Custer, Jewel Cave, and the Badlands (and more)

Life is just rolling along and there is much to write about, but I need to get down the last of our trip from the beginning of August before it all fades away.  So this is the overview (with lots of pictures).

After leaving Yellowstone we stopped at the battlefield site of "Custer's Last Stand" in South Dakota.  It's not a place I would have thought to stop on my own, but Ian being a Lt Colonel in the Army is fascinated by such historical sites and his insight always brings them alive.  It's kind of amazing to stand in such a place and try to picture what people on both sides saw in that landscape as things unfolded. 

The area is beautiful but looks like an unforgiving place to live.  The memorial and graveyard are in an official park service space, but the larger drive you can do to follow the historical markers are on someone's private land.  It was a hot day and this was a relatively small stop so I was glad to do most of it in the car, but we did get out and look around periodically as Ian told us the story of the battle from various vantage points.

Book Club Invite

Our book club here in Bay View has been doing a series of local authors, and today was my turn!  I got to attend a book club meeting about my first novel, Almost There.  It was fun.  And terrifying.  And I was insanely nervous, but hope I didn't look it.

We now interrupt this blog post for a moment of shameless promotion!  Because those of us who self-publish (and even many who don't) must be brave and force our more introverted selves to jump up and down and wave our arms and beg people to please please please read our work (please please).  So buy my book!  Links for everywhere to buy it in every available form can be found HERE.

Also, those of you who have read it and have not yet put up a review on Amazon (or GoodReads), please take a moment and do so because that would help me more than you realize.  I appreciate so much the kind emails and comments I've received.  Sharing some of those thoughts online in a place like Amazon might actually help get my novel into the hands of people who don't personally know me, and that would be exciting.  Now back to our blog currently in progress:

I really like our book club.  I tried a different one about ten years ago, and at the first meeting I discovered I was the only one who read the book.  I excitedly told everyone all about To the Lighthouse and how interesting I thought it was, from the stream of consciousness technique used to tell the story to the particular relationships in it.  The other women kept drinking their wine and looking down at the copies of the books in their laps with puzzled expressions saying, "Huh, it sounds like it might be interesting!"  The second meeting was not much better, and by then I realized I was sort of ruining everyone's good time by wanting to, you know, talk about books.

This book club grew out of a Facebook discussion that began with, "Does anyone know of a book club I can join?" and several of us chimed in, "No!  But I want to join it when you find one!" and then we just declared ourselves a book club and the Bay View Book Club was born.  It's been a great way to get to know more people in the community.  The first meeting had more than a dozen people.  Since then it's been a mix and match selection of about half that each time, but someone always posts the upcoming books and dates and meeting places and whoever wants to come can come.  It's nice because it's not any more demanding than you want it to be.  And everyone reads the books.