Category: Blog

You have only until midnight Central Time on Tuesday December 31, 2013 to order a signed-and-personalized copy of Carousel Sun!  Here’s the link.

You may order signed (but not personalized) copies until Uncle Hugo’s runs out, but do you really want to run the risk of not getting your copy?  Here’s that link again.

If you’re coming in late and have no idea What This is All About, though you of course must have a signed personalized copy of my entire ouevre — here’s the original post, Detailing All.

Oh, look, a Winter Storm Warning, starting at 10 a.m. tomorrow, when I Fully Expect to be at the grocery store, if I’m not at the vet’s office with Mozart.  (Good wishes and prayer wheel spinnings for Mozart, please.  He’s decided that baby food is even kind of a chore to eat.  We think (hope) he’s got something going with his mouth that maybe the vets can fix.  They’re cautious, and reasonably so, about putting a 15 year old cat under anesthesia.  On the other hand, baby food shouldn’t be that tough to chew…)

So, anyhow, 3-6 inches of snow expected from 10 a.m. tomorrow through 10 p.m. tomorrow night.  The good news is that the projected temperatures are higher; the original forecasted temps would have almost been too cold for snow…

But, that’s not why I called y’all here today.

What I’d like to know is, Would you want to live forever?

Or, alternatively, Why would someone want to live forever — absent, OK, a Deathless Enemy who must be pursued and neutralized, or Science!  or True Love or Fear of Eternal Damnation — though we’re starting to get thin, here, by my reckoning.  At some point, I think, one would become So Weary that even the threat of Eternal Damnation might not trump the wish to simply lie down the burden and sleep.

This may, I note, Just Be Me.

And I will, in fairness, also note that we deal with at least two Deathless in our work.  What seems to keep them going is Their Work, and they are fortunate, that their work is infinitely variable.

But, given your everyday guy who happens to be a vampire, or who otherwise has to perform some vile act in order to NOT DIE, when their lives seem to be, aside the quest to NOT DIE, pointless or without purpose. Why does that person want to live forever?

 

 

Maine’s tag-line is: Maine: The way life should be

In case you didn’t know that.

As I may have mentioned here once or twice, I like living in Maine, and anticipate no necessity in future to shift to, say, Florida. Or Arizona.  Or any of those other Warm Places with Interesting Weather of their own.

Maine’s Interesting Weather usually happens in the winter. I think this is a serious error in planning.  Maine should schedule its Interesting Weather in the summer time, when the tourists can enjoy it, and when the Interesting Results of the Interesting Weather can be contained by Seasonal Weather.

An ice storm in July would be just the thing, providing welcome relief from what we like to call “heat”; a deftly timed power outage would impart the thrill of being alone in the achingly cold dark, tempered by the knowledge that the next day would dawn bright and hot, melting the ice in time for everyone to enjoy a noon swim.

I appeal to the Maine Department of Tourism to look into this slight change of schedule.  It could bring Million$ into the state’s tourism efforts.

Back here at the Old Schedule, we had an ice storm Saturday through Sunday and into Monday afternoon.  We briefly lost power on Monday morning, but it came back, lulling us into a sense of false security, until it went out with a vengeance in the small hours of Tuesday morning.

And it remained out.

After a breakfast of tuna fish on rolls, with hot tea (eating off the shelves, you know), we went outside, where it was 23F-feels-like-16F, and worked up a sweat chipping the cars free of their icy sarcophagi.

We came back inside, had another cup of hot tea, and a cookie and discussed whether we should start the wood stove.  The problem being that the woodstove and the oil furnace share the same flue.  Meaning that, if the power came back on soon — as was our devout wish — we’d need to turn it off until the woodstove had finished its burn. We have an 18-hour woodstove.

In the end, we decided to play the old Who Cares About The House, We’re Going To Town card, and see if that brought the power back.

So, we went to town and picked up the mail (Christmas cards! A check for our share of an anthology sale to Audible! My limited edition Major Arcana deck of the Tarot of the Zirkus created and produced by Waterville’s own Doug Thornsjo!) hit the various hardware stores to replace the snowmelt we’d used up, and to buy birdseed, then had dinner at the Weathervane before heading home, where we found that!

The power was still out.

It was now approaching 4:30 pm, and I was beginning to fear for the items in the fridge.

We lit the woodstove, with much help from the cats, took one of the back-up batteries down to the basement to power a light and recharge the cellphones, and sat by the side of the woodstove, reading.

Until the power came back on, around…7:30?

Steve took advice on the internet, but it was as we had supposed; we turned off the furnace and repaired upstairs to have dinner and, eventually, to bed.  With extra blankets.  And coon cats.

It was Quite Chilly this morning when we got up.  The fire had burned down to a nice even ash, and the furnace has been brought back into play.

I’ve downloaded the Federal Government’s lists of what food items are safe to keep after an extended time without power, and which must be thrown away, and after breakfast — I’m thinking grilled cheese sandwiches, here, since the eggs are unsafe — I’ll spend some time cleaning out the fridge.  On the one hand, it’s good we weren’t planning a Feast and lost a families-worth of holiday dinner.  On the other hand, the fridge wasn’t exactly empty.

Today, it’s bright and sunny, though very, very cold (8F/-13C feels-like-minus 6F/minus 21C).  And I am extremely happy to have the furnace running, and the lights on.

To those who celebrate:  Merry Christmas.

1.  You have until midnight, Central Time, on Tuesday, December 31, 2013, to order your signed and personalized copy of Carousel Sun from Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore in Minneapolis. The devilish details are here. If you want to cut to the chase, here’s the link to Uncle Hugo’s Lee and Miller catalog page.

For the purposes of this discussion “personalized” means that you have asked the author to write something special on the title page of your book, in addition to their name.

1a. If you wish to pre-order an autographed (i.e. not personalized), you may do so at this link. The deadline for pre-ordering a signed copy is January 10, to give Uncle Hugo time to place the order, the printer to ship the books to Maine, to be autographed, and then sent on their way to Minneapolis. This is not a trivial thing we’re undertaking here, so everybody keep a grip on your good humor and I’ll endeavor to do the same.

2. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. is looking for an editor for the Bulletin. Job requirements are here. You do not have to be a SFWA member to apply. Application deadline is January 8, 2014.

3. For those who have been following the on-going saga — I have, as of this afternoon, completed signing Steve and me up for health insurance through the Health Insurance Marketplace. We have achieved a Silver Plan, which provides much more coverage than we had with Anthem, while costing about $250 less per month, in premiums. There will also be a minor break in the cost of meds and doctor visits. Now, all I have to do is gather together my “proofs” for this year’s earnings and write a letter explaining (with twenty-seven eight by ten color glossy photographs, with circles and arrows…) why exactly it is that I believe we will make less money in 2014 than in 2013. Piece o’cake.

4. As many of us enter a season of gift-giving, I will take this opportunity to remind you that Books Make Wonderful Gifts! Every single novel that Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, and Sharon Lee, too, have ever written are in print at! this! moment! so you may be as expansive in your giving as you like. And remember! Those novels are also available electronically, either directly from Baen, or from your favorite electronic bookstore. Also! All of the Lee-and-Miller, and Lee, and Miller chapbooks ever written are likewise available in electronic format — from BN, from Amazon, and from Smashwords. Go to Pinbeam Books for handy buy links.

5. It has been borne in upon me that it wasn’t particularly clever to migrate all of my heavy lifting, so to speak, to my right hand.  Not too many years ago, I could write, legibly, if not elegantly, with my left hand.  My new hobby for 2014 will be to see if I can recapture that skill.