The blogs are organized by date.
Comments will appear when we've had time to check them. Apology for the inconvenience, but it's a way to keep phishers and spammers off the page.
So I trooped down to CVS and had them take a photo and email me the digital image.
The State Department has a 'beta' version of an online passport renewal service. They warn that it may take several months to get your passport, but I don't *really* need the passport right away, so this looked good to me.
The site isn't bad. I had to retype the same info a few times on various forms, but otherwise, it's well designed.
I have an almost-whole-house generator, so this is a minor issue, except that the garage door opener is not on one of the circuits the generator feeds.
The garage door has a set of rails, and a gadget that rides on those rails. They call the part that rides the rails a trolley, because the marketing folks vetoed calling it a "hobo" or a "bum".
The trolley has a pull string that disengages the door from the opener, so you can open and close it manually.
Well, it turns out that the rope is made of a material that rots. I gave it a yank and the rope dissolved into wisps of dust and memories.
A couple of friends asked me about how neural nets differ from regular programming, so I'm going to geek out.
A neural net is a set of layers, each of which is a set of nodes.
Each node is pretty simple. It's a math function that accepts one input and delivers one output. The trick is the equation that the function evaluates.
A trivial neural net is three layers with one node on each layer. That's one input layer, one translation layer, and one output layer.
As a rule, when you implement a neural net, there is also one 'bias'
I spent Saturday morning in a seminar on merging world, character and plot. The presenter made a point that for SF and Fantasy, the setting is practically another character.
I attended three panels on AI, and I'm less of a skeptic on the topic than I was.
One of the panels was presented by a guy who works with the UPitt super-computer system. He talked about various AI projects they've worked on that are *NOT* ChatGPT. They use carefully curated datasets and are looking for correlations within that dataset, not trying to generate wrong answers to random questions.
One of the panels I led was on uses of AI. The focus was on legit uses of AI that aren't theft of the intellectual property the AI was trained with.
One of the audience members is using chatGPT to construct religions for his D&D campaigns. The religions it creates tend to have internal inconsistencies, which suits him perfectly.
One might be snarky and say the internal inconsistencies and not making sense add realism to his fantasy world.
I'll be doing a similar panel on AI at the NASFiC in a couple weeks.
This was enough to convince me I could set up a room in the basement with homesote soundproofing panels on the walls, a quilted ceiling and sound absorbing flooring. Sweetwaters was very happy to sell me good quality mics and a 2 channel pre-amp. My obsolete Apple notebook doesn't have a fan, but controls the mics and pre-amp very nicely (and quietly - no fan!).
The intention was that Carol would use this room for recording her parts to the music her trio was hoping to release.
So much for that plan.
It wasn't an expensive laptop. It's 2005 vintage, that I bought used some ten years ago.
But it's the machine I play games on while I'm eating, so I really miss it. Not to mention the saved games. I replaced the hard drive a few months ago and just bought a brand new battery for it.
I tried to wash and dry it. This ritual bathing trick worked when I upended a glass of ginger ale into a laptop during a bumpy flight, but didn't work this time.
I looked around at potential replacements and didn't see anything I really liked, so I hit Ebay and spent a little under a hundred bucks to
I've never been to a furry convention, so I thought this was a clever idea.
Then the volunteers poured in and he didn't need me after all.
But, it occurred to me that furry conventions attract the same sort of off-beat folks that SF conventions attract, so maybe they'd like my books.
So I headed to the hotel about noon on the first day of the convention. Nothing much will be happening yet, so this is a good time to get in and get out.
The high-point for me was chatting with a friend whose retirement project is extending his blacksmithing hobby into a complete 9'th century blacksmith shop. He described how the locks Bard and Sigurd would see were constructed, and showed me pictures of the 9'th century style hinges and draw-knives he's made.
The other high point was having Mary Ellen Wessels, one of my first singing partners come to visit and revisiting some of the arrangements we last did some 30 years ago.
The tape she and I did almost 40 years ago is available in the public domain now. You can listen to it at https://archive. org/details/filk_fragile_wall
I participated on a panel about Self Editing your work. I managed to only mention Editomat several times, and got a suggestion for a new feature to add: When a word was introduced to the language. The request came from a lady who'd editing a story that takes place in the early renaissance, but the author keeps using words that didn't come into common use until later.
This also came up in a recent critique group meeting - twenty years ago, I might pick up the phone and "ring" someone up. Now it would be a "call" or perhaps go straight to "text."
The "Tiffany" paradox was mentioned. The name "Tiffany" was used in the middle ages, but nowadays, it's strongly associated with the
Last November, I was chatting with one of the organizers and mentioned my intention to attend this year, and mentioned that I'd like to do something - ConComs are almost always looking for panelists.
It turns out that GaFilk doesn't do programming, except for guest concerts.
So they made me a Special Surprise Guest.
The drive to Atlanta was mostly uneventful.
Kentucky still has it in for me. Last year, when I drove to Florida to watch Carol's rocket go up, the road opened and ate my tire.
When I empty a bag, I cut it open and spread it on the floor so Caz can lick the last crumbs off the inside. This pleases him a great deal.
However, Miles has learned the schedule, and he shows up as soon as the bag is emptied. While Caz is gobbling his lunch, Miles is slurping at the cut-open bag as fast as he can.
Eventually (really, not very long) Caz finishes engulfing his meal and comes for desert.
But, there's a cat eating HIS food! A cat he's not allowed to chase or molest. He can't even touch it. But this is *HIS* food. He looks at me
After getting the anode replaced last week, I turned the tub faucet to full hot, and they were right - barely a trickle.
It's time to play with cleaning vinegar again.
So, I closed the master feed valve, opened the cold-water inlet and poured some 30% acetic acid into the hot water tank.
Two gallons of acid later, I replaced the pipe fittings, opened the cutoff valve and was relieved to see no water spurting across the room.
Next step was running the water in the tub until the acid-infused water reached the clog.
I did some research this week and weekend, and I can assure you that the rumor is false. There may be some roads that aren't being worked on, but the number is not statistically significant.
This weekend was the Ohio Valley Filk Fest in Columbus. This is a get together for folks who sing science-fiction and fantasy songs - what Raj and Howard did on Big Bang Theory, except we do it better. :-)
There were about two hundred folks at the con, mostly from the midwest, but a significant number of folks from California and some from overseas.
I was stupid last spring and volunteered to teach a seminar on music theory and harmonic arrangements.
In other news, my mushroom experiment is now declared to be a success. Back in May, I pressure-cooked some sawdust, put it in a plastic bag and added some of the goop from Christmas Kit.
Since then, I've diligently watered it and watched it do nothing.
Last week I did some reading on Oyster mushrooms and finally grocked what I learned back in college.
The trick with mushrooms is that the part we see is the last, dying gasp of a mushroom that's afraid it's going to perish. The bulk of the mushroom is tiny threads deep in the soil or tree-bark or such. This part of the thing will happily just grow as long as there's food and
The demos were done by my friend Randy Asplund .
When I first met him, back in the late '70s, he did paintings of knights and dragons and such using acrylics and oil paints.
Now he does calligraphy and illuminated manuscripts on vellum he makes himself using inks and dyes that he also makes himself, using the medieval techniques.
He did a demo of making a green dye/paint from buckthorn berries. This is a multi-step process that starts a lot like how I made the buckthorn
Skipping ahead to the answer: The correct way to replace a soffit is to call a contractor and say "Hey, come out and fix my soffits."
My way to replace a soffit starts with a guy willing to do a cash job in his spare time, and not have him show up.
So, I climbed a ladder and looked at the problem. It doesn't look that tough. You grab a crowbar, pull down the old soffit, then fasten up a new soffit.
Problem 1: fastening up a soffit requires holding up the soffit with one hand, holding the nail with the other hand and swinging the hammer with... Oops.
It's cherry season in Michigan, and I succumbed to a bag of cherries half the size of my head.
For a week or so, I grabbed a couple cherries every time I walked past them, glaring at me like so many blood-shot eyes (but more appetizing).
