House of Goats

It sure sucks to live here.  Bleh.

I started work on a new simple life book, "House of Goats."

I'm having way too much fun with this.   I remember all the mistakes I made when we first moved out into the country very well.  You know the stuff I'm talking about, the stuff I started blogging about, with mouse nests in the ceiling, and goat escapes, dog escapes, sanity escapes ... the good old days that just won't stop happening to me.  The question my kids keep asking is how close to the present will I write into this?  I have no idea.  I keep getting new material every day, like my ongoing obsession with January gardening, which is somewhat reminiscent of my late evening gardening where I contemplated gardening by torchlight to extend my gardening day.  

I'll write until I find a good stopping point, I guess.

Latest Kami-brained scheme--raising chicks in my mini-greenhouse on the deck.  I'll let you know how it goes.  It could be full of awesome, or fail to the max.  Either way, I suspect that little greenhouse will never be the same again.

Heck yeah chickens will go into the book.  The House of Goats just wouldn't be complete without The Smartest Chicken in the World.

Some links to peruse:

Scott William Carter has started a new blog series about writing.

Dean Wesley Smith writes about agent agreements.

Hard-Boiled Mystery Writer Robert B. Parker, RIP--died with his boots on (at his desk)

FYI, on Dean's page, you'll notice that the Agents Know Markets myth post has 96 (or more by now) comments on it.  Good stuff.

The Words Keep Coming

I'm still not moved into my office, so posts will continue to be sporadic and uneven, like life.

I've been writing like crazy the past few days, adding a lot of words to my Nanowrimo. I've also finished writing a new short story and will start on another short here pretty soon. My DH and I went a little crazy yesterday morning and came up with an alien biology that screams to be written about. More details as they emerge, skittering, from my flesh.

I love it when a good idea comes along and grabs me by the throat, but I don't actually need an idea, per se, to write. Like most writers I can go on and on just fine thank you about the human condition in all its dimensions--love and suffering, hate and pleasure, victory and lust, etc. There's plenty to write about in the regular, everyday world, just like there's plenty to paint all around us. It just requires a way of looking, the infamous artist's eye, to figure out what to write or paint about. It takes some practice but once the skill is there, it doesn't go away. Still, it's nice to have an idea take on a life of its own. It makes the writing that much more fun.

So I'm writing and settling into a post-convention routine that involves reclaiming my house from the Aaaaargh! Rats! and maybe even painting for Radcon. I haven't shown my watercolors in a while and I think it would be good for me to try to make that art show a deadline. I sold something at the last show I participated in, so I'm rather fond of Radcon's art show. They have the coolest stuff.

In other news, the puppies had a bath and spent the night in our bedroom to dry off (they have very thick coats this time of year and it takes a long time to dry out.) They tried sleeping on the bed, which worked out great for them (they took up over half of it) until they overheated. I was grateful when they decided the floor worked better.

It was nice to get a lick on the cheek to wake me up in the morning.

I'm still missing Beast very much, and so are the puppies. Lots of sad eyes and hearts looking for him, even seeing him for fleeting moments as memory intersects wanting. I got that song "Snoopy Come Home" stuck in my head for a couple of days. I've started listening to music while doing chores again to keep from slipping deeper and deeper into the pit of what-ifs that might have saved his life.

Last but not least, first hard frost this morning. We've had some good cold weather before this, but this is the first time I woke up to everything being white. Even our garbage bags outside had little white pebbles all over them--frozen dewdrops. Inside one of our metal posts, the ice formed a chaotic, delicate, criss-crossed stairway leading down into darkness.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Soon now, before we know it, the longest night of the year will be upon us, and we can begin to welcome the hope of longer days to come.

It's Magic!

Today has been a long time coming.  After a brilliant spring and summer full of adventure and butterfly chasing, it's time to get back to work.  I managed to get some stuff done in writing, and stuff done around the house and garden, but not enough to stay afloat, never mind make progress.  It feels like the beginning of a new year.  Maybe it's the kids still being on a school schedule.  I never escaped the school year calendar system to uninstall it from my brain.  Or it may be the first hints of Wandering.  For those of you unfamiliar with Wandering, it's an autumn thing.  The restless leaves, the morning chill, a special softness to the quality of light, especially at dusk, like glass lightly frosted in blues and salmon pinks, and the warm but urgent wind that inspires an intense desire to journey beyond the horizon line.  The Wandering twinge has tugged a few times already, but faded quickly.  It's early.

Soon now.

But that's not what I wanted to blog about today.  I wanted to talk a bit more about magic. 

