Category: Uncategorized (Page 2 of 4)

I was in the grocery store earlier this week, working through the list of things we needed, when I realized the list also had several items we already have, but wanted to make sure we had enough.
That made me ask the question of myself – what is enough?
The answer, as usual, it depends.
In the time before the covid pandemic, I’d have a couple of cans of sweet corn in the pantry, and the same for peas and black beans, or packets of rice. Now I have five or six of each, plus several packs of chicken and other meat stored in the freezer.
All of this extra stock was driven by the inability to buy those items. We went for a period of maybe six weeks where finding chicken in our stores was impossible. Similarly with peas and sweet corn.
For the past month it’s been eggs.
I hear the refrain about supply-chain issues, but if the manufacturer can supply peas with onions, peas with mushrooms, or peas with jalapenos, why can’t they provide peas with more peas?
It’s not just foodstuffs or paper goods. We’ve seen empty shelves of laundry detergent, dryer sheets, and air fresheners.
As a result, my shopping patterns have changed.
I’m more aware of what’s not on the shelves, or available in the produce section. If it’s an item I use regularly, I make sure I have a good supply in the pantry. Not so easy with fresh fruit of vegetables, but I’ve learned the earlier you get to the store, the more likely you are to find broccoli, or peppers or onions.
I’m hopping these supply-chain “issues” resolve themselves, and my patterns change again, but to be honest, I’m not confident.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted here, and it’s been quite a busy time.

On the writing front, I’ve completed several short stories that made their way into a spy fantasy collection titled The Vatican Shadows. In addition, I went through all the short stories I’ve written in the past year or so and added two more collections: Making a New Start and Mageweaver.

Making a New Start is a series of stories about Nidintu, one of my Babylon characters, who kept hanging around until I wrote about him.

Mageweaver came about after a conversation with my sister, Margaret, about weaving, and she was kind enough to license the image of one of her latest creations as the cover. Margaret is currently deep in preparation for the latest iteration of Heallreaf, a tapestry exhibition that she conceived, created, and is now in its fourth iteration.

All of these are available in digital and paperback at most stores, or directly from this website in digital only.

Stay tuned as there are two more collections coming from that backlog review, and potentially, a third.

I’ve been very fortunate over the years not to have a home or computer event that causes me to lose hard or digital copies of stories or other data I keep on my computers. Dean Wesley Smith tells of how he had a fire in his apartment and lost a novel and uncounted short stories. If I recall correctly, this was back in the 1980’s, so there were no computer backups.

Everything was typed manually, and stored in hard copy.

I have some of my stories in hard copy, but not all of them, and I see that as an option I’ll get to in the fullness of time. I often pride myself with the fact I have three or four thumb drives and a 4 Terabyte external drive where I keep regular backups of all my writing and other data. At less than $20 for a 64 Gigabyte thumb drive, cycling several into the backup process is pretty straightforward.

I was thinking about this one morning last week, reminding myself it was almost two weeks since I’d copied everything to a backup drive. Which was when I started thinking about the location of my computer, and those backup drives.

The computer, obviously, is on the desk in my office. The 4 Terabyte drive is on the right-hand drawer. Two of the thumb drives are tucked into the front pocket of my organizer, and the third is lying on the desk beside the laptop

Which means, if we have a fire, or a tornado rips through, everything is in the same place and those backups won’t help me one bit. Yes, I do have Dropbox, but mostly for current work in progress only. If everything goes sideways, that won’t help, and neither will the fact all my backups are within three feet of the computer itself!

So, the first thing I did was relocate one of the thumb drives into my bedside cabinet. The second was to make use of the one Terabyte of Cloud storage I get with my Office 365 subscription. It’s not ideal, but it’s a start.

Where are your backups?

Last weekend (March 13/14), the clocks moved forward here in the US. In past years this has been one of those almost non-events. The clocks change and we get on with our lives.

For some reason, this year has been different. I did wonder if it might be linked to my trip to England, arriving back the week before the time change, but decided it wasn’t the reason. England to the United States is the easy trip. It’s effectively a long long day which sends me to bed completely exhausted, and after a good night’s sleep, my body clock is back to normal.

This past week though has been a struggle. Every morning it’s like climbing out of a fog. While effectively I’ve been waking an hour earlier than I’m used to, this hasn’t translated to any being ready for bed any earlier in the evening.

I’m sure there’s a scientific study somewhere that explains what happens. This morning I woke up and from the light and how I felt, I knew the time without having to look at the clock.

That’s back to normal for me.

Now to get everything else in my life aligned. But that’s a story for another time!

This week I started a new story in my Babylon series. It’s a little different from most of the others because the main character in this story is the priest Arioch. The beginning is in the Esagila temple complex, Babylon’s main religious center, and I was on a roll, pounding the keys as the words flowed.

About three or four hundred words later, I paused, went back to tidy up what I’d written, and stopped at one word.

Bedlam.

I’d used the word to describe Arioch’s thoughts about the noise coming from outside. For some reason it didn’t feel right, but I wasn’t sure why. On an impulse, I reached behind my desk for the dictionary in the book case and flicked to the “B’s”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, bedlam is a corruption of Bethlehem, first used in England in the 1400’s and 1500’s in relation to the London mental hospital St. Mary of Bethlehem.

Over time, the word bedlam came to mean uproar and confusion. More importantly, it isn’t a word Arioch would have known or used.