But, this wasn't fast enough. I found a cherry with white fuzz on it and declared it time to make cherries safe for mankind.
So, I invented a thing.
Things like poisoning the ground (as black walnut trees do), replacing your enemies children with your own (as cowbirds do) and just plain eating the young of your competitor (as just about everything does) is not allowed in human conflict. (Luckily, eating other mammals is allowed. We're not at war, so it's OK. )
But, as Darwin pointed out, if a species doesn't do better than the other species at utilizing its niche, another species will displace it and take over that niche.
And, thus the iRobot Roomba E6 joins the dodo, the passenger pigeon and
As Costco put newer models on sale, more Roombas followed me home. They've served well, and gather about a deck-of-cards worth of cat fur each night.
Until they encountered Caz, Roomba-Bane.
Last week, the canny canine left a trap for the Roomba, cleverly concealing it on a brown carpet.
Like a tragic hero, the Roomba fell upon its sword, or at least it's rotating brushes, and ate the poisoned road-apple.
Several years ago a couple friends set up a garden in my front yard. As part of this, they set up a lightweight plastic deer fence.
After a few winters, there was a bit less fence, and a deer fence is not necessarily a dog fence. It would be nice to let Caz roam free in the front yard, but only with a proper fence.
So I got some green metal posts to rebuild the fence and sturdy metal fencing that I could attach to the ground.
After all, deer are inclined to jump over a fence, while dogs prefer to go under.
We had weather that encouraged me to put in the new fence poles. The
Caz took serious offense at the idea that a non-playmate was using his very own garage. And not only that, upending stacks of stuff that he hadn't gotten around to knocking over yet.
The opossum spent Saturday night in the garage, and on Sunday I couldn't convince the mighty hunter to abandon his quest, take his walk and do what needs to be done.
So Caz went into the house, and I went into the corner of the garage where Caz swore there was an intruder.
He was right.
The end-table is now safe in the basement and that section of flooring is protected by a layer of plastic and some absorbent drop cloth.
I brought up a floor lamp that wasn't being used much in the basement to replace the table-top lamp.
Almost good as new. Execpt that this particular end table is right next to the chair where I play computer games while I eat.
Losing the end table meant not only losing the table lamp (easily replaced with a floor lamp) but losing the place where I put my meal.
That's more critical.
I've been attending this con off-and-on (mostly on) since the first one in 1982 or so.
Carol and my relationship moved into gear at this convention in '91, when we spent most of the con with each other, not attending any convention functions.
Much of the week went into preparing for this con.
Last year I was asked to join the Programming Planning committee, which was an email group throwing out silly (and sillier) ideas for potential panels.
A few of my silliest ideas got picked up to be used, and I managed to
The chunk of cowling I found on New Year's eve gave me almost a complete cowl - it's only missing thirty-five cents - a chunk the size of a quarter and a chunk the size of a dime.
I decided this could be fixed with gorilla tape. Since the tape comes in colors, I got white tape for the white cowling, and black tape for the black base.
Step One was to re-position the mirror (again). I drilled yet another hole, and this time I finally got it pointed in the right location.
Several yards of tape later, the mirror is as good as new. Maybe not as pretty as new, but it works as good as new. Maybe when warm weather arrives I'll get a complete new mirror assembly, tear apart
I left town pretty much on schedule. Traffic was light and the roads were clear, and I was anticipating a nice, boring drive. It stayed boring until I got to Berea, Kentucky when the road leaped up and ate my tire. I was simply changing lanes on I-75. A nice big superhighway. What's simpler than changing lanes in light traffic.
If KY had done some road maintenance it would have been simple. The concrete slabs have spread and deteriorated. My tire slipped into one of the crevases between slabs and came out like shredded wheat without the wheat.
AAA picked me up, and conveniently enough, I was just a mile or so from an exit with a Walmart Auto Center and a Red Roof. The driver took my
But the liftoff got pushed to January, so I ended up spending the day at home.
Since I wasn't going to be here, and the weather was warm and rainy (not Christmas-like) and I was trying to get some code to work for my client, I didn't do anything about Christmas decorations, and it didn't bother me. When it turned out I was going to be here, and the weather got cool and snowy, my lack of holiday spirit started to annoy me.
Christmas was Carol's favorite holiday. The year her mom died she was depressed and wasn't up to do anything for Christmas.
His previous sitter let him roam the house with her other pets.
Caz absolutely does not like being alone. He's willing to not be in sight of me in the house as long as he can get to me if he thinks he needs me. Like, when a toy gets stuck and he needs someone with an opposable thumb.
The boarder commented that Caz was extremely anxious. She gave him a "calming" treat, but didn't try to dope him up. The Composure goodie didn't even touch his upset.
She suggested that he just wasn't familiar with kennels. I told her he
I'm not sure if Spirit is nationwide. It's an insubstantial entity that infests dead stores and brings them back to a semblance of life for Hallowe'en. Once the holiday passes, the stores die once more.
If you prefer, it's a Hallowe'en costume shop that short-term leases empty storefronts.
This store is aimed at both children and adults. It's well-lit, well-laid out, and easy to navigate through. I found more sexy-whatever costumes than I'd ever imagined. I've been in porno-shops with fewer sexy-whatever getups.
The trick is that Carol was meticulous about saving paperwork. That means that all the receipts, statements, returns, etc that I needed were in her office. Along with every piece of paper I didn't need.
Sorting through the papers is slow work. I have no trouble throwing out old lists of things to do and shopping lists. I can't throw out her notes on what to do with her stories, and every so often I stumble across a few of her journal pages. Those are tough, whether they're from our marriage or years before I met her.
By the late '60s, my friend and I were in our early teens and this woodpile was the grandest jungle gym you ever saw. The trees had all settled and weren't moving, so we could run, jump, climb over and under, build forts and defend the world from invading Martians, Russians, or Nazis depending on what movie was on TV last night.
In the few years that making forts and playing war were fun, we advanced from hiding behind a log to hollowing out sections and roofing them with smaller logs and making actual water-tight hovels, suitable for a medieval peasant family of four.
There are dozen's of variants of every type of tree this might be, all very similar, but not quite identical to what I've got.
Many of the possibilities are the same family as whortleberries, which are a pleasant sweet/tart berry popular in northern Europe. I pick up whortleberry juice when I go to the Eastern European grocery on Packard.
The berries from my tree are sweet and tart, must like whortleberries. I've eaten a few of them in the past with no bad effect, so I decided to collect a cup or so and try to juice them.
So, humanity is safe from me. I'm happily singing the blues.
Woke up this morning, I was feeling quite fine. Woke up this morning, I was feeling quite fine. Pulled out my little testkit, 'Cause I thought it was time.
Pushed that little swabby Through the top of my head Yeah, I pushed that little squeegee Through the top of my head
He got a trip to the cardiac vet a couple weeks ago. He's starting to develop a murmur again, but he's 8 years into the 3-5 year prognosis. I attribute at least part of this to him getting the pills he needs.
As part of the visit, I got a new prescription for his pills, which I took to my local Kroger.
The vet is now doing an automated thing where the prescription is generated and signed from a computer app. The pharmacy wouldn't just accept the prescription with a printed signature. They needed to check it, so I had to wait a few days for his pills, "We'll call you when they're ready."
Still, this is way closer to having my book accepted than I ever expected.
Amusingly enough, in one of my critique groups we were comparing notes on various publishing competitions we've entered lately. It turned out that one of my friends is another of the five candidates.
I use a thunderstorm for this. The power goes out, and I find out which computers crash because their UPS needs new batteries.
On Monday, the UPS that keeps my mail server running decided to not keep the mail server running.
Replacing a UPS battery is pretty easy. I keep spare batteries, and I've had over a dozen UPS's over the years. I know how this works.
You unplug the UPS, remove the screw that hold the battery cover in place, slide off the battery cover, replace the battery and reverse the process.
So far as Caz is concerned, the technical term for this is "Direct Challenge." He has felt honor bound to defeat these obstacles and has met the furniture on the field of battle. Within hours of my installing the slip covers, he successfully demonstrated his superiority over a mere coverlet by removing the cover and settling himself in between the re-arranged cushions.
