Cherie Priest's Blog: It's awards season, so here comes the shameless self-promotion, page 51

Fiddlehead finds its beginning

Finally. And it's about damn time. Yes, yes - there was a Big Move and the house-buying and the settling-in and all that stuff, and I forgive myself for the utter lack of progress on anything writing-related for the last few months. But now it's time to quit forgiving. Now it's time to get busier than a one-legged woman in an ass-kicking contest.

Why? Because the deadline for a solid draft on this bad-boy is September 15. I have three months, y'all.

It looks terrifying, all typed out like that ... but it's really not. And frankly, I knew good and well that I'd end up writing this one in a short time frame - which is Reason Number One that I slashed my travel schedule like I did, and flat turned down any new projects for the rest of the year.

It's positively exhilarating - the idea of working on JUST THIS ONE THING for THREE WHOLE MONTHS, YAY! I haven't had the luxury of such focus in years. So brace yourself for metrics, baby! Daily ones. Sometimes boring ones. But real ones, from here on out.

Ahem.

Here's today's progress on my 19th century D.C. spy caper about a powerful Difference Engine that will end the Civil War - now with warhawk conspiracies, clockwork assassins, three presidents with more in common than they know, three disgraced spies with less in common than they think, and a Bonus! not-at-all mad scientist who can save the world if someone will just give him a chance:
Project: Fiddlehead
Deadline: September 15, 2012
New words written: 1669 (it's a start!)
Present total word count: 1669 words





Things accomplished in fiction: Prologue. A short one, yes - but it takes place in Danville at the Confederate Congress, where Sally Louisa Tompkins is being forcefully escorted off the floor and out of the building for telling the truth. Also, there are spies. So just trust me: It's pretty cool.

Darling du Jour:
"She knew them all, in some fashion or another. She’d received letters from many of them, begging with money, all the notes essentially the same: 'They say this man will die, but at the Robertson he may have a chance.'

When these men prayed to God, they prayed for her."Things accomplished in real life: Took mom, grandma, and great-aunt to breakfast and then sent them on their way to Iowa. Long story short - my mom is driving her mother and aunt from Florida to Iowa so the aunt can manage some business affairs up there; they stopped here overnight, and left a bit before lunchtime. It was an adventure in cat-herding, but with cute little old ladies instead of cats. Other than that, I didn't do much. The cute little old ladies really wiped me out.

Other: Well, I guess I did do one other ridiculous thing today - Tweet lots of pictures. One of my (several) Surprise!tomato plants (found in what used to be the garden, and now is an overgrown jungle in the backyard). Also some roses. And a "charm" of finches, which is apparently what such an adorable gathering is called. (Many of the finches are fluffy-feathered babies - we have several nests in the area, and the fledglings are just now learning their way around the world.) Man. I've got to quit being so boring on Twitter...

And she don't always say what she really means

Oh, let's close the week on a happier note.
Here. I give you the first sentence of Fiddlehead:

"Sally Louisa Tompkins held her ground."

So that's six words to jump-start the metrics next week.
[:: quiet happydance ::]

The wind light as a thief

[sulk]

I woke up way the hell too early this morning, courtesy of a salesguy at Rooms To Go. Yes, Rooms to Go. Is it the hippest place on earth to shop? No. But RTG had a comfy chair/ottoman set we liked for the guest/game/cat room and we were tired of hunting around, so we gave up and bought it. A simple enough transaction, one would think. One would be mistaken.

(This was the Rooms to Go out on Gunbarrel, in case you're in the Chattanooga area and want to know which store to avoid.)

The salesguy joked about how we were his easiest sale of the day, for we knew precisely what we wanted and were paying cash. If I were feeling charitable, I'd say something like, "God help that poor man on his toughest sale of the day," but I'm not feeling charitable, because I've been awake since 6:50 a.m.

