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Month: September 2016

New Horizons

Did you hear about Elon Musk’s plans, outlined yesterday at the 67th annual International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico? He wants to go to Mars. Not just a billionaire taking a jaunt, but he wants to build a colony there. Put a bunch of stuff up there, engineer reuseable ships so they don’t have to build them again and again, send out teams every time Earth and Mars are close… He believes with SpaceX’s new rockets, they can make the trip take three months. Musk isn’t the only one. Mars One had 78,000 hopefuls in the first two weeks they were accepting applications. Mars One, I should point out, doesn’t plan to bring its people back from Mars. Their idea to cut costs is to make it a one-way trip. They plan to raise the money doing reality-tv stuff, as their astronauts train and learn to live and work together. These scientists think it’s better to send older people if it’s one-way. Apparently the thinking goes that 1) older means they won’t be having babies after the radiation exposure and 2) they won’t mind going there for the rest of their lives, since they don’t have much time left. I guess. NASA is thinking about where to start. I love the idea of going to Mars, though I can see the point of someone in my Twitter feed yesterday, who said we had no business taking and mucking up another planet instead of fixing what we’ve done to this one. Honestly, I…

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107,000 words written on Ever Touched – and Deep Thoughts

So, since I’ve hit the 100k milestone on Ever Touched and went beyond it, I thought I’d talk about some things I’ve discovered or learned or just plain thought about with this novel. #1 The first draft is not done yet. Technically, I have till the end of the month, but as that is fast approaching, I may not make it. I have at least 15-20k more to go minimum. I may do what I did with both Fey Touched and Grave Touched. Start the revision anyway, and write the ending once I get there. #2 The good news is that I have a comprehensive plan for the ending. The bad news is, I had to replot it twice. I’m not ruling out a third or fourth time. #3 Usually, a book’s theme song comes to me while planning. And I usually listen to it as I write the book. With Ever Touched, the theme song announced itself last week, after writing over 100,000 words. What the hell. (For the curious, it’s “The Sound of Silence” covered by Disturbed. Once you watch and hear it, you’ll understand why. Helpful link is helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk7RVw3I8eg #4 In every book I write, there’s a scene that could be a movie scene: intense action, intense feels, heartbreak, distress, characters in peril, etc. It’s the one scene that for me, encapsulates the entire book. Fey Touched has one. Grave Touched had one.  Ever Touched has one, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I almost…

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Too Many Awesome Things To Do

Well, friends, if you’re interested in the continuing saga of my sewing project, I have cut out two pieces of my shirt. That was a few weeks ago. I was hoping to at least be able to report that I’d cut all pieces out, or, even more optimistically, had at least gotten the sewing machine out, but alas. In fact, I keep coming up with new awesome and fun things I want to do, but…I’ve come to a realization. I’ve been spreading myself too thin. Too many projects, too many things to do. This is a bad habit of mine, especially recently. I think it comes down to having less time in which to do things these days. Back when I was young and beautiful, I could meander home from work, get in a couple hours of something fun, throw together something for dinner, and then spend a couple more hours doing something fun. And weekends! Glorious weekends! But now I have responsibilities and weird work schedules and work that has to be done at home around everything else, and if I get 15 minutes of project time a day it’s a good day, at least right now. And I get frustrated and try to stuff more in to catch up, and then I get more frustrated because yet more things aren’t getting done. It’s a vicious cycle, my friends. I am grumpy and stressed, and that’s no way to live. Do you have this problem too? Constant stress and…

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7 Lessons from the Garden

What I have learned about life gardening this year: 1. Some things take a lot longer than you think; be patient. Other things happen so quickly they’ll surprise you; be ready. We planted radishes for the first time this spring. They were ready to harvest within a month, and went to flower (meaning no good for eating) just a few short weeks after that. Conversely, we waited and waited for last year’s snapdragons and this year’s wildflower seed mix. After we’d given up, both kinds of flowers emerged and were blooming by mid-June. 2. Novelty is always more exciting, but reliability is invaluable. Every year we try a few new vegetables. This year: parsnips (very few came up), beets (yum), red onions (they stopped growing while still small), snap peas (double yum), and cucumber (it died in the summer drought). Every year we also fall back on our favourites: three sizes of tomatoes, hot peppers, herbs. (And every year we keep hoping for better luck with the carrots and sweet peppers.) 3. Some things just aren’t meant to be. We’ve tried growing bell peppers several times. What we end up with are stunted, squashed bells that don’t ripen past green. (Climate? Nutrients? Dunno.) We do have luck growing hot peppers, but everything we’ve planted turns out to be VERY hot and I can’t handle more than a sliver of it. This year we bought a sweet banana pepper plant and I was excited. Turns out? Either it was wrongly labelled or…

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Brothers (A Fractured World Short)

by Siri Paulson   Astrolabe started out of a nightmare, his face wet with tears. Toric had been calling for him, his brother’s voice getting farther and farther away as the monster carried him off. It was a Type III monster, the ones with the legs that stayed long and powerful no matter how their bodies shifted. He had known it was pointless to chase the thing, but he’d been trying anyway, in his sleep. His sheets were twisted and soaked with sweat, and the stump of his right arm ached horribly. It wouldn’t ease up until the doctor’s assistant came to change the dressing and administer his next dose of goatweed. No point trying to sleep again now. He got out of bed and checked for daylight in the crack between the heavy shutters of the room where he was staying in the Medical wing. Satisfied, he unbolted them one-handed and pushed them open. The night chill was already fading, early morning was seeping across the sky, and he could see the fighter trios trickling back across the rooftops and the street in front of HQ. Some were limping or leaning on each other. Was Theo among them? He didn’t even know whether she was already back on patrol with her new trio, the two young fighters who had replaced him and Toric. The fighters were only three stories down, but as Astrolabe leaned his head on the window frame to watch, they felt as distant, as unreachable, as…

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