Upturned Stones & Summer Break

Have you noticed the Work in Progress gadget on my sidebar? Well, my poor writer's blog has been silent for a while, but my writing, thankfully, has not.

I've been giving myself as much time as possible for both writing and daydreaming. In the past, I've sat down at the keyboard during my allotted (read: stolen from my real life) writing time with a frenzy of ideas, but no unscheduled, wandering, thinking time to draw them all together.

I think I expected journals full of random notes, snippets of dialogue, and flashes of insight to weave themselves into a story as I typed.

I'm having much more success daydreaming first. Lately, my mornings have all featured long walks with the little ones munching apples in the stroller while my mind was a million miles away. It is so absolutely effective! I realize I learned this lesson a while ago while running, but all my company caused some brief amnesia... oh but I'm back!

I haven't added to the official word count of Upturned Stones, but I have come up with a decent and very brief summary and a few pages of notes on the characters, key settings, and key plot points of the book. Over the next two weeks, I hope to finesse these notes a bit more and conduct a little research on stone and crystal enchantments (you'll see), and then dive in with a Nano style first draft to be edited later.

So that's the plan.

And here's the summary:

Evelyn Butler-Lydell, at-home mother of two and the daughter of a late feminist icon, has lost her balance and her lucky pendant. With her children off to school, she sets out on a mission to find them both and gets swept away by the meandering adventures of her audacious neighbor Greyson Roy, an out of work engineer on his own quest for meaning.

When Evelyn is not testing uncharted waters with Greyson, she is searching her mother’s cluttered lakeside bungalow for the pendant that she’s certain was lost there a year earlier, when the balance of her lovely life began to wobble. There she is faced with her mother’s past and her own forgotten ambitions, and so she decides to put her talents as a landscape architect back to work. She volunteers as a gardening assistant for in a retirement village where she becomes enamored with Abigail Giltch, an aging and self-proclaimed sorceress whose charming obsession with Evelyn draws her, and Greyson along with her, into the strange world of stone magic.

Suddenly Evelyn sees magic everywhere, most vividly in the sudden animation of her mother’s belongings. Everything from lost essays to a vintage piggy bank appear with alarming consistency just as the need for them arises. Though Evelyn vows to leave no stone unturned in her search for her lost pendent and her self, she instead uncovers the truth about the lurking stranger from her childhood, the full force of her mother’s love, and her own unexpected capacity for magic… and murder!