To make a long, tedious, 2+ week-long story short(ish): Salesguy ordered the wrong chair. A week later it was delivered, and it was ugly, and I was unhappy. Delivery guy said we'd get a call within the hour from customer service to arrange an exchange. A few hours later, I called customer service my own damn self because I hadn't heard from them. They told me there was nothing they could do, because the problem was the salesguy's fault, and I should talk to the store. So I called the store, and salesguy copped to the error and vowed to fix it, saying he'd call me first thing in the morning with details. I never heard from him again, despite leaving HEY DOOD WHASSUP? messages over the subsequent week.

Finally I snapped and drove all the way out to the damn store, where (lucky him) he wasn't working that day. But the office manager assured me that he did arrange for the return/exchange...he just hadn't bothered to tell me about it. Office manager said I'd get a phone call from the delivery people, in order to set an arrival window. In fact, I received a grand total of four irritating robo-calls from their delivery system, three of which were completely blank - and the fourth of which informed me that they would make the exchange at 7:00 a.m. today.

So yeah. It's sorted out now, and we have the right pieces - finally. But at no point did anyone at RTG even pretend to give a shit, so okay, well, fine. Duly noted.

[/end sulk]

In wholly unrelated news, I've figured out how to begin Fiddlehead - which is good, considering I have a deadline on that bad-boy. I realized it needed a prologue; and maybe later I'll realize the prologue needs to be chapter one - or whatever, you never know - but it definitely needs to be written first, and by golly, I'm going to write it. Tomorrow. After yardwork. Okay, possibly on Sunday.

As I've mentioned before, getting started is hard.

Speaking of Sunday - on Sunday night we'll have company, but it'll be fairly brief company, and it's not likely to disrupt my failure to begin writing schedule. My mom and grandma are passing through town with my great aunt, on their way from Florida to Iowa. Mom, at least, will be spending the night with me. She gets to see the new house, yay!

Of course, that means I need to clean the house. And well, tomorrow was going to be yardwork day anyway, so that's fine.

The husband and I are falling into the habit of doing yardwork every other weekend, and I have to admit, that's probably...um...insufficient. But it's holding the jungle (more or less) in check for now, and hey, it'll look nice when Mom comes to visit.

Not much else to report over here for now. The roses are doing well. The cat is fat and happy. The Cobra Matic has been on the receiving end of some furniture polish, and now it looks as good as it sounds. Laura came over last night and we played dress-up, and that's not a euphemism for anything. I went grocery shopping. I found a place to get my hair done, and verily, I got my hair done.

And I think that means we're all caught up.

Have a good weekend, everyone. With a little luck, come Sunday afternoon or Monday, I'll be posting regular word metrics here again. Well. I'm certainly going to try.

The roses of Rosebury Haunt

I mentioned before that we have an enormous rose bush/tree on the property, and that when we first arrived, it wasn't doing well.

The poor thing was so raggedy and bug-eaten that I honestly thought it was dead, or dying at the very least.

Look, I don't know squat about plants, you guys; and besides, we've been running around like crazy for weeks, trying to get the house itself sorted out - so the yard has been a secondary priority at best.

But I really wanted to save this tree.

I pruned off the worst bits, then treated it with a product that would feed it, kill off the bugs, and do something about the fungal problem ... and that exhausted my knowledge of how to rehabilitate ratty roses. But after about a month of this minimal TLC on my part, we have the tree's first blossom!

It lives! Its flowers are a creamy peach/pink! No, I have no idea what kind they are! Yay!

And now, of course, it's recovered so magnificently that it threatens a set of low-slung power lines. This weekend, I'll have to grab a ladder and cut it back somewhat. But the tree will survive it, I bet, and I can't wait to see it in full bloom.

In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor victory. But I'll take it.

The service was over but the testimonials had just begun

Yesterday was a day of loose ends, and today too, I think. Every time I sit down to write, some new thing pops up needing my immediate attention, so maybe that's just the universe's way of telling me to take another day. Or maybe I'm making excuses.

The first page is always the hardest.

Speaking of hard things, today I went and mailed off my quarterly tax payment, so that's one nasty task off the list. I don't mind paying taxes, really; I like having roads and sewers, firefighters and police officers, and so on, and I don't feel put-upon when the government asks me to help pay for these things. But Uncle Sam really doesn't make it easy, when you earn your money on a Whenever They Feel Like Paying You basis.

Depending on whose survey you believe, between three and six percent of the American population claims to be psychic. I'm not one of those people, and when estimating my annual income, I may as well be throwing darts at a bank statement.

Last year I overpaid. I let the IRS keep the difference as a buffer against future years when I will no doubt under-pay due to that Failure To Be Psychic penalty.

Hm. What else? Let's see.

Oh yes - as the husband and I were wandering antique/second-hand shops on Sunday, we bought something 100% weapons-grade ridiculous: A Zenith Cobra Matic turntable/radio console, circa 1951. I believe it's a model H880R, but if anyone out there knows better, by all means feel free to correct me.

The thing is in divine condition; its original owner - an elderly doctor who recently passed away - loved it and took good care of it, and a guy who restores old electronics picked it up at the estate sale. Everything is original except for a few of the hidden electronic bits, which have been brought up to speed. It sounds fantastic, works beautifully, and looks like a museum piece.

It's crazypants, I know - but we just couldn't walk away from it. Our reasons were many and varied, but primarily boiled down to these: (1). it was not prohibitively expensive, (2). we were never likely to encounter its equal again, much less at that price point, and best of all (3). we could make our house sound like Bioshock ANY TIME WE WANT.

So...yeah. It came home with us.

Anyway.

The house continues to be awesome. I'm sitting on the front porch swing right now, with a mason jar full of peach-flavored ice tea - not because I'm trying THAT HARD to be a southern stereotype, but because I am out of clean glasses, and I should probably do something about it. Except that it was easier to come lounge on the porch and blog.

Tomorrow afternoon, I get a visit from a princess, which will be awesome. I am, however, chagrined on the princess's behalf that there were exactly zero places in the greater Chattanooga area where she could put on a signing/reading as part of her book tour. Chattanooga: I am disappoint.

[We have a B&N and a Books a Million. So far as new book stores go, I do believe that's it.]

Then on Thursday evening, Laura's coming over, and we'll go trawling through the costume closet - aka, the Room Formerly Known as the Perplexing Back Room's closet. (It's not perplexing anymore because it's a guest room, as well as the room where the husband and I hole up to play video games at night.)

When I was over at Laura's place the other day, she showed me how they'd turned their office closet into her costume/dress-up closet, and I was like, DAMN. I wish I had an extra closet where I could WAIT A MINUTE NOW I TOTALLY HAVE ONE OF THOSE. Our back room's closet is actually the biggest in the house*, and until it dawned on me that I could stash all my dress-up clothes in there, it'd been virtually empty. So I spent yesterday afternoon hauling down all the fun stuff I'd relegated to the attic, and now I have a costume closet of my very own!

Laura and I are roughly the same size - close enough to share clothes, anyway - and we'll see if I have anything that will work for an outfit she needs for this coming weekend. Also I'm sure we will goof off,** but such is the way of these things.

And now ... my husband informs me that he's finished doing some long-overdue upgrades on the Clockwork Century site. This makes him a hero of the revolution, of course - though it also means that I now need to sit down with that sadly neglected place and update the ever-living shit out of it.

I'm hoping that doing so will help put me in the right mindset to begin Fiddlehead. So let's see how that goes ...


* None of the closets are original to the house, natch - and none are huge.
** Playing dress-up is NOT goofing off. It is SRS BZNSS. I'm pretty sure Princess Alethea will agree with us on that one.

Weekend Wrap-Up and Archetype Gripes

I spent yesterday kicking around town with my old friend Laura, which was a blast; we'd scarcely seen each other since I left for Seattle in 2006, and more's the pity - because we always manage to achieve awesome.* We lunched, we coffeed, and later we grabbed our respective men for a showing of Snow White and the Huntsman. The company was great. The movie was...um...pretty. But kind of weak.

