I don’t normally do food reviews, but today we’re making an exception.

Backstory: Dropped in on a new writing group up in the Roosevelt neighbor of north Seattle this week to see some friends and write with them. It’s a long drive from the farm, and they wanted to meet at 6pm, so Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I headed out mid-day. Got north and hit the Starbucks nearby for a while to do some of the heavy interwebs things I don’t want to do on my limited bandwidth out at the farm.

From there, we had some time to kill, and a whole bunch of new restaurants to try out. Normally, I would have walked three blocks over to Pies and Pints, but they’re gone now. Which sucks, but I have a different dealer for my fix. (Email me if you want her contact info. Got seven pies left in the freezer after seeing her this week. They’ll last me a month or two at most.)

So I had checked out all the places in the neighborhood. Sushi, burgers, vegan, whatever. One place jumped out at me, and she decided it would be a nice place to eat, so we went.

The joint is called Toronado and includes heaven.

She and I are carnivores who graze. Dead critter. Fresh veggies. No bread. Plus with our mix of food allergies, I’m always hesitant to try places at random.

But I cracked open their menu to see what we had. Page One includes a Plate Of Bacon. Beef, Pork, Lamb. Yes, you read that correctly. Beef Bacon. Lamb Bacon. Homemade on site, as I understand it. (The publican was also the owner. Really nice guy happy to nerd out about food on a quiet Tuesday afternoon.)

I have never had beef bacon. Or lamb. I had no idea what I was missing. You have no idea what you’re missing, either.

Then, I spotted something on Page Two to review. Macaroni and Modern Cheese.

WTF is Modern Cheese?

Turns out to be a different way to make the roux, with sodium citrate warmed as a binder.

This being Seattle, I had to ask. Every fool wanna-be chef in this town makes his roux with onion powder. Same with his gravy. To me, that’s the sign that there’s no more cheese involved than you need to give it color. Same with the gravy, they made it without tailings from frying sausage.

(I have gotten into arguments with professional chefs that you don’t include onion powder in roux and gravy. Where I come from, that’s possibly a tar-and-feather offense. And the farther I get from downtown Seattle, the more cooks agree with me, and the safer I am with chicken fried steak, eggs over easy, and biscuits.)

But there’s no onions in the modern cheese. He went back and asked the cook, just to be sure. And they do a three bacon version.

I’m sold.

She got a pulled pork sandwich.

About two bites into the bacon appetizer, she immediately texts a friend of hers. They frequently do Girl’s Night without me on Thursdays, where they try out new restaurants to see what’s good. They’ll be going back there. And I have already ordered a to-go box of the mac and cheese for her to bring home.

When I write Jessica Keller, it is almost always fashion porn to some extent. With coffee thrown in as well. I have been writing new Javier Aritza (Science Officer) stories lately, and those have tended towards  food porn. Hell, I just wrote a scene in the new Gareth novel (book 2 when it comes out) that takes place exactly in Toronado, just because I wanted to nerd out on the food for my readers.

And oh, by the way, beer bar with a massive, rotating selection of stuff, and an owner/publican who was nerding out with two businessmen at the next table over about a variety of beers he kept delivering in basically shot glasses for them to sample. Smart guy, knows his stuff.

You will thank me. Go up to the Roosevelt neighborhood of Seattle. Corner of 12th Ave NE and 65th St. Right next to the Whole Foods.

Come hungry.

We now return you to your regular tv dinners.

🙂

In a previous post, I mentioned that I had hit Pulp Speed One in May, with month left over. That’s the measure when you are on pace to write one million words in a year. It breaks down to an average of 83,334 words per month, sustained over twelve. In April, I started tracking my speed, because I had been at about 40-45,000 words per month while holding down full-time employment, and now I was working for Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) as an IP generator.

So, April ended at just over 75,000 words, and I hadn’t even been pushing that hard. Writing is a muscle. You don’t start out with a marathon. You start with a walk around the block. Then two blocks. Then a job. Etc.

I’ve been writing for a little over four years now, in the sense of fiction for publication. (I’ve been writing forever, but that’s a different story). I have some of the muscles, but not enough. Learning to write for many hours, instead of one or two, here or there, was a new thing. Something to work up to.

So I worked in April. And almost doubled my normal speed. Woo-hoo.

