Category Archives: Writing

There and Back Again

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Starting to get a little better understanding of the “village vibe” we got when we moved here. We’d met exactly one of our neighbors at the time. In a day or two another neighbor came to talk to me for a bit. He already knew where we were from and that I was a published author. I have a strong feeling that the entire blocks knows. It reminds me of growing up in a small southern town where everyone knew everyone and if anything at all happened, in short order everyone else knew about it. There are good and bad sides to this. On the one hand, everyone’s all in your business. On the other, well, I remember as a kid my friends and I were free to go anywhere we wanted in town or around it, do anything we wanted, with the understanding that, if what we did was something stupid or dangerous (or both), we’d likely either be stopped or, if possible, saved from the worst consequences of said stupidity. Our lack of supervision was strictly an illusion, because everyone in town, directly or indirectly, was on the job.

I’m not completely sure that I’ve missed that. But I do recognize both the value and drawbacks in it.

After picking up Carol at the Albany airport, we got home around 2AM. Now it’s 10 degrees Fahrenheit outside. I don’t think I want to go outside, but there are things to do, unfortunately, that don’t involve sitting behind a computer. Some days, I wish there weren’t.

Flying South

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IMG_0377Up at 4AM to take Carol to the airport for an early flight. She’s attending a workshop down in Florida, so I’m on my own—save for Da Boyz—for the next few days. On the way back I could see several large V-formations of Canada Geese heading south as well. I won’t be. The first real snow of the season is on its way tonight. I have my studded snow tires, my snow shovels, my salt. I’m as ready, I guess, as I’m going to be.

I’m still astonished at the number of crows that call the Mohawk Valley home. On the return drive I passed a flock that I swear stretched out at least half a mile. I’ve never seen so many crows in one place before in my life.

One casualty of the dead hard drive and missing backup is that the completed manuscript for Power’s Shadow is gone. Poof. Fortunately I do have the ebook edition, but this will delay the print book for quite a while. I’m behind on The Emperor in Shadow for obvious reasons, so it has to take priority for the next few months. I still hope to see a print edition of PS, but don’t ask me when because I have no earthly idea.

On the plus side, I’ve shifted enough boxes to reach the other wall of my new office, so that’s something like progress. I have plans for wall to wall bookshelves. A man can dream.

 

Questions

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Taking a break from painting, but can’t afford to be away from it for too long. One thing I’ve discovered about living in a valley in a more northerly latitude during wintertime is that daylight is a fleeting commodity. By about 3:30pm the light is pretty much gone, and when you’re painting floor and window trim especially, you kind of need it.

My office may be one of the last rooms we get sorted out. Too many others have priority. Which is fine—I have a functional workspace, so I can do what I need to do. I’ll just be doing it surrounded by boxes. Most of which I’d really like to get into. Especially my references, since The Emperor in Shadow sticks as closely to the historical timeline of actual events as I can manage. Working within a well-documented historical period is rather like writing sonnets—you are working with strictures on what you can and cannot do, and the trick is to be creative within those constraints. Indeed, I find that they work with me more than against. Sort of like, “Well, if this thing happened then, what was going on behind the scenes? What do we not know about it?”

Asking the right question at the right time is a hell of a lot better than knowing all the answers to the wrong questions. If writing doesn’t teach a person that much right off, they’re just not paying attention.

Another Fine Mess

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New OfficeMy new office. Or it will be once I figure out what boxes go in the attic and what needs to be unpacked and what sort of physical storage object type thing they need to be unpacked into, and well, you get the idea. Our stuff was delivered (mostly) intact. Which means it all has to be sorted out and placed where it can be most useful. Some of it will likely fall into the “Why did I think I needed this?” category and be purged or stored.

One thing I haven’t talked about too much because it’s both serious and embarrassing: almost literally the day before the movers were set to pick up our stuff so we could hit the road for Upstate, my hard drive died. Shouldn’t have been a problem. I keep backups. Only 1) Primary backup proved almost useless and 2) Secondary backup I managed to lose in the move. I don’t know how I managed it, but I did. I was looking at the almost complete loss of all my working files, including my story inventory and the work to date on The Emperor in Shadow. Fortunately I also had a third backup, not quite as up to date as the first two, but I was able to recover my story inventory. I still have some hope of recovering the working fileas on TEIS too, but it’ll be a few days before I can know that one way or another. It could happen, but if not I’m looking at starting over. Sigh.

Wouldn’t be the first time.

Story Reprint

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The Queen’s Reason, originally published in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet in 2010, has been reprinted in the current issue of Lightspeed Magazine. Check it out.

“The courtiers and servants did their best to conceal the truth, but that was a losing battle. The final straw, so to speak, was when their beautiful young queen managed to elude her Ladies in Waiting and greet the South Islands Confederation ambassador while wearing only a skirt made of broom straw and a gardenia pot for a hat. After that incident there was little point in denying the obvious: Mei Janda II, newly crowned Queen of Lucosa, was barking mad.”