the wife

I’m not going to be around much today

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The family is heading out to the Apple store and Barnes & Noble so my technophobic wife can test drive some ereaders. She won’t like them, I already know it, but what the hell, right? I get to check them out, too. What I really suspect will happen is that my son will fall in love the the iPad and want one for himself, and that’ll get him off my damn computer every day.

Frankly, we’re more likely to come home with a bag of books than a gadget.

(And yeah, I though the iPad 2 was going to drop yesterday, not tomorrow. My wife doesn’t care about size, cameras or gyroscopes, though–she plans to be disappointed by it no matter what.)

Update: My son tells us that we will also be visiting The Gap so he can buy some new Tshirts.

Me: “All right, son. If you want to, we’ll take a look. Is this about a girl? It’s totally cool if it is.”

Son: “No. I just don’t want to look ramshackle.”

Me: “God dammit! If you’re going to be a member of this family, you’re going to look ramshackle!”

Followed by much laughing. Considering the glasses frames he chose (kinda fancy), the shoes he likes and the pants he asks his mom to make, it’s pretty clear that he’s going to be a dress-up person. It’s like Alex Keaton being born to hippie parents.

No cell phone

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I often talk about how I don’t have a cell phone, and this morning demonstrates why. My son had a problem with a piece of software I bought for him, and damn if he didn’t throw a fit at me like I’m his personal tech support. When I had an office job I routinely got personal tech support calls from home–long, involved conversations in which I had to say things like “What do you see in the upper left corner of the screen?” and “Don’t pound the keyboard!” while sitting at my desk.

This is why I don’t have a cell phone; if my family wants to struggle with the computer, let them. Either they’ll learn on their own or they’ll do something else with their time. But constantly calling me to explain the same things over and over? No.

It might be different if there were other people who called me occasionally, but there aren’t. And I’m okay with that.

Game night

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Inspired by James Nicoll’s regular D&D posts, I thought I’d write up the session of Truth & Justice I just GM’ed. I’m doing it now because it’s late and I’ll forget if I wait until tomorrow.

Truth & Justice is a superhero paper-and-dice rpg. The heroes were:

  • Pressure, a gadgeteering scientist with the ability to control air pressure. The player is a 9yo boy.
  • The Black Monkey, a primate scientist, engineer, window-washer who was bitten by a monkey that he himself irradiated and who can now transform himself into a big, bulky human with a monkey tail, except that his eyes are glowing green and his body is a silhouette. Powers: Super-strength, -agility, -speed. The player is a 9yo boy.
  • Shait, a 12-year old daughter of archaeologists who is possessed by the spirit of the goddess of the Nile/flooding season/all water everwhere (courtesy of a shabbily-researched web site. If the GM had known they were looking up mythological figures, he would have advised them not to rely on a site with green text on a black background). Powers: Super-armor, Immortality, Water Control. The player is a middle-aged woman and non-gamer.

The player running The Black Monkey had never played any kind of rpg before, which put him one session behind Shait’s player and two behind Pressure’s. The session started where the previous had left off: Pressure had slipped out of his university lab and Shait had climbed out the window of a fleeing school bus and had defeated a villain called Nemesis. They were standing over the unconscious body when Black Monkey ran up, too late to join the fight.

Introductions were made, and Shait informed the other two that she was a goddess searching for lost relics. She also informed them that they would be helping her in this task. Despite their inexperience with gaming, I thought the expressions on their faces pretty closely matched the expressions the adult male characters they were playing would have. Sirens approached and all three left the scene, confident the police would be able to contain the villain.

Shait, of course, discovered that her school bus was long gone, having fled the appearance of a super-villain. She rolled well, found a discarded transfer and took a city bus back to her school. Her parents were called and she was grounded. The life of a pre-teen superhero is never easy, and it was going to get worse. Continue reading

How about that.

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My wife has an imdb page of her own. (No, I won’t link to it.)

She’s so much cooler than I am.

“He couldn’t take the PRESSURE!”

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So! Chad Underkoffler read my books, liked them and contacted me through Twitter to ask if I wanted a free copy of an rpg he designed: Truth & Justice.

Now, while I am usually too uncomfortable to accept free things from people, this is a superhero game we were talking about, so I bucked up, said “Yes,” and dl’ed my copy.

I should mention that I used to game all the time. Back in Philly and when I lived in L.A., I gamed pretty much once a week, like any self-respecting gamer. Personally, I like horror and superhero games, but maybe you already guessed that about me.

