It was thirty years ago today

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Sgt Pepper taught some punks to play…

Woke up this morning and realized that 2020 did have some emotional impact on me after all. We bounce back thirty years to one of those spectacular inflection points that you run into in life and look around.

(Those of you who’ve known me for a while can testify that I can be kinda reticent. Rarely talk about the deep past. Most of those enemies can no longer find me or have forgiven me and we chat now on social media. The future is weird.)

January 1990.

I have just graduated from Wichita State University with double majors in Philosophy and Political Science and a minor in Geography (Thanks, Dr. B!). Six months ago, WSU won the College World Series. a first for a team from a state north of the southern border.

In six months, I will turn 21. In eight months I will pack my ass up and head out of Los Angeles, to start a new adventure at Claremont Graduate School (I still have shirts from before the name change). (Coincidentally, the week I’m set to drive out, Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait and gas goes from $2 to $4 overnight. Yum.)

I continue to have a part-time job at the law firm where I’ve worked the last few years, happy that they cured me of the notion of wanting to go to law school. I would have been an amazing lawyer, and utterly miserable. Used to joke that I’d be on my third trophy wife by now.)

I have a group of gamers that I regularly get together with in the evening. We’re mostly employed and not going to school, so we might play 3-4 nights per week.

I still chat with two of them these days, but have seen neither in more than 20 years. Another one died of mysterious health issues in his late twenties, give or take 1997. I only found out after the fact several months later and apparently nobody who was willing to talk knew.

Several women made interesting offers in those days, to go with me to Los Angeles and escape the places where life choices had taken them. I didn’t take any of them up on it. Still chat regularly with two of them on social media, but haven’t seen one in 8 years and the other in 22. Both are happily married and we’re all old now.

The face that popped up out of nowhere this morning was the one who I gather hated my guts in the old days. It was an argument over a woman, of course, but he wasn’t involved.

This other woman had her eye on me and didn’t appreciate rejection when I happened to be dating someone else at the time. She and he knew each other long ways around from somewhere else, and she poured out all her woes to him. He’s the kind of guy who took it all and was deeply offended on her behalf, but didn’t come after me.

Unlike the rest of you, I’m sure, I did some crazy, stupid shit  in my late teens. To this day I have no idea how I didn’t manage to get myself killed in those days, other than most of the time I gave off the same sort of pheromones that you get from a rabid badger.

Looking back at myself, I was kinda scary. It was a defensive mechanism against shit that I’d been through as a kid and teen. Took me decades to understand that, because I never encountered the literature explaining the reason behind some of your behavior when you’ve been emotionally abused. Getting better, but holy hell I was a psychopath on a short chain in those days. (Lots of good beer if you want to hear any of those stories.)

But I have inflected now, thirty years ago. I can see endpoint in front of me. I will pack my shit up and vanish from the face of the earth. Didn’t entirely succeed, but let me put it to you this way:

  • Folks I was friends with in college I have spoken with in the last ten years: 0
  • Folks I was friends with in High School I have spoken with in the last ten years: 0
  • Folks I was friends with in Junior High I have spoken with in the last ten years: 0
  • People I knew before 1990 I have spoken with in the last ten years (excluding family): maybe a dozen, including my best friend in 4th grade who I lost track of for 35 years.

I got to reinvent myself when I finally landed in Seattle. Kids these days (ha!) won’t understand that it is possible to disconnect your phone and leave no forwarding address, and just ride off into the sunset. Big Data companies will manage to track your ass across hell and high water, but this was before technology changed the world.

It also helps that I moved 17 times from Aug 1990 to when Donna and I bought the house in 2001. Three of those involved time zones. Most of them involved zip codes. Averaged moving ever 9 months over that stretch.

Also helps that I have friends who have been there for me over the last twenty years when I needed them. I’ve tried to do the same for them. And become so many different people that I can barely remember them, other than it is possible to mark a city or job that links with a particular year (moving a lot does that) and extrapolate outwards from there.

