Kim Harrison's Blog, page 34
February 26, 2015
You guys want shirts this year?
I’m looking at the snow and doing the happy dance because I’M NOT IN IT!! Seriously, we are at the last week of February, which has traditionally been my release date apart from a few here and there, and I’M NOT TRAVELING! I’ve been blessed with good weather most years, and wow, it’s a mess out there this time. The Carolinas have snow that’s not going anywhere, and Dallas is bracing for its third snow event. Don’t get me started about Bost-snow-ton. Storm Sparta��is gearing up to layer ice and snow over a large part of the lower 48. Even when your destination city is open, the plane that was going to take you there might be grounded in Atlanta. Or Dallas. Or Washington.
My early September tour for THE DRAFTER is looking mighty good right now, and believe it or not, the publicity machine has already opened its sleepy eye, giving me a good stare before rolling over and hitting the snooze alarm. I’ve got stuff to do, and my soft inroads of thought have to turn to action the next couple of weeks. New cards, new freebies . . . new shirts? I’m not sure about the shirts. There are too many now for Tim to address and mail. I may have to go to cafe press this time. I can’t bear the thought of no shirts. You guys want shirts, don’t you?
My cardinals are singing in the snow, and the redwing blackbirds should be back at the end of the week. I can almost see them sitting forlornly on the dead cattails, waiting for the snow to go away. Until then, it feels good to be inside.
February 25, 2015
The Drafter
It’s official! The first in the Peri Reed Chronicles has a name. Okay. I released the name a few weeks ago, but I just saw it on Barnes and Noble and Amazon–and that makes it really real.
The synopsis is intentionally a little light, but you can check it out on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. No paranormals in this one. Peri is all human, and I think you’re going to like her brand of technological “magic.”
Click to read blurb
Click to read blurb
February 24, 2015
e-book sales
The Undead Pool is on sale today through Kindle at 1.99��Amazon��
Or you can get the first four in the series at Nook for 19.99 ��Bundle One
February 20, 2015
Breaking of Silence
I was awake early this morning, long before the sun came up. It gave me an almost singular chance to sit in my office and drink a cup of cocoa and witness the breaking of silence. There was no wind, eerily still with no sun to push even molecules into motion, no birds to mar the perfect beauty of temperature gradient slices of air so defined you could breathe them in like flavors of ice cream. To desiccated for clouds, only the black bare branches marked the subtle shadings from apex black, to blue, to a hint of watery pink at the horizon. Definition came from what lacked, not substance itself.
A foot of Sandman’s sleep lays upon the world, the swollen, ugly red of sun devoid of even a whisper of warmth as the earth rolls in its gravity track and pushes it up through the bands of cream and blue–rainbows so stretched and thin that their color can’t be seen.
It is so cold my attic is cracking.
February 18, 2015
Same time tomorrow
I had a really difficult time this morning finding my groove. It was all I could do to not give in to other things pulling at me. But I opened up my work file instead with the sentiment that I could at least put out a chapter of dialog, no matter how lame. And after five minutes of pain, the idea I wanted to share showed itself.
The point being, if I hadn’t sat down and opened it up, the idea wouldn’t��have evolved and tomorrow I would have been at the same point I was this morning.
Moral of the story? Just put down one page of work when you’re stuck. Then walk away if you have to, but don’t walk away until you put down one page. One page for your mind to mull over, one page to have something to spur more thoughts. Or nothing changes.
February 17, 2015
Watching the Westminster!
Anyone who has been lurking on my drama box for over a year knows that one tradition in our house that is older than the Superbowl is watching the Westminster dog show. More than 25 years and still going. Why? It’s a long story, but nachos are involved.
Last night was the first half, tonight is the last and choosing the best in show. It’s said that the best in show is America’s dog, but I disagree. America’s dog is the one on the couch beside you, watching it.
Anyway, the flat-coat Chihuahua did pretty well this year, being pulled out into the final line up but failing to place. I liked the looks of this year’s best in breed because it did not have the soft, baby face that most judges seemed to prefer in past years. This year’s dog was a dog, and it said as much from the mature doggy face, to the doggy grin it had when it trotted down and back. He owned the ground he walked on.
I think it’s an understated amazement that dogs are as social as us. We can read them as well as we can read our own human body language, and they can read and understand and respond to ours to better fit in and ease tension. We take it for granted, but it’s truly a wonder of joined evolution.
February 16, 2015
That’s a minus in front of those numbers
Really? Really and truly? I get myself out to my office this morning to find it has gotten all the way UP to minus 6.7? Well . . . okay then.
Blahh. I’d rather show you a picture of my fiesty fish in their temporary tank. At least it looks warm. I don’t need to bring my koi in for the winter, even though my pond isn’t very big, but I do every year. It’s under a foot of snow right now, and I like to watch them. The temporary tank is a great source of humidity in my office as well, so two birds with one stone, eh?
They were feisty on Friday with the sun on them. No sun today, though.
February 13, 2015
The new norm
And it’s going to get worse. We’re looking a minus double digits��this weekend. Bundle up campers, it’s cold out there!
February 12, 2015
Music. Go Figure
I went to sleep last night mentally whistling something I heard while working. I woke up with it still there, and when it was on the radio again this morning before the sun came up, I hit the “heart” button on my SiriusXM to save it. I save stuff maybe once a week, which isn’t much considering I have the thing on every hour I’m in my office. ��I even went and looked up the lyrics, sort of a 50/50 proposition in itself because most of the stuff on Chill is new or ah, not popular/marketable. The lyrics I found are a mess so I’m going to do a deeper search today.
But the point I’m not so successfully making here is that I’m connecting to music again.
I used to connect music a lot, but it tapered off right about book seven or eight in the Hollows. It worried me until I started working on Peri and again the music began connecting–and I figured out another one of my creative quirks.
When I’m busy learning about a character or world, when I’m in the gritty trenches of creating something from nothing and making the rules that I’ll work in for the next five years or so, I’m constantly searching for connections between everything on the page–the front, the back, the middle. The characters, their world, our world. Issues to text, plot to issues. The mental gymnastics spill over, not so much in the day-to-day stuff, but it will fasten upon music, ever present, ever changing–and a connection is made to a beat, a lyric, a feel or sound. It’s only when I feel I have the world down and the characters are so real that I can write them in my sleep that the music connection seems to die. Don’t get me wrong. I still listen and enjoy, but they don’t connect. And I missed it.
When I found one that connected to Peri, it was a great relief.
Here are the two latest:
La Roux/Skream In For The Kill
DJ Assad/Greg Parys We Are One
But the best for Peri so far has got to be Banks Before I Ever Met You
February 11, 2015
Small Victories
If you’ve been lurking on my blog much, you’ve probably seen some of my knitting. Oh, don’t roll your eyes at me, you disbelievers of the power of the needles. Us yarn weavers know. Knitting engages almost all parts of your brain from creativity, to problem solving, to spacial relations. The gentle movement keeps arthritis at bay and imparts an almost zen like state of meditation once you figure out the knits and purls. It’s been linked to mental fitness in lots of studies, but I just like it.
After a month of many gauges, experimentation with decreases and increases to get the slant lines, and a few nights with colored pencils and graph paper, I finished my Frank Lloyd Wright scarf, made from scratch and my own pattern. This was knitted on double pointed needles just for ease of holding, but was knitted back and forth, not in the round, and seamed up the side as I went. I would have rather knitted it in the round, but with the bobbins, that would have been impossible.
Now that I’m done with it, I think I’m going to do another that is narrower and longer–right after I finish with my Frank Lloyd Wright tea cozy, which would be funny if it wasn’t true. (More on that later. I’m about half way through.)
And yes. I do believe I’m going to try to put some of these patterns into a book. The monarch is slowly killing me with the desire to share. I just need one more piece that connects my work to the three-nation effort going on right now to save their flyway. Timing . . . is everything.
Earlier posts on the scarf:��https://kimharrison.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/phew-i-need-a-vacation-from-the-weekend/
https://kimharrison.wordpress.com/2015/01/08/must-have-more-yarn-more-yarn/
https://kimharrison.wordpress.com/2015/01/07/progress-all-the-way-around/
https://kimharrison.wordpress.com/2015/01/05/ha-ha-got-snow/
