{"id":2595,"date":"2016-04-23T11:54:43","date_gmt":"2016-04-23T17:54:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=2595"},"modified":"2016-04-23T11:54:43","modified_gmt":"2016-04-23T17:54:43","slug":"still-alive-kicking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=2595","title":{"rendered":"Still Alive & Kicking"},"content":{"rendered":"

March and most of April were eaten up by illness, aftermath of illness, another illness, and attempting to get the rewrites done on Cold Welcome<\/em> and catch up on things left undone while sick.\u00a0\u00a0 Including church music.\u00a0\u00a0 I am well again (fingers crossed) though far, far behind in physical fitness, housekeeping, and progress on the book after Cold Welcome<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Energy level is slowly coming back.\u00a0 The rewrite has been delivered to Editor (April 15), and her remaining comments, if any, will be dealt with in the copy edits.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We had a very dry spell between December and March, but then the rains…small ones at first, and then heavier ones.\u00a0 For the first time since spring 2007,\u00a0 a floodgate has been opened in Buchanan Dam and one in Mansfield Dam.\u00a0\u00a0 Lake Travis finally reached “full” a month ago; Lake Buchanan reached it this past weekend.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 No, the drought was not just 2011 (as some people seem to think.)\u00a0\u00a0 Nine years without the lakes being full even briefly…and until the rains last spring, most of that was below 50% capacity.<\/p>\n

The land is recovering; the plants that got rain when they needed it last year and this recover the fastest.\u00a0 The large trees that died, finally, between 2011 and 2015 will require many decades for replacement, and in some cases will never return–as with animals, small disjunct populations of plants can’t be replaced naturally.\u00a0\u00a0 We had two or three huge old black willows down in the creek woods, and between a half dozen and a dozen American elms, some quite large…and one, the biggest tree we had, cottonwood.\u00a0 That’s not coming back.<\/p>\n

But there’s water running in the creek, clear running from spring-flow, and in every pool of the grassland, insects are mating and breeding…little water beetles, damselflies, dragonflies, water striders, etc.\u00a0 Bees (both honeybees and natives), flower flies, beetles, butterflies are on the flowers of the many native forbs; the native grasses are up in their different shades of green, their different heights.<\/p>\n

I have two contracts active–one for a short story set in the Vatta universe, and the other for the sequel to Cold Welcome<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 Plus the production chores for that book–dealing with copy edits, reading proofs, doing whatever little writing chores the publisher wants as publicity.\u00a0\u00a0 Things should lighten up next year, because then I’ll just have the editorial and production work on the sequel to do.\u00a0\u00a0 At that point, I’ll have done some serious thinking about how best to manage continued writing with a need for more time spent on LifeStuff (the lights of those locomotives are also getting closer)\u00a0 and thus how to arrange my schedule…and Decisions will be made.\u00a0 As books have “hinge points” at which the story shifts gears or directions or both…so do lives.<\/p>\n

But in the meantime, I’m afraid I won’t be here much except in the comments section, unless drastic things happen.\u00a0 (Since a friend has just lost his job, and several others’ jobs look shaky, drastic things happening seems to be a trend, so…you never know.)\u00a0\u00a0 The comments show up in my email, so I’ll be responding to those, but not sure about actual posts.\u00a0 Though maybe.\u00a0 It’s all uncertain right now.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

March and most of April were eaten up by illness, aftermath of illness, another illness, and attempting to get the rewrites done on Cold Welcome and catch up on things left undone while sick.\u00a0\u00a0 Including church music.\u00a0\u00a0 I am well again (fingers crossed) though far, far behind in physical fitness, housekeeping, and progress on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,5],"tags":[112,31,107],"class_list":["post-2595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","category-the-writing-life","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-the-book-business","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2595"}],"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=2595"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2596,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2595\/revisions\/2596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}