Goodbye 2020

I’m not usually one for New Year year-in-review posts, but 2020 has seen so much turmoil that I have to say “good riddance”.

In many ways, as a family we’ve been lucky. Home life has been relatively unchanged, other than not having friends around for meals. Everyone we know has escaped so far, though it’s been harder on some than on others. The biggest loss for us was having to abandon a trip to visit family in the UK this summer.

We are all still earning, with all of us in essential services of some sort (groceries, education, provincial government). Again, we’ve been lucky. Many businesses are struggling, although many have also adapted in various ways as our knowledge of the spread evolved: closing doors, partial reopening, new safety procedures, new ways of operating ...

The biggest stresses that I can see emerging are connected: weariness at the constant vigilance and observing of distancing rules, and the lack of social contact.

People tout social media and online meetings. Zoom and Teams work fine for business meetings, but they are no substitute for gathering around a table for a meal or a drink. People keep promoting virtual coffees, virtual dinner parties, virtual water cooler chats, and I’m getting weary of that too because for me they just don’t cut it. Worse, to me they actively emphasize what we can’t do.

Sometimes you just need human closeness. Sometimes you just need a hug. That is the ultimate cruelty of this pandemic – that it’s robbed us of the most fundamental support mechanisms we know.

But my hope for 2021 is that we can learn and adapt in more long-lasting ways. We’ve learned that we don’t need to all gather together in an office in order to work and collaborate. The environment (and our wallets) has benefited from less travel. We could be and should be living and working smarter in future, making use of what we’ve learned this year. We should be looking forward to a kinder and more sustainable world, and treasuring togetherness when we’re finally able to again.

Near misses

Last week we had an unexpected snowfall. Snow was forecast for "higher elevations", which doesn't usually mean us, and when I left for work it was damp but not cold. Then I get a call saying "It's snowing here, and the highway is getting dicey." So I headed home while I still could and planned on working the rest of the day from there.

When I got home, we were without power. Power was out the whole day. We spent the day in semi-darkness, watching snow fall, and listening to the crack and crash of falling branches around our neighborhood.

But it could have been a lot worse, with several near misses:

The roads were getting dicey. The highway was slow but at least no accidents. I only just made it up the hill at the end of our road, and only thanks to a couple of patches of bare road where trees overhang, that gave me traction to get up speed for the next stretch.

We have a wood stove for warmth, so the house was livable. And we could boil kettles for drinks, and we cooked a simple supper on it just before the power came back that evening.

We have overhead lines for power and cable running from the road to the house. Half of the cherry tree at the front of the property split away and nearly took out the lines. Just the ends of some branches ended up resting on them, which I was able to reach with long loppers and cut them away.

At the side of the house, a couple of massive branches fell from the arbutus at the edge of the property. One fell onto a gravel path a few feet from the back of the garage. The other fell onto the carport roof. As I was clearing them away yesterday it was obvious how lucky we were that they did no damage. We have a deck above the garage and fencing for privacy along the edge of the carport where it butts up to the deck. Either of those branches could easily have wrecked the fence or the deck railings.

Yes, we had a lot to be thankful for that day.

Predetermination

My new book project, Wrath of Empire, is throwing up some writing challenges that are entirely new to me.

People tend to work somewhere on the spectrum between plotting and pantsing – writing by the seat of your pants. At one extreme, some writers will map absolutely everything out – what goes into each chapter and scene – into a detailed outline before they write a word. At the other extreme, some writers literally start writing and see where the story leads them, and plough their way through until they reach a conclusion.

Most writers sit somewhere in between, and I believe that how you go about writing a novel is not a neat linear spectrum between plotting and pantsing, but a whole landscape of possible methods.

In my case, I often start with no clear idea of where the story is headed (classic pantsing) but very soon I need to start adding some structure and direction (a high level plot outline). I then flip between manuscript and outline, and the two feed off each other.

Once I have an outline, my writing isn’t linear. Whenever I get bogged down in one part, I’ll leap ahead to an interesting scene further on, then come back and fill in the gaps. At the same time, the outline itself isn’t solid. All my novels so far have ended up taking very different paths from how I initially envisioned them.

And that’s where I’m finding things challenging this time around.

Wrath of Empire is a prequel. It tells the story of events that are mentioned in Ghosts of Innocence, so the broadest outline of the story has already been determined. And those landmark events can’t be changed.

I still have to flesh out a lot of details and bring them to life with a whole cast of characters and scenes that I haven’t begun to map out, but this time I can’t let the story take me any old where. It has to hit those landmarks on schedule.

Baby steps

As I mentioned last week, The Long Dark is available in all the most popular e-book formats.

I see a couple of you out there were very quick off the mark in downloading copies, and have already posted reviews to Amazon. Heartfelt thanks to you!

The paperback is a step closer. Since my post last weekend, KDP customer service advised me that there have been technical issues shipping to Canadian addresses which they were resolving. I was relieved to hear at least that it wasn’t a policy decision – “due to COVID we’re not shipping to Canada.”

They asked me to wait a few days and try again. I went through the process this morning of ordering a proof copy, not overly confident, but this time the order went through. If things go smoothly, I might have a proof copy in my hands by Christmas.

With things winding down on The Long Dark, I’m now turning my attention more fully to the next project.

This time I’m returning to Shayla’s world, but turning the clock back to where Shayla’s murderous journey began. Wrath of Empire follows Shayla’s original opponent, Chalwen ap Gwynodd, as she shields the young Julian through his uncle’s deadly plots to seize the throne.

Trapped in the lengthening nights of Elysium.

Abandoned by the last convoy south.

Alone with her teenage son.

Anna never thought she would die this way.

