Jane Lindskold's Blog, page 8

FF: Mei-Ling Welcomes You

Mei-Ling Lounges

Mei-Ling peers out of her favorite lounging spot to welcome you to the return of the Friday Fragments.  I talked a bit about what the Friday Fragments are in this past Wednesday Wandering, so I’ll just note the following

The Friday Fragments is not a book review column; it’s a list of what I’m reading and maybe a bit about my opinions.  I always read the comments section, because I enjoy learning what other people are reading.  Oh, and I don’t usually list shorter works unless in a collection or articles, I also don’t usually list scattered research reading.

Completed:

Enchanted Pilgrimage by Clifford Simak.  This work has a somewhat darker, grittier tone than most of his Fantasy.

The Witches of Karres by James H. Schmitz.  Despite the title, this is non-military space opera, not Fantasy.  It’s also a favorite of mine.

Audiobooks featured a return to Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe via two short story collections.

In Progress:

Migraine by Oliver Sacks.  During my recovery from rotator cuff surgery, I read most of Sacks’ works.  However, our library didn’t have some of his earlier works.  Jim got me this one and another for Christmas.  It’s one of Sack’s earlier works, and it’s interesting to see his style developing.   

Also:

During the holiday season, I often switch to audiobook re-reading because it’s easier to follow as I listen in the middle of doing various tasks.

Happy New Year!

Contemplating Dove

May your year be full of peace and tranquility.

I’m hoping for a year with more stories, both my own and those created by others.  To celebrate the latter, this week I plan to restart my Friday Fragments posts.

What are the Friday Fragments?  They’re a listing of what I’m currently reading, but also an invitation to post what you yourself are reading.  Re-reading is fine.  So are audiobooks.

I usually post without commenting about the book, although if I really love it I’ll mention that.  Or sometimes I’ll comment if I really hated a book and couldn’t finish it for that reason.  I’ll also comment if I feel an audiobook narrator either deserves praise or censure.  No comment doesn’t hold any secret meaning.  It may just be I’m too busy to do more than list title and author.

I don’t usually mention shorter works (unless I’ve read a collection) or magazine articles, although sometimes I’ll mention having finished an entire work.

So, take a look each Friday…  Even if you’re not interested in what I’m reading, Jim usually provides a photo of one of more of what some folks have dubbed our “extraordinarily literate pets.”

Again, Happy New Year!

The Largest Ornament

Decoration Supreme!

The balloon in the featured photo came down a very short way from our house, so we offer it as a Christmas ornament.

At the end of this piece, we feature a few of our Christmas cookies.  We did manage to finish them, more or less in time!  I’m particularly pleased that the Linzer tart features our own cactus pear jelly!

Wishing you, whatever holiday you celebrate—or if you celebrate none at all—a day of happiness.

A Few of This Year’s Cookies!

I Was Wrong

Outside My Office Window

Last week, I mentioned that I had nine types of cookies to do.  I was wrong.  I forgot two.  I am happy to report that Jim and I have finished almost finished eight of these.  As of this writing, the three remaining to do are cutouts (which are both time and decorating intensive), but I have done the sugar cookie cutouts and we’re partway through decorating them.  That leaves gingerbread and Linzer tarts.  At least I’ve made the cactus pear jelly for the latter.

But writing continues to get a space in my schedule.  After being unable to write for so long following my rotator cuff surgery—not only was my shoulder messed up, but I lost a lot of manual dexterity, and either anesthesia or exhaustion killed my creative impulse—the storyteller in me is up and raring to go, and I have no desire to resist.

We did get the holiday cards out.  This proved tough, because it was a reminder of the many friends we lost this past year.  But it was also a reminder of those we still have, and so not completely a downer.

An additional activity this week will be doing a podcast with David Weber and several members of the Royal Manticoran Navy.  Weber has said he’s going to give me lead on all the questions, but I suspect that—as with our collaborations—there will be a lot of give and take.

On this note, I’m off to write.  That bit with the sun spider is getting very interesting.

Later!

Sun Spiders and Saving Lives

Roary Cleans Up

I can’t think of anything cool and exciting to write about this week, because, honestly, the perfect writer’s life (at least for me) is warm and quiet.

What am I thinking about?  Sun spiders and saving lives.. or not.  Also, what order in which to bake the nine different sorts of cookies I need to make in the next few weeks.  Three of them are cutouts.  They take time.  But I enjoy.  I have an incredible collection of cookie cutters and too few excuses to use them.

Oh, and getting the holiday cards done.  Yes.  We still cards.  I need to write the letter, and not make it too much of a downer, even though this has been a tough year.  On the other hand, it’s a good year, because I can write that letter.

And finishing off the gifts that need to get in the mail by early next week.  I like making gifts when I can, but this year I didn’t put into the equation that my manual dexterity is still recovering.

