Get out the rain hats and ponchos! Maybe that will jog the Rain Spirits to send their wet arrows, and in quantity, We living things here in Southern Oregon (and in Northern California) surely could use it! Mount Ashland 40 miles south of Grants Pass had a dusting of snow this week and magnificent Mount Shasta got a light coat. White becomes those sacred sites.
But as Fall sweeps in, Summer is reluctant to leave. So we have both! Days in the 80s are back, with overnight lows in the 40s. I wore a cotton turtleneck, jeans and Carhartt vest yesterday to ride Brad. But I was ready to lose the vest if it got too steamy.
What to wear? What to do?
Rather like my journey as a new author (“Saddle Tramps”) finding my niche. I go back and forth. I call myself a writer of New West Mysteries. I love the American West, old AND new, tangled with mysterious circumstances that need to be straightened out. However, some stories I write are chilling thrillers and others sparkle with Hallmark Channel themes. “The Stone Horse” novella works as an inspirational parable and “Hannah of the Mustangs” shows a lost teen’s coming of age on Oregon’s Desert.
Like September being both Summer and Fall, I, too, do that cross-season, cross-genre thing. Refuse to be pigeonholed. Like to leave my options open.
Readers need not worry: In my books and stories you will always experience the New West. That’s the constant. And you will always find mystery, for isn’t all life a mystery? But you occasionally will see more, from other genres that catch my fancy. Or see my main genre shaken up with winds from new directions.
Summer to Fall. Then Fall to Winter. And at long last, Spring. New mixed with old. It’s what keeps us coming back for more, in writing and reading — as in Life