Studying physics and engineering in college, plus growing up with an engineer father and a mother whose an RN, has solidly rooted me in science.  I love science.  I love the scientific method, when it's employed properly.  But.  (Yep, you saw that big but coming, didn't ya!)  The scientific method isn't always used properly.  Politics, money, and personal agendas get in the way of learning.  Seriously.  For example, I pity the poor souls who get wrapped up in anything dubbed a paranormal study.  Ridiculed, scoffed-at, with little or no funding, they haven't even had a chance to develop the tools (and the tools are so critical) for examining certain phenomena.  They can't measure a damned thing.  Some have tried, using tools from other disciplines, but this is a lot like trying to learn what elements our sun is composed of using a flashlight, a notepad, a pencil, and duct tape.  Heck, a prism and a bunsen burner would be great, as would some highly refined materials to burn and catalogue, but no, you don't get those.  To add insult to injury, most of the paranormal 'scientists' don't understand the scientific method, or how to measure stuff, or what to measure, developing hypotheses, etc.  Many of them, if they're doctors of anything at all, have no experience in research.  

The reason I've been thinking about all this is because I heard a rumor that finally the medical community will be taking a more extensive and serious look into the placebo effect.  Hopefully that will eventually be something I can mark off my magic list.  Which should clue y'all into what's on my magic list.

On my magic list: 'ghosts' (whatever the heck they are,) healing through prayer/visualization/laying on hands, 'out of body' experiences, phantom predators, what I call deities (which are not omnipotent, btw, at least not to my experience, nor immortal,) the ability to dance longer and harder than I can jog, and other stuff having to do with phantom-ish things like disappearing objects that reappear in the last place I left them.

I would love to check these things off my magic list and have them placed in the known phenomena list, or at least properly explored phenomena list.  In other words, I don't really believe in magical magic as some sort of 'supernatural' force.  It's all natural, baby.  It's all part of this world.  We just don't get it, yet.  

Why is Bigfoot not on my list?  They're too borderline.  First off, they're presumably a living species and therefore that doesn't make them special, just rare, possibly on the verge of extinction.  Ockham's Razor and all--why should Bigfoot be psychic/magical/supernatural but be hairy and stinky like every other living thing?  If they're physical beings they have to have bones, and believe me they couldn't hide them all.  Serial killers have been trying to hide bodies for years.  Eventually, a percentage of those bodies turn up, and with an entire species, I think it would be damned near impossible to hide all the bones.  Now, if I see something, fossilized or other, that suggests that there might be a huge skunk ape running around, I'm all about changing my mind.  But I'm not willing to accept increasingly weird ideas about time travel or dimension-shifting beings until I've seen a Sasquatch or read about confirmed evidence.  I'm willing to entertain the thought that they might exist.  Enough respectable people have come forward claiming to have seen them, or smelled them, or whatever.  But they're not truly magical.  Same with aliens.  They're presumed physical, no, more, presumed to be flesh and blood, even by the people who swear they exist, and so I need some flesh, blood or bone evidence before I'm willing to say okay, I believe they're among us.   

On the other hand, I won't say that they absolutely don't exist, and I won't mock those who believe in them even when they're sounding their most woo woo.  I've seen too much weird stuff in my life.  I'm just not going to hold my breath for the first evidence to show up, and I won't be leaping up and down saying I told you so.  I'll be just as surprised as anyone else in mainstream science, though I admit I'll smile and speak a little blessing to those who knew but couldn't prove it and had been ridiculed up to that point.

Contrast this with healing, or ghosts.  I've healed some pretty serious stuff.  I've seen ghosts.  I've heard them, felt them.  I have corroborating witnesses who saw, heard and felt the same things.  If Amazing Randy was willing to come to my house and set stuff up here, I would have a million dollars right now.  But that's not the deal and that's the trick with 'real' scientists and worse, skeptics who make skepticism a lifestyle, who won't accept any evidence contrary to their beliefs, and scream laboratory conditions are required at the first sign that they might have to touch something they've poo pooed so far.  Now, I rather like Amazing Randy, but things have gotten skewed.  I watched a program once (bear in mind too that his editing team gets to pick and choose what's shown) where he mocked a purported psychic.  Even with Amazing Randy and his editors in total control of what I got to see on tv, they had to admit she got the vast majority of facts right about the person when reading a photograph.  She may have even gotten every one--I don't remember.  It was remarkable.  But she didn't get the one fact that he wanted her to get right, what he thought was the most important fact (the picture was of a serial killer) about the man in the picture.  To him, that proved that she was a fraud.

And that's when I knew he was just as much a fraud as those he wanted to expose.

I could have ghosts screaming through the house knocking on all the walls and I would not get my million dollars, because it wasn't in a lab, nay, not any lab but his lab, to which I would have to fly on my own dime.  I understand that he doesn't want to spend his own money going all over the place, but some things, like Saturn, won't move to a lab for convenient study, not for all the bank accounts in all the world.

Okay, rant over.

I believe there are explanations within the realm of nature for things like ghosts, healing, and what I categorize as religious experiences with intelligent semi-corporeal beings.  It's not all in my head.  For that matter I don't think it's supernatural.  

When someone else hears the knocking and the voices too, it's not just me and it's not mass hysteria when there's nothing to be hysterical about.  Mass hysteria is like swamp gas--a means for people to dismiss something they feel isn't worth pursuing.  If it's not worth pursuing, fine.  If no one ever decides to explore these things, it's really no skin off my back.  Weird stuff happens, and it's not really critical to our survival, though it may have an impact on our experiences after we're dead, if there are any.  (Dead people have long taken a back seat to the living in our modern era.  This may bug them, but neglect of the elderly is pervasive too and I get quite a bit more excited about that than I do about how society deals with issues of afterlife, especially since we haven't even scientifically established that there is one but we definitely do have issues with abuse of the elderly.)  Just don't tell me I'm stupid or crazy for knowing what little I know.

What science doesn't acknowledge or understand, yet is real as far as I can ascertain, I categorize as magic.  I want that list to be small.  I'd like it to be smaller.  Heck, as far as I'm concerned gravity borders on magic.  The 'well' in the space fabric is all fine and good, but what is space fabric and how can it communicate instantly?  No fabric I know of can communicate instantly.  There's a delay as the threads stretch when you deform the surface.  Therefore, it's a magic fabric, the magic fabric of space that no one really understands.  Or, it might be magic graviton particles that communicate instantly in defiance of what we know of physics.  Gravity is clearly real.  The difference is that everyone agrees it's real and is devoting lots of resources to its study, while healing through thoughts/focus/energy is considered bogus or woo woo.

I think the placebo effect is a big piece of thought/focus/energy healing (though it's not the whole shebang--how other people can affect a person without their knowledge is not part of the placebo effect.)  It's encouraging that forays may be made into our understanding of the placebo effect, and that we may be able to employ it and expand on it, make it more powerful so that we can use fewer 'real' drugs, less chemo, less surgery, etc.  To have treated it as a mere artifact since 1955 or whenever seems to me to be a major medical research oversight.  It deserves to be much more than magic.

We may not get to answer all the questions.  There's no rule that says that an offshoot of great apes on planet Earth get to figure everything out.  Some things may remain a mystery forever.  But they may not.  I think we have at least a shot at seeing a glimmer of an answer here and there to even the most complicated, obscure and elusive question marks in the universe.  I believe that most of the time scientists have correctly prioritized our explorations.  We have some big problems that need solutions and big questions that need answers.  Ghosts can wait (at least, I hope we aren't dealing with a big oops on that score.)  In the meantime, I'll have to be satisfied with dealing with them as I've always dealt with them and other magical things--as a bumbling primitive who doesn't really know what's going on, and through trial and error deals with them in such a way that helps the most and hurts the least.  

The Idea Monster

My idea monster likes cookies.  Apparently he also likes black tie cheesecake because I received a whopper of an idea in my idea inbox today after a nice dinner and dessert at Olive Garden (courtesy of a gift from my beloved INK comrades--thank you!)  It might become a short story, but I suspect that it's more of a novel-length idea (as usual, argh.)

I really don't need another novel idea.  I've already got enough projects to keep me busy for the next decade, easily.  But I don't like to let these things pass me by, because I never know what's going to write itself, and what I'm going to be struggling with for years.  I prefer to have a variety of projects at various stages.  It's one of the habits I nurture so that I'm never blocked.  If I'm having trouble writing on one project, chances are very good that switching to another project will get me writing again (and often I can come back to the blocked project with fresh enthusiasm and ideas in short order.)

Usually what I do when I have an exciting idea is I open a new file, type a few sentences and then save it under a memory-jogging title.  

How do you keep track of ideas (if you bother) and do you ever come back to them?

Hypothesis

Hypothesis of the day:  A homogenized system of governance over a non-homogenous population serves no one but the governors, and possibly not even them.