I can tell you frequently what year a movie came out if I saw it in the theater, because I knew where I lived that year. That year. Yeah…

So it’s been thirty years ago today that Sgt Pepper taught those punks to play. I’m 50 now, and more or less at the halfway point, because I plan to live to be 100, pumping out crazy novels and ideas until the moment I keel over, with my great-great-great-grandkids having stack of books to publish after I’m gone. (Got a grandson who is a freshman at Colorado School of Mines this year, so you can do the math on death + 70 for copyright.)

So it’s 2020. That has been my single look back at the mirror that was my past. 1990 was an ending across so many aspects of my life that I can draw a hard line in the dirt and call it good. 1998 would be another one, because that’s when I met Donna. 2008 when I lost her to breast cancer. 2013 when I won the lottery a second time and found another wonderful woman. 2015 when I published Auberon and discovered what the second half of my life would be like.

Hopefully you and yours are having a happy new year. It’s good to take a moment to reflect, but don’t wallow.

The whole future lies before you waiting.

Phoenix (Shadow of the Dominion 5)

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Just a quick, friendly reminder that Phoenix (Shadow of the Dominion #5) comes out on Jan 10, 2020.

wow. 2020.

I’m old.

But I’m not done yet. Got lots more fiction in me and hopefully y’all will continue to enjoy it.

Thanks to everyone for the lovely comments on the series so far. This one was fun to write because it is space adventure, rather than opera.

In Space Opera ™, the stakes have to get bigger and crazier with every book. Bigger monsters. Bigger starships. Planet-killing megabeams. The works. (Doc Smith’s Lensmen or Skylark novels are textbook examples of SPACE OPERA!!)

Shadow of the Dominion isn’t about saving the galaxy. It’s about a guy who got dealt a bad hand early and is trying to make the best of it. He hasn’t turned bitter and hateful as a result of all the things that have happened to him, but tried to do the right thing.

They’ll never forgive him for it.

But Dave saw it in Valentinian when he set the kid up. Kyriaki smelled it when she got too close and decided that she had to wipe that smug grin off his face. Bayjy got rescued from the worst sort of life.

And Glaxu. He still wants to know how the hell he ended up being one of the good guys. That shit was not written into any script he had approved.

This is a story about family. Not the one you’re born into, but the one you assemble as an adult, adding people who make it better and subtracting the ones that don’t. A wise woman once told me that if your friends don’t celebrate even your little victories in life, you need better friends. Those who will.

And my mom once looked at me and said “It’s okay to outgrow your friends.”

Make your life the sort of place where you’re happy. Either they’re happy for you or they need to go. Simple as that.

Valentinian has been running from day one. He got set up by a man with a secret a great many people will kill for, but the kid has the luck. It is his superpower and Dave counted on that to get himself away. It’s kept Kyriaki alive. Kept Bayjy in space. Found Glaxu a new nest.

But now we approach endgame. The Widow and her people are coming for that final confrontation that will see lives destroyed and the very future of Wildspace determined.

Or something like that. When you have personalities that big, you can’t help but wonder what happens when they slam headfirst into each other. And they will.

Phoenix takes us all back to Kryuome. Back to that desert, where X marks the spot and a treasure of unimaginable value lies buried beneath the sands, if Valentinian and his crew can avoid the Widow, the desert, and the sex-crazed cannibal mutants waiting for them.

My apologies in advance, but Book Five cliff-hangars hard. You’ll have to read Princess Rualoh to see how it gets resolved.

I’ve left the ending open, as I like to. Happy-For-Now is as good an ending as people ever get, so I tried to frame things right. I could put another twenty novels into this universe without a lot of effort, spanning the next thirty-some years. That’s how much detail and world-building I did along the way.

When you finish Princess Rualoh you’ll understand what that means. I plan to circle back one of these days and write individual books with Vee and the gang. Maybe duologies where I can cliff-hangar you again, just for fun. Wildspace is big, and there are other places to go.

What kinds of trouble can a Senior Cutter and a team of salvagers get into, with a war like destroyed the Urlan along the way? I had to think about that as well. If you have a ship sitting in space, and the technology to keep radiation from making the hull brittle, how long can a starship just float there, waiting for someone to come along and unlock its secrets?

