Yeah, not gonna make it

I've got a little over three thousand words down in the short story I was attempting to write before March.  There's still a lot left to write, and since it's now after midnight here, I obviously didn't finish it in time.

The good news is that I've got over three thousand words down in a new story.

Now all I need to decide is whether I want to keep at it for a few days or put it aside and start on book 5 of Wheel of Fire.  Actually, now that I think about it, I've got a few other things I need to do before diving into book 5, so maybe I'll give the short a little more time.

Infected

I've had a swollen place on my big toe for several days.  I thought it was just pinched in my shoe or something and that's why it was swollen.

Today, I squeezed out some pus.  It's infected.  :(

I put some ointment on it and bandaged it up.  I really don't want to go to the clinic for what seems like a minor thing, but I guess we'll see what happens.  If it gets worse, I'll have no choice.

I have no idea what caused this problem.  Just another mystery ailment, I suppose.

Back matter updated

I've uploaded new-back-matter versions of Ruined Worlds.  The ones at Kobo and Amazon now have a link to Auxiliary's Revenge in the back.

I've also uploaded Auxiliary's Revenge to PublishDrive.  I haven't moved a single copy of anything at PD since last spring, so putting the new book there wasn't a priority.  Anyway, it's there now, or at least it will be once they review it and approve it.

I've got a about a thousand words written in that short story I posted about previously.  Not much, but better than nothing.

I think I've got my tax stuff ready to drop off at the accountant's place.  With luck, there won't be any surprises.  I'm expecting to pay some bucks to the feds, though, and that sucks.

Yesterday, I moved nine copies of Clouds of Venus at Kobo.  That's unusual; sales and downloads at Kobo have always been sporadic for me.  Hopefully it's the start of a trend.  I'd love to get some real traction there.

Short story before March?

I've had an idea for a short story for a while.  It's finally percolated in my mind enough so that I think I'm ready to write it.  I'm thinking it might be a fun challenge to try to finish the first draft before March.

Think I can do it?

Bring back the Chestnut!

One of the most worthwhile endeavors I've seen in my life is the attempt to bring back the American Chestnut tree.

The land used to be full of them.  The Chestnut grew straight, tall, and fast, making it a wonderful supply of lumber.  It produced a large supply of nuts which were an important food source for woodland critters.  It was, simply, a fantastic tree species.

Then the blight happened.  A fungus arrived from abroad and began destroying the trees at a fantastic rate.  Most of them were wiped out in a very short amount of time.  The Chestnut has been endangered--and on the brink of extinction--ever since.

Until now.

In recent years, efforts have been made to restore the American Chestnut.  Some of those efforts include cross-breeding it with the blight-resistant Chinese Chestnut.  That solution isn't ideal, though, because the Chinese version is a different species and doesn't have the same characteristics.  Other efforts have involved more direct genetic engineering to make a fully-American version that is blight-resistant.

Those latter efforts have succeeded.  By inserting a gene from the wheat plant into the American Chestnut's DNA, researchers have developed a tree that is the old-fashioned American Chestnut in every way but is now also blight-resistant.  Check out the video from the project:

https://ensemble.syr.edu/hapi/v1/contents/permalinks/a9A7BmLz/view

I'd love to see the day when Americans once again roast Chestnuts over on open fire, just like the song says, as if the blight had never happened at all.

Bring back the Chestnut!  :D

Aliens

I've only published one story involving aliens, my short story The Lattice.  I really need to remedy this some day. 

The challenge is in creating aliens that are truly alien and not just humans in costume.  But you also don't want to make them too alien, because if the reader can't sympathize with them in any way, then they're just cardboard cutouts.  In that case, they might as well be paper targets on a shooting range.

It's not easy, hence my reticence.

I've got three books left in the current series to finish up before I move on to the next project.  In the meantime, though, maybe I can do some brainstorming about alien societies.

Store links are up

I've added them to the sidebar.  Scroll all the way down to get to the latest book.

Fire from Heaven

February 15th is "Fire from Heaven" Day.  What does that mean?  I'll tell you.  It's the anniversary of the burning of the Yazoo Land Act on the capital lawn.

In 1794, land speculation was a big thing.  The Revolution had been won just a few years before, and everyone was looking to the vast new continent, now freer from European meddling, with designs for getting rich via the real estate mania.  A number of wealthy and influential men formed companies for the purpose of land speculation.  They set their sights on the western lands of Georgia.  At the time, Georgia was the least densely populated of the former colonies, and it's western border went all the way to the Mississippi River.  These men began to bribe Georgia legislators and offer to cut them in on the action in exchange for being able to purchase huge swaths of land at bottom-barrel prices.