It won’t come to that. She won't let it. She scours the darkened town for anything to help them make the long trek to rejoin their clan. But on a world starved of engineering resources it will take all her ingenuity to cobble together a usable vehicle.

A chance of escape is almost in reach when Anna finds they are not as alone as she thought. But the unexpected visitors are on a mission that they will kill to keep secret. Whatever these off-world intruders want, it can't be good for Anna's world, and a fight to save herself and her son becomes a battle for the future of the entire colony.

Available on Kindle, Apple, Nook, Kobo, US $3.99

The Long Dark is published!

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image. 

 

 

Concluding a scene from The Long Dark in Mikey’s point of view. Mikey is trying to make sense of the adults’ conversation over dinner after the loss of a crawler and one of its crew. They are discussing the difficulty getting replacements, and here Nick responds to Anna’s question about shipping spares instead of whole units:

=====

 

“And yet, their shipping rates always seem to rise for anything useful. Or, as they put it, they give us a special discount”--those words were spat like a curse--“for something as vital as a replacement car. But that’s another purpose for the paperwork. To avoid us abusing their generosity, as they put it.” 

“Rather than letting things fail, isn’t it in their interests to give that special rate for the occasional crate of spares instead? Surely it must make more sense for them?” 

Georgina sighed. “You should have paid more attention to your social and politics lessons, Anna. The shipping doesn’t cost the Company anything.” 

That’s nine sentences. The scene continues ... 

“It’s all part of our colonial agreement.” The animal had vanished from Nick’s face. He just looked like a tired old man again. “Everything they ship us gets charged against our colonial debt.” 

“So if we’re paying the cost anyway, why is everything so difficult?” 

Connections clicked. It’s not easier to replace a whole unit. It’s more beneficial to the Company to keep things run down! Why?

=====

 

And, yes, The Long Dark is finally out there. 

Currently available in popular e-book formats (Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Apple). 

I have also uploaded the paperback files but right now I can’t get hold of a proof copy. Amazon says they won’t ship to my location in Canada and their “customer service” is giving me the run-around. But until I am able to review a physical copy I am not prepared to hit “publish”.

 

WeWriWa – the animal within

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image. 

 

 

Continuing a scene from The Long Dark in Mikey’s point of view. Mikey is trying to make sense of the adults’ conversation over dinner after the loss of a crawler and one of its crew. They are discussing the difficulty getting replacements. 

 

=====

 

“What they don’t tell you,” Nick continued bleakly, “is the cost of shipping new units out here.” 

Anna stared at him. “Then why not simply ship the parts we need to keep things running? I know nothing about costs, but even I can see that a few crates of spares is smaller and lighter than a whole car or yoop.” 

Nick grinned. Mikel had trouble working out expressions, their range and subtlety confused him, but some screamed loud and clear out of the background clutter. Nick’s grin held no amusement, it was pure animal ferocity. Mikel winced. Neither Anna nor Georgina seemed to have noticed the feral threat Nick suddenly seemed to pose.

=====

 

So what's got Nick mad? More next week.

Is it over yet?

Pause for breath as we near the end of a manic year.

 

As I looked out at grey drizzle this afternoon, the neighborhood feels like it’s been damp and chilly for ages. It’s hard to believe it was only a couple of weeks ago that Ali and I took the dogs out for a drive and a walk to a beach where this photo was taken. Thankfully we have a good stock of firewood ready for the winter.

If anyone thought that November would finally bring an end to four years of relentless US election campaigning they were in for a sad awakening. The election has come and gone with a clear winner but no resolution. And don’t expect the shenanigans to end next month with the Electoral College, or even in January. Trump has been laying the groundwork all year to undermine the foundations of American democracy and will continue to do so long after he’s left the White House. Anything to avoid conceding a loss. It’s been saddening to see how deep the misinformation has taken root.

Closer to home, up to now BC has been touched only lightly by COVID. Most of the outbreaks have been in care homes with relatively little in the community, and we’ve got away with fewer restrictions than many parts of the world. The picture has evolved through the course of the year, but for the most part life has continued. That picture has changed this month, with cases spiking alarmingly and new measures in place in the last few days. Limits on social gatherings, and for the first time a mask mandate in indoor spaces. At work, a directive last month to start bringing people back into the office instead of working from home has been reversed, for now. Whether it will be enough to bring things back under control remains to be seen.

Progress on the writing front, The Long Dark text and cover art is in the hands of the book designer, and I’ve been busy proof-reading the interior layout. Getting very close to publication before Christmas.

WeWriWa – Insurance woes

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image. 

 

 

Continuing a scene from The Long Dark in Mikey’s point of view. Mikey is trying to make sense of the adults’ conversation over dinner after the loss of a crawler and one of its crew. He’s puzzling over Georgina’s last words: “It’s hell trying to get even a handful of spares to keep things running, but they always seem happy to replace whole units when they finally fall apart.”

=====

 

“Sure,” Nick snorted. “Once we’ve completed a meter-thick wad of loss claims paperwork.” 

“At least that’ll be easy this time,” Georgina added. “It may be hard proving a unit sitting in the garage can’t be patched up any more, but one that’s lost below the surface must be a bit of a no-brainer.” 

“Actually,” Anna seemed hesitant. More strangeness. “It was still on the surface when we left it. Kinda. Will that be a problem?”  

That’s ten sentences. The scene continues ...  

Nick closed his eyes briefly. “We’ll be careful what we state in the reports. It’s lost to us for the coming season. Leave it at that. Once we’ve done the paperwork right, they’re happy to send a replacement. I think the loss claim allows them to set it off against tax or something.” 

Mikel filed the strange words away for future reference. Here was a whole world of connections, causes and effects, that seemed to hover on the edge of understanding.

