If It’s Not One Thing, It’s a Bunch of Things

Lord, how did I let another whole month escape me without a blog post?

Oh.

I’ll tell you how. The RT Convention is in less than a week and we’ve had so much last minute drama…hoo boy. I ran out of time and money and didn’t get as much swag as I’d initially planned, but that’s okay, because the table we were supposed to have?  We aren’t. We wouldn’t have anyplace to put all that swag anyway.  I had to drop everything (again) to do some “paycheck” work, so The Land of the Beautiful Dead didn’t get finished in time, but that’s okay too, because apparently, I had to sign up in order to put my books in the Freebie Room (???) and I missed the sign up date. No problem. Moving on. Just gives me more time to edit anyway.

Oh, and on the subject of TLotBD, it went from being a 45,000 word novella to 85,000 and climbing. Still not done yet! Hopefully, it will be published by the end of the summer, but don’t get your hopes too far up because–

I’m moving. Yup, buying a home, putting my huge collection of skulls in boxes, driving them three hours away and putting them in a whole new house. Yay. This is a good move for a lot of reasons, prime among them getting the (expletive deleted) away from this town, which consists of a train station, an oil refinery, and a stockyard, and our house is less than two blocks from all of them. My brother in law, who picked this house, swears none of them were noticeable when he bought it. He lived here alone for well over two months while we sold the last house. I was here less than ten seconds before I noticed them and I haven’t stopped noticing them in the five years I’ve been living here.

But now we are moving. The new house is comfortably rural and tree-y, nary a refinery or a train in sight, although there are a few cows. I can live with cows. I’m quite excited about the move, actually, but it is a royal pain to do the moving part, particularly when it intersects with a ten-day excursion to New Orleans for the RT Convention. And when the convention is over, I will find myself temporarily homeless as the present home is packed up and the future home is not yet ours to inhabit. I will be staying with my father and other sister for about two weeks and then I’ll be moved up to the new house, where I will live without internet or a washing machine for another two weeks, all alone, until the rest of the family joins me. They may well find me dressed in animal hides, crouching on my haunches around a carved stone idol of a laptop, offering human sacrifices for wifi.

Don’t panic.

 

I swear I will be better about posting on this blog when things settle down and yes, I know you’ve heard that out of me before. I mean it this time. I promise. I will even try to post about interesting things instead of string of excuses about why I haven’t been posting.  In the meantime, here is a small piece of the bit I just wrote for The Land of the Beautiful Dead, which you will NOT find in the Freebie Room at the RT Convention in New Orleans, nor will you find it on my (non-existant) table in the swag hall, but which will be available later this year, I swear. I mean it this time. I promise.

* * *

Of all the rooms in Azrael’s palace, or at least those where Lan had been, if she had to choose a favorite, it could only be the library. The sheer size of it, reaching up and up on every side, marvelously open and yet lavishly closed in. Every surface was in some way beautiful, from the rich carpets over the polished floors to the elaborate tiles and cornices on the ceiling and everything in-between. She could stare at just the windows all day, imagining stories to go with the pictures that had been set so colorfully inside them, and if she ever got bored doing that, she could always ride the ladders.

The library was the only place that made Lan glad Haven existed, because it meant that room had been spared when all the rest of the world had fallen down. It made her happy, a little, to think it might survive even if humanity did not, and at the same time, it made her sad for the same reason, because no one else would ever look at those windows the same way, with the same wonder.

So it should have been a good thing that Lan had to go to the library every day, except that the reason she had to go was to meet with her tutor. It wasn’t really that either, because the tutor wasn’t so bad, for a dead man. It was just that Lan hated reading. She could see the sense of it, but only in the same way she could see the sense of glazing or smithing; it was a useful skill for a community to possess, not an individual, much less many individuals in the same community. The very fact that there was someone whose sole function was to teach reading made it completely unnecessary for anyone else to learn.

She said as much, but her tutor simply told her all complaints had to be submitted in writing.

* * *