And about sun spiders and saving lives.  Or not.

I think I’ll go write about that.  The rest can wait.

Enjoy Roary showing off, and I’ll catch you in a bit.

Revisiting Andre Norton

Andre Norton Releases

Thanksgiving weekend was a working weekend for me, but David Weber and I succeeded in finishing off the proofs for our forthcoming novel, Friends Indeed, and getting them turned in.

Last week, I focused on filling you in on my writing life.  This week, I thought I’d mention some aspects of a very important writing-related part of my life: reading.  A long time ago, I learned that if I don’t read, my writing suffers.  As those of you who’ve followed the Friday Fragments part of this blog (which I plan to resume early in the New Year) know, my reading is widely varied and eclectic.  During this period of recovery from my rotator cuff surgery, that trend has continued and expanded to the point that I found myself in Jim’s and my library, looking for something I hadn’t read or at least hadn’t read in a while.

The shelves of Andre Norton novels caught my eye, and I brought in some I either didn’t remember having read, or hadn’t read—since Jim’s and my library combines books that were his and books that were mine and books that seem to have appeared of their own accord.

Libraries are like that.

After I read The Crystal Gryphon and its sequel, I realized that, although it’s common these days to talk about her work as “dated” and no long appealing to readers, Norton’s themes of outcasts and found family, as well as embracing multi-racial and multi-species casts, are not in the least dated.  In fact, they’re becoming trendy all over again!  After I segued over to her science fiction titles, I found this held true here as well.  The science may be dated, and the emphasis on psychic or mental powers no longer considered “real” science, but if you can look beyond that, the stories work.

Andre Norton’s stories should also appeal to role-playing gamers, as they focus in on small groups dealing with problems.  There’s some justification to the claim that her novel, Quag Keep, was the first role-playing tie-in novel, since she set it in the World of Greyhawk, after playing D&D with Gary Gygax.  Even more trendy, it is probably the first “isekai” novel of the “gamers end up in the game world” sort.

Since many of Jim’s and my Norton books are old paperbacks with yellowed pages, I was pleased to find that many of her works are available as e-books, often as very affordable e-book bundles.  The only problem we had (for Jim soon joined me in re-reading Norton’s works) was that the bundles often had titles that were different from the original works, and it took a bit of poking around to find which bundle contained which novel.  There are some formatting glitches, but on the whole my aging eyes appreciated being able to adjust font size and the like.

I only met Andre Norton briefly, in part because I was simply awed by her.  However, I did submit a story to one of her popular Cat Fantastic anthologies back in the mid-nineties.  It was a “cold” submission, after I saw a listing in Locus or one of the other trade magazines of the day.  As one did in those days, I not only sent in my manuscript, but I included a self-addressed stamped envelope and return postage for when she rejected it.

Except she didn’t reject it.  She complimented “Noh Cat Afternoon,” told me she wanted it for Cat Fantastic IV, and she clipped my stamps to her letter.  What a classy lady!

Until I started re-reading Andre Norton’s works, I hadn’t realized what a quiet influence her works had had on me, and later on the subjects I lean toward in my own writing.  We share a fondness for human and animal characters working as equals.  We also share a fondness for archeology, discovery, and exploration as themes.

It’s been fun rediscovering her works, and even better, enjoying them!

Thankfully Busy

Roary Emojis Smiles and Love

It’s been a really busy time here, and even more than usual I am thankful that I can be busy.  I’m still working on strengthening and stretching all the muscles and tendons that were weakened as a result of severe injury to my right rotator cuff (upon which I had surgery in early April of this year), but even though I still spend a lot of time doing PT, I find I can do tasks that were impossible even a month ago.

Among these is spending more time on writing-related matters.

Two main projects have been filling my time.  Before my surgery, I had about 64,000 words written on a fourth Over Where novel.  (First novel in the series is Library of the Sapphire Wind.)  For a long while after my surgery I was unable to work on it.  However, I have now re-read the whole thing and done a huge amount of polishing.  I hope that as soon as next week I’ll be writing new material.

The other project taking my time has been reviewing the page proofs for Friends Indeed, the fifth novel in the Star Kingdom/Stephanie Harrington Honorverse prequel series I’ve been writing with David Weber for quite a while now.  We started with Stephanie at age ten, and in this book she turns seventeen.

Folks often ask me if I can work on two or more projects at once.  The answer is “Well, sometimes, sorta, maybe.  Depends.”  In this case, the fact that both jobs called for my “editor brain” rather than my “writer brain,” made it possible.  Another reason I could do both is that I can only read page proofs for an hour or so at a time before I find myself skimming.  Since skimming rather defeats the purpose of reviewing page proofs (which is to catch as many small errors as possible), I usually take a break, do something else, then go back to the proofs.