But then I hit the end of the month and realized that I was close to Pulp Speed One. Dean recognizes up to Pulp Speed Six in his blog, jumping by 200,000 word increments. At Six, you are writing 2 million words per year, which sounds like an astronomical number.

For context, a novel is defined by many of the award categories as being 40,000 words or more. One million words, therefore, would be the equivalent of writing twenty-five of those novels, or roughly one every two weeks, with some time off for vacation. Fifty working weeks per year, twenty thousand words per week. Four thousand words per day, five days per week, with weekends off.

Boom. Pulp Speed One.

But something interesting happened in May. we went down to a writing retreat in Lincoln City, OR. A group of us rented a house on the beach (off-season), packed it with food and coffee, and wrote all day. It goes like this. Write for an hour or so, then walk around the block. Rinse. Repeat. All day.

Fabulous Publisher Babe’s goal when she does these is 10,000 words, and 10,000 steps each day. No television. Limited internet. Prepared food at hand, so no need to go anywhere and just through lunch together and eat it.

Sit down, shut up, and write.

Let me repeat that, for the folks in the back: Sit down, shut up, and write.

Someone asked me my secret to productivity. Can you guess it? Sit down, shut up, and write.

When a normal writer is on, they can type 1,000 words in an hour. What FPB has taught me recently is that when we hit a thing called “Flow State” that can jump to 2,000 words in an hour.

For me, the early part of a novel requires lots of thought, because I write into dimly-lit hallways. I have several ideas, and a direction, but nothing so formal as an outline. And I occasionally just write into the darkness and let writer-brain take over.

At the retreat, I wrote the following daily word counts:

• Tuesday: 8200
• Wednesday 7500
• Thursday 9000
• Friday 12,006
• Saturday 7500

This was writing all day, with time off for lunches with local pros a couple of days and a few dinners with friends. Note that Friday I went off the rails as the story hit stride. Saturday afternoon, I finished the novel I had started the previous Sunday, just before driving down Monday morning. Just over 48,000 words written.

When I hit Flow State, the craziness mounts.

Yesterday (Friday, June 1) is a REALLY good example. I was getting to the end of the latest novel (Packmule, out in early 2019). Wrote about 2500 words in the morning block, before we had to head off and do errands. Stopped at a Starbucks at the corner on the way home so she could spend 45 minutes doing some internet heavy publishing work (easier there that out at the farm with iffy coverage). In those 45 minutes, 2000 words came out.

Then we went home, fed the kitty, and headed out again, for a meeting she was attending. I waited in the front room, plugged into the wall and standing up, and banged out another 2000 words in 55 minutes. From there, straight into town to a friend’s retirement from day-job party. Hung out in Seattle with some former coworkers all slowly escaping the hell that was the previous job. Got home around 730 pm, fired up the machine, and banged out about another 1800 words in 90 minutes.

And I stopped there because the novel was done, save for the denouement I wrote this morning (the last 1500 words in a much different tone from last night). Yesterday’s word count: 8200 words, in one day.

Won’t hit that today. Don’t need to. But I could.

I ended May 2018 with 120,000 words written. That’s Pulp Speed Three with a little room to spare. (116,667).

Dean talks about writing like it was a job. Sit down and write for eight hours, as if you’re on the clock. I’m getting myself to the point that I can do that. And I try to write every day, missing maybe one day every two or three weeks when things are crazy, or long drive somewhere, or just not feeling the words. I don’t beat myself up over not writing, because I’m racing Death, not anything so short-term as this week’s writing target.

So let’s math (deal with it, I never told you there would be no math here). Let’s pretend like I can sustain 8,000 words, five days a week, with two weeks off. Possible, because I just did that during the retreat.

That’s 40,000 words in a week. That’s a novel, if you will. Multiply that by 50 weeks.

You are looking at 2,000,000 words. Pulp Speed Six.

Now that’s a crazy goal. Might be impossible, because I have to edit, and publish, and stuff. And have a life.

But let’s also pretend like I could hit flow state on demand, which is getting easier and easier as I practice. Let’s drop that to six hours of work, or a block in the morning and a block in the afternoon, with time off for all the other crazy shit I need to do to make life happen.

Pulp Speed Nine is 60,000 words per week. Or twelve thousand words per day, five days a week. Or six hours in Flow State.

