Percolator In Action

From my backyard: A cecropia moth visited our trampoline.

While I haven't had a change to write a darn thing lately, the time away from doing so has allowed my subconscious percolator to do its thing. Three things I've accomplished this week without physically accomplishing anything (writing related):

1. At long last, I've happened upon a title for the sequel to Trust. Now called: Chains of Gray. That only took several years...

2. I've discovered that I seem fond of two themes throughout several of my stories--which are otherwise unrelated. One is the color gray (or grey, as I prefer to see it) having some significance in various ways. The other is genetics - either the manipulation of, breaking down of or restrictions based upon them. It started with Trust, then went in another direction in A Broken Race and splintered into Devolution. Now its continuing on in the as yet untitled (Egads, yet another project to title. Let's hope that doesn't take years, shall we?) prequel to A Broken Race. Neither thing was intentional in its multiple manifestations. Giving the percolator time to wander through my stories while my body was busy allowed it to make these connections and point them out to me. At which point I profoundly said, "Huh. Weird."

3. I've had time to work on troubleshooting the aforementioned Devolution. That short story has been languishing in my 'rework' folder for well over a year. I've got the conflict down its just finding the right *bang* for the resolution that totally escapes me as of yet. It's not a twist kind of story and that might be what's tripping me up. At least this gives the percolator something to chew on while the rest of me is off in worker drone mode.

Have you noticed any unintentional repeating of things in your stories?

Dragon myself through the week

From this side it looks angry.

It's been a crazy busy week. You'd think being down one kid (he's working at Boy Scout camp for two weeks) would make for a little extra time, but no. Work has continued to devour what would usually be my writing time. Which also is my critiquing time, so sadly, I've also fallen woefully behind there too. On the slightly brighter side, I have been able to devote some subconscious effort to percolating submission pieces for A Broken Race, which is nearly ready to head out into Queryland.

While I've been so busy, I have managed to carve out a little craft time with my daughter. She's been in a 'let's make dragons out of clay' mode lately. Who am I to argue? So I sat down with her and a ball of air dry clay and we made dragons.

At this angle its more friendly.

Admittedly, I made this dragon over a month ago (work has been at crazy level for quite awhile). I then moved it to the corner of my kitchen counter where stuff that sits around collects. I figured that if it sat there, I'd remember to make time to also sit with my daughter and paint it. Great intention.

It sat there for a week and got hit with some random something that I set on the counter. One wing, a foot and several back spines fell off. I swore. Profusely. Then I got my glue gun out and fixed it.

I moved my repaired and still unpainted dragon to my desk in an 'out of the way' place so it would be safe until I got around to painting it. While it was in this safe place, it seems that I managed to smash it with a tape gun in a flurry of shipping packages for work. All that stuff that broke before, fell off again. Only this time, the wing shattered. Again, I swore profusely. I didn't fix it.

The poor dragon and its broken bits sat in a pile of clay dust for several weeks. You might say it was daring me to fix it and I was ignoring it because I was still pissed that I'd broken it again before I had made time to paint the darn thing.

Finally, after a late dinner, I hauled out my box of paints and my glue gun. The dragon got fixed. Again. It also got a base coat. Then it sat on the table for two days until I stepped away from another twelve hour day and a late dinner to begin the brain numbing process of painting scales. Four days later, its finally done.

The dragon has now been placed in an actual safe place. And if fate has it's way with the dragon again, at least I have these photos.

Getting away from it all

From my pond: Suicidal stag beetles.
For the record, they suck at swimming,
but keep coming into the pond anyway. 

The juggling of submissions is still going on, as is an overwhelming work load. So what do I do? Leave.

I planned to be gone for most of four days, but only manged three thanks to the insane heat and deer flies. I hate deer flies. I hate mosquitoes too, but together, they are a force I'd rather not reckon with. So yes, my answer to the near triple digit heat and bugs? Leave.

It wasn't all bad though. I did get to relax a little. I swam a lot in a gorgeous little spring-fed lake. And I sweated. A lot. Probably lost a few pounds. The night sky was beautifully black as opposed to home with all the city lights interfering. And there was much reminiscing.

I hadn't been to that campground since 1989, the last year we went camping as a family when I still lived at home. After my mother's sudden death, all family camping ground to a halt. It was sad but fun to go back to visit a place where we'd all relaxed together. Now my own family has been there too. It was a peaceful sort of reclaiming happy memories, part of my ongoing twenty-three year and counting search for closure sort of thing.

Now that the camping supplies are put back in order and stored away until next month, laundry is done and the house is relatively cleaned, it's time to get back into the swing of things.

Sort of.

