Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

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Back From a Hiatus

January 1, 2024 /

While jotting down some ideas for 2024 plans and goals, something drew me to the website here, and with it a certain amount of surprise that I realized I haven’t posted anything since July of 2023.

At the same time was the realization that maybe it was not so much of a surprise. There was a definite tilt in our world over the summer, and that contributed to 2023 being the lowest word count year since I started keeping track in 2017. I am looking to change that substantially in 2024, and over the next few weeks I’ll share some of the goals and the plans to reach those goals.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom in 2023. I finally finished the next Jacob and Miriam novel – Death at a Wedding – and once I get the final feedback from the my proof readers, it will be up on all the usual places. Currently, I am targeting the end of January. The next story – The Corpse in the Courtyard – is already under way and hopefully you won’t have to wait two years for that one to appear.

And the tilt? I’m not sure it has completely finished twisting our lives but we are learning to live with it!

System Upgrades

July 20, 2023 /

Since moving into our house just over five years ago, our network has been the standard AT&T router, and a signal extender in the room I use as an office. It’s worked reasonably well, although there have been times when the television in the office goes into a streaming spiral, and my internet connection is horribly slow.

This was mostly liveable until we upgraded our security system – adding cameras and sensors and all of it connected into the network. At which point the connection in the office wheezed and croaked. The television barely connected and connections into a client’s VPN became unpredictable. For other reasons we had the security company technicians back and I mentioned these issues as he was resetting the control panel. He looked at our set up and shook his head, with the expression you normally see when a doctor’s about to deliver bad news.

Essentially, the router and extender weren’t capable of handling the load.

We talked about options and the technician recommended either Eero or Orbi. Some research showed Orbi is a Netgear brand and as I’ve used Netgear a lot in the past, I bit the bullet and placed the order for a router and satellite.

The one thing that impresses me nowadays is how easy installation is for all manner of equipment. Guided by the phone app it barely took thirty minutes, and that included reconfiguring the network name on the AT&T router so we could reuse the original name on the new system. Next was to check everything connected, and when I turned on the television in the living room, I paused. It was the best picture I’ve ever seen – clearer, sharper, more color depth. The one on the office was the same. It was like we’d bought new televisions as well as a new router.

The VPN connection still has its moments, but given how everything else is working, I’m thinking that’s the clients issue.

2023 So Far

July 6, 2023 /

It seems hard to believe we are already half way through 2023. It doesn’t seem that long ago since we were coming down from the New Year festivities, and wondering when it wold warm up. Now we’re into those hot, heavy, humid summer days and wondering when it will cool down.

Back in December, I had six writing projects in mind, and no surprise I’m still working on the first one. There are some reasons for that – multiple day-job projects that only really calmed down in April, and if I’m honest, no real planning to accommodate those projects and the writing. The result has been the lowest six month word count in a long time, which I wasn’t happy about, especially when I looked at a “completed” chapter and found a series of annotations that reminded me the chapter wasn’t as completed as I thought.

Yesterday I took a hard look at the manuscript and found some more not quite completed chapters. Mapping that tidy up, and the chapters still to write to a calendar for the next quarter gave me a schedule. The schedule also includes the first part of the trilogy I mentioned back in December and some short stories that got started and ground to a halt. I added those in so I could at least acknowledge Heinlein’s second rule for writers (You must finish what you write).

I’ll keep you posted.

A Soft Spot

June 15, 2023 /

I recently started reading Amanda Foreman’s book A World on Fire. The sub-title is “Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War,” and the first section of the book is introducing the major players and setting the scene.

I’m only about fifty or sixty pages in, out of eight hundred, but there was one theme that jumped out at me, and that was the passion, anger, and vitriol evident between the two parties in Congress. It reminded me very much of what we’re seeing most days in the news, although I don’t think we’ve quite reached the stage where in 1859 a Virginia newspaper put a $50,000 reward on the head of William Seward for allegedly inspiring and instigating John Brown’s raid.

Foreman goes on to relate how the atmosphere in Washington grew poisonous as Southerners sought to implicate leading Republicans in the supposed conspiracy behind the raid. Again, change some names and events and you could be in 2023 rather than 1859.

I hear a lot of talk about how in the 80’s and 90’s the House, the Senate and the President worked together for the good of the nation. Did they really? A few years after I moved to the US, came the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton. I don’t recall much togetherness. So I guess the real question is were those supposed halcyon days of the 80’s and 90’s the norm, or is normal the combative nastiness we see today, and that Foreman describes?

All of which reinforces an opinion my father first expressed many years ago. He declared a soft spot for all politicians, regardless of allegiance. It’s a deep peat bog in the English Peak District. There are many to be found in New England and around the Great Lakes.

A Milestone in Time

June 1, 2023 /

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were talking about some places we’d visited and trying to pinpoint when we’d been there. I threw out a date that sounded right, and she shook her head. No, she said. We went before COVID!

And that made me pause for a moment.

I’ve read a lot of articles and commentary on how COVID was a defining period for many people, and hadn’t really made the connection myself until then, and I wondered why.

The answer, as I see it depends on how the COVID pandemic affected you. We were incredibly fortunate in a combination of working from home and living in a semi-rural area, we were shielded from many of the issues people faced in more urban settings, especially with regard to lockdowns.

I think because we didn’t have the huge dislocation many people went through, COVID wasn’t such a defining period for us, until we looked beyond a daily, or weekly focus and considered longer timeframes. So while it took me a while to catch up with the rest of the world, I’m definitely more aware now of pre and post COVID timelines.

Kitchen Experiments

April 16, 2023 /

This past week my wife was out of town catching up with some friends, which left the kitchen open and available to explore two dishes that have been on my let’s try list for a while. I do a lot of my experimental cooking while she’s away. And I make sure to be cleaned up before she gets home!

The first meal was Goan Venison Curry from issue 12.22 of the Big Green Egg Life Style magazine. The combination of fennel, cloves, chili, and cardamom appealed to me, and as I have stack of cubed venison in the freezer, it seemed a good choice. Except I must have missed something, because the generous spicing described in the article didn’t materialize. If anything the whole flavor was very bland, which was disappointing because I love a good curry.

With the curry behind me, the next experiment was Roast Chicken with Babylonian Spices from the book The Witches Feast by Melissa Jayne Madara. The dish is based on a translation of the recipe amusarnu pigeon with broth from tablet 8958 of the Yale University collection, dating back to about 1,700 BC.

After the not so great experience with the curry, I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into – especially as I made some changes – sesame oil instead of olive oil, and the roasting phase on the Big Green Egg instead of the oven. While the chicken cooled after poaching in the sauce, and before roasting, I tasted the sauce, and immediately knew I had something different.

I was really pleased with the chicken, and plan to try it again. Now all I need are the other recipes on tablet 8958.

Managing Chaos

March 30, 2023 /

It’s been a while since I posted, and directly related to the way my world seemed to spin out of control in February and March.

As well as closing down one project, and starting another, I was asked to help manage the response to an RFP. It didn’t sound much, but these things never do. Suddenly I found myself juggling three projects across three time zones and trying not to double or triple book meetings. It’s all very well to suggest using an online calendar, or paper to manage this all, but the overhead is horrible. I know, I tried both and I wanted a simpler option.

I’ve written about the Obsidian application several times on this blog, and no surprise, we’re going there again. One of the three projects I mentioned is tracking the progress of several thousand line items on a shared Excel spreadsheet. I got a handle on my piece of that by building a quick tracking board using the Obsidian Kanban plugin. I have about twenty distinct items in flight at any one time and finally I know the status of each one.

The calendar was a little harder. Eventually, I went really basic. Using the Obsidian Canvas feature, I built a column for each day of the week, then added a note for each meeting with the time, description, and a color code for the type – client or personal. Because Obsidian synchronizes seamlessly across all my devices, it’s a quick glance to see if a specific date and time are free.

For the moment, I think the chaos is under control. One of those three projects finishes at the end of March so the need for coordination should become less. Except you know how it is with chaos. It’s never completely tamed.

He said. She asked

February 1, 2023 /

Last night I was part-way through a book, racing to the end, when suddenly I was out of the story, looking at the room around me, and wondering what happened.

When I looked back at the story, the actual words on the page, the author had written one of those dialog statements that reads like a question and tagged it at the end with “she asked.”

Back when I was a newer writer, I added all manner of tags at the end of dialog. You know the sort of thing – Mark demanded, she whispered – I’m fairly certain I never wrote he ejaculated. Even to my novice mind, that never seemed quite right.

And then I discovered Elmore Leonard.

Pick up any of his books and open it to a random page. The chances are you’ll find whole blocks of dialog – sometimes pages – where the speech attribution, if any, reads: Chili said, or she said. I’ve read and studied Elmore Leonard’s books and never in those blocks of dialog are you in any doubt as to who is speaking. I learned a huge amount from that study.

It took a while, but I did get back into that story, and it ended as I hoped. I just wish she’d said instead of asked!

An Obvious Solution

January 18, 2023 /

I did quite a lot of driving in the first half of January, and that enabled me to catch up on some of the podcast backlog.
One of those podcasts was Joanna Penn’s interview with Dan Padavona.
Over the years I’ve read a lot of books about attaining your goals – from Napoleon Hill through Catherine Ponder and Brian Tracy. I won’t go into the details, but they all talk about visualizing your goals as a beginning action each day.
Easy to state. Not so easy in practice.
I don’t have children in the house any more, but I do have a cat and two dogs and the moment you’re awake and up, they expect your complete focus and attention, for breakfast if nothing else. Maybe I;m too literal, but that apparent conflict has always bothered me.
Now, back to the podcast, where Dan Padavona makes the comment about sitting down to review and visualize his goals before starting to write each day. Not necessarily first thing in the morning.
Well duh!
And there was my answer.

Planning for 2023

December 27, 2022 /

When I began jotting my thoughts down for 2023, one of the things that struck me was how similar the list was for 2022, and that made me pause.

A lot of the personal items were house maintenance projects, like replacing air-conditioning units. In 2022, they fell into the “nice to get to” category. For 2023, they’ve mostly moved into the “need to schedule” category.

From a writing perspective, that took a little more thought. As I mentioned my word count fell off a cliff in July and derailed my goals. There was also another factor in that the initial plan was to write mostly long fiction – more Jacob and Miriam stories, and a trilogy I’ve had rolling around in my head for a long time. Instead, I got distracted into short fiction, and short fiction I found hard. With the benefits of hindsight, I should have reviewed everything in the middle of the year, and reset. Easy to make these decision after the event.

Those thoughts coalesced around the same time I was reading some of Mark McGuinness’s work on being a 21st Century Creative, where he talks about a project focus rather than something more granular. The more I read, it became obvious I’ve let myself become too focused on the number of words written instead of the end product – a short story, novella, or novel. In 2023, I’m going to shift the emphasis. The writing plan, including keeping a more regular schedule with this blog, is to complete six projects in 2023. I’ll still track word count, and if I succeed, it will be about double the actual words for this year, and end up about 60% of what I planned for 2022.

And the projects? I know the first one, and have already made a start. There are placeholders for the rest, but they aren’t cast in stone.

I’ll let you know how it goes , and in the meantime, I hope everyone has a safe and prosperous New Year.

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