Maryland is pleasant

I'm packing a library in a home in an upper-middle class area north of Washington DC. Seems Baltimore and DC are closer together than Dallas and Fort Worth. I'm in a Best Western that's nice enough but hard to get to off the freeway if you don't know the specific turns...which I thought I'd figured out till I was driving down one side of the freeway and could see my hotel on the other. The area is hilly with lots of trees, both of which hide the office complexes lining this one winding boulevard. Fact is, ALL the streets are winding in this area. I haven't driven down more than 30 feet of straight road since I got to this town...which I honestly do not mind once I know where I'm going -- I topped this one hill and suddenly there's my turn and cars are behind me; I had to go to the next street and double back -- because it really is very lovely. Open spaces abound and the commercial makes way for the aesthetic. Hell, I passed by a 7/11 without even noticing it, something almost impossible to do in SA...well, with a convenience store since all the 7/11s are gone, there.

The house is like something out of "Leave It To Beaver." A two-story Cape Cod (I think) on a cul-de-sac with a nice open front yard and more trees and two-car garage and a basement...which is where the books are, of course. 1200+ of them and no ventilation to get the old book dust out of the air. So I'm sneezing like a fool, right now. And that's after using a saline nasal spray to wash the crap away.

Most of these books are pretty beat up, but I'm not packing them for sale; they're following their owner out to San Diego. Seems the man who collected these books didn't want them ever left to a library or sold off, so his son inherited them and now he's become an avid collector, too. Funny how that works.

It is tiring but basically mindless, so I've been able to think out parts of whatever story I've been working on while doing it. And I figured out a way to get my protagonist, Antony, out of a jam he's in and set up the rest of the story at the same time. I don't know how things will resolve themselves in RIHC6v2, yet, but the journey's half the fun and so far I've done a double-double back that I hope comes off as neatly and surprisingly on the page as it does in my brain.

But now I'm pooped and plan to soak in a tub for half an hour. Weather's expected to get colder and wetter as the week progresses.

Oh, I read Kyle Cicero's latest book -- "Mark Julian and the Case No One Foretold." He gets his plots going in as many convoluted ways as I do...maybe more since he has more characters to keep up with, most of them quite enjoyable and inventive. It's a fun, light read -- I zipped through it on my flight up. I hope he does well with it; my books are dead as regards sales. Maybe I should start writing about gay vampire detectives, give that "Twilight" crap a run for its money. I already have a script about the bloosdsuckers, albeit straight-oriented...no, not a good idea to mess with your undead Queen.