Ian S. Bott's Blog, page 5

As if 2020 isn't crazy enough already ...

On top of all the 2020 craziness, the west coast is ravaged by wildfires.

Obviously I'd seen the reports from California, but hadn't realized how close to home the trouble extended. Until Tuesday morning, when we woke up to smoke-filled air drifting from across the border.

Air quality here has been poor all week. Here is the view from my deck this morning. You can see the haze obscuring nearby trees, and the row in the distance – only half a mile away – is almost invisible. 

 

Fires extend all the way through California, Oregon, and Washington state.

Ironically, it was only a week ago that Ali and I were commenting how lucky BC has been this summer. When we went on vacation, campfires were still allowed at the end of August, something we've never seen in all the years we've been here. After several record-breaking years of wildfires, this summer has been damp and cool, so we haven't had to deal with mass evacuations on top of the pandemic.

Not so down south!

Wherever you are, I hope you're keeping safe this crazy year.

P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm }

Last gasp of summer

So, we're now into September. Since moving to BC, I've always reckoned on Labour Day marking the end of summer. Yes, we may still get warm spells for a few weeks yet, but as soon as the sun disappears it feels autumnal. Darker mornings and evenings, cooler air.

In the last week, Ali and I took another trip up-Island. We enjoyed our week in a cabin back in July, and decided to do it again to round off the summer. It was just the two of us this time (plus dogs) which made a nice change. The week started off a bit crappy, with a two-hour hold-up on the highway due to a serious accident earlier on in the day, followed by a day of rain, but things improved throughout the week. Overall, we had a good time doing nothing much in particular.

Now it's a long weekend before we all get back to the grindstone.

There is a lot of confusion and anxiety about the upcoming school year.

At Ali's school there is supposed to be distancing and other health measures in place, including some remote learning. But from the information available, it looks like all students will be on site for a large chunk of the time which seems to make a mockery of the need for remote learning. If on-site is good enough for half the day, why not the whole day? And the class sizes are too large to allow effective separation.

Matthew will resume college studies, and it looks like most of the learning will be remote other than essential lab work. Again, questions of practicality rear their heads if an on-campus block is followed by remote work where the students are supposed to be off site.

Maybe things will become clear in the coming week, or maybe it will be a gong show. Who knows?

P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm }

COVID stress

The pandemic is still with us, obviously. March seems like a long time ago, let alone the blissful ignorance of January when it all sounded like a distant problem being faced by people half-way around the world.

Back then, it felt like the world was being turned on its head by the evolving spread of the disease, and the ever-changing advice as new facts emerged. Precautions appeared at first unthinkable, then laughable, then became incorporated into everyday life.

Now we are settled in for the long haul. Who knows when a vaccine will be available, or how effective it will be? Meanwhile, the world has to keep turning and we continue living our lives as best we can. Masks, distancing, and other changes in how we live and work have become an accepted part of life.

But, underlying all the more obvious disruptions and anxieties, I've noticed a more subtle source of stress. It's not something I've heard people talk about, because most people I know work from home most of the time, and this stress is most noticeable in the office.

Social distancing means deliberately and consciously keeping your distance from other people. That requires constant awareness, and active avoidance behaviors. That is not normal behavior for a social animal. In fact, it goes fundamentally against our very nature.

Intellectually, I understand the reasoning. Heck, I'm doing exactly the same to my co-workers – keeping distance, backing off if I see someone coming the other way in a narrow hallway. But on the receiving end, it feels like being shunned, rejected, cast out from society.

Casting people out is a harsh and cruel punishment practiced by societies since time immemorial. It hurts.

Of course, this isn't punishment, it's precaution. But knowing that there's a good reason, that it's not about you, doesn't lessen the hurt. When intellect conflicts with gut feeling, intellect loses. I don't know what the answer is here, but it doesn't feel like something I can just “deal with” or get used to.

P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm }

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image. 

 

This snippet concludes the opening chapter from The Long Dark. Anna drives a massive surface vehicle and is aiming to retrieve a hard-to-reach navigation beacon before winter closes in. A sudden sound startles her. The last snippet ended: Home and safety, a crawler driver always looked to their rig first when danger threatened. 

 

=====

A faded echo rolled over her like distant thunder. Anna scanned the horizon. Her scalp crawled. There’d been no signs of a storm, and the landscape around her seemed placid, unmoving. Besides, that didn’t sound like it came from the depths. She squinted skywards. 

A vapor trail traced a fast-moving line across the coppery sky and cast an ethereal shadow on the skim of cirrus that muted Big Red’s shine. Anna puzzled for a moment, and released a pent-up breath. Dangerous time of year for craft to be chancing a landing. 

She sighed and shrugged, not her problem, and turned her attention back to securing the beacon.