So far as I'm concerned, the technical term for this is "Direct Challenge." No dog is going to upset my plans for preserving the furniture.
The slip covers I bought come with tie-down straps, but they aren't arranged properly for my sofas. I'm not sure the actually work for any
What's also strange is that the folks who have every reason to recognize their inferiority think they're better than most, while it's the folks with the most smarts and talent who fall prey to Imposter Syndrome.
Lots of us have an example of Anti-Dunning-Kruger as near as our mirror.
Carol suffered from Anti-D-K big time.
Years ago, to help her cope, a friend of hers had a "rice jar" made for Carol. It's about six inches tall with a bulbous body, a narrow neck and a slightly funnel shaped mouth.
(Cue ominous music)
The week started with the scheduled trip to the Honda dealer for a 30, 000 mile checkup. This gave me several hours to read and comment on the stories for Monday night's critique group. The Ypsi dealership gets points for their muzak. They play a Motown track from the 60s and 70s. I refrained from singing along, even on the refrains.
The unpleasant news was that at just 30, 000 miles, I needed new brake pads and rotors. Given that I make a lot of use of the regenerative breaking, this is confusing. But it is what it is, so I took the car back to the dealership on Tuesday, giving me time to work on other projects.
To make this task easier, she put an alcove next to the door. The alcove is large enough for a bench that you can sit on to remove clothes and outdoor footwear.
Needless to say, a bench is a flat surface and all flat surfaces promptly become clutter collectors.
Enter the cat who believes the world is his oyster. However, since he doesn't know what an oyster is, he treats it like a litter box.
Part of the clutter on the bench was the bags of kitty litter. Mark
On April 1'st he announced that he was closing his booking business and taking on the position of marketing director for a couple well known 1980s/90s era pop-rock bands.
I congratulated him on the new position, and then learned I'd been April Fooled. Those who know him better than I understood that he'd have never signed up with those pop-rock posers.
In the course of discussion, I suggested he should have chosen bands who were not still alive and touring, and noting his proclivity in the horror direction, suggested that he might like representing a ghost band.
Fed Ex succeeded in getting the battery from the west coast to Detroit overnight. However, once it hit the Detroit suburbs, it stopped dead. On Monday, FedEx reported that they were swamped and couldn't manage to move a small box two miles.
On Tuesday, it was the same news.
By Tuesday afternoon, both MedPlus and my friend were ready to scream. They each found different suppliers that used different shipping systems and ordered batteries, again to be shipped "overnight."
On Wednesday, FedEx managed to deliver the first battery that had
With warm weather, Caz has taken to leading me around the house and into the woods instead of just walking along the road (and as close to the road as he's willing to mark).
So I saw this chunk of yellow plastic. I picked it up to toss it in the trash, and realized it was a chalk-line marker. It must have been dropped by the guys who took down the cherry tree that tried to take down my house last fall.
It didn't work, but having spent a winter in the snow, etc, that's no surprise.
So, a non-functional chunk of cheap tool. You can buy one of these
This would be a minor issue except that the Roomba cleans that room at about 2:00 AM.
If you are thinking "Oh, shit!" you'd be right. My little pet-mess carpet cleaner got more use than I'd anticipated when I bought it.
I found a youtube video on cleaning crap out of a Roomba. It seems I'm not the first person to experience this. In fact, the newest Roomba has a turd-avoidance system.
Step one in cleaning the Roomba was to take it outside and wipe it down with a cloth you're willing to throw away.
My trip to Milwaukee was mostly uneventful. The traffic was light, and I didn't even slow down much below the speed limit going around Chicago on the trip out (mid afternoon Thur) or even on the way back (Friday evening). I hit a patch of lake-effect snow going through Indiana, but even that only slowed me down a little.
However, on my way to Milwaukee I got word that another friend has lost her husband. The Carol that my Carol used to sing with is now a widow.
The good news of sorts is that I could be there to give her a shoulder and someone to talk to.
As the decades passed, it evolved into a party where the gang that lived in each other's back pockets in our twenties and early thirties got together once a year to compare notes and medical conditions.
The New Year's eve party was a big part of my solstice season, but Carol didn't always feel like attending either of the two parties I visited.
But, I always made it a point to be with her at midnight. That was our tradition - we would see the New Year in together.
Carol was always trying to organize things better, so this was one of the gifts she really liked.
When we built the new house, this set of drawers fit in the guest closet. We use it to hold house-slippers and such.
Last week, I detected the odor of cat coming from that closet. I'd already removed stuff from the floor and cleaned the closet walls once, so I wasn't thrilled.
She nodded.
On Sunday, there was a Zoom filk party where a couple of my and Carol's singing partners sang, Carol Ferraro's "Graveyard in the Sky" about having your ashes sent into orbit. This prompted me to pay the down payment and get Carol Flynt onto the passenger list. She'll be going into orbit for months or maybe years, before becoming a shooting star.
As I muttered, "What the heck'er" There appeared a small woodpecker, Black and white and red-head swooping, flying from my household wall. Just a bird who made a tapping, With his beak, insistent rapping. Pecking at my outside wall. I'd serve him lunch, if he'd just call.
So, on Tuesday he got five hours of hanging with his puppy peeps.
On Tuesday evening, after the five hours of playtime, I took Caz to visit a friend with a year-old Schipperke (pronounced skipper-kee).
Schipperkes are a breed of dog developed to be a ratter on barges.
Per the AKC: ... The Schipperke, Belgium's "little captain," is the traditional barge dog of the Low Countries. Curious, lively, and intense but mischievous, this little black dog is a robust, long-lived companion for whom there
The operation was a complete success. Textbook perfect.
On the 29'th she was lucid, doing breathing exercises and sleeping a lot. I spent the day with her.
But, on the 30'th, she was less lucid. I blamed it on the drugs catching up with her, but when one eye didn't track with the other, I grabbed the nurse.
Several minutes later, she had most of the available staff around her bed, and I got kicked out while they drained liquid from around her lung.
This was the 31'st Rally of Writer's conference in Lansing, and the second we attended.
This event is worth the time and then some. There are 16 talks spread over four sessions ranging from craft talks like sentence construction and world building to business talks like how to pitch stories and promote your book.
The attendees range from award winners like Karen Dionne and Lori Nelson Spielman to folks who intend to write something Real Soon Now. Most have one or two pieces that they are either self-pubbing, or are shopping around.
There's plenty of time between sessions for schmoozing, and an
Linda Peckham explained how to look at a sentence as word clumps, rather than the more formal grammar rules.
The basis is that you have Left-hand clumps and Right-hand clumps.
| Left | Right |
|---|---|
| A subject word | An action word |
| Words or clauses to modify the subject |
The panelists ranged from me, who never did NaNoWriMo (but helped Carol) to folks who reworked their novel and got it trad pubbed.
There are as many things to do after you've finished NaNo as there are people who finish. Some like to keep on going while the idea is hot (particularly if you didn't completely finish your story). Others prefer to let the story sit and then start reworking it, when they aren't so full of "oh, I'm so Great!".
As expected, we all use different tools to write and rework the novels after we're done.
This was a lively panel with a bunch of takeaways.
There are three "standard" character types in a story:
This year's Literary/Writing track was particularly strong. There was frequently more than one panel I was interested in going to running at the same time.
The ego-boo for me was my reading on Sunday.
I read a "love" story from the upcoming "Unintended Consequences" collection to a trio of 12 and 13 year olds in the KookieKlatch session. The kids were strongly opposed to hearing a "love" story, until I mentioned that it had two witches trying to make people fall in love, then they were grudgingly willing to listen. In the end, it took an hour to read a story that normally takes about 20 minutes. We stopped to talk about who liked who, why Mother Nona made believe she had a limp, what a ferrule was, whether New York or Philadelphia was a
There were more people in the audience than on the panel. That this happened at 10:00 on a Sunday for a poetry panel beggars the imagination.
There was more to discuss than anyone expected, and more opinions and just information. Amal is getting her PhD in this area, and is a font of knowledge.