I don't know. I feel like I'm not being fair, but I found it strangely flat. When I went to Twitter and Facebook in the immediate aftermath and mused about the movie's lack of resonance, the number one reply could be summed up as "KSTEW SUCKS, YO." And I was like, damn, people. Cut a girl some slack.

No, Kristen Stewart was fine. She didn't have much to work with, bless her heart, and no one else did either. I guess that's why I hate to hate on it: The actors were great. I loved drunken English Thor and his sweaty, scowly ways; the Evil Queen was power-goth murder on wheels; Prince Charming excelled with pointy things and quips; Snow of Arc had glowy skin and was kind to animals; and the dwarves were a study in Wasted But Delightful Cameos. But I felt like it never really gelled.

You'd think that the recent shotgun spray of Snow White redos/updates/reinterpretations/etc. would eventually produce something interesting by sheer statistical chance. But I'm still waiting.


* Lest you doubt: That's her in the middle back at DragonCon in 2004. See? Awesomeness.

How to Tell a True Ghost Story

When you write ghost stories, everyone wants to tell you a ghost story. That’s the first rule.

People come up to you after readings, at conventions, in coffee shops, and they want to tell you about the time they heard a noise they couldn’t explain -- or saw something that wasn’t there, and couldn’t have been. Usually they start out in third person, because nothing out-of-the-ordinary ever happens to them, not personally, no. But soon the pronouns shift and you hear a “we” where before it’d been “they,” and their eyes go distant as if they’re rebuilding the memory from scratch -- assembling it out of the box, and finding screws left over.

By the end they lose steam, and sometimes they don’t even finish the story at all because why would they? They may as well be telling you about a dream they had the other night. "And anyway, there was nobody there."

When you write ghost stories, everyone wants you to tell them a ghost story. A true one. That’s the second rule.

The problem with the second rule is the problem with the first rule: A true ghost story very likely does not have a point. It doesn’t have a punch-line, and it may not make any narrative sense. A true ghost story likely doesn’t mean anything to anyone except for the person who experienced it; and even then, what it meant -- what it did, how it felt, what it changed -- may have nothing to do with the literal events as they occurred.

You can’t pass the sensation along to someone else, because in the retelling it loses too much. You have to blow it up, shake it up, dress it up, if you want it to carry of the weight with which it hit you. You have to translate it from private epiphany to transferrable profundity.

That’s your job, isn’t it? You tell ghost stories. You should tell a true one.

Everyone loves a true ghost story, which is only another way of saying that no one wants to die. We want to believe that some people hang around after the lights go out ... just so we know it’s an option.

We need to believe it’s an option, and it’s hard to believe in things that don’t make sense. So we tell ghost stories, and we give them logic and structure and punch-lines, or at least credible resolutions. But when we do that, we very rarely pretend that they’re true. After all, you’d be hard-pressed to claim you know for a fact how a third-grader once was haunted by a hat rack.

No, really. A friend of mine was menaced as a child by an old hat rack that followed her around the house. She never saw it move. She’d awaken from a nap on the couch, and the hat rack would be standing between her and the television. She’d get up to use the bathroom at night, come back to bed, and it’d be leaning against her nightstand. It was Salvador Dali doing Doctor Who. And that’s a true ghost story.

Here’s another one, of another kind. I live in southern Tennessee, in a city that was hotly contested during the Civil War. A hundred and fifty years ago, tens of thousands of people died violently, gruesomely, painfully, right here. If you tell it right: every one of them a ghost.

Why wouldn’t they be?

After it rains the mist on the mountain looks like cannon smoke so it’s something familiar, and they stay, I guess. They roam Lookout, or wander the pea-soup fog at Chickamauga, and they cry for help or moan in agony, but no one ever comes because they’re only dead, and everyone knows when an out-of-towner’s moved in to the neighborhood. Only the folks who Ain’t From Around Here call the cops when they hear the cries of dying men, and the sounds of artillery in their backyards. So the police stop by, and their flashlights punch holes in the haze, but they don’t see anyone. They radio back and forth with the station, explaining that yes, this is just another one of those calls and it’s okay, they’ll have a word with the residents.

