In our first segment, a writing update. The time travel story is in revision as I type it into the computer machine from my stylish Product Placement (TM) notebook. It's shaping up as a longer story than previously estimated. Here are the numbers:



My new story in longhand, featuring the return of Corporal Robeson from "Finders Keepers," my Space Grunts story, is off to a solid start. Let's go to the big board:



In the next segment: will our basement project ever end? The jury's still out, but I got a little more work done over the week. And for the first time, Ella and I took advantage of the dedicated gaming table to play a little Scrabble and leave an unfinished game for the next convenient time to play, without having to worry about spilling our cereal on it the next morning or having the cat bat around the game pieces.

Our closing segment: taking advantage of the beautiful weather today, Ella and I went for a short hike along the mighty Mississippi, fabled in story and song. Here's what it looked like:

It's an epic battle to the death: me v. the basement project. There is light at the end of the tunnel, hopefully not the light of an oncoming train on fire while transporting nuclear waste and driven by an engineer whose wife just left him for his best friend after flushing all his collectible comic books down the toilet and having his dog put down. But this project has turned out to be a prolonged sucking of the life out of me . . . much like continually seeing previews for the latest episode of Real Housewives of [fill in the blank]. Big progress over the weekend but not much rest.

The work week was the usual mash-up of deadlines and meetings, disasters narrowly averted, fires put out, and the occasional bonus of free food. My projects are all more or less on track for now, but there's always the chance that around the next bend the tracks have been torn up by crazed badgers.

Friday: Got home from work, had a quick dinner, and then we went to Hamline University's production of the musical Urinetown, which turned out to be an enjoyably silly and self-referential send-up of musicals.

Saturday: Spent most of the day in the basement. After previously building a big section of shelves from Ikea, Satan's store, and filling them with books, I now noticed that the whole thing was leaning a bit to the right. Any further to the right and my shelves would be listening to Sean Hannity. That would not stand. So, took all the books off, rebuilt, added additional bracing, shimmed, leveled, put books back. Shelving now stands right in the middle of the road. Took on other basement-related chores almost right up until getting together with friends for a night of wine and pizza, both of which were desperately needed, especially the former. The day went by with no writing, breaking a good streak. Damn basement.

Sunday: Back underground, as if buried alive. Ah, the amontillado. For the love of god, Montresor! More getting things back onto shelves. Reorganizing, recycling old boxes, getting comic books and magazines into magazine file boxes and onto shelves, etc. I now have quick access to my Howard the Duck and Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics. Which is good. Ran out to Menards for additional supplies and took advantage of being out of the house to stop in at the comic book store. Got a handful of Trek titles plus the first issue of the cool new Ricardo Delgado Age of Reptiles series. Got home and did a little more work almost right up to when my sister-in-law and company came over for dinner. More wine, this time with a nice rare steak, both of which were desperately needed, especially the former. After everyone else was in bed, I wrote a couple words and tweaked an outline template to get back in the daily writing saddle.

Tonight I shall again descend into the basement for an hour or two at least. Another shelving unit to finish building and then populate, in part, with back issues of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Soon I shall have to post some more pictures.

So the phone thing. I did my nice and neat rewiring, which didn't do anything because the problem was outside the house. On Wednesday I finally contacted the phone company to get the line fixed. I didn't feel like dealing with people--a surprise, I know, because I'm such a people person--so I logged onto the website which had a page for creating a repair ticket. I go through all the steps and off it goes. I see that it has a way to check the status online, so I click it just to see what happens, even though I'd just signed up. The status says they are trying to contact me about my repair, and if I don't hear from them soon I should call them. I look at my work phone, expecting it to ring, but nothing. I wait a half hour or so, and the status still says they're trying to contact me. Silly, because I'd given them my work number. But, just to make sure something hasn't gone wrong, I call the 800 number, go through the nightmare talk with the automated recorded voice thing, which eventually says, "This repair is already scheduled. If you have further questions, please stay on the line for a representative." I didn't have any damn questions, the automated website told me to call and then the automated phone basically told me I didn't have to. Anyway, the phone was fixed, and the guy moved the line to the other side of a large branch that it was rubbing against.