The legislature turned out to be corrupt as hell, and the bribes worked.  In January of 1795, Governor George Mathews signed the Yazoo Land Act.  This was one of the biggest real estate deals in world history, encompassing most of modern-day Alabama and Mississippi.  The land was sold to four speculation companies for less than two cents an acre.  It would later be subdivided and sold for enormous profits, which, of course, was the whole point.  They weren't interested in keeping the land any more than house flippers of the 21st century real estate bubble were interested in keeping their houses.  It was all about fast profits.  The land was resold a number of times, and oftentimes the same piece of land was sold to more than one person at once, leading to confusion as to just who owned what.

The people of Georgia were outraged.  They considered it a betrayal of their rights as Georgians to purchase land and populate the frontier within their state's borders.  They resented the idea of a new landed aristocracy gobbling everything up in shady back-room deals, and they began to protest.  There were men brandishing ropes and threatening to hang legislators, and in 1795, such threats weren't just bluff and bluster like they would be today.  It was an era where duels over matters of honor happened on a regular basis, and they really meant to hang some politicians.  The election campaign season of 1795 was all about the Yazoo scandal.

Georgia's two U.S. Senators at the time were James Gunn and James Jackson, both heroes of the Revolutionary War.  Gunn was in favor of the Yazoo Act, and he was one of those who stood to benefit from it.  Jackson opposed it.  Jackson opposed it so much that he actually resigned his U.S. Senate seat so that he could run for the Georgia state legislature.  He was elected, along with Governor Jared Irwin, on a reform platform aimed at repealing the Yazoo Act.

The Heroes:

 General James Jackson

Governor Jared Irwin

On February 13, 1796, Governor Irwin signed a bill nullifying the Act.  He then set about striking all mention of it from the record, just like Pharaoh did to Moses's name in the movie The Ten Commandments.

Two days after the Act was repealed, on February 15th, a ceremony was held on the capital lawn.  All copies of the Act had been destroyed except one.  (Or so they thought; one copy survived--the one previously sent to George Washington)  Georgia's capital at that time was in Louisville (pronounced Lewisv'l).  It was decided that simply burning the last copy wasn't enough; they needed to call down "Fire from Heaven" to properly send the Act to its grave.  Someone--probably either Governor Irwin or James Jackson, though there's also an apocryphal story about a mysterious rider on a white horse who showed up out of nowhere--produced a magnifying glass and used it to focus the sun's rays on the Act.  It caught fire and was destroyed.

The matter wasn't legally settled, though, for decades.  The consequences of the scandal would have far-reaching effects.  At least one Supreme Court Justice, James Wilson, had a long history of land speculation and was said to be one of the bribers involved.  He was financially ruined in the Panic of 1796-1797 and spent his final days bankrupt and literally on the run from his creditors.  The scandal also produced the Fletcher v. Peck ruling, a landmark case that basically overruled the repeal of the Act and enforced the land sales.  In the Compact of 1802, the feds agreed to remove the Indians from Georgia in exchange for Georgia's agreement to honor the Yazoo sales by selling the land to the feds for $1.25 million.  The last of the Indians were removed in 1838 when President Jackson finally made good on the government's promise, but the Yazoo fraud remained a political talking point in the intervening years.

There are lessons to be learned from the Yazoo scandal, though no one seems to have learned them.  We somewhat repeated the whole thing in 2007-2009.

Anyway, today is the anniversary of a victory over bribers and corruption and scandal, however incomplete that victory turned out to be.  It's "Fire from Heaven" Day.

A book is born

I just hit the publish button at Amazon and D2D.  Book 4 of Wheel of Fire will be live as soon as the retailers crunch the numbers and do whatever they have to do.

Kobo is acting glitchy again.  It wouldn't let me upload a cover.  So that retailer will have to wait a little while.  Once they get their glitch sorted out, then I'll publish the book there.  Sorry, Kobo readers!  :(

Now that I've published, I can reveal the title, cover, and blurb.

Jerry Harper is back home, recovering from his injuries. It won't be for long. He's a strategic asset now, and the government is eager to send him back into action. They want to protect him better on his next war patrol, so he's assigned to a new station: the Agrarian Commonwealth's new battleship. He and the fleet soon jump out and begin their mission.

