I've written every day since June 16. It's a new push to get back in the swing of things. I've set no minimum word count, and Saturday night, for the first time, I had no new words. I flicked through a number of possible projects and nothing came to me. But, since I spent an hour on the laptop doing nothing but thinking about and trying to write, I decided I deserved to keep my streak going.

The main problem was the project I'm primarily working on right now needs a lot of research, and since I was at my mom's in the country, working on my laptop and with internet access only through her desktop and dial-up, it just wasn't conducive to the task. That's why I opened up a number of back-burner projects to see if something would happen.

Oh, well. I put in the time and effort anyway. Tonight, back at home with cable internet, I got some real words down in the primary project. Day 13 and counting.

I have sympathy for the friends, family, and fans of Michael Jackson, but we can remember the accomplishments of this troubled and talented man while sticking to the facts.

CNN made a big deal about 1985's "We Are the World," crediting Michael Jackson with starting an entire trend in the 80s, bringing rock music back to social causes. I don't deny that Jackson contributed to the cause by writing the song, but it was Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats and Midge Ure of Ultravox who got the ball rolling with 1984's "Do They Know It's Christmas," which sold more than a million copies in the U.S., and then followed that up with organizing the Live Aid concert the following summer. Bob Geldof performed on the "We Are the World" recording as well, and it was played live in the States during the Live Aid concert.

During his long career, Michael Jackson, although not a political singer as such, recorded other songs that dealt with social issues that reached his wide audience, and he deserves credit for that; but Jackson's positive contributions should be praised without forgetting the contributions of others.

In the time and place where I grew up, we got all four channels of TV.

My mom still lives in the same house in the wilds of northern Minnesota, but things have changed. (Actually, my home town of Carlton is almost in the dead middle, north to south, of the state, but in the Twin Cities, in the lower quarter of the state, the entire other three quarters is considered "northern Minnesota" . . . kind of like people on the equator calling the entire rest of the planet "the poles.")

You still can't get cable out there in the country, but you can get a satellite dish. My mom doesn't have one, but starting a few years back a Fox affiliate started coming in if you got the rabbit ears just right, and now, with the switch to digital, several other channels are available. One of them is devoted to old shows of the 60s, 70s and 80s.

So Ella, who spends a great deal of the summer at my mom's catching frogs, is now watching Emergency!, The Incredible Hulk, Adam-12, Buck Rogers, and Battlestar Galactica, among others. I spoke with her on the phone tonight for the first time since she's been watching these old shows. It was quite amusing. She, of course, loves Twiki on Buck Rogers, was freaked out by Emergency! when a woman had a heart attack as her daughter was giving birth ("It's a double whammy!" she told me), and is already amused by the pattern of The Incredible Hulk: "He just hitchhikes around and ends up helping some girl."

Sadly, the station doesn't show Mannix, which, for some reason, I've been having a strong urge to watch lately. Though I'd definitely settle for some Emergency! and Adam-12.

Yesterday morning as I got ready for work I noticed my wine fridge was at a temperature of 62 degrees. *Gasp!* I could lose my membership in Wine Snobs-R-Us if I drank my zins and cabs that warm! Thinking it had just become confused, I reset the temp to a nice compromise of 57 degrees (just a little above average storing temperature and a little below average serving temperature of the reds I prefer) and went to work. When I got home I immediately checked the temp: 62 degrees. NOOOO! I realized that I have not cleaned the fans since, well, I got the thing, so I got out the vacuum cleaner, pulled off the regular floor attachment, and held the pipe up to one of the fan grates. Out came a bunch of dust. When I thought I'd cleaned as much as I could without dismantling the thing, I plugged it back in, set it to 57, and had a glass of too-warm zin. The wine had been sitting out on the counter while I unplugged the fridge and cleaned it, so was probably in the mid-60s. This morning I checked it right away. 56 degrees, and so far it has hovered around the high 50s. Perfect. Tonight I look forward to having some zin at just the right temperature.