Clif is opinionated.
As ever, the convention was a lot of fun. I spent time with a lot of friends who live within lunch distance, but I never see outside a hotel, total strangers, and friends from faraway. I didn't leave the Saturday Filk until 1:30. I might have stayed longer if I wasn't on a 10:00 AM panel on Sunday.
Confusion is developing a really strong writing track. I attended more than a half dozen sessions, and all were excellent.
My highlights included:
As usual, this was a multi-faceted experience. Clif attended techie talks on robotics and Clif and Carol each hit business-of-writing talks on finding agents and promoting yourself and craft-of-writing talks about editing and killing your characters.
High points included:
Julie Timmer led off with discussing characters and character arcs. She provided a worksheet like this:
Wells made the point that the setting controls what characters can see or do and lets you control the flow of action as well as setting the mood or just being there.
Taverns, town wells, Rotary meeting, coffee shops, etc are places where people meet and exchange information. Bridges, gates, mountain passes, and intermittent wormholes control when and how people can get from one location to another.
The servants who travel the back corridors in the castle are likely to know more than the courtier who stays in the main hall. The traders who know the secret passes can reach our hero faster than the Army. The guard at the city gate knows who comes and goes.
I attended four discussions:
Each of these was presented as an interactive workshop with exercises to explain the concepts and bring the points home.
The keynote was delivered by Lori Nelson Spielman on "The (Elusive)
Attendence was next to nothing. Three folks showed up and none of them had actually written anything to edit.
A Friday evening panel is always lightly attended - folks are just arriving, getting dinner, etc. To add frosting to the cake, my panel was opposite Talis Kimberly's concert and Bill Higgins talking about the latest NASA news.
I did find a few folks to talk to about my project, and spent time chatting with friends, so the con wasn't a total loss, but it wasn't the splash I'd hoped to make with Editomat's second big publicity push.
Obviously, you can't go into details about how and why the history of the time happens. Not unless you're writing a book that will replace Sominex for insomniacs.
But, how much history do you need? Is it enough to say your hero is marching into Manassas, serving under Longstreet, ready to send the BlueBellies scampering back to Washington, and assume you reader will know this must be the first battle of Bull Run in the US Civil War? Or do you need to explain that this is the first battle of the war, both sides are ill-prepared, overconfident and flat out stupid?
Well, any story about that battle will prove the stupid part, but that's not my point.
One of the panels I was on covered self-editing tools.
Basicly, these are automated tools that will not fix your writing, but will point out areas you should examine more closely (and maybe rework.
It is rumored that the mad arab Abdul Alhazarad was encrypting a secret recipe for a true devil's food when he slipped into the realms from which none return.
I should have realized where my explorations would lead. Today I discovered Godiva's Fudge Brownie mix. (Avaialble in 6 packs at Costco.)
No longer content to traverse the paths that others have mapped out, I gave only casual heed to the instructions on the box.
I attended the event mostly to listen to Kirbi Fagan talk about being a fantasy cover artist and how she works.
This was more than worth my time. Kirbi is a talented artist and a very dynamic speaker. The fact that she's excited about her art shines through with every word.
You can't have a discussion about art without examples of art. Waving your hands just doesn't work. Kirbi brought a wide collection of book cover images, both hers and others.
Some of our highpoints were:
Finding the Right Publisher with Adrian and Cynthianna Matthews.
I was a little late following the concert, and missed any advice on the actual search for a publisher. The discussion when I entered centered around the publisher-author relationship and the characteristics of a good one. Both speakers agreed the relationship was similar to a marriage. When each side respects the other, each wants the best for the relationship and there is an even give-and-take between the partners, the relationship flourishes. The main advice was for authors to present themselves and behave as professionally as possible, and expect the same from the publisher. If the mutual respect is not there,
The Guest of Honor was Kelly McCullough . Kelly was visible throughout the con and participated on nine panels. Jody Harrow chaired the convention, Sue Stahl did the programming and Susan Harris and Patricia Altergott handled the con suite.
Everyone did a great job--We've seldom seen a convention run so smoothly, but special thanks go to Susan and Patricia for always having real food in the Con Suite. Maybe not a full meal's worth, but always something other than sugar or salt to tide us over until we got a real meal. There was plenty of sugary and salty snacks as well, and very tasty ones. (Where did that delicious pumpkin bread come from? Carol wants the recipe!)
The Church scribes who recorded births and deaths replaced the scalds who would memorize lineages and a few years later Gutenberg's movable type brought Bibles and literacy to the common man, replacing the need for a Church official to recite biblical passages.
The middle-1800s saw the invention of the Linotype machine, Rotary Web-Fed Presses and Double-Sided printing. The Dime Novels followed shortly thereafter, providing mindless entertainment to the masses.
The way literature is produced is changing drastically these days.
She's an author to watch.
There Is No Lovely End is a very strong first novel. It's complex, engaging, has incredibly diverse characters and a marvelous author's voice.
It's not perfect, but it's damn good.
The starting point for the novel is that one of the legends about Sarah Winchester, of Winchester Mansion fame, is that she was told to "Go West" not by Horace Greeley, but
But, for the Bard and Sigurd stories, I needed to know what are they ate in medieval northern England? Lots of steak & potatoes? Not even close. Potatoes are a New World vegetable and cows were more valuable for milk.
And clothing? Doublet and Hose? (Nope, that's more rennaissance), tunic and leggings (probably), robes (for the upper classes).
Two of the more useful sites I found were unexpected.
Would you believe out-of-copyright comic books? In particular, the Robin Hood
Science Fiction stories often have a magic technology - something that's new enough that even the scientists working in the field don't really know where it will lead. In the 1920s, the electromagnetic spectrum was new, and E.E. "Doc" Smith used rays to heat, cool, push and pull objects whenever he needed something done. In the 1940s and '50s, Atomic Energy would power everything from Isher's energy weapons to Heinlein's spacecraft, not to mention creating the occaisional big green monster. In the 1970s and 1980s, an Artificial Intelligence would be a man's best friend or worst enemy.
Today, Nanobots are the magic technology that can eat cities, repair and enhance your body, let you ooze through keyholes and
Al Bogdan (author), Daniel O'Riordan (author), Deborah Millitello (author), Ellen Denham (author), Ferrett Steinmetz (author)
I'm afraid I didn't get much out of this panel. This was partly because the panel was at 7:00 PM, just after I finished a large dinner and was deep in a postprandial stupor, and partly because the panelists had similar backgrounds and group experience, and thus didn't present many differing ideas.
Even so, there were some gems:
Tony was suffering from allergies that hit him at the hotel (there was a lot of that going around) and finally broke down and took an antihistamine, which made him groggy. So it was a very low-key kaffeeklatsch. There were only three attendees, so conversation was laid-back and drifted from general topic to general topic.
However, this is the session I remember the best, because during it, I made my first-ever pitch to an editor. Go me! I stumbled through it, botched most of it, but managed to say enough to get two reactions from Tony. The first was a criticism of my basic premise, a hole Tony suggested I close. The second was the name of the slushreader I should address my submission to, once I finished my edit. He told me to mention him at Detcon1 on my query. At the end of the session, he asked me what I was going to do with my story. I'm going to close the hole
Sam is gifted with wry humor, which balanced the air of cynicism permeating everything he had to say. On the other hand, it was 10:00 in the morning and there was no coffee, despite the nature of the gathering, one of the few mistakes at the con. So none of us were necessarily at our best.
Jabberwocky represents Tanya Huff, Charlaine Harris and Elizabeth Moon, among others. Sam is not seeking new clients, but others from the agency are open. He mentioned Lisa Rogers takes romance stories. Their rate is 15% for US/20% foreign. Usual length 80 to 120K words.
The main thing I learned from the session was how to pitch a story. Sam invited pitches, and I listened carefully to how others presented their stories. Brief, punchy, stressing what is unique to the story.
Patty Templeton (author), Becca Price (author), JF Garrard (author & editor), Christie Meierz (author) and Beverly Bambury (publicist) discussed the ins and outs of self-publishing your books.