=====

WeWriWa – replacement parts

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image. 

 

 

Continuing a scene from The Long Dark in Mikey’s point of view. Mikey is trying to make sense of the adults’ conversation over dinner after the loss of a crawler and one of its crew. 

 

=====

 

The conversation around him seemed to have moved away from Ambrose, away from things that made his mother cry. Back to the trek. The terrifying unknown reached out to engulf Mikel, but he needed to listen, to learn how to deal with this impossible threat to his stable life. 

“The Company will send new equipment.” 

That was Georgina. She always seemed to know a lot of things Mikel didn’t, but then she was so slow at seeing the connections between the things she knew. Once he had the facts, Mikel was always faster at solving problems and drawing conclusions than Georgina. That troubled him, too. Teenagers weren’t supposed to be better than grown ups.  

That’s ten sentences. The scene continues ...  

“It’s hell trying to get even a handful of spares to keep things running, but they always seem happy to replace whole units when they finally fall apart.” 

Another anomaly. Somehow this one seemed important, but Mikel couldn’t see where it fit into the pattern of life, home, and safety. Why is it easier to replace a whole rather than a part?

=====

WeWriWa – clocks and calendars

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

 

Continuing a scene from The Long Dark in Mikey’s point of view. Mikey is trying to make sense of the adults’ conversation over dinner.

=====

Of course, he knew all about orbital mechanics. The world--his world--spinning on its side, one pole facing the sun, then the other. Orbital period thirteen Earth standard years, axial rotation thirty Earth standard hours. Odd. Clocks were set to the Elysium day/night cycle, and yet the calendar was tied to Earth standard. When people talked about a year they meant an Earth year, not Elysium. Why the inconsistency? An anomaly, but not interesting enough to pursue right now.

Here was the relevant bit. People on the surface forever chasing summer, escaping the deep freeze that came with long years of darkness at this latitude.  

That’s ten sentences. The scene continues ...  

Hence the trek. The migration from autumn in one hemisphere to spring in the other, then back again after another six years. 

It made logical sense, but Mikel baulked at the implications. Leaving his home. Leaving familiarity and security behind. On an intellectual level, he could understand the idea of other towns, other domes with other rooms, but he couldn’t picture it. Couldn’t place himself there. His home was here. 

This was what he’d locked away. This had happened before. He was fourteen years old now. Earth standard years, that is. He would have been maybe eight then. It figured. He couldn’t remember much from then, but the terror had been real enough to leave its mark.

=====

 

WeWriWa – Mikey’s memories

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image. 

 

Continuing a scene from The Long Dark in Mikey’s point of view. Mikey is trying to make sense of the adults’ conversation over dinner.

=====

 

Memories crept cautiously to the fore, memories of pain and panic that he’d kept safely tucked away since he was young. It was happening again. Anna hadn’t come home last night. That wasn’t unusual, except that she was supposed to be here. Instead, Georgina had brought him home and looked after him. Georgina, not Karin. Too much happening that shouldn’t be happening. 

Last night, long after lights out, Mikel had crept into the family room and spent hours on a tablet trawling the town library, trying to make sense of what was going on. Something in conversations around him had given him a starting point. 

The trek.

=====

WeWriWa – Introducing Mikey

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image. 

 

More excerpts from The Long Dark. You met Anna and Jennifer in earlier posts, now I’m introducing the third major point of view in the story – Mikey, Anna’s son. This scene happens after Anna rescues the crew of a stranded crawler, though they sadly lose one of the crew members ...

=====

 

Mikel arranged a meticulous wall of crisp fries, corralling a spoonful of mushroom stew. A small heap of green salad stood guard to one side. The trick was to eat the innermost fries before they got too soggy, and rearrange the circle before the stew leaked out onto the rest of the plate. Mushroom stew and green salad didn’t mix. Mikel couldn’t explain why, it was just one of those unhappy combinations that he avoided at all costs. 

Like the school room, the clan dining room was unusually quiet. The adults’ voices were odd today. They talked in hushed tones about someone called Ambrose. Something bad happened. When he looked close, there was a trail of damp down Anna’s cheek and a strange catch in her voice.  

That’s ten sentences. The scene continues ...  

He tried to ignore it. Wishing it away. Anna was crying. The strangeness stabbed deep into his mind. Children cried. Anna didn’t. Anna was strong. It would be okay. 

Mikel had no idea who Ambrose was. Maybe he’d met him, maybe he hadn’t. Grown ups all looked the same, apart from a few that he knew well, so the talk was not relevant. Not interesting.

=====

WeWriWa - The Long Dark draft blurb

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image. 

 

Following Teresa's idea last month, I'm having a go at posting the draft blurb for The Long Dark. This has been through a couple of rounds of comments with a group of critiquers, but I'm keen to give it a try with a different audience:

=====

 

Trapped in the lengthening nights of Elysium. Abandoned by the last convoy south. Alone with her son and his teacher. 

Anna never thought she would die this way. 

She won't let it come to that. She scours the darkened town for anything to help them make the long trek to rejoin their clan. But on a world starved of engineering resources it will take all her ingenuity to rig up a usable vehicle. 

With a chance of escape almost in reach, they find they are not as alone as they thought. Hopes of rescue are crushed when they realize the unexpected visitors are on a mission that they will kill to keep secret. Whatever these off-world intruders want, it can't be good for Anna's world, and a fight for personal survival becomes a battle for the future of the entire colony.

=====

While working through final edits, I've also started posting background material to my website. Click on the image to find out more.

 

And cover art is nearly complete. Since last month I've mostly been playing around with the look of the sun. That was one element I wasn't happy with, and I think it's heading the right way now.

