An Era of Limited Choices

 My Calmer Half is doing better, and sleeping better. It's a hallmark of how bad things had gotten that I can see daily improvement... and means that as he gets better, he runs into the same hard and soft limitations that I remember after medical misadventures. 

"I can do that!" does not, in fact, mean he can do that. It means he feels well enough he feels like he can do that.

"I'll just.." There is no just. There is a lifting limitation for a reason.

"It's under 10 pounds! I can lift it!" does not, in fact, mean he can lift it from that angle, or bend low enough to put it away, or lift it repeatedly. 

I feel for him, I really do... because I've been there too many times to count (I did get smarter after the fifth shoulder dislocation. Of course, I also got out of my twenties, so cause/effect is debatable there). 

It gets better. For now, we laugh, we love, I lift, we go on. 

Want something new to read?

 It's a well-acknowledged fact that no author can write fast enough to fill the demand for good books by their readers. As such, let me present to you a book a I beta-read for a friend, and happily bought and read again for enjoyment when it came out. 

Nick Nethery's Relics of the Fallen is all of the scifi, all of the military camaraderie, none of the romance, and all of the humour, including some hilarious digs at the city of Killeen as only someone who's been stationed there could do. Also, heartwarming family interactions that make me strongly suspect they were pulled from real life, because they read real and true.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FM8HRD5J/&tag=httpbayoure09-20

...and you know what happens when you've been away from blogger for months? I can't figure out how to upload an image anymore. They "improved" it. Click the link to see the cover, eh?

To Paraphrase Samwise Gangee

 "Well, we're home."

Surgery went well, recovery had a few complications, all handled. We overnighted not far from the hospital so he could get some rest (catch up on sleep compared to blood tests every 4 hours) and drove home today. 

Friends of mine talk about the ADHD tax - the extra they spend because they forgot things until the last minute, or lost track of something and had to get another (a common complaint to all mechanics and certain sizes of sockets). I have discovered the introvert tax: the freeway from Dallas to Fort Worth was travelling at speed, clear of jams, and yet I still ended up taking the tollway because it got me away from That Guy in a BMW who didn't believe in turn signals or reasonable lane changes. After he nearly wiped out a car 40 feet in front of me with nowhere I could dodge that wasn't into another vehicle... 

The controlled access of the expressway seemed like a bargain at twice the price to be away from him, and the future organ donor on the rice rocket, and the semi that wasn't too keen on staying in any lane...

Dallas is a lovely place to visit. I am very, very glad to be home with my love, where the only irate and unpredictable critter is an ancient arthritic Kili-cat who's swinging between "I love you!" and "I'm going to follow you from room to room so you can see I'm snubbing you!"

Next up: healing, followed by physical therapy, followed by more surgery. I'd include Young Frankenstein jokes in that timeline, but to be honest, I already started those the first time I lost track counting the number of staples in him. "It's ALIIIIVE!"

Spite: it gets things done.

On the last day of my work week, my coworkers reminded me that I'm supposed to be decorating a pumpkin for the work party this weekend. That is, they were gleefully comparing felts and paints and various ways to bedazzle a pumpkin. I had forgotten about this, because of the hours I'd been dealing with Day Job.

I originally wasn’t going to enter the pumpkin decoration contest, until they quite innocently, with no malice aforethought, noted that they expected the limits of my creativity would be to bring a pumpkin with “Scary” scribbled on it in sharpie.

Which is how I find myself writing again, in fits and starts, and running around town trying to find a kid’s trenchcoat, paint, and 3 pumpkins that’ll stack so I can have 3 racoons in a trench coat, pumpkin version.

Of course, I also have access to Cedar Sanderson, and not just her paints and brushes, but her amused ability to paint. So in the end, it's not so much a demonstration of my craftiness, as my ability to delegate. And I'm okay with that.

Spite. It gets things done. 

I love this man so much

So, I come home after getting the weekly allergy shot.

Calmer Half: "How was it?"

Me, sticking my lower lip out, and letting my inner child complain: "I got shot!"

My Calmer Half grins, and starts to stand up and pull off his shirt. "Wanna see where I got shot? I'll show you mine if you show me yours!" 

***

It's been a hell of a year, but with love and a sense of humour, we'll make it through. 

I'm blameable like beer

Been sick the last 5 weeks, so not much happening on the writing front. House renovation from the dishwasher's fill valve failing full on proceeds slowly. I have no words lately. Lots of steroids and antibiotics, but no fiction. On the other hand, this doesn't stop me from being an influence on my friends, whether for good or for ill. 

CV Walter and Cedar Sanderson are in a little text chat with me, useful for hashing out who's going to the farmer's market and would they pick up the CSA box, or discussing cover art, or stories we like that are not in genres the gents would enjoy, or hey, Aldi has this back in stock, or getting feedback on the latest chapter of a WIP, or there's a great sale on breakfast sausage at Red Barn Butchers...

