C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 107

Winter is about to arrive…

…the koi have been up and about all fall, not going to sleep yet. They’re uncommonly nervy: I wonder if they don’t perceive our near water level lines as some sort of protection. They’ve never been so out and about. But that’s about to change: Wednesday will be in the 50′s. Wednesday night a cold air mass arrives, with moisture, and snow and freezing rain are possible, not to mention fog.

Our new trees and bushes are being quite pretty: the magnolia and birch and weeping cherry have gone bright yellow, the hawthorne is gold, the new cherry tree (sakura) is bronze with hints of red. the dogwood is reddening, our red Japanese maples are brilliant, and the burning bushes are raspberry red to brighter red, and the Virginia creeper is going red along the front stonework. We are very happy with our fall color: we didn’t know how they’d all go in fall, but the placement and look is very nice.

We lost one of our Japanese maples, the green one, to verticillum wilt, which is a soil fungus very common up here: most Japanese maples sold in the PNW have the problem, according to one horticultural site. And there’s no cure for it but to plant something that ignores it, like an apple, or such. Except—cauliflower growers in California also fight this pest, and one discovered—wait for it—that it hates broccoli. Apparently broccoli has something in it that verticillum can’t abide; and they chop up broccoli and use it as a soil treatment.

Well…so we got a lot of broccoli from Costco and chopped it up, and dug it in around all our Japanese maples, for starters. We also dug it into the place where we had to take the green maple out. Next spring we are going to plant a new green Japanese maple with a lot of broccoli, and if it lives and thrives there in soil we know was infected, we’ll go on broccolizing our trees.

A fun question, from elsewhere on the webz: where are most of your dreams located?

…geographically, that is. Is it somewhere you once lived? A particular place? The answers there were scattered and whimsically interesting. Mine very rarely involve people I know, and they don’t involve people I write about—though sometimes it’s a half-grown-up version of the gang from my old neighborhood, occasionally, very rarely, it’s Jane; occasionally it’s old family stuff. And many places are places I’ve never actually been. I used to think somewhen I’d like to live in an old Victorian house, but I’ve had so many weird dreams about a place like that I don’t think I’d be comfortable in a place with too many doors.

Weirder still, when Jane and I were househunting, we went into a few, and I’d be real enthusiastic at first, but after a little bit of walking around, these places began to ‘tell me stories,’ in a weird way…just like echoes of feelings, never words, just weird stuff. A writer’s brain IS a haunted attic, I fear. We’re probably the scariest thing ever to wander the halls.

Halloween—and happy remembrances.

We miss having all the kids—back in the day, I used to give away a whole grocery bag of candy, but that was in a quiet neighborhood. Here we’re on an arterial on one side, with 4-5 houses between us and another arterial, and kids who don’t live in this little section can’t get here safely unless parents drive them or steer them across the arterials—that means not many little ghosts and goblins. We laid in a supply of Tootsie variety pack and a packet of pixy stix, and a little bag of 3 Musketeers, because we usually swipe a couple of bars for us. I couldn’t get any other variety: the store shelves were stripped bare, except for those items. That’s ok. 3 Musketeers has long been a favorite—those and Zero bars. When I was a kid I was allergic to chocolate, an allergy I grew out of—but I got to have 3 Musketeers because’s light in chocolate, and ditto Zero bars. Everything else went to my brother. Or got traded to other kids for peanut logs, Bit O’ Honey and sultana bars, two of my OTHER candy sins as a child. I don’t know that you can find those any more, especially sultanas.

Definitively, our re-download link is NOT working right

…sort of like a self-appendectomy, us trying to test it has problems. But enough people have tried it and failed that we are sure it is most sincerely screwed. We are trying to find the problem.

If you need an updated file, write to me at cj@cherryh.com

We need to know if our re-download link is working and we can’t test it ourselves…

…sort of like a self-appendectomy, us trying to test it has problems.