Patty said the big take-away in this session: Make it easy to catalog your book. Add the publication and catalog info to the copyright page. Librarians and book dealers will love you for this and those are the last people you want to *not* love you. I looked at her book; she practices what she preaches.
The cats, however, being cats, are not creatures of habit.
To be fair, when a hair-ball wants to see the world, it's not going to wait for a discount tour.
Thus, I got up to find a brown smear across a black carpet.
This actually wasn't much of a problem. My spot-cleaning carpet shampooing machine made short work of de-browning the carpet, and I just needed to wipe down the Roborock and replace the filter, roller and sweeper - all of which are items you replace every few months anyhow. Once this was done, Robbie the Roborock was happy to skitter across the
Monday morning, when Caz went into the front yard, I followed and did my usual check to see if there was anything to harvest in my little garden. I normally stand on the south side of the raised bed, since that's closest to the house and shortest walk.
Nada. Lots of leaves, quite a few blossoms, but no veggies.
One of the squash plants has been making a break for it, squirming over the north wall to freedom. It obviously didn't realize it was leaping out of the raised bed frying-pan into the fire of rabbit and deer country.
The travelling squash was not fruiting, but when I looked back into the garden from the other side, there was a zuke the size of
I'm developing more respect for the folks that get useful info out of these applications.
It only took me a few hours to learn how to train it for simple boolean logic. Another day and I had it mapping the numbers 1-4 to a 4-1 sequence only a few thousand times slower than executing the equation y=5-x.
You should not use an AI for the kind of problem you can solve with an equation. It works, but the power in AI is that it can learn how to cope with problems for which a mathematical solution cannot exist.
Like, the English language.
This is a 4 day conference: Thur - Sun. I drove out on Thursday and got to my hotel in time to register, look around, chat and find dinner.
On Friday I was on four panels, starting at 10:00 AM discussing how to fine-tune your dialog with Elizabeth Moon, Brenda Clough, and Greg Frost. All well known SF writers. Luckily, I was the moderator on this panel, so all I had to do was ask questions and get out of the way. (which I mostly did).
I finished the day discussing how to write bawdy songs, mostly talking to folks who know more bawdy songs than I do.
One of the editors who's bought a few of my stories attended this
When I joined the club, this was a 5 page, purple ditto, stapled in the corner. The printing was so poor you could hardly read the stories, which was widely acknowledged to be a blessing.
Over the years, we learned more about reproduction (ahem) and even a little about writing. By the time I graduated, the 'zine was a digest sized chap-book, offset printed with nice looking artwork, courtesy of two students who would soon be professional artists.
We printed one of my stories, and my friendly native artist did a nice pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate it.
A few months ago a friend found old VCR tapes that included the concerts Caroll did with her two co-singers at X-Con in 1992.
About halfway through, I joined them. This was the first time Carol and I performed together in public. After a couple songs, another friend joined us and we did my a capella arrangement of Cream's "Tales of Brave Ullyses".
This is the only time we ever performed the song, and I thought it was lost forever.
Our concert is now available on Youtube at
I was on hand to make sure the system restarted properly.
I drove down to Ohio with a friend to watch the event. This is the first time I've seen a full, total eclipse of the sun.
I had the clever idea of going to a Love's truck stop just north of Columbus where there's lots of free parking, a dog park for Caz and fast-food for me.
We got there with plenty of time to spare. The traffic was a little heavy, but the only slowdowns were construction.
As usual, I was on a couple panels, talked to lots of folks and even sold a couple books.
A friend of mine, Tori Gates, does a weekly podcast and mentioned on the email list that he was looking for folks to interview at the convention.
Like, ask me twice if I want to promote my book!
We finally found some time on Sunday morning, and did a ten minute or so chat about Promised Rewards, writing in general, conventions, etc.
You can listen to it at
I escorted the invader out of the premises with the aid of an extensible gripper and purchased a live-trap to keep in the garage.
I tried baiting the trap when I first got it, but the bait was always gone in the morning without tripping the trap.
I assume pixies ate it.
So, the trap has sat, empty and forlorn for the better part of a year.
Last week, Caz declared that There Was A Problem. He checked the woodpiles, the lawn mower, under my car and finally decided
A whole-house generator was the 3'd or 4'th item on the list.
While we were working on this list, the power went out, and the generator moved to the top of the list.
I think it's the only item on the list that we actually did.
Some twelve years later, that generator has become so obsolete that there aren't any tech's capable of working on it. Not even with phone calls to the Generac support lines.
A technician spent several hours working on my generator last week and
Costco has started carrying Rocco and Roxie odor/stain remover, so I picked some up.
I was interested to see how this compared to Nature's Miracle.
Caz, being the eager-to-please dog that he is, promptly left a deposit on the rug for me to clean up.
The roborock beat me to the punch and attempted to ingest Caz's outgest.
Coprophagia in robots was never a topic that Asimov thought to address in his I Robot stories. Capriphagia would be less of a problem, though
I've been eyeing them since they showed up in November. Once Thanksgiving was over, I allowed one to follow me home.
I decorated it with some fancy ribbon as garlands and a few pre-made mini-bows. I ordered strings of doll-house holiday lighting to finish the decorating.
The doll-house holiday lights are LED's about half the size of a grain of rice on very fine wire. They are powered by a small, flat battery like you put in a car's remote control. The package had 3 sets of lights, each 3 feet long. I thought that was too much, but it turned out to be just right.
As everyone who ever used a wrench knows, the first one is easy, it's the last bolt that's impossible to get loose.
Which leads to hot water heater anode rods.
I've managed to live all my life without ever knowing about these things. It seems hot water tanks are built with a "sacrificial" rod that dissolves to protect the tank. The idea is that this rod reacts with the water and chews up the various ions, etc before they corrode the tank.
The symptom that you need to replace this is your water starting to smell like sulphur.
Skating rinks use the same philosophy. When songs get too old to be played in elevators and grocery stores, they get played for skaters.
Before Carol and I got together, I was ice skating pretty seriously. I skated several hours a week and had mastered most of the simple jumps and was even working on a double.
New wife, new jobs, etc, and it's been almost 30 years since I was on the ice.
When people join a writing group, they worry about someone stealing their story, or their ideas.
This never happens. The kind of folks who join writing groups already have more stories and ideas than they can handle.
Nobody ever worries that someone's story will lead to re-organizing their kitchen drawers.
Ooops.
A story I recently critiqued had a character accused of being a Martha
The first time Carol came to spend a weekend with me, she took an extra day off work and came on Thursday night.
Unfortunately, I had to work on Friday.
So, I drove to work with her and gave her my car.
My usual behavior when I'm somewhere new is to go walking and explore. I generally know the area a few blocks around the hotel as well as the natives after I've been there a couple days.
This was not Carol's style. She stayed put, like a turtle hiding in its shell.
Last spring, the wind blew a kid's plastic soccer ball onto my property.
Caz thought this was fun. He couldn't manage to pick it up and it bounced away when he tried.
It was fun for almost five minutes, then he found a way to sink his teeth into the problem and the problem went away.
A month or so ago, I saw a soccer-ball sized toy ball at the Pet Store labeled "Indestructible". It's firm foam rubber covered with elephant-hide grade rip-stop nylon.
Caz thought this ball was great fun. It lasted almost four hours,
| Left a mound of | Fenrir's feces |
| Where the Rock was | known for rolling. |
| Sullen brown in | shadowed stillness, |
| Waits for Robot's | evening strolling. |
It turns out that one place where the iRobot Roomba excels over the RoboRock is ease of disassembly and cleaning.
There are a half-dozen easy-to-find screws holding the bulk of bottom panel in place, and then a bunch more hard to find smaller screws that hold the rest of the assembly together.
I have an Hieronymous Glyph story that my editor rejected, so I decided it would be easy to rework a story centered on a lawyer, a ghost and a ghostwriter into a vehicle for a different lawyer.
I didn't own a TV before I got married, so I'd never watched Night Court. I hadn't even heard of it.
