Failure!

Well, I’m late getting this written and posted. (Sigh.) What a bummer.

I actually tried to do some quick research on ‘tardiness’ for this thrown-together blog. Google returned lots of sites where I could get the definition, but I already know that. The few sites that weren’t for the definition were mostly about students who were habitually late, and a few were about business policies concerning tardiness. Not what I was looking for.

I was looking for clues about the reasons why people are late with projects. I thought maybe I could share some insights about why I am sometimes late getting a blog done on time. But that kind of site didn’t show up, or if it did, it was so far down on the list that I never got to it.

THIS week, I know why I’m late. Our household has become a mad-house.

Last weekend, we got another storage unit and started packing up and taking boxes of stuff that we’d been using the last several months. Any effort to maintain some semblance of a ‘daily schedule’ flew right out the window. My hubby was so worried we wouldn’t get things done that there were times when he got up at 5 am to pack. Having finally gotten our new po box number from the Florida post office, I’ve been trying to notify everybody of our immediate change of address, which made Hubby mad, because I wasn’t helping him pack and take stuff to storage. So no, I’m not done with my list of businesses and people to notify.

Today, Hubby dropped me off to drive home the rental truck. He is off at dospace for one last session on the laser printer. The moving men are supposed to arrive sometime around noon to load up the furniture and take it to storage for us. Then I can take the truck back.

Almost everything is packed. We will take the tv to storage in the morning. I have a laptop and e-reader to throw in my suitcase, and we’ll do one last load of wash tonight. (The washer and dryer are staying.) So, without him ranting about ‘never getting it all done’, I can take a break and do this blog, at least until the moving men show up. I have to be careful with what they take, because we have quite a bit of stuff that we are actually taking to Florida with us.

So, no big insights into tardiness. Only the insight that I do better when life has some semblance of a schedule. And eventually, once we get a new home and get settled, we will develop something that could possibly be called a schedule. I will be so relieved when that happens!

What’s coming next week? Hmmm. Hard to say. We are attending Icon in Iowa City this weekend, on our way to Florida, so I won’t have a lot of time for research. I keep hearing tidbits about ‘Planet 9’ - not that they’ve found it, only that it has to be there. I might put that off a bit longer, see if they finally do find it. Possibly a report on Icon; we haven’t been there for several years. Or maybe not, because once we get to Florida, there are lots of conventions of all types for us to attend.

I guess you’ll just have to come back and see what I write!

Inspiration Everywhere

Sometimes, after sitting at my desk for weeks, my ideas dry up. This year, with the World Science Fiction Convention being in Spokane WA, we decided this was the time to take an Alaskan cruise. I wanted to see a glacier calve off some icebergs (before they retreat so far they can’t be seen doing that anymore).

Not only did I see that sight, I had lots of experiences and thoughts to tuck away in my mind’s corners to possibly be used in future stories. And the same happened to John; he almost daily stated he could use a particular experience in one of his short stories that he now hoped to turn into a novel.

For instance, our first excursion was ziplining through the tree canopy of the forest surrounding Juneau. Having an on-again/off-again fear of heights, it took grim determination to try this. Thankfully, once I started zipping along each line, the gear kept me from looking down, so I only had to ‘face my fear’ on the platforms in the trees, for the most part. Now I have a little bit of a feel for what it’s like to don a harness and ride along a cable; how the wind feels, how easy it is to get ‘off-balance’ and start rotating instead of facing forward. Not to mention how wet one’s clothes can get, how slippery one’s shoes can get, or how poorly one can see the rapidly-approaching platform one is aimed for when it’s raining.

The day started misty but calm, and it was a gentle rain by the time we finished. From that, I might be able to extrapolate what the experience would be like in a heavier rain or even snow.

The tallest point we reached was 185 feet above the ground. (“I did not need to hear that,” I told our guides.) I don’t think the platforms were any more than half-way up a tree, and for the most part, there were tree limbs around us. But the course came down the side of a steep hill, and the ‘training’ line started at a platform about 1 foot off the ground and ended at one about 10 feet off the ground. The 2^nd line (the bunny slope) took us even further into the air. With some imagination, I could possibly figure out what it would be like to use a zipline between buildlings like a cat burgler, or across chasms, or from stony outcrop to stony outcrop on a mountain.

