Lois Tilton at Locus Online reviews (among many other stories for July) Ink and Blood. Looks like she liked it some, but didn’t love it, which is of course a matter of personal taste. Still, it’s exciting to see that my stuff is being read.
Monthly Archives: July 2011
puppies, human and canine.
here’s a story what i wrote.
Hey, kids! My short story “Ink and Blood” is up today at Beneath Ceaseless Skies! And best of all, you can read it for free, and also download it for your Kindelmaschine or other electronic readenings device.
I wrote the first draft of that story with a fountain pen. (Well, I do nearly all of my first drafts in longhand anyway, but it seemed to be particularly fitting for this story.) Here’s the first page from the hand-written draft–note the slightly longer title.
a whale of a time.
What we did with our Wednesday:
It was a perfect 80-degree day. There was only a little bit of shipboard barfing involved. We saw a trio of fin whales, who obliged the camera-wielding hairless apes in their noisy metal float by surfacing several times. Afterward, we had a tasty lunch at a lobster shack in the harbor, and brought home some fresh lobsters that had been skipping across the bottom of the Gulf of Maine just a day or two prior.
New Hampshire is an awesome place. From where we live, it’s just two hours to the Atlantic coast, the White Mountains, Canada, or Boston. And yet I can shoot in my front yard without asking permission or pissing off the neighbors, we have the cheapest hooch in the country, shall-issue carry permits are $10 for four years (and may soon go the Vermont route), you can buy freshly-caught lobster and eat fresh clam chowder at roadside stands, the fall in New England is the most gorgeous season anywhere, and I can open a bag of Rolos in public with a switchblade without incurring the wrath of the local constabulary.
As far as Wednesdays go, this one was one of the better ones. Hope yours was tolerable, too.
(For the curious: We went with Granite State Whale Watching. It was a four-hour trip out to Jeffreys Ledge, and we have no complaints at all about the service or value received.)
point-‘n-shoot.
Quinn “borrowed” my point-and-shoot camera and snapped a few pictures this morning. The resulting photo series is kind of interesting, a vignette of things important to a six-year-old.
puppy update.
Three weeks old today, 49 and 47 ounces respectively. Look at the size of them in relation to their mother.
They have a lot of growing left to do, but they’re already enormous for their age. Those are going to be some big dachshunds. I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up being close to thirty pounds.
borders loot, and ZOMG the heat.
Our local Borders in West Lebanon started its Going Out Of Business sale today, and I was in the area with the kids, so I stopped by. Considering the circumstances, the staff were downright chipper.
The kids got a book each—a giant dinosaur pop-up book for Quinn, and a Winnie the Pooh picture book for Lyra. I got this:
That’s the latest in the “Knights Who Say ‘Fuck’” fantasy series, and four more Piccadilly graph-ruled medium notebooks. Borders was my source for the Piccadillys, which are perfectly serviceable Moleskine clones. With the current “Ah, Fuck It” discount at Borders, the medium ones are a hair over four bucks a pop, whereas the Moleskines in the same size are $12 and change. Luckily, I’m a packrat when it comes to paper, so I have enough Piccadillys of all sizes stashed away to keep me scribbling for a decade or so.
The minivan has a leak in the Freon system, which means that I got to do a three-store grocery run with two kids without a functioning AC today. The console thermometer showed 101 degrees while I was stuck in traffic on our shopping mile in West Leb, and it felt like driving the van through a giant pizza oven.
I was going to do something productive this afternoon, but after this morning, I just want to sit in front of a fan and chug ice-cold beverages for the rest of the day.
hydration devices of the future.
Here’s an interesting thing Robin bought: a water pitcher that infuses the H2O with fresh fruit flavor.
It has a vented “spine” that can be filled with fruit and (conceivably) other flavor items as well. In this case, it’s fresh watermelon with a few mint leaves tossed in. The lid has a removable water-filled core that can be placed in the freezer.
The resulting flavored water is actually quite good—a light note of fruit, nothing too sweet or overwhelming. Of course, I’m already trying to think of uses that involve cocktails.
free fiction fuesday.
My friend Claire has a story up at Strange Horizons. She’s a fellow grad of Viable Paradise XII, and every time I read one of her stories, it’s like a kick in the ass to Do Better. You go read.
the end for borders.
And that’s it for Borders. All remaining 399 stores are closing, some possibly as early as the coming weekend.
The one in West Leb is going to leave a big hole in the storefront lineup on 11A (and, incidentally, in the book store variety around here—it was the only big bookstore in a sixty-mile radius, the next B&N being in Manchester.)
So long, Borders. I’ve written a fair amount of words for the last few novels there. Now I’ll have to find a new hangout for my weekly Dadcations…
