What we've been doing around here...
Dinner is cooking. It's chicken and rice with root vegetables and a Greekish dill yogurt sauce.
I have spent most of the day working on White Space #3, The Folded Sky, which is giving me a wrestle on the "getting into the narrative front." I've tried three different inciting incidents now and don't like any of them, so it's back to the drawing board to try to find inciting incident #4. Who was it who first said to throw out your first three ideas? Well, there it is.
Last week I took a break from trying to come up with inciting incidents for this book and tried to come up with an inciting incident for a different book, so I could write that incident up as a proposal and send it off to my agent, so she could try to sell it and keep us both fed and housed.
You know, so it goes.
I've been thinking about social media, which is less and less fun for me as time goes by.
Instagram has started dumping you into your rear-facing camera to go live or make a "story" when you hit the post button, and frankly I hate it with the passion of a blinding suns. It seems like you have to quit out and then go back in to get the option of just making, you know, a photo post? I don't want to be on TikTok.
If I wanted to be on TikTok, I would first have to be half my age...
Hah, anyway. I am too old to be a cool kid. Or even have fomo about what the cool kids are doing. It's kind of pleasant.
So anyway, there goes instagram making itself even more unusable. And I have to say, the Al Gore-rithms are making it easier and easier to step back and spend less time on social these days, since they make it impossible to actually keep up with, you know, my friends and colleagues. Which is why I was here in the first place.
Whine, whine, whine. I'm turning fifty in four months. Does it show?
Anyway, speaking of things to do on the internet that are actually fun, there will be a Virtual 4th Street Fantasy convention this year. I've recorded a panel for it ("Personalizing the Apocalypse") with a remarkable cast of brilliant people, and we will be doing a live Q&A for attendees on the weekend of June 18th.
If you would like to "attend," you can register here! Moneys collected go toward paying off hotel expenses, and if you would like to make a donation, the convention is a 401(c) nonprofit organization, which means donations are tax-deductible.
In other news, the irises are finishing up; the roses are starting; and we are going to have to take down a beautiful giant ash tree in the back yard because it is not recovering from storm damage from last year's hurricane, alas. This saddens me enormously, sigh. But I am trying to convince myself that this is an excellent opportunity to plant something else wonderful in its place.
I wanted an American Chestnut, but the blight-resistant ones are not on the market yet, so I am contemplating a blight-resistant American Elm, a hardy pecan, or a super splashy cultivar of sugar maple with bright bright vermilion fall foliage. The pecan is probably the most climate-change-surviving option, and the squirrels would love me for it...
My heart kind of wants that bright red-orange sugar maple though. ;)
What are you folks having for dinner tonight?
Best,
Bear