Chris James's Blog, page 14

Going on vacation and coming back with a stray kitten

[image error]Last week, I took the family on vacation to the Slovakian village of Stará Lesná at the foot of the Tatra Mountains.  We had a great time: we stayed in an apartment that was part of a large house run by a delightful couple; we climbed both easy and challenging tracks going up Mount Lomnicky; we visited caves and a healthful thermal spa; on the only day it rained, we enjoyed the Tatra National Park Museum…  And, on the last day, we took in a stray kitten.

I’m still not quite sure what the hell happened.  The night before our last day, Youngest Daughter had been complaining—with no little justification—that we had still not got the kitten we’d decided to get back in the spring.  I tried to placate her but she can be a tough cookie when she’s convinced she’s right (women, eh?).  So the universe went to work on the issue.  The next morning and the last day of our vacation, we went to Stary Smokoviec to begin our final climb.  Youngest Daughter found and picked up to comfort a kitten which was scared and obviously lost.  She left it with a couple of very helpful shop assistants.  We climbed for a few hours and, somehow, the bloody thing was still there when we came back down.  The shop assistants insisted that no one had been looking for it, and in any case Stary Smokoviec is a small town where they all know each other’s business and they knew no one had lost a kitten, so the kitten must have been dumped in the hope a fox or an eagle might snap it up for a tasty lunch…  You can imagine the look on Youngest Daughter’s face.

I can highly recommend that part of the world for some enjoyable climbing on mountain paths which by Austrian standards are a little busy, but which by Polish standards are deserted.  Anyway, here are a few shots of the scenery—and the newest member of the James household, called Wafer.

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Some summertime shots

It is remarkable to think that we are already halfway through 2019.  I’m not sure where the time goes, only that it goes far too quickly.  This week, we managed to escape the worst of the European heatwave here in Warsaw with a little blast of cooler air from the east; nevertheless, today we’ve seen 33 degrees out there.  The garden is alive and buzzing with bumble bees and butterflies.  In the early spring, I spread half a cubic yard of chicken shit around the raspberry plants, and now that graft is paying tasty dividends.  So here are the best shots of this summer in my garden, all taken this afternoon.  Finally, as it is the end of the month, I would like again to express my gratitude to you if you are one of the hundred or so readers who gave one of my books a try in June – thank you!

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Documenting the New Motorway, #7: The Overpass for the Forest Animals

As Corpus Christi is a bank holiday in Poland, I thought it was high time to post something here after my tardiness over the last month.  I don’t know what happened to the blue tits in the last post: one day a couple of weeks ago, I woke up and went to check on them to find the apple tree empty, with only a flurry of tiny grey feathers scattered about on the lawn around the tree.  Oh well.

Anyway, today I decided to take a look at how things are progressing on the stretch of new motorway closest to my house, which has cut a swath through the local forest.  Here are a few photos showing how this section leaves the ground on low supports to allow passage for the forest animals.  Progress seems to be going well, but time is running ever onward: this part of the motorway is due to open in August 2020, just 14 months from now.  And apologies for the image quality: I took these around 6.30 pm this evening and the light was fading.

In other news, one of the hens has been brooding on a dozen eggs for the last almost-three weeks.  As soon as they hatch, I’ll post pictures of the ugly, smelly lumps cute, adorable chicks here.  Stay tuned!

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Blue tits are nesting inside my apple tree!

And that’s a title for a blog post I thought I’d never write.  A couple of weeks ago, Mrs James and I noticed a pair of blue tits spending a lot of time on the old apple tree in the middle of the back garden.  Well, it turns out they laid eggs inside the trunk, which have now hatched.  Here is the tree.  Where the two main limbs part, I cut off another limb about 15 years ago:

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 This cut made a good place to put my cup of tea while I mowed the lawn.  Then, as the years passed, it rotted till now it looks like this:

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And if we look inside, we can see an unhatched egg to the left, while to the right is a newly hatched chick.  That squiggly line is its mouth, and I have counted three live chicks in there.

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Obviously, we’re trying not to go too near the trunk too often.  Here are a couple of shots of the parents, who fly in and out of the trunk at about 100 miles an hour.  And note that they are both carrying food which they seem to be getting from the hazelnut trees.

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Elsewhere, the hawthorn bloom this year has been exceptionally rich, and the rhododendrons have flowered this week, so the bumble bees and I do our annual joust where I try to photograph them, and they cleverly pretend to ignore me.  I love nature.

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Pictures of apple and pear blossom

First things first: if you’re one of the 109 readers who read one of my books in April, thank you so much for your time.  In addition, since Invasion published on 16 March, more than 140 of you lovely people have read it, and each of you has my sincerest thanks.  If I could impose just a little more and drop a not-so-subtle reminder, *cough, cough*, to leave a review on your territory’s Amazon page, I’d be even more grateful.  Anything will do, even three stars with “Yeah, it was all right, I s’pose”.  Without reviews, books on Amazon tend to vanish as quickly as my kids when it’s time to wash up after dinner.