There was a part of me that argued to leave the wording as it was. After all, how many of my readers would pick up on Arioch using a word that didn’t exist until nearly a thousand years after he lived? The thing is, I’d know, and every time I read that paragraph it would kick me out of the story, which means some of you are likely to have the same reaction.

I changed the paragraph, but Arioch’s still in trouble. Now, I just have to work out how he fixes it

So, I looked at the calendar yesterday, and realized the plan to post my February update in early March was so late, it makes more sense to do a double update. Well, it did to me.

Starting with the updates, the story I mentioned in the last post was accepted by WMG Publishing for their anthology Promise in the Gold, which will be published later this year. Additionally, the paperback version of Thieves in the Temple is available on Amazon, and I published the Portals collection under the title Tales From the Puzzle Store in early March. No paperback version as yet, but stay tuned.

One of the learning items from putting together Tales From the Puzzle Store has been Books2Read. They are part of Draft2Digital, and provide you with a single link that references all the online stores where your books are available. You’ll see some changes on the other pages of this site in the next few weeks as I implement those links, and a page about the other collections planned for this year. I’m also looking at working with Payhip and Book Funnel so you can buy directly from this site without going through any of the big retailers. 

I’ve continued using the beta for Aeon Timeline 3, including using it to map out a longer term series project that could easily run to six or more books, although it will probably be later this year, or early 2022 before I get to start on those.  

I’ve done quite a bit of research and thinking about the Thieves in the Temple and its successors, and how they should be branded. Going forward, the plan is to use a sub-title A Jacob and Miriam Novel. Of course that may change by the time Death at a Wedding comes out. Needless to say, those dates have slid a little, so more when there’s news to share on that front.

This past week I nearly screwed up.

I wrote a short story for an anthology with a deadline of February 14^th – and no, it wasn’t a romance :).

I had a couple of other projects with deadlines on the 14^th, and for once focused on one at a time. My usual approach has been to work on everything at once, and we all know how that tends to work out.

By Saturday evening I had the story under control, and estimated I needed another five hundred words or so to finish it. Gauging the number of words to the end is something that just happened when I did the story a week challenge last year. I’ve been within a couple of hundred words in those estimates and a quick burst of writing on Sunday morning got me over the finish line and on the upper side of the estimate.

I read through the story, sorted out spelling and punctuation and ended up with just over 2,500 words. I transferred it into proper manuscript format, checked the submission guidelines. 

And crap!

The minimum submission length was 3,000 words. Somewhere in my head I recalled the minimum as 2,000.

I’d kicked around two or three other ideas for this anthology none of which had enough structure in my mind to pull three thousand words together in a few hours.

Did I mention I’d also promised to grill steaks for a Valentine’s dinner?

There was no point in submitting the story as it was – automatic rejection, so, I printed a hard copy of the story, sat down with the dogs on either side, ready to offer advice, and looked at what I’d written. As I read through I didn’t try to edit and restructure the story or replace word order. I tried to really put myself in the head of my main character, think about what she would see, smell, hear, feel, and touch. The five senses that add depth and and richness to the descriptions of where she is and what’s happening.

I think it was less than an hour later that I took the notes I’d scribbled over the margins and between lines, updated the manuscript and realized I now had over 3,000 words.

Yes, you can overthink the editing process, but in this case, editing wasn’t changing the way the story was written. It was adding depth to hopefully help my reader stay connected to the story. 

If you’d asked me two weeks ago if I could do that, I would have said no. 

Now I know I can do that with a story

I’ll let you know what happens.

Technical issues on this site prevented updates during the remainder of January. I spent some time with the iPower support team and they tell me the issue is resolved, although I’m still seeing some odd behavior on the site.

As a result of the technical issues the updates I had planned for January are now pushed to February which is already pretty crowded.

There was no progress on the paperback version of Thieves in the Temple. It requires a block of dedicated time in Affinity Photo and to be honest I’ve had more fun with Death at a Wedding and writing three of the five short stories for the Portals Collection which will be published either later in February or early March. I wrote just over 20,000 words in January, the most in a month since April 2020, so I’m quite pleased with that progress and just need to keep it up for the rest of 2021!

I also laid out my 2021 publishing plan in January. At the moment it’s in an Excel spreadsheet but I will be moving it to the new version of Aeon Timeline as part of my version 3 beta testing. The new mind map option in Aeon 3 looks to be very powerful. I have some ideas on some non-standard uses for it, and will let you know how it works out.

About a month ago, Dean Wesley Smith announced on his blog that he was starting a publishing challenge: publish 70 pieces of his own works – written and edited in the next year to coincide with his 70^th birthday. A couple of weeks after that, he issued a challenge to the rest of us: publish 52 pieces of our own works in 2021. As a partial rebuttal to the potential naysayers, Dean asked the rhetorical question for those who completed the short story challenge – how many of those 52 stories have you published?

I completed the challenge: 52 stories in 52 weeks, and I’ve been reasonably diligent in getting them out to magazine editors. Not so diligent at getting them up online. Dean’s question could have been directed right at me.

So.

Challenge accepted!

Of course there’s more to putting a story online than just converting to ePub or mobi. There’s covers, copy, categories, and pricing!

The timing is excellent because with Thieves in the Temple so close, these are all areas where I need to become more proficient. Although trying to find cover art is nearly as much a time-sink as doom-scrolling through the news.

I’ll keep everyone updated on progress in the monthly recaps, and yes, I know I owe you the November recap. 

Stay tuned.