Still Singin’ the DSL Blues

As the disasterous conversion to the Quest package continues, I await my second appointment with the Direct TV guy, who wrecked three cars and wasted 4 hours of my precious vacation time when his ladder flew off his truck on the freeway. Another 4 hours thiscoming friday and hopefully I’ll… Continue reading

DSL Blues

Turn around and suddenly it’d been 4 days since my last post. We went out today to get power of attorney taken care of for Grandma. It’s something that’s long over-due and would have saved us a lot of trouble had we done it before the broken hip. Still, it… Continue reading

CopperCon 27

We woke up early this morning to the dog barking, and found Grandma on the floor by the front door. “I just arrived,” she said. I’ll probably never know how she got to the front door without her walker, but there she was. Senility with convelescence and incontinence is not… Continue reading

Interesting Statistics

The current issue of Locus has the results of their annual survey. In the reading section, they asked about what types of SF and fantasy their respondants liked. The speculative genre seems to be doing better across the board. Under the Do you like… question, SF hit 90% for the… Continue reading

End of Drought

I finally made another sale after a 3-month drought. Tales of the Talisman purchased my story The Great Basilisk Race. This is the first time I intentionally wrote a fantasy story, though frankly, it could have been set in any genre. It is slated to appear in the June 2008… Continue reading

It’s Not Easy Being Green

I decided to tackle the green pool today. For those not following along, in July of 2006 my pump broke. I was told 2 days to repair it, but the two days turned into ten. You don’t leave a pool uncirculating for 10 days in Phoenix during the summer. A… Continue reading

The Imperfect Beasts

Sometimes, I just don’t know what I was thinking when we had kids. You spend at work the friday before Labor Day dealing with a customer representitive who is not at all pleasant to work with, then come home to kids that fight. They can’t help with the laundry without… Continue reading

Untitled

Today, I finally registered for the 2008 Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference at Arizona State University. Orson Scott Card and Michael Stackpole are on faculty this time. OSC is teaching a class, and Stackpole is teaching the genre small group (workshopping) session. I’ve wanted to meet Michael Stackpole for… Continue reading

Dark and Light?

I’ve noticed something since I started writing–dark fiction seems to sell. Markets that specifiy dark fiction seem outnumber the others by a significant margin. It gets me wondering why. This train of thought was brought about by some comments on the Darker Matter web site about my story Chaos Theory…. Continue reading

The Respite is Over

So much for our sub-hundred-degree days. Today and yesterday, the remnants of Hurricane Dean came roaring through the desert, leaving nary a drop of water on the ground, but plenty of humidity in the air. It also dropped our temperatures below 100 degrees for the weekend. We go back to… Continue reading