Had Friday off and got a lot of work done on my current story project, even though there was no forward movement, just restructuring existing writing and changing the outline. Slow going, but it's much better now. Also set up the new printer/scanner. Man, it's nice to have a printer that works. And I've barely started taking advantage of the scanner. Cool.

Saturday got a little more writing in, dealt with all the Halloween stuff. When Ella was at her cousin's getting more candy, I got a hankering for Chipotle. Went there but the line was out the door, down the sidewalk, and spilling into the parking lot. I did a plan B and went to the grocery store to get quesadilla fixings. Later Ella told me she'd heard that Chipotle was giving a free burrito to anyone who dressed like one. That would explain why so many of the people in line had tin foil on their heads. True story.

Sunday was yard work. The storm windows are in, the backyard raked and mowed. And still got a little writing in. Now I'm going to watch a little TV.

Let me start by saying the Canon Pixma MX860, my new wireless multifunction printer/scanner/copier/pressure cooker prints beautiful borderless photos, can make copies directly without the computer on, and seems to be generally fab, a welcome replacement to my old Epson, which a bit of a steaming pile from day one.

However, getting the Pixma installed was a tad on the nightmarish side. The first steps were prolonged but all right: three test sheets had to be printed to align the print head and other various things. But when it came time to establish the wireless connection to my network, things went south.

My network could not connect to the printer. I went to the troubleshooting guide that came with the printer and followed the steps. Nothing. I fiddled around for hours. Although the steps it led me through never got me past the first few pages, flipping through the rest of the guide gave me an idea.

To keep people from scamming my wireless internet access, specific IDs are assigned to my iMac and iBook so that only they can go online. Since those IDs, although under an "internet" heading in my router control panel, really are just restricting what can connect to my router, I realized that the printer also needed to be added to that list. I did so and was finally connected.

Then I went to print something. No go. "Error 300." I Googled and found a message board discussion of this problem. Delete the printer through the Mac control panel and reinstall the printer through the Canon control panel. Bingo, it fired right up.

So it's working fine now. Someone less geeky could never have gotten the wireless connection made, however. Of course, perhaps you could argue someone less geeky wouldn't have a wireless network and even if they did they wouldn't have set up WPA2 security along with restricted router access on top of it. Not rocket science security, but still above average.

I can now breathe a sigh of relief that I don't have to deal with trying to clean printer heads every few days and still get crappy prints from that Epson dog. To be fair, my first couple printers were Epsons and I was perfectly satisfied. But this last one was a lemon and Epson made no effort to make me happy. I will never get another Epson.

Outlying planets are not viable defense posts for inner planets. Pick an outer planet. Imagine a sphere defined by that planet's orbital diameter surrounding the inner system. Pick a spot along the outer planet's orbit for its current position. Picture that three dimensional arrangement: a star at the center of a sphere, its inner planets spread along the orbital plane, the outer planet at one point on the surface of the sphere. It's like a medieval defender with no castle but just one brick, carrying it in a circle around his house, hoping that all arrows shot will hit that brick.

Except for an enemy stupid enough to fly right by the outer planet within the range of its weapons, that planet will serve no defensive purpose at all for the inner system. Most approaches to the inner system will put an enemy ship within the orbit of the outlying planet while keeping the ship closer to its target than it ever had to be to the outer planet.

Something for all sci-fi writers to ponder. And geekily debate on internet message boards.

So our land line has been working intermittently the last week or two, but we've avoided reporting it for fear that the problem would be inside our house. It's a little known fact that if they come out to the house and it turns out to be an internal wiring issue the phone company can legally take your car.

Between our cell phone and the intertubes we haven't really missed it, and the absence of telemarketers and fundraisers has been a relief. Still, I decided I should try to determine if it really is an inside problem or not.

After some superficial research, I quickly determined that our phone wiring hasn't been updated since the 1970s at best. Not a surprise there. Our house was built in 1912, and we've frequently run into problems related to that. Like only having one outlet in a room, and that only taking two-prong plugs.

Still, I was surprised to find that part of the problem was that behind a previously unnoticed access panel in the basement was a switchboard with a matronly lady named Marge manually plugging wires in and out to facilitate calling. She'd succumbed to old age, with a smile on her face and a large headset on her ears. I just sealed up the room, Cask of Amontillado style, and moved on.

Instead of various modern conveniences, our phone line comes directly into the basement and attaches to an ancient piece of hardware attached to a beam. Two wires plus a ground. But there's a transformer plugged into a nearby outlet and wired into the system. What's up with that, I wondered, knowing that phones are supposed to draw all necessary power from the phone lines themselves.

A little more research found this: "Antiquated telephone terminals contain incandescent lights in them (i.e. the old Western Electric Princess phone and Trimline phone) and need more energy than the telephone line supplies." Apparently the house must have had some of these phones in the past so the extra power was wired in over the yellow and black wires which are usually unused if you only have one line.

So, I'm thinking of taking that out and organizing all the various other lines that run off the ancient terminal and connecting them with a pigtail wire instead. Of course, the phones still won't work, because the problem is most likely external, but at least the wiring inside will be nice and neat.

The basement renovation project continues to progress. Lots of books have made it onto shelves, we've got three rugs down on the floor. The A/V corner of the room is pretty much done. A 1940s desk has a 1990s TV on it. I made a little shelving unit to fit under the desk where a chair would go, housing a 1970s receiver (which my dad handed down to me when I went to college in the 1980s) plus twenty-first century CD, DVD, and VCR. VCR sound runs through TV, but CD and DVD go through receiver, which, being ancient, has only one auxiliary input, so had to add an A/B switcher. The DVD player is tiny, with no display, so it's nice to have a separate CD player with display that can be controlled easily without turning on the TV to see what track is playing. Simple stereo sound, then, on DVD player, but, hey, it's just the basement. The living room is wired for surround.

Worked a lot this week on an article for Star Trek magazine. I'm pretty damn excited about that, especially since my novella got bumped to an October 2010 release . . . before another editor got laid off. Just trying to keep my name in the game.

On Saturday we got some new fish for the aquarium and picked up the complete The Adventures of Robin Hood on DVD, an ITC production from 1955 to 1960. Ella is nuts about this show, and it really is classic TV. I'm enjoying it and Richard Greene, playing Robin, is just perfect.

On Sunday I got a little writing done on my time travel story, even though writing it longhand on the bus during the week while revising it as it gets typed into the computer on weekends has gotten a bit confusing. Today I actually made a spreadsheet listing the longhand scenes and the computer scenes so I could figure out where I was. That done, I was then able to progress a bit.

Then I went out to throw the Nerf football with Ella. Had fun throwing the ball and taking pictures; I'd lob the ball way up so I'd have enough time to also snap a photo of Ella catching it.

Sunday evening had a dinner party, as already posted on Facebook. But I'll repeat the menu here for LJ friends not on Facebook: pork tenderloin, garlic mashed potatoes, butternut squash with gorgonzola and walnuts, spinach salad with bacon and hard-boiled eggs, The Show Cabernet Sauvignon 2007, Trapiche Oak Cask Malbec 2006, Ravenswood Lodi Old Vine Zin 2006, and steamed chocolate pudding with chocolate sauce and caramel ice cream. Wow, was this all incredibly tasty. I'm still stuffed, and also drinking a lot of water to hydrate myself against all that wine. Time for bed!

During the week got an email from the editor of a poetry magazine saying that she'd like to buy a couple of my poems. That was a pleasant surprise, as I had completely forgotten submitting these way back in April. She also apologized for the delay in response. No details beyond that, but once things are finalized I'll post the wheres and whens.

I don't write much poetry anymore, and these two date back to original drafts in 1990 and 1991. A poem I sold to Strange Horizons a couple years ago dated back to 1988. I guess I was ahead of my time.

Blew my writing streak. Oops and dang. I wrote everyday from 6/16 to 10/2 and then yesterday I completely spaced it. Worked a number of hours in the basement constructing shelves (and made a trip to the hardware store for supplies plus a second trip to the hardware store to get what I forgot the first time), then a couple more hours getting books out of boxes and onto the shelves, then cleaned up a bit, monitored the kid doing homework, ate, showered, and sat down to relax and finally watch the season of premiere of House.

