I heart NASA, and NASA hearts me back.
I just watched Obama’s speech livestreaming from whitehouse.gov, on the new plan for NASA. He talked about how space travel and exploration as an ambition is an essential part of the American character.
I remember as a kid always wanting to go see a launch live. I settled for watching lots of them on TV. I remember the first test flight where they took the Space Shuttle on top of a 747 piggyback. As a young, solitary trekkie I thought calling it “Enterprise” was really fitting and cool.
And of course, I always wanted to grow up to be a science fiction writer.
I still haven’t seen a launch, but I will be going this summer to attend NASA’s LAUNCH PAD workshop for science fiction writers and editors, in Laramie, WY. This is basically a crash course in astronomy for science fiction writers and editors so that we can “get it right.” It’ll be a week at the U. of Wyoming with nights at the telescope, planetarium, etc, with daytime lectures in astronomy. I’m soooo excited! It’ll be in mid-July and I’m rather psyched.
My life has already seen such vast leaps in our knowledge, Voyager, Hubble, Mars rover, etc… What’s next?
DGC: Money for Nothing
Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron’s Guitar Chronicles.
In the morning I woke up to find him asleep in the other bed in his room. I guess I’d conked out in the wet spot. The connecting doors were still open and I wandered back into my room to get my toothbrush and such from my bag. Here were two unmade beds. I went through the same charade I’d done that one morning in Matthew’s room, tousling the sheets to make the bed look slept in.
I took a shower, tried to shave a day earlier than usual and cut my face up a bit, put on clean clothes, and wondered where I’d lost the hair tie Tread gave me yesterday. I found it in the breast pocket of my denim jacket and combed my hair back into a wet tail. Ziggy was still asleep. I closed the connecting door most of the way, took out my guitar, and started to play. Something Tread and I had been playing the day before had firmed up during the night into a song. Something about it didn’t sound quite right with only one guitar, though. If I did it in the studio, I’d have to overdub another part. And live, I’d have to hire someone else… nothing was ever simple anymore.
Today's Game/Baseball in Tweets
Ringing In The New Season at the Stadium
I’ve been at every home opener since 2000 except 2009, which got rained out and so I drove back to Boston in tears instead of staying in the city another day to go to the make-up game.
Today made up for it.
My two favorite Opening Days of the past decade were in 2001, seeing the actual raising of the Championship Banner and the “ceremonial golf cart ride” to Monument Park, and in 2003, when after the game was delayed one day by snow, Matsui finally took the field in pinstripes for the first time and hit a grand slam.
Today might top both of those. Continue reading →
Red Silk Editions almost here!
Woo! You can now pre-order printed copies of my paranormal romances, MIND GAMES, and the first two books of the Magic U series, THE SIREN AND THE SWORD and THE TOWER AND THE TEARS. Red Wheel has the books up in their online catalog right now: https://redwheelweiser.com/category.php?id=124.
MIND GAMES will be shipped August 1, 2010
THE SIREN AND THE SWORD comes October 1, 2010
and THE TOWER AND THE TEARS follows on December 1, 2010!
BITES OF PASSION, an anthology of erotic vampire stories I edited, will also be out on August 1, 2010. Pretty cool, eh?
For those who missed earlier news, these are all books I did in ebook with Ravenous Romance first, which Red Wheel Weiser, a publisher specializing in new age, occult, and Tarot non-fiction books, has licensed to launch a new paranormal romance imprint in the mainstream bookstores. This is very nice. 🙂
Discoverability, Still A Book's Biggest Problem
I gave a talk as part of a panel in the Bookbuilders of Boston/Emerson College “Gutenberg to Google” series of presentations on the ebook r/evolution. I promised I’d put it online later for those who missed it, and here it is — my take on “discoverability” and how this key principle is behind three of the hot button issues facing publishers going digital, namely
1) the transition from physical retail marketplace to the online marketplace
2) the importance of social media and author involvement
3) Piracy! Yarrr!
