Four friends, thirty-five (plus) years after high school.
-the Centaur
Posts tagged as “We Call It Living”
Wow! 2023. What the hell? Seems like Blade Runner was just yesterday. But it was actually pre-pandemic! But in the real world, it's a "new year", as most Americans mark it, so it's time for New Year's Resolutions.
Or is it? As far as I recall, the science of New Year's Resolutions - whether it works or not to set new goals at the start of the new year - is decidedly mixed, and a brief check seems to confirm that.
But New Year's Aspirations, yes, I have those. For one, I'd like to start blogging every day. For another, it would be great to resume drawing every day. And Wednesday, my wife and I are going to buy bicycles.
For this year, though, I plan to edit my fourth Dakota Frost novel, SPECTRAL IRON, in the hope it breaks the logjam of the eight (8!) unedited novel drafts sitting on my hard drive, and to make progress on several other creative projects, at work and in life. To get started on that ... I'm now going to get back to work.
Onward!
-the Centaur
Pictured: an aspiration made real: the hand-me-down "comfy chair" from Francis Produce, which I have kept for 25+ years, now turned into a reading nook in my new library. That nook is filled with artwork and standees and books and novels and comic books, and in that comfy space there I have actually, like, started to read books again and stuff after years of and years of stunted fiction reading, post-grad-school.
Two tomahawks in all but bone for the high school gang's 30th annual "Edgemas" party, prepped with my own custom almost-dry rub and set aside to rest for 24 hours prior to a reverse-sear:
I hear it turned out pretty well. :-D
-the Centaur
It's a [re]start. Welcome to 2023, everyone.
-the Centaur
So I dropped in to Cafe Intermezzo near Perimeter Mall to get a little editing in on SPECTRAL IRON and realized that THIS was where I and my wife went for our first date, almost exactly twenty years ago! (I think we were sitting just out of view, not far from the chair you can see at the left of frame.)
I wasn't taking pictures as regularly then and selfies certainly weren't a thing, so the closest pictures I have of Sandi were from a photo shoot we did almost a year later when she needed reference images for some paintings she was doing. Many of those are just Sandi striking odd poses that corresponded to something that she needed to draw, but I think the one above turned out quite well.
Cafe Intermezzo will always hold a place in my heart as it's one of my best late-night thinking and writing places, but the one at Perimeter has an even more special place, as it's where Sandi and I, who had met at the Chamber a few weeks before, shared our first date and our second kiss.
Here's to another twenty great years!
-the Centaur
Well, it's that time of year again ... 65,000 of my closest friends have gotten together in five hotels and two convention halls in Atlanta to celebrate all things science fiction!
My schedule is below. I worked right up to the start of the con, so am just now posting this two days later, but for the benefit of the time travelers in my audience, I'll include the first two panels:
- Thursday
- 8:30pm - Start Now, Research! - Hyatt Embassy EF
How much research is enough? How much is too much? When do you stop doing research and start writing?
- 8:30pm - Start Now, Research! - Hyatt Embassy EF
- Friday
- 7:00pm - The People Who Live in Your Book - Hyatt Embassy EF
Characters rise off the page and become people--if they're well-crafted. Discover ways to make this happen in your fiction.
- 7:00pm - The People Who Live in Your Book - Hyatt Embassy EF
- Saturday
- 10:00pm - Stories Needed: Get Yourself Invited into an Anthology - Hyatt Embassy EF
There's an anthology being published that might just work for a story you have in mind. Or, when you hear about an anthology and KNOW you have a story for it, what do you do? Get some professional help from our pros.
- 10:00pm - Stories Needed: Get Yourself Invited into an Anthology - Hyatt Embassy EF
- Monday
- 10:00am - Writing About Star Trek - Hilton Galleria 2-3
There are thousands of worlds within Star Trek, and thousands of topics to talk about. Where do we start? Join a panel of published writers to discuss what's worth discussing in Trek books, articles and more
- 1:00pm - Where Do You Get Your Ideas? - Hyatt Embassy EF
This is a question that every writer gets asked by everyone they know. What is the answer to that question? - 2:30pm - Predicting the Future - Hyatt Embassy EF
Where in the world is fiction headed? Do the old tropes still work? What's fresh and new for the future?
