Sorta Back

I received the replacement modem today. The first thing I did was to plug it into the old power supply. Guess what? I isolated the problem to the old power supply. I immediately tried the old modem with the new power supply and guess what?

I haven't been able to get the new modem to work properly, so I'm running on the old one. I haven't decided which one I will ultimately keep.

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Yesterday, I finished my first short story in several months. It's a story intended for the J.J. Adams anthology Federations. I'm setting it aside while I work on another short--the one I'm working on for the Jay Lake anthology. Wish me luck with those.

Dial-up

Sheesh, I can't believe I was a dial-up hold out for so many years. Now, limping along without my DSL is extremely painful. It's dial-up or isolation. Here's hoping my high-speed replacement arrives soon.

I drove down to Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale today and heard a reading by S.M. Stirling. If you haven't ready any of his work, he's a history geek with a literary flavor to his prose, and a twisted sense of humor. Good stuff. I had four books signed, including his newest title, The Scourge of God. Of course, like any writer I have an in-pile of that's three or four figures deep.

I didn't manage to get a photo with Steve, nor did I get to talk much shop. This was apparently the last stop on his book tour and he had someplace to go, very probably the airport. Seemed like a decent enough guy, though.

An Untimely Death

I got home from work today and discovered my wireless modem is no more. It's pushing up the daisies. It's climbed the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It is an ex-modem. I thought these things were supposed to die right after the warranty expires, not with over 2 years left. Anyway, I don't get my new modem until sometime next week.

Of course, the guy on the tech support line had to ask me if the thing is plugged in. I told him I have a masters degree in engineering.

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The pool was green at the beginning of August. I managed to kill the algae after significant problems. Now I'm fighting a bad pH problem. I've never had the pool go this acidic before. I've already added 5 pounds of soda ash. I bought another five pounds and dumped about a third of it in this evening. Hopefully that will get the pH back on the scale of my test kit. If not, maybe I'll start etching printed circuit boards.

I use a liquid test kit with phenol red, and the scale only goes down to pH 7.2 at a very light yellow. Heavens to murgatroid, a pool can be a pain. I'd really like to use it again before it gets too cold. It was 105 today, but I usually overseed in early October. It should be under 90 degrees for overseeding, so the summer days are waning.

Creative Energy

Suddenly I have a rash of short fiction ideas. After the nightmarish workload I had last week (just shy of 70 hours) I started writing again on monday evening. I threw down 1000 words on a short fiction piece I have slated for J.J. Adams' Federations anthology. I'm not sure if it will end up there. It's evolving a bit differently than I had envisioned, and I'm not sure if it is going to be a good fit. I may have to come up with something else.

After that, I have another short story in mind for submission to the Jay Lake anthology Footprints.

After that, I still have to write the Halloween contest story for Codex writers group.

And, I don't really have anything to send to Writers of the Future contest this quarter. I'd hate to send in boilerpot, but it may come to that. I've submitted every quarter for the past several years and racked up 7 Honorable Mentions (including the quarter finalist finishes before they called them Honorable Mention).

So far, I feel like I'm able to write again. I want to use these several short fiction projects to get my writing discipline back, then I'll return to the novel. I feel like I have to write four short stories this month to get myself back into the game and to meet my goals of submitting to several markets, including the ones I mentioned above.

There's also another story that my writers group critiqued a couple of months ago. I haven't gone back over that one, but I'd like to finish that one by Halloween. I'm hoping if I can use this short fiction to stoke the fire, I can salvage what's left of 2008 and make it a reasonably productive year. Sub-par, to be sure, but better than the three completely wordless months I already have in 2008.

Mish Mash

Today I have a mish-mash of news. First, something sad. I arrived at work this morning to learn that one of my co-workers was killed in a motorcycle accident over the holiday weekend. It's spooky because I sat in his office on thursday last week, thinking to myself that I just talked with him on thursday. That's really eerie because it's the second time something like that has happened in the past year. At least it wasn't Karoshi like last time.


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I found a web site that will generate a map of where you've been.



create your own personalized map of the USA
or check out ourCalifornia travel guide

Here is where I have been in the world:



create your own visited country map
or check our Venice travel guide

I would live to see what Alan Dean Foster's maps look like.


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I learned today that I took my 7th honorable mention in the Writers of the Future contest. I would prefer to either win the thing, or disqualify myself. The constant flow of HMs is starting to get old.

Mote Coppercon (a little more only)

I ran over to coppercon again today, mostly because my daughter Reanna wanted to go to the mall with her friends. So, I left her with her friends (and one friend's mother) and went to the con that was a block away.

I had my camera this time. I was hoping to get a picture with Steven Brust, but he is pretty elusive. He had a signing with Michelle M. Welch, but I arrived in the last five minutes and only Michelle was there. Apparently, Brust took off about 5 minutes before I arrived.

I did get a couple of pictures with Jack Mangan. Here, Jack is looking philosophical and I'm just wondering what he's doing.



I wanted to get a picture with Michelle, but despite sitting in the lounge with her, Lejon, and Jack for maybe 45 minutes, that never happened.