Today when I fired up the computer it hit me . . . dammit, no writing yesterday. Just simply forgot. Back at it today, though, getting a solid start on a new project. Said project required me to watch a couple Star Trek movies, so that was fun.

Is anyone watching Fringe this season? I've taped the first two episodes and haven't gotten to them yet.

All I wanted was a nice muffin to start the day . . . when I get to my cube I realize the person did not give me the flavor I asked for. A small thing in a world of terrorists and tsunamis, I know, but dammit, just one freakin' muffin is all I ask.

Got an email from a guy running for St. Paul school board. Asks that you contribute what you can afford. The footnote to that states that "The law limits contributions to $500 per person." F#%@ing-A, man, a damn school board and they can look for up to $500 a person?!

F#%@ing money.

Granted, not a very high position on the scale of heroes, but I'll take what I can get.

I was very annoyed at buying the wrong pilaster clips for the shelving standards I'm using to make A/V component shelves during the basement renovation. I had thought there was only one kind at Menards, but the bag of clips I had clearly didn't fit the standards.

So back I go, return the clips at the desk, then head back to the shelving section. Indeed, there is only one display of standards and clips. But mine didn't fit. WTF? I take a closer look at the clips, comparing one bag to another, and sure enough, some clips don't match. I open up a couple bags to try on the standards. Yep. Some work, some don't. I dig through all the bags and discover that about two-thirds of them are the out-of-whack kind that won't work with the standards. I tracked down a guy in a blue shirt and show him the problem and received profound and repeated thank yous. I really could have used a new iMac, but I'll take what I can get.

Now construction can proceed. Soon I will once again be able to turn music up to 11 in the basement. Sweet.

Work on the time travel story continued throughout the week; this weekend, however, my writing time was consumed by writing my next review for Author magazine, Dracula: The Un-Dead. You'll have to wait a few weeks to see the review, but I just have to mention something I didn't have room for, one truly awful sentence: "It was as if fate had known her destiny long before she ever had." Ouch. Luckily, not indicative of the prose in most of the novel.

On Friday wrote a scene featuring Corporal M. J. Robeson, my space Marine from "Finders Keepers." I'm very pleased with the scene: it is both the creepiest and the most heart-wrenching thing I've written, I think. Now if I can just make the whole story come together around that pivotal scene, I'll have something.

Went to Once Upon a Crime mystery bookstore on Saturday for a signing by Pete Hautman. If you're not familiar with his work, you should check out his titles, both for adults and young adults. I've said it again, but I'll say it before: He once told me he pictured me as an old man shaking my fist and shouting, "Sons of bitches!" He's a wise man.

I didn't really have much writing time this weekend because Saturday afternoon we had to bring my mom's car back now that our RAV is fixed. Sat around a fire on Saturday night, eating Sandra's fresh-from-the-oven apple-cherry crisp, cherries from our tree, apples from a friend's. Delish.

Ella just finished reading Watership Down (and had a nice chat about it with Pete at the signing) and then today when we got home there was a dead rabbit in our backyard. Now that was lousy timing. We buried it underneath the lilac bushes, and Ella spent a lot of time at graveside.

I thought I was making progress on the basement renovation Sunday afternoon. The TV down there sits on top of an antique desk. Since it's not used as a desk, the space beneath it where a chair could go is wasted space. Came up with a scheme to build a shelving unit to fit in there for the A/V components: receiver, DVD, CD, and VCR. I bought some side-mounting standards with little clips that hold up the shelves. Project came to a halt when I realized the clips (which are sold right beside the standards) don't fit the standards. Blurgh. Back to Menards on Monday, I guess.

On a positive note, I picked up Kirsten Beyer's latest Voyager novel, Unworthy, which I'm looking forward to reading after I finish Greg Bear's Dinosaur Summer.

The writing experiment continues: writing a first draft longhand during bus rides during the work week, then typing up a second draft on the computer on weekends. So I haven't finished the one before I've started the other.

