I’m happy to announce (a few days late) that the Return to Luna anthology has been released by Hadley Rille Books. The anthology contains stories from eighteen up and coming writers, including my story “Misdirected”. The forward is written by Harrison H. Schmitt, an Apollo astronaut and the last man to step foot on the moon.
You can buy it direct from the publisher for a discounted price of $12.95 or from Amazon.com (although at the time of writing, it is out of stock).
Dogs #1 and #3 survived their visits to the vet yesterday, so armed with canine antibiotics we’re packing up the truck and heading to the Northwoods of Wisconsin to visit family for the holiday. It’s been nearly 10 months since we’ve seen my Dad and more since I’ve seen the rest of the clan. Andrea hasn’t met any of them yet.
I expect to fall behind on email, twitter, and LiveJournal. Don’t have too much fun without me.
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone celebrating it. Give your loved ones a big hug and pay remembrance for those you can’t. Life is too short to waste it on tomorrows.
Andrea is a baker (as well as a writer), and I like to eat. We’ve been talking about making gingerbread for Christmas. We made our first experimental batch last night. We made a dozen gingerbread men in various costumes. The best were the gingerbone (skeletons) and the ninjabread man. Next time we’re going to try making a ninja outfit out of fondant. I neglected to take pictures before they were consumed, but I promise to take some the next time.
We’ve taken to spending some quiet, romantic friday nights, watching tv and having some wine. We were sitting on the couch, waiting for the gingerbread to cooled when the power went out. It’s not unusual to loose power, even in clear weather. I flipped on the scanner and heard: “did anyone see the bright light to the west?”, “…transformer…”, “…looked like a spotlight…”. It didn’t take long for the power grid to switch to a new transformer, but somewhere in the process our internet died. Another router fried.
We made a trip to Frys to pick up a new one, but they didn’t have the one I wanted. We stopped for a bite of lunch at Hooters (when did they get boneless wings?). There’s a Tiger Direct store nearby, so we headed in that direction with the intent to stop by and check out a comic book store on the way. We wanted to pick up the second volumes of The Walking Dead and 100 Bullets, and I’m on the look out for Transmetropolitan.
Right next door to the comic book store was a pet store that I’ve bought from before. That was probably a bad thing. We forgot to go look for comics and the pet store not only had a mix of two of my favorite breeds, but she was on sale.
Behold the Puppy!
She’s a Neapolitan Mastiff/English Bulldog mix and should be between 75-100lb when full grown. It’s a good thing we have plenty of room now, and are planning to move to a place with a fenced in yard in the country next year sometime. Between our new puppy, the boxer and the blue heeler/border collie, we’re full up on dogs.
We haven’t decided on a name for her yet, but we’re leaning towards Ripley.
A smattering of links I’ve been meaning to share.
Another busy week or two and I’m still failing to blog consistently. Mea culpa.
A week ago Thursday, Andrea and I went into Chicago to see The Most Interesting Show in the World, hosted by Jim Rose. It was a slimed down version of his famous circus, featuring The Amazing Kenichi, Melody Sweets, Leonid the Magnificent, Johnny Fayva, Lilian Stepanova, and Mark “The Knife” Faje. We had great time, apart from the show starting an hour later than we were expecting and the parking ticket. I’d love to catch Jim Rose again, but probably not inside such a small club. There were no more than 30 seats available, all of which were taken or reserved by the time we arrived.
We went to Windycon 35 on Saturday. I saw Trey and Tim from the writers group, met Tobias Buckell briefly, and got my copies of Mike Resnick’s “This Is My Funniest” 1 & 2 signed. Not a bad day. The theme of next years Windycon 36 is steampunk. I can’t wait.
I finished the story I’ve been writing for the Footprints anthology and submitted it on Friday. Today I finished a story for Byzarium’s Flash Fiction contest. The contest uses a piece of artwork as the prompt for a 500-word story. This was the second story I’ve written using the artwork of Kiriko Moth as inspiration. She’s an amazing artist and I hope to see more of her work in the future.
My two immediate writing deadlines are met. Next up I need to type up and start revising my Tesla story. I met my goal for the year of twelve new stories, but now I need to revise them and hit the slush piles hard. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I’ll be working on stories for the upcoming Federations and Shine anthologies. Lots of hard work ahead but I’m looking forward to it.
We picked up some new books this week. I’m slowly getting caught up on the reading I want to do, so expect more posts in the coming week, along with a book giveaway.
The Return to Luna anthology, containing my story “Misdirected”, will be released in December 2008. I’ve done the usual things new authors do, squeeing over the proof and breaking out into giggles at random. I just received the cover (jacket?) artwork. This will be my second publication, but the first one to see print. I can’t wait to hold this in my grubby little hands.
Cover art (c) Walter Myers
I don’t have the details on where and how to buy yet, but I’ll be sure to add them here when I have them.
Home from New York City. Short trips like this are always a little tiring. So much activity crammed into a short period of time. This was my second trip to Ad Tech. I’m a techie at heart and don’t consider myself much of a salesman. That puts me in the minority at a trade show like this.
I’ve always had an eye for business. When I wrote software for the tanning industry, I would often talk to salon owners about what they did and what they needed. I even spent several nights working behind the counter, so I understood how their business worked.
Over the years, I’ve become a little more comfortable stepping out of the technical role. It helps that I’m passionate about the work I do and firmly believe we have a technically superior system. I designed it from the ground up and for the last four and a half years it’s been my baby. As the company grows and I step into more of a management role, I delegate more and slowly put the tools into the capable hands of the team we have built and continue to build.
I met many of my clients/partners at Ad Tech or the after party. It’s always a pleasure to put a face to the name. In some cases, there were people I’ve been working with for nearly five years that I met for the first time yesterday.
A good trip, good food, and good people. I passed Diane Neal from Law & Order: SVU on 7th avenue (I’m such a L&O fanboy). I had my first New York style hot dog. I ate my first (and possibly last) oyster. I celebrated Obama’s win in Times Square.
We walked through Times Square earlier this evening, hours before the first poll closed. The crowd was large and people were still filing in. Hours later, after the post-trade-show meetings and work were done, I sat down and watched the acceptance speech in awe. A block and 31 stories away, I could hear the people cheering.
Fear of crowds be damned. I left the hotel and let the noise be my drummer, I didn’t walk a lot as I had hired transport the company bostoncorporatecoach.com/ which is in so many countries and in all my work travels they have been the best to hire.
In Times Square, the people cheered and cried. Chants of “Oh-bah-ma” and “Yes-we-can” rang clear. Cars honking. Passengers waving. Signs waving. Camera’s flashing. Strangers embracing in celebration and saying, “we did it.”. We. A victory for us all. Ethnicity, sexual preference, gender, citizenship, it did not matter.
Empowerment.
I was overwhelmed by the surge of emotion, of hope and possibility. I teared up several times, looking up at the digital billboards proclaiming the historic news: Barack Obama, President-elect. Never in my thirty-three years have I seen or experienced anything like this. It looks like my generation has its Lincoln or Kennedy. A catalyst for change, a driving force for prosperity. It’s about damn time. Maybe the US can shed it’s reputation as the biggest dickhead and start working with the world instead of trying to cram our ideologies down its throat.
Celebrate and cheer now. We’ve a lot of work to do. We still have bigotry and intolerance to fight and a long road to walk before we can hold our head high and be proud of our record of human rights. At least now, we’re on the right road.
I made it to New York City with minimal difficulty today. Court went smoothly and traffic was light, so I made it to O’Hare with enough time to catch an earlier flight. One shuttle and subway ride later, I found the Westin and checked-in.
I met my co-workers for dinner at Quality Meats, followed by 40/40, where we co-sponsored a VIP party for the trade show. A fun night, and I got to meet several people I’d only known via email or instant message.
Feeling a little dead tonight. My original flight was canceled and American Airlines decided they needed to call me at 4:15AM and 4:45AM to make sure I knew about it. Between that and the flight I managed about four hours sleep today and tomorrow’s going to be another busy day. Here’s to hoping the beds here are comfortable.
It also looks like I’ll be staying over an extra day, so home again on Wednesday. I’m already missing Andrea and our menagerie of pets. I hear the dogs have been camping out at the front door all day and night, waiting for my return.
I sent in my absentee ballot a couple weeks ago. If you haven’t already, please go vote and make your voice heard. I think we’re on the brink of seeing some real change happen and that makes me feel pretty damn good.
A somewhat long, personal post about divorce, life, love, angst and real-life drama below the cut. You have been warned.