Eagles Over the Kennebec

But today was not that day.

It's been a mixed week -- and not just the weather. Lots of stuff happening behind the scenes, under the desk and in the fourth drawer on the right hand side -- For the love of God, don't open --

*Sigh*

I just painted that wall.

Anyhow, lots of stuff going on, most of which I can't talk about right now. I would appreciate thoughts for a fortunate outcome, if anyone is so inclined. And rest assured that, as soon as it's possible to share whatever news there may be, I will.

In the meantime, two things that I can talk about --

Thing the First

Last night, The Bread Machine, aka the Lexmark Optra T612, through which manymany manuscript pages have passed...Last night, The Bread Machine let out with a horrifying shriek right in the middle of a print job and stopped. On the status screen, in badly broken up letters was the legend: PRINT HEAD ERROR

Um, eep?

Does anyone know what that means/is it fatal?

Thing the Second

Alert readers will remember my deep and abiding desire to acquire a CD of Meg Davis' Captain Jack and the Mermaid. I have now written to billroper and to Meg herself, and have to date received no response from either. So, in the spirit of going to Plan B or C or wherever it is we are now...

Is anyone going to a con sometime soon? If you are and would be willing to execute a commission for me, please drop me a note in private.

Mozart is asleep on the box by my knee, which is comfortable and welcome.

And I need to get back to work.

So, all winter, we not only don't have winter, we hardly have any snow.

Until we're scheduled to be on the road.

To wit:

.. Potential for a major noreaster to hit southern and western
Maine and all of New Hampshire Wednesday and Wednesday night...

Low pressure will develop along the mid Atlantic coast Tuesday
night and currently all indications are suggesting this storm will
intensify rapidly as it moves northeast Wednesday night.

Strong winds would accompany this storm and may become very strong
with wind gusts of over 40 mph late Wednesday and Wednesday night
into Thursday causing significant blowing and drifting. Strongest
winds would occur near the coast.

Q: Where do we catch the train?
A: Portland

Q: Where are we going?
A: Boston

Gah.

Finished up the Unexpected Deep Background segment of Fledgling. I should say, the first Unexpected Deep Background segment. God, She knows, there will be more...

And -- I had meant to blog about this and then forgot because, ummm, I Am A Maroon.

Anyhow...

Thursday evening kinzel and I went to a reception at the campus art museum. This is one of the things I like about working on a college campus. There's always stuff going on, some of it quite odd, but most of it interesting.

In the case of Thursday evening, the stuff included an up-close and personal viewing of the sand mandala under construction in the museum's lower level. Words fail me. Beautiful, vibrant, magical -- OK, magical's good. Also? Unexpected. One thing, for instance, that I hadn't at all expected is that parts of the work -- the jaguars, the mountains, the leaping dolphins -- are three dimensional. I had expected the whole thing to be flat. Silly me.

The work is also poignant, because it's so fleeting. On Friday, the completed painting will be --- swept away.

Edger would be proud.

Onward now to the chores I didn't get done today because I was writing. Happily, I have already made rice for tomorrow's lunch (We have a microwave in the office! that means I can bring a yummy and nutritious lunch of brown rice, left over turkey medallions and broccoli, zap it and be happy! Words cannot express how tired I've gotten of cheese sandwiches.). But. The Mountain of Dishes remains to be done. Best get to that before it achieves sentience...

Edited to add: this link to a photograph of the sand mandala that almost does it justice. Thanks to kinzel for the heads-up.

The cold appears to be in retreat. At least, I can breathe, which has to be counted a Good Thing. Also, I was able to get some work done, arriving this afternoon at the point I had expected to reach last Sunday. Not as Good a Thing, but for'ard progress nonetheless.

One of the days when I was too miserable to move, I lay in bed and listened to NPR, kind of dozing in and out. In this way, I half-heard a talk about ballads, and how the form had traditionally been open source, with every bard and barmaid who sung a particular ballad embroidering and/or altering it as they pleased. Nowadays, the form is no longer open source; we know if a certain ballad was written by Springsteen or Dylan and the song is sung as the writer intended. One of the people in the discussion group allowed as how we had lost some richness in the process, but was inclined to feel that it was more than balanced by our being able to know who the songwriter was, thus gaining All Kinds of Depth and Insight into the Song.

Which, even in my depleted state, was...a shock. I didn't realize that Actual Grownups believe that knowing the artist or writer's background shines the bright light of Discovery upon their work.

After I became less miserable, I graduated to the couch and read. Miss Melville Regrets by Evelyn E. Smith (sadly out of print -- but plenty available on the used book sites) is a hoot and a half -- the story of how a middle-aged society spinster took up the gentle art of assassination.