The first draft of the untitled time travel story is nearing completion:



Meanwhile, work on the electronic second draft has made some nice progress:



Strange thing is, the second draft is only a third of the way through the first draft. An added scene and general fleshing-out has really upped the word count. However, some of the changes being made in the second draft have made at least a couple later scenes in the first draft unnecessary, so I'm guessing the word count may still work out about the same in the end. We shall see.

The saga of the broke-down RAV continues. Tomorrow (Monday) we plan on retrieving it from where it died out of town on Labor Day weekend (with a shout out to my brother-in-law Bob . . . thanks, Bob, for once again saving our asses) and also hope that it only needs a new timing belt, water pump, and thermostat. Given the alternative, those do qualify as "only."

Wrote longhand work days on the bus on my still-untitled time travel story. On Saturday and Sunday I key-entered stuff on same story, embellishing and tweaking as I went. It's coming together. I should post word counts on both stages, but I'm too tired to do it.

Saturday I worked at Wheels & Wings, the annual car show put on by the publishing company I work for, which has its roots in strictly automotive publishing. It's a bit removed from the diversified company it grew into and even further removed from Quayside Publishing, the larger pub group that bought it a couple years ago. I worked in the warehouse finding people books, which I enjoy. Since the majority of attendees are strictly car geeks, those are the kind of books they're looking for. So it was a pleasant surprise when a customer asked for A Hundred Feet Over Hell, a great Vietnam oral history book I edited. That was a lot of fun.

That night I installed some plastic conduit on a basement wall for the renovation project, for running phone wires through. Easier than trying to run it behind the wall.

Sunday Ella helped me clean the aquarium. We've got a thirty-gallon tank that desperately needed some up-keep. Then I did some work rerouting cable for TV signal into the basement. Still need to snake it through the ceiling and then install some conduit on the same wall as previously, instead of trying to run cable through wall. Took a break to go through the Nerf football around with the kid.

Sunday night we went out to a fabulous restaurant with friends, had amazing food and wine, then happily found out the server comped our wine because the owner of the restaurant knows Sandra's sister. Much appreciated and a nice finish to a short weekend.

Now back to the grind . . .

Well. Been too long since my last blog post, so this will be a bit of a round-up.

On the writing front my sprawling arcane metafiction novella has gone to beta read. The first response was essentially a fair and resounding "WTF?" so that MS needs to go back in the oven until I find a proper balance between concept and readability.

My untitled time travel short story is developing well. While still writing it long hand on my bus ride to work, I've started key entering it on weekends, revising as I go. Today I wrote a whole new scene I realized was missing in the handwritten draft. And I like it.

Meanwhile, as reported and commented upon all over the geekosphere, another round of lay offs at Simon & Schuster has cost me another editor on my Trek novella. No news yet on what the heck is going on over there, but I'm hopeful that the novella will still be out next fall. And good luck to Margaret Clark who joins Marco Palmieri as another victim of the publishing industry's troubles.

As originally posted on facebook, our car broke down while heading out of town for the holiday weekend. Not sure yet what we're going to do about it, fix it or start car shopping, but on the upside my mom has lent us her car to use, which saves the expense of the rental car, which we will bring back tomorrow.

The basement renovation continues. The loss of our RAV for hauling shelves and building supplies puts a speed bump or two in the road, but we'll just have to find a way around that.

Tonight will be another bonfire at my mom's annual Labor Day weekend camp out . . . there may be smores involved. Mmmm . . . smores. I find a nice red wine goes well with them!

I was at my local wine shop the other night, looking forward to a relaxing browse through the aisles during their big sale. However, a couple came in and talked to each other the whole time.

Let me clarify: they weren't next to each other the whole time. No matter how far apart they were in the store, they just pitched their voices across the intervening aisles.

"What was that white we had that one time that you loved so much?"

"I wouldn't say that I loved it, but it was good. I don't remember what it was."

Stuff like that, lobbed across the entire store so that everyone had to listen to their mundane conversation. Acting as though they were the only people there, as if they were just chatting across their own living room.

People, listen. No one wants to listen to whatever happens to fall out of your pie hole. If you want to talk to each other, stand next to each other. Acknowledge that you're in a public space that you share with others and behave accordingly. Use your friggin' inside voice, for cryin' out loud.

