Elizabeth Moon's Blog, page 137

Wildflower pictures

New wildflower pictures are up at the 80 acres blog.     All these were taken yesterday on either the morning or the afternoon expedition.

On the way to and from the city this morning, I saw drifts of bluebonnets here and there.

On the down side, what had been a lovely ranch south of town with a mix of cedar and other native woody plants has been scraped bare of all growth, with the Ashe junipers overturned into ugly windrows.  Someone's undoubtedly going to build something ugly there.   It has al

A website to look for

Patricia Wrede,  a writer whose work I've very much enjoyed, has a website now--it's all shiny and new and you can find it  right here.   

Nose to the Grindstone

Good progress the past two days, after a total flop on Wednesday (ambushed by other stuff, zero words on the book.) 

2300 words today so far, and nicely over 123,000 for the book...and I'm intrigued enough by the scene I'm working on to keep going this afternoon.  124,000 by day's end is possible, though I'm not inclined to push too hard.

If this were one of my SF novels, I'd be at, or very near, the end, with the finish post clearly in sight, ready for the home-stretch sprint.  This being one of

80 acres: pictures

Yet more images up at the 80 Acres blogsite.,  in multiple posts--one on Odes (images of Plateau Spreadwing Damselflies laying eggs) and one on spring beauties--the view out the kitchen door and some buckeyes in flower.

Reunion

No, not a school reunion, but a (going to happen) reunion with a friend from high school.  Like having a school reunion without the people you *don't* want to see, without the crowd, the noise, etc.

She called this evening.   She and her husband are going to drop by for two nights in early May.   She's going to remind me how to cast on (knitting--I used to, haven't for years, and have a hankering to do a little again, but I have forgotten how to start--and probably how to knit and purl, too, but

Writer's Block: Divided Self

Do you behave differently online than you do in real life?

Submitted By tinysaur

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<!-- end .appwidget-qotd -->Yes: both online and in real life I spend hours sitting here in front of the computer.

No:  in real life I gesture when I talk, my voice goes up and down and there are many cues to whether I'm intending to be funny, or serious, or I'm tired or bored or frustrated with something else.   In real life the people I'm having a conversation with can see the facial expression, the direction of gaze, the te

Migrating Language & Autism

I'm going to shift the discussion of Language & Autism over to the blog where it fits perfectly, The Speed of Dark.  Of course it can continue here, but one of the advantages of having it on the Speed of Dark blog is that it's easier for me to access the references from the website if they seem appropriate.   And this blog is more general-interest, so a post about something else is likely to push this topic down the queue soon.  

For instance, today I dealt with travel arrangements (ineptly, as t

Language & Autism

Our son did not learn to talk early, and for years after he said his first word (many years) his syntax was odd enough to make his speech barely intelligible to most people.   Though it has improved a lot, he still gets "tangled' sometimes, and often "mazes" (repeating parts of a sentence several times.)   It's clear to me that he's constructing the sentences in chunks, and has to repeat every chunk to get the whole thing out at the end (like those songs where you have to repeat a key part of pr

Snippets (yeah, two of them)

So a dwarf, a gnome, and a thief meet in a bar, and....

Snippets result.  Actually, lots of words resulted, but snippets is what you get. 

Here.

You might also enjoy the previous post, which tells you a little about what it means to be a kteknik gnome.  And though everyone else calls the thief a thief, he doesn't consider himself a thief, even though he started the cascade of events that's now about to play out...well, he started one of the little stones down the mountain.  Admittedly, someone els

80 Acres: photos linked

I posted some pictures from yesterday's walk on the land at the 80 Acres blog .    In the next few days I should be able to get more good ones.   If you wander over that way and want to comment, please do so there...asyouknowbob, I'm trying to prove there's enough interest in the topics to make it feasible to write a book. 

Though nothing's going to interrupt the new Paks-world books, no matter what.

For those who then wander to the 80Acresonline website and see references to things that aren't t