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I am pleased to report that Chapter Two has been posted. Read! Enjoy!

If you've made a donation, you should have received an e-mail informing you that Chapter Two has been posted. If you did not receive such an e-mail, please let me know ASAP -- it means your name did not make it onto my maillist. (Either that, or your ISP thinks my e-mail is spam.)

Anyway. Obviously, Chapter Two is paid for, or I wouldn't have posted it. Chapters Three and Four are also paid for. Chapter Five is very close.

I'm still in the middle of writing Chapter Nine; I've been busy with other stuff, such as sending out the last copies of The Sorcerer's Widow.

Thanks for your support!

Well, it's finally happened. I got a renewal offer. Took longer than I expected.

About a year ago, I started getting stuff in the mail that I hadn't ordered. I'm not sure whether it was meant as a joke, or a birthday present, or what, but someone -- I don't know who -- had signed me up for a whole bunch of things. They started arriving, without explanation.

First there were the cosmetics on trial. I returned those. I was a bit concerned because the packing slip said they'd been paid for with an AmEx card, and I made sure it wasn't mine. Put a watch on my credit, just in case.

Then came the intro package from Book of the Month Club. I canceled my new membership immediately, explaining I hadn't actually signed up, someone else had, and I asked where I should return the books. They said not to bother, so I added them to my "to read" stack.

Next was the membership on the North American Hunting Club. That brought a knife, a game cookbook, and a magazine subscription; I returned the cookbook and canceled my membership, so I only got one or two issues of the magazine, but I kept the knife, as it was a "free gift." (Some gifts aren't free?) These folks were much less helpful and cooperative than BotMC or the cosmetics trial, but they eventually accepted that I wasn't interested, and I passed the magazines on to some guys serving in the military overseas. (The magazine wasn't bad if you're a hunter; I'm not.)

And after that, it was all magazines. New ones kept showing up through March 2013, too. I'm guessing my mysterious someone had a bunch of airline points to burn off before they expired. At any rate, I eventually found myself with subscriptions to Forbes, Yachting, ESPN: the Magazine, Men's Health, Men's Fitness, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, and Chevy High Performance. (I think that's all of them.)

Yachting was the first to show up, if I remember correctly. It's weirdly fascinating because there's the contrast between the rather down-to-earth attitude, with articles on maintenance, ports, etc., and the fact that it's about toys costing millions of dollars. I read the first one pretty thoroughly, but quickly got inured to it and now typically go through an issue in about three minutes, mostly looking at the pictures, before passing it on to friends who like boats.

Chevy High Performance -- if you own a Chevrolet muscle car from the '60s or '70s, you need this magazine. If you don't, it's absolutely useless and might as well be written in Etruscan. I don't. This is another one I pass on to guys in the military. But wow, if you want to know anything about restoring, maintaining, or hot-rodding an old Chevy, this is a gift from the gods.

I'd seen Men's Health and Men's Fitness on the racks at the supermarket, and assumed they were sister (or in this case, brother) magazines. Never had any interest in 'em. But once they started showing up, I read them, and discovered they aren't siblings, they're rivals, and Men's Health is the good one. It's more upscale, better written, better edited, and all around classier, so I still read it, though I'm not going to renew when my subscription runs out. It looks at lots of lifestyle stuff for guys in their twenties and thirties. Men's Fitness is much more concerned with, well, fitness -- exercise, diet, and not much else. Where Men's Health has a well-rounded feel and is clearly aimed at straight men, Men's Fitness is narrowly focused and has (at least for me) a faint homoerotic vibe. I found it really boring, and transferred my subscription to someone else who was interested. (I hadn't mentioned that homoerotic vibe to him, but then, it may just be my imagination in the first place.)

Then there are the three business magazines. I'd heard of Forbes, of course, and always assumed it was a business mag, but it isn't, really; it's money porn. It's not about business, it's about billionaires. It's rather badly written, self-congratulatory in tone, and mostly about how wonderful the very rich are, simply because they made piles of money. Add in the editorials by Steve Forbes and others that demonstrate an insane misunderstanding of real-world economics, and the real world in general, and you have a magazine that I've found steadily more and more repulsive. When I noticed from the label that I'd been given a two-year subscription I decided I had to get rid of it, and Julian had a friend who works in finance, so I've just signed that one away.

Entrepreneur, on the other hand, is kind of fascinating. It's not about business in general, but only about entrepreneurs. It's better-written than Forbes, and doesn't take a political position; it just looks at how these guys got to where they are now (and maybe you can too!). That was one of the late arrivals, so I may revise my opinion in time. I don't really have much use for it, and would hit the old change-of-address road if I knew of anyone who wanted it, but at least it doesn't embarrass me to have it in the house.

And Fast Company is cool. It's about the cutting edge of business -- innovation in every field, high-tech news, online developments, etc. It's tied to several websites that I haven't really looked at yet, but every time I read an issue I come away with scribbled notes about things I want to check out online. This one might be a keeper.

Which brings us to ESPN. Okay, I watch ESPN sometimes. I've read Sports Illustrated. I thought I knew what to expect. I was wrong.

ESPN is the best magazine we get, including the ones I subscribed to myself, rather than having dumped on me. I'm not a big sports fan, but there is some fine, fine writing here. It's got stats I never thought about, human interest stories I'd never have considered. A recent issue had a huge feature on racism in Italian soccer that did a better job of looking at race and history than anything I've read in more general publications. There are big chunks I skip in most issues, because I frankly don't give a damn about basketball or most of the NFL, but even there, I can see it's some fine writing and excellent research.

And today I got a renewal offer for ESPN -- another year for just a buck.

I wouldn't even be tempted by any of the others, but that one...

But no. I don't have the free time to read more magazines; I'm years behind on my fiction reading, and could always use more time writing. So I am reluctantly going to let it go.

But it did prompt me to finally write this blog post. I'd been meaning to do it for months, and this renewal offer was what finally pushed me to do it.

So there we are.

On a whim, we spent last weekend in Rhode Island -- mostly Newport, looking at the "summer cottages" of the rich and famous of a century ago, but with a couple of stops in Providence, as well. Toured five mansions in Newport -- the Elms, the Breakers, Chateau-sur-Mer, Rosecliff, and Marble House.

The variety was interesting. Rosecliff was designed entirely to throw lavish parties in -- the whole house is built around the magnificent ballroom. The "marble" facade is fake -- it's terra cotta. There have been some major movies that used Rosecliff when they needed a lush 1920s ballroom. The original owner, a silver heiress named Theresa Fair Oelrichs, intended to establish herself in high society simply by throwing the best parties, and seems to have succeeded -- though when the Gilded Age passed and such entertainments were no longer the thing, she went a bit dotty and died relatively young.

Marble House was built entirely to show off -- the people who grew up in it hated it and found it depressing, because it wasn't really meant to be lived in, it was meant to impress people. Each room was a recreation of a particular era in French design, all of them overblown. Alva Vanderbilt, who built Marble House, may have been important in the women's suffrage movement, but she was apparently a pretty horrible person.

The other three were all actual homes; yes, they were meant to impress people, but they were also meant to be comfortable places to live in and raise kids. The Breakers, built by Cornelius Vanderbilt II, is the best of them. The people who grew up summering there, or at the Elms, remember them very fondly.

Chateau-sur-Mer, the oldest of them, was the only one meant for year-round living; the others were just for the summer.

It was an entertaining trip -- and since I'm currently writing scenes set in huge upper-class estates in On A Field Sable, the whole thing is legitimate research and therefore tax deductible!

I haven't posted here in ages, "here" being either Dreamwidth or LiveJournal, unless you count tweets that show up on LJ. Seems as if I ought to do a general update on things.

My writing: I've been working on several novels at once -- no short stories or nonfiction lately. Here's a partial(!) list:

Graveyard Girl is a "young adult" novel about a fifteen-year-old girl who acquires a specific limited psychic ability. I started it in 2010, but it was very slow going for at least four reasons; I finally finished the first draft Tuesday. 175 pages, 49,000 words. Now I need to get started on the second draft.

Ishta's Companion (the title on this one has changed several times) is the next (probably) Ethshar novel. I started outlining it back in the 1980s as A Stranger in the Forest. It'll probably be the next serial, starting this summer. I'm just over 60 pages in.

On A Field Sable is the third novel in "The Fall of the Sorcerers," following A Young Man Without Magic and Above His Proper Station. Tor decided to drop the series, so I put it aside for a couple of years, but dammit, I want to write it anyway, so I will. I'm about 200 pages in -- maybe halfway.

