The drive back from Texas was a bit damp. It rained so hard it washed almost all the mud off my car. I'm pretty sure Texas is now a foot higher than it was before I visited. Unless all my mud got carried into the gulf.

On the way home, I stopped in Dayton to have lunch with one of my publishers (I feel so professional and grown up writing lines like that!). I also picked up copies of "Madam, Don't Forget Your Sword".

This is an anthology of stories about the side-kicks, instead of the usual tales about the heroes. I sold them the Aelfred story in which he buys a bunch of shovels and picks, then fakes a gold strike in order to sell them at top price.

This is a direct steal from history. The first man to make money during the Sutter Mill gold strike in California was the guy who cornered the market on picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows.

I was on a panel about using history in your stories at Inconjunction and got to use one of my favorite lines: "When you steal from another author, it's plagiarism. When you steal from history, it's research."

I also sold stories to Dragon's Edge and the first Mindsea anthology this month. That's two stories that got accepted last year, and will come out this year, and one from this year. THREE stories in one year!

It's a dictum in the world of comedy that v is everything. ^

Timing is also very important with computers.

Two days after I left my mom with her newly upgraded computer, Ubuntu released an update. This update changed the order of starting RAID devices and mounting all disks.

Basicly, the system says:

Mount all disk drives. If any disks fail to mount: Die in Flames Initialize RAID devices so they can be mounted.

So, my clever idea of putting my mom's data on a redundant disk system, so she'd be safe if a disk crashed, didn't quite work because you can't mount a disk pack that hasn't been initialized.

The solution was a bunch of reworking configuration files to say "It's OK if this fails during startup" and a later "Now that the RAID is running, mount it."

So, two sets of screwed up timing - the bug they introduced with the new order of events, and introducing this just two days after I left Texas and couldn't easily fix it.

My mom's computer spent three days on a truck from Texas, one day on my bench, and another three days going home.

It arrived in Texas right on schedule, she hooked up all the cables and then called me to step through tests and confirm that everything was working.

Amazingly enough, it was.