While in space, horrifying news arrives. The Reliants have invented a doomsday weapon, a virus that targets the Agrarian genetic code. They begin deploying it, and Agrarians are killed by the billions. Jerry is tasked with using his electrokinesis to find the virus's production facility so that a coordinated attack can be made. It might be the only chance the Commonwealth gets before the galaxy's Agrarians are exterminated.

Jerry's health is in rapid decline due to his electrokinesis. He can't afford to push himself. But a Rifleman does his duty, even if it kills him.

UPDATE:  Just published on Kobo.  Whatever the problem was, it seems to be resolved.  It might have been on my end, not theirs.  Or it might have been one of those gremlins that pop up in code every now and then and then disappear just as suddenly.  No telling.  Anyway, the book's now in review at Kobo, so hopefully all is now well.

Two possibilities

Last night's proofreading session had me tearing up a few times.  There are two possibilities here:

1.)  I've become a sap in my middle age who will cry about anything and everything.

2.)  I'm not a sap; I've simply really nailed the emotions I was going for in those particular scenes.

Obviously, I'm hoping #2 is the case.  I hope the readers get an emotional impact out of this upcoming book.

*fingers crossed*

Aside: I cried at the end of the third Mistborn book.  I wonder if Sanderson ever cried while writing it?

If lightning was music

...it might look a little like this:

Nice pickin' there, fellas.  :D

Something frozen this way comes

Snow, man.  Freakin' snow everywhere.

I saw the flurries in the weather forecast a couple of days ago.  I also saw the high temperature of 44.  That told me that the possibility of snow was overstated.  Besides, the weather people always exaggerate.  They engage in sensationalism just like regular "news" people and for the same reasons.  I figured the likelihood of it actually snowing was small, and the likelihood of it sticking to ground was even smaller.

Yet here we are, post-blizzard.  :/

On Sunday, it was warm enough to go outside in short sleeves.

On Wednesday and Thursday, it rained non-stop in a fashion Noah himself might have found familiar, and there were tornadoes in the area.

Now this.  Freakin' snow, man.



UPDATE:  The snow has already melted.  It's completely gone.

Now we have fog.  Thick pea-soup fog.  Because why not?  We've had everything else this week.

You don't see this every day

The stock market has taken some interesting turns this week.  There have been three straight sessions where the S&P has gapped up.

The proverbial wisdom is that gaps want to be filled.  You see an example of that after the big gap down in that image.  The next candle after the gap occupies the gap.  That's typical.

The last three days, though, have been one gap up after another.  None of those gaps have been filled yet.  Not unheard of, but not common, either, especially when the gaps are with the overall trend rather than against it.

So what does it mean?  Beats me.  That last cross-shaped candle looks like it might be a turning point to the downside, and the 63 RSI supports that, but the MACD is about to cross over to the upside, too, and the price action bounced right off the 50-DMA support line, so the signals are conflicting.  When you can't figure out the technicals, then the best course of action is to either do nothing or look to the fundamentals for guidance.

I'm not an expert at this stuff.  I'll stay on the sideline for now.


UPDATE:  The latest gap filled today with the market's downward move.  This might be the start of a long-awaited correction or consolidation.  Things have been running hot for a long time.  A couple of months of treading water would be beneficial, I think.

Something familiar about this

There's a new illegal drug causing havoc:

A lethal new drug known as “gray death” has been found in Louisiana — and it is so powerful that touching it could kill you, authorities warned.

Gray Death, eh?  Where have I heard that before?  ;)

Little snags

I'm in the process of proofreading my book.  I expect to publish it within the next several days.  I had hoped to publish it on Feb. 3rd or 4th when I had planned to send my newsletter out as part of another obligation.

A few days ago, though, I updated Calibre, and then I started getting error messages when I opened an epub I made in it.  I thought it was a problem with the book.  To make a long story short, I went through a lot of formatting-related hassle to correct a javascript problem that might not be the book's fault anyway and is probably a bug in the program. 

So I've been delayed a bit.

I reached a critical mass of exasperation, threw my hands up, and decided to revisit the issue after the Super Bowl.

Speaking of the game, I was mostly disappointed in the commercials.  That's all I was interested in, not the game itself.  I stopped paying attention to the NFL when my team made the biggest choke in sports history.

I liked the M.C. Hammer commercial and the Groundhog Day commercial, but that's about it.  A lot of the jokes fell flat for me.

Still on track to publish this month, and almost certainly before Valentine's Day.  Book 4 is coming.  Stay tuned.