[As usual, three weeks lag here, if you aren’t reading this on my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/blazeward). If you’d like your news fresher, and the monthly Anti-Stodgy/Redneck Chef newsletter, all I ask is a buck to help keep the lights on around here.]
Sunny morning. A little chilly in here, but that’s the furnace dying over the weekend. Control board fried, which was exactly what my week needed on top of everything else. A little salty. Actually, a lot salty and staying largely away from people who don’t deserve to be bit. (MOST of you don’t deserve to be bit, I’m presuming.)
In the home stretch of Marrakesh 6. As noted, aiming for a duology, where 6 ends but flows right into 7. Not sure that I will manage. Might just end 6 and circle back to the story in 8 or something. Don’t have to know today.
Also working on the erotica on the side. About halfway through story #2, but sidetracked. Will keep working on it, because fun.
Honestly, an unmotivated morning. After the furnace guy left yesterday (gotta order the board, supposedly installing tomorrow), I went down to the lower meadow and spent several hours staying in shape. Electric brushcutter (think weedeater with a steel cruciform blade), ditch tool (think hockey stick with an oversized metal blade), machete, attitude problem.
There is a barbed wire fence under the blackberry bramble. I have uncovered a long stretch of it. Found more yesterday. Talked with the neighbor on that side and she’d excited that I’m clearing out the property line between us, because it’s been a bramble like that for at least twenty years. And her husband will drag a mower on a tractor to keep it knocked down, once we know he won’t be ingesting barbed wire as he goes.
With luck, I can get it fully knocked down this year (last year was last year) and keep it down long enough for grass and trees to take over. Figure my property value goes way up when I end up selling, if I add an entire acre of usable space that fronts onto the pond (currently buried in bramble on all sides).
And it keeps me in shape, because I’m swinging a small scythe back and forth, plus digging for half-buried wire with it. Keeps the upper body loose and strong, and I’m old enough now that I’ll start losing more and more muscle and bone as I age. Fighting that battle today means I’m in better shape tomorrow. Same with the karate. Stuff I want to still be able to do at ninety, because I started today and kept at it for thirty-five years.
Not a lot past that. Unmotivated. Unexcited. Might take the day off from writing and get other work done instead.
Oh: WORLD CON IS IN SEATTLE in August. Knight Errant (A’Zedi Survey Corps, Book One) is coming out in June. I will have a paper edition (it is sitting on my left on my desk). If I Tuckerized you into that book (just about everyone I got permission from at this point, saving a couple), and you will be in the Seattle area (WorldCon or any other reason), I would like to get you to sign my copy. And I’ll sign yours.
Mark your calendars. I’ll also be in Vegas for AuthorNation in November, and am talking to the folks at Superstars for February. Hoping to make it to Minneapolis in December for family holiday, but that’s not nailed down yet.
Also happy to road trip to Portland to see you, but not any greater distance than that or Spokane or the Canadian border going north. You let me know.
More erotica in the background. If you wanna first read it, lemme know. If you write erotica or know folks who do, I suspect we’ll give serious talk to starting a Syndicate Magazine at some point, so we’ll be talking and recruiting. Film at 11, as it were.
Past that, y’all have a lovely Tuesday.
shade and sweet water,
b
West of the Mountains, WA
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