 

Progress September 2020

At this time last year, my target was to publish The Long Dark about now. I was coming to the end of a detailed critique cycle and I figured it would take a few months to process the feedback, revise, and complete all the finishing touches for publication.

It ended up not being quite as straightforward as I'd imagined. There were some common comments on a few areas, and I went out to a couple more beta readers after a serious round of edits to see if I was getting close. Now I'm working through those story lines again on what I think will be my final round of edits before detailed proof-reading.

While the story was out with beta readers, I've been working on cover art. Again, this has ended up taking longer than I'd originally intended. You can see regular progress posted her all the way back to May.

One part of the artwork was bugging me, though. The sun wasn't right. It's meant to be a red giant, which will be huge in the sky but nowhere near as bright as our sun. I started off emphasizing the redness, but I've never been really happy with it and never figured out why.  

 

Then – a silver lining to all the smoke in the sky the last two weeks – I was looking up at the sun on my way into work and realized I've been trying to show Big Red as a sphere. I decided that was a mistake, and the disc would likely appear a lot flatter, like our sun at sunset or through a smoke haze.

I'm not quite there yet, but getting close. 

 

All told, I do feel like I'm now in the final stretch, and still aiming to publish before the end of the year.

As if 2020 isn't crazy enough already ...

On top of all the 2020 craziness, the west coast is ravaged by wildfires.

Obviously I'd seen the reports from California, but hadn't realized how close to home the trouble extended. Until Tuesday morning, when we woke up to smoke-filled air drifting from across the border.

Air quality here has been poor all week. Here is the view from my deck this morning. You can see the haze obscuring nearby trees, and the row in the distance – only half a mile away – is almost invisible. 

 

Fires extend all the way through California, Oregon, and Washington state.

Ironically, it was only a week ago that Ali and I were commenting how lucky BC has been this summer. When we went on vacation, campfires were still allowed at the end of August, something we've never seen in all the years we've been here. After several record-breaking years of wildfires, this summer has been damp and cool, so we haven't had to deal with mass evacuations on top of the pandemic.

Not so down south!

Wherever you are, I hope you're keeping safe this crazy year.

Last gasp of summer

So, we're now into September. Since moving to BC, I've always reckoned on Labour Day marking the end of summer. Yes, we may still get warm spells for a few weeks yet, but as soon as the sun disappears it feels autumnal. Darker mornings and evenings, cooler air.

In the last week, Ali and I took another trip up-Island. We enjoyed our week in a cabin back in July, and decided to do it again to round off the summer. It was just the two of us this time (plus dogs) which made a nice change. The week started off a bit crappy, with a two-hour hold-up on the highway due to a serious accident earlier on in the day, followed by a day of rain, but things improved throughout the week. Overall, we had a good time doing nothing much in particular.

Now it's a long weekend before we all get back to the grindstone.

There is a lot of confusion and anxiety about the upcoming school year.

At Ali's school there is supposed to be distancing and other health measures in place, including some remote learning. But from the information available, it looks like all students will be on site for a large chunk of the time which seems to make a mockery of the need for remote learning. If on-site is good enough for half the day, why not the whole day? And the class sizes are too large to allow effective separation.

Matthew will resume college studies, and it looks like most of the learning will be remote other than essential lab work. Again, questions of practicality rear their heads if an on-campus block is followed by remote work where the students are supposed to be off site.

Maybe things will become clear in the coming week, or maybe it will be a gong show. Who knows?

COVID stress

The pandemic is still with us, obviously. March seems like a long time ago, let alone the blissful ignorance of January when it all sounded like a distant problem being faced by people half-way around the world.

Back then, it felt like the world was being turned on its head by the evolving spread of the disease, and the ever-changing advice as new facts emerged. Precautions appeared at first unthinkable, then laughable, then became incorporated into everyday life.

Now we are settled in for the long haul. Who knows when a vaccine will be available, or how effective it will be? Meanwhile, the world has to keep turning and we continue living our lives as best we can. Masks, distancing, and other changes in how we live and work have become an accepted part of life.

But, underlying all the more obvious disruptions and anxieties, I've noticed a more subtle source of stress. It's not something I've heard people talk about, because most people I know work from home most of the time, and this stress is most noticeable in the office.

Social distancing means deliberately and consciously keeping your distance from other people. That requires constant awareness, and active avoidance behaviors. That is not normal behavior for a social animal. In fact, it goes fundamentally against our very nature.

Intellectually, I understand the reasoning. Heck, I'm doing exactly the same to my co-workers – keeping distance, backing off if I see someone coming the other way in a narrow hallway. But on the receiving end, it feels like being shunned, rejected, cast out from society.

Casting people out is a harsh and cruel punishment practiced by societies since time immemorial. It hurts.

Of course, this isn't punishment, it's precaution. But knowing that there's a good reason, that it's not about you, doesn't lessen the hurt. When intellect conflicts with gut feeling, intellect loses. I don't know what the answer is here, but it doesn't feel like something I can just “deal with” or get used to.

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image. 

 

This snippet concludes the opening chapter from The Long Dark. Anna drives a massive surface vehicle and is aiming to retrieve a hard-to-reach navigation beacon before winter closes in. A sudden sound startles her. The last snippet ended: Home and safety, a crawler driver always looked to their rig first when danger threatened. 

 

=====

A faded echo rolled over her like distant thunder. Anna scanned the horizon. Her scalp crawled. There’d been no signs of a storm, and the landscape around her seemed placid, unmoving. Besides, that didn’t sound like it came from the depths. She squinted skywards. 

A vapor trail traced a fast-moving line across the coppery sky and cast an ethereal shadow on the skim of cirrus that muted Big Red’s shine. Anna puzzled for a moment, and released a pent-up breath. Dangerous time of year for craft to be chancing a landing. 