If you can, will you poke the new download link and see if it works If it works it will produce all the files you ever downloaded from CC. If not…it won’t. Then, of course, let us know whether it worked or not.

I hope everybody has come out OK…

I have no way to know (and those in the affected areas may have no way to report) but we are concerned. Stay safe, please.

One resource: “**REDCROSS” (**73327677) on your smartphone: they have a free app that will tell you nearest shelters and what’s available…you can also download it from the apple app store or the google app source for android. They’re saying now that the extreme situation has passed, they are opening less-secure shelters to offer showers and meals to people who need same, esp. around Long Island. Other regions may be doing the same.

If anybody knows anybody who has lost books in the flooding, one resource is projectgutenberg.org, a source for classics and out-of-cooyright books, some of which might otherwise be difficult to find.

And if virtual hugs from friends will help, you’ve got them from here.

Final call for errata on Netwalkers and Yvgenie…

Jane has a spot for it, and a cutoff date: TELL JANE ABOUT AN ERROR IN AN E-BOOK: WITH CUTOFF DATES

And just because one more download could fix it…

When we fixed the Deliberations glitch, we had to haul the html back into WordPerfect, then retranslate to html. This process apparently proliferated yet ANOTHER glitch, causing a weird character to pop up in the text — in some browsers—

So if you are not totall out of patience with us, go to Closed Circle’s main page which now has a special download link that will let you download a NEW (the third) version of Deliberations. If you have JUST done this, it could glitch because of your old link still being valid, so if that happens, use your old link—which will get the version 3 file just fine (that being what is up there now) —sigh!

E-book conversion is not for sissies. And it’s the SHORTEST of the new stuff. And I tried to be so careful…

All of you in Sandy’s reach, take care.

This is an unusual event: when meteorologists say this is a ‘historic’ storm and a combination of events which will accelerate the storm in its last stages into a sharp turn, and drive the central pressure below the 955 MB it was last night. Pressure difference means serious wind, and it is well possible it will come in not as a tropical storm but re-accelerated. Several things are exacerbating this: the energy in the nor’easter, the fact it’s a high tide, and the angle at which it will come in. Exacerbating the potential for damage: trees are still in full leaf, which, sail-like, increases the surface exposed to the wind, ergo the strain on the tree, and falling trees will bring down electric power. This is not only bigger than Irene, it’s got those several complicating factors which put this into territory the scientists say they haven’t seen before. Here’s a technical explanation from two days ago of WHY the cold of northern waters isn’t causing the storm to peter out: note that it’s already sunk below that record pressure cited in the article.Technicals on Sandy

Please, if you’re in that region, err on the side of caution.

Jane is completely exhausted, having worked a string of 15 hour days to get this done…

…plus the emotional strain of putting out a book she’s fought for literally for more than ten years and the rewrite of a series that goes back further than that She’s decided, being totally done in, to let me filter comments for her—which I well understand. At a certain point in a creation, your nerves are sandpapered raw, and you want to hear from people, but you dread hearing, too. This book of hers won’t get review comments in the major press—nothing from the New York Times or Kirkus, we’re quite sure [which is damned unfair]—and I’ve had an idea: that we put up, kind of like Amazon’s reviews, reader comments.

So if you have any, as you read ‘Netwalkers, you can post them here, and if you approve them being quoted, say so.

Meanwhile—what is Jane doing, but deciding (before getting back to writing Homecoming Games) to do the cover updates we’ve promised (more 15 hour days staring at code) which I didn’t want, but when you’ve got a decade or so of wound-up tension going—that’s sort of what you do: pick a non-moving target and one requiring known quantities like html and button-pushing, rather than launching out on writing that requires steady hands. The scene she’s on, I happen to know, is mind-blowingly sf and delicate—and I understand.

So if you’ve got things for her, or just want to wave hi, or have gotten into her books and want to discuss (she would love that), just send reactions here and I will quietly slip them to her.