In the meantime, here are some pictures of the apple tree and the pear tree in my garden today.  They look like this for only a few days in the year.  Spring is such a lovely season.

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Easter in Poland

Saturday: boil eggs; paint the boiled eggs; put them in a basket; take them to church (well, not me, obviously, but Mrs James and the Daughters) to get them blessed; bake lots of cakes.

Sunday: meet family in the morning and consume a vast breakfast that includes an indescribably delicious soup full of boiled eggs; go for a walk; eat lots and lots of cake.

Monday: throw water over each other; eat any remaining eggs and cake.

Meanwhile, in the garden, there’s magnolia blossom, plum blossom, tulips, butterflies, and the sublime beauty of the emerging maples…

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A Few Pictures of Early Spring

I, Mrs James and Youngest Daughter went for a bike ride today along a path that follows a river which is a lot cleaner than it looks in the photos below.  Further down, there are a couple of shots of a local lake in which silver birches grow for a few years when the water level is low, but then drown when the water rises.  Best of all, I managed to get my first ever shot of a Mourning Cloak butterfly.

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Documenting the New Motorway, #6: The Bridge Takes Shape

Today we had a lovely warm spring day here in Warsaw, so it was time to brush the cobwebs off my bike, give the chain and gears a squirt of WD-40, and pedal down to the east bank of the Vistula and see what’s changed since last September.  The supporting columns are coming along very nicely and the whole area is a very exciting place to visit.

Yes, I know it represents the expenditure of billions of Euros in homage to the internal combustion engine, but it is worth bearing in mind that this kind of infrastructure will in time be re-tooled to handle autonomous systems of non-polluting transport in the decades and even centuries ahead, so it’s not all bad.   Plus, in the shorter term, once this baby is done and open, it will reduce a diversion of 35 minutes through Warsaw city in my car down to, quite literally, just three minutes.  So you’ll not hear any complaints from me

Thanks for reading

[image error]The Kindle edition of The Repulse Chronicles, Book Two: Invasion has gone live this morning.  If you pre-ordered the book it should be on your devices now.  I hope you enjoy reading it even a fraction as much as I enjoyed writing it.  With each book, there are a number of other people behind the scenes who read the manuscript and whose suggestions and advice always go towards making the finished product better than it would otherwise have been, so if you don’t like Invasion, blame them I really would like to thank all of those dear friends as well.

Now it’s time for me to get on with things and try to add another novel to the growing list of books that won’t die with me.  It’s important to have the right, positive attitude when it comes to fiction writing

Letting Go (aka Squeaky-Bum Time)

If you’ve never set up a pre-order with Amazon KDP Select, here is a brief look at what happens behind the scenes.  The whole idea of making your book available for pre-order is of course to build anticipation among readers ahead of its publication.  You can set your book for pre-order up to 90 days before its publication date.  You need to have your cover done and to have a completed draft of the manuscript.  Then, on your Amazon author account dashboard, you get a helpful countdown timer that looks like this:

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However, the one thing Amazon does take very seriously is customer satisfaction.  As time passes, you’ll get reminder emails.  Here is an example screenshot from my inbox:

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All of those emails all say the same thing, this:

Your pre-order is set for release at 03/16/2019. Please check your KDP account to ensure that you’ve uploaded the final version of the book you want customers to receive. Maintaining a positive customer experience is important, and part of that experience is to ensure that customers get the version of the book you would like them to read. A bad customer experience could result in negative customer reviews for your book.

Although it doesn’t actually say Failure to comply will result in your annihilation, the inference is certainly there.  In 2017, I pushed back the publication date of Dystopia Descending by two weeks after I’d set up the pre-order.  Amazon responded by banning me from setting up another pre-order for one year.  So, overall, I wasn’t too distraught that Invasion took longer than I thought to write, because at least with the passing of time, I’d got the ability to pre-order back.  And this time around, I’ve taken no chances.

This week, I let go of The Repulse Chronicles, Book Two: Invasion.  The paperback is published, and with many thanks to a certain young man in the US and his e-book conversion skills, yesterday I uploaded the final-as-far-as-I’m-concerned version to Amazon.  Of course, it is possible to continue revising a manuscript indefinitely, but my personal rule of thumb is when I realise I’m re-editing the same sentences for the third time, then it really is time to let the book go.  My readers can—and will—make up their own minds.  And they’re pretty discerning readers, too.

In any case, Amazon will lock me out of the book on Tuesday 12 ahead of publication on Saturday 16.  For reasons best known to those crazy cats at Amazon, they need four days to prepare to transmit a stream of electrons that travel at the speed of light.

And just to have some extra fun at this stage of the writing process, over the last two weeks we have had decorators in the James household to cheer the place up.  Here are some before and after shots.  See if you can spot the difference