That’s the sort of silliness in my notes of Longshot Hypothesis and her crew. I would love to hear your feedback as well.

Enjoy

blaze

West of the Mountains, WA

Countdown to Phoenix

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So we’re coming up on the Christmas holiday in the West. Happy whatever holidays you celebrate where you are.

By now a few of you have read Petron. Thank you for the lovely reviews and commentary. As I have said, it is really the end of Jessica’s story (for now), but there are places I could go from here. That much ought to be obvious from the way I epilogued everyone.

Personally, I’m the most interested in what Uly and the Bartender do, but I do know a few of you are wanting more Phil Kosnett, for obvious reasons. That’s also on the calendar, but I have a limited number of novel slots available in 2020, so we’ll have to see where we go. Maybe I’ll write shorter stuff for some of your favorite characters.

The great problem in life is having enough time to write all the stories, not in trying to come up with ideas. Any pro writer will tell you the question is “How do I make them stop?”

But we are just in an interlude with Jessica. I’m still in the middle of Valentinian at this moment. Thank you also for the lovely comments on the series so far.

This is space adventure, rather than opera. The difference is scale. In an adventure, you don’t have to keep upping the stakes novel over novel.

Jessica is opera. Always bigger. Valentinian and Dave are adventure. Leading somewhere obviously, but not with humanity and the galaxy at risk. Just an angry wife, betrayed and displaced, and hungry for vengeance.

My apologies in advance, because Phoenix cliff-hangars pretty hard. But in a good way. Like the four before it, this novel comes in around 45k words. I can work longer (Petron came in around 140k) but this is a nice length to tell a single story hard and fast, without having to have all manner of boring and irrelevant side quests along the way.

To make it up to everyone, Princess Rualoh is about 60k. I had too much to cover in order to wrap everything up, but I am quite pleased with the result and hopefully you will be as well.

Make sure you get your pre-orders in now so that the books hit your readers as soon as it gets live.

Additionally, the audio for everyone did not drop originally, but I just looked and Dominion-427 and Phoenix audio are available, and Princess Rualoh will be in a few days when they finish processing everything.

Thanks for staying with me, and lemme know if you have any questions. I’m not done with Valentinian, as you’ll see, but we leave things in a place none of you are going to see coming. Need to go back one of these days and write more.

Cheers,

b

So apparently I’m Dutch now. Or something

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Update: Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) is a woman of a particular age, and the doctors recommend 4 oz of fatty fish every week to get all the right stuff in her diet. For the last however long, we’ve gone and gotten sushi at this fantastic place in Maple Valley, WA.

Sumo Sushi, on Highway 169 if you get this way. Fantastic sushi at pretty good prices.

But fresh sushi is kinda spendy, and we’re always trying to find ways to not necessarily spend so much money, especially as 2020 looks like it might be something of a down year in book sales. (This happens every time you get a presidential election, but things are going to get out of hand.)

I’d rather be proven wrong as a cynic than an optimist, at least here.

But fatty fish. Mackerel, sardines, herring, tuna, trout are all fatty. White and warm-water fish are less good, because they tend to have very little fat.

This week, we went into Costco. They had a 1kg package of herring in oil. I’ve never had herring in the store, because traditionally it is pickled with salt and a LOT of onions. I’m allergic to onions, so there.

But this was just hunks of herring. She needs it. I like to expand what goes in my flavor packs, so we bought. Opened it up tonight and counted out 9 steaks, not as wide as my hand but a little longer. Ballpark each one at about 4oz, which is what she should be eating each week.

Pulled out all four of the current flavor packs from the freezer and slipped a herring steak in to freeze with them, so I also have fatty fish. Currently: chicken thigh, duck confit, pork skin with fat and meat, beef marrow bones, goat chops, pork neckbones. Half a pound of that lovely offal I made a few weeks back. Add a slab of herring to that.

I cook it by letting it everything defrost overnight in the fridge, and then into the slow cooker. Add all the veggies from the freezer or fridge: broccoli, cauliflower, bok choi, kale, mustard greens, Swiss chard, carrots, cucumber, beet slaw, red cabbage, whatever else.