She sighed and shrugged, not her problem, and turned her attention back to securing the beacon.

=====

Hopefully this ties together Anna's scenes with Jennifer's. 

After three months' sporadic work, cover art is now down to finishing touches.

 

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

 

Continuing the opening from The Long Dark in Anna's point of view. Anna is driving a massive surface vehicle and is aiming to retrieve a hard-to-reach navigation beacon before winter closes in. 

 

=====

Up another hanging ladder, Anna mounted a slender catwalk suspended below the front of the cab. She selected a lightweight cable from the row of drums above her head and released the drum’s clutch. 

Once more on the ground, she fastened the dollies a few meters back from the end of the cable, then clipped herself on for safety. With the end of the line slung over one shoulder, and a sounding pole in her free hand, she tested the surface ahead as she trudged away, sinking ankle-deep with each step. 

Despite the late season wind keening around her, sweat slicked the edge of her mask by the time Anna slogged her way to the beacon. 

She slackened off the beacon’s guy lines and carefully lowered the heavy three-meter pole to the ground, slipping the axle of a dolly beneath each end. 

A sharp crack followed by a muted rumble startled her. She glanced instinctively back to the crawler, calming her heartbeat when she reassured herself it was okay. Bright yellow boxes slung between silvery mesh wheels looked like a row of old-fashioned stagecoaches, except those ancient carriages were never built four decks tall. Home and safety, a crawler driver always looked to their rig first when danger threatened.

=====

Back to cover art, and progress at last. That last unit and wheel peeping in from the edge of the page is done. From now on, progress will be less obvious as it's down to details.

 

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image. 

 

 

Continuing the opening from The Long Dark. Although it's been drawn out in time by the weekly snippets, the chapter as a whole is quite short. To conclude the chapter, we switch back to Anna's point of view. Anna is driving a massive surface vehicle and is aiming to retrieve a hard-to-reach navigation beacon before winter closes in.

=====

Unhurried, Anna reviewed the crawler’s controls, checking the giant vehicle was safely immobilized. She grabbed her mask from a hook on the back of her seat, and pulled it over her head as she descended a narrow stairway to the cramped equipment bay beneath the drive deck. She paused to settle the mask properly in place and pull a strand of hair out from under the edge seal, then she hauled a pair of two-wheeled dollies and a tool belt from the neatly-stacked storage racks. 

Through the crawler cab’s lower airlock, Anna climbed a ladder to the ground. Hints of over-ripe fruit in the air reminded her that the mask’s filters would need cleaning when she reached home. Her unfastened jacket flapped around her thighs in fitful squalls. She ignored an icy chill working its way around her waist through gaps in her clothing, and lowered the dollies to the ground. 

She knelt and pulled off a glove to test the plant’s surface. Tight-knit matting and whorls of stringy fibers yielded to her touch. They felt dry, scratchy, but still held firm when she tugged on a handful.

=====

And (making use of the new rules) this scene continues ...  

Seasonal changes were coming on fast, but maybe she’d arrived in time in this case. She suppressed a shiver of unease as she peered at the ground between her and the beacon. She had a job to do.

=====

That big heap of firewood you saw last week is almost all gone, but it's been unusually hard work this year. Some years we get lucky, and most of it is the right size for our stove. It just needs to be barrowed around to the carport and stacked neatly ready for the winter. 

This year, probably around 80% of it was in chunks that needed splitting down a bit. To make things harder, this load is mostly maple and is very dense. Some pieces split easily, but some put up a fight. And there's a small-ish pile left that we couldn't touch with the axe, so today we're renting a log splitter for the day to tackle those last bits.

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

Continuing the opening from The Long Dark, on the way down to Elysium with her senior negotiating team, Jennifer receives an unwelcome message. The previous post ended with: “The merest whiff of it beyond this circle, and we all spend the rest of our lives in jail.”

=====

Jennifer pondered while the cabin windows shone with the plasma glow of their hypersonic passage across the sky. A faint tang of burnt flint hung in the air. “Are we to know the nature of this potential discovery?”

“The President chose not to commit that detail in writing.” Galloway sniffed. “Just enough information to convince you of the gravity of this order.”

Jennifer narrowed her eyes at him.

Galloway smirked. “Your job is to make sure the Company will have complete control of this discovery when it finally breaks. The colonists get nothing.”

=====

I've had a new distraction this week – our order of firewood for the winter arrived, which was a weight off our minds because it's been hard this year to track down a supplier. Now this all needs to be split down to more manageable sizes and stacked ready in the carport.

All the same, I have made progress on the cover art, just not quite as much as I'd planned.

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.




Continuing the opening from The Long Dark, on the way down to Elysium with her senior negotiating team, Jennifer receives an unwelcome message. The previous post ended with: “As you can see” - Jennifer fought to keep her voice steady and her tone matter-of-fact - “our mission has a new factor to take into account.”

=====

Galloway’s expression couldn’t be said to be smug, he was too experienced for that, but it held a quiet anticipation. He’d known exactly what the letter would say. “The President places a lot of faith in you.”

Such precise wording. Outwardly a compliment, and nothing anyone would argue with. But ‘places’ rather than ‘has’? That single word gave the barest and utterly deniable hint that faith might be misplaced.

“So,” she said, “while we are busy renegotiating the Company’s agreement with this colony, you have a mission of your own. Chasing a new drug.”

=====

And (making use of the new rules) this scene continues ...

“Confirming tantalizing reports of its existence.” Galloway’s eyes glittered. “And given the potential impact of this on the trade talks, this has to be of the utmost secrecy.”

