Aim High

You know when it's coming time for soccer matches by the sound of shotguns. Nobody knows who actually released the first breeding pairs of kindergeier on American shores. The surviving urban left blames it on some fringe right-wing "get off my lawn" types, and the right blames it on the left's "we need to return to mother gaia" types (given they were behind the wolf reintroduction and effectively banned wolf hunting until it was irrefutable that the Northern Dire Wolf was indeed neither natural nor sticking to their mad scientist's lair far away from jogging trails.) I personally suspect it was some mad scientist who either didn't live long enough to take the credit, or was too ashamed of the real results of releasing fifteen-foot flying predators on American suburbia and rural habitats.

You see, they were beautiful and scary predators when in Africa (and who was the very drunk Afrikaner who confused one with a lammergeier, anyway? They're clearly mostly pterodacytl.) Once the average suburban mom realized their child was in danger... well, now we hold combined soccer and sporting clays, and every mom encouraging little Johnny or Susie on has a shotgun loaded with depleted uranium. Sure, they're shooting small clay disks - but the real competition is to see which team can bring down a kindergeier attracted by the sound and sight of a lot of children running around an open field. According to the records, soccer games these days are a whole lot more civilized, now that every audience member has a shotgun. I'm not so certain about that - because the ladies don't put their shotguns down when they go indoors for the PTA meetings, under the certainty that "predators are always out there." And you should see some of the, ah, more aggressively run meetings when a new educator or teacher imported from the concrete jungles and their liberal arts schools tries to bring the Old Progressive ideals of Re-Education up...

(We've also lost a couple teachers in our district, over the years, who didn't realize that the juveniles go after children, but the adults will just as happily go after a full-sized human. Lost a lot of ATF agents, too, but not many moonshiners - city folks never look up.)

Leafing out

Kudzu may have been the most successful plant in terms of fast growth that an evil overlord has released on the world, but it is eventually doomed to failure since nobody likes it. His mentor's evil abomination that will take over the world, mint, is far more successful - although the old man, if he hadn't been killed by some vigilantes with torches and pitchforks, would have objected to me calling all his strains by one single "mint."

Sadly, those evil geniuses working on the plant-based domination have to contend with smaller successes than the ones bent on hydrogen bombs or earthquakes tearing California off the continent (even if the latter seems to have a large number of sympathizers who keep smuggling his research notes out to satellite minion labs.) However, they are much longer lasting - while the ability to control the Vile Felines that stalk men didn't quite work out, we're all pretty pleased at "catnip" anyway, as the flowers will draw the 180-pound predators mindlessly into even the most obvious trap, and leave the wooded suburbs and exurban prairies safer for our children to play. (If the city dwellers are too afraid of guns to plant the traps, well, they're welcome to be hunted in their concrete jungles.)

Yeah, that one will work out for generations to come, a positive and lasting legacy for Dr. Menthe. Though personally, I'm even fonder of the chocolate mint - made, I'm told, to try to keep his Chief Assistant happier once a month. Whatever the actual reason (though I'm pretty sure a woman was involved in there somewhere), it's made the supply of something chocolate much steadier, and the female half of the population much easier to get along with - even when the kraken disrupt the flow of coffee and cacao northward.

Still wish he'd gotten a good coffee mint growing before he met his untimely end.

Fuzzy Pictures and bribes - good news!

If Teddy Roosevelt had been a crane wrangler instead of a Rough Rider and later President of the United States, he would have modified his famous philosophy of foreign policy with the statement, “Walk softly and carry a big worm”… mealworm, that is because there’s just nothing in this big bad world that compares with the magical persuasive power of a mealworm when you want to coax a crane chick into doing something unnatural like following the trike.

It's that time of year again - whooping crane chicks are hatching, and learning to move their fuzzy little butts to follow a trike around and around!

They're kinda reverse-malamutes: they start brown and grow up to be white, where malamutes start white with cinnamon color and grow up to get nice dark top coats. Both puppies and chicks are very, very cute.

Check out Operation Migration for good news of the fuzzy and peeping variety. Operation Migration - In The Field

Taking the Star Road

Calmer Half published his first fiction book last week, Take The Star Road, and it's been the strangest feeling to watch it spread its wings and fly up the Amazon bestseller list. On the one hand, it's fascinating from a watching-data point of view to watch the interplay of quantity and velocity of sales with listings, and to see how readers react and review, on blog and on amazon. It's like watching a slow-motion unfolding of a flower, to see the way that reviews spread from a few sites to, one book-reading length of time later, spreading across the blogs.

Please understand, I am very grateful to all the readers who have taken a chance on an unknown author and tried him, whether they finished the book or not, much less left a review or told a friend about it. The willingness to try and unknown first-book author is a gift I do not hold lightly! I am also fascinated by how they see it; after going 'round and 'round with revisions and reviews, watching my Calmer Half learning techniques and trying them out, I have long since become unable to see the story for the ghosts of the past five versions between the words on the page and myself. To watch people seeing the final product with fresh eyes is like playing tourist with visiting friends; it makes the old home city exciting and new again.

