Still working on the social navigation paper. Here's a cat.
-the Centaur
Posts published in “The Cats”
Adventures of the feline kind.
What, you think you can just look at me, sitting here on this weird funny pile of leaves on top of these strangely fallen logs, minding my own business like a normal cat, and I'll look back? At YOU?
Jeez luiz, some people ...
-the Centaur
Well ... a picture of a painting of a sculpture of a cat.
More in a bit.
-the Centaur
Yeah, that last one was a post I forgot to finish. Up late today, so no blog post for you. Instead, please enjoy this picture of a cat.
-the Centaur
Instead, please enjoy this picture of a cat.
-the Centaur
Brands of cat food, that is. As I recall, the farther it is to the right, the more likely it is that Loki will eat it. The farther it is to the left, the more likely it is that Loki would rather go outside than even smell it.
Oh, I'm sorry, were you working here?
-the Centaur
Snow in South Carolina! Or, as my friends in Boulder call it, Tuesday. It usually snows once or twice each year in Greenville, but we only get one of these big dumps of powder every 3-5 years or so.
In the moonlight, the neighbor's house looked as pretty as a Thomas Kinkade. Now, I've seen snow like this before, I've seen it before, and it's familiar to my wife, who works a lot in New York. But as for Loki ...
No sir, he didn't like it.
-the Centaur
Just because I was on vacation doesn't mean I wasn't drawing ...
Above, a sketch of some desk toys ... below, I think it was a from-memory quick sketch of Indiana Jones, but I find that hard to believe.
Below, test sketch of Puck climbing a skywall from JW&TFGOV.
Test sketching the shape of a face ...
And another quick sketch of Gabby.
Drawing, even a little, every day.
-the Centaur
P.S. Monterey is, as always, awesome.
Quick Sharpie re-sketch of yesterday's drawing - no roughs, from memory. I'm almost afraid to see how I did:
Huh. The overall outline is better than I expected, but I squished his head and mixed up his arms. Interesting. Almost the opposite of Data as Mr. Light Bulb Head, we have Gabby the Pear-Headed Cat.
Welp, here's to remembering that better next time.
Drawing, even a little, every day.
-the Centaur
Pigma Micron sketch over non-repro blue roughs of Gabby the Cat. Let's see how I did:
As it turns out, I didn't pay too close attention to the landscape after the face, and so there's no way to make it line up perfectly no matter how you scale or rotate it:
Ah well. Still, drawing every day.
-the Centaur
Vincent van Gogh from "Vincent and the Doctor". Roughed in non-repro blue on Strathmore 9x12, outlined in Sakura Pigma Graphic 1 and rendered in that and Sakura Micron 08, 03, and 005, plus Sakura Pigma Brush. I erased part of the non-repro blue to try to clean it up, which ended up being a mistake as it destroyed some lines, leaving white marks through the drawing; however, using Photoshop's Black and White feature with cyans almost taken to black and blue taken to white, it dropped out the blue while adding a nice warm shading to it.
Overall, not bad, though I am still squashing heads even when I am explicitly trying not to squash heads, and ending up with slight asymmetries, particularly in the left side of the beard, when I am explicitly trying to avoid that. But at least the eyes are not totally oversized this time.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur
And just ~600 words too, though much of today was cats, taxes and work. Taxes are submitted to the accountant, the cat is home from the vet after a nasty gastrointestinal scare, work is progressing (RL is hard!), and Dakota Frost is having a great time doing SPOILERS with SPOILER, so, no excerpt for you. 
So it's that time of year once again: I've won Nanowrimo, again, by writing 50,000 words in the month of November; by my records, this is 28 straight wins (counting Camp Nano in April and July in the mix) for a total of ... holy cow ... 1.5 million words in successful Nano challenges.
Welp, I'm calling it: Nano is the most successful technique I've ever used to to boost my writing output --- more than morning pages, more than writing workshops, more than the Artist's Way --- with the possible exception of Write to the End, with which Nano is intimately intertwined (for me).
Now I hear my editor calling: How about boosting that editing output, Francis? I hear you. Writing I don't seem to have much trouble with, but between robots and the zombie apocalypse I've found it hard to get the necessary brain juice to edit the 7, no 8 manuscripts I have in the queue.
Come to think of it, why couldn't we have had the zombie apocalypse while I was writing about a zombie apocalypse? Covid would have been really thematically appropriate when I was working on BOT NET (Facebook zombies) or SPIRITUAL GOLD (actual zombie zombies).