Retreat of the Clone and book-colored glasses

Now that I've got Jasmine back (yay! stupid optical drive ...) I can declone Lark.  I'm not a big fan of keeping financial information on a laptop, so I won't reload that, and I don't plan on having 10,000 images or how ever many I have now on Lark either.  Lark will mainly be for writing, and Jasmine will mainly be for all other things biz like financial stuff, tracking subs and serving as my art-focus computer (plus serve as an occasional school confuter for the kids--this way when they need internet access for research I can still write.  They have their own confuters but they don't have internet access on them.) I can also manage my husband's biz on Jasmine.  He will remain a very busy boy.

Much as it was cute and fun to have a Jasmine mini-me, I'm ready to start with fresh data. Now the trick is to get everything that has changed since Lark became a clone transferred onto Jasmine.  A tech at the Power Mac Pac showed me how to temporarily lobotomize Lark (turn him into a hard drive!) so that I can sort through the files without interference from software and see exactly what's been modified and created since Lark's birth.  Then I can firewire that stuff over.

This is a very kewl trick and I'm excited to try it out.  I'll be glad when it's over, though.  I have a new short story I'm in the middle of and I'm going to take a shot at writing a dark SF flash.  Deadlines loom.  The novel WIP is whining for attention, too.  I'm normally a bit more casual about these sorts of things (except deadlines--I'll sweat to meet them) but I was inspired by Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki to look at my writing in a whole new way.  (Read my review here.)  Hey, I will take just about any inspiration to light a fire under my backside when it comes to writing.  

I think my insanity is once again confirmed.  I can read a book on financial intelligence and immediately my brain feeds back with an idea with how to approach my books.  Rose-colored glasses makes the world look safer and kinder.  What color are the glasses that make the world filter into a writer's perspective?  I say they're actually clear, but they have these translucent arrows all over them that point at story ideas.  Each arrow is tinged a color based on genre.  The end result is a psychotic hummingbird's idea of a basket weave of arrows, making the glasses appear to have an pearly coating.

Maybe horror writers live in the near-black arrow riddled world of shadowed arrows where the very air generates a story idea of terror.  Fear them.  They live in the dark.  Their neighbors are the monster that lives under the bed, the guy who keeps sending me anxiety dreams and Stephen King's undead pet cat.  The zombie apocalypse lodge holds its meetings down the hall.

Going to the Fair

After some more fixes around the house by the plumber, we've settled into debt, er, I mean our new water-cushy environs nicely.  The girl suggested county fair therapy, so sometime this week we'll go look at cows and goats and chickens and geese and ducks and turkeys and sheep and horses and beefalo and pigs and llamas and alpacas and bunnies and guinea pigs and bees and booths and displays and contests and art and photography and plants and crafts and farm equipment and rodeo stuff and listen to music and generally have a good time.  

Going to the fair was never a thing we did when I was a kid.  I think I visited one fair briefly with a friend who went to see another friend who was showing goats.  Nowadays it wouldn't feel like summer without going to at least one fair.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe it's a gawking thing.  Maybe I enjoy discovering what the kids are interested in.  Maybe it's seeing what other farm people are up to, though obviously not everyone who participates is into farming.  Probably it's all of the above and more.

County fairs are pretty complicated places.  The layers of people who attend and why and the history and traditions--it's an intense confluence.  If I could get that kind of complexity in my books and still maintain that sense of unity--the fair--that would really be something.

Strangers Think They Know Me

I finally found a title for my latest short story, "Strangers Think They Know Me."  I read an article on the SFWA website about titles and titling and got enough out of it that it made my job easier.  Thank goodness, just in time to keep myself from going insane.  I have almost as much trouble with titles as I have with naming characters.  I've been trying to title this particular short for four days, longer than it took me to write the darned thing, I kid you not.

I know I haven't been writing enough because I keep having these very vivid dreams that lead to story ideas.  It's a self-solving problem, at least until my dream space starts getting cliche', at which point not only will I not be writing enough to keep from dreaming, but I'll be bored while I'm dreaming.  Bummer.

So far, though, my dreams have been a rich mine.  Since I don't need more ore while I'm writing heavily, this arrangement with my subconscious suits me really well.  

I've got more short stories in the back brain to work on, but first, I have to visit Masks and Signet as I've had some ideas with both of them.  I find it's best to exploit ideas while they're still fresh.  If I'm given too much time to mull about them or if I discuss them too much with others, I lose that matchstick flash of enthusiasm.  I can slog with the best of them on a first draft, since I know the next flash will be along momentarily, but during editing those moments of heat and light are much more rare and precious.  So away to Masks, or Signet.  Maybe I'll keep both docs open at the same time and see what happens where.  I think I've got enough fire for both of them at the same time.  So, does that make us a ménage á trois?