=====

Hopefully this ties together Anna's scenes with Jennifer's. 

After three months' sporadic work, cover art is now down to finishing touches.

 

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

 

Continuing the opening from The Long Dark in Anna's point of view. Anna is driving a massive surface vehicle and is aiming to retrieve a hard-to-reach navigation beacon before winter closes in. 

 

=====

Up another hanging ladder, Anna mounted a slender catwalk suspended below the front of the cab. She selected a lightweight cable from the row of drums above her head and released the drum’s clutch. 

Once more on the ground, she fastened the dollies a few meters back from the end of the cable, then clipped herself on for safety. With the end of the line slung over one shoulder, and a sounding pole in her free hand, she tested the surface ahead as she trudged away, sinking ankle-deep with each step. 

Despite the late season wind keening around her, sweat slicked the edge of her mask by the time Anna slogged her way to the beacon. 

She slackened off the beacon’s guy lines and carefully lowered the heavy three-meter pole to the ground, slipping the axle of a dolly beneath each end. 

A sharp crack followed by a muted rumble startled her. She glanced instinctively back to the crawler, calming her heartbeat when she reassured herself it was okay. Bright yellow boxes slung between silvery mesh wheels looked like a row of old-fashioned stagecoaches, except those ancient carriages were never built four decks tall. Home and safety, a crawler driver always looked to their rig first when danger threatened.

=====

Back to cover art, and progress at last. That last unit and wheel peeping in from the edge of the page is done. From now on, progress will be less obvious as it's down to details.

 

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image. 

 

 

Continuing the opening from The Long Dark. Although it's been drawn out in time by the weekly snippets, the chapter as a whole is quite short. To conclude the chapter, we switch back to Anna's point of view. Anna is driving a massive surface vehicle and is aiming to retrieve a hard-to-reach navigation beacon before winter closes in.

=====

Unhurried, Anna reviewed the crawler’s controls, checking the giant vehicle was safely immobilized. She grabbed her mask from a hook on the back of her seat, and pulled it over her head as she descended a narrow stairway to the cramped equipment bay beneath the drive deck. She paused to settle the mask properly in place and pull a strand of hair out from under the edge seal, then she hauled a pair of two-wheeled dollies and a tool belt from the neatly-stacked storage racks. 

Through the crawler cab’s lower airlock, Anna climbed a ladder to the ground. Hints of over-ripe fruit in the air reminded her that the mask’s filters would need cleaning when she reached home. Her unfastened jacket flapped around her thighs in fitful squalls. She ignored an icy chill working its way around her waist through gaps in her clothing, and lowered the dollies to the ground. 

She knelt and pulled off a glove to test the plant’s surface. Tight-knit matting and whorls of stringy fibers yielded to her touch. They felt dry, scratchy, but still held firm when she tugged on a handful.

=====

And (making use of the new rules) this scene continues ...  

Seasonal changes were coming on fast, but maybe she’d arrived in time in this case. She suppressed a shiver of unease as she peered at the ground between her and the beacon. She had a job to do.

=====

That big heap of firewood you saw last week is almost all gone, but it's been unusually hard work this year. Some years we get lucky, and most of it is the right size for our stove. It just needs to be barrowed around to the carport and stacked neatly ready for the winter. 

This year, probably around 80% of it was in chunks that needed splitting down a bit. To make things harder, this load is mostly maple and is very dense. Some pieces split easily, but some put up a fight. And there's a small-ish pile left that we couldn't touch with the axe, so today we're renting a log splitter for the day to tackle those last bits.

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.





Continuing the opening from The Long Dark, on the way down to Elysium with her senior negotiating team, Jennifer receives an unwelcome message. The previous post ended with: “The merest whiff of it beyond this circle, and we all spend the rest of our lives in jail.”

=====
Jennifer pondered while the cabin windows shone with the plasma glow of their hypersonic passage across the sky. A faint tang of burnt flint hung in the air. “Are we to know the nature of this potential discovery?”

“The President chose not to commit that detail in writing.” Galloway sniffed. “Just enough information to convince you of the gravity of this order.”

Jennifer narrowed her eyes at him.

Galloway smirked. “Your job is to make sure the Company will have complete control of this discovery when it finally breaks. The colonists get nothing.”

=====
I've had a new distraction this week – our order of firewood for the winter arrived, which was a weight off our minds because it's been hard this year to track down a supplier. Now this all needs to be split down to more manageable sizes and stacked ready in the carport.

All the same, I have made progress on the cover art, just not quite as much as I'd planned.

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.




Continuing the opening from The Long Dark, on the way down to Elysium with her senior negotiating team, Jennifer receives an unwelcome message. The previous post ended with: “As you can see” - Jennifer fought to keep her voice steady and her tone matter-of-fact - “our mission has a new factor to take into account.”