- 10:00am - Writing About Star Trek - Hilton Galleria 2-3
At each panel, I'll be giving away signed copies of the writing inspiration book Your Writing Matters by my friend Keiko O'Leary. This is the latest release from Thinking Ink Press, and we're very proud of it! No matter where you are on your writing journey, I think this book can probably help you, so come on by!
See y'all tomorrow!
-the Centaur
Well, after a long hard month and many ups and downs, I have successfully completed Camp Nanowrimo, one of the three yearly National Novel Writing Month challenges to write 50,000 words of a novel in a month - and this is my 32nd time claiming viiictory!
This was one of the more challenging Nanos for me, as April is our quarterly planning month, and on top of that we decided to switch managers within our team and to switch to semester planning in our org. So that led to a dip in the beginning, where it was hard for me to get my groove.
The blood on the deck continued almost to the end of Camp Nano. This month's project was my third go at JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE FLYING GARDENS OF VENUS, and I found it particularly difficult to get momentum as the story is more complicated than normal, with a new protagonist Puck taking center stage in addition to Jeremiah. You can see the dip compared to past Nanos:
I felt like I was struggling and stumbling with the story, writing and rewriting scenes, trying out different alternates (I count these as words written; editing can come later). However, as I rolled into the end of the month, these struggles started to pay off, as I understood better what was up with Puck, why so many weird things happened around her, and what role they played in the story.
Over the years of doing Nano, I've reached this particular point of the enterprise many times - a point which I sometimes call "going off the rails". This is the point where the story seems to gel, and I think it happens when I go from exploring the logical consequences of a set of characters in a situation - which is where I start almost all of my writing - to creatively injecting things into the story that could not be predicted from its beginnings. These still need to be grounded in the plot and consistent with the characters, but there's a difference between the things you typically expect to happen in a scenario and truly creative innovations which cannot be predicted from the setting alone - what the Mythcreants writing team calls Novelty in their ANTS framework (Attachment, Novelty, Tension and Satisfaction).
Over almost 20 years, I've had this creative spark, this "going off the rails" many, many times, and stories always seem better for it. I have tackled 16 Nanowrimos so far out of 34 monthly challenges (also counting Camp Nano and Script Frenzy) and have successfully completed it 32 times.
Each time for me, it's facing those middling slumps, facing the places where I've fallen out of love with my own story, that ultimately kickstart my creativity into high gear and make me fall in love with my work again.
That happened this time, even though I wanted to give up. I know Nano doesn't work for everyone, so your mileage may vary, but for me, as I've often found in other arenas of my life, you sometimes have to work just a little bit harder than you want to to reach an outcome which is far better than you have any right to expect. That was true with Cinnamon, originally a side character in the first Dakota Frost about whom I have now drafted three novels, and it is turning out to be true here with Puck as well, the Girl Who Could Wish, now turning into a truly interesting twist.
Oh, an excerpt. Let me see if I have some rough draftiness lying around here ...
“It’s an ecosystem,” Puck murmured. “There’s a whole ecosystem in the floatbergs—”
One of the jellyfloats wandered under one of the falls, and screamed, terrifyingly human-like, as it steamed and melted—and then Puck realized what the liquid was: sulfuric acid. This was an upper-atmosphere floatberg, its engineered bacteria designed to harvest sulfuric acid from the air—and as the floatberg disintegrated, the collected sulfuric acid which had not been processed was now spilling out in uncontrolled streams, destroying whatever had inhabited this cavern.
“I’m sorry,” Puck said to her little audience. “I … I think it’s too late.”
One of the bigger parakeys, with a crest, hopped up on her knee.
“Is that a vest?” she said, touching a bit of what looked like cloth. “You … you can’t be intelligent creatures, now can you? How could you start a whole civilization up here? Floatbergs only go back a few hundred years, and they don’t last for more than months, maybe weeks—”
The parakey chieftain, if that’s what it was, cheeped at her.
Puck drew a breath.
“I wish this cave could be saved,” she said carefully. The crowd of parakeys cheeped and beeped, and the chieftain pawed at her and cheeped even louder, like a little screech, and she relented. “Alright, a proper, non-conditional wish this time. I wish this cave would be—”
The bottom dropped out from beneath them.