“Withholding information like that from the negotiations ...” Jasmine Golightly, Jennifer’s legal expert, twisted her mouth. “The merest whiff of it beyond this circle, and we all spend the rest of our lives in jail.”

=====

Thankfully, in between computer upgrades and a week camping, I've been able to resume work on cover art since I last posted a progress picture:

Camping

Although I'm not sure we can call it that this time!

With a significant birthday this month, the original plan had been to travel to the UK to be with family. That, of course, all got upended with COVID. And with the ongoing uncertainties around travel or pretty much anything, any plans to get away were decidedly last-minute.

As a result, we chose not to even think about getting the trailer ready for use this summer, but we still wanted to get up-island if possible. As it happens, our favorite campground has a row of cabins up by the river, so we rented one for the week.

I've always been curious to see what they were like. We've walked past them so often in years gone by, and this is the first time we've been into one. From the outside, they look small, and with hardly any windows I'd have expected the inside to be cramped and quite gloomy.

Totally wrong on both counts. I was impressed with the layout, the light and sense of space inside.

There's a generous living & dining area, a compact but adequate kitchen, and two bedrooms down one side to the left of the picture. Outside, there's a deck and secluded picnic area.

We had a good time away, mostly mooching around the campground and swimming in the river. Plus I started outlining and drafting a couple of tentative scenes for a new novel, which I hope to get into full swing once The Long Dark is published.

Upgrades

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm now working on a new laptop. My old MacBook was at least 10 years old, and was reaching the point where I wouldn't be able to keep up with software updates.

With a birthday coming up, and many previous years of not wanting anything in the way of gifts, it was an opportunity to splash out.

So I'm now getting to grips with the move.

I've generally found Mac upgrades to be fairly painless. Unlike Microsoft, which treats every Windows upgrade as an opportunity to show off how cool and geeky the Microsoft propellorheads are, and force millions of poor users in the real world to completely re-learn everything from the ground up, Apple doesn't mess much with the user interface. There may be new or updated features, but you can pretty much rely on finding things tomorrow in the same place they were yesterday.

The single most significant change this time was entirely self-inflicted – a switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. This switch is a bit of a learning curve. In many ways, OpenOffice Writer and Calc look a lot like MS Word and Excel. Much of the look and feel is similar, but the overall sense of familiarity hides a wealth of smaller differences, which I'm still learning. Sometimes it takes a bit of online research to find out how to do things, but I have to say that – so far – I haven't found anything I used to do in MS Office that I can't do in OpenOffice.

And one huge sigh of relief – OpenOffice is blisteringly fast.

When I write a novel, I break out the manuscript into anywhere between 9 and 12 separate documents. These typically run to 10k or 15k words. I've always found that Word takes quite a while to open a document this size, and it's got worse over the years with various “improvements”. The most frustrating behavior that cropped up at the last big upgrade was that it would only seem to load the first few pages and then stop until I tried to scroll down, then it would realize there was more to follow and load some more. I would drag the scroll bar down only to find I was only a few pages in, and the scroll bar would jerk and shrink as more got tagged on to the end. For documents the size I deal in, I had to force the scroll bar all the way down again and again until I was sure I had the full text. This could take a minute or so on a really large document, like when I pack the whole manuscript into one file for publication.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I went into OpenOffice and opened the full text of The Long Dark – over 100k words, 200 pages. It was all there in under 2 seconds. No messing around.

So, I'm now up and running, and learning as I go. It took many long hours last week to copy files over, especially my locally-stored mailboxes because the export/import feature didn't work as advertised. The one thing I still haven't yet solved is how to move my photos library. I've tried several approaches which should in theory have worked, but none of them so far have managed to copy that single 18GB file. So, that is still a work in progress.

P.S. Just discovered another benefit – I can copy/paste from my document straight into Blogger's text window without accidentally including a load of MS Word hidden crap, and it carried over italics as well!

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

Continuing the opening from The Long Dark, Jennifer receives an unwelcome message.

=====

An exchange of puzzled glances between the other negotiators told Jennifer they at least had no knowledge of Galloway’s message. The craft creaked and juddered in sudden turbulence, mirroring Jennifer’s own turmoil. There were always hidden agendas at work, anywhere the Company’s tentacles reached. That was a given. But Jennifer was used to being the architect, not the clay. How had Galloway slipped this past her?

As per its instructions, she passed the letter, already starting to degrade on contact with air, around the cabin. This handful of senior officials needed to know the score, to know how to steer the complex legal and financial discussions they were about to embark on.

“As you can see” - Jennifer fought to keep her voice steady and her tone matter-of-fact - “our mission has a new factor to take into account.”

=====

No real progress with cover art this week. It’s been another intense week at work, plus most of my energy has gone into setting up a new laptop, an early birthday present. My old MacBook was at least 10 years old so it was time for an upgrade. I've still got a few things to sort out, but for the most part I'm up & running.

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.


Continuing the opening from The Long Dark, Jennifer receives an unwelcome message.

=====

Wordlessly, Jennifer plucked the envelope from Galloway’s limp grasp and turned it over in her fingers. The President’s personal seal was intact, and the real deal, as she verified with a tap to her tablet. A physical missive in a pry-proof envelope, primed to destruct if anyone but her broke the seal. Guaranteed confidentiality. A shiver ran up her spine.

The seat’s cream calfskin upholstery cradled her sudden weight as the craft lit its engines and began banking and maneuvering down through thickening air. As they banked, the skyward windows darkened against the sullen glare of the red giant star in the sky.

Tuned to her biometrics, the tablet confirmed her identity and disarmed the envelope’s destruct. A hard and razor sharp thumbnail cracked the seal and slit the flap of the envelope. She read the contents, bringing all her negotiation-table training to the task of keeping her dismay from showing.