I have four novels in the can right now, and am about to move on to the next project.

Let’s go get crazy.

Okay, a bit of a background on the term. Pulp Speed refers to the Pulp era authors like Lester Dent and others, who frequently wrote a short story in a day and mailed it off to a magazine the same day. They didn’t rewrite. They didn’t agonize over every word and sentence. They just wrote. And published several stories every month, across the then-humongous universe of SF magazines.

The modern consensus of Pulp Speeds goes something like this: Pulp Speed One is measured as a pace of writing ONE MILLION WORDS in a year. Which sounds insane, but breaks down like this. 1,000,000/12 = 83,334 words per month. In a thirty-day month, that breaks down to 2,778 words per day average.

Given that a writer who is on point and not fucking around on the internet can usually hit a pace of 1,000 words/hour, that’s roughly three hours writing, every single day.

Obviously, if you have a day job, or a young family, the chances of you being able to carve out that many hours to dedicate to writing each day are low. However, on the other hand, if you have quit the day job to write full-time, you need to treat that like the job you left behind.

Divide your day into two parts. Pick the half of your workday that will be dedicated to writing, and write.  (“Sit down, shut up, and write” is the best advice I can offer you.) The other half of your day is going to have to be dedicated to “work.” Editing, Covers, Email, Social Media and Advertising, etc. If you have reached a level where you can also bring your spouse on full-time as your assistant, then they can take as much of the non-writing tasks as possible, freeing you up to dedicate to your craft.

For those of us with a bit of the hunger, the workday is frequently twelve hours. Six to write. Six to publish.

So now, back to math.

Pulp Speed One = 84,000 words per month, sustained.

To increase to Pulp Speed Two, you will need to sustain 100,000 words per month, which comes in at 1.2 million words per year. (We’ll leave off Three+ speeds for now, because the lower numbers already frighten some folks.)

I left the dayjob at the end of February this year, so I’ve been on my own for three months now. In March, there was a lot of transition and learning, plus Fabulous Publisher Babe ™ was in the process of selling her house in the city and moving out to the farm with me.

In April, I hit a stride. The normal pace of around 38,000 words I had been sustaining for the last few years suddenly jumped up to 75,000. I hadn’t previously been tracking word counts on any scale less than a year, but I wanted to know where I was at.

Hell, that’s almost Pulp Speed One, and I wasn’t even trying that hard.

Writing is a muscle, just like any other. You work your way up to a marathon. You add another disk to the weights. One more push-up today than yesterday. That sort of thing.

So I decided that in May, I would push a little harder for words than I previously had. My mornings start around 6 with a shower (I am managing to sleep that late, most days, from 4 for the last several years). Maybe I feed the kitty if she’s in the main house instead of the girlcave. (We call that the “morning Kabuki” because she is a very communicative kitty, once you understand interpretive dance.)

Then I feed myself, check the mail, check the news, and read my web comics. At that point, it is usually 730-800, and I crack open the current project and begin to cycle to hit stride and voice.

And I try to write until 1100. Sometimes I fall off sooner when I run out of words. Some days I go clear until noon. But that’s 3-4 hours dedicated to words. All that adds up.

I just got back, just now, from a trip to Lincoln City, Oregon, where four of us had rented a beach house all week, to do a writing marathon (“Sit down, shut up, and write”). Came down on Monday, which was a five hour drive from the farm so didn’t get a lot of work done.

• Tuesday: 8200 words
• Wednesday: 7500
• Thursday: 9000
• Friday: 12,006 !?!
• Saturday: 6500

Felt like a slacker Saturday, but the novel was done. I had started it last Sunday, so a week ago, and wrote the damned thing in a week. Current draft is 48,000 words. It will need more editing than usual, but that’s because I’ve never sustained this speed this long, and I was creating a whole new universe, as the first novel in a series I plan to write.

———-

And it’s pulp. Which I found appropriate, considering. I tried to write the whole thing as if it was the late 40’s, and this was one of those radio/cinema serials. My main character could easily fit in with Steve Rogers, Clark Kent, or Kim Kinnison, having that earnest Boy Scout thing going.

At the same time, I wanted to write it like they envisioned technology was going to be, from the vision of 1948, so there are some lovely anachronisms baked in that are already present tense today, in a story that starts on Earth in 2387, before falling through a wormhole and escaping the Einstinian trap that is the Terran Solar System.

