My wife is having a great time in Italy (I just received a pic of her standing beside the Mediterranean with mud all over her).
My son has promised a Nerf gun sneak attack this morning. I know he wants me to set up a large defense, but I’ve been a little busy.
I am working on my new WIP, and I’m sorta hating it. When I have it open, and I’m working in the file, it’s good. When I’m making breakfast or putting away dishes, I don’t want anything to do with it.
In two and a half hours, the shuttle van will be coming to pick up my wife for her week-long trip to Italy. She’ll be gone about a week and a half, and I will be staying home with my son.
There will be much writing time claimed, much pizza eaten (and salad) and some small amount of computer games played. I hope to clear the final level of Swordplay Showdown.
By which I mean that I’ll be checking email, but not doing a lot of internet reading/socializing. At least, I don’t think I will.
Have a great weekend, everyone.
(Oh, and I did a “Take Five” piece for Suvudu. It’s funny. Check it out.
Game of Cages is officially on the bookstore shelves (or in your hot little hands) and I can move on with my life. Maybe.
For instance, my father-in-law took one glance at the Lego guns my son has been building, and he insisted my wife take photos of them. Like this:
or
There’s more at the Flickr set.
Needless to say, I suspect we’ll be visiting Brickcon this fall.
Last night we had a surprise baby-sitter[1], which means it was date-night with my wife. We had a terrific dinner at Palermo’s in Ballard, did a little boring shopping, then walked around the neighborhood having an actual uninterrupted conversation.
It was nice, even if I was a little distracted. I’ll admit that I’m stressed about the release of Game of Cages and we talked about that quite a bit.
You know what? I am no damn fun at all. Other writers dance around and get giddy when their books come out. All that hard work finally coming to fruition, right? But all I do is fret.
I so very much need to get over this. I’d really like to be a person who was easy-going and optimistic, but damn, that just isn’t my response.
Comments are turned off because sympathetic or encouraging responses make me uncomfortable.
[1] How I define “surprise”: We scheduled the date with her and then got so wrapped up in our lives that we forgot she was coming over.
Last weekend my wife, son and I drove out of the city (in a rented car! Luxury!) to see a natural formation that’s unique in the world: The Channelled scablands of central Washington. Great name, huh? For those of you who don’t know about the scablands, Dry Falls and Lake Missoula, here’s a quick ‘n’ dirty explanation: Thirteen thousand years ago during the end of the last ice age, much of Montana was covered by a body of water we now call Lake Missoula. Ice dammed a river valley in Idaho, creating a body of fresh water larger than several of the Great Lakes.
You won’t be surprised to hear that eventually, the ice melted, the water broke through the dam, and the largest flood ever in the history of our planet was unleashed. Over the course of three days, a 300-ft-deep flood raced across Idaho, Washington and into Oregon as it raced to the sea. The effects of this flood are still most prevalent in the central Washington area near Grand Coulee. There was a Nova program that covered this: Mystery of the Megaflood, but it doesn’t appear to be one of the shows they offer for free online. Maybe you can borrow it from the library, like we did.
What this means is that, out in the desert of central WA, are the effects of floods of water writ large. You know the ripples you see in sand when waves flow over them? Well, look at the land formation above this small town:
Those gigantic humps are marks of the flood. Crazy, isn’t it?
More below the cut, including Dry Falls, an ice age waterfall ten times larger than Niagra Falls. Continue reading
I’m trying to get a package together for my agent (sample chapters and selling synopsis, basically) and sweet mole sauce, have I been struggling. The last couple of months have been stressful–I don’t need to review, do I? Good.–and my daily word counts have been small. Now that I’m in the revision phase, I’m finding all sorts of repetitive and contradictory stuff in there. Characters are introduced twice, the protagonist discusses a clue with a character then decides to hide the info from him 50 pages later, the protagonist is confused by changes to a building he said he’d never seen before.
It’s a damn dirty mess. I really need to work faster on these early drafts, if only to save myself time and effort during revisions.
Anyway, I picked up a bunch of weird books at a yard sale today, and I’ll be slipping out of the library as soon as I dig up a movie for the family to watch tonight. We have a big afternoon of de-cluttering planned, although it remains to be seen which family members will be willing to get rid of some of their belongings (me) and which will not (them). Wish me luck.
My family is reading the Harry Potter series right now. We’re on the second book, and we’re reading it aloud to each other.
I did not remember how funny these books are. Maybe it’s just the difference between hearing them aloud and in my head, but we have been laughing and laughing throughout. Rowling really has a feel for broad characters and light comedy.
It’s fun!
Yesterday we planned to go to the beach, hit the library and head downtown to watch SORCERER’S APPRENTICE. The weather report promised us that the day would be mostly cloudy, leading to a drizzle at the end of the day. Being Seattle-ites, we headed to the beach anyway. Being Seattle, the day turned clear and beautiful. And me without my sunscreen.
We played Frisbee golf (more like Frisbee putt putt), built driftwood shelters on the beach, took photographs at low tide, (Oh, look! a bald eagle in flight!:
The full but rather small set is on flickr here. ) ate a picnic, dropped off and picked up books at the library, then… the movie!
Non-spoiler version: Fun but unsatisfying. Nic Cage was better than he’s been in a big-budget film in a while and Jay Baruchel really sells the nerdy hero character he’s signed up for. But while individual scenes and sequences are a lot of fun, the movie as a whole doesn’t add up. Like too many films that involve stopping bad guys from casting a world-ending spell, it feels like watching a game of Calvinball where everyone goes home before the end.
SPOILER VERSION: Sorry, but this got long Continue reading
1) Time for a yay! I’ll be doing another Big Idea essay at the end of August, this time for GAME OF CAGES. Yay! This time I’m going to write a little bit about pets and pet-owners. You guys know how I feel about pets, right? I’m sure many of the people who read it are going to suspect I’m an alien infiltrator, but I swear it ain’t true.
2) I have a huge disorganized jumble of odd books at home. Why, you ask? Because I’m going to be giving them away. They’re all out of my father-in-law’s collection (with his blessing), and they range from ethnic joke books with blank spaces where the ethnicity would go (“You supply the ethnic!”), to stacks of old Archie comics, to old-time erotic photography (now with more bodystockings!), to other, odder books. As the big event, I’ll be giving away this puppy. That’s right, folks. Watch this space.
One question: should I bother with contests? Or just pretend to choose people at random?
Anyway, those books shouldn’t be in a jumble, but they are, because…
3) I spent a good portion of last night tidying my desk so the new printer will fit. My laser printer has stopped working since my Qwest troubles caused me to reinstall my operating system. The Australian print drivers I’d installed seem to have been wiped, and I wasted a bunch of time looking for working replacements. Grr. Way to not support Mac OS, Samsung! I hate you now. Add to that a phone conference about the book trailer for Man Bites World, and I find that…
4) I have a lot of housework to do tonight. Vacuuming, dishes, tidying, recycling, not to mention a quick shopping run for my wife and son’s comfort foods because…
5) Tonight my wife and son come home. They will both need a lot of attention, and I have to say I’m excited to see them. I don’t do very well when my family isn’t around.
She was a good person and I liked her. I’m not going to talk much more about it than that.