Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 3

THE FOREVER WAR comic

THE FOREVER WAR comic will be reissued by Titan in February of 2017! http://comicsalliance.com/titan-joe-haldemans-forever-war-comics/

Mexico

Mexico.  We got on the bus in Valencia around dawn and drove for hours.  One early-morning stop for coffee at Peniscola was a mild disaster for me.  I lost my balance on an uphill cobblestone road and wound up falling into a puddle of evaporated piss in front of a bar -- graceful as always! -- but another bar was open and I was able to clean up after a fashion.  Skinned my shin in two spots, which would be hard to do on a road that was not made of cobblestones.  I had a beer but decided not to add to the puddle, and used the strangely clean men's room there.  I guess they kept it clean by using the street.

Uneventful long bus ride.  Back in Barcelona about five in the afternoon.  Wandered around a bit, circling around, and stopped in front of our hotel, where the restaurant maintains a nice gas fire for people to sit and talk on the sidewalk.  I had a delicious and most welcome Campari on the rocks.  We made reservations for supper and came up to the room to check mail and rest.

Looks like it will be raining all tomorrow.  I'll write on Asa and maybe find a sheltered place to draw something.  Might find a museum somewhere in this culture-laden town.  But no bus!

Joe
 

The Coming

From Gay: Google will be running a special promotion called “Alien Invasion,” and they're offering Joe's book THE COMING. The promotion will run from 11/10 through 11/17 and the book will be downpriced to $1.99 during that time.

wholly water

I thought this was kind of interesting, from California Public Radio station KPCC' s program about living in orbit.  Astronauts preferring  "pee water" to industrial "battery water."============== <quote>4. Recycle EVERY dropAstronauts learn to use and reuse lots of things, and water is no exception.On board the space station there is "regenerative system" that captures moisture in the air and processes it into drinkable water."Everything from your breath to your sweat," Dyson Caldwell said.They also recycle urine water by purifying it until it is drinkable."It's not bad," she admitted.In fact, she remembered when her crew did a taste test between water from fuel cells brought by a space shuttles and the recycled water from the ISS."Folks preferred the space station pee water."============= <end quote>It doesn't take a lot of imagination to foresee a future where water which has supposedly been reconstituted from orbiting personalities goes on the market.  It would be hard to prove that it wasn't."AUTHENTIC JOHN GLENN WATER!"(You read it here first.)  (Or maybe not.)Joe

FOREVER FREE

From Gay: Early Bird Books is offering FOREVER FREE, the sequel to THE FOREVER WAR, for $1.99, just today, Saturday. link.openroadmedia.com/view/5669d8f51...

1968, the novel

From Gay: The BookBub Newsletter is supposed to be featuring Joe's book 1968 today for only $1.99. BookBub.com

next book (reply)

Vala, I'll finish the new book, PHOBOS MEANS FEAR, soon; a lot of travel in the way -- like now, the Worldcon.  It will come out about a year after i finish it, unless they have some reason to rush it.

Joe

thoughts in the rain

I guess every fiction writer slips into autobiography every now and then.  Yesterday I wrote (from the viewpoint of a middle-aged female character, whose mother died years before, at the beginning of the book)

"Sometimes I really wish I had my mother here, to laugh with me about the ways we torture time and space to bring it into alignment with the linear illusion that we inhabit.  Here in the provisional reality of cyberspace."

-- and in fact that is literally true.  My mother's been gone for more than twenty years now, but I still miss her presence, especially as an old woman when I was an adult myself.  So now I'm a couple of years older than she was ever allowed, and on this rainy morning I feel deprived of those decades I've traveled without her.  Far better, I think, than being relieved to be free of her, which I know is just as common.

Joe

slippery ink

I could use a bottle of that stuff myself.  Do they make it for computers?  (In sff.net, someone referred to "slippery" ink.)Actually, there is a pronounced difference in the "slickness" of various fountain pen inks.  Like most people, I think, I prefer a brand with a little drag to it.  Especially with an italic nib.You don't want to go zooming off onto the desk!I'm off to studio this Saturday morning.  Hoping for a female model.  Perhaps an attractive one.No, I should hope for an old man who resembles a toad.  See what haooens.Joe

headed home

Gay and I find ourselves hanging around in Chicago now, after a hectic but not high-pressure week at the biannual Ernest Hemingway conference, which was in Oak Park, Illinois, EH's birthplace.

Heading back tonight to the steamy hellhole of Gainesville, Florida.

We had an interesting time yesterday.  Went into town and met Gary Wolfe and Stacey for a boat ride, an architectural tour of the Chicago harbor.  There are many buildings around the harbor, as you might have guessed.  Then we went up to their apartment, I think on the East Side, and played with their two old cats for awhile, drinking a fine little bottle of Eiswein.  (No, the cats didn't have any.)

We had dinner at one of Gary's favorite neighborhood restaurants, a cavernous rib place, where the fare was indeed remarkable, tender slow-grilled ribs with a fine spectrum of sauces. 

Enough of this high living, though.  I must hie me back out to the asteroid belt, where real men make a living hoisting verbs and adjectives, muttering imprecations as they worry them into place.

Hope I can get into high gear on the novel.  In the best of all possible worlds, to which I always aspire, I would finish it before Worldcon.  But Worldcon is early, mid-August.  So open a fresh bottle of that new high-velocity ink, and write harder!

Joe