Readers of Enemy Lines know that my daughter and I have a thing for spiders. We capture nice big hunter spiders (as opposed to trapper spiders that weave webs to catch their prey), keep them in habitats in the house, and feed them crickets. Well, sadly, over the last few weeks our last two spiders died. They only live a year or two, and you never know how old they are when you catch them. But we know a spider we wish we could catch. This amazing wolf spider lives at my mom's. Some squirrels chewed a hole under the eave of an outbuilding, providing a nice hole for it to hide in. And this one is huge. I would imagine it eats chipmunks and the occasional kitten. Wolf spiders are the largest spiders native to Minnesota, and this one is the largest I've ever seen, definitely at the top of the size range for the species. With legs spread out, I'd estimate a diameter of two and a half inches, its body just over an inch long. Given the size of its abdomen, I suspect this is a female who will be laying eggs soon. Note the bright spot on its head: one of its upper eyes caught the flash of the camera.

Soval knows who I am now . . . should I be concerned? So one of my authors from the day job drops me an email the other day and says he's hanging with Gary Graham, do I know who he is? Of course, I respond. He's on Star Trek and Alien Nation among other things. A week goes by and I get another email from the author . . . he was hanging with Gary again and told him his editor knew all about him. Uh-oh. Ambassador Pointy is on to me. And he's a Vulcan who holds a grudge.

Yesterday was the fourth day in a row I've written. In your face, Balzac! Just a few sentences and tweaks here and there, but enough to feel that I'm finally crawling out of this slump I've been in. Prepare to taste the smell of victory.

I've actually written three days in a row. That's not much of a streak, and the word count is laughably small, too small to be worth posting, but coming out of a several-weeks-long slump it feels great to finally be back at it.

Part of the problem is I've reached a point in the current project where what remains to be done is kind of mechanical, nuts-and-bolts stuff that's not exciting to write and requires research. It's not, "Hey, I get to write that action scene," it's "Hey, I have to do a half hour of research to make sure those two sentences of background detail are accurate." Not the most enticing work when you're trying to get back into the swing of things.

But the few things I've tweaked over the last few days have come together well, and, I hope, are enjoyably readable no matter how tedious it's been to try to get them written. The next part I need to work on requires a bit of commentary, so I'm thinking I'll be able to have some fun with the writing process. That will build up some inertia to help me through the next round of fact checking.

Onward.

If you're trying to interest a publisher in reissuing your publish-on-demand paperback, opening your cover letter with the sentence "The book . . . needs a hard cover publishing" is not all that convincing.

Then saying "The author, [author's name], has retained all rights," referring to yourself in the third person, does not instill confidence in an editor.

And going on to make numerous errors of grammar and punctuation does not put any icing on an already questionable cake.

I'm just saying.

So I was Googling around the intertubes trying to find something about Master Gunnery Sergeant Arthur Himmelberger, when a dubious hit led me to the September 30, 1993, issue of the Circle, the college newspaper of Marist College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

I found the reference to Himmelberger, dismissed it as the wrong guy, then noticed this article beneath it:



Click on it a couple times to get to a readable size . . .

Finally got a tiny bit of writing done last night. It may have been a microscopic step forward, but, dammit, it was progress.

For various reasons, good and bad, I haven't been writing lately. Over about the last month and a half there have only been a few glimmers. One weekend I typed some handwritten notes into the computer, last week an off-the-cuff comment on facebook inadvertently inspired a subplot for my novel, and then last night I got a couple dozen words done in my novella.

I think part of what got me going last night is knowing that daytonward and infinitydog are under deadline and working away like professionals on their novels. So, thanks, guys, for shaming me into working. Not that you had that in mind or even knew the effect you had on me, but I'll take it where I can get it. And now that you do know you've shamed me, I'm certain you'll enjoy further shaming far more than you should.

So there.

