The Queue: It’s oh so quiet

It’s nice and still. How about you? Nothin? That’s cool.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we– wait, do you hear that?

It sure does! And this year we’re seeing a new revamped version of the holiday, so even if you’re kinda bored of the whole wickerman nonsense, it’s definitely worth participating, especially if you’re behind on getting your Trader’s Tenders stuff done.

I’ve been in the middle of writing a cozy mystery for a while. I have my main character nailed down — she’s a writer who took a nest egg from her success and is now renovating a century farmhouse in rural Upstate NY, which then gives her a lot of reason to mingle with her new community, shake up the social order a little, and bits of “business” which would have her going to slightly offbeat places. She lives next door to a woman who has a gruff exterior but likes cracking jokes, keeps chickens and a small homestead garden, and has two tiny little froufrou dogs. She meets two besties, one a waitress at the local diner who is slightly shy and a little gullible but who knows all the local gossip, and one who is a PI who is boisterous and uses a lot of folksy idioms as a way to make herself seem unthreatening to her targets. There’s a town square with a paradoxically risque fountain, a stone church, the sporting goods store which does phenomenal business selling fishing and camping supplies but very few tennis rackets, an applesauce factory a bit away from town but near the railway line that cuts along one side of town near the river, and a huge farm goods store which also sells groceries and serves as the florist. Because the county coroner is an elected position, the dude who picks up the dead bodies is better known as the dude who owns the ice cream shop, which has led to all kinds of rumors despite the fact that the actual morgue is half a block away behind an old 300 chicken coop.

Anyway, despite truly loving everything I have going on so far about my setting, characters, general themes, and subplots, unfortunately I can’t figure out how to murder somebody to get the plot going. Not exactly a minor problem I can fix in post. I’m honestly at a loss. So that’s my subtitle for NaNo this year: Kill Bill.

Any time a game has cloth physics and a ponytail or long braid option, I take it, because it will inevitably do something that cracks me up, whether it’s clipping through helmets or acting like your character is in a windstorm in an otherwise completely serious cinematic.

Given the option, I always choose to play as a woman. I almost always choose a character that looks vaguely like me, unless that’s not an option, in which case I choose a character that looks as far from me as possible.

If I could cook anything flawlessly every time, it would be baguettes. For something with such simple ingredients and centuries-old methodology it’s deceptively tricky to get right, especially in a home cook situation. But if you can master it, it goes with almost any meal, or else makes a meal onto itself. The best sandwich I ever had was from a boulangerie in Paris: a half baguette smeared with french butter, with swiss cheese, tomato, and lettuce. That’s it, end of list. And yet it was such perfection I have dreams about this sandwich.