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well with a five-pointed star

Abe no Seimei and Seimei Jinja

I was in Kyōto. I was looking up something else on my phone and saw “Seimei Jinja” on the screen map, not too far from my ryokan. My metaphorical antennae immediately pricked, and I knew I had to make a detour.

If you’ve read my Kitsune Tales stories, you might remember Abe no Seimei as an important figure in Japanese folklore. He was a real person; we have plenty of documentation for his life. But it’s likely that not quite all of the feats and attributes said of him — being half human and half kitsune, binding 12 heavenly generals as servants, changing oranges into rats, etc. — are as historical.

Abe no Seimei and Seimei Jinja
pine cone and ornaments on Christmas tree, courtesy PicJumbo

Holiday Cards! 2023 Edition

pine cone and ornaments on Christmas tree, courtesy PicJumbo

????It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas….????

Well, not really. We still have Halloween and American Thanksgiving to go. But in terms of planning ahead… It’s time again!

Every year, I offer to send Christmas cards to anyone who wants one. It’s been so much fun to send cards all over the world! But we’re doing the holiday cards a little differently this year, so please read about the new options.

Last year the number of people who requested a Christmas card quadrupled from the previous year. Quadrupled. I was honestly thrilled and delighted! But on the grinch-y pragmatic side, that was hundreds of dollars in postage, not to mention printing costs or the hours of signing cards. I regret nothing! but I should consider future costs.

That said, I don’t want to stop sending Christmas cards. I’ve heard from some of you how this might be one of only a few cards or even the only card to come in, making this one important, so we’re keeping the cards.

So how could I continue offering unlimited holiday cards, and maybe also offer something else special? After consideration, I came up with this idea, and I hope you like it. This year, you have three choices:

Holiday Cards! 2023 Edition
flames flames flames on the side of my face

Luggage Panic and Time Travel

a plane taking off in silhouette before a red sunset
I took this photo at DFW.

Here’s a story with little take-home moral. :)

Tuesday morning, I woke up in Tōkyō. I got up early after four hours of sleep and caught a shinkansen (often called a “bullet train” in the USA). Three days before, I’d stayed at a hotel and sent on a suitcase full of vintage kimono and obi to the airport to wait for me. But there was a problem with airport delivery (we hadn’t known the weight of the filled suitcase and so had opted for a payment plan that turned out not to be eligible for airport delivery), and the hotel had contacted me through the booking agent to ask for my Tōkyō address instead. All that was fine.

Luggage Panic and Time Travel

That time I got stuck in England…

So you might remember we had a global pandemic which affected a lot of travel plans. One of those plans was a family transatlantic cruise from Southampton to New York–or, as my mother repeatedly described it, “the Titanic route.” That trip was eventually rescheduled for April of 2023, and so last month we flew to London, visited some tourist sites, and then hopped a train to Southampton.

En route, I checked my phone and realized our train journey wouldn’t make it. The final leg was shut down due to an accident (someone had gotten onto the tracks). I worked to re-route our party, knowing we had a countdown to board the ship. But as we prepared to disembark early and find an alternate route, another message came in: our cruise was canceled, less than an hour before boarding began, due to a technical issue on the ship. (Later information revealed that it was an engine/scrubber problem.)

Well, then.

That time I got stuck in England…
painting by Victor Hugo

Review: Les Misérables (with a Z)

I wrote this a couple of weeks ago on a plane en route to ClickerExpo, but I forgot to finish and post it live. Here we go!

Les Miserables playbill

I had the opportunity to see the new tour of Les Misérables this week, and I’m still trying to decide how I feel about it.

I came awkwardly to my Broadway nerddom. When young Laura told my piano teacher I wanted the learn the “Phantom of the Opera music,” I meant Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and I was honestly boggled when she gave me the title track to Lloyd Webber’s show, which I’d never heard of. Then that stage passed, and I came of theater age during the heady early ’90s. This of course meant Les Misérables was a key influence.

Review: Les Misérables (with a Z)
WW2 era poster style featuring a woman in uniform standing at attention in front of a faint battleground with planes overhead

D-Dames is here! D-Dames are here? The book of D-Dames is here!

Plural titles can be tricky, because the correct phrasing will sound wrong if the listener doesn’t know it’s a title. But, to the point, a new book is out!

D-Dames

D-Dames is a collection of short stories about women with elemental magic in World War 2. These stories were written originally and separately for the elemental anthology series from Tyche Books and edited by Rhonda Parrish, but now they are collected for easy enjoyment together. And I’ve also added, through the power of ebook expansion, annotated versions!

(Ebooks are cool, because they’re kind of little Bags of Holding, able to hold a great deal more without increasing your shelf footprint or carrying weight.)

D-Dames is here! D-Dames are here? The book of D-Dames is here!
Aeclipse Press logo

Typo Bounty Program!

I self-publish, and I publish traditionally. My work may be read by one editor or a half dozen. I’ve read it myself 5 or 25 times before it goes to press. And still somehow a typo can occasionally slip through.

Bert knows this is wrong.

It doesn’t happen a lot; I work hard to put out clean manuscripts. But I recently found an error in a story I’d sold (published elsewhere), and then this week a glitch ate some layout code and spat up paragraph break errors among hundreds of pages, all of which must be found and fixed manually.

Sometimes it’s human error. Sometimes it’s software. It’s always frustrating, even if they’re generally uncommon. But one advantage of independent publishing over traditional is the ability to correct that stray typo sooner rather than later (or not at all).

Announcing the Typo Bounty Program! /perky kazoo music/

Typo Bounty Program!

Authors & Publishers, check your machine learning licenses

Check your machine learning licenses. Even if you didn’t know you had granted one. Especially if you didn’t know you had granted one.

I have just been alerted by my narrator to a clause tucked into my Findaway Voices distribution agreement. It was the last bit of attached Schedule D, distribution policies about things like poor recording quality, hate speech, and [highly inappropriate behavior with animals and minors], and other categories I never expected to apply to our work, so I hadn’t seen it.

Authors & Publishers, check your machine learning licenses
neon Blue Swallow Motel sign lit in twilight

Route 66: Classic Signs

This entry is part 17 of 17 in the series GDB & Route 66

One of the best parts of Route 66 is the old signs, many with neon, all with fun old design. And there are a few newer signs intended to blend with the vintage ones.

I took these photos on my Route 66 trip a few years ago, but in all the travelogue posts, I forgot to publish this one! Please enjoy this blast from the past.

Route 66: Classic Signs