There's now a Simon & Schuster store on Scribd.com. A number of the SCE titles are available as protected pdfs. I didn't find any other Trek titles.

S&S Scribd store

Scribd press release

AP story

We let Yeats go tonight. He was at least fifteen years old, perhaps as old as seventeen.

Yeats was a year or two old when we adopted him. His first owners had to give him up when they moved someplace that didn't allow cats. His original name was "Milk Monster," apparently after an unusual fondness for milk when he was a kitten. It was a fun, goofy name, but, being English majors, we decided to call him Yeats.

He was Sandra's cat, at least at first. When our friend, a veterinarian who knew the original owners, brought him to our house, he needed a flea bath. I helped cover him in some sort of special foam, working it deep into his fur. Needless to say when we finally let him go he wanted to be with someone else, and he went to Sandra. When we got Eliot, since Sandra was already spoken for, he seemed to imprint on me. Eventually, they both turned into Ella's cats. Eventually.

Since we'd had them for a few years before Ella came along, they were at first none too pleased with the crying thing now in the house. When she started crawling around after them, they liked it less. But as she learned to be gentle with them, they realized that here was someone who would shower them with petting now that Sandra and I were too tired to give them the attention they had been used to from us. We gave our attention to Ella, and she bestowed it upon them.

In his younger years Yeats was very shy and tended to hide whenever someone came to the house. People barely knew we had him. As he got older and warmed up to company, he soon became the life of the party. He always sat up like a meerkat to look at people or out the window. He didn't do it as a trick or to beg for food or after being coaxed. He just did it, and he would sit like that for quite awhile. If he was doing it to look at you and you didn't pay attention to it, he would reach out and gently pat you with a paw. We became used to it, but whenever someone came over to the house for the first time they would be amazed by it.

But the time had come. His health had been deteriorating for the last couple years, and there was going to be no getting better. Nevertheless it was a hard decision, but in the last couple weeks he took a turn for the worse. Sandra and I both felt that it had to be done now. Ella accepted the decision, preparing to lose a friend she had had her entire life. She was quite brave tonight during the whole process, and I'm very proud of her.

When I mentioned at work today that tonight was the night we were losing one of our cats, one of my coworkers immediately said, "The one that sits up?" It's what everyone remembers about him. I'll miss the old guy.

I have finally friended the ebullient popfiend, inspired by his statement, "I'm making my way to 100K comments before my 4th LJ anniversary on July 20th. As I type this I stand at 91,394 comments, so what better way to drive up the comment count while simultaneously bringing people together in a positive manner than by having a FIENDISH FRIENDING FRENZY!!!"

Thanks to kradical for posting about this on his LJ, thereby bringing it to my attention.

For the first time in weeks I did some writing. Not much, just dipping a toe into the pool, but it was satisfying nonetheless.

We were at our friends' cabin over the weekend, but I had brought along the laptop just in case. I started out typing up some notes for a short story that I had jotted down in a notebook while on the bus. Ended up writing some dialogue and developing a new scene. Only just over six hundred words, but when you haven't had time to write a single word in a month, that's a solid start.

Can't get distracted by writing this one yet, I have my novella to finish when I have more time to sit at home and work, but taking notes on another project still helps getting back into the swing of things.

Or at least his people might have researched a book I edited. During his D-Day speech Sarkozy said (according to a transcript I found online):

When on June 7, 1944 sergeant Bob Slaughter found himself on Omaha Beach where he had unloaded the day before, he was all the more upset by the vision of all these men taken along by the waves, men that he knew since childhood and that had grown with. A thought then crossed his mind: “we were brothers, we will be always. They died so that we can live. I thank them for what they gave us”. During all his life, there remained haunted memories of “these austere faces, large eyes and mouths opened, fixed in the cold of death”.