Poor Puck! She can't seem to cut a break. But at least I know who and what she is now, and how she's related to Jeremiah, and can therefore move forward with this story with confidence.
Prevail, Victoriana!
-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
Recall to memory the Sixth of January,
Riot, insurrection and plot
For no justification should the January Insurrection
Ever be forgot
A little over one year ago today, lame-duck President Donald Trump directed an unruly band of his followers to "fight like hell" to overturn the election of Joe Biden, in the hope of disenfranchising me and the 81 million other Americans who voted to bring to an end Trump's dyscivic reign.
"Dyscivic" means "antagonistic to civilization." It's a word coined by alt-right pundit Vox Day to disparage the aspirations of "social justice warriors" like myself. I am a writer, and I hereby confiscate "dyscivic" and repurpose it to mean "antagonistic to the civic structures of our society" - which Donald Trump was.
Of my good friends who voted for Donald Trump, at least two voted for him precisely because they expected he would be disruptive to our existing system. One specifically said, "I voted for Donald Trump because I hoped he would blow up the Republican Party, and I'm waiting for the Democrats to go next."
Keep waiting. Even though progressives like AOC and moderates like myself don't always get along, we recognize that we share the same end goals, that our principles are compatible, and they're worth fighting for together, even if we might disagree on methods.
I don't get the same sense from my most right-wing friends, who viciously lambast politicians from their own party for not "getting on the Trump train" in every possible respect - even when those politicians have multi-decade records voting for precisely the positions my friends loudly advocate for.
Reliance on trust is toxic to any organization. It encourages dependence on personal relationships - even friendships - developed over years or decades, and makes the organization resistant to new information delivered by new people. When that trust is in leadership, it becomes loyalty ... which is deeply dyscivic.
The purpose of government is to put the use of force under rational control. To prevent one man from using that force to execute their own personal will, we create civic structures that corral the use of power. We loan power, not grant it; and when you loan power to someone, you watch them.
Over four years, we watched Donald Trump demand loyalty on an unprecedented scale in American politics - from his followers, from fellow politicians, from the machinery of government. He turned on his appointees when their understanding of their civic duties conflicted with his own petty desires.
And when the American people had had enough - when even some of my Trumpian friends switched parties because they could not abide what he was doing to our political system - Trump spat on those of us who dared to vote against him, and then tried to pretend to his followers that we did not exist.
Well, sir, our voices were heard. And we won't be silent. We know that you and your followers are going to try again - I remember watching your suppoprters meeting in the dark in the months leading up to the insurrection (holding 10pm rallies in the parking lot of a nearby grocery store). We'll be watching.
For I'm not the only one. Here's a few quotes from my fellow Americans around the web:
http://wilwheaton.net/2022/01/one-year-later/
We all know how that turned out. All but seven Republican Senators — forty-three of fifty members in the upper chamber — protected him and embraced his Big Lie. In the year since, they have doubled down on it, and they have not stopped insisting that we did not see what we saw one year ago today with our own eyes.
And:
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2022/01/06/january-6-one-year-on/
And yet, after perhaps 48 hours of unrehearsed shock, the Republican party rallied around this traitor to the republic and the constitution, and tried to rebrand an actual coup attempt into overexuberant tourism.
And not about January 6th, but important all the same:
https://angrystaffofficer.com/2022/01/03/american-war-and-american-memory/
Why is this important? Because as we look ahead into another year at the beginning of a new decade of a constantly changing world, America needs to take a hard look at herself and ask whether we are remembering or forgetting the right things. This is not only vital to our collective consciousness as to who we are as a nation, but to the success of future military operations.
I assert that remembering the right things isn't just vital to our success in military endeavors, but to each of us personally, in the aggregate, as a nation, and as a civilization. If we don't remember the true story - good and bad and ugly - then those who make up stories for their own convenience will rule the day.
Remember, the Big Lie was the foundation for the Final Solution.
Let's make sure that doesn't happen here.
-the Centaur
What a year! Hard to believe 2020 is over. Well, now that we're moving on to 2021 ...
Wait, what? 2021 is over already?