=====

And continued progress with the cover art, although to be honest, not much headway this week. It’s been an intense week at work and most days I’ve been too tired to pick up a paintbrush.

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

Continuing the opening from The Long Dark, we are still with Jennifer’s point of view.

=====

Jennifer glanced at the three other members of the Company’s senior negotiating team before finally eyeing Simon Galloway coldly. He was no part of her team, and yet he’d invited himself onto her private shuttle, claiming to carry a message of vital importance from the President.

His green velvet jacket screamed extravagance. That, she could forgive, but worn over the top of a cream brocade waistcoat, silk cravat, with silk ruffs at the wrists it was ... over the top. Foppish.

Ice blue eyes regarded her patiently, destroying any illusion of whimsy.

“Well?” Better have this out in the open before her own simmering resentment got the better of her.

“I apologize for the unplanned intrusion.” His voice held no trace of contrition.

=====

And (making use of the new rules) this scene continues ...


“My orders were to bring this to the senior team only once we were off the longship.” He offered a slim white envelope, pinched delicately between thumb and forefinger, pinkie cocked like he was about to sup from a bone china teacup.

=====

And continued progress with the cover art

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

Continuing the opening from The Long Dark, we leave Anna’s point of view to introduce another major character.

=====

Jennifer Steel glared at the beige-green orb of Elysium with mixed feelings. She loved the Company’s princely income from this soggy plant-covered rock, but as for the planet itself, it was hate at first sight.

“It’s going to get bumpy in sixty seconds.” The pilot’s voice held just the right blend of deference and warning. He’d suffered her presence with little sign of the simmering resentment she knew she evoked. She was well aware of the rules about passengers in the cockpit, but she’d been curious to see first hand her reluctant home for the coming weeks. She also liked toying with underlings, a privilege that came with her executive rank.

Even Jennifer, however, knew better than to argue with physics. She turned from the cockpit window and drifted, weightless, back to the luxurious confines of the cabin. She took her seat and strapped in before they hit thick enough air to light the scramjet.

=====

And continued progress with the cover art, snapped on the last two Fridays. Progress slowed down this month because I was struggling with the world news recently as I blogged about last week.

Get a grip!

This is a hard post to write. I keep coming back to it, wanting to say something, to vent some feelings, but then hesitating because it feels too self-indulgent. This blog is usually focused on externalities, not so much on inner feelings, but these are not normal times.

Simple truth is, I’ve not been doing too good these past few days.

The realization came during the week when one of my team leads talked about their regular team check-in that day. One of the team mentioned having difficulty sleeping. The events in America dragged up memories of personal experience of racial abuse. In talking it through, other members of the team opened up and shared their own stories. It turned out every single one of them, in one way or another, was struggling to process what is going on in the world at the moment, especially in the US.

At the team leads level, we wondered how much more distress was lying hidden beneath the surface among ourselves and our colleagues. In discussing the emotional impact of extraordinary stories, one after another, day after day, I found myself overwhelmed with emotion.

And I realized, I’m not okay.

That feeling of being overwhelmed and helpless persists. It reawakens with every new story of someone somewhere getting hurt or abused. I am fortunate that it’s not affecting my sleep - yet - but I struggle to focus on anything productive during my waking hours, and tears are never far from the surface.

I am struggling with anguish at the scenes of violence, both on the mob and the individual level. I despair at the peaceful protests turning ugly, often through deliberate instigation of people who have no interest in the protestors’ message. And I am brimming over with anger at the attempts by the powerful to bully a population into submission.

The world has gone mad.

Underlying that is a long-held fury at the systemic abuse of power the 1% “haves” wield over the 99% by the open manipulation of levers of power in their favor, whether it’s passing legislation that favors their rich donors, healthcare and other benefits they award themselves while denying others the same, gerrymandering and manipulating election practices to hamper voting by those they don’t want to have a voice, and a host of other dirty tricks.

This is a bubble that has been waiting to burst.

There is no excuse for the many acts we’ve seen the police commit over the past week.

Equally, there is no excuse for rioting and looting.

Then again, there is no excuse for the deeply-entrenched attitude that the color of a person’s skin entitles one person to set themselves above another. That is the real pandemic that bedevils the world.

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

Continuing the opening from The Long Dark, Anna drives a crawler across the surface of a massive plant hundreds of meters deep, and is eyeing up a beacon she needs to retrieve over dodgy terrain.

=====

She checked the chrono. Plenty of hours of daylight left. “See you for supper. Charlie Tango seven niner, out.”

A quick scan of her surroundings. Glints in the distance reflected coppery sky from a network of catchpools. Beyond, grey shadows marked a series of ridges and a few clouds darkened the horizon, too far to be threatening just yet. To one side, the ground sloped up to merge with the bleached-bone swelling of a structural rib. Safe to travel on, but leading away in the wrong direction.

Anna pursed her lips. If she was going to stow that beacon, she’d have to fetch it the hard way.

=====

And continued progress with the cover art ...

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

Continuing the opening from The Long Dark, Anna drives a crawler across the surface of a massive plant hundreds of meters deep.

=====

Through the wraparound windows of the cab, Anna judged the distance to her goal. The marker beacon, standing two hundred meters away, had canted at an angle, and the smooth olive ground nearby had a mottled look confirming the grim picture from the ground radar. The upper layers here had thinned dangerously. She couldn’t risk the crawler any closer to retrieve that beacon, but the town needed to salvage all the working equipment it could for next season’s harvesting operations.

Anna reached for the bank of controls alongside her seat, and the short wave radio hissing and sputtering on top of the ground radar and inertial navigation screens.

