to get. If you can, put those kind messages of support into Amazon reviews with 5 stars. Sure, you might think 3 means “it’s good” but not according to the mathematical programming hijinks.

Founder and Editor-in-Chief of AmberUnmasked.com and Vodka O'Clock Podcast. Author of The Farrah Wethers Mysteries, comic book short stories, prose, and non-fiction. Cosplayer and figure model.