I've also found myself laughing at the disconnect between information addiction and reality. We all know reality doesn't move at internet speed (except when it does), and the volume of information out there doesn't mean that things are happening quickly. There is no useful data to be gained by checking sales more than once a day, because sales happen at the rate they happen, and in books, you're dealing with a product that will take consumers anywhere from a night to two weeks to find the time to read and react to (longer, if they're busy and there's another book ahead in the queue. Perhaps we shouldn't have released so close to Larry Correia's release of Warbound, but Take The Star Road was ready to launch.) I can't hurry reality, no matter how much I want to know if this bird will dive or fly. The smartest thing to do, all authors agree, is to not read reviews (as they're for readers by readers, not for authors by readers), not check sales, and concentrate on the next book. I know this. I react to this sage advice about as well as I do to a low-carb diet; by sneaking emergency chocolate out of the chocolate cache after dinner, and peeking at sales and reviews anyway.

Ah, well. Due to waiting too long and then not doing well at emergency planting when I was still in a brace, (the plants were getting rootbound,) everything but the eggplant, asparagus, and mint has died or failed to thrive, and the eggplant is iffy. On the other hand, the basil, thyme, dill, and rosemary indoors are leaning toward the sun from the window and doing just fine. That will have to do for things growing this year, and at least we'll have herbs and a book. The time I save gardening,(other than contemplating whether I should mow the mint with the yard as a precautionary measure; it's the mad scientist of herbs, out for world domination) I can spend lining up words with all the care of a Rube Goldberg contraption. The description of the next book won't write itself, and I still need to choose cover art and buckle down on getting the print version of the first out. It's going to be an adventure, both across the stars in the story and from day to day in the writer's household.

Cleanup

For the first time in weeks, I can hold a broom or a mop handle. This is awesome, and sorely needed. Unfortunately, released to "brace as needed" is not the same as fully healed, and the floors, well, they're so dirty you'd think they hadn't been swept or mopped in weeks.

Solution: for every room I sweep, and every room I mop, I get a glass of mead and some internet time. This encourages me to finish each room, and to take a rest break afterward. On the downside, this means after a few rooms, I've really lost all motivation to get up out of this chair and go do another. On the other hand, I think the injured limb is about done for the day anyway.

Now for a very weird fact: did you know down here in the south, land of 8 inch long pine needles, they bundle those pine needles together and sell them as "pine straw bales"? My mind, it is well and truly blown. According to the gent who showed them to me, as well as gave me prices for renting a tiller, "They're mostly used on flowerbeds, ma'am. The birds will also steal more of the wheat straw for building their nests."

It's a whole different world down here. I'll think I've got a handle on the culture, and then I stumble onto something like that, where "everybody knows" but a transplanted Alaskan.

P.S. J. R. Shirley - Lydia Bailey is on the way. Thanks for the recommendation!

A Good Day

The plane has passed her annual, and is waiting at the hangar, ready to fly.

The doc released me from the splint, provisionally, dependent on good behavior and progress in physical therapy.

A Ladies Love Taildraggers volunteer called, reminding me of their annual fly-in coming up.

After work, I found a bag of chocolates waiting all gooshy-warm in the car from a day in the sunshine. (I love my husband.)

It's a good day.

Hope you're all having a good day, too!

A Few Good Men - Good Read

I realized I've been selfishly keeping a book all to myself that I oughta share with y'all, because you'll like it. It has explosions, and political machinations, hilarious one-liners and jailbreaks, aerial battles, a pig in a dress, a dog named Goldie (the blonde of the dog world if ever there was one), misguided idealists, subversives on the side of right, central planning's consequences, unhappy merchants, confusion, chaos, and glorious fun. A Few Good Men, by Sarah Hoyt.

If John Ringo's March Upcountry was a retelling of Xenophon's Anabasis, then this? This is America, 1774-1778... From the initial inevitable (now that we look back) first clashes to the troops on the move. We don't get all the way to the end of the revolution. Although, given it starts with a jailbreak, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was the French Revolution there for a few chapters - pretty dicey on which way it'd fall on human nature versus human planning and reaching for something better. (I'll have to ask Jenny, of Cradle of Liberty, what she thinks - because the more of our revolution I learn, the more messy it becomes, full of humans and political pressures and cultures of the day, and the more nods to it I see in this book.)

This is a book that takes the idea that "the one right farm boy turned hero will automatically rule the kingdom well", and blows it into flaming chunks. It centers around a tyrant's son who stumbles out of solitary as an almost unintended aside to someone else's jailbreak, to find his father dead, his brother recently assassinated, and himself now the heir to a city-state. His household, the only people he can trust not to want him dead, needs him to take the reigns of power to keep the place from being carved up by the ruling cabal. Even they, though, aren't what they seem; they're riddled with rebels who are looking for a time and place to start a glorious new republic.

Luce's inability to be the tyrant his father was creates a power vacuum, and there are many, many forces and factions rushing to break the stasis and the status quo to seize it. Even his allies may prove as dangerous as his enemies... and his enemies are very dangerous indeed.

That only covers the first few chapters, and doesn't even start to get to the pig in a dress. You'll have to figure that one out yourself, by reading it. But beware - woven in with all the action, there are a couple places where she should have put Class IV beverage alerts in there!

Ebook option at Amazon (linked above), and all formats at Baen Webscriptions. First 10 chapters free here. Enjoy!