Update

Still proof-reading and gardening. Most of the tomatoes are in now - only five or six more holes to dig (groan!) Corn and beans are seeded, squash seedlings planted. I'm late with everything this year because I was working on the final draft of Ash Spear weekends when I should have been tilling.

Update

We're proof-reading today in and around things like mowing the yard and tilling the garden. Tomato-planting tomorrow Monday - it's high time. This is the one year in five or six that I didn't get a killing frost after May 1st and therefore could have planted early (if I hadn't been so busy with the manuscript!) - oh well.

Back home again

Back from a weekend in the Black Hills of South Dakota at an SCA event called Quest for Camelot. As usual I forgot to take pictures, but here's one I took at the site two years ago.

Proof copies of The Ash Spear arrived while I was gone - it's looking good!

-GRG

progress

The final proof copies have been ordered, and barring any unforseen problems, The Ash Spear should be released on Lulu early next month, probably reaching Amazon.com sometime in July (Lulu pushes it to Bowkers, but Amazon has a monthly upload schedule after that). This one weighs in at 328 pages and $19.95 SRP, though hopefully Amazon will discount it a bit. For a bit more about it and a couple of quoted passages, see its page on LibraryThing. There's a lot of other fun stuff there as well ;-)

Now I can start researching the next one, and maybe catch up on the rest of my life, including my gardening - the tomatoes are climbing out of the cold frame, and have started blooming!

-GRG

Still here...

Yes, I'm still here - in the throes of proofreading / revising / all the nick-picking detail that comes at the end of preparing a book.

Tomatoes are getting big, too - I'll try and get a picture up soon. It's spring!

-GRG

Binary weather

Spring in Denver is binary: winter/summer/winter/summer/winter/summer... Snow Monday morning, nice weather Tuesday, snow (with lightning and thunder!) Wednesday evening, nice weather yesterday and today, winter storm warning for tonight and tomorrow... The picture's from last Sunday, one of the nice days.

Less snow...

We got about 8 or 9 inches of snow here, I think, but it's melting fast. The ground had already thawed, and the last two sunny days have helped. The tomato seedlings in the cold frame survived, although some got a bit spindly; I have the lid up this morning to give them more direct light.

On the writing front, I've been doing a couple of other projects while I wait for feedback from my proof-readers. One, still part of preparing the Ash Spear, is to work on the maps, which are nearly ready now - ready for the proof-readers, at any rate. I have to remind myself that things which are perfectly obvious to me, such as which part of Britain is Wales, aren't necessarily going to be obvious to my (mainly North American) readers. This is the sort of assumptions they're checking for now - things I can't see.

The second project has been a little different. I'm doing some spoken word recording - poems and stories from the books. I'd like to make some cd's presently - both collections like these and spoken book versions of the books. The new microphone I've recently bought has solved the sound quality problem, but is picking up a background hum from the computer. I'll have to figure out a way to deal with that before I can do commercial quality recording, but in the short term this is good practice, and good for proof of concept. I'm thinking of including copies with some of my review give-aways, too.

-GRG

Snow!

Denver is under a blizzard warning today, and I'm at home. Not much snow so far, but it only started here about an hour ago. I may add more pictures to this post as the day goes on.

12:15 local time - lots more snow.


Later in the afternoon... ... and 6 pm local time.

p.s. I've added a weather sticker at the bottom of the page.

More coldframe...

Titus has discovered the catmint in the coldframe. He really likes it... Yes, he's sitting in the pot. Fortunately catmint is tough!

The water bottles are there as a temperature regulator, btw.

Tomatoes in the coldframe - 2009

It's that time of year again. I spent parts of the last week starting tomato plants from seed. Almost all have sprouted now, and are in the coldframe, which I've had open yesterday and today thanks to a bit of warm weather. That will be changing tomorrow, but at least the seedlings are off to a good start!

Book stuff: I'm working on maps for Ash Spear. I think it needs a general map of central Britain and a more detailed map of Gwynedd, where a lot of the action takes place. Photoshop Elements is my friend, though I still find myself swearing at it occasionally. After that I have to create the back cover - description and layout. By the time I finish that I should be getting feedback from my proofreaders, and can start on final text revisions. Still on track for a mid-June Lulu release, which translates into Amazon etc. sometime in July.