But that was not to be. I don't know about you, but I find the whole zombie apocalypse thing wearing, not to mention the whole election thing. Add to that serious realignments at work, which meant basically reinventing everything I'd been doing to come back to the same place, and 2020 has been a full on freight train of suck.
Not that everything's been bad. I finished the bulk of a novel, JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE MACHINERY OF THE APOCALYPSE, back in April, and I'm halfway through Dakota Frost #7, SPIRAL NEEDLE. We finished our patio here ...
... and started a grand new vegan cooking adventure together ...
And we even found and bought a new house, a very nice new place (it has turkeys) ...
... with a great space for my library and my wife's art studio, which we're in the middle of a slow motion move to while we renovate the old pad. These have been bright lights in an otherwise bad year. By you know how it's been: so stressful that - well, you've seen how much I've been blogging. I feel like this should be the best time ever in my life, yet 2020 has left me feeling a lot like this:
But, we have traditions which can help us through, like Thanksgiving ... oh, dangit Covid! So, ANYWAY, other traditions that do not involve Covid or Zoom, Nano traditions: the stats, and the excerpt. What did this month look like, Nano-wise?
This wasn't the hardest Nano I've handled ... I think the worst was being over 21,000 words behind in 2016 for PHANTOM SILVER, though briefly LIQUID FIRE in 2009 got almost that bad. Nor was it record-breakingly productive, like the astounding 25,000 words ahead finish on BOT NET 2017. This was a middle-of-the-road Nano, helped by really pouring on 12,000 words last weekend:
That was on purpose, so I could coast into Thanksgiving having finished, and spend a very nice dinner with my wife. (We had vegan muffulletas with authentic olive salad filling shipped direct from Central Grocery in New Orleans, which I highly, highly, highly recommend). That left November's work on SPIRAL NEEDLE comfortably in the middle of my previous efforts:a
And so, now, an excerpt ...
Too late, I realized the thickening arms of the octopus mist echoed the ghostly glow of the streetlights. “Teleporter! We’ve got to find a weakness!” I cried, flicking and snapping my wrist to loose a crossbow bolt, a feather from my origami peacock—an analysis spell. The feather flitted out, replicating itself in the flood of magic, its unfolding structure revealing an intricate, oh so intricate pattern embedded in the misty galaxy. Unfortunately, Nyissa, far older and faster than me, had fired her own analysis glyph. Our spells collided in a flash of sparks and feathers. “Damnit,” I cried, flinching. “Only one of us needed to do that—” “Sorry, was reacting to your idea, not your action,” Nyissa said. “I—” A long black shaft lanced out—and with a terrific report, blasted Nyissa in the face. Nyissa flew back. Her mask shattered. It would have been so romantic to scream her name and lunge my hand toward her—but both of us had been in fights so many times before, and I instinctively swung the Waystaff up, its spine catching bayonet and flipping the long gun upwards. The hooked beak hissed, striped cloak flapping, and I saw the thing whole. Towering. Raptor-beaked. Cloaked in tattered striped cloth, draped over a flaring dark greatcoat. Black leather straps bound a tortuously lean torso seemingly rippled with twitching muscle. But the clawed arms fighting mine held what looked like a musket, the striped cloak looked like the ruins of a flag, and atop the thing’s plague doctor mask was a tricorn hat. “What are you?” I yelled, shoving against the musket with the Waystaff. The thing screamed at me, foul smoke erupting from its beak, and I flinched and gagged. It wailed at me with its musket, alternately clubbing aside the Waystaff and jabbing at me with the bayonet, as sparking smoke roiled into what I assumed was the musket’s flintlock—it was preparing to fire! I leapt backward, spinning through a knight’s move version of the Dance of Five and Two, hastily pulling together a spell: “Spirit of flame, act as my shield!” The plague knight screeched and dropped a grimy black ball into its musket—just as my Dragon tattoo uncoiled from my skin and looped around me in a helix of Technicolor scales and feathers. The plague knight fired with a clap of thunder—met by a gout of flame.Wow! Excitement! Adventure! Tattoo magic versus magical monsters! And while we didn't get to see that much of the costumes in this excerpt, we've got cute vampires wearing sexy clothes fighting alongside our heroine in her long black vest / trenchcoat. What's not to like? That is all for now. Until next time, please enjoy this picture of a cat.