My hero has to encounter aliens for the first time in his life. And overcome his own sexism (remember: pulp SF from the 40’s, so dames in heels and skirts, and never capable of self-actualization, ya know) to discover that alien women don’t need to be protected from bad things, thank you very much. Eye-opening for the boy.

But at the end of the day, they are all just people, and Gareth always wanted to be nothing more than a hero. He can never go home, but he can take it upon himself to protect this new, galactic civilization as the only human these people have ever known.

In a way, I also tried to write this as a reversal on the Superman origin story, with a human suddenly cast into a weirder universe as the first and only of his kind (actually not, but that the genesis of the whole story, and you can read about it later). He has hopes and expectations that he will have to carry on his shoulders.

And yes, he gets to be a hero.

But it’s pulp. Hand-waving space fantasy of the juiciest kind. And it was a lot of fun to write, so there will be more, but I will have to tuck them into writing gaps going forward, because I have two other series I want to finish off (three, actually, which is another long story for later).

But back to Pulp Speed One. As of right now, I’m at 88,000 words for the month of May, with eleven more days to go. I’m pretty sure I can hit 100,000 words, writing 12,000 words in 11 days.

I am not going to try to sustain Pulp Speed Two. At least, not yet. These are muscles, and I want to work slowly up to that speed. And to have fun.

But we’re still talking 85,000 words, every month, going forward.

Or, in happier terms, how about two 40,000 novels, every month? It won’t work that way, but that’s because I am committed to writing two shorter pieces every month, while working on whatever novel I’m in the middle of. You will see an Imperial Shit-ton of new stuff soon. I have 24 things in the can right now. Six of them are for the first six issues of the new SF magazine that I am launching in two weeks. Six more are stories in those same universes, to extend the stories you’ll read. That leaves twelve more you’ve never seen before. And counting.

And speeding up.

Y’all ready for a firehose?

shade and sweet water

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

Just four days from now, it will be gone forever. You should make sure you have your copy today, or tell your artist friends about it, because there’s way more here than just things for writers.

The Write Stuff Bundle

• Creating Your Author Brand
• Completing Your To-Do List
• Writing a Novel in 5 Days While Traveling (or how to keep going while going)
• How To Get Your Book Into Schools (or your art)
• Estate Planning for Authors (or any creative whose stuff will remain 70 years after they do)
• Secrets to Effective Author Marketing
• an On-line Lecture on Heinlein’s Rules (and why you need to know them)
• The Ancient Child Thirty Day Program from Steve Barnes
• Business Planning for Professional Publishers (and anybody who hates spreadshits, not a typo)
• The Three Act Dramatic Structure for Writers

All of these are way bigger than just writers. Any creative type (yes, YOU) can learn a lot from some seriously professional, extremely successful artists sharing their experience, and doing it at a pretty good rate, since you get all ten for a good price, rather than the normal amount.

And the clock is running. Four days and change are I write these words, and then gone forever.

You need to rush out and do this. Or get this for the artist in your life as a Mother’s Day gift (today), a Graduation present, birthday, or a very early Christmas.

They will thank you.

</smooch>

So I’ve quit the day job and turned myself into a full-time writer. Yay!

And I’ve apparently done the impossible, because according to traditional wisdom, a new, full-time writer is supposed to slow down for the first six months of their transition, because they have to reinvent everything. Apparently, doing that wrong.

In 2017 l I averaged about 37,000 words per month, or a little over a thousand words a day. I knew I had sped up, but didn’t really track it as a separate value in March, as I had so many things going on. Did track my numbers in April, as an experiment. 75,000 words. Or, just shy of what the old timers call Pulp Speed One (one million words per year), which would have been 83,334 words, or a million words per year pace. (Pulp Speed Two is 100,000 words per month sustained.)

So now I have a target for May. Not that much of a stretch, either. Need to hit 21,000 per week, and I’ve on that pace. Part of the issue is that writing at that speed is a muscle, and you have to train for writing marathons just like you do running ones. Working on that. Getting better. Learning.

However, I have also sped up. The old pace I maintained had a goal of constantly working on a longer piece (novel or novella), while dropping out and writing a short (-er) story every month so I can maintain my monthly schedule to publish things.