And that’s typical of a true ghost story. All you can say at the end of it is "Oh." And then you don’t bother the police anymore. You turn up the television and draw down the blinds, and you hope to God that it isn’t really true, because if it's true then you may die horribly and then stay, and there’s nothing that anyone will do for you, either.

So why would anyone want to hear a true ghost story?

Plenty of people believe that the universe is precisely that unkind, but all the same, they’d rather not leave it. So mostly when it comes to true ghost stories, people want to hear the punch-line because they seek order, and leaving looks like chaos.

A few years ago I did a radio show in Tennessee on Halloween, appearing as the Local Ghost Expert on account of I’d written a book with ghosts in it. (And also on account of my friend Travis knew the DJ, and Travis is a connoisseur of stories both true and otherwise.) It sounded like a cool thing to do, but mostly I just made people mad.

"Hey, have you heard about the Brown Widow at the Choo Choo? Her husband died in the Civil War, and now she haunts the station, waiting for his train to bring him home..." Sorry, but the Choo Choo didn’t open until 1909. "Did you hear about the Lady in White at the Read House? She was killed by a Union general in room 311..." I doubt it. The hotel wasn’t built until the 1920s. It turns out that Jesus H. Christ, I am no fun at all.

But those people needed to hear true ghost stories. And so do you. This is one I didn’t tell them.

I was closing down a bar, a small upstairs venue in downtown Chattanooga near the river, but don’t ask me which one. It doesn’t matter. It isn’t there anymore. I’d been warned, but I was new -- and people try to scare the new girl. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t hear the man in the bathroom. His breathing was ragged, and he kept saying, "No. . ." in voice so soft it barely had any echo at all. The light wasn’t on in there; I knew it wasn’t, because when you flipped on the light you also turned on the ventilation fan, and that goddamn fan sounded like a propeller in a coffee can. But I saw light under the door. So I played that game with myself, that game everyone plays where you can’t help it -- it’s not like you can walk away without knowing. So my hand crept toward the doorknob, but I’ve seen that kind of movie and I’m not an idiot, so I put my hand back in my pocket just in time to hear a bottle of Jim Beam slide off the bar and onto the floor, where it broke, and then I didn’t hear the man in the bathroom anymore, and the bar was empty but it smelled like whiskey and blood.

And anyway, there was nobody there.

It drove me crazy, trying to figure it out. Because in the aftermath of a true ghost story, you hit this psychological wall, and on that wall there’s a sign that says, "It happened to me, so it must make sense." But this haunted bathroom overlooked a corner lot with nothing in it but a drive-up bank teller and some rarely used parking spaces with weeds growing between them. It was an old building, sure, on an old row of 19th century warehouses. No known murders, sudden demises, or other assorted atrocities.

Not for another two years would I understand it, and then only by accident, unless you believe in coincidences. I was in an antique store, flipping through old photographs of the city taken back during the War. I flipped right past something that caught my eye, so I returned to it, and gave it the once-over a second time. Just a squat, boring, single-story building with a window and a door. Something was piled up under the window. Beneath the picture someone had written the address in pencil; it was the address of the corner with the drive-up bank teller and the parking spaces. And something was piled up under the window. I looked closer. The rest of the script said, "Used as a hospital by both sides during the shifting occupations." Which is why the pile under the window was made of arms and legs, freshly severed by doctors with bone saws and bullets and Jim Beam.

That’s a true ghost story that never happened. I never worked in a bar, but there was a bar. There was a bathroom door that no one wanted to open, and regular patrons would go all the way downstairs to use the other restroom no matter how drunk they were, because man, no fucking way. And I should’ve bought that photo. It was a supernova between my fingers, and for a few seconds, I couldn’t breathe because how often does a true ghost story have an honest-to-God punch-line? Just about never. But this one does. It’s the exception that proves the rule.

