touching base

Gay noted a couple of days ago that I've been neglecting my journal.  So I sat down and wrote about a page, and then when I went to save it – it disappeared!  Without a cybernetic trace, which is kind of scary.  Punishing me.

Fortunately, I'm not superstitious.  So I'll try again this morning.  As the skies glower and the sticky air promises the same thing the weatherman is saying:  Wicked thunderstorms.  But I'm safely on my porch with a cup of hot coffee and the birdies are tweeting to each other some avian version of "Get under cover, you stupid cloaca."

No blog activity the past while because I've been trying to finish a novel before we take off for Cambridge, via the worldcon in Chicago.  Probably no more than twenty pages left.  Maybe I will finish it before we leave, or maybe at the worldcon.  I think I've done that before, some novel due September first.

(Fortunately a novel contract is not as strict as, say, murder for hire.  Unless you're Peter Straub or Stephen King, you can send in a novel a year late and people will say, Oh, is he still alive?)

I've also been taking notes and gathering stuff for the next novel, though I probably won't do much work on it at MIT.   First priority is a novella for Gardner and George Martin's antho on "Old Venus."

  

(Reminds me . . . need to pack some references for that.  I have a great solar system text from the 1920's, as well as a couple of 1950's-era sf stories set on our "sister planet." )

  

A couple of weeks ago I was bicycling with Brandy and tried to conjure up the relevant lines from Green Hills of Earth – "We rot in the molds of Venus / We retch at her tainted breath / Foul are her flooded jungles / Crawling with unclean death" – or something.  Have to look it up.

When I read that as a 12-year-old, I had no notion that in another twelve years I would myself be crawling through flooded jungles, trying to keep a weapon out of the mud, on the watch for enemy soldiers – and if I had known, I would have thought the 1955 equivalent of "How cool is that?"

Cooler to think about, little Joe, than to do.  But that's true of a lot of cool stuff.

Back to work, you lazy swine.  (Sound of whip whistling through the air and snapping.)

Joe

(Here's Saturday's model, with notations . . . )