=====
Galloway’s expression couldn’t be said to be smug, he was too experienced for that, but it held a quiet anticipation. He’d known exactly what the letter would say. “The President places a lot of faith in you.”

Such precise wording. Outwardly a compliment, and nothing anyone would argue with. But ‘places’ rather than ‘has’? That single word gave the barest and utterly deniable hint that faith might be misplaced.

“So,” she said, “while we are busy renegotiating the Company’s agreement with this colony, you have a mission of your own. Chasing a new drug.”


=====
And (making use of the new rules) this scene continues ...

“Confirming tantalizing reports of its existence.” Galloway’s eyes glittered. “And given the potential impact of this on the trade talks, this has to be of the utmost secrecy.”

“Withholding information like that from the negotiations ...” Jasmine Golightly, Jennifer’s legal expert, twisted her mouth. “The merest whiff of it beyond this circle, and we all spend the rest of our lives in jail.”


=====
Thankfully, in between computer upgrades and a week camping, I've been able to resume work on cover art since I last posted a progress picture:

Camping

Although I'm not sure we can call it that this time!

With a significant birthday this month, the original plan had been to travel to the UK to be with family. That, of course, all got upended with COVID. And with the ongoing uncertainties around travel or pretty much anything, any plans to get away were decidedly last-minute.
As a result, we chose not to even think about getting the trailer ready for use this summer, but we still wanted to get up-island if possible. As it happens, our favorite campground has a row of cabins up by the river, so we rented one for the week.
I've always been curious to see what they were like. We've walked past them so often in years gone by, and this is the first time we've been into one. From the outside, they look small, and with hardly any windows I'd have expected the inside to be cramped and quite gloomy.


Totally wrong on both counts. I was impressed with the layout, the light and sense of space inside.

There's a generous living & dining area, a compact but adequate kitchen, and two bedrooms down one side to the left of the picture. Outside, there's a deck and secluded picnic area.
We had a good time away, mostly mooching around the campground and swimming in the river. Plus I started outlining and drafting a couple of tentative scenes for a new novel, which I hope to get into full swing once The Long Dark is published.
P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm }

Upgrades

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm now working on a new laptop. My old MacBook was at least 10 years old, and was reaching the point where I wouldn't be able to keep up with software updates.
With a birthday coming up, and many previous years of not wanting anything in the way of gifts, it was an opportunity to splash out.
So I'm now getting to grips with the move.
I've generally found Mac upgrades to be fairly painless. Unlike Microsoft, which treats every Windows upgrade as an opportunity to show off how cool and geeky the Microsoft propellorheads are, and force millions of poor users in the real world to completely re-learn everything from the ground up, Apple doesn't mess much with the user interface. There may be new or updated features, but you can pretty much rely on finding things tomorrow in the same place they were yesterday.
The single most significant change this time was entirely self-inflicted – a switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. This switch is a bit of a learning curve. In many ways, OpenOffice Writer and Calc look a lot like MS Word and Excel. Much of the look and feel is similar, but the overall sense of familiarity hides a wealth of smaller differences, which I'm still learning. Sometimes it takes a bit of online research to find out how to do things, but I have to say that – so far – I haven't found anything I used to do in MS Office that I can't do in OpenOffice.
And one huge sigh of relief – OpenOffice is blisteringly fast.
When I write a novel, I break out the manuscript into anywhere between 9 and 12 separate documents. These typically run to 10k or 15k words. I've always found that Word takes quite a while to open a document this size, and it's got worse over the years with various “improvements”. The most frustrating behavior that cropped up at the last big upgrade was that it would only seem to load the first few pages and then stop until I tried to scroll down, then it would realize there was more to follow and load some more. I would drag the scroll bar down only to find I was only a few pages in, and the scroll bar would jerk and shrink as more got tagged on to the end. For documents the size I deal in, I had to force the scroll bar all the way down again and again until I was sure I had the full text. This could take a minute or so on a really large document, like when I pack the whole manuscript into one file for publication.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I went into OpenOffice and opened the full text of The Long Dark – over 100k words, 200 pages. It was all there in under 2 seconds. No messing around.
So, I'm now up and running, and learning as I go. It took many long hours last week to copy files over, especially my locally-stored mailboxes because the export/import feature didn't work as advertised. The one thing I still haven't yet solved is how to move my photos library. I've tried several approaches which should in theory have worked, but none of them so far have managed to copy that single 18GB file. So, that is still a work in progress.

P.S. Just discovered another benefit – I can copy/paste from my document straight into Blogger's text window without accidentally including a load of MS Word hidden crap, and it carried over italics as well! P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm }