C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 158

I've been locked in the galleys…

Takes a bit to do this. It's not like reading. You have to be alert for stupid periods where they don't belong, the global decision to capitalize every word that follows a colon, the indecision on when Cook (a specific man) should be capped…I tell you, it's amazing what a typesetter can do that's new.

You may have noticed us coming and going…

… This was a problem at the host involving a particular server. We are now back, and we believe the host has now solved its problem. This solution may also answer certain questions such as the sudden rash of download errors we have had at Closed Circle, which have required our intervention. We hope to provide a level of service that does not include download errors. So keeping fingers crossed, after losing first our e-mail and then all our sites today, we are now up and running.

Apologies to anyone inconvenienced by the situation. We think it is now fixed.

The Betrayer galleys just landed…

…on my virtual and figurative desk. For the first time, a pdf of the ms, then, same day, the actual galleys which I'll mark; but I can read the pdf on Jane's Kindle. IF I can get Jane to lend it: she's got Intruder on it, and is in mid-read—with her usual accompaniment of brilliant suggestions. My readers should know—Jane's is a real important readthrough, and she often catches what I mean to do, but didn't do well enough, or actually should have thought of—we're too good a working relationship for me to cheat and say, "Oh, of course, that's what I meant!" when the truth is, "Gee, wish I'd thought of that." Bren's brilliance is partly Jane's. And I always feel a little antsy until she's finished her read—because if there's one person in the universe who'll say, nah, you blew it—she would. It's that not-cheating thing we observe. So she's liking it thus far and all's right with the universe.

Finished the bit for Janet,

now working on the April Seeking North bit…

It rained and blew, and most of our snow is gone, but there's a great submerged ice sheet on the pond.

The hockey people are trying to have an open air hockey meet at our baseball stadium. Naturally it's warm and rain.

We tried to go skating today and so did Hank, but they're having a junior hockey event at our rink. Bummer!

Doing a little bit for a Thieves' World story with Janet Morris…

More later on what title and where, but it's the Sacred Band item, and she wanted Ischade to do a walk-on, and wanted me to write it. So…I'm taking a bit of a busman's holiday and going for a drive in that universe.

Ischade (pronounced ee-ShAHd) [short a]—is the morals enforcement division in Sanctuary. Or as a filksong has it: "It's Ischade who keeps the streets all clean. She walks them every night…"

We're under snow again today, about half a foot. It'll all melt tonight, as we continue this striped weather pattern. People in lowlying areas of Washington on the Columbia drainage, heads-up. Fortunately the snowpack is staying unmelted in the mountains.

Right now the horizon toward Mt. Spokane is gorgeous. It's rare that you see the mountains all snowcapped, usually just Mt Spokane, which is the only one to rise at all above the tree line, but right now all the peaks have snow halfway down their flanks, thick enough even the tree cover doesn't show much.

Getting the tank back into shape

We had let the marine tank kind of get along in the keeping of the monster hammer coral…euphyllias like it, and they had taken over.

So we fragged the monster (Jane has pix) and rearranged the tank.

To our great disgust, Jane's brilliant arrangement has a flaw: the keystone for the archwork has caulerpa (a noxious weed: see: the Killer Algae documentary on its invasion of the Med) and aiptasia (rock anemone, a pest species that has no helpful uses nor great beauty.) We got the cursed rabbitfish originally to deal with the stuff, and it's failed. I'm now taking other means: a sea hare (a brown variety of shell-less snail) is alleged to eat the stuff, and a gfo reactor (granulated ferrous oxide) will deprive it of phosphate. We'll see. Very little else will eat it. Peppermint shrimp will at least harass the aiptasia and eat its young. But quel pain!

Meanwhile we've acquired some little striped highfin gobies and a royal gramma. If you're curious …you can wander the F&S site.

And we're going to have a battle on our hands with that weed.

And I've got a Seeking North story to post—maybe tomorrow…

Jane's got to vet it first.

THE BOOK IS FINISHED!

At last!

Jane and I are breaking out the Champagne tonight.

the day from hell—Wednesday.

I get up—I turn on my computer. I have no website.

I have no blog.

I have no e-mail.

It's snowing.

I figure out that when I received the notification that I owed more money to a company for the website, I dimly (I have NO brain when I'm working on the end of a book) thought it was to the hosting company we quit using. I'd cut the service off.

It turned out I'd canceled our domain server.

