I’m going to be on hiatus from the blog this week and next–but it’s for a good reason I’m going to post here later.
Category: Thoughts
Interview for Here Be Merfolk Bundle
A.L. Butcher just posted up an interview with me on her blog. I used to watch actor David Hedison do interviews (his were always in person) and it was pretty cool to see, so it’s fun for me to think about what I want to say. Anyway, drop in and have a loook.
Here Be Merfolk
The call of the deep rings ever in our ears, from myth and legend to crime and mystery. Sea-people, mer and monster, immortals and reluctant heroes feature in this sea-worthy bundle.
Table of Contents
1. “The Women of Whale Rock” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
2. “We, the Ocean” by Alexandra Brandt
3. “Oshenerth” by Alan Dean Foster
4. “Deep Dreaming” by Debbie Mumford
5. “Dolphin Knight” by Robert Jeschonek
6. “On Desperate Seas” by Kate MacLeod
7. “Fate’s Door” by J.M. Ney-Grimm
8. “The Murky Depths” by Linda Jordan
9. “Dark, From the Sea” by Linda Maye Adams
10. “Ondine” by Brenda Carre
Available from your favorite booksellers.
The Lost Hour
What if a murder occurred in the lost hour from daylight savings? From Kristen Lamb.
The Curse of Perfection
November marks NanoWrite, which is is when many writers try to write 50K in 30 days. Nano, perhaps curiously, reminds me of the cooking competitions on Food Network. They just finished up the Halloween Baking Championship and are about to start the Holiday Baking Championship. There’s all the cake competitions too.
Particularly with the cake competitions, we sometimes get a cake decorator who proudly boasts up front that their standard is perfection.
Then they make contact with the timed challenge of the competition.
There’s no time to be perfect.
But some of them try to hang onto the perfection, and the time crunch pulls them apart. They start making careless mistakes that put them behind. Because they’re still focusing on perfection, they fall further and further behind, refusing to abandon part of piece that’s too complicated or try something else.
Others quickly toss out the perfection, but veer in another just as bad direction. They go sloppy. Their focus becomes laser focused on finishing, without regard to quality.
Suddenly they hear “One hour left” and it’s a mad rush to try to pull everything together. Only it’s really too late to play catch up, and the piece either ends up a mess or on the floor.
Which sounds a lot like Nano. The purpose is to drive out the perfectionist, because if you stop to perfect each sentence, you’ll never get 50K by the end of the month. Yet, it’s hard for writers to let go of needing to be perfect and they end up not even getting close to their goals. Or they write sloppy. Imagine writing a story and leaving out all the punctuation. Now imagine having to fix that during a revision.
Cringe.
Perfect is a curse, because it is anything but perfect.
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Favorite Halloween Monster?
Halloween is one of my favorite holidays of the year. I remember from the original (and horribly dated now) Beauty and the Beast when Vincent said that Halloween was when “the walls between the worlds grow thin and spirits roam the Earth.” The holiday is delightfully spooky with ghosts, spiderwebs, and other ghoulish things.
My local Thai restaurant had bobbing ghosts in the entry way–cloth draped over balloons. Simple and very effective. There’s also a house down the street with a giant inflatable dragon.
My favorite ghoul of the season is the skeleton. There’s something really fun about skeletons. The image below reminded me of a Buck Rogers second season episode where Mark Lenard was an alien being who could remove his head.
What’s your favorite Halloween ghoul?
Escaping the World
It’s not been a good two weeks because of all the hysteria and nastiness in the media. And it’s toxic, especially for my creativity. After reading the book Your Happiness is Hacked (and highly recommended!), it was very eye opening to how we’re being manipulated by social media.
But the book also mentions that people spend their time on their SmartPhones and don’t get out in nature much any more. So I thought a trip out to have some fun was in order. Nature is one of the greatest things for refreshing me.
I found Occuquan Regional Park. It’s a park with boating ramps and some nice paths following along the Occuquan River.
This is a view of the river. Though it looks like it’s about to storm, it never did. I’m still waiting for some rain. And it’s humid!
Some fall colors. We’re still about a month off from all the trees turning, so these are some early birds. I think these are oaks.
And a historical sighting. This is called the Beehive Kiln. Some of the history is here.
Rain is a Fascinating Thing
I woke up to rain this morning. Since I grew up in Los Angeles where the sky is clear most of the time and rain an infrequent thing, it’s fun watching, or listening to the rain.
Especially at night, watching it spill over the street in the halos of the street lights. I sat at the widow seat as we flew over thunderclouds and watched the lightning flash below (flying through thunderclouds…not so much).
Still I had business at hand, so it was off to the farmer’s market for fruit and vegetables. It was raining enough that I had to be careful not to have water dumped down my back at the edges of the tents the vendors set up.
Contest Giveaway: Guess the Actor
And we have a winner! Peggy got the name!
This is Richard Hatch, who starred in the first (and in my opinion, the best) version of Battlestar Galactica as Adam’s son Apollo.
We still have the Star Trek lady below to guess, and another one above.
No one’s guessed the actress below. If no one does, I’ll post who she is in a few days. Meanwhile, here’s another actor to identify.
This was taken at DragonCon in 1997. He sat a couple of tables away from David Hedison, so when he started playing around with the stuffed animals, I had to grab a shot.
The actor starred in a 1970s science fiction TV show. He passed away last year.
First person to guess his name gets a coupon code for the 2018 Military SF Story Bundle.
Socks, Socks, My Kingdom for a Sock
When I was growing up, we had what we called “The Orphan Pile” in the laundry room. It was a bunch of my father’s socks. He always bought black socks, same brand, all looked alike.
Then they got washed.
And some would get eaten by the dryer or the washer. Or maybe the cats or dogs.
So they would go into the orphan pile with the hope of eventually find the missing sock. Somehow, despite all starting out in the same color and same brand, they emerged from the washer mutated and none of them would ever have mates again.
What the heck does the dryer do with them?