Olive oil. Avocado oil. Apple Cider Vinegar. Balsamic vinegar. Salt, pepper, cayenne, chili seasoning, garlic, dill, nutritional yeast, etc.

Cook for 24 hours on low, churning lightly every once in a while. Pour into casserole dish and left cool covered in fridge. Eight servings for breakfast. Cut out and nuke while making coffee.

But tonight, we just ate a steak raw. She mixed up some vinegar and sugar and it tasted an awful lot like the fish and chips I used to get when I was a kid, with malt vinegar over it.

Apparently, the Dutch eat herring raw. Like, pull out a steak and dip it in salt and onions and then eat. Dutch sushi, if you will.

But my diet keeps getting broader and better for me.

What are you doing to ensure you outlive all those bastards?

🙂

It’s a pj’s kinda day

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we’ve been way too social over the last week or so. It’s been wonderful, and I’m glad we did, but I needed to take a day off. Normally on Sunday morning we go down to Krain, WA (just north of Enumclaw) and have breakfast at the Krain Cafe. Damned good food and amazing people.

Today, we came home and changed back into pajamas and are having something of a goof off day. I just made myself a redneck mocha (areopress coffee and hot cocoa mix, with coconut milk). Just hit send on the latest BW newsletter. (the serious one as opposed to the redneck chef one). Writing a blog because I can. And want to.

Got to thinking about circles over the last few days. There are a lot of people I know (my wife the Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) knows everyone). But I don’t encounter all that many people IRL. Don’t have a job anymore, except to write, so that and gaming group folks are about it, except when we do special events.

But there are a lot of lives I sort of follow on social media, and then it gets weird when I run into them in the flesh, as it were. I know way more about them in cyberspace than I do meatspace, so I have a moment of hesitation engaging.

Last night, at a friend’s birthday/Xmas party, I got hugs. I used to hug, but in the modern age, I’ll hug men and stay reserved around most women. They get it initiate.

I think they appreciate my not assuming a hug, but it got me to thinking last night about all my circles.

These are not Venn diagram circles, but the layers each of us has around themselves at how they interact with people. Closest friends and family who get the whole story. Folks who get the reader’s digest condensed. The elevator pitch edition. The none-of-your-damned-business people. The strangers.

I’m an introvert. An extremely gregarious one, but last night I didn’t feel like engaging in direct conversations, because of all the people at the party, I knew two that I would just talk to. A dozen more I have talked to and who know my name. Two dozen faces I more or less know, but might only see at this particular party. Maybe don’t even know their name (except I usually remember names) or they don’t know mine. Maybe only ever shared a dozen worlds in the last few years.

Internet friends, but not IRL friends you go have a beer with.

I have internet friends who rant and unleash their anger, but I have had to learn to just shut up and listen, and hope I can gain context from the words. Angry black men (with damned good reason, mind you) but if I ask what’s going on, I risk becoming a target. (Again, mind you. Been there, done that, got the scars from what I had thought was an innocent question. Ignorant certainly.)

It isn’t their job to educate me, but sometimes I get lost because I’m not part of their inner circles, same as they aren’t mine. Maybe never met in the flesh, because they live in North Carolina or Georgia, most of the country away from me in Seattle.

So I listen, and contemplate circles.

You ever do that?

Stop and try to figure out if you know someone on the interwebs well enough to ask a harder question than the weather, unsure if you’re about to be virtually bleeding as a result?

These folks don’t know me, except from what I’ve posted and the sides I’ve taken in the past, if they saw them. I can be an ally. Am I a friend?

Hard to know. Strangers come up to me at the party for a hug, and she commented that she felt like she knew me so well, because we interact on the social medias, but this was the first time we’d actually met in the flesh to say hi.

I’ll take her word for it that we kinda waved at each other last year at the same party, but I didn’t know who she was, except a face in that crowd. Got my hug. Had a brief conversation about her kids, because she had just bought a sweater for her oldest that was similar to the one I was wearing.

