C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 100

I offer this as hope for those of you on the East Coast…

…warmth is coming. We usually catch it from Alaska and Alberta, here in Spokane…and we see spring when the wind shifts and skies clear: we’re now trending toward spring. Ice has melted, snow is in the last piles, which usually are totally gone by St. Paddy’s Day, and we have seen the koi beginning to seek the sun. Renji is always the first, the explorer: Kenpachi was with him. And now Ari, so badly wounded last year, is alive, has been out—the wound the eagle dealt hasn’t healed as much as I’d hope: she may always have it: but hey, she’s survived and is fat and looks as happy as a sleepy koi can look.

A project for you…

It would be really useful to have a directory of persons in the Foreigner books. Thus:

1. [name]–[book in which person first appeared] [book in which person suffered some major change, like moving, dying, getting married: ] [Ongoing Job description] [household: eg: Bren's domestic staff; or in the case of humans, what job] also note changes of household, like Bindanda, who has moved around a bit.

Any one who’d care to do it, I’m setting up a new pagelet entitled: ONGOING PROJECT, and you can put it there, name by name. Ultimately we’ll collate it, alphabetize it, and shift it into a pagelet called REFERENCE.

Jane’s entered a Project Runway for ball-jointed-dolls. And she has made some…

…killer outfits. These are hand-made. And Wiishu stands about 6″ tall. Get a load of the tennies Jane made, not to mention the cargo pants with functional buttons.

The Arrival of Puki-shu, Wiishu becomes a Fashion Model, and more!!!!

Finding Richard III…

You may have seen the original TV cast of this, but here’s more detail. It does seem to be him…

Richard III burial

There’s a great deal strange about his story. He was much maligned in the rumor mills of the day…and accused of the murder of the two princes in the Tower.

The deed is laid at the feet of an otherwise distinguished gentleman who loyally served the king…one Sir Robert Tyrell, who was the boy’s jailer, who, accused of the murder, staunchly refused to disclose where the princes were buried, and who was eventually executed for the crime. His family maintained, later, that the princes were not dead, and that Tyrell had actually rescued them and gotten them to a place of safety, and that he died accepting the blame for a non-crime, because of his loyalty to the king.

Richard III was blamed as the one who gave the orders. But there was a complete tangle of politics surrounding that and other matters during his reign.

Finished the short story. NOW I need to get to work on the book…

This short story is (literally) Bren’s first few days on the job. It wanted to be written. Amazing how late in the series I had to be to know how those days would have gone.

NOW I need to get to that next Bren book, and get it done, while I still have all the pieces in my head. THen…I think I am starting to have a non-Bren book nudging me, but I have to think about this, and I won’t let myself think until I have this book really rolling…

Plus—I think your letters have shaken some things loose. Both my editor and my agent are working on the e-book problem.

New coat! I’ve needed this for some time.

And it’s wonderful. It’s burgundy, thin, with real down, windproof, stitched in curving channels, and so compressible one pocket contains a bag you can put it into if you turn out to overheat. Got it from Amazon. And the only thing I’ll say is—get a size larger than you think you’ll need.

My feather allergy has meant I’ve stayed away from down all my life, but, y’know, I don’t sleep with this one: it lives in the closet, and the windproof fabric doesn’t leak feathers. And *warm*. It’s about a third of an inch thick, and it’ll get a test when the temperature gets below 35, but it is real promising!

It’s so nice to have a coat without holes in the lining. Jane’s threatened to make that old coat disappear, and now, well, I might not miss it.

First contact…human style…

lost family

Pleasant lunch with an old friend…

Did have.

Unfortunately—got hit with onion. That’s such a pain.

Got a lot of end of the month/end of the year stuff to do: tax records. Etc.

I keep swearing I want to dump our installation of Quick Books and start over…it’s about 15 years old and it creaks and has all sorts of stored contacts from back in OKC.

but then I think of what it’s like to set up your business type and hand-enter all those ‘memorized’ categories and contacts and I think—I’d rather go swimming in January.

Snow, then rain, snow, then rain…

I wish it would just snow and be nice. This banded weather is a pain. Though it does mean we’ve only had to clear the walks once.

Did Earth get hit by cosmic blast in 8th century?

the article

The gentleman’s a bit optimistic re the ability of our ozone layer to protect us from a far more major one…but it’s an interesting notion. I hadn’t heard about the radiation re the trees.