Eagles Over the Kennebec

Spent the first part of the weekend reading through the first hundred pages of Longeye. Found the place where the story-so-far wobbled, and unkinked it, then added some new words. Did the interview in Second Life, in which technology again asserted its superiority over the rolannis of this world, and! I did some filing before the pile fell off the top of the file cabinet and killed somebody. Also found time to watch Arsenic and Old Lace, which I had not previously seen. Let me just say? I adore Aunt Abby.

Those few things accomplished, I look up to find that it's Sunday evening, a school night, so I cannot stay up until two a.m. writing. Or, I could. But it wouldn't be pretty, tomorrow. Oh, my, no...

Snow called for Monday night and snow and ice on Tuesday. Didn't we do that last week?


Progress on Longeye:

30462 / 100000 words.
30% done!

The first surprise is that the German editions of the first three Liaden Universe® books are up for preorder at Amazon.de. Reserve your copy now of Der Agent und die Söldnerin, Eine Frage der Ehre, and Gestrandet auf Vandar. Nice art. Interesting spaceships. I note that Shan does not appear as a sabertooth tiger with a fondness for high-tech explosive devices. This is a Good Thing.

The second surprise is that I now have a MySpace page. I know, I know, a bunch of y'all have been insisting for Some Time that I get my act over to MySpace, but, yanno, Life, and also a chapter a week without fail for manymany weeks. We have the fact that my brain went boom! in the middle of the chapter scheduled to be written this weekend to thank for my getting on the stick with this.

Another book surprise -- the Ace edition of Crystal Soldier is out!

And for the final (Ghod willing) surprise on the weekend: Kit Jimenez accidentally "took" her house back into inventory, whereupon she needed to quicksnatcheverythingelseback! too, to prevent them from raining down upon the blameless landscape. Sigh.

On the bright side, I have an AWESOME dress to wear to the Talis Portal on Info Island next Sunday, March 11, at noon, Second Life time. kinzel and I (it says here) will be discussing the whys behind our first, second, and third forays into electronic media, and how demand has changed since we started publishing BPLAN Virtuals Disk-Top ebooks in the late 1980s. Be there or be somewhere else.

Edited To Add: While my muse is off sunning herself in some pleasant clime, ogling the cabana boys and sipping rum through a straw, I updated the Coming Attractions page.

Last night's talk at the Second Life Library went well, I think. Thanks to a thorough exploration of library facilities by Second Lifer Shawna Montgomery, and the quick resurrection of vintage-but-not-quite-deceased equipment from various cache-spots here at the Confusion Factory, the talk was actually a talk, rather than an online chat.

The venue -- the open air theater on Info Island -- was lovely, the event was well-attended, and the audience enthusiastic. We had a great time.

A podcast was made of the talk, and -- thanks to Second Lifer Alexander Basiat and Sam Chupp -- is available for download off of this page.

...you have been warned.

When last we saw Our Heroine, she had purchased a parcel of land and was assiduously making trees. I make good trees. Nothing else, mind you. Just trees. In any case, the fellow next door, who apparently aspires to be known as the Biggest Prick in SL (I'm serious; he has bent all his efforts to producing phalluses, very large; in cammo, black, &c), bought me out for five times what I paid, which was fine by me.

I relocated to Boreal, bought a nice patch of snow, and a house. I took the house back to my land and tried to unpack it.

No go.

I read the instructions (several times), but what I was getting wasn't what was described. After some time of banging my head against this, I IM'd the creator, who teleported over to show me how it was done.

And she tried to get things working -- and they didn't. And again. And again. She finally "gave" me a replacement house, which rezzed -- but without doors, and with a wonky code for the interior teleport tubes.

She worked at trying to make things right for about an hour, appearing things, disappearing things, turning my house on its axis, building several sets of doors from scratch and hanging them -- only to find that they either wouldn't open, or jumped over onto my neighbor's property, or inside the house, or -- just vanished.

And after doing all this impressive, ghoddesslike manipulation, she says to me, "I've got to go do housework." Which was a lovely SFnal moment.

We made a date to get back together later in the evening, and after much more striving -- including me managing to disappear my own house after everything was set (aaaarrrrgh!) -- I am decently housed and very happy with my location.

Which is good, because I am never moving again.