Small talk. The kind of thing you share with a relative stranger, rather than someone you tell dirty jokes to. Don’t know her well enough to make the sort of sarcastic jokes I might with the gamers who know I was raised by pirates and sailors. Partly, it’s the modern age, and I’m okay with that. I have other women I do make those jokes with, because they’re just as salty.

But it’s the holidays, and I only maybe see these people in the flesh at someone’s holiday party.

Kinda sad. Kinda strange. Kinda interesting, in a philosophical way. (And I’m a trained philosopher, so kids don’t try these stunts at home.) Not really sure where it takes us, other than the need to unplug and talk to those people in real life.

I frequently try to get people to meet for coffee or a beer. I’m happily married, so not even remotely a threat, but people are shy. Easier to talk with all the cyberverse between you, because on the internet, everybody is one state over.

How do y’all handle that sort of question with circles?

The Indie World and Fans

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So I don’t have a formal publisher. Or rather, I married her. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm)

We write fast and publish regularly. I’ll put out 14 novels in 2019 and write 20. 4 Issues of Boundary Shock Quarterly. 2 Issues of Blaze Ward Presents. Turn them around pretty quickly, because the Canadian Copyeditor Babe(tm) works fast.

Nonetheless, errors creep in. Or rather, nobody catches some of the stupid shit I do. And it’s all my fault.

However, we live in the future, and it’s kinda cool.

When I put a book up on Amazon, occasionally I get warnings from them about errors in a manuscript. Those come from someone who had read it and then signed in and notified them of problems.

Many authors, I am sure, huff and curse when that happens. I know I did, but then I had an interesting realization. I can put out an updated version of the file pretty quickly. So it gets progressively cleaner, even as I thought it was pretty good to start with.

Fans, offering up suggestions. And making the book better.

That’s all sorts of awesome, when you get right down to it. They liked it enough to finish it and send notes. (Personally, I don’t even mind if you send them to me directly here, as they’ll get processed almost as fast.) Some fans might just stop reading when they hit something like that.

I can’t do this without you, the fan. Somebody has to buy the books. Someone has to tell their friends, their book club, the lady at the grocery store.

That’s why I give everyone who signs up for newsletter a new book nobody else has (Not for sale anywhere.) to say thank you to you people.

We operate in a strange future. Fifty years ago, you had a publisher, and they had teams of people. They also had years to work on a manuscript, from the first contract signature to the book landing on a shelf. And errors still got missed.

But those errors were permanent. You had to sell enough to justify a second run. Or maybe a revised updated edition if you got famous enough.

We turn things out that quickly, but we can also fix them that quickly.

So again, thank you, whoever you were or are. They keep coming. We keep fixing them.

(And if you want a paying gig, lemme tell you, most of the writers I know can’t ever find enough good editors. You can make good money getting to read things first. I have a whole group of folks that I just send novels and stuff out to, usually before they even go to the copy editor, because they’ll end up buying the final product, but they also appreciate seeing how the sausage really is made.)

Just thought you should know.

 

Countdown to Petron

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Just about a week to go, and I’m hoping the rest of you are as excited as I am.

Late in the day on the Dec 9 (Seattle time), the fourteenth (and currently last) of the Jessica Keller books will be out.

PETRON

I really enjoyed that book, even as long as the story ended up being, for me to wrap everything up. Mind you, (spoiler alert) we killed Buran in book eight. How do you top killing a god? (end spoiler)

By starting a galactic civil war that includes the former Holding, Aquitaine, the Fribourg Empire, Corynthe, Lincolnshire, and Salonnia. That’s what’s coming. Hopefully you are all prepared and don’t have to go to work the next morning, because things will start crazy and keep going, all the way to the very end.

And it is an ending. I know I promised the Ambassador more Phil Kosnett stories, and I have a trilogy in mind, but you’ll see how they come about when you get to the very end and see how his story wraps up.

Remember, these are the Jessica Keller Chronicles. The tagline on book one was the promise I made to the audience (you). “She could win the war, if they would let her.”

It just took a while and threatened to destroy everyone and everything to get there. And you will see heroes fall. Some of them won’t surprise you, if you’ve been paying attention.

Other heroes will rise. Again, it’s all telegraphed in there across the whole of the previous thirteen books. If you were paying attention.