“Serendipity Control, this is Charlie Tango seven niner, respond please.”

She scrunched her face and hit the volume button at the blast of static from the radio. She fiddled with the decoding controls, tuning the software that struggled to pluck meaning from the waves of electromagnetic interference bathing the atmosphere.

“Serendipity Control, this is Charlie Tango seven niner. Anyone receiving?”

=====

And (making use of the new rules) this scene continues ...


On the third try, a distorted voice answered. “Go ahead, Charlie Tango seven niner.”

“Got eyeballs on my last beacon for this run. Nearest end of the south-west line, but approach is tricky. Will be off grid for an hour or so.”

=====

Last week, I started creating artwork for the book cover. As the weeks go by, I’ll include some snaps of progress. Here is a snapshot from Monday and Friday ...

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

It’s been a year since I last posted on Weekend Writing Warriors. A year ago, I'd just finished the first draft of The Long Dark. Since then, it’s been going through intensive critiquing and editing and I’m on the home stretch to publication later this year. This week, I’m posting from the opening chapter.

=====

From the center seat in the crawler’s drive cab, six meters above the ground, Anna ’t Hooft studied the treacherous terrain ahead.

Ground radar painted a cross-section of the organic mass under her wheels. Labyrinthine chasms and crevices plunged hundreds of meters deep. Twisted columns and webs of plant tissue spread and interlocked to form a solid-looking surface.

On Sponge, looks could be fatally deceptive.

A tingle ran up Anna’s back, and she blanked the radar screen. She could read the surface details well enough. She could tell what they concealed, and in her mind could reduce the plant mass to safe, clinical labels: soft, brittle, strong, source of water, building material, harvestable tubers. All the treasures Sponge had to offer could be divined from the colors, textures, and contours up here.

She preferred to not actually see what lay below.

=====

Support our workers

All around our neighborhood, hearts have been appearing over the last month. Someone has been making plywood cut-out hearts on posts to stick in your lawn. Some have appeared on hydro poles and in windows. Someone down the road shaped a string of lights into a heart on their fence.

All this is to show support for our armies of essential workers, from healthcare professionals to delivery drivers, to the grocery store workers and many others who are in close proximity to the public all day long.

We combined this heart theme with another suggestion to brighten up Victoria with Christmas lights, and clipped a string of lights to our hedge facing the road.

To give a sense of scale, the hedge is taller than our camping trailer (parked behind, out of sight) and twice as tall as me. The heart is about 9’ tall. Standing on tip-toe I can barely reach the red light at the bottom of the “V” across the top.

Of course with the light evenings this heart isn’t visible until some time after 8pm, but I like to think it brings some cheer to people driving past of an evening.

Wedding anniversary

Twenty-eight years ago yesterday, Ali and I got married at home in our living room, with a registrar and about thirty close family and friends. We had lunch in a marquee outside (it just about fit on our back lawn ... just) with a buffet that we prepared ourselves. The day finished with a noisy, raucous knees-up for 150 people at a venue in town. No question of social distancing then!

Being our twenty-eighth anniversary, it was on the same day of the week (Friday) as our actual wedding day. A small discussion ensued about the twenty-eight-year cycle. There have been three other times when our anniversary fell on a Friday, but this is the first time it’s also been a leap year. With leap years in between, anniversaries on the same day fall at erratic intervals of five, six, or eleven years but they always come around again at year twenty-eight (except when the next turn of the century messes things up, but that’s another matter).

Of course, our celebration yesterday was of necessity a very small family affair. There’s a nearby Thai restaurant we like that’s still open for take-out. I checked the menu online and phoned through an order. I figured I should do that early and my hunch proved correct, it was a hour wait, but that was OK.

Looking for silver linings to all this, it was a quiet drive, parking available right outside. They were geared up to serve customers efficiently and I was straight in and out again, even though they were clearly busy with a row of bags lined up on the counter ready to be picked up.

And dinner was delicious. Thank you Sabhai Thai!

Grim statistics

Over the last month I’ve developed a grim fascination with figures. Trying not to let it become a compulsion - but what the heck! - Ali watches news briefings, I watch graphs. In these trying times I think a little short term madness is essential for long term sanity.

I discovered the Worldometers site which captures a whole raft of world statistics, including tracking the daily progress of the pandemic.

At the start of April, experts were suggesting the US might see between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths. At that time, when the tally was still only a few thousand, such figures were laughed at and quickly downplayed by politicians. A week or so later, the expected toll was revised down to between 60,000 and 80,000.

Now, the US is heading for a million cases by Monday and should exceed 60,000 deaths by Tuesday. On current trends I fully expect that original estimate to be realistic - if not optimistic.

I know it’s not really scientific to compare one country with another, when each has different demographics, different healthcare systems, and different approaches to handling the pandemic. But those are the only pointers we have to go on. So looking at countries that are further ahead in the outbreak, places like Italy and Spain reached a plateau in the graphs of daily new cases and daily deaths, followed by a slow decline. The US and Canada are still on the early part of that plateau. In fact, they haven’t really leveled off in a significant way. This tells me that today’s figures will likely at least double or triple over the next month.

While I’m making dire predictions, looking elsewhere in the world I am keeping a worried eye on both Brazil and Russia. With all the attention on China, then Europe and Iran, followed by the USA, they haven’t really been prominent yet. But just looking at the recent rates I can see them both joining the “100,000 club” by the end of the month and mingling with the hard-hit European nations soon after.

Finally, it sickens me to see the protests flaring up in some countries. These figures are bad enough, and they’ve only been kept at this level (I was about to say “this low” but there is nothing low about them) by the measures being taken. Healthcare systems have been stretched, but not completely broken. That will all change drastically if we let down our guards too soon.