More often, a true ghost story is about waking in the night from a dream that you’re starving, not hungry but starving, and pushing something heavy up the hill outside your apartment and you’re so weak you can hardly stand but you’d better push fast, because if they catch you they’ll kill you on sight. And there were lights all around your bedroom, but you lived at a city intersection and that wasn't so strange until you opened the curtains and saw no cars, no street lights, nothing at all -- like the grid had gone down or it was a hundred and fifty years ago and there is no grid. Either way it was dark, except for the light in my room that quaked like old fire.

But you still heard the rolling of the heavy thing, right in front of you, then you watched it roll right past you -- you watched nothing roll, but you could hear it over the sound of your heart in your throat -- and there was nothing there, rolling right over the Georgia Avenue hill and down to the river. And you didn't hear it anymore. And the lights vanished.

And the cat in my arms wouldn't unlock her claws from my pajamas; her ears were flat against her head, and her eyes were stretched so wide I could see their rims of white. Her eyes were as big as nickels. Like them, I enlarge to show detail. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be true.

Making Things Official

Last night I realized what my house's name is. I'd been wondering when it'd hit me, and staying patient - figuring that it'd settle into something that felt right one of these days. Not a "manor" or a "hall," certainly; the place isn't big enough to warrant such a designation. But with 3 bedrooms and 2 baths, it's too big to be a nook or cottage, either. Maybe a croft, given that we're right on the mountain's edge, or perhaps a loft or nest - with the woods right there behind us.

Back in Seattle, my friend Suezie said that the Tennessee house should have a name relating to Briar Wilkes, or Boneshaker - since that's what's paying for the place. I agreed, but couldn't think of a good way to work it in.

In the end, it worked itself in. Sort of.

We have roses here. Several smaller plants and a veritable tree of a thing - none of which were in very good shape when we arrived. The littler jobbies were relatively easy to save; they were undernourished and choked with spider mites, both problems that were a simple fix. It only took a couple of weeks to bring them back to full glory.

But the larger bush - the sprawling rambler the size of a shed - had both of those problems and God knew what others besides. It was a raggedy, moth-eaten looking piece of work, and at first I halfway thought it was dead or dying.

(Furthermore, it was much harder to assist, as it was blocked in by a jungle of overgrown daisies. No seriously. They were so thick they'd fallen over and formed an impenetrable swath of ground cover almost two feet thick. The damn things were choking everything in every direction for a couple of yards.)

But shortly after our arrival, I trimmed back some of the most bedraggled bits and began treating the tree with an anti-fungal and insecticide, and giving it some hearty doses of good food and water. And just recently - maybe within the last few days, even - it's started putting out healthy new growth. Ladies, gents, and the otherwise affiliated ... I think it's going to be all right. I certainly hope so. I'd love to see it bloom.

(The smaller roses are red and a peachy-pink. I wonder what color the Big Guy puts out.)

Anyway. While on an unrelated internet surfing mission last night, I found myself checking out Old English prefixes and suffixes (don't ask) ... and came across "bury" as a suffix meaning "fortified," or "guarded." And just like that, the house had a name.

She is Rosebury Haunt.

She is fortified with brambles, briars, and blooms - and haunted by yours truly for the foreseeable future. So don't give me any shit about the "haunt" bit. I'm an old goth. This is an old house. Let it never be said that I was afraid of going cheesy.

So is Rosebury Haunt ... haunted? If so, it's a gentle kind of haunting thus far. Nothing goes bump in the night except the ice maker in the fridge, and there are no dark corners where the kitty fears to tread.

But we are on a haunted parcel; a hundred and fifty years ago, soldiers fought and died here - all along these blocks, up and down this valley - scrambling for control of the mountain behind us. A couple thousand men never made it home.*

So who am I to say?