I call the domain server, who used to be good people, but who are now not…not since they ceased to be the only game in the world. I had to pay 150.00 to get them to get the domain back.

Then it turned out I shouldn't have.

Lynn got on it and tried to get the domain back…

Well, I'm too rattled to work on the book, my brain is incredibly scattered, and we decided despite the snow, and to get me calmed down, to go to the fish store in the neighboring city and turn in some coral frags, pick up some supplies, and most of all get that rabbit out of the sump before he has a heart attack.

We bucketed everything we want to rid ourselves of in 2 buckets, got our shopping list and our bulky ro/di filter we use for marine water, and headed for the store: foggy snowy drive, but no great problems.

We traded in the frags (technical term for coral bits: one too many as it turned out) and we bought some fish and a new small coral and the supplies, got the ro/di recharged, and headed home. Snow is thick; we stopped at the store to get some groceries while Jane kept the car running. And we got home safely, got the buckets inside, and Jane went out to, she said, see to the heavy stuff. Well, I knew she was shoveling out there, but I have the brain of a cabbage, right?

I set to work putting away the groceries, and then started moving things in the tank because we also got some live rock (rock soaked in seawater that has bacteria on it) and that's shipped without water, and it needed to get in some tank. I knew I had 2 rocks that had caulerpa algae on them, and I wanted to get that down to the sump and not let it (without the rabbit) get started in the main tank. I didn't want to put the new rock down in the sump, because there's caulerpa mixed in the weed down there. (Caulerpa is a noxious, poisonous weed most fish won't eat.)

Well, I was looking for a place to dispose the last live rock, when Jane came in hoping for food, sure, I think, that I'd been fixing lunch, and instead found me working with the tank. So she wanted to do the arrangement of the coral, and took that over, but I kept kibitzing until she was in a frazzle, and I was, and meanwhile the domain people called. My eyesight is such close up that I thought it was Lynn, so I talked to them, then found what they were telling me sounded like a line, so I dropped that call, getting the case number, and called Lynn, who handles our server people, and Lynn told me the gruesome truth: my call this morning had put the domain out of her reach: these jerks nabbed the domain and we have to deal with them.

So I call them back. and by this time couldn't, because these bandits had grabbed it—so I'm stuck with them for 45 days until we can tell them to take a flying leap.

And they said it would be 3 days before the domain was back in service.

(Well, as you can see, we're going better than that, but these people are still bandits, way overcharging, and with a service fee for everything.)

But meanwhile Jane was still fighting the battle of rock/coral arrangement, upside down in the tank: I got back to her, and by this time she was in pain, hungry, unfed, and really in a mess.

We finally got the tank set, we got our fish in clean water, we're all good, and by then it was suppertime, at which point Jane finally got fed, and we heard from Lynn that the domain had propagated: we established that it had reached Pasadena.

We both had stiff drinks and were just too fried to watch anything but nature videos. I'm assuming I have e-mail this morning. Or will. This morning both of us have headaches. But the tank is good, and we're back online. And we're resolved what we're doing 45 days from now.

one of those days…(the Monday and Tuesday version)

Jane and I determined on Tuesday to frag the very large (nearly 2′) hammer coral in our marine tank—because it had grown up against the glass and took half our 54 gallon tank. We prepared: we got buckets (polystyrene), a small saw for the coral, found a jar of carbon—check—to calm down the corals once a wounded coral started spitting. And we had also—more on this later—ordered some new kitchen cabinet. Quite a day on Monday. But Monday was a good day.

Tuesday wasn't too bad. We got into the tank in short sleeves and moved out to water-filled buckets any coral that could be impacted by falling bits of other coral. The hammer coral proved impenetrable by the saw—but fragile when it came to being lifted. It broke in every which direction, leaving us wildly trying to get its pieces into buckets.

Then we had to catch the 5″ rabbitfish, the assassin who had done in 5 other fish: he is venomous, seriously so, but not fatally, and we are not willing to get jabbed by one of his spines. We nabbed him and took him downstairs to the sump that serves the tank, so he could stay overnight in the weed down there.

We cleaned the walls of the tank with a razor blade, and replaced the corals from the buckets back into the tank, having to find places for the broken hammer, which had so many heads our tank ended up looking like the Rose Parade.

We'd done our days work. Except I'm also writing the ending for the current book.

Wednesday deserves another post.