the wife

Dino Master is SOFT! a belated August Post

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Three things to make a belated August update:

First, in this latest (but not final) revision of the book, I’ve completely thrown out the denouement and rewritten it from scratch.

It’s longer now, but I’m not too concerned about that. It’s the denouement for an entire series of novels (plus the shorter stuff, too) so I wanted to give it a chance to breathe. If it feels like it’s breathing too much when you finally get a chance to read it, mea culpa.

The next task is to add some chapters from the point of view of the main villain. That’s not really a spoiler, but it is something new and unexpected. And after so much time spent revising, just sitting down to write new text is very satisfying.

Second, I’m a fat guy who has had two incidents of chest pain over the past year, so the doctors wanted me to do an angiogram, with the potential to implant a stent or two if I needed it. For those who don’t recognize the term, it involves sticking a long wire with a camera at the tip into an artery, usually at the wrist but sometimes at the groin, and sliding it all the way up to take photos of collections of plaque that sometimes builds up near the heart.

A good thing: if I ever need to write a scene where an alien worm is crawling through a body, I now have sense memory to draw on.

Another: they didn’t find anything of any significance. There was a little bit of cholesterol buildup, but nothing they felt particularly concerned about. No stents.

Yet another: the nurse told me that I was the easiest patient she had to deal with that day. Now, I realize that it’s not a competition, but if we’re talking about patients who cheerfully go along with whatever the medical staff wants without being too demanding in return, I’m tops.

(When I made that joke to my family, my son laughed and my wife gave me A Look. Her health mantra is “Be demanding.”)

Third, it’s finally official that I have arthritis in my knees.

Fourth, for Tabletop Tuesday, we have just started a campaign of Escape from Dino Island.

I was hoping they would dig it, and everyone seems to have picked up on the tone and the style pretty much right away. The game itself is meant to be a one- or two-shot, but this might run a little extra.

My wife and son may not be avid gamers, but they do like this family tradition and they enjoy playing. My favorite part is when things take a turn they absolutely did not expect. Last session, while they camped inside a crashed helicopter on the beach, one saw a dino run out of the jungle with a long stick in its mouth. They saw it dip the end into the flames and run back in the foliage with a lit torch. There was, maybe, ten seconds of silence as they stared at me, thinking about what that might mean.

Love that. So much fun.

Sadly, it seems that I’m a wimp of a GM. (Or in this case, a “DM” for “Dino-Master”.) I hate injuring my family’s PCs, let alone killing them, and what fun is a Jurassic Park knock off if the dinosaurs aren’t killing people? Next session I’ll have to toughen up.

That’s my belated August update. Thanks to everyone who supports my Patreon, and I’ll try to get September done on time.

Religious Faith as Superpower, and Other Nonsense

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I had originally written up a long post about religion in fantasy and horror, and the way that having the “right” religion had traditionally been treated at a superpower to use against supernatural evil. But I just deleted it.

First, I was talking about a specific as-yet unrealized project and I didn’t want to name it or kick the people involved.

Second, I was raised in a religious family but I’m an atheist now. As an atheist, I much prefer stories use the concept of a loving god of infinite mercy over the idea of a god who takes sides. Why shouldn’t vampires have the chance to receive salvation? Why shouldn’t demons? God created both. He should love them, too.

Third, all that said, I’ll sit down and watch as many Salem’s Lot movies as they care to make.

Fourth, speaking of that, fuck those Harry Potter TV seasons. We need a deeply faithful Salem’s Lot TV miniseries.

Anyway, the point was supposed to be that lately I much prefer science horror and cosmic horror.

Also, The Boroughs is really well done.

Moving on, I’m more than two-thirds of the way through *this* revision of the final 20P novel and some of these story problems are going to haunt me for the rest of my days. I keep having to stop and rethink/recontextualize whole scenes while trying to preserve the story I’ve already got going.

I sort of feel that Pandemic Me must have hated Current Me to have dropped this vomit draft on me.

In personal medical news, I posted earlier this month about my recurring chest pains. This past week I went in for a echo cardiogram. The result appears to be that my heart has no discoverable defect. I’m sure that’s significant but I won’t have context until I can actually sit down with the cardiologist.