I edited Bob Slaughter's memoir Omaha Beach and Beyond, which includes this:

The next morning we retraced our steps back to the beach. It was shocking to see how many men were washing in the surf, and many of them were from K Company. Men I grew up with, caddied with, double-dated with, puffed off the same cigarette with, drank out of the same bottle with, all washing in and out with the tide. It went through my mind that we were brothers and always would be. They died so that we could live. I thank them and our Heavenly Father for what they gave us.

The tide was coming in and we stared in disbelief at this wasted scene. Hundreds of dead bodies and wrecked hulks littered the now somewhat tranquil shore. There were wrecked, burned-out tanks, landing craft, and military debris of all kind. By far, the most shocking were the cold and bloody bodies washing in the surf.

Actually, Sarkozy's speech confuses the source; the section I gave from the book isn't actually a Bob Slaughter quote, but is included in the book as a transcript of an oral history interview Bob conducted with Technical Sergeant Felix P. Branham, Company K, 116th Infantry. I can't find the second quote Sarkozy gives in either Bob's words or Branham's.

Perhaps he found a transcript of Branham's oral history elsewhere, but I like to think he has read Bob's book. That's my story, and I'm sticking with it.

Bob emailed me this morning and is understandably pleased.

Yeats, the black-and-white one, is about seventeen years old. He's skin and bones, his fur is dull and unkempt, he has trouble jumping up to things (often falling down), he even lies down in slow motion (his stiff old joints obviously causing discomfort), he can't keep food down, and there are things going on with his bowels that I won't detail any further. We have close friends who are vets, and beyond the obvious "he's ancient" they're not sure what all is wrong. At one point they were certain he was riddled with cancer (an ultrasound showed dark masses throughout his body), but when he was still alive six months later that seemed unlikely. We could subject him to a battery of invasive (and let's face facts: expensive) tests and procedures, but where would we be? Giving extensive and uncomfortable treatment to a very elderly cat who has never been easy to medicate.

Those are the cold, hard facts. Telling them to Ella, who has known Yeats her entire life, was something we've been working on for literally over a year, bringing up the inevitability of Yeats's death, how sometimes the humane thing to do is put your pet to sleep, preparing her for the possibility that she could come home from school to find him dead. But then over the last couple weeks he has taken a turn for the worse, so we decided we had to move forward on this. Ella took it as well as could be expected.

It's hard to like a cat when you spend so much time cleaning up his various bodily emissions from the floor, the stairs, the wall, the radiator, your shoes, your brand-new leather shoulder bag, etc. Readers of my LJ know that I have a love/hate relationship with him; for instance, read this and then read this. In a strange way I'm glad to say that finally making the decision has allowed me to again feel some real affection for Yeats. Knowing that soon he will be gone, and that I will miss him, has me thinking about what a great cat he has been. He spends much of his time sitting up like a prairie dog or meerkat, then reaches out and pats you with a paw in a touchingly humanlike gesture. Late last night, and again this morning, as I was cleaning up after him I didn't feel the same frustration anymore.

He had a good run, Yeats did.

ETA: I have scheduled the appointment with my friend Rodney for next Thursday. This will give Ella a week to spoil Yeats and say goodbye. It's going to be a rough week for all of us. Sandra and I have had Yeats longer than we've been married! We got him when we moved into our first house together. It was the first time Sandra had a cat.

Last night I almost wrote for the first time in a month. Almost, but then got distracted by updating a page on my website. I'm disappointed I didn't actually get to the writing, but given the time of night and the next step necessary in the novella I'm working on, I can't imagine I would have been very productive.

After my lunch break here at the day job, I have to get back to a problematic project that is running right up to the wire and with lots of related pressure. Yikes.

But here's something: the publisher of our Voyageur imprint popped into my cube and said, "Hey, you want this?" and held out a boxed set of the first three Velvet Underground albums on CD. You bet I want that. I loves the VU and, believe it or not, still own a couple of these only on LP. Sweet.