My apologies to folks googling for something sexier than writing.  Boy are you on the wrong site!

Birds and Hazards

We had heavy (for this area) snowfall last night while we slept.  I love waking up to snow, and quiet, and the swarms of birds that snow always brings.  (Note to self--refill the feeders.)  I swept off the tile downstairs where I keep my bird supplies and dumped the sweepings onto the snow.  In minutes, three juncos had found the pile and started scratching through it.

The motion attracted Huntress.  She started talking to them in the language of the birds.  I don't think they understood her.  She has a really thick accent.  She kept trying, though.  They ignored her, poor thing.

I went in to work late, when I felt comfortable with driving.  The roads were good on the way to work, and on the way back home, but just before I got to the house I noticed there was still traces of slush in the road.  If it freezes tonight, it could be nasty, though not all the way down the hill.  The trick is to get past the ice without ditching and making it onto the lower, dry or merely wet part of the road.  The other trick is to have that instinct that tells you that the steep curves near the bottom of the hill are safe.  Many a driver trying to commute into town has listened to their instinct and been oh so wrong.  They've been wrong enough that the folks living on the downhill side of the curves got tired of people ending up in their cow pasture, so they built up a huge berm.  

If only cars were as proportionally durable as a skateboard, you could bank off the berm down the next stretch and look pretty cool in the process.  Of course the last curve has no berm and you'd then end up off the side of the road on a steep hill crushed against a tree.  What we really need there, since the slope is too steep to rationally attempt to build a berm there, is one of those cement half-pipes set on its side.  Then not only could you use it to negotiate the curve, you could also flip a loop with your car.  Not even the Dukes of Hazzard pulled off a stunt like that.

Ideas

Traveling and two great INK meetings (one open one at Starbucks and one just for us) have filled me with all kinds of ideas. I don't know where to start.

In the garden for as long as I can, I guess, since the opportunity to garden will certainly go away. It'll never be like the Buchart Gardens around here, but I can live with country splendor. In the meantime, though, this time of year our wildflowers look intensely shabby. Everything is browning and going to seed. That's what it's supposed to do, but ... And I look at it and it feels like if I just took a pressure hose to it, the brown would come off and my shining, beautiful garden would be revealed from under the muck. But that's just an illusion. There is no muck. There is only this, the natural course of annuals and herbaceous perennials. Underneath the six foot tall mass of withering plant matter there is an evergreen and some deciduous shrubs. They're babies now, but as the years grow them up for us, they'll fill that large bed and I won't put in the wildflowers anymore, at least not there. The idea that I took from the Buchart Gardens was to keep at those weeds. Yes, they're constant and yes, it's a losing battle (I loved the little sign they had for sale that said The Weeds are Winning and the picture of a dandylion going to see on it) but if I never give up, never surrender then eventually the garden will settle in to a point where there will be shade. And where there is shade, there is victory. I already have a few areas where the plant mass over the ground is heavy enough that weeds have no chance to develop underneath. Must keep going ... The other idea I got from the gardens is the concept of patience. Seeing so many mature shrubs and trees there reminded me that I have many, many of those same specimens, but they're only 4 feet high at most. It takes surprisingly little time before they mature, especially when you're busy--

Writing. My second set of ideas came from chit chatting for hours with my writing pals and my beloved, handsome husband. Now I'm all conflicted, of course. I'd been all decided to blue screen Mayhem, my very first novel ever, for my Nano project, but then along came the idea of writing a novel about writing a novel. I realize this is not a novel (heh) idea, but there's something compelling about the subject and I can't seem to let go of it. I don't know.

And then there's the painting. I've been painting steadily, but also I've been better about letting projects rest for long enough so that they can develop better both in my head and on the page. While we were in Victoria one of the more compelling things I got to stare at was a collection of First People's ritual masks. It's unfortunate that you can't take pictures of them, but they're burned into my memory. Normally one viewing isn't enough (and now, thanks to S&C I have a gorgeous sketch book/journal that is just the right size for taking into places like royal museums so in the future I don't have to rely on memory) and this is no different, but this happens to be the second trip to the museum within two years, and so I have a better shot at actually realizing in paint what I experienced. In the end, though, I'm not attempting to accurately portray the masks. What I'm aiming at is what they inspired me to imagine, and conveying how they made me feel. They're mysterious, intriguing, frightening, humerous, beautiful, wild and graceful and primitive all at once. Gotta paint that. I just gotta.

So I'm full of ideas. Now I just have to make them flesh.

Piece of cake.