Coppercon 28

Todays panels at Coppercon went well. I finally got the chance to sit on a panel with both Emily and Ernest Hogan, two Phoenix writers who I have known for several years. I had lunch with Jack Mangan, Michelle M. Welch, and her husband Lejon.

The panel on bringing SF into the classroon was moderated by Paul Cook, who teaches a SF course at Arizona State University. Chris Paige teaches, too. Emily Hogan sat on the panel as a bookseller, and I sat on the panel as a writer and parent. We had some good discussion and I think it went well.

My second panel was "Does SF translate well to film?" It was moderated by Kevin Birnbaum, who is a screenwriter. Summer Brooks is part of Far Point Media, a group that handles a lot of podcasting. I was one of two writers on the panel, Tabitha Bradley was the other. We got into some good discussion with a lot of audience participation. After the panel, Summer, Kevin and I talked a great deal and Kevin showed us a preview of a film he is involved with. Very risky and heated racial tensions permeate the story. Should produce good controversy.

My last panel was on minorities in SF. I have blogged about this in the past, and I brought up many of the same points. Summer Brooks moderated this panel, and we were joined by Ernest Hogan. Of my three panels, this was the only one that ended a few minutes early, but we did have some interesting back and forth.

Michelle M. Welch is on a panel with Steven Brust tomorrow. I hope to attend that one, as it should be entertaining.

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Oh yes, one last thing. Here is the film clip of the storm last night. I almost decided not to post it because it really doesn't look like anything special. Believe me, somewhere in the sky we had a lightning flash several times a second. It was incredible. Apparently my phone has low enough resolution that it can only pick up what is immediately in front of it. So, when you watch the clip, imagine a whole array of these clips surrounding your head and playing at different start times.



That is all for today. I worked nearly 70 hours this week and I am exhausted.

Light at the End of the Tunnel -- A Train?

It looks like the hoobaloo at work that has me working long hours might be showing signs of resolution. It's not a done deal yet, but good progress has been made. After working over 14 hours yesterday, getting home at 11:00PM, I got home at 6:00 today then had an hour conference call. Almost a vacation by comparison.

But nobody wants to hear me whine about long hours. I can't really stop writing no matter what I said. It's in my blood.

There was a terrific lightning storm this evening, still going on, in fact. I'm running the laptop on battery and connected to somebody's "linksys" so I can keep my own hardware unplugged. I took a full minute of video on my cell phone that I will share once I can bluetooth it onto my work computer. It doesn't do the storm justice, but it still has a lightning strike every few seconds. It just doesn't show the flashes from the lightning in other directions. For a while, there was a strike of lightning going off somewhere in the sky every 1/10 second or so. Just amazing.

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Recall that Sam's Dot Publishing is planning to release my IGMS story, The Adjoa Gambit packaged with a new novelette, Winter, as a trade paperback early next year. Just today, I got a very cool blurb from Jack Mangan. Jack is a local writer and runs the Deadpan podcast. He's linked on my sidebar, go check out his stuff.

Anyway, I wanted to share the blurb.

"The best elements of Science Fiction's past, present, and future can be found in Rick Novy's writing. This is blue-collar, classically-influenced Spec-Fic at its best."
-- Jack Mangan of the Deadpan Podcast, author of Spherical Tomi

Is that a great blurb or what? At first, my reaction to the term blue-collar was to be a bit perplexed. Then I gave it some thought and realized that it's a very succinct way of stating what I usually take four or five sentences to put across. I'm not a literary writer. I don't want to be a literary writer. I'm an entertainer, and I write to tell a story for the reader to enjoy. In that respect, it is blue-collar, and that's intentional. Most of what I write I want to be fun reading.

Hiatus

I regret to announce that I no longer get to be a writer. My day job, the one that pays the mortgage, is consuming pretty much all my waking hours. That means there isn't much point in maintaining a blog until my situation changes. Farewell.

The Lava Tubes

We arrived safely from the weekend excursion to the famous (not really, I hadn't heard of them) Lava Tubes. I also don't know why people call it Lava Tubes when there is only one of them.



It's a 1-1/2 mile out-and-back hike with no choice but to come back because the cave dead-ends. Here is Russell going in.





Photography is difficult inside as without flashlights it is completely dark. Here is a picture of people out of range of the flash.



See what I mean? We met up with this poor, unfortunate soul who seems to have been in the cave for a very long time.



Russell found a light saber in the cave. It was probably discarded because it is clearly a factory reject.



We camped just off the forest road. Here, Russell is setting up one of the tents.





We did visit Lowell Observatory. We didn't get to see much. The sky was clouding fast, but we did get to see M57 (aka the Ring Nebula) through a 16-inch telescope. It looks much the same as in the photo , but washed out and colorless as expected when viewed optically. The eye is not as sensitive to color as is photographic film.



I bought a sweatshirt with this logo:



The boys had fun at the observatory. I was somewhat bored because the public dog-and-pony show experience doesn't hold anything new for me. Still, it was better than a lot of alternatives.