There’s Fungus Among Us … Nanowrimo in 13

While outside walking Gizmo today, I noticed we have some odd growths popping up in the back yard.  I wouldn’t have thought anything about them, but it’s the first time I’ve seen anything quite like it in our yard.  There are two colors of these mushroom looking things.  They are growing from where we yanked out a big old tree stump on year…but they didn’t grow here any of the other years.

One thing I have to say about North Carolina…stuff grows here.  You get five minutes of sunshine and add a drop of water and the whole stat thinks it’s springtime again.  Flowers bloom … bugs buzz out of wherever they’ve been hiding, and freakish mushroom things grow out of your back yard. It’s just the way things work here.

It’s stuff like this that spawned my stories “‘Scuse Me, While I Kiss the Sky,” “Cockroach Suckers,” and “The Not Quite Right Reverend Cletus J. Diggs and the Currently Accepted Habits of Nature.”  There will be more.  I even created Old Mill, NC, so I’d have a proper setting, and so I could write about things around me without using the real names and places that might someday irritate the neighbors.  Not that this is really very likely, as the types of characters who make it into my stories very rarely seem the sort to pickup up books and kick back to read.  On the other hand, they could probably tell me what it is that’s growing back there…and whether it’s likely to spit out alien spores and try to take over the town…

I almost wish that I was working on something from Old Mill for Nanowrimo this year, but instead I’ll be visiting that old haunt of mine, San Valencez, California, where so many of my stories have come to life.  I’ll also be putting to good use, for the first time, the years I spent riding with Tiburon MC, which is a story I’ll leave for another time.  Suffice it to say there will be motorcycles, colors, and dragons…and voodoo.  That’s how DeChance rolls, you see.

You still have plenty of time to get over to the Heart of a Dragon website and register to read along as I write the novel in November.  If you hurry on over to the Vintage Soul website before November 1st and pre-order that novel before I start Nanowrimo, you can get a good savings, a signed book, and be entered into a drawing to become a character in Heart of a Dragon, with the possibility that it will become a continuing character.  Thirteen more days.