The Innkeeper's Daughter is a stand-alone light fantasy I started on a whim last year. I'm on page 37. No idea what will become of it.

Mirrors and Shadows is the first volume in an urban fantasy trilogy I started maybe twenty years ago and put aside because I was busy with other stuff. I recently decided to push it higher up the priority list. I had a chapter and a bit; now, after throwing out some stuff I decided wasn't working, I have a chapter and four-fifths.

Vika's Avenger is a science-fantasy novel I wrote a couple of years ago that didn't find a publisher. I'm revising it and planning to do a Kickstarter campaign to pay for cover art, getting it professionally edited, and so on, so I can do a decent job self-publishing it. I'm not quite halfway through the rewrite.

That's all the active stuff -- i.e., I think that's everything I've worked on writing since Christmas, but I'm not sure, and there are several others where I have files open in NeoOffice as I'm typing this.

On the publishing front, I'm looking into two novels that Misenchanted Press may publish by people other than me. One's a new revised edition of an SF novel Tor published, and the other's an all-new fantasy; I don't want to be more specific than that, since as yet there aren't any signed contracts. I was copy-editing one of them just before coming here to type up this post.

I've done our 2012 tax returns; Julie still needs to look them over before I can file them.

Was in a car crash Friday -- a very small one, no one hurt, but our car will be in the body shop most of next week.

We're getting solar panels installed on the roof this spring, if all goes well. The paperwork is progressing. Site design's been done, and we're waiting for permits.

Been making travel plans; looks like we'll have three vacations this year.

And I guess that's it. Thought there was more. I'm probably forgetting something; I got interrupted midway through typing this.

ADD: Oh, yeah! I'm going to be do an AMA ("Ask Me Anything") on Reddit on May 9th, barring disaster. Start thinking up questions now!

I'm fifty-eight. This is an age when a lot of my contemporaries are worrying about caring for their elderly parents or other relatives. Many of them, understandably, post about their concerns in various online venues I frequent.

Which makes me feel a bit odd. The last of my ancestors died more than twenty years ago. I have exactly four living blood relatives older than I am, so far as I know -- two siblings, and two first cousins once removed. (There may be some other distant cousins, but none of them live in the U.S. and I lost track of all of them long ago. One of the living first cousins once removed lives in England, come to that.) My parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles are all long gone.

My wife's parents and grandparents are all gone, too, though she still has some aunts and uncles.

While I can see that caring for aging parents must be stressful, it's a problem I sort of wish I had. But only sort of. I miss my parents very much, but I'm relieved I'll never need to worry about them.

So every time I see some article talking about how sooner or later we all go from being cared for by them to being caretakers for our parents, I have a rush of mixed emotions as I say, "Not all of us, damn you."

I didn't archive any LPs to MP3 Saturday, but I did plenty of work on my music collection in iTunes; I decided I was tired of looking at placeholders and wanted to fix the missing album covers. In doing so, I discovered several covers that were present, but wrong, so I fixed those, too.

In order to get a couple of covers I had to go get the actual CDs and scan the covers in, because the albums are sufficiently obscure that I couldn't find them anywhere on the web -- e.g., the Christmas album the Chancel Choir at my sister's old church released, which they apparently never put on their website.

So I pulled out some of my CDs, and promptly discovered a couple that weren't in iTunes, even though in theory I'd ripped everything years ago. Turns out I had ripped a couple of albums in WMA format, which iTunes can't play.

For stupid reasons that don't bear explaining I wound up having to rip them anew on Iris, the computer in the upstairs study -- couldn't get either Chloe or Beth to do it right. Got it done, though. (That was "There's Trouble Coming," by GHz (pronounced "Gigahertz"), and "Strong Medicine," by Patty Reese -- both local artists.)

And there were a couple of albums I never did rip before. One's the original-cast recording of the 2002 Hexagon show -- Hexagon's a political humor group that does an annual musical revue in Washington -- "It's A Grand Old Gag." So that's now in my collection.

The other... well, it's in Japanese. I could tell from the art it had some connection with the series "Ranma 1/2," but the music wasn't anything I recognized...

I tracked it down on the web. It's DoCo's third album. DoCo is an all-girl pop group made up of five of the voice actors from "Ranma," who perform in character as the Tendo sisters, Ranma-chan, and Shampoo. Their first two albums were apparently fairly ordinary J-pop; their third is karaoke versions of all their hits.