I’ve considered intelligent creatures traveling in this way, but only 10-20 feet off the ground. If they were on a steep piece of terrain, they would have to use ‘switchback’ lines or ‘tack’ their way down. I’m still working on how they would get up a hill. That might involve tree-climbing.

It was hard for me to get started with this adventure. By the time we finished, my knees were shaky and I was completely worn out. The other adventurers asked how I felt about ziplining now, did I enjoy it? I replied I wasn’t sure ‘enjoy’ was the word I would use; I would have to do it again to see if it was fun. And then, during the obligatory visit to the gift shop, I found THE t-shirt I HAD to have! It said,

I survived ziplining!

Well, I’ve spent this entire blog talking about ziplining. I thought I would quickly run through a catalog of our ‘new experiences’ from this cruise, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen that way. Yeah, I tend to ‘run off at the keyboard’.

So stay tuned for my further adventures! They’ll get written up and posted, mixed in with all the other stuff I find to write about here.

Best Made Plans

Have you ever made plans that just didn’t live up to your expectations? Even vacations have bumps when things don’t go your way. Our last vacation ...

In Florida, every time I lay down, my sinuses immediately plugged up and I was soon mouth breathing. My cpap mask only covers my nose, so it was no help.

John had signed up to march in Disney’s StarWars weekend parades. He was up at 6 AM that first Friday in severe pain and unable to bend one knee. I took him to ‘urgent care’... which didn’t open until 8. He had to scoot in and out of the back, with the leg stretched along the seat. It was gout; they prescribed steroids and ice packs. (He did get to march the next day, and for the rest of the parades while we were there.)

To see the parade, I had to be at the gate by 7:30 (one never knew what time they were going to let people in), rush to one of the (2) benches along the parade route and park myself. The parade happened at 11. The humid heat did nothing for my stuffy sinuses.

I got a page written for my ‘Mac’ serial, but Open Office kept crashing and finally refused to open my ‘Mac’ file again. Unable to think, having no OO specialist to consult, I gave up. John, however, got his 2nd novel rewritten (2nd draft).

I finally let John take me to ‘urgent care’, and I waited 3 hours to see a doc. Then the pharmacy didn’t have the medicine! Augmentin was on back-order? The doc changed the prescription. To sulfur pills. My brother has to take sulfur pills. They work, but not quickly. Another week before I started feeling almost decent.

Friends spent weekends with us. On the last parade day, as everyone was getting ready, the wife fell and struck her head. The husband took her to urgent care, so John went alone to do the parade. Long story short, it was much more than a bump on the head; she ended up in the hospital for 2 nights before they could go home.

Wednesday, I started home, stopping to call my mother-in-law to say I was on my way. She had been taken to the hospital that morning. Frantic phone calls and text messages dogged me all the way home.

Thursday, the radio talked about severe rain and some flooding ‘in Missouri and along the Mississippi.’ I was in Illinois, about to turn west to St Louis. I called my son and asked him to research this, in case I needed to continue north and go through Des Moines. He said it was located south of I70 (the road I would travel).

East St Louis, Friday morning, heavy rain. Happily, the worst was over by the time I left St Louis. But EVERY river and creek I crossed was definitely over its banks! Like I wasn’t nervous enough.

NOT a good vacation. It wasn’t a bump, it was a series of steep cliffs the entire time. I suppose there’s bound to be a bad one every so often, right? But I haven’t given up; we plan to head for Washington (state) and an Alaska cruise in August. Hmm. Maybe it’s good we got this ‘bad luck’ over during this vacation.

Thoughts on Electric Cars

A power company in Missouri will be installing close to 100 vehicle power-up plugs in Northwest Missouri and the Kansas City area. “That’s nice,” was my thought. “Now, if I had an electric car, my home charge would (probably) get me to Kansas City, and that charge would get me close to St Louis. But there’s still a long distance between St Louis and Florida. I wonder if any other power companies will do the same? St Louis? Paducah? Nashville? And so on? And how far out of my way would I need to go for one of these power-ups?”

As an author, I’m an ideas person. I have to be. I have to come up with ideas about characters, plot, scenes, everything. When I write science fiction, I don’t know exactly how thing works, I just have to be convincing.

Why has everybody been designing electric cars that are good for running around your home town, but not for traveling? I like to travel. If I could do both in an electric car, I would be scrounging up pennies to get one. Instead, I had to opt for a car that got decent gas mileage on the hiway.

I keep hearing about ‘tweaks’ some car company has made - like when you apply the brakes, a slight charge is trickled back into your battery.

Why stop there?

Here’s some ideas I wish SOMEbody would incorporate into an electric car. 

1. Solar panels. They’re being put everywhere else, why not on the car’s roof, trunk lid, hood... even the fenders, doors, sides and bumpers! They don’t have to be big and clunky; they can be small and flexible. (I’m not in favor of alternating colors into a checkerboard, but maybe that’s just me.) Trickle that power into a spare or already-discharged battery, and you’ll get further before you have to pause and charge up all the batteries.

2. Wind power. Windmills are good enough to put in the fields, why not put some tiny ones on the car? A few unobtrusive intake slots, and again, you’ve got some electricity to trickle into the batteries. Just moving down the street, a vehicle has air sliding past it, why not use it?

3. Human power. For those times when the sun isn’t out, or you find yourself way out in the middle of nowhere with dead batteries, this would be your backup. Open up a panel - perhaps in the dash in front of the passenger seat - and out pops cycle pedals. If you could change the position of the pedals, you could either use your legs or your arms. Just pedal away to charge your batteries so you can get further down the road.

I actually use these ideas in some stories set in the not-too-distant future.

Okay, talk to me. What improvement would you like made to today’s electric cars?

Anticipated Cars

Anticipated Cars

When I was a kid, the next anticipated ‘improvement’ to cars would be hovercars. ‘The Jetsons’ cartoons also seemed to promise flying cars, but we figured they had to float before they could fly.

Floating cars were on our doorstep... almost. But they never arrived. Loooong before I could drive, I asked my dad what was taking so long to get hovercars ‘off the ground’.

Now, dad was a mechanic, with no formal schooling beyond high school, but his answer made sense to my less-than-10-years-old brain. The layer of air under the car had to support the car’s weight, so they had designed a rubber skirt around the bottom to keep the air from dispersing. However, they couldn’t control the car’s height precisely enough to keep the skirt touching the ground. I’ve accepted that explanation for over half a century.

Eventually, we stopped hearing about hover cars.

These days, the big thing is cars that drive themselves. Sounds good!

You see, I rather routinely drive to Orlando 2-4 times a year. In my car trunk, I have my suitcase, my husband’s luggage, my laptop, my cpap... sometimes I even take my sewing machine. Hubby flies down after a few days, and all he needs to bring is a bag of books to read and his cpap. By driving down, we don’t have to rent a car.

This is a 22-hour drive, straight through, but I can’t do that. I can’t even manage 11 hours of driving - between boredom and highway hypnosis - so it takes 3 days to get there. I love Orlando, but the drive is dreaded.

If the car drove itself, I could read, write, crochet, or just enjoy the scenery. The trip could be as enjoyable as the destination.

I imagine other transportation methods would undergo changes, if cars drove themselves. Flying is expensive, especially with luggage, so people may decide to use their car. Trains are as expensive as flying, take at least as long as driving, and the route might not be as direct, so why not take the car? As for buses... well, some things might not change that much.

Bring on the self-driving car! While you’re at it, make them electric, solar-powered, and re-chargeable in a few minutes, with plenty of recharge stations around the country.

Then we could really get somewhere.

Constellation Report 2014

This past weekend, John and I attended Constellation in Lincoln NE. I had a blast, more fun than I’ve had at a con in years, probably because I was feeling better than I have in years. Still, when we got home Sunday evening, I was too tired to write a blog. And today, I tried to catch up with some things, which took way longer than I thought it would. So I decided this week’s blog would be an edited version of my daily journal entries from the weekend:

4/25/14, Friday - got up around 8. John had said he wanted to leave around 1 pm, then at some point in the morning, he said that in order to get on the road by 1, we should probably leave the house around 11:30, to give us time to go the Credit Union and have lunch. That gave me time to print some things for panels. My first panel was 6 that evening, Exoplanets, and although the group was small, and my notes only produced a half hour panel, I think it went pretty well. I took my blue wig off before the end of the hour, it was sliding around on my head so much. If I’m going to do any costuming, I’ve got to figure out how to put on a wig properly.