The trick with writing a series, any series, is to keep it interesting all the way through. If the author starts to get bored, the writing gets boring, and the readers put the book down. It’s even worse in epic space opera, where every novel must be bigger than the one before it.

The excitement must build and keep building. The stakes must keep going up. The threats. The risks.

EVERYTHING…

Which is why you should end a series, and plan that ending ahead of time. I didn’t want to have the CS-405 books be part of one of the other novels, partly because 7-9 would have been HUGE, but partly because I wanted to tell Phil Kosnett’s story there, instead of Jessica’s.

The Jessica Keller Chronicles 

I do promise another Phil Kosnett trilogy at some point. First Centurion Kosnett. Possibly Ambassador Kosnett, just to tweak the real Ambassador Kosnett, since he’s such a cool guy in real life.

But we’ve reached the pinnacle. You have a week to pre-order, or binge yourself to get caught up, because Petron goes live on Dec 10 and you won’t want to miss it.

Been playing with new covers

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A reminder for folks who might have missed it in other place: Sometime early next year (Q1-ish), the plan is to start selling certain short fiction directly from my website, rather than out on the major distributors. There are lots of reasons, but primarily, I don’t sell a lot of short fiction, even when I bundle it up in Beyond The Mirror collections. (Trust me, I run those numbers and nobody buys them.)

Plus, if I sell it elsewhere for $0.99, I make about 26 cents.

So I plan to make sure people are drawn in to the website to read things that you will not be able to buy anywhere else. That exclusive part is the key. Right now, I’m planning to put up a new story every month on www.blazeward.com. This is in addition to the short fiction and other stuff that goes to my Patreon people long before anybody else sees it. Throw in the Boundary Shock Quarterly stories and the Blaze Ward Presents stuff and I figure to write about 36 short-ish stories next year, in addition to the 14 novels I have planned.

So there will be stuff you can only get here. Right now, I think that we’ll start with Kumiko. You might have read the first Kumiko story in Boundary Shock, but I have a longer story for her, part of a whole series. Along the way, I wrote origins short stories for five people I plan to introduce. Here are the first two covers: Dancer and Shirabyoshi

I already have all seven covers done, so you’ll start seeing them by next summer. I also have Ollie, Yasmin, Farouk, and others that will be coming out.

Why am I doing this? Simple enough. Places that are the heart of social media right now are going to fail. Facebook is declining as more and more people turn off their accounts and move elsewhere. (When was the last time you logged into your MySpace account, anyway?)

For creatives, we’ll lose that central marketplace of ideas and potential fans, so I need to start training people now that they need to come to my website every month in order to find new fiction. That will get them into the habit.

There will be the new novel for sale every month, and if you follow me on places like Amazon they should send you a reminder. You should also sign up for blog posts directly in your email, rather than however you get them now for the same reason.

The world is fragmenting. This is a good thing in general, because some things have gone desperately wrong, and the market turning against bad players will cause them to course-correct.

But Indie artists like me suffer when we lose the ability to reach a number of new fans quickly because one of you shared something I wrote. (Feel free to forward this email to your friends like you did in the old days before social media sharing. It helps.)

So that’s the plan. If you are a cover artist or in need, I am starting a newsletter in january that will deal with all sorts of things in publishing, two of which helped me create those two ebook covers above in under an hour combined, and I don’t use anything by Adobe. Yes, you read that right. No more Adobe. Really cool covers for ebooks done pretty damned quick. And hopefully the folks involved are working on print-book covers as well. Had a chat with them and provided some specifications, so fingers crossed.

But that’s my news today.

Happy Turkey Massacres to all the US folks celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow. I’m going home in a few hours and making blueberry poptarts from scratch for one of the desserts. We also have pumpkin and pecan pie. Homemade dulce d’leche. Spatchcocking a chicken and having scratch-made stuffing. (Handmade cassava root bread. Homemade sausage. Etc.)

Gonna be a nice quiet weekend. Should finish the lastest novel by Saturday, and then on to #20 to round out the year.

What traditions do you have for the holidays?