Last thing: for Tabletop Tuesday, we have reached the part of our Brindlewood Bay campaign where I’m allowed to make the villains attack them with “sendings and servitors” and boy, were my wife and son startled by this scene. Both gave me that head-shudder-wide-eyes look of surprised.

Very satisfying.

Take care. Look after each other, and thank you for your support on Patreon.

The Work of Making Things

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Before I blather on about nonsense, here’s a brief progress update for Twenty-One Palaces.

Revisions hit a huge snag, but it was a snag I knew was coming. Also: difficult. I had to take a few long walks to sort out all the reasons why this group of scenes were a bust. Then I went through them, making lists of necessary story elements. Then I had to come up with a new and interesting way to get all those necessaries incorporated into the new scenes.

Anyway, it sucks to be making such slow progress, but I knew going in that this segment of the book was going to need major work, so it feels good to be nearly done with it.

Once I do that, I put the book aside for a day or two so I can do taxes, then it’s back to revisions.

In other news, my family observes Tabletop Tuesday, in which all three of us get together to play a game (and not a computer game, which would be basically impossible for my wife and me). Board and card games, naturally.

Sadly, we don’t have very many, and it eventually became repetitive.

Happily, this gave me an opportunity to introduce a bit of ttrpg fun into our game night. My son tried tabletop role playing when he was 10. After a few sessions, he shrugged and went back to Minecraft. Many years later, he’s a young adult willing to have a bit of fun. As for my wife, she’s never had any interest in this kind of game, but she is all in for family activities, so I have a captive little group here.

Our first effort was A Town Called Malice, which I picked because it’s very structured for an rpg. Playing this let me introduce role-playing elements, but the progression of the story and the overall plot were basically programmed in.

They had real fun with it, so a few weeks later I introduced Brindlewood Bay.

BB is a mystery role-playing game that uses a system derived from the Powered by the Apocalypse rules system. The player characters are elderly women in a mystery book club who like to meddle in the murder investigations that pop up all too often in their little coastal New England town. It’s very Murder, She Wrote, in a good way.

Also, there’s a cosmic horror element, but that will be more important later.

Anyway, the game works like this: There’s a mystery, a set of suspects, a list of clues, and a murdered character. The GM is admonished not to start the session with a preconception about which suspect is the real murderer. That’s determined through play.

The clues are deliberately vague. They might say, for example: muddy boots in the wrong place, a perfumed love letter, a shattered award, a revised will. That’s all the PCs get.

The idea is that the players collect these vague clues and, when they feel ready to accuse a suspect, craft a murder narrative out of them, then roll the dice. Plus one for each clue the players find a way to use in their narrative. A successful roll means you’ve found the killer. A failed roll, oops.

Honestly, I was iffy about this game when I first read it. It sounded less like solving a mystery and more like creating one. Is that really what players want?

The verdict, for my family at least, is abso-fucking-lutely. I really could not have predicted how much they would love Theorizing about the murder and the murder suspects. They do it so much and so enthusiastically that I have to remind them to play the game once in a while. Talk to suspects. Gather clues.

Weirdly, this continues a long-standing trend for me. Games that seem like something I wouldn’t like become absolute favorites, while games I’m enthusiastic to try miss me somehow.

Anyway, I’d call BB a hit.

Speaking of mysteries, Veronica Mars (the TV series) has popped up on Netflix. It’s one of my favorite shows. If you decide to sit down and watch it (and you should) keep in mind that there’s a movie between seasons 3 and 4.

It’s a 20-some year old show, but it has great characters, the story really moves, and it’s highly recommended.

(The links above are DriveThruRPG affiliate links.)

A Very Bad Month

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Okay.

So.

I need to update everyone on where things stand for me, why I have made almost no progress on the new novel in the past month, and how things are looking for the future. 

What I don’t want to do is go into any real depths about my wife or what she’s going through, except to say this:

On Oct 21st, my wife was taken by ambulance to the Harbourview Medical Center Emergency Room.

The only thing I want to say about the incident that put her in that ambulance is that the street infrastructure in the United States is a travesty.

