Sunday Salon for 2 July 2023
Happy Sunday! Sunday Salon is hosted by Deb at ReaderBuzz. Check out her post and the links to see what other bloggers have been up to in the last week.
How’s the weather?
We had a heat advisory Friday and multiple thunderstorms that night, with dramatic lightning and occasional downpours. Fortunately, none of the ping-pong ball-sized hail fell on our house, but it was nearby. Lots of folks lost power, too. Mostly, we’ve just been experiencing summer heat and humidity, par for the course in July.
What are you reading?
I gave up on The Choice by Nora Roberts, even though it was the third book in the series. Maybe it will work for me at another time.
Instead, I picked up Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers. This was her first book and the first book to feature Lord Peter Wimsey. This year is its 100th anniversary.
What are you watching?
I finished the Korean series Extraordinary Attorney Woo on Netflix — I was delighted by the whimsy throughout the show.
Now, I switched to Manifest — the oh-so-soapy science fiction drama on Netflix that I started watching during the pandemic, when something about a world-changing menace hit the spot. The final episodes arrived early this month. So if you like a series to be complete when you start watching, now is the time.
Our movie pick of the week was The Lost King starring Sally Hawkins. Do you remember when King Richard III’s skeleton was found in a car park in Leicester, England? This movie is about how that happened with some added whimsy that we enjoyed. The Richard III Society was integral to the endeavor — I learned about that in the novel The Murders of Richard III by Elizabeth Peters.
What are you doing?
Last week, I reported that updating my blog went smoothly. That’s when the problems started. . . . I’m still dealing with the aftermath. I did a bunch of scary things like use SSH to edit my wp-config.php file. But there’s still stuff going wrong. I’m confident that I can fix some of it (like the wonkiness of the sidebar), but I may yet have to pay someone to help me get to the bottom of the problems caused by moving my blog from http:// to https:// (the secure version).
What are you writing?
I did manage to get back to my novel–writing. I have good characters, an interesting setting, and an intriguing situation. What I don’t have, yet, is a plot — a structure that will make all of this a compelling story and not just a lightly fictionalized history lesson. This is still true after three years of working on my novel. I’m going to try tackling it from a different direction in July to see if I can get this to gel in a satisfying way.
How are you on this fine Sunday?