![\"Shattered-Shields-cover\"](\"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Shattered-Shields-cover.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nYes!\u00a0 The cover of Shattered Shields<\/em> in which I have a story, “First Blood.”\u00a0 Those of\u00a0 you who haunt Amazon.com have already seen it, no doubt, but last week was my first sight of it, when the editor sent it out to all of us.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n The outage occurred at night, when I was about to publish the image and some comments, and I finally went to bed (because sitting in the dark makes me sleepy.)\u00a0\u00a0 The next morning, the old computer announced that it couldn’t find things, and I had to wait until it did…only I had other work to do.\u00a0\u00a0 And by the time it perked up and admitted that it knew where all the stuff in the inbox was, and was ready to cooperate,\u00a0 its daily full system scan had started.\u00a0 And the phone rang, and this happened and that happened and…I never got back to posting this post.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the speaking gigs.\u00a0 The first was with a “lifelong learning” program at the University of Texas in Austin, called LAMP.\u00a0\u00a0 They were having a series of writers.\u00a0\u00a0 Since the people who should have answered whether or not I could take swords on campus never did, the person in charge of me said “Oh, please bring them!”\u00a0 So yes, I trundled my sword case down from the parking lot and into the building, along with my knitting bag.\u00a0 Because I was early and knitting is a soothing activity for waiting, and in case I got stopped and had to put the swords back in the car.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I did not have the exciting toy “blaster” that a friend owns and I’ve borrowed before (to be the science fiction part of a presentation…I also had, and lost somewhere, a fat foam rocket-ship) because my friend was down with a bad case of\u00a0 gut trouble caught at an SCA event.<\/p>\n Swords and socks, it turns out, are a good combination.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Socks are a useful metaphor for storytelling;\u00a0 I even wrote a blog post for one of my publishers about that (can’t recall which, this morning.)\u00a0\u00a0 They all seemed to have a good time.\u00a0\u00a0 And with an adult audience, which this was, all the people who wanted to fondle swords had the sense not to snatch them up and wave them around.<\/p>\n Speaking gig number two was with a book club way the heck up a winding road on one of the taller hills in west Austin.\u00a0 I didn’t take swords to this one, because they’d been reading The Speed of Dark<\/em>, and though Lou does fencing, the meeting was in a private home.\u00a0 One does not truck the sword case into someone’s home when one does not know a) how all the people feel about swords and b) the size of the room and the vulnerability of things in the room, especially overhead.\u00a0\u00a0 A couple of them wished I’d brought swords, but…no.<\/p>\n I took the socks instead, and when it came to story structure and writing process, those were my show-and-tell.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Again, they seemed to enjoy the evening and I certainly did.<\/p>\n Meanwhile,\u00a0 I’ve done more massaging of the blog-published stories, tinkering with a variety of things.\u00a0 Lots of back and forth with the friend I’ve hired to help me arrange and proofread.<\/p>\n \n \n \n \n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This post would have gone up last week, except for a power outage, a stubborn computer, and two speaking gigs for which prep had to be done. Yes!\u00a0 The cover of Shattered Shields in which I have a story, “First Blood.”\u00a0 Those of\u00a0 you who haunt Amazon.com have already seen it, no doubt, but last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[109,53,5],"tags":[40,112,107],"class_list":["post-2190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artwork","category-life-beyond-writing","category-the-writing-life","tag-artwork","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2190"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2190"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2192,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2190\/revisions\/2192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}