Elizabeth Moon's Blog, page 135

The Texas legislature and "voter fraud"

In a state suffering a severe prolonged drought, where the population has already overstretched water resources, where people are losing jobs and homes, going hungry, going without medical care, where children don't have schools to go to or qualified teachers to teach them, where good productive land is scraped into heaps and paved, while city buildings stand empty...

The Texas legislature prefers to get on its high horse about voter fraud.  They haven't been able to produce any proof that it exi

Tarheels!

For the sake of my cousins, I commend the Tarheels' National Championship in basketball.

I even watched part of the game last night.   Though I'm not a fan of college (or pro) basketball,  it was obvious that the Tarheels were running the show from the get-go.  Outstanding.

I truly loathe the intrusion of "March Madness" on the TV schedule, but at least this year I can be happy for someone.

80 Acres: Cactus Flowers, etc.

Yesterday, Karen and I walked out on the land and discovered that the lace cactus was in full bloom: pictures are up at http://www.80acresonline.org/blog/

We also saw monarch and other butterflies (including the Cloudless Sulphur feeding from the lace cactus flowers), heard and saw white-eyed vireos, white-crowned sparrows, red-tailed hawk, and black-chinned hummingbirds--male and female both, feeding on the coral honeysuckle in the SW meadow.

Other wildflowers (sparse, but there) included

New Snippet at Paksworld blog

Snippet, snippet, find your nice smoking hot snippet here!

This one's unusual in that I know it's not going to be in the final book, for reasons that will be clear when you read the book and imagine this in place of what's there.  It was pages long and full of spoilers...I wrote it while thinking out what might happen.   When I first-draft, I write a lot of stuff that won't be in the book...it's not wrong, exactly, but it's scenes from a viewpoint I don't want to use, or background that I need to

Nose to the Grindstone

Revisions, revisions, editorial phonecall, more revisions, revisions, revisions.   The boys are off to a movie, thank goodness, so no interruptions--except, writing this, I suddenly recall there's laundry to be hung out.  And another load to do.

(vanishes again)

So you thought you could sing...

It was that kind of rehearsal.   I had cracked open time and found a little most days to at least look at the hardest of the Bach pieces, but this week's that meant not getting ready for my house guest.   I skimped the music until today ("Yes, yes, I'll work on *this* page today and *that* page tomorrow...") 

And lo, other than the professional ringers brought in to pep up the rest of us,  many others were worse off than I was.   Scoldings were the order of the day.  It is one week and two days

LJ's little enforcement herd

LJ, for those of you not on it and thus not aware of its plans, is unrolling another set of bright! shiny! new ideas! they know we will all love!!!   (What they love is bragging on themselves.)

As before, they haven't fixed any of the things that bug me, nor have they ever replied directly to me when I've either complained or asked for help.   They are proposing (among other things) to institute an automatic "LJ cut" so that ALL posts are truncated behind a "read more" line after very few charact

New Material up at Paksworld website

Ever wonder about the religions in Paksenarrion's world?  There's now a "Religions":section here.

If you'd like to see a partial character list, this is the place.    This list includes most of the character names from The Deed of Paksenarrion that have roles in the new books.   It does not include all the names from The Legacy of Gird, and may not (by accident) include all the names in the first of the new group.   Names keep increasing as new characters show up, so completeness isn't possible.

How to Go to Maryland without Leaving Texas

This morning, I drove up to Central Texas College, and with the aid of the technical wizards there (who are my age, which is reassuring)  I spent an hour and a half at Howard Community College in Maryland.   The magic isn't quite  perfected yet (some audio problems on both ends) but the audience didn't boo or walk out, and the questions indicated some familiarity with the book and some serious thinking going on. 

I don't know how they felt about it yet, but from my end it was a success.  It is d

Some days it's just work...

Tasks, in no particular order: 

1) Get the data on Religions in Paksenarrion's World off to my web-guru, so it could be uploaded to the Paksworld website.  This involved removing that section from the Names file, reorganizing it, checking spelling, filling out information where needed, alphabetizing each section (since Word doesn't have a nice block-alphabetize function), and sending it. 

2) Get the Character List organized, data in it checked for accuracy and sufficiency, and get that off to my