* * *

Speaking of haunts and hauntings ... ever since we got back, I've been thinking about ghosts and ghost stories. (This is where I started writing them, after all.) But every time I try to line up my thoughts, it comes out sounding like Tim O'Brien. Could be, that's all right. Maybe my next post will be about how to tell a true ghost story.

But don't hold me to it.


* More than a few are buried in the enormous cemetery a stone's throw away.

The more things change

Last night I finished the copyedits for The Inexplicables, and kicked everything over to Liz - so now that book is, well, if not put to bed ... then it definitely has its teeth brushed and its jammies on. This frees me up to get back to work on other things. Or rather, it now removes my last excuse re: not working on other things that need working on.

Like Fiddlehead, which I still haven't started yet. Never mind the short projects I have in the queue, and the other things I'd love to start.

But today was an errand-running and cleanup day, which I gave myself permission to indulge without second-guessing, since I produced Tangible Work Results last night.

Therefore, I visited a new salon and made an appointment, and went to the home improvement store for an assortment of small odds and ends that had been piling up on my handy-dandy list. Then I came home and used some sticky reflective letters to label our recycling bin (you don't need a special bin, but you're supposed to designate whatever you use); I cleaned up a positively epic tangle of overgrown daisies in the back yard, for they had become utterly unmanageable; I pruned, trimmed, and watered/fed/insecticide-ed a rose bush/tree that's in bad need of TLC; babied our other roses and trimmed up the herb garden, which had also become epic in its fluffiness; used my brand new hose reel to manage 200 feet of garden hose which was previously strewn about behind the bushes; and hauled out some paint to do second-pass touch-ups to the iffy places indoors.

I'd halfway thought about trying to catch a matinee of Dark Shadows today, but now I'm too gross, tired, and sweaty to make the effort. And yes, I know. It's bound to be a terrible movie - but if you think that'll stop me, you probably haven't been reading my blog for very long.

The husband and I did catch The Avengers the other day, and we enjoyed it quite a lot. But other than that, we haven't much left the house on non-house-related errands.

(We aren't really reclusive hermity-types, I swear.)

In other news, it'll be suppertime here before terribly long - and merely typing that big fat paragraph up above has made me hungry. I'mma go make a sandwich. Then maybe I will play some video games or take a nap. Then tomorrow: it's back to writing work in full and proper force.

You just watch me.

Catching up and moving onward

Things continue to come together over here. Yesterday we finished the last of our Major Stuff Shopping, and when the last thing gets delivered on Thursday, we'll officially have the place fleshed out - at least from a furnishing standpoint.

Not that we'll be "done" in any real sense. My dad says that when it comes to home ownership, you're only ever done for now. He's right, I'm sure. There are already a dozen little projects I'd love to fiddle with, not least of all the garden - which is, at present, a rectangular patch of backyard harboring dandelions, semi-wild onions, clover, and the tail-less cat.

The tail-less cat (henceforth TLC, as her name eludes me) showed up in our back yard shortly after we arrived, and at first, I thought she was a pregnant stray. A pretty little black-and-white longhair, TLC was too skittish to touch, and her pendulous tummy swayed as she waddled frantically away.

Poor kitty, I thought. I will feed her and lure her close, and maybe she'll have the kittens nearby - so I can catch them and vet them and home them and oh yes, I was making plans.

After a few days, she'd figured out I was a food-dispensing monkey - and I'd find her sitting outside the roses, waiting for me to open the curtains every morning. Just to make sure I would see her, and know that there was a hungry, pitiful, single-mother-to-be hoping for breakfast.

And then I met the neighbors, who had a good laugh about it.

Formerly a feral stray, TLC was taken in and spayed by these same neighbors - who have never successfully gotten her to stay indoors or wear a collar. She is, however, spoiled silly, routinely vetted, and amply fed.

