Month: August 2022

Quirky

I really love roadside attractions and quirky little museums–and I’m fascinated by the people who run them. This was one of the inspirations for my new novel, The Taste of Desert Green, in which one character owns a dinosaur/outer space themed museum in the middle of the Mojave. Sadly, Wally Harlow’s Fossil Galaxy exists only in my imagination. But here are some real places I’ve visited and enjoyed!

  • Oregon Vortex and House of Mystery: where objects seem to roll uphill, etc.
  • Winchester Mystery House: built by the Winchester rifle heiress, it’s huge and… weird
  • Icelandic Phallological Museum: a penis museum in Reykjavik, and it is amazing
  • Meteor Crater: a big old hole in the ground, over 1.2K in diameter. There’s a space museum there too.
  • Cadillac Ranch: an art project. A bunch of cars stuck upright in a field outside Amarillo, Texas. You get to cover them in spray paint
  • Carhenge: more cars in the ground, this time as a scale model of Stonehenge, in very rural Nebraska
  • Maryhill Stonehenge: another Stonehenge, this one to scale and made of cement, in rural Washington. The nearby Maryhill Museum is also extremely cool
  • Museum of Broken Relationships: the original is in Zagreb. People have donated items from past romantic and other relationships, and little cards tell their stories
  • Jerome, Arizona: this is a tiny former mining town, where the jail slid down the hill, the hotel is in the old hospital, and you can stand above a 1900-foot-deep mineshaft
  • Neon Museum: at this place in Vegas, they’ve collected old neon casino signs. Visit at night!
  • Vancouver Police Museum: includes the old city morgue
  • Mutter Museum: medical museum chock-full of specimens
  • Wyoming Frontier Museum: the former Wyoming State Penitentiary
  • Trees of Mystery: giant redwoods and Paul Bunyan

Are there quirky museums or roadside attractions near you? Have you visited some good ones on your travels? Please share in the comments!

Summer

Here we are, well into August, and my fall semester begins in 10 days. Sigh.

It’s been quite a summer. I went to Europe twice: to Paris and Florence with my husband and then, a few weeks later, to Zagreb, Lisbon, and Porto with my older daughter. Went to BayCon. Also spent a week on the Olympic Peninsula and a several days at Big Bear Lake. Had a very mild case of Covid. Helped my older kid move 100 miles north to her own place; she’ll be working on an MA in Economics. Took my younger kid to the airport to fly north for her second year of college. Spent hours and hours and hours doing day job department chair stuff. Taught a summer class.

I managed to get some writerly things done as well. The Taste of Desert Green, a fairly angsty contemporary set in the Mojave Desert, releases August 23. Farkas, a sort of retelling of Stoker’s Dracula (set in 1950s LA), just finished final edits and will release in October. There are plans in the works for an audio version as well, with one of our favorite narrators! A holiday novella tentatively titled Ash and Clay is currently in edits. And I’m working on the 10th Bureau book. Meanwhile, Joel Leslie is working on the narration of the third Bureau anthology (which includes Caroled and Camouflaged).

So a good summer, an extremely busy summer… and it’s nearly over.

In the last four months of the year, I’ll be looking at more travel adventures and, I hope, a lot more writing!