A moment of serendipity.

Sometimes a scene just comes together. 
Lynne Cantwell | 2021

Earlier this week, Big Al's Books and Pals re-ran a review of Spider's Lifeline, the third book in my Pipe Woman's Legacy series, which came out in 2016. It was a moment of serendipity for me, as I'd been thinking about the book just a few days before. And that reminded me of a moment of serendipity that occurred while I was writing the fourth and final book, Turtle's Weir. 

You may have heard the term "Easter egg" in relation to movies. An Easter egg is a scene in which the filmmakers have included an inside joke, or a moment that makes a reference that only diehard fans would understand. Here's an example of one that occurred in Raiders of the Lost Ark: Hieroglyphs cover the walls of the room where Indiana Jones finds the Ark of the Covenant -- and among those hieroglyphs are drawings of R2D2 and C3PO, two of the most beloved droids in the Star Wars movies. It makes sense when you realize George Lucas both invented the Star Wars saga and co-wrote the story on which the Indiana Jones movies were based, and Harrison Ford starred in both movie franchises.

Writers include Easter eggs, too. Often, it's intentional, but sometimes the moments write themselves. The latter was the case in Webb's half of the Pipe Woman's Legacy. 

There's a scene in Spider's Lifeline in which Webb and his mother, Naomi Witherspoon Curtis, attend a reception hosted by former President Brock Holt and his wife, Antonia Greco, in honor of an Icelandic princess named Ingrid. Brock and Antonia's sons, Rex and Roman, are also there. Roman is a free spirit -- a musician who is as much of a Trickster as is Webb himself. There's a moment where Webb goes to the bar to get himself and his mother something to drink. Roman joins him there, and while they're chatting, Naomi shakes hands with the princess and then drops to the floor.

Antonia and I reached her at the same time. I helped her to a sitting position as Antonia clucked over her and called for her husband to get their physician. Cameras clicked again; I expected we’d be the top story on tonight’s news.

“No doctors,” Mom said crossly. “I’m fine. I just took a tumble, that’s all – it happens when you’re old. Thank you, Roman.” She took her drink from his hand and sipped.

“Yeah, thanks, buddy,” I said, accepting my own from him.

“I’m here to help,” he said, in a more serious tone than I’d ever heard him use before. “Remember that.”

What caused Roman to turn serious right then? I had no idea at the time.

But then in Turtle's Weir, Webb made a return trip to the moment via time travel get a better view of what had happened, and Roman's reaction became a little clearer.

As Webb-in-the-timeline broke from the bar to scramble toward Mom, I glanced around the room. Ingrid watched what she had wrought with satisfaction in her eye. But then she glanced up from the tableau on the rug at me – not Webb-in-the-timeline, but me, Webb-the-observer. Her eyebrows shot up and her mouth dropped open. Then her forehead creased in anger.

I covered my own shock with a jaunty little wave. Then, as I got ready to spring up out of the timeline, I noticed someone else in the room was watching me: Roman Holt. He was crouched next to me on the floor, holding my drink and Mom’s. And of the three of us – Roman, Ingrid, and me – he was the only one who didn’t look surprised that I was there.

In real life, right after he’d handed us our drinks, he’d told me, I’m here to help. Remember that. The comment had seemed to come from out of the blue at the time. Now, at least, I had a little context.

I gave him a shrug and a grin, and got out of there.

Thanks, Webb, for clearing that up for all of us. And thanks to Big Al and the pals for the reprise review.

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I'd like to say I've made progress on the second Atherton Vampire story this week, but I'd be lying. Real-life events have sucked up much of my focus for the past few days. But serendipity strikes again! The next session of Camp NaNo starts Thursday. So all I have to do is draft an outline for the story by then. Piece of cake.

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These moments of bloggy serendipity have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed!

Happy Independence Day! The turtle has been released.

Ikluft | Wikimedia Commons | CC 3.0

It was crunch time for most of last week at La Casa Cantwell, but we burned the midnight oil (and threw in a few other cliches for good measure) and managed to get Turtle's Weir out the door, as promised, on Thursday.

The paperback edition is still in process -- which is to say that I uploaded the file to CreateSpace this morning -- but it, too, will be along in due course. 

Thanks to those of you who have already picked up a copy of the e-book. You're all my new best friends. To the rest of you: it's only 99 cents through tomorrow. After that, the price goes up to $2.99. So you know what to do now, right?

Finishing this book is allowing me to clear the decks for some other projects. Today, I worked on pulling together an anthology of short stories. Most of them first appeared in the Five59 anthologies, but I'm also including a couple of flash fiction pieces from the weekly contests at Indies Unlimited, and a horror story from another anthology. This is the first time I've created an anthology of my own short stories since I put the three Land, Sea, Sky prequels into one volume, and I discovered I had a fairly large backlog. The working title for this new book is Back Home Again, and I expect it will be available within the next couple of weeks.

Once that's done, I'll turn to updating A Billion Gods and Goddesses. It appears Webb and his friends have only added four new deities to our existing motley collection, so the update won't take too long. I should have it done by the end of the summer. (By the way, my offer still stands: If you bought a copy of the first edition of the gods guide and you'd like the update, email me and I'll send you a copy for free.)

And then there will be an omnibus version of all four of the Pipe Woman's Legacy books. I'll be releasing that near the holidays.

After that? I dunno yet. I usually write something new in the fall for release in November; I expect I'll do that again this year. Maybe I'll start a brand-new series. Yeah. I like the sound of that...

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

Now on deck: Turtle's...

As alert hearth/myth readers know, I've been trying to figure out a suitable title for my new book -- the fourth and final book in the Pipe Woman's Legacy series, and the twelfth book set in the Pipe Woman Chronicles' universe -- for the past couple of months.

Book titles are funny things, and titles for individual books in a series are odder still. For the original Pipe Woman Chronicles, I picked Seized, a single past-tense verb, for the title of the first book -- and then had to hit the thesaurus pretty hard to find suitable one-word titles for the other five books. (Gravid was perhaps the least successful compromise, as it didn't end in -ed.)

For the second series, Land, Sea, Sky, I went for nouns that had something to do with the elemental force that took center stage in each book: Crosswind for Air, Undertow for Water, and Scorched Earth for, obviously, Earth. That last one was another compromise, as I had to opt for two words to convey the meaning I was after.

Which brings us to the Legacy books. I didn't want to do another round of single-word titles, so I opted for two words, the first being a possessive noun. Dragon's Web and Firebird's Snare worked great for Sage's books, and I thought I was done. But then I realized I needed to give Webb a couple of books, too -- so back to the thesaurus I went. Spider's Lifeline was genius, I thought (if I did say so myself).

A. Balet | Wikimedia Commons | CC 3.0

And then came Book Four.

I knew that part of the plot would revolve around Hilary's kappa, Enkou (sorry if that's a spoiler), so I decided to put the word Turtle in the title. Which meant I then had to come up with a word to go with. Out came the thesaurus again. The titles of Sage's books include terms for traps: web and snare. But a lifeline isn't a trap. It's a way out.

When I saw the word weir, I realized I'd found my title -- because a weir can be both a trap and a way out.

Weirs have been built for centuries, both along rivers and in tidal areas. They serve a couple of purposes: like dams, they can be used to regulate the flow of water; and they can also be used either to trap fish for catching, or to point them toward a fish ladder to allow them to get over the weir. (This photo is of a weir at a grist mill in Washington state.)

Webb's girlfriend's kappa has proven to be a free agent, answering to no other gods -- but he has also proven to be loyal to Hilary, and by extension, to the Curtis clan. So leave it to Enkou to develop a mysterious structure that might save everyone in the end.

Oh, right -- here's the cover.

Turtle's Weir is currently with my editors, and I believe we're on track for publication this coming week -- probably Thursday, June 30th -- but I'll send a newsletter when it's live. This would be an awesome time to sign up for my mailing list, if you haven't already. Just click here and add your name and email address. I wouldn't want you to miss the release date when it's so close.

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These moments of catch-and-release blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.