-the Centaur
Out with October, in with November, and with it, a bunch of updates. Dragon*Con came and went and was a success. Our Kickstarter for Beyond Boots 'n' Bars was funded; thanks to everyone who participated! But most importantly, the move from California to the East Coast is mostly done.
That last I blame for my lack of posting (and drawing - sheesh, I am ~80+ drawings behind) but, ultimately, that was the most important thing that I and my wife needed to be working on for quite a while. Now, she's got a functioning art studio again, and my library is ... getting there.
But, now it's time to get back to it. I'll be doing Nanowrimo again - JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE FLYING GARDENS OF VENUS, something-like-book 2.75 on my original outline. Since Nano has been so great to me, I'm sponsoring it this year, which in turn, means you can find FROST MOON there!
Welp, back to it. Onward, fellow adventurers!
-the Centaur
a long day. but a good one. more tomorrow.
-the centaur
It's not that I've not been drawing every day. But my marriage is more important than drawing every day, and my job is more important than my posting every day, and just from the perspective of posting, while we're on that subject, site maintenance is more important than all of that, since I couldn't post.
However, taking a shotgun to all of my plugins (except the Classic Editor, which WordPress Gutenberg can pry out of my COLD DEAD HANDS) and running all available updates got the site back to life. Still not sure what precisely went wrong here, as the failure wasn't correlated with any detectable change.
SO anyway, drawing hasn't stopped, but posting of them will resume when I get the huge box of stereo wires detangled so the site is smooth again. Pictured: me, having a drink with my wife, spending a wonderful afternoon and evening together, most of which did NOT involve any form of drawing.
-the Centaur
UPDATE: The problem was the Jetpack plugin, and it persists even if the plugin is reinstalled from scratch. This has some precedent, as I see other users with the same problem, though I haven't dug deeply enough to understand what is going on in my case.
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.
Tired, could stay up later to finish a full drawing, but then, I've been having trouble getting to sleep once in bed when I do that, and I don't want to have another bout of awake-till-6am insomnia. Here's a quick sketch to tide you over - with a brush pen, since I seem to have exhausted all my Sharpies.
What I did instead this evening was art related: I hung some of my wife's paintings in the new place:
Now that's art. As for me, I'm still drawing every day.
-the Centaur
Mostly vaccine recovered, but didn't sleep well. Pretty tired, crashing out early.
Drawing every day.
-the Centaur 
Also Drawing Every Day #132, but you probably guessed that.
Go, immune system, go! Back to bed.
-the Centaur
SO! Once again, I have written more than 50,000 words in a month - this time, on Dakota Frost #7, SPIRAL NEEDLE, which is close to being finished. (Yes, yes, YES, I know, Dakota Frost #4-#6 and Cinnamon Frost #1-#3 are not edited yet, editing is harder than writing, and pays less than teaching robots to learn. I'll get to them, I'll get to them, I promise). I can't figure out the new Camp Nano interface to make it cough up the usual winner banner, so you'll just get that screenshot instead.
This is my twenty-ninth victorious Nano challenge and thirty-first attempt overall. That's great stick-to-it-ness, but I was behind for much of the month, not getting my feet under me until the 10th, but I managed a big pushes two weekends a go and a huge push last weekend, leading to me briefly getting ahead of the game right around the 28th, making today an easy coast (1500 words finished me off, though I wrote through to a notch over 1,667 words just for completeness). According to my records, that 8,154 word push on the 25th was the second most I've ever written in a day, topped only by my 9,074 word mad push to finish PHANTOM SILVER, Dakota Frost #5, on July 30th, 2016.
Overall, a bit behind this month, which was pretty rough OKR (Objective / Key Result) planning at work. I love the IDEA of OKRs - say what you want to do (Objective, for example, write roughly 1/3 of a novel) and how to measure it (Key Result, for example, 50,000 words in the month of April), but this time it took us until almost the 20th. 3 weeks is way too long to spend on planning for a quarter's worth of effort.