-the Centaur 
Wow, um, pandemics. SO, short story, I've been having a rough one, which is why you haven't seen me on this blog. Perhaps the story of my suffering is a story for another time, because I just found this Camp Nano post back from APRIL which was never published because, wow, um pandemics. Congratulations to you, zombie apocalypse, for throwing me off my game! Yay for you, Miss Rita, I guess?
SO ANYWAY, what I'd like to announce, what I planned to announce at the end of April but forgot to post, and now what I have to doubly announce at the end of July, is that I have completed the Camp Nanowrimo challenge to write 50,000 words in the month of April!
And, um, then, I did it again in July.
For those who don't know (how long have you been reading this blog?) National Novel Writing Month is a challenge to write 50,000 words in the month of November, and Camp Nanowrimo is a pair of choose-your-own goal sister challenges in April and July. I do 50,000 words each time, for 150,000 words a year. So far, I've done this (successfully) 27 times ... so my April Post was going to be "Viiiictory, A to Z" and there would have been some dang title for July, Plus One. But whatever, here's a graph of Nanos for you; from the dark line, it looks like my output this month (the dark line) was a bit more ahead of the game than normal (the average is the dotted line):
What was I working on?
This April, I mostly finished JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE MACHINERY OF THE APOCALYPSE, a "novel" made from a collected set of short stories set in an alternate Victorian era filled with strong women, rayguns, and aliens . The first of these stories, "A Choir of Demons," was published in Aurora Wolf magazine, and collectively, they tell the tale of how Jeremiah grows from a wet-behind-the-ears Lieutenant to the leader we see in THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE. My friend Tony Sarrecchia, creator of the Harry Strange Audio Drama, is helping me adapt these to audio.
This July, I started Dakota Frost Book 7, SPIRAL NEEDLE. Dakota, the best magical tattooist in the Southeast, faces a new challenge when her weretiger daughter Cinnamon gets mixed up in a lycanthrope attack, and Dakota will move Heaven and Earth to make sure Cinnamon is safe ... if she can just figure out who's trying to hurt her, and why? This book actually excites me about writing Dakota Frost again - vampire-werekin medicine, Colonial American plague doctors, and secret societies - even if it is perhaps is distracting me from finishing the editing of DF #4-#6 and Cinnamon #1-#3.
But the pandemic, and all the other business going on in my life, has drained my energy for the very difficult task of editing --- and drained my energy for many other things. (Hence no blog posts since my cats came back from the hospital, though they got sick again; they're fine now). In this crisis, some people have died, some are sick, some have lost loved ones, some have lost jobs, and many just feel like they've lost their minds. Fortunately, I'm on the good end of the spectrum: I have my wife, I have my cats, I have my job, and I'm still able to write. For all of that, I count myself blessed.
As for the rest ... well, I'm picking up the pieces and getting back on an even keel, step by step.
Please bear with me while I am beating off the bears.
-the Centaur
Pictured: two hangry cats. They were both sick, just prior to the pandemic, and that was rough enough that I thought I had real problems. Ha! I guess the coronavirus showed me. At least I'm getting to eat some tasty and delicious vegan food.
In the words attributed to Trevor Noah, "Why do you invite a tiny lion into your house to pee in your box of sand?" Well, he's small, cute, and furry, and emits calming noises. Kind of like an animate stuffed animal. After years of exile during his Yellow Years, Gabby is once again an inside cat, and this morning he crawled atop the bed and fell asleep atop me.
Here's hoping he keeps up his good behavior. I need a little something that takes the edge off the stress. Not that I have existential worries to stress about; humans adjust to set-points, so my main stress is figuring out how to make my very good job become a slightly better job, or how to prevent it from becoming a slightly worse job, all while still having time to write.
Not that I have enough time to do that either, but at least I can blog again.
-the Centaur
Wow, it's been February since I posted. I mean, I knew February was busy working on robots, and that slowed me down some, but March, man. I found out my long-running cold was actually chronic sinusitis, my Mom ended up in the hospital and I had to fly back to see her, and then we had another big robot push, right in the middle of the back-to-back Game Developer's Conference and Clockwork Alchemy steampunk convention. The robot push didn't work, necessitating another solid month of work.
SO, yeah, March, man.
Now, at last, things seem to be chilling out. Let's see if we can get to that blog backlog ...