Where the hell did I get that?

Anyway, I ripped that, too, and discovered that iTunes can handle Japanese text pretty well, but that moving files back and forth among my various systems did something weird and I was getting multiple copies of every song. Took awhile to make that stop -- for awhile they were breeding faster than I could kill them.

And there were some files on iTunes where I had to correct faulty data.

Basically, I spent the entire afternoon messing with this stuff, rather than doing anything productive, but at least my collection is more complete and up to date than it was.

I set out to make MP3 archives of all the old Bob Dylan albums I'd inherited from my sister Jody, but ran into a few issues.

First off, she had the first four in mono, rather than stereo; was it worth downloading stereo versions?

Eventually I decided it wasn't, and I got through "Bob Dylan" and "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," and I noticed a couple of things:

Bob Dylan was something of a prat back then. Not that he is or isn't now, I wouldn't know about that, but he definitely was back then, crediting songs (when he bothered to credit them at all) to "someone named Henry" he met in Texas, or whatever, and arbitrarily replacing every single "-ing" in any song or album title ever, regardless of whether he wrote it or not and regardless of how he actually pronounced it when singing, with "-in'." I guess that was supposed to be folkier.

And I didn't really want to listen to all those albums in succession. Yes, there are some classic songs on there, but there's other stuff, too, and after two albums I'd had enough for now.

I think I may do the rest out of order -- I suspect I'll find "Highway 61 Revisited" more congenial than "Another Side of Bob Dylan." For now, though, I cleansed my auditory palate with some Jethro Tull and Joni Mitchell.

Seems my copy of Bark, by Jefferson Airplane, is too badly scratched to get a clean MP3 from, so I splurged and downloaded it from Amazon. What the hell, $9.99 won't bankrupt me; probably worth that much to not waste time trying to get a clean copy.

Interesting listening to it again after so long. Especially "War Movie," a song that (a) I've swiped phrases and images from on occasion, and (b) convinced me that Paul Kantner was a fan of A.E. van Vogt and probably Poul Anderson. (I already knew he read John Wyndham, since "Crown of Creation" lifts half its lyrics from Re-Birth.*) I'd forgotten the super-science rebellion was supposed to take place in 1975 -- that's just so quaint here in 2012!



* And later, when Blows Against The Empire came out, I knew he'd read Heinlein, specifically Methuselah's Children.

For some time now I've been saying I was going to switch my primary online hangout from SFF Net to either here or Facebook, but somehow I keep posting on SFF Net, just from habit.

So you fine folks have not been informed that despite returning from Worldcon full of writerly enthusiasm, I have somehow only managed to write about half a dozen pages so far this month, half of it on projects that had been shelved for literally years (e.g., The Partial Observer, begun and last worked on, until yesterday, in 2007).

You remained ignorant of my ongoing effort to replace all my old LPs with MPs, most recently adding the Steve Miller Band's "Brave New World" to my iTunes playlist. It's a very fine album, and I find myself wondering why I hadn't played it since the 20th century. Best thing that Steve Miller (who is not the Liaden author) ever did.

And when I brought up the question of where Julie and I should retire to, a decade or so from now, you were not consulted.

I'm going to try to do better. Honestly. But some encouraging comments would help.

Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen of The Sorcerer's Widow are now online. This completes the serial and the first draft.

All fourteen chapters will remain online until the contracts with Wildside are signed, and I haven't yet received said contracts, but I expect them any day now.

I'll accept donations until August 1st. Right now I'm $14 short of my target, though obviously I took in enough to pay for the whole thing.

I'm two chapters into the second draft. I expect to have the whole thing done by the time we leave for Worldcon. No idea when it'll be published, though -- that's mostly up to Wildside. I'll keep donors posted on progress.

I intend to continue doing Ethshar serials, but I don't know when the next one will start. I don't know which story it'll be, either. Easiest would be Ishta's Companion (which keeps changing title, but is actually one of the very oldest unfinished stories in my entire collection). More ambitious would be the untitled-as-yet one I've referred to as "the Big Fat Ethshar novel." Azraya of Ethshar is also a viable option. We'll see. It'll be at least a few months before I launch, as I want to do other stuff for awhile; might be much longer than that.

So -- hope you like the story.