Thanksgiving cooking

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We do things a little nonconventional, out here on the farm. That includes holidays.

American Thanksgiving will be this week, so Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I have been working on things. We’re going to spatchcock a chicken and then have strange fixings on the side. I’m allergic to onions and mushrooms. She can’t do eggs, dairy, or nightshades. Plus, she’s generally paleo, so as low carb as she can and can’t eat wheat, rice, corn, soy or anything else derived from a grass.

Tonight, we ate dinner from leftovers, and both decided that it wasn’t enough. Plus, it was getting time to start looking at what desserts we wanted to make for Thursday. She has a couple of fun cookbooks, so we found a pie crust recipe for her to make her pecan tarts in. (I grew up with pumpkin pie, so pecan just doesn’t do it for me.) Then she asked what I wanted.

I have been jonesing for a good pop tart or something similar. I can eat them, but have you ever read the ingredients label? Yuck.

But I could take the pie crust recipe, which was already sweet, and do things with it. Got crushed pineapple in cans in the cupboard. And the googles found amazing things when I typed in “pineapple pop tart filling.”

so we have four pineapple pop tarts cooling on the top of the stove right now. the crust is coconut flour, coconut oil, arrowroot, and maple syrup. The filling is pineapple, sugar, vanilla, lemon juice, and cinnamon. Gonna ice them in a little while when the cool down. (EDIT: frosted and yum)

All things you can eat without having to try to pronounce. Healthy for you, even. This round we messed up the crust a little, but we’d never tried this before and I was pushing the envelope a little, like usual.

But I made myself pineapple pop tarts from scratch tonight. Kinda awesome, all the way around.

What silly traditions or non-traditions do you have around the holidays, when it comes to cooking?

OryCon wrapup and stuff

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I have so many outlets of communication these days that the blog is going to be far less than it used to, but I’ll still share things here that don’t go elsewhere. Let’s face it, I have my Patreon, where every Monday I try to talk about what I’ve been writing, in way more detail than anywhere else. I’m about to ramp up the monthly newsletter to twice-monthly. I moved the Boundary Shock Quarterly announcement newsletter to quarterly so I wasn’t bombarding people, but keeping them up to date (We just dropped issue 008 last month, if you did forget.)

So the blog needed something specific. It goes wider than any of the others, because it feeds my Amazon author page, goodreads, and a few others.

So general stuff.

OryCon 41 (the link already says 42) was fantastic. I got to moderate a panel with Lifetime Guest of Honor CJ Cherryh and Brenda Cooper on “Humanity 1.1” where we talked about the ethics and morals of genetic engineering like good little science fiction writers. Those two ladies were wonderful. I mostly just tried to ask questions to keep the conversation moving, because nobody was there to hear me talk.   🙂

The next panel was with Science Guest of Honor Mika McKinnon. Occupations of the future, but we turned it into “Art in a Post-Scarcity World.” She’s fantastic fun, if you ever get a chance to listen to her talk. And had awesome cosplay going the entire time. Wonderful lady.

Finally, Science Fiction and Politics, with Bob Brown moderating. This was the panel where we stopped at one point and took a vote as to whether fuckery was an acceptably descriptive term. I had a blast.

Outside of that, got to see lots of folks who are con friends. Connected with some new folks as well. Been sending out social media friend requests and notes over the last few days, so all good.

Right now, I’m talking to some folks in the Atlanta area about what single Con I might want to try to make in 2020, down in that neck of the woods, if I could. Got a lot of travel going on next year, so things tend to be a little weird. If any of you know a good SFF con in the southeastern US that I might try, please let me know, or reach out to those folks and ask them to send me some information. Happy to talk writing as a business, and SF as a vocation.

And it’s coming on to winter. Currently defrosting some turkey. We cooked a bird a while back and froze the bones. Then put them in a crockpot and melted them for broth a week ago, but I also got a nice amount of meat off of them at the same time.

Found a focaccia mix that we can both eat. Going to boil down some bone broth with a little coconut milk into a gravy, mix in the turkey, and make me grain-free/egg-free pot pies as an experiment.

What are y’all up to as the weather gets nasty out there?