K.C. Shaw's Blog, page 30

emails and titles

I'm embarrassed to admit that sometimes I submit stories to anthologies just because I want the comp copy. Thus it is with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Cookbook anthology, which I happen to have a story for--but I can't get my sub to go through! Anyone know if that antho is still alive? If they are, does anyone have a working submission email address? [ETA: I got the email to go through today. Maybe it was just a glitch this weekend.]

It's starting to feel like fall here, just a little. The...

A Noble Sport

Rather than wait for my fencing aunt to make an appearance in town, today I went ahead and gave myself my first lesson out of a book. Fifteen minutes of lunging an imaginary sword at an imaginary opponent and my fat, weak legs are all wobbly and sore. I reckon this means I'm doing something right.

It's actually fun, this fencing thing. It doesn't seem very practical, of course. In modern fencing, one moves back and forth in a straight line like opponents in a 2d video game. In real life, anyon...

It's the trivia that makes us real

Until I lost an online friend, I never realized how important you all are to me. The last several months I've been lazy about posting here and commenting on my friends' blogs. That's going to change. I don't have to wait to post until I have something to talk about; the most important details are the tiny, seemingly mundane ones that define our lives.

So...um. I've been writing like crazy the last couple of days. I'm at 70,000 words on The Trickster Society and coming up on the end. That's goo...

RIP Jamie

I just found out that fellow writer and online friend Jamie Eyberg and his wife died this past weekend. I'm shocked and horrified. Things like this don't really happen, not really, not in real life--or at least they only happen to people I don't know.

I don't have any words to say, except that Jamie will be sadly missed by his friends and readers. Rest in peace.

A memorial fund has been set up to help their children; information about it is available here.

Horror meme!

Oh no! Natalie L. Sin has tagged me! I'm supposed to tag five others, but honestly, by the time I get tagged for anything, everyone I know has been tagged already. So if you want to do this one, consider yourself tagged. I'm so boring.

Now, the meme. I'm supposed to post a series of photos from horror movies, and the photos must all relate to a theme.

This one's hard for me. I don't watch horror movies because they either gross me out or bore me, or both. Therefore, I'll fudge just a bit as non...

Blah blah blah

I think the more I twitter, the less I blog. Of course, it doesn't help that I don't have much to blog about lately. Blah blah wordcount blah blah my job is exhausting blah blah rearranging bookshelves blah blah rejection blah blah blah.

Last night I mowed the lawn. I think I made about a dozen tweets about it, as if it was important or something, and then I realized just what a tedious person I've become. Not that I've ever been the sort to do great big amazing things, but seriously. Tweeting...

Cargo Cult Ironing

This is hell week at work, which means I basically come home, go to bed, and get back up and go to work again. My feet hurt. I'm about to go to bed, but I need to iron a shirt for tomorrow, so I set up the ironing board and put the shirt on it and I'm going to go to bed now. Maybe in the morning the shirt will be ironed!

It was great to see my brother's family this weekend. Not only did my brother fix Bunny the eee's keyboard, we also actually played a little bit of D&D! That was especially aw...

Plans

My trio of awesome nephews have gone back to their hotel to swim before bedtime, and I'm taking a break from frantically typing up everything I wrote today. Currently the wordcount stands at 51,000, but I have a lot left to type.

This afternoon I attended a meeting in the downstairs conference room (at work, of course). When I walked in, there were bottles of water on the table along with a few boxes of cheap cookies, a binder and pen at every place, and graph paper. Yes. Graph paper. I still ...

In the middle of the book in the middle in the middle

I got a lot written today! I need to type it up, but I suspect it's more than 2,000 words. I'm more than halfway through The Trickster Society, around 50,000 words so far and accelerating.

I'm not sure how and when it happened, but something clicked in the story recently and I feel pretty confident in how it's going. That may change tomorrow, but right now it's great.

Oops, my nephews are here! Bye!

The August Garden

I can't believe how fast this summer is going. Here it is August already. The garden is looking very August-ish: tangled, messy, and just the beginning of autumnal browns and golds among the leaves. The tomato plants are not very visible in this picture because they've gotten so big they've toppled their cages and are lying along the ground, sending down roots from their stems and letting the heavy tomatoes rot amid the weeds.

I'm over 40,000 words into The Trickster Society and writing as fas...