I'm sorry to say that Thunderbird Falls was not nearly as entertaining. This may have had something to do with the fact that the only character I actually liked got killed. Also? I had a headache.

Am now reading Richard Burton's account of his journey to Mecca, which is fascinating and notable for the absolute clarity of its prose.

And now I'm at the computer, getting ready to swear off for the night, consult with kinzel, and I dunno, do the dishes or something...

Spent most of the day in front of the computer, which was more exciting in the doing than the telling, I fear.

I note that Fledgling is now funded through Chapter 15 and about 35% of Chapter 16.

In another thread keristor asks, How many more chapters are there to go before it is fully funded?.

That's a reasonable question, and you'd think it would be easy to answer. But -- as we say on the information page -- we don't know how many chapters there will be. We can make an educated guess, based on the number of chapters in past books. That guess (stressing the word guess) is 37.

We did not, at all expect this kind of response. We figured we'd put up the first chapter, and there'd be a period of a few weeks while the donations came in, whereupon we would start the process again. Never in our wildest speculations did we think that we'd have almost half the book funded before we'd even begun.

That's just ... wow.

I discover with delight that there is a Gravity Research Foundation monument somewhere on the campus of my about-to-be day-job. Definitely, I must seek out this thing.

I discover with considerably less delight that the weather for Sunday night into Monday is predicted to be -- well, see for yourselves:

Sunday Night: Snow or sleet likely. Snow and sleet accumulation around an inch. Lows in the lower 20s. Light and variable winds...becoming north around 10 mph after midnight. Chance of precipitation 70 percent.

Monday: Snow...possibly mixed with sleet at times. Additional snow accumulation. Highs 25 to 30. Northeast winds around 10 mph in the morning...becoming light and variable. Chance of precipitation 80 percent.

Oh, sure, now we get winter.

Sigh.

Finished the too-long, inarticulate version of the synopsis last night. Man I hate writing synopses (all together now: Awwwwwwww). kinzel is kindly going over it now, pen in hand, and may he strike out much and well.

Paid bills this morning until I ran out of money (um, oops?), and need to make a post office run in a few minutes. This afternoon will no doubt be dedicated to reworking the dern synopsis, so that it and a freshly printed manuscript can be boxed and on the bus to Madame the Agent on Monday.

Then, I get to relax *insert hollow laughter*.

I note that for the second day in a row, it's bright and sunshine-y outside. Is that allowed?

...and here comes kinzel, pages in hand...

...it might take us a bit to actually get them on the air, but hey! That's the kind of home-grown service you can come to expect from a one-woman station broadcasting from the Interior of Maine!

'way back in October difrancis made the following request:

I have always wondered how you and Steve started writing the Liaden stuff
together, and how the early process went and how it goes now.

Steve and I set up housekeeping 'way back before the rocks cooled. He was the elder writer by manymanymany articles, reviews, and stories. I had an extremely active fantasy life, a first place win in the BaltiCon Short Story Contest, and a desk drawer crammed full of 200-500 word "stories" (I don't talk much in Real Life, even less then than now, and hadn't yet figured out that writing isn't anything at all like talking, except when it is).

Very shortly after we got our cats and our books settled into one apartment, a kind friend lent us the use of his beach house for a week. Off we went, full of, um, creative energy, a portable typewriter, Scrabble, and a bottle of Bogg's Cranberry Liqueur among our baggage.

One early morning, as we were finishing up a bottle of Boggs and our third, sixth, or twelfth game of Scrabble, I laid down the word "decat." Steve considered this for a moment, then asked what somebody would have to do in order to be "de-catted." I explained that "decat" was a technical term, used to describe the set of ten beads on a rosary (yes, it's misspelled; this was Scrabble). He accepted the explanation and the word, but the question of what terrible crime would carry the punishment of de-catting stuck. Next morning, I hauled out the portable typewriter and wrote the rough draft of "A Matter of Ceremony," which would become my first published short story.

And that was the murky beginning of our collaboration.

Other collaborations followed, some by accident, like the Kinzel stories; others, like "Candlelight," more deliberately. We got used to bouncing ideas off of each other, and working out the knotty bits as a team.

So it wasn't at all unreasonable or unusual for me, after a day of hard typing and many pages torn from the typer and hurled in the general direction of the trash can, to lay a sheet of paper before Steve on the kitchen table, and say, "I think this is a novel."

On the sheet was a single sentence: The man who was not Terrance O'Grady had come quietly.

Steve considered this awhile, sipping his wine, and eventually allowed as how I was right. Then, he asked me who my character was.

As previously reported, I had brought an active fantasy life with me into the partnership. And it happened that I had worked with two rather dashing characters for many years, and knew them well. So I spent the rest of the night and into the wee hours of the morning telling Steve about Val Con, Miri, and the universe they lived in.