-the Centaur
Pictured: Gabby and Loki, mortal enemies, chilling with me on my lap on my front porch. They got up there by themselves, I swear.
Wow. It's been a long time. Or perhaps not as long as I thought, but I've definitely not been able to post as much as I wanted over the last six months or so. But it's been for good reasons: I've been working on a lot of writing projects. The Dakota Frost / Cinnamon Frost "Hexology", which was a six book series; the moment I finished those rough drafts, it seemed, I rolled into National Novel Writing Month and worked on JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE MACHINERY OF THE APOCALYPSE. Meanwhile, at work, I've been snowed under following up on our PRM-RL paper.
But I've been having fun! The MACHINERY OF THE APOCALYPSE is (at least possibly) spaaaace steampunk, which has led me to learn all sorts of things about space travel and rockets and angular momentum which I somehow didn't learn when I was writing pure hard science fiction. I've learned so much about creating artificial languages as part of the HEXOLOGY.
So, hopefully I will have some time to start sharing this information again, assuming that no disasters befall me in the middle of the night.
Oh dag nabbit! (He's going to be fine).
-the Centaur
Well, Gabby had his stitches out and his collar off for all of twelve hours before we were back in the emergency room. He was cleared for activity, but then re-opened the wound.
The lesson: I should have said something. I knew we were taking the stitches out and returning him to activity too soon; they doctor gave us a window of 10-14 days, but the technician scheduled us for a 10-day return. That day, I was a bit iffy about the stitches, but they went ahead and removed them. I clarified: is he ready for activity? Can he go out? They said yes.
Well, they were wrong, and I should have said something at the day of the original appointment scheduling, at least putting it off until Monday. Failing that, I should have said something before the stitches came out. Failing that, I should have used my own discretion and left the collar on for a few more days.
Failing that, I failed my cat.
The late-night emergency doc didn't think the cut had reopened the underlying wound and that it didn't warrant stitches ... but it looks worse today. I kept him inside overnight and today; let's see how he's doing and whether I should exercise my discretion and take him back in.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Cancer cat, abscess cat, aka Lenora and Gabby. 
A predator has landed on me. Send ... heeellllp ...
-the Centaur 
One of our cats recently passed. Another came down with a urinary tract blockage. The third has cancer.
Now the fourth? Major abscess under his chin.
But! Recovering now, thanks to swift action. Cafe closing. That is all.
-the Centaur 
In theory, mast cell tumors of the skin don't kill cats, at least not directly. They can lead to lesions that can't heal and further infections, but its MCT of the spleen or gastrointestinal tract that are really dangerous.
For Lenora, our precious little wimp cat, this cancer is aggressive enough that we may need to take proactive steps. She's gone from one lump to 10 to 30 to 40 to 50 to 70, with a brief dip back to 40 after her surgery to remove her spleen ... but now the MCT has exploded, going from 80 to 100 to probably hundreds at this point, many of them showing lesions and scabs.
The first two combinations of cancer treatments failed; this one does not seem to be having an effect. Lenora is still active, but she no longer wants to spend time indoors, instead choosing to find high spots on the exterior podium or the fence. I think she thinks fleas are eating her alive.
I fear she's on her way out. I'd love to say "I know" but everything I've learned over the years tells me (a) you don't really know and (b) foreclosing an opportunity in your mind is a precursor to getting it foreclosed in real life. We sometimes like to think that we're tough minded people making hard decisions in the face of difficult circumstances, but if you're that guy or gal, I have bad news for you: you're selling yourself a line of bullshit.
Far too often we get tired of dealing with something and choose to perceive it as hopeless, then take all the bad decisions we need to in order to make the bad outcome we've decided upon happen, then telling ourselves "there's nothing else we could have done." This is particularly common with cars: cars rarely die until we decide to kill them by not maintaining them. It's even more common with politics: the other guy's plan rarely fails on its own until we take steps to sabotage it, just so we can then say "we told you so."
With your health, or the health of a loved one, what does this translate into? Never give up. Stephen Hawking lasted something like five decades after his doctors told him he'd likely be dead, and he didn't last that long by crawling into a bed and not fighting every step of the way. Sometimes heroic measures are not called for, but just giving up hope will make things far worse far faster.
So we're here for you, Lenora, even if you're on your way out.
Have a scritchy behind the ear. Yes. There you go.
-the Centaur