That’s gone up to at least two stories per month now. So I have a lot of material in the can, waiting publication dates. That’s good.

Where it gets hinky is that The Red Admiral comes out next week, and I’ll be answering questions from folks about that, and I’ve already finished Lord Of Winter (#7) and started plotting out Book 8 (title reveal at a later date because I feel like it).

Worse, I had to write a short Yan Bedrov novella that sort of takes place during the last part of Lord of Winter, but I had been planning it for a while.

And then, at the end of the novel, a situation arose, and writer-brain spun me off into a whole other storyline. Let me put it to you this way, I’m 40,000 words into the first novel of a quick trilogy that will take place outside of Jessica’s storyline, and be fully resolved before the end of book 8, but I need to write all three of these before I can finish the eighth book, due to implications that will come up. Messy, messy, messy, because I don’t want it in Jessica’s last two books.

At the same time, the secret writing project is going public in a few weeks. I’ve written five stories directly for it over the last year, plus two other stories that have to come out at carefully set times, plus a couple of completely unrelated stories that just jumped up and bit me.

I risk losing track of where I am. But I have never had as much fun writing, so it will be full speed ahead for a while, while I adjust to the new pace.

So, you, as a fan, when you ask me questions about a particular story, do me a favor and remind me in greater detail what I’m talking about? Because I’m several hundred thousand words ahead of you right now, and need to pivot to figure out what I’m talking about.

On the brighter side of things, The Red Admiral is out in a few days. Have you ordered your copy?

And don’t forget The Write Stuff bundle is ongoing. Your chance to learn about the craft from some amazing writers (and me). Get yours today.

So every spring, Kris Rusch puts together a bundle of books on the craft of writing. This year, I was lucky enough to be included in The Write Stuff bundle. There are some new and interesting books  up this year, including Kris’s book on Creating Your Author Brand and Dean’s book about writing a novel in five days while traveling, because Dean’s crazy. I’m somehow up there with my newly released Business For Breakfast book: The Three Act Dramatic Structure.

This one I wrote because many folks writing fiction come in via the typical creative writing courses in high school and college. I tried that. Honestly, I did. My last college creative writing professor was one of those people who would never give one of her students an A if they possessed a penis. True story. I knew that going in, and scored as high a B+ as she would allow, and probably would have been an A if I was a girl. Shit happens. Learned a lot, even if I suffered a serious amount of abuse from that “person.”

I took the abuse the wrong way. It was as a sign I that I should stop writing fiction at that point, and instead transition all my effort into epic, long-form poetry. There are six volumes of stuff, mostly dark fantasy, most of which have never seen the light of day. Maybe one of these days.

Later, I started running with a different crowd, and spent some time writing short stage plays (for sale in many places, if you’re bold and a little crazy).

When I finally stumbled into Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm), she convinced me to write fiction again for the first time in roughly 25 years. And I’ve done pretty good at it. But along the way, I learned a whole different way of story-telling. The 3 Act is different than the typical 7-Point Plot Structure, so she convinced me that not many writers knew about that way of doing things (and the 2-Act, the 4-Act, etc.) so I should write a book about it for writers looking for more tools to go into their toolbox.

That’s my story, and I won’t tell you the truth without free booze and sushi.

But Kris liked it enough to include in the bundle for writers. As she said in the intro: ”

…in the past, when I’ve compiled these bundles, I did my best to make bundles that would help all kinds of writers.

This year, that includes writers like me.

In this bundle you’ll find ten different writing products. They have a lot to teach you.”

M.L. Buchman wrote a fantastic book about how to set up your literary estate. I helped review it in early drafts, and provided copies of my (very weird) will and estate as an example of some of the strange things creatives need to think about.

As a creative (more than just writers, I’m addressing you artists of all flavors and shapes), did you know your copyright will outlive you by 70 years, right now? That means your great-great-grandkids can continue to collect royalties and residuals for something you did today.

GET YOUR WILL DONE AND KEEP IT UP TO DATE!!!

“Hollywood” Hendrickson has a book on how to get your book into schools (assuming you aren’t writing erotica, etc. heh) and significantly increase your revenue and discoverability.

The other books and things in this bundle are just as impressive, and will go a long ways towards helping your be a better creative. Note: I didn’t say writer, I said creative. These things go far beyond just writers. There are important lessons and ideas for any crazy person like us.