In Seattle, not so much. My wife is not interested in gaming at all and I just didn’t have the time to find/make friends to create a new group. (I still don’t, really). But that’s why we have kids.

My son, looking over my shoulder as I downloaded the files, started to become a tad excited. We had tried gaming once before: When he was about…6? 7? and really into Scooby Doo, I designed a kid-friendly Chill adventure for him. It was basically a haunted house without a lot of actual danger.

He loved it. His favorite part was at the end, where I showed him the drawn-out house with the key numbers written inside, and the second page with the description of each room. He looked up at me with eyes as big as golf balls, and he said the 11 words I’d been dreading: “Dad, now I’m going to make up an adventure for YOU!”

What followed was two and a half hours of the most random, incomprehensible adventure I’ve ever played. Continue reading

The David Lynch movie of cheeses

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Last night (date night!) I ate the David Lynch movie of cheeses. It didn’t taste good, not at all, but there were so many flavors going on and they were so complex that I was fascinated. I mean, yeah, chief among those flavors was Old Feet and French Armpit, but there were others, too, and I kept picking up new one. I can’t say I enjoyed it, but it was compelling enough that I ate my full share.

Don’t ask what it was, though. There were no labels, and even if there were (and they came in the shape of the cheese’s country of origin, with little pictures of the dairy animal the milk came from and phonetic spellings of the name) I still wouldn’t remember the name.

The rest of date night was terrific–my wife and I wandered around our neighborhood shops–sampling wine at one place (and buying a nice bottle of port), sampling desserts at another, browsing the little local bookstore. Fun.

And even before that, I had a full day of work on the Project I Can Not Yet Discuss. (Everyone has a Sekrit Project–I want something of my own) Today will be more of the same. Lots of revisions to handle and I’m already getting a late start.

Mac Freedom… Engage!

Movie and book

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Last… spring, I guess? my wife, son, and I went to the movies and, before the film, saw a preview for Harry Potter 7, part one. My son turned to me and said “I want to see that.”

“You can’t. You haven’t read the book yet.”

He hadn’t been interested at all in Harry Potter until then, but that was all the urging he needed. Later that week we pulled book 1 down off the shelf and read them aloud in the evenings. Most evenings, anyway.

I’d forgotten how funny those early books were. Sometimes we were laughing so hard that the reader had to put the book down until we’d composed ourselves. And, somewhere in book 4, he became sick of it and we had to drag him back in.

We finished the last book today. My wife cried during several of the final chapters, especially “The Prince’s Tale,” “The Forest Again,” and “King’s Cross.” I don’t know what anyone else thinks, but whatever Rowling’s other faults, she wrote the hell out of “The Forest Again”. That chapter is one serious kick in the ass.

SPOILERS for the series.

I can’t help but wonder how much behind the scenes information the filmmakers had from Rowling. There’s a scene near the end of movie 3 in which Lupin transforms into a werewolf and Snape steps in front of the three kids. It’s clearly a brave, heroic move, and nothing at all what you’d expect from a true Death Eater.

The situation doesn’t even come up in the book; Snape is still unconscious when Lupin changes (the whole werewolf scene is quite different). They also telegraph the romantic relationship between Ron and Hermione much earlier.

Anyway, the books were terrific this second time around–very satisfying. I know a lot of people hated Harry around book 5, but I couldn’t help but see him as suffering the after-effects of Cedric Diggory’s murder. My wife, who never reads fiction (except mine), really loved the books, too.

As for the new movie, the animated story of the three brothers was the best part, but the movie wasn’t terribly by any means. The three leads have matured nicely as actors, and they managed to introduce several necessary but film-neglected characters smoothly. None of it had the thrills or the hopelessness of the books, but it worked on its own.

This whole series deserves a more in-depth post, but it’s late and I’m sleepy. Considering everything that’s been going on, I’m not seeing myself putting together an real analysis of the books, the films, or the changes that happened in adaptation.

Five things make a post

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1) My wife just finished making an animation station for my son, and she’s currently working on a tall, narrow “standing desk” for me to use at home. She rocks.

2) If I owe you an email, please be patient. I’m having issues with it for the moment.

3) There’s fantastic news going on that I can’t really talk about. Not until some things are finalized. ::crosses fingers::

4) There’s some other news I can’t quite talk about yet that is only partially good. Again, I need to clarify some stuff before I’m ready to share, but share I will. Watch this space.

5) As of 2006 in the U.S.A. less than two percent of households earned above $250,000. That’s less than two percent of all households, not individuals. If your home brings in a quarter million dollars a year, you qualify as upper class. You’re wealthy. Embrace this truth.

