Paksworld

I got back from San Antonio in good shape–the weather going down qualified as Interesting, and the weather coming back easily made the category Delightful.  The Toe is much better.    The FYE Conference was fascinating, and I met a lot of people from colleges and universities all over the country.  Random House sends a big team promoting its “common read” and “FYE read” books.    A small group of writers are given exposure to the faculty and staff who choose the books for freshmen to read, or the whole college to read.   Since The Speed of Dark has been used that way, I’m now on their radar.  I was the only fiction writer (of five) and the only woman.   Felt kind of odd, and very unlike an SF convention (where were the Klingons??   Well…there were Romulans on Star Trek on TV last night) but I had fun.

And tomorrow is the Big Day.  My Silver Book Anniversary (so to speak.)    Among the other writers were National Book Award winners  (wow!) but I had them outnumbered, if not surrounded.     Tired now, and waiting to hear back from the hotel if they found what I left in the room (and I haven’t left anything in a hotel room in…um…I can’t think when was the last time.)   Worst is that it was my favorite writing-on-a-trip collection of music–all classical.  Bach, Stanford, Mozart, Beethoven, Elgar, etc.

If you look at the US weather map, there’s a big red blot over North Texas (headed for Oklahoma I think) with a “tail” that extends across Central Texas and angles across Mexico.  The big red blot used to be on top of Central Texas.   It’s full of thunder and lightning and rain and little lumps of hail.   It thunder-bumped most of the night, and every time I relaxed into deep sleep because the noise was only rain (Yay rain!)  another embedded lump of noise and flashing lights woke me up.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, you should get a post every day the week before the launch.   But there’s a couple of little glitches.  And here’s the big one.   Wednesday night I came home from choir practice with a very painful big toe on my left foot.  “Oh, it’s just that I got a fold in my sock,” I thought.   No.  It woke me up this morning before 5 am (it was quarter to five when I finally looked at my watch)  hurting like the dickens.   Swollen, exquisitely tender, throbbing.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was reminded again this weekend of the way death comes seemingly out of nowhere to shatter relationships new and old.   A friend of mine in another state was participating in a serial transport of a rescued dog from the shelter where it was first found to its future home, some two thousand miles away.   The puppy stayed at her house overnight, and the next day she drove it to the next person in the chain.   The person set off…and she and the puppy were killed in a weather-related road accident.  You can read about it on my friend’s blog, which includes a beautiful tribute to the remarkable woman who was killed.  Please do, in fact.

Read the rest of this entry »

My mother was a terrific knitter (and seamstress, and designer, and needlepointer, and…well just about everything.  Engineer, nurse, built some furniture, designed everything from houses to ranch pens to clothes, carved wood, painted pictures…and made biscuits I will never equal.)    Watching her pull together a knit-in-the-round sweater with no seams (especially one of the patterned ones) was a visual metaphor for what I do writing books (I realized this years later, after she’d died.)    You could talk to her while she was knitting a sleeve.  Often you could talk to her while she was knitting the body.  But when it came to The Joining, when the two sleeve tubes were mated to the body tube at the correct angle , with her signature little cable running up the join,  when there would be enough double-pointed needles in the project for several hours  to make it look like a torture device, there was no talking.    There was silent removal of empty coffee cup and setting down of a filled one.

Read the rest of this entry »

So…a week ago I was just coming home from the dress rehearsal for Messiah, feeling better about it than I had at the first rehearsal with GuestConductor.  He had slowed fractionally at the first orchestra rehearsal on Sunday night, when the orchestra also had some problems…and we’d left just as the soloists were starting their rehearsal.  Dress rehearsal was pretty much straight through, with soloists in their order, and there was another fractional slowing.  Not quite enough, and the tempo was still not steady through some of the faster choruses (speeding up as we went along.)  But by this time we had figured out what to do about it–thanks to the tools that UsualConductor had given us over the previous rehearsals (and, in my case, the years of singing under him and taking voice lessons from him.)

Read the rest of this entry »

We had two long tables almost full, and a day of food, music, knitting, swordplay,  talk (LOTS of talk),  and beautiful weather.    In honor of Anne McCaffrey,  I had changed the table decorations to include horses, more green, and a large bowl (standing in for the cauldron of plenty in Irish mythology) instead of a wicker cornucopia.   We toasted her life, achievements, and influence in mead brought for the purpose by one of the guests (he made it, which was even more special) and those of us who’d been fortunate enough to meet her or work with her told Anne stories.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some distractions I can work right through.  Others…I can’t.   Thanksgiving is one of those others.   It’s the holiday on which I indulge my love for cooking and entertaining occasionally.    Occasionally, because I do a huge lump of work for Thanksgiving, and I’m not going to put out that much effort every week or so, or I couldn’t write books.    Holiday music is another.   Again this year our choir is singing Messiah with the Austin Symphony.   And this year, the first rehearsal was today, Saturday, and the next is Monday…yes, this Monday, the Monday before Thanksgiving.  EEEEEPPP!!! Read the rest of this entry »

Research is part of any writing, fiction or nonfiction.   If you know you’re going to write about shoemakers in New England in colonial times  (just to grab for a topic I know nothing about), you would have a limited topic and your research would need to be “deep”.   If you know you’re going to write a novel set in an invented world (SFnal or fantasy), then your research must be broad and had better be deep in some areas.

But no matter whether your topic is narrow or wide, some of the research you do won’t make it into the book…at least, not into a book anyone will want to read.  Most of us have read a book that “taught us more about penguins than we really wanted to know,”  written by someone who did a lot of research and wanted someone else to share the pain.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am deep in chronology now, maybe halfway through, and discovering that I have duplicated some events (though the way the scenes are written varies a lot) and completely left out some very important ones.  Last night’s work session was on one such scene (a plot-mover for sure.)    Getting the others into even rough order helps a lot in seeing overlaps, duplicates, and gaps.

Read the rest of this entry »