Things I've learned to say

 ...after moving to Texas.

"Wow, look at how green everything is!"

Yep, everything is relative.

Home again

 How sweet it is to be snubbed by one's own cats. Or, something like that. After breakfast this morning with Alma Boykin, in which I failed at socialization before coffee (fortunately my Calmer Half and Alma managed to do the talking thing), we hit the road. No detours this time, and almost no stops - if only because we had food, and we had a full tank of gas, and we had a pile of dirty laundry and a cooler full of ribs. 

The litterbox has been cleaned, the laundry started, the tea kit put away, half the spare clean clothes put away, and the cats have gone from purring and joyous at our arrival to full snubbing due to our absence, and in one case, a rather hilarious attempt to kill the suitcase that took her people away. 

Here's to life being back to normal!

Unreasonable standards

 This year, I brought two guns to Blogorado - the S&W Compact in .22LR, and the S&W M&P EZ in .380. (Man, that sentence is almost military or aviation in its amount of jargon/acronym, eh?) They're almost identical in the grip, so I started training with the .22 and then finished by running two mags through the .380.

The most annoying thing about trying to get better at shooting after destroying my shoulder is that I have such a small functional learning window. Like swimming after my last shoulder sprain: I loved swimming, but 20 minutes driving, ten minutes in the changing room before hand, ten minutes in the changing room after, and twenty minutes drive home gets to be extremely annoying when I can't handle more than 5 minutes of swimming at a time, and those 5 minutes are a reminder of just how much I suck compared to where I used to be. Even when I doubled my swim time, I was still at "It takes more time to shower than I spend swimming."

Which is why I don't swim anymore; I can only handle so many doses of frustration, suck, and fail before I get an attitude problem. I weightlift now, which at least doesn't require getting changed and showering, and I can see slow, steady progress charted in the logbook.

Well, today I slew the mighty steel targets (yay), until my shoulder started bitching at me. My darling man was trying to help with such advice as "You're anticipating where you're shooting next. Slow down, focus on the front sight. Take a break every 2 to 3 shots in you need to."

Right about the time I wanted to bite his head off, I instead took the car keys, and went and sat in the car, out of the wildfire smoke and dust, in the air conditioning, drinking water and shaking out two tylenol. After a few minutes, he joined me. 

"I love you." I figure this is always a good conversational opener with my darling man: a reminder that no matter what, I do love him. 

"I love you, too." He replied, and calmly waited. 

"I'm sorry." I figured this, too, was a very wise thing to get out there, on the table, sincerely meant. 

I didn't expect the confused, "For what?"

"Snapping at you. I shouldn't let pain make me bitchy! I should be better than that. And when I'm hurting and about to bite your head off, when you're the one of the two of us who knows what the heck they're doing, and are trying to give me perfectly reasonable advice... I'm sorry. That's why I went and hid in the car, and got painkillers."

My darling man proved yet again why I call him Calmer Half: He looked over at me with a smile. "No need to apologize. You did exactly the right thing." After I'd blinked at him in mild confusion, he added, "And this is why I will never do an extended training course with you. Some things, spouses are not meant to do together." 

I made an agreeable noise, and took another drink of water. 

After a while, he said, "Want to head back to the hotel, now?"

"Yes. But what I'm going to do is get back out there, and shoot the .380 so I get familiar enough with it to carry." After all, that's why I brought it. 

"All right." He nodded, and put his hand on the door handle. 

Grumpily, not liking the limitations of my body, I muttered, "And then go back to the hotel and lie down. I'm sorry." I don't like grumping and snarling around him.

"There's nothing to apologize for, love."

"I just hate not being anywhere near as good as I want to be!" 

I wasn't expecting the rueful laughter that filled the cabin. "Oh, I know. So do we all!"

Not all who wander are following GPS?

 On the road to Blogorado, we decided to take a 30-mile detour and visit Kent Rollin's new cowboy coffee shop. It's new enough that the grand opening was set for the day after we showed up. Kent's wife was lovely, gracious, and holding down the counter while a familiar face and cowboy hat was running in and out delivering box after box of supplies. 

As for the coffee? That was awesome. I got a mocha - my standard for new coffee shops, and Peter got the cowboy coffee. The mocha was a good mocha, but the cowboy coffee was really worth the drive! 

From there, we looked at the GPS, which was being its usual "interesting" self, and the routes it was trying to give us - none of which included the obvious use of I-40. Peter said, "Interstates are boring. why not?" So off on US routes and farm-to-market roads we went.

You know, if want to see a collection of small towns, and really get the feel for the land, that's certainly how to do it. And it only took about an hour longer, including the stop for gas where the whole town's internet was out, so the credit card readers couldn't. (Thank goodness for cash.)

We arrived in plenty good time, and spent the afternoon and evening hanging out with friends, eating too much, and sucking down lots of water and soda to combat the altitude and the allergens hanging thick and hazy with the wildfire smoke and dust in the air. And on the cat fur, as a barn cat named Short Round (she was the runt of the litter) came out of wherever barn cats go, and started cadging scritches, then flopped down against me and went purring off to sleep. 

As hugs were traded, along with catching up, and guns were pulled out and food piled high, I wasn't the only one who's had permanent singing tension between the shoulderblades since March, and we were starting to relax. Life is good!

As soon as the meds couldn't combat the allergen load, I turned in to shower, medicate, and sleep, which is the only reason I'm up so early... for once, I may not be a tail-end Charlie in to breakfast, muttering "coffeeeeee" like a modern day zombie!

Two months later, the anthology is out!

I don't post very often, so it was only two posts ago I was talking about being ambushed by friends and coming up with a story for an anthology. Well, it's now out! 

 

Tales Around the Supper Table: -An Anthology of Texas Writers-

Alma TC Boykin- Pigmentum Regium;
Monalisa Foster- Caliborne's Curse;
Dorothy Grant- Business not Bullets;
Kathey Grey- The Invisible Train;
Pam Uphoff- Runaway;
JL Curtis- A Favor Owed;
Jonathan LaForce- Knights and Dragons;
Peter Grant- Starting over;
Lawdog- Bad Night in Falls Town;
John Van Stry- They Only Ever Just Send One;
Wayne Whisnand- For a Child.

Alma has a dragon working on Alchemy, Peter has a prequel on how Tyler Reese came to partner in the old west with Walt Ames, before the start of the series. 

Monalisa has a hilarious take on urban fantasy and actuaries, and LawDog has a hilarious take on vampires... in Wichita Falls. "The people around here don't do intricacies. They do dynamite and bulldozers at noon."

I have a trader trying to build up a lost colony by shipping spices - described around the writing table as "The challenge of doing business in space Afghanistan." 

By the way, if you want to do business with some crazy, determined people who are trying this very thing in modern-day Afghanistan?

Rumi Spice is sourcing saffron, black cumin, fennel, and other spices out of Afghanistan - bringing fresh, high-quality spice to the USA and funneling the profits, with as few middlemen as possible, straight back into the people there, trying to build a living for them and that doesn't involve opium or endless wars, and invest in the local infrastructure.

One minor word of warning: the cumin is so fresh and strong that I have to halve it for most recipes, as they assume you're getting ground cumin what might have sat going stale on a supermarket or spice cupboard shelf for over a year.

Chicken Kedra with Almonds & Onions

I have discovered one feature of that takes the Instant Pot from "Yet another gadget cluttering the kitchen" to Awesome Device: the ability to pull the meat out of the soupy sauce and hit "saute" to reduce it down.

The downfall of the slow cooker is that it often leaves dishes far soupier than I want - especially when I don't want to serve them on couscous, crackers, biscuits, or rice. This doesn't quite eliminate that, but it goes a long way to correcting it without the danger inherent in pouring hot liquid from one vessel to another, and back!

This is first pass at adapting a dish to the new device, making it simple enough I can cook it on a day when I don't have the time, patience, or pain tolerance for 3 hours in the kitchen attending simmering dishes.

Chicken Kedra with Almonds and Onions (Instant Pot)

1 can chickpeas, drained
1 cup blanched almond slivers
2 pounds chicken thighs, thawed
1 cup warm water
1 pinch saffron threads
1/2 Tablespoon chicken better than bullion
1 teaspoon white pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1 large cinnamon stick
1/4 teaspoon ground tumeric
2 Tablespoons ghee or butter
2 large onions
1/4 cup chopped flat parsley
Juice of 1 lemon, or to taste

Drop the saffron threads in the warm water and let them soak while prepping everything else.
Toss ghee (or butter if you don't have any) in the Instant pot. Add the ground spices, and cinnamon stick.
Pull out the food processor. Turn one onion into tiny grated near-paste. Leave the lid on! Or, if you hate your tear ducts, grate the onion. Chop the second onion into thin slivers.
Turn on the Instant Pot to saute. Stir spices and ghee, so they can heat a little. Add grated onion and bullion to pot, stir.
Wait a moment, then add chicken. You can let sit on saute for a couple minutes while everything blends a little.
Turn off saute, and add chickpeas, saffron water, and slivered onion on top of the chicken.
Put lid on, seal vent, and set to high for 10 minutes.
Let release pressure naturally for 10 minutes, then pull lid off. If too soupy for you, pull out chicken, and hit saute to reduce down to a thick sauce.
When at the correct for you thickness, add in the parsley and lemon juice, and turn off the heat. Add chicken back in, stir, and serve. 

Two months late and two thousand words over...

Some time ago, I wasn't paying enough attention and got voluntold into an anthology for the North Texas Writers, Shooters, and Pilots Association. As in, by the time I looked up from the food to figure out why I'd been mentioned, I was already in. Oops.

I warned the people involved that this was a bad idea; I had two books out and was working on a third, and had no idea how to write a short story. I told them not to expect anything from me. I flat out stated I was finishing the third book first!

It didn't get me out of it. Friends have these unreasoning expectations and somehow we find ourselves trying to live up to them...

So, several months, three how-to books on shorts, quite a few anthologies read, and four false-starts later... (Those ended up being chunks of novels that went nowhere or were discarded because they weren't the short story I wanted. Look, I haven't even figured out sequels yet, and those are still novel length! (As for those 4 starts, they're in the scraps folder. Someday, I may figure them out and be able to revise and finish. I want to; one's arid-land farming in alien ruins, and the things that farmers know but never talk to archaeologists or town clowns about.))

The deadline blew past like the air force boys overhead in T-38's practicing low-level formation flight. And to be honest, the frustration at being unable to figure this out was not nearly as bad as the feeling that I'd let the guys down.

Due to... well, mainly a lot of things blowing up and going stupid in a lot of people's lives, which we've all been suffering this year, the anthology was delayed. Jim Curtis gave me this look over food and informed me I wasn't off the hook; he still expected me to rise to the challenge.

In a fit of pure frustration, I gave up and started writing the next thing that came to mind. I thought it was another novel. And then I realized that it may be a novel's worth of worldbuilding, because my brain can't stop thinking through economics and the intersections of culture, technology, and humanity. But the story itself, set in all that? It doesn't care about the two-front war and how strange and imprecise front lines will get when there's all of space with its many uninhabitable star systems that no one cares about. It only concerns two people with nearly diametrically opposed goals and cultures.

In fact, it came out as a novelette. (When's the last time you heard that word?) At almost 13K words, it was a little too long for a short story, and a little to short for a novella. Way too short for a novel.

I wasn't certain I'd gotten it right, even though my brain said it was finished and nothing more was going to happen. So, I chopped a couple scenes and got it down to down to 12.3K. Then I sent it out to alpha readers, saying "Is this a complete story or the first few chapters of something?"

Based on feedback, it is a complete story arc that needed a little editing to clarify the ending, though half my betas liked as is, and half want it expanded into a novel. Jim was still waiting patiently for a short, so I eyed it with the intent of editing out 2.3K words, and hey, I'd have a short story!

Besides, as my darling man pointed out, expanding short stories into novels later is a long and glorious pulp tradition, so there was no reason not to do both. I may have given him the hairy eyeball and grumped that the backbrain was supremely uninterested in doing that, and besides, not only have I still not figured out sequels, I also missed figuring out a short by over two thousand words, and he expects me to pick up yet another skill set I don't have?

Being my husband, he smiled, and offered crème brulee and black rifle coffee. I forgive him everything!

I rewrote the story, especially the ending, cut out a lot more, and explained a little more here, added a character interaction there because it'd work better than an infodump, and... it went from 12.3K words to 12.5K

This was not the direction toward the 10K word cutoff for the anthology I wanted.

Jim Curtis took it anyway.

So in a few months, y'all may get to enjoy a not-so-short story of a spice and tea trader doing business in the colony world equivalent of modern-day Afghanistan, her extended family whose plans to take care of her are anything but helpful, and the soldier who intentionally gets himself caught in the middle...