You should reach out to the artists in your life and let them know about this bundle. They will get a lot of material, from some amazing people, at a really good price.

So the names won’t mean anything to the rest of you, for now, but I’ve been listening to two of my characters argue back and forth for several weeks. (At some point, you’ll meet Angus and her grandmother and understand that previous sentence.) The topic is doing new things on a regular basis. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) refers to something similar as her “anti-stodgy campaign.”

The logic goes like this: According to studies, most people lock down their personalities pretty hard starting in their mid-teens. By their mid-twenties, things are carved into ruts. You will eat the same food, wear the same clothes, listen to the same music (usually the same albums, and not just the same bands), etc. for the rest of your life. Let me repeat that: for the rest of your life.

That frightens me. It’s worse when I realize how many people I have encountered in my life who are still THERE. (Three decades later, for me, as a scale of comparison.) Listening to exactly the same bands now on the state fair circuit, without a new album in decades.

So the Babe works every month to do something completely new. New clothes. New food. Maybe a new toothpaste or a new way to drive home. Conscious effort to say YES to new things when given the chance.

We call it “Adventures.”

Why this matters.

I have been infected with adventure.

Last week, we were in the Half-priced Books store, looking for something. Wasn’t there, but I stopped and looked at the used music racks, just for fun. I have found that I can frequently find some greatest hit album for a band I sort of know and kind of like, for about $5. Or, cheaper than I could get the two or three songs I really like from someplace like Amazon.

There was a album that looked just weird. Odd name. Weird picture. Hand-written font for most things. $4. What the hell. Looks like fun, and I need to do something crazy this month, so I bought it.

No idea who the band is. Walk out into the parking lot, jump in Baxter, and throw it into the CD player. Windows are down. Sunroof is open. Nice day.

Turned out to be a pretty good album. First of so far three from a Scottish band. Might have to dig up the others, and wiki tells me that they are supposedly recording a fourth (I think. Not looking it up right now to confirm.).

The band caught my eye originally because of their name: We Were Promised Jetpacks. And, damn it, we were. Somebody should do something about that.

The album was These Four Walls. Pretty good stuff. Not going to move the world, but a nice listen and I ripped it to add into the mix.

Last month, someone on social media suggested a band named Tinariwen, which they described as a Tuareg Blues. Yes, seriously. Once you get past the singing in a language I don’t speak, it is absolutely Mississippi Blues. The album I picked up was their 2015 concert album: Live in Paris. And I’m not usually a blues fan. But these folks are good musicians, and were having a good time.

Which brings me back to the original point: What new thing have you done lately?

🙂

A decade ago, I lost three of the closest people in my life, over the course of about a year. One simply vanished, his inbox overflowing, fate unknown. The second was my first wife, Donna, who died of breast cancer in the summer of 2008, after a three year battle she would never win.

The third was my friend Perry Clark. He was a gamer I met when I first moved to Seattle in ’97. A chef and raconteur who was endlessly charming and lovable. Former navy man who occasionally got called up to do things that involved disappearing without a trace for a week, and then coming home, unable to discuss.

But a dear friend.

When he had to return to Georgia to deal with an ailing parent, he drove there and then got stuck. Six months turned into years, and he found a job and and a good woman. I used one of those old Southwest travel passes I had accumulated in the day job, to fly him to Seattle for a week so he could be mybest man when Donna finally let me marry her, right at the end. Mostly, though, so I could get him home, to remind him.

Then I handed him off to some other friends who hadn’t seen him in years either.

That’s how good a friend and a man he was.

In February, 2009, I got a call. His number. A woman’s voice asking “Is this Blaze?”

And I knew immediately.

He had been at church on a Wednesday night, cooking dinner for the congregants, like he always did. Wasn’t feeling well, so he sat down, suddenly unable to breathe. His lips turned blue and he died in the arms of the pastor, surrounded by his other adopted family, returning to him all the love he had always given to those around him.

His sister told us the story. She flew up to Seattle a few months later, returning a few things, like the little brass telescope I had given him as a Best Man present, something he prized enough to have told her and others about it.

I miss him.

I miss them all, but today would have been his fifty-sixth birthday, and I never got a chance to say goodbye, or how much he meant to me. I hope he knew. I can only wake up and look at my phone, when it flashes the birthday reminders each day, and think about how much he would have enjoyed where my life had gone to.

