Martha Wells

Going to start the decorating for Halloween today!

Plus I finally broke 95,000 words on the third Cloud Roads book. Yes, it is going slowly, but I’m still hoping to finish by Christmas.


Couple of links:


Contribute to “Trick or Treat for UNICEF” and read the new Young Wizards Hallowe’en short story by Diane Duane
We’re offering “Not On My Patch” to advance readers this year as part of an effort to help UNICEF celebrate the 60th anniversary of its annual Halloween “Trick or Treat for…

Last night we went to see the live musical version of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein on the university campus and really enjoyed it. It was a hoot, especially the dream sequence dance with Viktor Frankenstein, where they assemble a giant puppet monster. It was a little too big and loud for the auditorium, though. (We noticed during the Beijing Acrobats show that their acts were designed for a somewhat taller stage area.) Makeshift makeup/dressing rooms for the cast had also been constructed…

We have officially started our Halloween preparations with the cemetery and the hanging skeleton being installed in the front yard. For a lot of houses, this would be the entire decoration, but our tolerant neighbors know that for us it’s just the beginning. We have a fog machine and we know how to use it.

We’re having a Halloween party this weekend and a houseguest, so I need to clean the house so there will be a clear field for us to tear it apart when we decorate.

It was our sixteenth…

I decided yesterday I had to paint the dining room. It hasn’t been painted since we moved in, and was starting to look it, since enough things get moved around in there for the walls to be pretty banged up. I also had some paint left over from the first failed attempt to make the foyer and stairwell light gray. The paint that didn’t work in those darker areas works much better in the dining room. And I’ll be able to use up the rest of the can, so it won’t be sitting there in the garage slowly…

I’ve been watching Halloween shows, as I am likely to do at pretty much anytime of the year. There have been some interesting ones on the DIY channel.

There was one on people buying haunted houses to live in (if I had the money, I would totally buy a haunted house, unless the ghosts were actively ax-murdering people.)

There was one on converting an old building into a haunted attraction, that pointed out one of the first steps was a highly sophisticated fire suppression system, including a…

Got some good news this morning: The Serpent Sea was listed on the Book Smugglers’ Radar as a book they’re really looking forward to! That was very nice to see this morning.

(Sample first chapters plus links for preorders for The Serpent Sea here.)

Yesterday, I noticed the viney weeds we have in the backyard were out of control (it’s rained twice, most of everything else is still dead, but the viney weeds I hate have sprung back to life) so I got the big metal rake out to get rid of…

It rained again last night! Very exciting if you’re me. I finished some other things I’ve been working on and am going to dive back into the third Cloud Roads book today.

***

The Cloud Roads got a very nice mention from N.K. Jemisin: Stuff you should read while you wait and I second the recs for the other books she mentioned, too.

Link:

Got this link from Google+: Good Media: When Digital Shaming Goes Too Far: Lessons From the Seattle Tip Stiffer
Within about 72 hours from the moment…

My teeth still hurt. That’s about all I’ve got this morning.


lots of links:

All Hallows Read give someone a scary book for Halloween!

Whatever: The Big Idea: Kate Elliott on Cold Fire The family that worldbuilds together stays together. You know how teenagers are: Always coming to their mom and saying, “MOM! We’re making up a world with our FRIENDS! Want to WORLD BUILD with us?”

Amazon: The Sleeping Partner by Madeleine E. Robins is now available I got to read this early and blurb…

I knew I’d been having increased anxiety issues lately (had a lovely classic anxiety dream this morning, too) and at my dental appointment this morning they told me I’d been grinding my teeth. (There are like, teeth imprints in my tongue, too.) So I need to stop that. Years ago I had a big case of TMJ from teeth grinding, but managed to stop and it went away. Fun! Not.

Anyway. Before I go back to work, I wanted to engage the group brain and see if anyone remembered this children’s novel. It…

We got rain this weekend, wonderful wet rain falling from the actual sky! Not fire, rain. For more than half the day. It’s too late for crops, many dead trees and animals, but at least the vegetation that’s still alive looks less stressed.

I have a short story I need to finish in the next few days, so that’s what I’ll be working on today.


A couple of things:

My ebooks that are available on Kindle are now available through Amazon.fr. (Along with Amazon US, Amazon.de, and a few on …

Our air conditioner stopped cooling night before last, and while I was running it trying to figure out if it was a repeat of the freon leak problem from earlier this summer, I noticed it was making the lights in the house fluctuate. Not generally a good sign. The repair guy found two electrical components that had gone bad, one that was failing slowly and one that had had a little explosion and was getting ready to take other things with it. So it’s good it didn’t happen while we were gone. It…

I think our fourteen year old cat Bella, who was not named after the Twilight character, is a vampire. She doesn’t eat, she sleeps all day, she nibbles on me. She’s rejected the tuna-flavored medicine and isn’t fond anymore of the catnip-flavored; they should make a mice-blood flavor.

I wish I could stop waking up at 5:30 in the morning.

Yesterday’s work was interrupted at regular intervals by Bella, the fourteen year old cat, who felt constipated and believed I could cure this (since I control the universe) if I would just try. She communicated this most of the day by sitting next to my elbow while I was typing, and purring, head-bumping my arm, and her trademark, the silent meow of “why won’t you just succumb to my will?” I finally got her to take her medicine, and I…

Got back from vacation yesterday. We had a great time, but now I need to finish up going over the copyedit/proof of The Serpent Sea. So here’s some photos: