Tag: rain

A bit of shameless promotion

September 9, 2015 / / 0 Comments

(Really, that title is a total lie. All promotion feels at least a little shameful to me. I’m too old school Yankee: Take nothing from no one; be beholding to none. Blame my forebearers.)

Anyway, a bit of book news! DEVIL AND THE BLUEBIRD is now available for pre-order on Amazon. I’ll admit to not being a big Amazon user, and this book doesn’t actually come out for another eight months, but if you like the idea of ordering a book and receiving it months later, after you’ve forgotten about ordering it, when it feels like a surprise gift rather than a planned purchase, then head on over here.

Beyond that, I have little to say today. I’m busy wondering about the 1-2 inches of rain predicted for tomorrow, and the sections of my house wall swaddled in plastic as it waits to be finished, and how those things might interact. We need rain, but after weeks of none, I could have gone just a few more days…

April whimsy

April 16, 2014 / / 5 Comments

It’s April, and it snowed. The snow was the end to a day in which I wandered about in the rain without my raincoat, which I didn’t have because I couldn’t find it because it was hanging on the back of the bathroom door (obviously).

In the midst of wandering in the rain, I went into a used clothes store that had also been a used clothes store way back when I was in high school. It was the place where I bought my one and only piece of cool clothing when I was eighteen. I wore said piece of cool clothing all the time until it became threadbare and tired and gave up on existence altogether. This time through, I was very tempted to buy either a sailor’s uniform (why? because) or a long black overcoat. The overcoat was so long, though, and so large, that I could have used it as a tent as easily as a coat. I decided against it.

(Why, you might ask, didn’t I just look for a raincoat? Because practicality is not one of my strong points.)

After coming home wet and tired, and with a throat that had turned the corner toward sore, I discovered a drip. Kind of like the Telltale Heart, only I hadn’t planted the drip in my floorboards, or anywhere else. This drip had located itself in the ceiling. Up into the crawlspace I went, with great enthusiasm, of course. Who doesn’t love fighting the elements in tight spaces filled with insulation?

(As a side note, I managed to spell insulation as insultation, which I really, really wish was a word. I’m sorry, but you’re about due for an insultation. Let me see what we have available.)

Then, crawl space tasks accomplished, I climbed back down. (Hey, if you have a phobia of…well, I don’t even know what the correct term would be, so, if you have any phobias, skip this next bit.) Only, things weren’t quite right. My finger hurt. A lot, like I’d stuck a nail in it. Or a staple, or anything pointy and not meant to be in fingers.

I looked down. There, sticking off my finger, was a mouse skull. Yes, my finger was impaled on a bit of bone sticking out of the eye socket of a mouse skull.

Occasionally, there are times I want to scream. This may have been one of them. I’m not really bothered by bones, or mice, or even by things stuck in my finger, but…A MOUSE SKULL STABBED MY HAND! It was like Sleeping Beauty and the spindle, only I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a fairy showdown at my christening, and I definitely don’t live in a palace, and…MOUSE SKULL. Really, it was more like the urban fantasy version of Sleeping Beauty, where she gets impaled by a bone and ends up asleep in a unused subway tunnel full of thorn graffiti that comes to life whenever anyone tries to enter it.

Okay, so then it rained more, and then it snowed. That’s more or less all the news from here, aside from my raging cold.

For those of you in the market for more hard-hitting blogging, I’ve got interviews coming! Multiple ones, with writers, about sky-diving. No, not really. About writing, of course. Perhaps not as flashy as mouse skull impalement, but trust me, writing is more interesting.

With that, it’s time for more tea and nap. (For me, though I encourage everyone else to partake as well. Tea and naps have never done anyone any harm.)

Still here

October 13, 2012 / / 5 Comments

I’m just very quiet.

I can’t speak to how all depressed minds work, merely my own. During low periods, my ability to think linearly tends to shrink. Instead of traveling from point A to point Z, with stops all through the alphabet, I go from A to B and back to A, round and round, endlessly. It makes for less than interesting conversations, and equally dull posts.

So I haven’t had much to say.

Yesterday I went on a hike with a friend. We started in the rain and ended in the sun, went around and up and back down what passes for a mountain in this area of the world. Almost to the top, we heard a noise and found a large porcupine a few feet off the trail. (If you haven’t made the acquaintance of a porcupine before, you can look here.)

This fellow wasn’t particularly threatened by us. He showed his back, shivered his quills a little, and, once he was sure we weren’t likely to try to eat him, sidled up to a raspberry cane and put a leaf in his mouth. My friend and I stood there and continued our conversation and the porcupine kept eating. All was fine until I responded to something in a rather loud voice. The porcupine gave us his version of a sigh and a dirty look, and ambled away. We offered our apologies and went on our way as well.

That’s more or less the height of excitement around here this week.

More of the story

May 2, 2012 /

When I posted on Sunday, I only gave part of a story. Yes, Rainpocalypse sold to Strange Horizons, which is a fabulous thing. It’s a story about a lot of rain, as well as other things, like souls. I wrote it originally for an anthology that I never submitted to, much like I wrote “Snowfall” for a contest I never entered. Yes, I believe that can be called a pattern.

Anyway, that was one thing. The other thing, the one I alluded to a week or so ago, was that Daily Science Fiction bought “This Place From Which All Roads Go.” Also very exciting! “This Place…” features a water disaster of another sort, and families, and community. The whole piece is somewhat more personal than many stories I’ve written, albeit in the weird and unrecognizable ways that happen when minds convert experience into fiction.

So, that’s it for now. It’s raining, it’s cold, the peepers are peeping, the owls are calling, and I am bound for sleep.

Thanks for all the…stuff

December 11, 2011 /

This time of year the sun doesn’t even rise above the pine trees in the backyard. It shines over my computer desk for a brief period of time in the morning and then is gone across the sky by midday. It’s a hard time of year for those who need the sun, and it’s made even harder by a preceding summer of endless rainy days.

It’s easy to write about a world devastated by drought when you’ve spent a summer watching your well slowly dry up. It’s easy to write about flood waters relentlessly rising when it’s rained continuously all year, or to write about slowly losing all connection with the world when your phone and power lines go down regularly. I live a life determined to provide me with an abundance of material, I suppose. 🙂