Liralen's Adventures Through Life

I'd forgotten that going home is always a blend of getting back to where and whom I came from along with both the comfort and discomfort of being here. That it's that uncomfortable feeling of 'oh, that's where that phrasing came from' or 'that's why I have that attitude' all blended with the comfort of the familiar, the known, and all the memories that go with them.

I slept in until 9 and just skipped breakfast in order to talk with Kelly for a while. I had no desire to pay for breakfast either. A cup of bad coffee and a cup of really excellent tea (Carl lent me his tea kettle, and I had my gaiwan and Flit's tea from Thursday. The Phoenix oolong proved to be astonishingly good) was plenty to get me into my really excellent Atomic Robo game with Morgan Ellis. Carl had recommended that particular game to me, and I was really really happy that I was able to get into it!

I now know the joy of Palomino Blackwings. Carl was cool enough to show them to me when I was there in Oakland, and they're utterly amazing pencils. Better yet is the pencil sharpener for them, which is in the foreground here. It's a lovely two-bladed deal, with the first blade made to sharpen the wood of the pencil. The second blade gives the point to the graphite. What's even better about it is that I can use it as a lead sharpener for my 2 mm leads in their lead holders! So Carl's kind of started me on a pencil binge since BigBadCon and I'm pretty happy with them. You can get them at pencils.com and jetpens.com . Today I've been using the pencils to diagram and plot out character motivations and the entire history of someone going undercover in the 90's Russian Mafiya. The whole spectrum of the organized crime over there is immense and fascinating and I can see why it might have scared people here. Combined with all the information from Codes of the

There was one small side trip we had to do on the way to Big Bad Con , although it was really way out of our way, because the convention was by the Oakland airport and Chez Panisse exists in Berkeley. I made the reservations for the café upstairs exactly one month before. They don't open up reservations until then, and last year we were unable to get reservations because we started too late. I made sure that this year. I also got an interesting surprise on the way there. If you want to just read about the con, click here.

I have made the Black Pearl and she is mine. There are these kits made by a company called Metal Works, and this little beauty started out as four sheets of laser-cut metal that I then punched out of the sheets, bent, and put together according to the directions. My near-sightedness made it so that I had to just take my glasses off and do it. I suspect I wouldn't have even tried it if I were still wearing contact lenses. There are times when it's good to know that I'm getting old. Today was a gorgeous Colorado fall day, the foliage all the colors of flame, and the wind stiff and solid enough to lean against. A raven glided (the way I knew it was a raven, as crows can't glide), stock still, above my head. It cocked one beady black eye at me, cawed at me, and then floated off backwards. I got another thousand words toward a short story, answered a query about usage of a photograph of one of my paintings on Flickr , and several hundred more words on the blog about

I had a very scattered day today. A great deal of the confusion stemmed from the fact that we have a dozen different projects and no idea which one we should tackle first. So, instead of working on anything in particular, we nailed down particulars for a few stories in order to be able to work on them tomorrow.

I plotted a book today. Strictly speaking, I mapped it out over the last week, and today went over it with DP, and today we have the whole outline for the third book in our series. Drawing the scene map had the advantage of me being able to add tags and things to each box whenever I felt like it. Each scene had the following: Characters A title Motivations What I wanted to get across in the scene And the movement of the character across the scene Today's List of Accomplishments: I made coffee cake I watched One Piece with Jet I helped Jet with homework Jet and I went to Noodles and I had the BBQ pork mac and cheese! I got my allergy shots I knitted on Cathie's sweater I finished the Home Tour Tickets Marian came by to give me all the committee's feedback and I incorporated it all. I sent the tickets to the printers after getting one last look at it from the committee. I wrote some of my blog entry about Oakland. I had burritos from flour tortillas I ha

My summer has been completely consumed by writing and by the things that I've been trying to do to have a good summer. Everything from family reunions, small adventures, and the usual just going out and doing something in the summer because we have Jet here with us so we can really explore. Writing has been eating my head. All of it, including most of the words that usually get out into my journals. I think that here, I'm going to be talking more about the mechanics and reality of actually being a writer, and trying to get multiple novels off our plate, and onto my plate, and how to get into and through my characters. It's such a huge part of my life now, that it's just insane. Everything I do, everything I think has been feeding back into character, plot, motivations, and what better detail could be used for a particular stage of the various stories we have going. Everything from how Olympic style epee is different from foil, to the way the roads run across the US, t

Since 1997, I blogged on my own private blog on a friend's server.  Then in 2003, I started blogging on Livejournal , and actually got a permanent account over there, which I don't regret as I've been there for nearly nine years.  Given that it took me six years to move to a new technology, it doesn't really surprise me too much that it's taking me this long to come here. Livejournal seems to be dying, and the links here to Google+ and other places seems just that much easier, and I may well journal more frequently here rather than there.  I'm just tired of the Russian white-outs of the site, and very very tired of the spam.  I will probably leave my fanfiction there, as I'm writing less and less of it now, as I publish more books, and there are several good fanfiction sites now where I'm happy to put that stuff. I really do love my fanfiction.net site , as the folks there are very friendly and have given me some good and keen insight as to what wor