On the one hand, I'm relieved. I'm always sad to see homeless animals, and it's just as well I don't have to find homes for half a dozen kittens. On the other hand, I could do without the turd presents the fat little scammer leaves outside our back door every day, now that I've stopped accommodating her.*

I'm told that she's an excellent mouser who has never successfully caught a bird to anyone's knowledge, and both of these points please me. We're right at the foot of a mountain, backing up to thick woods which are no doubt teeming with mice ... and we have a shit-ton of birds hanging around, not least of all because I feed them.**

Speaking of birds, though - we may have a couple of new under-the-porch-eaves residents: two of the cutest wee tiny purple-headed finches you ever did see. At first they considered the hanging planters, but after I knocked down an unrelated, long-abandoned nest from a corner, they seem to feel that prime real estate has unexpectedly opened up and the time to buy is NOW NOW NOW.

(Aside I: Obviously I would not have taken down the old nest if it had not very, very clearly been out-of-use for ages.)

(Aside II: Maybe it was haunted, and that's why nobody else took over the lease in all this time. Some kind of bird-atrocity was committed there, and word's gotten around. Maybe other birds called the nest, "The old McFeatherstone place" and teenage birds dared one another to go sit there by themselves ... and when the moon is full, they say that the ghost of Widow McFeatherstone hangs from the petunia planter while moaning, "I KNOW WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE WHEN DOVES CRY" and never mind now this just getting silly.)

Anyway, now they're checking out that freshly vacated corner, and I really do hope they move in.

Hm. Let's see, what else?

Well, today we went to the Chattanooga Market, which frankly blew our minds. The weekly (seasonal) market had just started up around the time we moved away, but it was pretty damn pitiful. Now it's a total circus - well stocked, with a lot of great local crafters, farmers, and other assorted people-with-stuff-to-sell. Well done, Chattanooga. Well done.

I spent a few bucks, brought home a few things, and plan to return, but here's hoping that next week it's not quite so damn hot. And you know it was damn hot if I'm complaining about it, because I'm the sort who keeps the AC set around 80 degrees if I'm left to my own devices, and if it's cooler than that indoors, I'm likely to jaunt around in a bathrobe. You can take the girl out of Florida, etc. etc. etc.

But damn. A few thousand people were crowded into a big old pavilion, and it was 95 degrees.

This having been said, the heat prompted me to sample the wares of a really great two-person soda company offering some seriously fantastic custom syrups. I had a "honey lime" beverage, and would cheerfully go buy another - or try out some of the other flavors. Now I just wish I could remember the company's name. I'll keep an eye out for them next time.

[Edit: It was these guys. Pure Sodaworks. Two thumbs up.]

Not a lot of news to report in home repair and improvement news. This is partly because we're coming up close to Done For Now - and now we're figuring out bills and services, and whatnot. The Perplexing Back Room is now a guest room, but it's big enough that yes, we use it as a game room too. We threw our old TV back there, hooked up the game system, and now we're just waiting for the seating to arrive. (On Thursday, see above.)

It actually looks pretty nice, despite the carpet. I took a picture or two for Twitter, but we've rearranged everything since I did so. The whole thing is still a work in progress.

The library/study has come along nicely, too. The husband's bookcases arrived, and are assembled, and are now holding up books - so yes, we are Officially Unpacked. [:: throws confetti ::] He still has some art to hang, but the place looks great.

If this meager tally sounds like a pitiful excuse for how little I've updated as of late, I would add another excuse to the pile: the copyedits for The Inexplicables landed a few days ago, and I've been eyeballs deep therein. I'm still not done, but I'm about 2/3 of the way through. I was going cross-eyed, so I thought I'd take a break and come over here to ramble.

Mission accomplished, I'd say.

Right. Well. Happy Memorial Day weekend, everyone. Go hug a veteran. I have to wait to hug my two nearest and dearest veterans, as my dad and stepmom won't be here to visit for another few weeks - but I will surely make up for it then.


* In all fairness, she quit doing this after a week. And now she'll let me pet her sometimes, which is great. She's really a beautiful, sweet little cat. Just ... hilariously fat.
** "Feeding" is one of the many services I am likely to provide for random critters.