OH, almost forgot, an excerpt:
The questing metal fingers of the Plague Witch's "broom" branched and lunged at me. The Salzkammergutschwert’s black blade swept through the metal spikes, as cleanly as a Larry Niven variable sword through tissue paper. The Plague Witch recoiled, whirling the broom-thing, striking its black kettle end on my overextended sword hand. The Salt Chamber Sword sang out across the street, slamming into a fire hydrant in a hiss of water. But that movement naturally carried me forward, as I thought it would, and the moment the Plague Witch raised her head, I shoved my free hand at her, jamming onto her pointed beak a magical silencing wreath made of glowing vines and Technicolor feathers. “Oh, shaddap,” I said, drawing the wreath tight just as she tried to scream. The Plague Witch squeaked—she had a mask, not a beak, so the wreath couldn’t actually shut her mouth, but it could effectively gag her, and as she flailed her head, I kicked her. “And siddown!” And as she stumbled back, for a moment, I thought it was going to work. The Plague Witch writhed. I seized the Waystaff. Nyissa seized my arm. “I suggest retreat!” she cried. “No argument!” I yelled back—but retreat was not so easy. The silencing wreath wasn’t a free design, like my bluebirds or butterflies, but was an ad-hoc construct made from—and attached to—my vine and peacock tattoos, which tugged at me. “Some difficulty!” “Dakota!” Nyissa cried, pulling me away. “Let go!” “She’s got me,” I said, my feet slipping on the street. Oh, this had been a bad idea: as the Plague Witch struggled, the wreath self-replicated, drawing more and more silencing power from her own strength—but the design was imperfect, and was reeling me in towards her. “Nyissa!” Then things happened very, very quickly. Nyissa—my bodyguard, my bride-to-be, my love—darted forward, seized the Salt Chamber Sword in a burst of spray, and swung wildly at the tattoo vine connecting us. But the Plague Witch, flailing, swung her damaged broom at Nyissa—impacting her stomach. Nyissa didn’t even scream: she just doubled over in a splash of blood. The broom swept through her as the Plague Witch stumbled away, her body taken through a forward tumble, the lethally sharp sword falling from her hand—and severing the magic-tight tattoo connection. My vine snapped back to me, hurling me to the pavement. My wind went out. The Plague Witch tore off her disintegrating crown of vines, and screamed—-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, I have this particular type of multi-monitor setup I prefer - with a laptop screen abutting two other monitors, one horizontal, one vertical - but I couldn't quite do that here on my personal setup, at least not at first, because I didn't want to buy any more monitors after buying that Wacom behemoth, and eventually, the perfectly good ones from the old house will get shipped.
But I had a couple of spare old monitors from previous computers, long since retired - so old that only the DVI ports work, though one of them has an HDMI port I don't think I got to work. After lots of flickering, the oldest one of them finally gave up the ghost, but the other was able to slot into the same place. (It's on the left, above, with Roger Moore's mug from my Drawing Every Day session on it.) While can't rotate vertically like the other, it worked, at least, and I could use it.
Then it started flickering too.
Now, three or four things could be happening here. First, it could be a flaky old monitor screen, natch. Second, it could be a problem with the monitor's plug, since jiggling the software cable often fixed it; on the same grounds, I ruled out a device driver issue. Third, since it happened to two monitors attached to the same laptop with the same cable into the same port, it could be the laptop itself giving up the ghost.
So, after putting up with this for weeks, if not months, I finally started to look into new monitors. Apparently, the monitor I want costs roughly a thousand dollars with shipping, but I know I want that monitor because I have one in California waiting to be shipped here.
Then I thought back to my diagnosis.
Two monitors, plugged into the same laptop on the same port ... with the same cable.
Now, for various reasons, I can't swap the ports around much (the Wacom is SUPER finicky about what it wants it's 15,000 cables to attach to, and if you LOOK at it funny the stylus stops working) and I couldn't try a different cable because, THANK YOU, Apple and the rest of the computer industry, for changing the ports on all your laptops so my box of cables from previous setups is now virtually USELESS.
But I could order a $12 dollar USB-C to DVI cable off Amazon.
It arrived today. I plugged it in an hour or so ago.
The ten-year-old monitor? Working just fine.
Moral of the story: make sure to vary all of your variables when you are debugging, or you'll possibly trick yourself into the moral equivalent of spending a lot of unnecessary cash.
-the Centaur