4/26/14, Saturday - got up around 7 feeling good. After breakfast in the hotel restaurant, went back to the room and watched tv for a time while John was on the computer. Made John into a Klingon for the day, then went downstairs for my reading. An audience of about 6 (numbers are growing!) and at least one of them took notes on where to find my work! Again, about half an hour of reading, but I stretched it out a bit by talking to the audience about the types of books they like to read, favorite authors and so forth. Then down to the basement for my panel on alien archeologists digging up Lincoln NE and needing help figuring out what some of the items they had found were. Not a big audience, but once they understood the concept of ‘audience participation’, I think they had some fun. Again, need to find more items, as I ran out of pre-thought items, and was drawing random items on the white board, in order to get past the 1/2 hour mark.

4/27/14, Sunday - had a harder time getting up this morning. John got me up at 8, and I told him I needed another hour. That extra hour did help. When I got up, I finished packing up, then went to the con suite in search of breakfast so I could take my pills. By then, the elevators were overflowing with people trying to check out, so I walked up to our room, thinking I heard John below me in the stairwell. John had given up on elevators, and started taking suitcases to the car without a cart. Smaller items were all that was left, so I started taking them out into the hall. Couldn’t carry them all at one time, but thought I could move them down the hall towards the stairs little by little. Then John showed up and took most of it to the car, while I took my stuff down to the basement to wait for my next panel time. Bought 3 books from Tyree, and it sounds hopeful that he’s going to publish Cali. ‘First Americans’ was, again, a smallish audience, but I managed to get some comments out of them. Again, need more material, only lasted half an hour. The next panel in that room never showed up, so people wandered in and out, and everybody farbled their way through the hour. Then my last panel - Dissecting Dragons. HUGE audience! Filled up all the chairs in the room, and then some. Lots of audience participation, lasted 52 minutes (thanks to the audience participation), and many people told me they had enjoyed it.

A great weekend, for me.

Real Life

So much for getting myself organized. After recovering from my drive home from Florida, today I heard that my one remaining sister is in the hospital, having suffered a stroke. I haven't been able to complete a blog to post today, so this is a rerun from March 2010.

I keep coming up with ways ‘real life’ can be analogous to writing.  Well, give me a break; real life has conspired to give me a head cold for the trip home, and all my thoughts are sticky with ‘head cold goo’ and won’t move around well.

So, I started out in Florida, where nobody paid attention to the posted speed limit of 70.  The far left lane (of 3) was for those driving at 80+.  Then I got to Georgia, where the Florida Speedway quickly became the Georgia Parking Lot – miles of stop / creep / stop / creep.  I forget how many times it happened, pretty much the entire length of I75 through Georgia, except going through Atlanta.  And seldom, when you finally got to the point where you could speed up, was there any clue for the jam.

Did you know that if you enter Nashville on I24, and want to leave Nashville on I24, there is no lane you can get in and stay in and stay on I24?  I felt like I was playing hop scotch; skip left two lanes for a left exit, skip right one lane for a right exit, skip right another lane for another right exit, then skip left two lanes for a left exit!

Stories are kind of like that, don’t you think?  If there’s nothing getting in the protagonist’s way as you tell the story, the story zips along at 80+ mph and gets done quickly, leaving the reader to wonder what all the fuss was about.  If something does get in the way – whether you call them bumps, problems, challenges, or stalled trucks – the speed of the story will be inconsistent, and the tension will build.  Likewise, if your story line jogs here and there, as your protagonist tries this angle, and then that path, it will help to keep your reader on their toes, wondering which way the story will go next, and will the protagonist actually get where he wants to go?

So, ‘map’ out your story line, and don’t forget to add some difficulties.  Road trips never seem to go as smoothly as we expect they will, do they?  A story that travels a straight line to its obvious conclusion isn’t much of a story.