However, Night Court reruns are available on Amazon Prime. I'm now binging my way into season 4.
I've also never written to fit into a defined world before, so this exercise has resulted in a much more major rework of the story than I expected.
Other four-footed folks think the woods belong to them.
This morning, we encountered a doe-in-residence during our Lewis and Clark expedition.
We were within twenty feet of it when Caz barked and lunged. The deer just stared at us, probably wondering what we were doing in its kitchen.
Then it stamped one foot at us.
Caz did nothing about the stamping, so I stamped back.
The deer stamped its other foot.
Penguicon does a very nice thing for the attending authors. They have a room set aside for book sales. You don't need to pay anything to use the room, not even a small percentage.
However, if you use the room, they require you to spend a few hours manning the book store.
This is not a hardship. I already knew most of the attending authors, and had a chance to meet a few more. When there were no potential victi... buyers we chatted among ourselves, compared publisher horror stories, discussed other venues, and such.
I had a good time. This convention had very active tracks for Costumers, Gamers and Writers. They don't have any filking, or movies, or even late night parties. I ended up going to bed before midnight each night, unlike my usual habit of being up til 2 or 3.
Despite this, I spent a lot of time chatting with folks and meeting new folks. Since this convention isn't part of my usual routine, I didn't know many of the attendees. But a couple folks I knew when I worked outside of Akron in 1986 came to the convention and found me to say "Hi. " It was cool to chat with folks I hadn't seen in almost 40 years.
I played a game called "New York Pizza Delivery" with the game's creator. It's a fun game, and I bought a copy for my monthly
That was my Christmas present to us that year. Carol enjoyed it as much as I did. A lot of sandwiches and pizzas got baked in it.
That said, I don't recommend this model. It's got a lot of nice features, but the timer is a mechanical twisty-thing that's calibrated for an hour. It's impossible to set the timer accurately in the sub-10 minute range, which is the difference between cooked and charcoal when you use it as a toaster oven for pizza or sandwiches.
Google and Youtube informed me that trying to modify the timer was a waste of effort. There's dozens of screws and panels to remove to get at the timer, and then there's no better unit to replace it with.
In early January, I realized I could shut off a couple valves, open the drain valve on the hot water tank and siphon vinegar into the pipes via the bathroom sink faucet.
I let this sit overnight, then ran the water to clear out the vinegar and whatever it had disolved.
I ended up with a lot of gritty black water that smelled like salad dressing, but no improvement in the shower.
So, I decided to follow the grand psychotic tradition of "If it doesn't work, do the same thing again, but harder." I discovered that Lowes sells "Cleaning Grade Vinegar." This is 30% acetic acid, instead of the
Rather than get him a brand new toy, I decided to cannibalize the previous cover to repair this one.
Now, I know just enough about sewing to be dangerous - mostly to myself - but nearby objects like cloth, needles and pins are not safe, either.
So, a few words of warning, if you spread the victim out on the dining room table in order to pin things together, remove the table cloth first.
So, bright and early, Monday morning, I returned to the scene of the crime. As we all know from detective novels, the villain always does this.
I managed to find about half the cowling that protects the mirrors innards from the great outdoors.
I looked online, and replacing the entire assembly is about $600 and an hour of labor. Most importantly, the parts aren't available for weeks, and I'm heading to Florida for Carol's liftoff on Sunday.
So I returned to the victim and examined the rear view mirror. A little
This model dishwasher is well known as being nice and quiet, but not known for actually cleaning dishes. We found it succeeded admirably in the category of not cleaning dishes.
Carol and I discussed this and concluded that it wasn't worth the major effort of repairing a dishwasher that doesn't wash dishes anyhow. We looked into getting a new one, and never found one we liked enough to drop the exorbitant number of bucks to get one that's known to work.
And with just two of us, there weren't a lot of dishes to wash.
And so, for the past several years, the dishwasher has been used
This year, I was the Writer Guest of Honor. That really is an honor. Folks like Seanan McGuire, Glen Cook, and Gene Wolfe have held that spot.
But, I actually won the Open Contract Challenge, and my book will be out early in 2023.
The bad news was that my normal dog sitter couldn't take Caz.
at the 11'th hour I found a place for Caz to spend the Thanksgiving weekend. One of the tech's at his vet's office does dog boarding, and she had room for Caz.
They needed an author bio. Writing a bio for me, instead of for us, was hard. This was the first one of those I've had to write.
Back when Carol and I built this house, we intended to put some task-lighting over a "breakfast nook" that's never been used for breakfast (but sometimes is used as a food-prep area, and has been spillover office since I moved upstairs to keep the animals amused.)
So, I popped the breaker for the hot water heater, checked there was no voltage, and tested the resitance in the heater elements.
Naturally, the bottom one was shot.
Now, the proper way to handle this is to drain the hot water tank with a hose, replace the heater element, and refill.
So I hooked up the hose and got dinner and played some computer games and went back to check on things.
The fast way to drain a hot water heater is to unscrew the bottom heater element and stand back.
It started out OK, he got fed, got his post-breakfast goodies (a Cosequin treat) and his walk. We came back, and I wanted to catch up on email, and he wanted attention. Lots of attention. Having some 70 pounds worth dog demanding NOW NOW NOW makes it difficult to work the keyboard.
So, I went to the dining room to see if he needed a thumb or two to get last night's treat out of the hollow bone I'd hidden it in.
And found a big brown gift on the rug.
As soon as I turned on the light, Caz's ears went back, head and tail went down, and he slunk into the other room and lay down on his bed. I never even scolded him.
One feature that's not obvious to the casual eye is that we live in a neo-impressionist post art-deco world where designs have no straight lines. There are things that look flat and straight, but when you try to put something flat over them, you discover that they curve just a little and the flat pieces will rock and roll over. (Well, rock and roll did come after the Art-Deco movement.)
This is why the good lord gave us foam weather stripping. A little weather stripping lets you fake a curve with a straight piece of wood.
After three trips, Caz has yet to dislodge the new design. I don't think he's really trying.
So, I decided to write the synopsis as Bard would tell his story.
Presto, just 600 words.
Now, I know that Bard is just a figment in my head, but he knows how to tell a story. More important, when I was thinking from Bard's point of view, the egotist left out everything that wasn't about him.
I submitted Bard's version of the story, and to my surprise, got to the last round - submit your novel! Two stories enter, one story leaves.
Instead, it's the Covid Report. After all these years, I finally caught the bug, just a few days before I was scheduled to leave for the con.
I felt feverish and just plain crappy on Tuesday, but tested negative. If this was just a 24 hour cold, I could still go to the convention.
So, I didn't quite change any plans.
On Wed, I tested positive.
In one way, I was relieved. I really didn't want to go to the world-con when I was sick, but I didn't want to miss it if it was just a
With the current fads for essential oil aroma therapy, it's easy to get an ounce of 100% pure, organic nutmeg oil. Amazon will ship it to your door even while you're quarantining yourself.
I put a few drops on the hat I wear when I walk Caz to see what happened.
The deer-flies still dive-bombed me, but they never landed on me. The canine control surface got the usual quantity of bugs.
From this limited experiment, I conclude that nutmeg oil works as an insect repellant. After a couple days, I started to have the flies land
On Sunday I was informed that one of the top 15 entrees had dropped out, and now, instead of being number 16 our of 15, I was in the chosen 15.
By luck, the chapter that I'm to submit had just gone through one of my critique groups, and (with luck) is stronger now than it was before.
I really don't expect to be chosen. This publisher tends towards dark and horror, and my story is a humorous adventure.
But, nothing ventured, nothing lost. It didn't cost anything to enter, so I've got nothing to lose.
Last fall I picked up a rolling cat-box from CostCo. The brand was Omega Paw, who seem to be the only folks making this gadget. It's a nice design. It has a grating along one side so when you roll it over, the loose sand goes into a receptacle, and the clumps go into a removable drawer for easy disposal.
One of my electric "Litter Robot" units has been failing, so I decided to replace it with another rolling unit. It's arguably less overall effort than the automated units that need a serious cleaning once every six months or so.