I'm still counting today as being on vacation. Which means I'm working as little as possible. I'm not editing. I'm not designing and I'm certainly not producing anything. I have answered all my emails and I did finally manage to read Steven Brust's Dragon this weekend. That's only been sitting in my TBR pile for a year now, along with far too many other books. Oh, free time, how I miss you. I enjoyed hanging out with Vlad again. It's been years, and he's one of my favorite characters to read.

Tomorrow, I'll get back to work, but today, darn it, I'm relaxing.

Camp, edits and balls

Trala runs screaming through the paper-lined paths. "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"

"What the heck are you talking about?" Delilah asks, peering upward. "Holy crap. She's right. Run!"

Nekar stands his ground beside Ms. Wildstar. They both watch as a wad of cloth plummets to the floor. Nekar gives it a minute to settle before examining it closer.

"Why the mass of terrycloth?" asks Blue.

Ms. Wildstar shakes her head. "It's a towel."

Nekar extracts a crumbled post-it note from within the wad and straightens it. "She Who Taps the Keys has officially thrown in the the towel on Camp NaNo." 

Delilah creeps out from the paper wads. "She finished?"

Blue holds up his translator. "Perhaps you should get one of these." He sighs. "It's a phrase meaning-"

"What's on the post-it note?" asks Ms. Wildstar.

"Story titles." A steady whump, whump, whump sounds overhead.

Trala takes another hysterical lap. "The sky! It's falling!"

Blue snakes out a tentacle and trips her. He whistles to himself as he backs away. 

"Is she submitting again?"

"Five stories at once. Hence the juggling. If you hear any hint of swearing. Do run. Worse than the sky, balls will fall on your head."

Ms. Wildstar nods. "That explains the editing snow of random words that fell thickly over the weekend." 

Nekar reaches over to pluck a shred of paper from her hair. "Hey, you got a nod on you."

"Oh god, get it off!" She shudders. "They were everywhere! I thought I'd burned them all."

"We should make sure there aren't any more laying around. The damn things breed like dust bunnies." Nekar leads Ms. Wildstar into the pathways.

Still working on that New Year's Resolution

Back in those last few minutes of 2011, I pledged that this year I would embrace the word Less. I am pleased to announce another milestone in my efforts toward that end. This weekend I wrapped up my four year stint as a Girl Scout leader.
While there were some proud moments during those years, I can't say that this is something I'm going to miss terribly. It was something I let myself get roped into for my shy daughter's sake, and because I thought I could bring something to the program that our troop was missing - namely a craft lady and organization.

We've decorated and tool aprons,assembled hygiene kits, and this year, made blankets for a local women's support organization. We've made cards for service people and place mats for the elderly. We earned bunches of badges, sold car loads of cookies and went on some fun end of the year reward trips together. We hung out at a big mall and made Girl Scout build-a-bears. We went to a big water park where some of the girls had their first big night away from home in a pretty awesome hotel. We went camping, which many of our girls had never done. This year we went to a smaller water park and also went horseback riding, which, again, many of our girls had never done. We went roller skating and bowling discovered local art museums, pet stores, parks and countless other field trip locations.

These girls all went into this as girls who went to school together, but came out as friends. There were even some unlikely exchanges of phone numbers and promises of hanging out over the summer happening on the way home yesterday. I hope they follow through and look fondly on all the pictures they took together in the coming years.
Both of us current leaders are passing the torch to a new pair of brave souls. I wish the new leaders luck and patience.

Why wouldn't I miss what seems so sound rather like a warm-fuzzy-fest from this post?

No more pressure to attend the monthly leader meetings and no more planning meetings cramming into the frantic end of summer. Two less after school troop meetings a month - which also means no more last minute phone calls of:
- Did you get snack or do I have to?
- OMG! Do we have paperwork from everyone for this field trip today?
- I'm so far behind at work, I'm going to be late. Oh crap, you're going to be late too? Ahhh!

No more:
- Wading through piles of emails from the local leadership
- Feeling guilty that I couldn't squeeze more of the fun local opportunities for the girls into my schedule
- Filling out troop paperwork
- Having to run to the store to get last minute craft supplies for projects I didn't have time to set up because of work.
- Having to call thirteen parents to remind them of what their daughters need to bring to our next event.
- Composing last minute notes to send home to try to avoid those thirteen phone calls before an event.
- Waiting for twenty minutes at the end of every meeting for the same two parents who never remember to pick up their kids even though our meeting gets done at the same time every time.
- Dealing with other leader drama from the other troop at our school.

Yes it was fun, but it was a lot of work too. And so, with fond memories intact, I will undo a knot from my superwoman cape, allowing a little more neck room, and walk a few feet closer to the sunset.