However, i have been running around like a chicken with his head cut off ever since. I spent several days bussing back and forth to the hospital while her injuries were assessed and her surgery prepped. I helped her get home and get set up here. I make sure she gets around okay. There are meals to be made and cleaning to do, and she is working to get to a place where she can do more things on her own, but that time isn’t soon.

I’m lucky to have my son here to help. Very lucky. Still, my own health is not exactly fantastic. I am fucking exhausted and I hurt most of the day. I do my best to keep my spirits up for her sake, but I barely have the energy for reading or watching movies lately.

Weirdly, doom-scrolling seems to be the way I reset when my body and mind feel overdone. That can’t be healthy, but it can’t be denied, either.

Which is my way of saying that I’m not making very much progress on the final book in the Twenty Palaces series. Some, but not a lot

Turns out that it’s hard to focus when I’m sitting on the couch, thinking how close I came to becoming a widower. 

In truth, I’m lucky. Her injuries are bad but they could be worse. Her attitude is ferocious and she is determined to recover. She’s knowledgable about anatomy/muscle function and is taking her rehab seriously. Her PT and doctors have to reign her in when what she’d love to be doing is keep pushing pushing pushing her range of motion, balance, and muscle redevelopment. She’s going to work hard and I’m going to help her.

But that means I skipped this year’s post about great horror movies I watched at Halloweentime. I just haven’t had the heart to watch horror. I’m barely making any headway in the book I’m reading. I don’t sleep well. My legs ache all the time. And the woman I love has all those same things going on and more, so it’s on me to make things better for her, if I can.

To wrap up, my wife has started cheering for me when I take time to work. And I must work, desperately. She’s been the majority breadwinner in our home since the pandemic hit, and while we still have a little bit of the money from that long ago advance for Child of Fire, honestly, this looks like trouble. 

Real trouble. 

Whle we’re not at the point where we’re desperate for a way to cover this month’s rent, that time might be coming. So, if you have ever enjoyed my work, please consider joining my Patreon, or maybe buying a few copies of my books to give away. 

If you can’t do that, placing a request with your library system to carry my work would be greatly appreciated. So is simply posting a review of a book you liked on an online bookstore.

Things are getting back to normal, slowly, and I expect to steal a long block of time to work on that final Ray Lilly book starting Friday, but I do need a bit of help to get through, if you can.

Okay. I need to go back to the kitchen and work on tomorrow’s (much reduced) Turkey Day celebration. And even though we’ll be doing with less this year, I have so much more to be grateful for than I ever have. 

Thanks for reading this far, and thanks for your help, if you can provide it. 

Followup to the end of Netflix DVDs

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Friday was the last day Netflix was sending out discs, and that morning I found an email in my inbox saying thanks and goodbye and use this link if you want to download your queue, history, ratings, reviews, etc.

Which I did, obviously.

Some of the discs I’d planned to get from Netflix would be available at my local library, so I could keep up my plan to make Film Friday a thing. (Confession: the day before yesterday was Friday and I forgot to postpone our shows to watch one. Derp.)

Also, looking through my history shows a weird randomness that sort of baffles me now. At the beginning of 2022:

  • Morning Glory
  • Spider-Man: No Way Home
  • Alice in Wonderland (2010)
  • Flee (2021)
  • Venom: Let There Be Carnage
  • The Lure
  • All About Eve
  • The Illusionist
  • Last Night in Soho
  • Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
  • Beauty and the Beast (1946)
  • Ghostbusters: Afterlife
  • Stillwater
  • No Time to Die
  • Munich

That is a genuine mix of shit and shine, plus a few interesting failures and reasonably enjoyable entertainments. I mean, I used to curate (fingerquotes: “curate”) this list via online recommendation and vague ideas about stuff my wife would enjoy, and while I’ve hit more than I missed, I have definitely missed now and again.

The Venom sequel is there because she liked the first one (I didn’t). The Ghostbusters movie annoyed my son so much that he walked out of the room and refused to watch anything with us for more than a year. I got angry with my wife because she chuckled at Beauty and the Beast, as though the 1940s-era special effects made it a kind of an adorable school play. And Bad Luck Banging… was highly recommended but we just couldn’t stand to watch so much footage of a woman walking down a crowded, ugly street.

But that’s me focusing on the bad experiences, as I so often do.

According to my account summary, I rated 890 movies and shows, which put me in the top 10% of subscribers. I also wrote out eight actual reviews, which put me in the top 30%. Only eight reviews! Maybe if I’d written three more I’d be in the top five percent.

And while I’ve rated more discs than I borrowed, there’s some stuff in there that I do not remember at all. For instance, I gave one star to Karate-Robo Zaborgar, a movie that I’m absolutely certain I’ve never even heard of before today. 

But in the process of Googling about it, I’ve found a bunch of other movies by the same director that might be fun to look up. Gothic Lolita Battle Bear might cause actual brain damage, but it sounds like a laugh.

The section I keep returning to is the history, though. I stumbled onto the long section where we borrowed a couple seasons of Veronica Mars, which my son liked very much. It was the first time he ever scolded me for liking the one season more than another.

Also, there was his enthusiasm for The Middleman, and his dismay when he realized it hadn’t been renewed.

And I can still remember the sound of his laugh when The Dude said, “Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”

And my wife, who always put a high premium on watching movies that were full of beauty, absolutely fell in love with Tarsem Singh’s The Fall the very next week, which was followed by Tampopo.

It’s not necessarily about Netflix’s dvd service itself, but glancing back through the history reminded me of our family history. At least, the part we spent in the living room, watching old movies and TV shows.

If you have an account, I recommend downloading your file.

Tech Hell

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Fun things for Christmas: To video Giftmas morning and all the opening of the presents, only to have that video be borked beyond repair.

The SD card in the camera became full, so I downloaded it to the desktop, then deleted everything on the card. Immediately after, I got a message from PHOTO saying some files were corrupted and couldn’t be viewed.

Had I stopped the import before it was finished? (It LOOKED finished). Were the files recoverable from my SD card?

One $20 app later, I undeleted everything I could from the card and saved it to my drive. Unfortunately, none of the recovered files (I tried twice) are viewable. The video “type” is unrecognized (they’re avi files) and the jpeg photos “have no metadata.” Neither can be imported into my Photo library and neither can be viewed at all.

Late last night I made another small video to make sure it works. It does. I have no idea why or how I lost my Christmas video for 2016, but I suspect it’s my fault and this bullshit year keeps getting worse. Watch this be the year I keel over dead and because of my own stupidity my family doesn’t even have a record of our last Christmas (which is not a thing I can say to them but I’m thinking about it).

Anyway, that sucks. All advice on restoring those files gratefully received through LJ or social media.

Want to see the cover for the German edition of The Way into Chaos? (train trip wrapup)

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I should have written this post last week I guess, but I returned from vacation and landed with both feet on the run. I’m working hard on One Man again, and making good progress. Homeschooling is on again. My wife has a computer station I need to set up. My niece, who has been housesitting for us so kindly while we’ve been taking trips, is having a birthday.

So I haven’t really had time to write an in-depth report on the 30-day train vacation I just took. Here’s the short version: It was great to see family. It was great to see friends. I was lucky enough to eat a bunch of regional foods: jambalaya in New Orleans, pepper steaks in Philly, Italian beef sandwiches in Chicago. Splashing around in the ocean in Miami was fantastic, and so was seeing the monuments on the National Mall in Washington DC.

And then there were the long, quiet moments with my family on the train. Sometimes we played games, or read, or talked with other passengers. Sometimes we just stared out the window.

Sleeping was a bigger challenge than I’d expected and those east coast trains carry more people than this Seattleite is used to, but it was a beautiful trip with a lot of family time, and that’s what I wanted.

We also stopped in at every bookstore we could find, but none of my books were on the shelves. It’s just been too long, and I need to finish this one asap.

Speaking of which, the German edition of The Way into Chaos has come out, and I like the cover. Check it out.

Brief trip update

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As I write this, I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Chicago. Last Wed, the 13th, my family boarded a morning train and arrived in Sacramento about 6am the next morning. We ate a (too-) big breakfast at a place nearby, then caught the California Zephyr to Denver.

We took a lot of amazing pics from the train (check my Twitter account for them) and arrived in Denver just in time for a spring snowfall of about eight inches. Things were so overcast that we didn’t get to see the mountains. We stayed at the home of a friend of mine, a guy I’ve known for more than 30 years, and spent most of our time hanging out and talking.

It was great. Also, the weird food reactions I get were much reduced there, which helped convince my wife that many of our nagging but minor health problems were related to our apartment/the city of Seattle.

Now we’re in Chicago. We ate German food and had an Italian beef sandwich–exactly as good as we’d heard. Now we’re resting before we catch a night train to Boston.

No lie, it’s been more difficult to get the sleep I need on the train than expected, and this is only the first week. Luckily, after Boston we have several days of very short trips. Maybe we can catch up.

Otherwise, it’s been great.

And away we go! Off on our train trip

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I scheduled this to post at about the time of our departure, so when you read this, I will have said goodbye to the relative who’ll be watching our apartment, ridden the bus to the King St. Station, boarded a train, and begun my 30-day family tour of the country.

I don’t know how much connectivity I’ll have so I don’t know how often I’ll be able to check my LJ friends page, Twitter, Facebook, etc. If I don’t note some important event in your life, it’s not that I don’t care. It could be that I’m in the middle of the Rockies with no connectivity.

Also, I have an iPhone (borrowed–thanks, Jeff!) so I hope to tweet pictures of our adventures. Give me a follow if you want to see.

In the meantime…

Wish us luck!

The Long Train Trip

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Today I picked up the USA Rail Passes for my family and myself. The short description, for those who have not clicked that link: With a pass, you get to travel for a set number of days to anywhere in the US. We have a 30-day pass, which means we get 12 “segments.” Get on the train, get off the train, that’s one segment. We get 12 of them to use in 30 days to go anywhere we like.

It’s my birthday present, delayed from last summer because I wan’t sure how much money we’d have after Uncle Same came around for his share of last years book sales.

Can I take a moment to say “Thank you,” to everyone who bought a copy of my books, and “Thank you very much” to everyone who helped spread the word? We wouldn’t be doing this without you.

Anyway, we have a set list of cities to visit, mainly to see family and friends. Denver, Chicago, Boston, NY, Philly, Washington DC, Miami, New Orleans. I think that’s the list.

Most of our time in these places will be catching up with old friends, hanging w/ family, or being tourists. I won’t be meeting online friends or readers on this trip, because there just won’t be time. We’ll be spending, like, a day in each of these places. Maybe two. Philly gets three because that’s where my family is and I haven’t seen any of them in a dozen years. My son was a toddler the last time we visited; now he’s a teenager.

Did I mention that this is a birthday present for me? We’re spending 30 days together, and if you add together all of the segments (none of which will be longer than 30 hours, I think, until the leg home) they come to about 10 days out of the 30.

That’s a lot of time to spend on trains. If we were flying, we would probably spend 4 days tops, including TSA checkins. We’d have more time in the cities, seeing folks, maybe even visiting a few bookstores. So why the trains?

Well, for me, the time spent on the train is the whole point. We’re together, without TVs, or internet. We can’t retreat to various bedrooms, have no chores to spend our time on. All we can do is hang out together, talking, playing card games, reading, or just being family.

As I mentioned above, my son is a teenager now. He turned 14 last winter, and he’s almost too old to go jaunting around the country with his dorky parents. Not quite too old, because we mostly get along pretty well, but he’s starting to suffer from the stormy teenage temperament, and he can be a bit of a pill.

Still, we have a good relationship. I’m pleased to be hanging with him, and I’m always pleased to spend time with my wife.

Plus, we’ll get to see the Rocky Mountains, travel through the southwest, and Florida, and the eastern seaboard, and we’ll visit the National Mall and Freedom Tower, eat po’ boys, walk on Boston Commons, snorkle, and who knows what else.

Maybe I’ll even get to finish this damn book.

Anyway, on Sunday I’ll be at ECCC signing books, and the following Wednesday I’ll be hopping the Coast Starlight for some intense family time. If I won’t get to see you on the trip, I’m sorry. Hopefully, I’ll sell a shit ton more books and we’ll get to do it again soon.