I've had to coin a word to try to describe my long, slow crawl back to writing (and it's also fitting because I do feel so at home while writing). Haven't arrived yet. There was a confluence of events that ran me off the rails about a month ago, and I keep struggling toward getting back on track. I feel stuck in a dolly zoom, things are moving around me and yet I make little progress.

I have three main projects on my mind, all of which I've mentioned before, but here's a recap:

*Finishing The Periphery, my on-again, off-again novella I've been puttering on for about ten years. I'm only a couple thousand words away from a complete draft. This is my Lovecraft pastiche/metafiction/paranoid conspiracy epic that may have become so esoteric that I'm the only one who likes it. We shall see.

*Writing a story to submit to Space and Time magazine. I met editor hildy9595 at Shore Leave 2008, and she said I should send something to her. Well, here we are coming up on Shore Leave 2009 and I haven't done it yet. Of course, I did write two short stories (including "Finder Keepers" for Space Grunts available now!) and my Trek novella Honor in the Night in that time, but still. Over the last week or two the story has finally taken shape in my melon, and I've jotted some notes, but nothing on the computer yet. Blurgh.

*My original novel, a Victorian pastiche/mystery/steampunkish/alternate history kind of thing. I have three chapters that beta readers have enjoyed, and have a basic idea of the whole story. Next step is working out a formal outline from the voices in my head.

*I only said three main projects above because item four is very general: trying to figure out the lay of the land in Trek fiction and what to pitch/beg for next. Some days I still feel my head reeling from the premature departure of Marco Palmieri. I'm a creature of habit, and although my work with Marco was just beginning, I could feel a comfortable pattern developing. Having the Trek department and, really, publishing at large, go through an upheaval just as I was starting to settle in a bit threw me (and others, obviously) for a loop.

Beyond that I really think it's time I start agent shopping. Not sure if I have enough work out there or in the pipeline to make this feasible, but it's a good goal to keep in mind, and just the process of searching would be helpful for me. The process would keep me focused, eyes on the prize, professional, etc., all things I need to work at to grab the bull by the hot irons and keep this writing thing going.

Words of encouragement and advice welcome. Or wine. Or chocolate. Or chocolate with wine in it. Mmmmmm, wine . . .

One of my colleagues at our Motorbooks imprint is working on a book featuring cutaway illustrations of cars, trains, etc. He just called me over to his cube and showed me a big transparency, about 6x9, of the Enterprise, circa The Motion Picture. You can see people walking through the corridors, the bridge crew, all over the ship. I remember that poster from 1979. I always wanted it but never bought it for some reason. Maybe it seemed like too much out of my allowance. Maybe I had no place to hang it . . . I didn't have much wall space in my room between windows and bookshelves. Did anyone out there have that poster on their wall? Dayton?

I've choked down some BK kids meals, since the kid is a vegetarian and not a fan of Burger King, and the kid's friends have given her some stuff, so right now we have Scotty, McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, and Scotty. And the Kelvin. We got McCoy and Sulu from her friends. So, yeah, out of four meals I got three Scottys.

Anyone want to trade?

My friend and sometimes codefendant daytonward announced an amusing scheme on his blog called "Where's my book?", challenging his readers to send in fun photos of his books from wherever they may be reading them on summer vacation.

My wife, Sandra, was out of town Memorial weekend, so Ella and I had a little "staycation," doing all sorts of fun stuff. Now, we weren't actually reading Dayton's newest, Open Secrets, over the weekend, but we did have occasion to take some fun pictures of it anyway. ( To save space, I've put the photos behind the cut. )

Wow. As planned, we watched "Space Seed" last night to get ready for our Trek marathon today.

We watched II, took a break for a bike ride and lunch, then launched into III and IV back to back.

Then we went nuts and went to Star Trek for the second time.

Yes, that's four, count 'em, four Trek movies in one day. And Ella wore her uniform to the theater.

We both feel the power of geek fu coursing through our veins!