He always took joy in the happiness and success of others, and I have tried to live my life the same way.

But today I miss him.

Happy birthday, dear friend. You are not forgotten.

So it’s been about six weeks of being a writer full time. Starting to establish some of the patterns of life, but got a ways to go. And new things keep happening in strange ways.

Got up Friday morning when the body said wake up. Managing to sleep until 630 or 700 many days now, up from 400 for however many years. Shower, feed the cat, clean the litter box. The usual Kabuki with Kitty.

Then I open the curtains in my bedroom and surprise an elk, grazing in the septic drain field. The house is T-shaped, with the two bedrooms on the crossbar and a bathroom between them, so I’m looking at her down the length of the bar and across the driveway. Maybe 60 feet away.

Really awesome. I have an elk in the yard. Those are infrequent. Got deer I see way more.

She looks up and locks on me as the curtains open, so I wave. (I’m like that.) She goes back to ignoring me and munching grass.

Go to fix myself coffee and breakfast, but decide to spin the computer around to face the other direction today, so I can watch her graze. Big, majestic matriarch, from the looks of her.

About the time I have hot food and hot coffee, I see more elk in the yard. They come up the hill from my neighbor on the left, running along the railroad tracks below us, and then cross my hill because I have cut all sorts of trails in the blackberry and underbrush for my wife to enjoy.

At this point, I realize the whole herd is moving through, as I have her at the far right end of the septic field, with a couple of other females with her, and then I get to see the boys. Buck with at least five points (maybe six, never got a clean view of him and the pictures are not that clear either.) Younger buck with a pair of 16 inch spikes. And a yearling with a single, eight inch spike on one side of his head.

Mob, just happily grazing. At one point, I counted fifteen butts in view, stretched across the west side of the property, right where it starts up the hill to my landlocked neighbor. (She has a driveway easement, blocked in by me, railroad tracks, cliff, and wilderness preserve. Nice lady.)

I had been planning to empty the composting bucket that morning, but as the herd moves across and down the hill, four of them ended up by the composter munching grass merrily. Since they outweigh me, I figure they get the right to stay, plus I like having big critters about. (They don’t seem to like this particular salt lick, so I need to change flavors. Usually, they vanish faster.)

So, for about an hour, I had a herd of elk in my back yard. A whole, freaking herd.

Then, Saturday. Turned around at one point and saw a yearling deer in the septic field. Wander over to the window and check. He stays put and munches. About an hour later, I now have four deer. That’s the most I’ve ever seen at one time. Usually, Momma gives birth to twins and I see them gamboling about all summer. (She’s likely to give birth in about two weeks, if she’s pregnant. Not sure with this group.) After summer, they’ll split up, except they haven’t.

The usual group all winter has been a two-year-old pair of siblings, boy and girl, plus a yearling from last year that I presume is the younger sibling. This fourth one might have been Momma. She was bigger than the others, and had a healing scar on her left shoulder that I couldn’t have covered with my whole hand. Fabulous Publisher Babe (TM) suggested that an aggressive male might have bit or scratched her.

Dunno. Just enjoy my critters. Have two water troughs out for them, and a salt lick. Having deer and elk around lets me know that I do not have any large cats in the neighborhood. That’s important, considering how far out I live in the wilderness, with a railroad right of way and a wilderness preserve less than two hundred meters from a corner of my property.

Had problems about six years ago, when someone clear cut a major chunk of land about a mile away. One neighbor thought they had a rogue male black bear (the less dangerous kind that generally just kill trash cans) in the area briefly, but I’ve had nothing for a while. Odd possum. Saw that might have been a feral cat once. Lots of hummingbirds and other winged attitude problems.

Once I got my house built in the middle of the last big open space in this neighborhood, the predators have apparently moved on. I can have fifteen elk wander through and occasionally bed down. And I find all sorts of spaces for deer to hang out. Haven’t been hunting for big game in nearly fifteen years, and don’t really miss it.

Mind you, I grew up hunting birds every fall. Pheasant, quail, occasional dove. Had pheasant the other day for dinner, and realized it was the first one I had ever eaten that hadn’t been shot by me or my dad. That was a weird thing.  Turned into a hippy in middle age. Might still go after birds one of these days, but don’t know anybody around here with the right connections. (My dad knew EVERYONE, when it came to getting permission to hunt birds on their land, but that was a thousand miles away.)