Date night

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Last night was “date night”, the biweekly ritual in which my wife and I suddenly realize, at about three in the afternoon, that our regularly scheduled baby sitter will be there in an hour and a half and what the hell are we doing to do together all on our own?

My wife wasn’t keen on yet another restaurant trip and I couldn’t blame her. Instead we went to the Henry Art Museum in the U District: The PanOptos exhibit was pretty damn cool. This is one of the photos I took. I’m not sure why, except that I like the imperfections.

And James Turrell’s Skyscape sculpture, Light Reign, was wonderful (and I immediately tried to think of a way to build it in Minecraft, which only shows you what a saddo I am). I would have spent much longer in there if it hadn’t been so chilly (it’s installed in the courtyard).

Dinner came immediately after (and, since we had it in the U. District, the less said about it the better) and then we hopped over to the UW Bookstore to catch Cherie Priest’s reading of Bloodshot. I’m dubious about vampires, but her excerpt sounded pretty good, and when she talked about the book afterward she tempted me even more. Still, vampires. Hmm.

From there we took the crosstown bus to Ballard for dessert in a nice Italian place we found. My wife’s cannoli (she loves cannoli) had a chocolate coating on the shell, unfortunately, but my tiramasu was pretty dang good. Then it was home to watch the Lego animation my son had worked on.

In short, fun. And of course we spent a good deal of time talking about Important Things. For instance, we have a trip to Lisbon that we’ve been wanting to take forever, but when I bring it up it turns into a flight to Amsterdam, then a train trip to London, followed by a tour through Barcelona and Madrid and finally…

Me, I just want to go to Lisbon and check it out (we have family there). My wife thinks she’s being restrained because she’s ready to put off Paris and Rome until the next go ’round.

On top of that, I’ll be going to Readercon this summer (Hello, convention-going people. I’ll be at Readercon this July. If you’ll be there too, please introduce yourself. It’ll be my first sf convention and I’m not entirely sure how I’ll do). For my wife, this is a chance for all three of us to fly out early and check out historical sites. While I’m at the con, she and the boy would tour around the city, learning about the American Revolution and so on.

Nevermind that I’d miss out on those tours. Nevermind also that she’d like to immediately fly from Boston to Amsterdam, etc. Jeez, give that woman a transcontinental flight and she takes a month-long international jaunt.

The obligatory Turkey Day post

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The pies have been made, the dishwasher has been unloaded, loaded and then run again, the coffee has brewed, and it’s snowing. Thanksgiving! (for Americans, at least) Me, I’m about to go do today’s pages before I get together with the family for cooking, eating and watching some old movie (up this year: Errol Flynn’s THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD–and didn’t my 8yo roll his eyes when he saw that DVD cover.)

But it’s a time to take note of those things we’re thankful for. Me, I’m a guy who thinks about thankfulness and gratitude all year long; in a sense, I obsess over it. I’m always measuring my debt to those who are kind to me or who love me, and I’m constantly trying to pay back. However, today is a day when those feelings are normal, so I’m going to indulge, especially since I have something new to add this year.

First I’m thankful for my family. Nothing is ever going to trump that. If aliens came down in space ships and gave the world free energy machines, pills that heal knee injuries, and cameras that never took a picture of a politician with their mouth closed, I’d still be more amazed that my wife not only puts up with me and all my craziness, but agreed to have our child.

But for the first time I have something new to add to the list. Maybe I should have said this last year, but I was still kinda dizzy from publishing that first novel. I’m thankful for all the folks who read my books, enjoy them, and recommend them to their friends. It’s a tough economy right now, and a lot of new series are struggling or have already been cancelled. The Twenty Palaces books still have a chance to continue, though, and that’s because the readers have been so great.

So thank you for reading and spreading the word.

The menu for today is pretty traditional: Filling but unhealthy breakfast, then cut vegetables with dip, along with pickles and such. For dinner: brined turkey, sausage stuffing (I ground the sausage myself), giblet gravy, mashed potatoes, roast asparagus, cranberry sauce, honey-glazed onions. If I’m lucky, the boy will try–just try–the turkey and cranberry sauce. We also have some nice wines to enjoy after dinner with Errol and sweet potato and/or apple pie.

And finally! I’m am thankful to the guys at Wyrd and all the folks doing great work on the book trailer. And because I can’t resist, one more image. This time, it’s not a photo taken on set; it’s an actual frame grab from one of the shots, showing Ray throwing his ghost knife.

Frame grab--Ray throwing ghost knife

Damn. Now that’s Ray Lilly.