When I ran out of steam, and wine, he said, "I was wrong. It's not a novel. It's seven." Then he got a pad of yellow paper and we right then mapped out the seven stories in the Agent of Change arc. Sometime during that, I left the table for a few minutes to call in sick at my job, and sometime along mid-afternoon, we went to bed.

Next day, I started writing Agent; it took all of a month to finish the first draft, and consumed most of our waking hours. We talked story points in the grocery store, role-played scenes at breakfast, argued motivation in bed.

At one point, I felt we needed to introduce a member of what I called "The Green People," not-very-well-defined characters from my fantasy life whose sole purpose was to speed up the story when things got slow by doing something "alien" and incomprehensible. Steve took that idea, married it to "Honest John," a character of his own who was sore in need of employment, and so the Clutch were born.

We submitted Agent to Ace, where Ginjer took eighteen months to reject it with, "But it's like...John LeCarre in space!" and then to DAW, where it was rejected by return mail, and then to Del Rey, which emitted a Deep and Vasty Silence for a number of months before we got a phone call from Steve Hickman, who had been commissioned to do the cover art, asking if we could send him the rest of the manuscript so he could find out what happened. A couple days later, we got the contract in the mail.

By that time, we'd already finished and submitted Conflict of Honors.

End side one. See you on the flipside

From the Sunday Sentinel's job listings:

Category: General Help
Description: HARD WORK
LONG HOURS.
Earn $150-$300
cash paid daily.
Call Big Dale
(Phone number deleted, 'cause you really don't wanna be calling Big Dale. Trust me.)

You don't usually see this kind of ad in the fall. The carny ad has for years been: HARD WORK. LONG HOURS. MEAN BOSS. But that runs in the spring.


I work at my cousin's place tomorrow, then I have five days off in a row. Therefore, I will be printing off a copy of Carousel Tides today in preparation for a cold read. Will have to straighten the Auxiliary Office, aka the living room sofa, and excavate the Mencken Table. And finish the current project, which is alllllmost there.

Better get crackin'.

...breezy, blue, and bright. A perfect day for a drive, but I'll be good and confine myself to a walk.

In other news, the check, she arrives. And there was much rejoicing.

Also? I am resigned; I will never figure out how to play sudoku.

It's been an exciting few nights for Snuff and Jack, eh? What's odd is -- though I remember the story and what happens therein, I'm surprised by how quickly some elements come on stage. Larry Talbot, for instance. Hadn't expected him for another chapter or two....

kinzel is on his way out to the bank. Me, I've got some SRM work to catch up on before I settle down to write.

The new glasses have arrived, and they are a marvel of lightness and clarity. After forty years of tortoise shell and/or brown frames (to match the hair) these are half-framed in silver (to match the hair). And did I mention light? I hardly know they're on (except that, y'know, I can actually see my hand in front of my face). My glasses used to be quarter inch thick glass weighing approximately three tons; they put grooves on the side of my head, pulled my ears out of alignment, and left bruises on the bridge of my nose.

They're doing wonderful things with plastics, nowadays.

Mozart has been a cuddlecat today. He's taken to jumping into my lap for a cuddle after I've finished eating dinner. Today, I could hardly get him to decamp when it was time to rise and Do Stuff, and when I came back to the computer, he was immediately in my lap, curling himself into an impossibly small curl, for a seventeen pound cat, and slept there while I typed through his whiskers and ruffled pages in his ears, for more than an hour. My lap was numb by the time he stirred, sttttrrrreeeettttccchhhhed, and hopped down to go spend some quality time with the rocking chair.

SRM orders have been filled. Writing has been accomplished. Laundry has been finished. Haven't quite made it to the dishes, yet. That's next on the agenda, I guess.

Progress on the story formerly known as "There's a Star in the East on Christmas Morn"

4,005 / 10,000 (40.1%)

...from which you may deduce that I've been listening to Springsteen's Seeger album.

More and various office stuff accomplished, and other chores according to their needs. kinzel brought home my birthday present -- a gorgeously framed Narbonic strip, surrounded by gerbils. 's beautiful. Now all I need to do is to find a place to hang it.

I remember learning John Henry in elementary school, and weeping with frustration because the music teacher, poor soul, "wouldn't" tell me WHY John Henry had decided to race the steam hammer, knowing that the contest would kill him. She kept saying, "It's just a song, honey," but I knew she was holding out on me, because even I could tell it was a story, and I knew even then that stories tell you WHY.

Adults put up with a lot.

The story, it grows in bits and patches, non-linear. I'm used to that sort of thing when I'm writing a novel, but don't really expect it in a short story. On the other hand, who am I to argue with a system that seems to be working?

Progress on
"There's a Star in the East on Christmas Morn"

3,636 / 10,000 (36.4%)