Costco no longer has these. Apparently they sold out fast. PetSmart and my local stores never heard of rolling litter boxes. Luckily, Chewy has
I hunt for the newest place the cats have decided to mark.
I finally decided that the scent in the corner of the laundry room with the washer and dryer was coming from under the washer and dryer.
Moving these monsters to clean under them is very low on my list of things I'd love to do. So in an effort to assist, the washer kicked its drain tube out of the drain pipe and flooded the laundry room.
The wet-dry shop vac I bought in 1981 was one of my best ever investments, even if I can't find the proper filters for it any more.
In fairly short order, I sucked up most of the water, mopped up more, and set up a 20" fan to dry the rest.
I was on a panel about planning a story vs just writing and seeing what happens. I brought a couple of the poster-sized plot layouts I made for Carol to show one way of planning a story.
I also delivered a talk on psycholinguistics and tailoring your prose with careful word choices.
The author readings were poorly attended (to be polite). Two authors shared each reading slot, and the audience was generally 2 or 3 friends of each author.
All of the computer makers recognized that Networks would be *BIG*, and everyone tried to make their idea the new Standard.
Even here in Ann Arbor, Applied Dynamics built a working microwave network before Xerox released their "ethernet" standard. But by the time we had it working, the momentum was already going to ethernet, even though it was still vaporware.
Along with incompatible networks, there were incompatible ways to send email messages. At one point there were jobs for people to take messages from one machine and type them into another. There was no
I've been running my own e-mail server since the mid '80s. The relatively simple server for just me got more complex when Carol and I got serious and I set up an account for her to also receive email.
It got more complex when we went independant and the server was handling email for cflynt.com and noucorp.com.
The real complexity came when Google and Yahoo decided to come up with ways to make email more secure and get rid of spammers. Rather than stop giving out email addresses to anyone who asked for one, they came up with convoluted techniques for cryptographic checksums and customized DNS entries.
One of the things she wants to do is check her client's bone density, to ensure they don't over-stress anything on the equipment.
Now, GE makes a cute little bone density tester that you put your foot into, a membrane full of water expands to cover your heel and it looks at ultrasonic wave forms to determine the bone density of your heel. Presumably, that maps to the rest of your body.
They name this gadget "The Achilles," proving the power of a liberal arts education.
These things are expensive new, but there's a thriving market in
On Tuesday evening, the walking stomach refused his dinner. On Wednesday morning, when I took him for his morning constitutional, he had a bout of diarrhea. I called the vet and they asked me to bring in a sample for them to test.
If we still had snow on the ground, this would have been easy. But we've had some warm weather, and by Wednesday, the woods were covered in dark brown leaves. With one dark brown pile hidden in them.
Luckily, while Caz was busy, I was looking at some branches that I'd sawed. I used those branches to get back to very nearly where the dropping was dropped. I could smell it, but had to look for several minutes to find it.
I drove to Chicago on Friday. Caz spent the weekend with his girlfriend next door, and the cats got the house to themselves.
They weren't very happy about this. They didn't eat as much of their dry food as I expected (barely touched the food I left out), and Mr. Mark refused to take his medicine and treat unless he got spoon fed.
When I got home, they were all over my ankles, and gobbled their treats.
I read on the couch for a couple hours so Mark could sleep on my
Mark has been getting resistant to taking his meds. I ended up getting some clam juice to spruce up what had been his favorite medicinal goodie, and he still needed persuading most days.
So I got a variety pack of Churu to try this stuff out.
Big win! The cats slurp this down without even sniffing it first. Carol and I were smushing Mark's medicine with a spoon and mixing it into the Delectable pate' to try and hide the flavor. Now, I just put the pill on top of a quarter teaspoon of Churu, and it's gone.
When I lived alone, I didn't do much about Christmas.
The year that Carol's mom died, she was depressed and didn't have the energy to set up the tree or decorate. A few days before Christmas I finally had time to go shopping, and I picked up a little two foot tall pre-decorated tree.
That's been our tree for the past 15 years or so.
For the last half-dozen years of so, I did most of the Christmas set up in the house, bringing Christmas to Carol. It pleased her to wake up and find that I'd set up the tree and stockings and stuff while she
There's no place more appropriate for Carol.
About thirty local friends attended, and I set up a zoom link for her friends from overseas.
I made a recording of the session, but haven't been able to look at it.
The celebration of life went well. We gathered at about 4:30 and a little before 5:00 began the as-formal-as-it-gets portion where folks talked about their memories of Carol. Renee and Dalya talked about knowing Carol in junior high. Ginger spoke of her time working with Carol at the College Boards. Barisha and Carol talked about singing
Everyone who knows Carol is not surprised that she's still buying books long after she died.
I logged into her Amazon account to see if there were more surprises waiting for me and found a "For Clif" list.
This hit me harder than you might think.
The last present my dad bought for me came almost a year after he died. He'd ordered a comedy album for me that for some reason or other
So, I went online to check that they'd received the payment, re-instated the insurance, get the little paper, etc.
And failed.
Carol took care of the financial things, but luckily, she kept all her passwords in the browser so I can access her accounts.
However, the AAA website kept giving me a "This action can not be performed." message when I tried to get a printable copy of the insurance. Then it failed to show me the billing/payment info. Then the AAA site just went offline and died.
I made it a point to talk with a friend at least once every day, to avoid being to insulated.
And my friends put a lot of effort into keeping me in touch with humanity.
For most of last week, this was easy. My mom and sister arrived on Tuesday evening and stayed until Friday morning.
This was good timing. I really needed the week mostly alone (I talked with at least one person every day), but late at night, this big old house
Whitney Spotts, from Schuler books gave us a quick drink from a fire hose on how to promote your book.
This was aimed specifically at independantly published hardcopy books being promoted at bookstores (like Schuler's), but the advice was relevant to just about anything.
It's best to get your books distributed via Ingram or Baker & Taylor. Specify that these are to be handled as guaranteed sales. This will cost more, but the bookstores won't touch stuff that they have to hold forever whether it sells or not.
Schuler's offers a 60/40 split for consignment sales, plus a $25.00 consignment fee. We're pricing our books low, so we only see about $1.00 of profit in our 60% of the cover price (after we pay shipping, etc), so that means we've got to
Agent Alice Spielburg, read randomly selected first pages and gave her assessment.
She was kinder than I think she needed to be. She pointed out a few places where folks could improve their work, but didn't use the (more common in these things) "Here is where I stop reading and throw it away" response.
From a couple comments, I think she was told to be encouraging, and not as bluntly honest as she might have preferred. Rally is a very supportive conference, and the "You suck" school of critique is strongly discouraged.
Deanna Sjolander , David Taylor, and Monica Velentinelli.
The takeaways I got from the few minutes I was there was the observations that for every trope, there's an anti-trope that's just as hackneyed (unless you come up with a new way to play it) and that different societies have different tropes. You might get a clever story by becoming familiar with the "everybody does this" trope for Asian or African stories.
I've been reading various original Arabian and Armenian folk tales (the original Thousand Nights tales, for instance), and once you get beyond the Disney tales, these are not the same as the Brother's Grimm. The villains and heroes are not quite so well defined for one thing. There are more shades
There was a ton of information in this panel. Most of the folks were actively taking notes while someone else was speaking, and I finally (too late) realized I should be recording it.
I missed too much good stuff, mostly the "free" ways of marketing.
Maintaining your mailing list of readers is the top idea.
Jonathon (who writes military fiction) pushed joining Romance Writer's of America. They
This panel was a surprise. I expected to talk about writing folks who aren't the king, not the famous warrior, and stuff like that.
With Bard & Sigurd, (two wandering nobodies), and Petros, Parvana and Ana (three slaves), it seemed like I'd have something to say.
Instead, we talked about un-represented minorities: women, people of
The main thing I did on Friday was to hit the Writer's and Donuts panel.
The idea for this get-together is if you feed them, they will come.
This may not be as true as it was when I was a starving student, but close to twenty folks showed up for the session.