And someone, who shall remain nameless, was bemoaning the fact that they wanted to get more writing done. (Three someones out of three on the chat, really.) But one of them allowed as how they really missed doing Flash Fiction Friday, where they'd come up with a prompt, and then everyone had to write a thousand word story by the end of the... I think it was the end of the weekend. It's been a couple years.

(I failed to follow the directions, and worked at least one prompt into a chapter of the novel in progress, while they wrote flash fiction. "Cole's cooking cornbread." If you find that line, now you know...)

So, why not restart it? Because her Fridays are now booked solid to overbooked... and she doesn't want to do something as small as flash fiction, this time, she wants to do short stories. which would take even more time out of her weekend that she doesn't have to give. 

Me, being me, saw this as no impediment. If Fridays are booked, just move it! If the deadline of 3 days is too short, make it a week! Adapt, improvise, overcome!

So about the time I was making a joke about tentacles (The current WIP includes satire of certain subgenres. It has a Kraken who is disappointed that he has two humans, but they're not a mated pair. Ryleh keeps trying to give his humans well-meant but wildly species-inappropriate mating advice.), I also replied, "So, make it Taco Tuesday!"

Somehow, these two things ran together in my friends' minds (I don't pry), and the running gag of Taco Tuesday With Tentacles was born, grew legs (or tentacles?) and took off running.

Next thing I know, they've both written a story by the deadline for the first week. And they both blamed me! One in the foreword, one in the afterword. I mean, once I took the obvious cheap shot about getting getting it in front and behind at the same time by two  romance authors... all I could do was laugh, and agree that I'm very blameable. 

You know, like beer: a beverage exists to be regretted, and blamed the next day for all that you accomplished, and the manner and style in which it was done.

Cedar is building her romance pen-name, with a sweet romance of a chance encounter on a desert planet under deadly circumstances... (What? I didn't suggest it! She still blamed me...) with Djinn (Available on Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRVTL8Y1 )

CV Walter did a short story that's "the start of the happily ever after you knew would come" set after one of her romances, Pursued by the Alien Pilot, and has it available in her substack, here: https://cvwalter.substack.com/p/january-update-and-a-free-story

The story itself is sweet, and the book it's following isn't that steamy. The series has plenty of spice, though! If that sounds like fun to you, this is the specific book to read first before the taco tuesday story: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09SYBG9S7

I have no idea what those two will do by next Tuesday. One's off at a convention, and the other just helped me pack my entire pantry, and demolish the OSB-and-bent-screws shelving the prior owner left us. Maybe they'll be too tired and busy. Or maybe exhaustion and sleep deprivation will mean this time, round, Taco Tuesday (With Tentacles) might actually have tacos. Or tentacles.

I don't judge. I feed them and make amusing suggestions, or advice that seemed like a good idea at the time...

Looking for something else to read?

There's no way I can write fast enough for my readers, so I want to recommend a series I ran into while looking for anything else that might be in the same odd niche as Combined Operations. It's just as tactical, and just as much tangled into the personal and the realpolitik, though despite what you'd expect from the covers, there's almost no romance in it. In fact, it's best if you just ignore the covers, and enjoy the stories. (Seriously. Ignore the covers. I hope he sells enough to fund new covers!)

Thomas Doscher's The Vixen War Bride series is set well after the galactic battles, the human colonies wiped from the face of their planet, and the fleets of starships fighting an alien menace. Instead, this is a human-scale military series, about the war for hearts and minds both of Captain Ben Gibson's human Rangers, left high and dry with orders to occupy a rural backwater in the conquered enemy's homeworld because they have nowhere else to go...

And the vulpine enemy, whose culture they never knew. Armed with only their weapons, their ability to adapt, improvise, and overcome, and an interpreter who's grasp on the local language is at best on a three year old's level, Gibson is setting out to make the best of a bad situation.

He isn't the only one. The local priestess has decided that in order to save her people from the vengeance of the conquerors, she need to be the token sacrifice. Armed with courage and inspiration, she demands he marry her, and succeeds... Only to realize that now she has to figure out how to tell him what he's done. 

Cross-cultural communications and the nature of people at their best, and their worst, are handled with a deft touch and light humor in this series, with both viewpoints shown so the reader can delight in the attempts at two very different people with limited communication to forge a path toward true peace.

You'll also enjoy the hijinks of bored enlisted, and the tense moments of dealing with the problems of repatriating guerillas, as well as the many small incidents, day after day, full of  unfounded assumptions, revelations, laughter, and tears as they work together and at cross-purposes to establish trust... despite the latest dictates from the far-away army headquarters, and the deep-seated prejudices on both sides.

A surprisingly heart-warming set of military scifi tales; highly recommended.