The same with cell phones. I've got to listen to everyone's damn business, no matter how trivial or personal. Once, while trying to have a relaxing cuppa in my neighborhood tea shop, I had to listen to a woman arguing with a pharmacist. The conversation built up to this: "Well, it was prescribed by my gynecologist, where do you think the rash is?" No, really, that's verbatim, because it's burned into my mind like a gunshot to the head.

Somebody, please make it stop.

As previously blogged, I contributed the discography to the book Whole Lotta Led Zeppelin.

Now here is my byline and introductory paragraph from the Italian, Korean, and, yes, Japanese editions, respectively.




Cool, huh?

So I'm rushing about this morning getting ready for work when I notice something on the kitchen floor by the basement steps . . . what are those, bread crumbs?

I lean in closer. No, wrong color for bread, and why would there be a bunch of little pieces of bread this far away from the kitchen counter? No, the little chunks of whatever are kind of off-white, sort of gray . . . the color of ceiling tile.

Slowly I straighten up and raise my head to look at the hanging-ceiling tile above me. And in one corner there's a hole chewed through it. Suddenly, a clawed tentacles shoots out of the hole and wraps around my neck--

OK, that last sentence was just from the world that exists inside my head. But the little hole was for real. Dammit. Between having to get a new roof, which we noticed when the leaking stained our new ceiling tiles, and now this, we're going to have to replace half the tiles we put in. And I've got to try to catch the rodent(s) responsible for this latest travesty and give them a stern talking to.

Did I mention "aargh"?

As previously blogged, Eliot's behavior has changed a lot since Yeats has been gone. His favorite place is now at my feet under the desk, snuggled among the various wires and modems and keyboard foot pedals and such.



Of course, his favorite, favorite place is under the desk when he uses my foot as a pillow so that he's maintaining physical contact all the time.

On June 16 I started a long-overdue policy . . . I work everyday on my writing. I didn't set a minimum time or word count, because I wanted to make it easy to succeed. I'm certain if I didn't make my minimum I'd feel depressed and it would be counterproductive. But if all I have to do is jot a sentence or just a word or two or even just look through various projects and think about what to do next, I get it done, feel great, and keep the habit growing.

Now I'm coming up on two months straight, with progress on two separate projects I've posted about previously. And my question is this: should I expand my definition of "working on my writing" from simply "working on manuscripts" to include other aspects, such as chatting with an editor about future possible projects? Perhaps my daily goal should be "working on my writing career," which could be either actual writing or researching markets, talking to editors, and so on.

I'm a little on the fence. Should I let myself off the hook of writing if I've worked on some other aspect of developing my so-called career, or should I still get at a manuscript every day in addition to the other stuff? Remember, part of this is driven by my limited time as a guy with a family and full-time day job.

Pour yourself a cup of coffee and discuss.

So I'm on the bus this morning heading into work after a long weekend. We'd been up at my mom's, where I'd planned to get a lot of work done key-entering a story I've been working on longhand . . . but I forgot the charger for the laptop, the battery of which died on startup.

Anyway, I'm on the bus and shortly after I sit down, one of the other riders, a regular, a guy I see everyday day after day and week after week but have never spoken with, gets up and comes over to me, saying something. He's holding something in his hand, a book or something. I didn't quite hear because I was in my "bus zone," living entirely in the strange little world in my head, and I'm wondering what's going on.

    "What?" I say.
    "You read science fiction, right?" he says, obviously repeating what he said before.
    "Yeah."
    "Here, I found this in my basement. I thought I'd noticed you reading science fiction. I was just going to give it to Half Price Books. Take it, do what you want with it."

And he's holding out the July 1977 issue of F&SF toward me, a special Ellison issue, as you can see in the scan of the cover. Cool. So I thank him and off he goes back to his seat. I thought briefly of amusing him with my telephone encounters with Ellison, but more people were getting on the bus and it just gets too noisy. And I don't really know if he knows anything about Ellison or not, so I spare him my usual ramblings.

It seems to me more bus rides should come with cool free stuff from friendly passengers.