Baen Books has the very interesting policy of selling electronic Advance Review copies of their books available to the general readership, rather than just to reviewers.  The e-ARC of Friends Indeed went live just a few days ago.  If you’re eager to read the story before the book’s release in March, you can buy it here.  These are uncorrected proofs, much like the ones I’m working on now.

On that note, time to go read…  I wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving!

Jim’s Arrowheads Are Cool!

Alibates Flint, Obsidian, Chert, Blue Glass

“Maybe one of the next WedWanders can be about how cool Jim’s arrow heads are? With pics!” asked Kerri after reading last week’s WW. 

This query had its origin in my comment last week that Jim was advising a graduate student about lithics.  Lithics is the subsection of archeology related to the use of stone, usually for tools and weapons.

Jim became fascinated with lithics early in his career.  In his early twenties, wanting to have arrowheads for himself, he learned how to make them from Greg Stradiotto, one of the other young archeologists working at the excavations of Salmon Ruins in Farmington, New Mexico.  Learning to knap (make points or other stone tools, such as scrapers and axes) takes a lot of time, but out in the middle of nowhere, after a long day digging, that time was available.

As he progressed in the art, Jim rapidly realized that the flakes left over from making arrowheads (usually called “projectile points,” by archeologists, because it’s often not possible to tell if they originally were used to tip an arrow or a spear or a dart) told him a lot about the stone detritus he found on sites.  It’s rare to find an intact point, but there are lots of flakes, as well as cores (the chunks of rock from which the blank used to make the point is struck off), hammerstones, and, most fun of all, failed efforts that mirrored his own struggles.  He’d often feel a real kinship with that long ago knapper.

For a while, Jim collected the debitage (leftover bits) from his own knapping.  He would weigh this, with and without the finished point.  In this way, he was able to arrive at a pretty good guess as to how much they were retrieving from their screening at sites.

Although most folks think of points as being made from flint (which is the reason people talk of “flintknapping” as if this means the same thing as “the making of points), Jim mostly works in obsidian, which is volcanic glass.  Obsidian was commonly used in the parts of the southwest where he has spent his career.  It also doesn’t need to be pre-treated with heat before it can be worked, as do many types of flint or chert.  (Which he has worked with as well.)

Jim also works in glass, sometimes taken from the thick bases of bottles, but also from slag glass chunks.  The blue pieces in the photo associated with this are knapped from modern glass.

In addition to arrowheads, Jim has made scrapers and gunflints (that’s the squarish thing in the picture).   Many of his pieces end up displayed in shadowboxes, but he’s made some into jewelry or other ornaments.

Jim would be happy to answer questions, if you have them.  And, Kerri, I hope this was cool enough for you!

Early November Snow

Last week, as Jim and I were getting over the flu, we had the first snowstorm of the season: six inches or more of very wet, very heavy moisture.  And, because this is what happens, our furnace decided to act up and our relatively new roof developed a leak.

However, our favorite RotoRooter came through for us and made sure we had heat.  (Cheers to Kirk, Scot, Chris, and Chris’s assistant.)  And some kind snow deity decided to divert the moisture so that the dripping stopped of its own accord before the ceiling was ruined.  Mind you, we do have a rather ominous patch on the ceiling that looks rather like a hand pressing down, but you need to know where to look.  And we hope to get someone out here to check the roof out before moisture comes again.

One of the good things about our part of New Mexico’s arid climate is that we may indeed get that break.  In fact, moisture might not drop from the skies again for weeks or months.  Then again, one of the biggest storms we had dropped fifteen inches on a day when no snow was predicted.

I’m back to working on my current manuscript.  Jim is feeling well enough that he’s been able to work with a graduate student he’s advising on lithics.

And the cats are happy, especially Mei-Ling and Roary, who are afraid of snow.  (Persephone actually likes watching it.)  The guinea pigs, however, are very confused.  This is their first autumn, and they can’t understand why we aren’t bringing them choice treats from the yard whenever we go outside.

Take care, be well…

Now For Something Fluffy

The sniffles of last week morphed into a really horrible cold/flu that put both Jim and myself down for the count for the rest of the week.  This meant that we didn’t get to dress up for Halloween, so I won’t be able to share pictures this year.

Then the furnace went haywire…

Meanwhile, a few more copies of Wolf’s Search and Wolf’s Soul arrived, so I’ve restocked my website bookshop, and I’m slowly getting back into everything I had to let go in favor of having the flu.

On the cheerful side, while it’s gotten chilly, our house is holding the heat pretty well, and we’ve had rain give the ground the sort of good soaking that helps the perennials shift into winter mode.

Featured in the photo this week is what may look like a cat to you, but is actually my nightcap.  Actually, it is our cat Persephone, but one of her self-assigned jobs is sleeping on my pillow, often wrapped around my head.

Wishing you warmth in this season of change!