Unlike last year, when folks sat at cafe-style tables and awkwardly tried to chat with each other, Richard Chwedyk played host and did a round of everyone introducing themselves. Once introductions were done, he initiated conversations about writing tools (amazingly enough, there were less than twenty editors used by the twenty people - but it was close), available resources (mostly Chicago area resources,
Celtic Guitar is (per Phil) a catch-all term for non-standard folk tuning and clever fingerpicking. This includes solo guitar players like John Fahey, Leo Kotke, Martin Carthy and Stephen Grossman and groups like Pentangle. Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span.
Phil and Susan gave nice introduction to DADGAB tuning and provided chording diagrams and tabs for a few simple tunes.
My takeaway was that folks love to give you a short (or even medium long) answer. The more ignored folks - firemen, cops, plumbers - are even happier to discuss how the real world works.
If you want someone to read your 7,000 page novel and tell you all the places you screwed up, you should pay them.
Pay can range from small, unmarked bills, to exchange of services (virus proofing your plumber's computer), to trading reading chores.
Christian Klaver, Ferret Steinmetz and Merrie Haskell discussed the business of being a writer in the context of finding an agent.
The takeaways were:
Pizik's made the point that all literature has a theme. Sometimes you're beaten over the head with the theme (think Brave New World and 1984) and sometimes the theme is hidden behind the curtain and you don't really notice it.
The plot is what keeps you reading, but the theme is why you remember the book later. It's what grabs you and holds you.
Theme either comes first. "I'll write a novel about how a strong character can rule his own destiny despite society's expectations", or it can come later, "Hey, my main character does his own thing regardless of what people want him to do".
I know that ghostwriters exist. Nobody believes that famous people's memoirs were written by the famous people who are too busy to sit down and write a thousand pages.
It turns out that there is also a thriving business in writing stuff for the everyman. Theres a market in writing for folks who want their memoir for their grandkids, but don't have the skill to write it, or people with a grand idea for a novel, but without the time or skill to put it to press.
These jobs are either handled on an ad-hoc manner by someone who just happens to know someone, or by commercial outfits that link writers to folks who need them.
The session on Writing Great Young Adult and Middle Grade was presented by Madeline Smoot of CBAY Books
She discussed what makes a kid's book salable:
This was the official release of checkIt under a new name: Editomat.
It's no longer a freebie I share with a few friends, it's now got a for-real website, paypal, documentation and everything.
Sean and I are in agreement that Editomat is not the last word in editing - the final judge is a human being. But he thinks Editomat is cool and likes how it highlights the things a human should look at.
That's the purpose for Editomat.
Proud as I am of the tool, and as much as I use it, it's not an AI (it
The obvious conclusions are that you need to be kind, but also honest.
You do your friend no favors by saying their drek is really pretty good, but if you can find a good thing in it, that's something you should point out. "I really like the kitten." might not help, but "The dialog works well, and the villian is cool". is good.
It's also not helpful (to anyone) to point out flaws without some suggestion for how to fix them. Again, "The dialog sucks" doesn't help much, but "Your dialog is too stilted. Try reading it out loud and see what you'd say instead."
Being young men, Bard and Sigurd have appetites. They pay attention to food, so there is a fair amount of food mentioned in the book.
Their meals range from dried fish to banquets. Early in the story they visit a monastery and are honored with sweets.
I found a recipe for a Saxon style Apple Walnut cookie on the net and adopted it a bit.
1 cup dried apples 2 cups walnuts 2 tbs honey 4 eggs
Around here, that means that all life stops, except where it concerns this year's project.
That's true for Carol.
For Clif, November is a week-long meeting with his consulting client, running a technical conference, finishing Christmas presents and a little bit of help with plotting and technical details.
This year's project is In Transit, the sequel to Misrouted.
At the end of Misrouted we left our heroes needing to make the Luna colony profitable.
Carnival Charlatan is an urban fantasy with a bunch of twists.
I was enthralled by Emma Bull's War For the Oaks when it came out in the 1980s, but I got tired of the genre by the mid-90s when it seemed like everyone was writing about edgy elves living in the alleys on the seedy side of town.
Skeeter breathed some new life into the genre.
For starters, her heroine, Ariel, isn't an elf living on the edge in a city. She's a witch in a travelling carnival where she disguises the
Carol was a panelist for Publishing: Traditional or Independent.
At Detcon she met some folks from Baen and was encouraged to submit MisRouted to them.
At the panel, she discussed why she chose to submit to a traditional publisher rather than going with indie publishing.
For her it comes down to wanting more time to write. Creating book covers, finding editors for development and copy editing, learning layout--it's all complicated with a large learning curve, and she decided she'd be rather be writing the next book.
Sisyphus I fear that I shall never see A story written easily. I think and plot with all my might, Then tear it up. It's just not right. I work and toil and write again. It's almost done. I read it, then It's thrown away. It's just too bad For you to read. And now I'm mad! I force myself to find a way To say the things I want to say:
Write every day.
The authors all give excellent reasons why writing every day is a Good Thing. It builds habit. It ensures you have some time writing. The skill of writing comes from practice, like any other skill. (Of course, I don't practice my guitar, either.) Especially for busy people, carving out a little time each day means you can make progress towards a work-in-progress even during crunch times.
It sounds so simple. Yet, like too many striving writers, I didn't do it.
There's always a reason. I work for a living. My clients tend to want
It's generally easy to find the big facts like how far from here to the moon, but it's harder to find the little things you need to make a world real.
For instance, how many people would it take to run a lunar colony? How many cooks, cleaners, admin, etc are needed to keep three shifts of miners in the mines?
The answers come from strange places. I found the answer to how much support staff it takes in an Army Correspondence Course that describes how many folks it takes to run a field kitchen, which can feed 300 soldiers in a pinch (T rations) or 125 if you are serving cooked meals (A or B rations).
This was one of the most enjoyable and busiest conventions I've attended in almost forty years of conventioning. Tammy Coxen, ConChair and Kim Kofmel, Programming Division Head and Literature Track Head, both did a grand job. I've never attended so many panels and enjoyed all of them.
This was my first time going to a Con as a fiction author, instead of as a Joe Phan or filker. Mind you, my (current and first) novel is self-pubbed and I just put my grubby paws on real hardcopy the day before the con, but it made a big change in how I viewed the con.
I didn't hit the "Meet-The-Pros" party, or SFWA or anything like that,
Beverly Bambury (publicist), John Scalzi (author) , Martin L. Shoemaker (author), Sean Mead (corporate branding consultant)
With his years of blogging (since 1998), his book sales and his twitter activity, John Scalzi is an expert on branding yourself in the modern age. As such, he dominated the panel, but was well worth listening to.
The takeaway points from this panel were:
Neil Clarke (Clarke's World) accepts short stories 1-8K in length. Pays $0.10 per word up to 4K, $0.07 per word after.
Richard Flores encouraged those who receive rejections from the prozines but think they have a good story to submit to Plasma Frequency and other semi-pro magazines. Sometimes acceptance/rejection is a matter of editor taste; what one editor likes another may not. Looking for Flash (up to 3K) fiction, SF, humor, some Fantasy.
In the earlier panel, Beverly was very energetic and enthused. It turned out that this was before she'd had any coffee. By the time the Kaffeeklatsch came around she was fully caffeinated. Think of the squirrel in the Over the Hedge movie, and you have an idea.
I'm really glad I hit this session. Beverly has lots of information and knowledge and is generous in sharing it. Given that this is her bread and butter, her willingness to give so much away for free is both refreshing and appreciated.
Her big point is that when you publicize yourself you have to be yourself. Don't try to publicize a fake persona that's not you. Folks
Cath Schaff-Stump (author), Elektra Hammond (editor/author), Jim C. Hines (author), Oscar "Oz" Wilson (author), Sam Morgan (agent)
This panel was one of the ones I wanted to hit. My Bard & Sigurd stories aren't Science Fiction in any sense of the word and aren't really Fantasy (no magic, elves or dwarves, but plenty of Vikings and the occasional snowstorm.)
The first few passes of comments were the obvious observations: