The Payoff: Patience rewarded.

The preorder is up and the wait is nearly over. The Payoff  goes live this Friday, April 30th. Thanks to all of you who have preordered already! I'm grateful to each and every one of you.

Cheetah 123 | Deposit Photos

Patience is a virtue, or so I've been told. We have all been forced to practice patience during this past year plus, waiting for our vaccinations to take effect and for the world to reopen. Some of us have been more gracious about this down time than others, it's true. But whether we grump or whine or take more drastic measures -- or sit back and resign ourselves to waiting -- it's all really just the way we choose to pass the time until the pandemic is over.

Even before the virus hit, we had a choice about how to react to waiting. There are all sorts of coping strategies available, from meditation to creative crafting to kickboxing. But really, the only thing that will fix the problem is the passage of time.

In The Payoff, Janis and Jan have had a lot of time to practice patience. Forty years, in fact. Raised together at a quasi-research facility called the Institute, they fell in love -- and then to protect themselves and each other from the woman who tormented them there, they split up. Four decades later, they have reunited to finally right the wrongs that were done to them all those years ago.

Seems like a ridiculously long time to wait, right? I received some similar complaints about Naomi Witherspoon's ten-year romance with Brock Holt in Seized. Why did she wait around so long for him to ask her to marry him? Why didn't she dump him when she realized he was a jerk? Well, to be honest, it was partly because that was the timeline that the story demanded. 

But the book's critics also didn't seem to want to give enough credit to inertia. You know, you're in this thing and it's not great, but it's really not that terrible if you squint just right, and you can manage it okay or anyway you tell yourself you can. And life happens and pretty soon you realize you've been with this guy for ten years and nothing's happening, and why is this owl dive-bombing you in downtown Denver?

Naomi was not so much practicing patience as she was practicing inattentiveness. She woke up pretty fast when Joseph showed up, though.

In The Payoff, Janis Fowler and Jan Marek are in a completely different situation. As children, they mentally granted outsized power to Dr. Tandy, who had total control over their lives. They weren't much more than children when they left the Institute -- they were certainly naive about how the world worked -- so they never had the chance that you and I have had, as adults, to recast our mental picture of the adults in our young lives as fallible people who don't control us any longer. And Jan had Seen that he and Janis would be reunited someday, and that would be the time they could finally give Tandy what she deserved. 

So they've waited. For forty years.

There are lots of true-life stories about couples who split up when they're young due to circumstances beyond their control and reunite decades later. Usually, in the meantime, they've gotten on with their lives: they've married somebody else, raised a family, worked, or gone to war. In these tales, when the couple gets back together again, they often find that while they're different people now than before they split, their reunion was worth the wait.

Janis and Jan seem to think their reunion was worth the wait. I'm hoping you, dear readers, will agree.

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I don't have a link for the paperback edition yet. I'll share that next week. And not to be too much of a tease, but I might even have news about a special edition of The Payoff then, too. 

Sounds like it's a good week to practice patience. See you next Sunday.

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These moments of impatient blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Keep masking up and social distancing! And get vaccinated when you can!

Plotting by squirrel.

Alert (not to mention long-time) readers of hearth/myth may recall this post from four years ago, in which I went into some painstaking detail about how I created the overarching plot of the original Pipe Woman Chronicles series. To review: I originally planned four or five books, each corresponding to a cardinal point on the Sioux medicine wheel. Seized corresponded to the East, where things begin; Fissured, to the South, the home of youth and passion; and so on. And I stuck to that structure when plotting the series, which eventually did end up being five books.

When I got to Land, Sea, Sky, I was a little less structured. I did come up with three main characters: Sue was allied with Earth goddess Gaia; Darrell was the Sea guy, by virtue of being in the Navy; and investigative reporter Tess was Sky, which can also be air and which is generally considered to be about communication. Each one got a book, nominally, although their stories were sufficiently intertwined that it might have been hard to tell whose book was whose from the outside, unless you knew what the author was trying to do. (Hint: Crosswind is Tess's book, Undertow is Darrell's, and Scorched Earth is Sue's.)

Peter Trimming | CC 2.0 | flickr.com

And then I began plotting the Pipe Woman's Legacy series, and all my careful plans went out the window.

Originally, I intended to write just two books, with Sage as the main character in both. She was, after all, conceived by a couple of god-possessed humans. And White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman had meddled sufficiently in Naomi's life that it seemed logical to me that she would also lay claim to Sage in some way. So Earth's savior Sage, together with her pals, got their duology. That rounded out the whole Pipe Woman Chronicles story arc to ten books.

But then people asked me, "What about Webb? Doesn't he get a book?" The more I thought about it, the more I realized he should. He had enough magical power to presume that the circumstances of his conception were probably similar to his sister's (without, one hopes, Joseph going walkabout for a couple of weeks afterward this time).

At that point in my planning process, things got a little squirrelly. The plot of Webb's duology is different from the rest of the series. For one thing, the gods are largely absent from Spider's Lifeline (and getting to Them is going to take up a chunk of the next book). For another, this is the first time I've handed the reins of the narrative over to a Trickster, and in some respects he's leaving me guessing. I was surprised, when I went to draft the outline for book 4, to discover just how far afield the story had gone in book 3.

But fear not. Webb and I have had a chat, and he's promised to stick to the plan in the next book. We'll see how long it lasts.

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Hugs and big thanks to those of you who have purchased a copy of Spider's Lifeline so far. You're all my new best friends. For those of you who have not yet grabbed a copy, the eBook will be available at Amazon for just 99 cents through the end of this month. That's not exactly forever -- so go get it now, before you forget. Thanks!

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These moments of squirrelly blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Mother's Day spinning.

Pschemp | wikimedia.org | CC 3.0

Today is Mother's Day here in the United States. My daughters Kat and Amy took me out to dinner -- brunch is too early for us -- and then Amy pulled out a couple of drop spindles she bought recently and let me play with them for a little while.

A drop spindle is basically a low-tech, but quite efficient, way to create yarn or thread from carded wool. (Carding cleans the sticks and other junk from the wool, and lays the fibers straight so they can be spun into thread or yarn.) Last fall, Amy talked me into taking a learn-to-spin class at the yarn shop where she works. She took the class, too, and has gotten really good at spinning. I have not practiced much, and so I am not as good at it. (Actually, I'm not very good at it at all. I need a lot of practice.)

The spindles in the top photo are all top-whorl drop spindles, the "whorl" being the circular chunk of wood (or other material) at the top of the shaft. There's a hook on the end of the shaft above the whorl. You wrap your wool around the hook to anchor it, then pull on the supply of fiber to thin it out, and then you set the spindle spinning to put twist in the yarn. The twist makes the yarn stronger. Once you've got a length of spun wool, you unwind it from the hook and wind it around the shaft below the whorl; then you wrap the unspun end around the hook and do it all again.

Pschemp | wikimedia.org | CC 3.0

There are bottom whorl spindles, too, including what's known as a Turkish spindle. Its whorl is two interlocking pieces of wood that, when assembled, make an X shape. There's no hook at the top of this type of spindle -- instead, you make a half-hitch knot near the top of the shaft (the spindle in the photo has a little knob at the top to keep your half-hitch from sliding off) and then spin just like you would the top whorl spindle. When you've spun a length of yarn, you undo the half-hitch and then wind your yarn around the arms of the whorl. The big advantage to the Turkish spindle (to me, anyway) is that when the spindle is full, you pull out the shaft and the arms, and you've got a ready-made center-pull ball of yarn.

Other bottom-whorl spindles have a point on the end. You use them by putting the point in a bowl or on the floor, and spinning the spindle like a top.

I say all this like I have a great deal of experience with spinning -- which, as I said above, I don't. At all. I have a bit of yarn that I spun with the very basic top whorl spindle we got in class, and that's it. But I've been wondering whether part of my lack of enthusiasm is due to the fact that I don't really like the spindle we got in class. So Amy (bless her heart!) got me a gift certificate for Mother's Day, and I've just ordered not one, but two new spindles. One is a bottom whorl spindle that's flat on the bottom, so you can set it on the floor to "park" it while you're stretching out the next bit of fiber (the other options being sticking it under your elbow or holding it between your knees). The other one is a spindle that you can use as either a top or bottom whorl. If I hate both of these, I'll try a Turkish spindle. And if I end up hating all of them, well, Amy's going to get a nice collection of spindles out of it.

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The game is afoot for the release of Dragon's Web, the first book in the Pipe Woman's Legacy duology. As the first step in my nefarious plan, Seized is now free at Smashwords, and the price is never going back up. If all goes well, it will also be free everywhere else by the end of the month, including -- with any luck -- Amazon. I'm hoping this will bring lots of new readers to the series.