Later, I might post some of the pictures I took of my critters this week. Look on my FB wall.

And I’m writing like hell, with the new normal. Wrote two stories this week, with editing and publishing work. And more coming. My pace has more than doubled at present, and I hope to maintain that all summer, when I have a lot of carpentry work to do.

But for now, I got critters to share the yard with.

shade and sweet water,

bd

West of the Mountains, WA

Happy Dance!!!

“The Hammerfield Payoff (The Science Officer Volume 8) is now on sale at Audible, and it will be available on iTunes and Amazon within the next few days.”

For those of you keeping score at home, that means that Matt has caught up with me and completed Season One of The Science Officer. All eight books are now available in an audio format. This makes me happy.

In addition, I’m hard at work on what will become story #9, hopefully in the fall. This one will be a collection of shorts, instead of a novella, like the rest are, and will serve as a bridge between Season One (1-8) and Season Two (10-17). Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) is also currently researching how we might do the Omnibus Editions as straight audio books, by just having Matt upload his original files into the new title and running with it. Stay tuned for more details as I know them.

Things landed at a good spot at the end of The Hammerfield Payoff, and it had always been my intention to take a break so I could make some progress on Jessica. If you’ve been paying attention, you saw my note earlier this week that I had finished the first draft of Lord of Winter, with a planned publication date of December 2018 at present. The Red Admiral  (Jessica #6) comes out in a little over a month, and I’m quite thrilled with it.

Melissa is hard at work on doing audible versions of the Jessica Keller books, starting with Auberon and she is deep into Queen of the Pirates right now. Eventually, all nine of those will be available in audio versions as well, as I expect to write the last two Jessica novels (8 & 9) over the next 12 months and drop them on roughly the same schedule in 2019 (June and December).

Thank you for staying with me as I work through this mess. There are so many stories I want to tell, and so little time to tell them, but there is also good news on that front. On February 24, I walked away from the day job finally and have spent the last month organizing and speeding up my writing.

According to folks like Dean, most writers actually slow way down for at least six months to a year after they make the transition. Something about losing the focus on carving out whatever time a person has, between job, family, and life, to write. They suddenly have hours of free space that needs to be used writing.

It is a muscle. I am aware that I can’t just make a huge leap to writing 10,000 words a day. (I have done that twice, under weird and special circumstance, btw.) But this year, I want to jump from a target of 450,000 words to 650,000 words. That involves going from an average of just over 1200 word per day to just under 1800 words every day. I don’t write every single day, as things happen. (Went to a nursery in Morton, WA on Thursday and that was a day trip.) But Friday I managed about 5500 words.

The key is progress. For me, a little counter at the top of my spreadsheet that assumes 1781 words each day, offset by how many days into the year we are. Today is the 90th day of 2018. I’m a little over three days ahead of my production target, and I spent the entire morning in the garden. Planted new stuff: two FIlbert trees, another aronia, a new lingonberry, and a new kind of strawberry (flavor #15). Took a grape, a strawberry, a lavender, and an oregano out of pots and put them in the ground. Had some coffee and some gatorade, and now getting into the second half of my day. There will be words shortly, and then I’ll head into Seattle later and do a barcon. (That’s where I won’t go to Norwescon for personal reasons, but will hang out at the bar and catch up with old friends in town. If you read this in time, ping me with contact info if you wanna meet up, or come looking.)

We’re making progress. I’m speeding up in my writing, as I’ve hit 5,000 words in a day a couple of times now over the last two weeks. That means more Javier and Jessica for you.

Two tidbits, as rewards for people that made it this far: I just finished a short story that is a sequel to Fairchild. Publication date unknown, because it’s 6500 words now, and I could turn around and make that an Act One of a full novel, depending on feedback. Maybe later. Title: The Strawberry Dragon.

Second: there will be a new Alexandria Station story coming out in June. It takes place at the beginning of the Concordancy War, and is the start of a new timeline (new characters, new worlds, new everything) just before the fall of civilization. Title: Last Leaf Falling. Watch this space for more details.

Thank you for helping make my dreams come true.

Shade and sweet water,

bd

West of the Mountains, WA