I didn’t get into ebooks and place myself on the cutting edge of new book technology because I thought ebooks were really cool and I wanted to be where the action was. No, I was essentially FORCED to become an expert on ebooks or my company was dead in the water. I founded Circlet Press in 1992, way back before a little thing we refer to now as “The Returns Crisis.”
Circlet’s history is a turbulent one — we’ve been battered by every upheaval in the book industry since our founding in 1992. Continue reading →
The Prince's Boy: 37
(Continuing the weekly serial by Cecilia Tan! Need to start at the beginning? Click here.)
37: Kenet
The next morning the general met with a bevy of his top commanders. I was bade to wait in the field marshal’s tent with two other pages while they conferred. The pages served the two most important battalion commanders, and knew one another, it seemed. They were probably the same age as me, yet they were so much more knowledgeable than I was. I listened to them go on about all things military for some time without saying a word, but eventually their attention turned to me.
“So, you’re Roichal’s new boy,” one of them said. He had a mess of black hair like Jorin’s but he was far more rangy, his arms too long for the uniform jacket he wore.
“Yes,” I said, not sure how else to answer.
Continue reading →
Crowdfunding Update
Wow. So earlier today I posted at Daron’s Guitar Chronicles and in my blogs that if folks were interested in seeing the “blow by blow” action on the sex scene that recently appeared in summary form, well, I would write the scene and only send the “bonus track” to those who donate in the tip jar.
So far seven lucky readers have received the emailed scene, which I finished a few hours ago. It’s 1500 words, pure Daron. It’s not too late to receive this yourself–I’ll take donations for it until end of Friday, basically. You set the amount of your donation to whatever you want. (Click here to donate.)
Also, since these donations totaled more than $25, there will be a bonus chapter posted on Saturday! (Every time donations hits $25, it triggers a third post in that week. Otherwise the usual is two posts a week.) If these donations end up topping $50, I’ll add a bonus post next week, and so on, too!
Thanks again to everyone who has contributed, and to those who are reading even if they can’t contribute. Comments are love, too. 🙂
Donate now, receive a special scene…!
Okay, an enthusiastic reader convinced me to try this. In the scene just past in Daron’s Guitar Chronicles (“Madness: One Step Beyond”) our narrator has non-anonymous sex for the first time in recent memory. His account of what happened once they got their clothes off is somewhat artistically summarized.
I’ve been convinced to write a “blow by blow” version, for donors only. It’ll be sent via email.
I won’t set a specific price on it, just anyone who throws a tip into the jar before midnight on April 9th will receive an email with this special bonus scene.
Click the Paypal donate button here to contribute!
And thank you. Yeah, go ahead, twist my arm, make me write smut. Daron’s cringing right now, but don’t worry, I’ll get him drunk and get him to spill the beans. Maybe I’ll even get Ziggy’s point of view on the events. I won’t know until I sit down to write it! *cracks knuckles*
Latest in Daron's Guitar Chronicles:
(Bonus post this week because of donations! Enjoy!)
Part Three: 1988
Skip forward to the early spring, then, to when things really began to happen. I was at work when the memo came around that Moondog Three’s album was no longer supposed to be shelved in the Local Rock section but in the Indie section, which was right next to the Local section but was definitely a step up in the world. Melissa, the woman who’d replaced me in the jazz section when they’d moved me to rock, had come and given me a high five. Michelle kept a copy of the memo for posterity. I found it hard not to check the bin every day to see if the copies that were there had been sold. I guess it wasn’t a random coincidence that this was when “Grenadier” went from being played on the “Local” rock shows to regular rotation on one of the commercial rock stations in town. We were getting some gigs in places like Syracuse and Troy, New York, and heard it on some of the college radio stations out that way. We were driving to one of those gigs the first time we heard it on the radio and Bart was screaming so much he almost drove off the road.
Continue Reading…