Well, at least I made the error in the moral-high-ground direction.
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Category: My Rock Star Life
a little less about writing
Giftmas Create-A-Thon!
Many of you will remember that I typically participate in Giftmas each year, a writers’ fundraising event for a food bank. This year, we’re doing something a little different! A bunch of writers and creators are working toward various goals, and we’re asking for your pledges to support Doctors Without Borders, a medical charity doing critical work with refugees around the world.
My dual goals are to write and to make travelogue videos for you while I hike. Others are doing different goals. You can pledge to support one or several of us!
Update: I wrote over 30,000 new words, for a 3x goal-smash! And the videos are coming. Please pledge accordingly. Thanks!
You can support in three ways:
- Make a base pledge directly to the fundraising campaign. This is fast and easy (and there’s nothing to remember to do later!).
- Make a lump sum pledge if a creator achieves their goals (“I will donate $50 if Sally Writesalot completes her goal of a poem a day in November”).
- Make a scaled pledge based on a creator’s output (“I will donate $10 for every travelogue video Laura shares” or “I will donate $5 for every thousand words Sally completes”).
Pick whatever sounds fun to you; we appreciate all donations to the cause! You can support one creator or several. On December 1, creators will report their progress, and you’ll have until December 10 to honor any remaining pledges. We may also have some fun bonuses for supporters along the way, so please join us!
Want to join me?
Sign up!
Honeysuckle Must Die! (Dealing With Invasive Species)
The husband and I have been tackling invasive species on our property.
The primary offender and target is Amur Honeysuckle, also called Asian Bush Honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii). It looks nothing like a native honeysuckle, but some people deliberately planted it in gardens, and that was a terrible idea. Now, it’s freakin’ everywhere, and it’s a problem — it don’t feed much of anything here, so it spreads ferociously while reducing useful food for native insects and animals.
Look at how this shrub spreads — it’s very dense, and the native seedlings are going to have a tough time finding a place to grow. It also dries out the soil and increases predator access to bird nests, reducing populations. And even if you don’t care about native plants and birds and pollinators, you might care that the spread of this invasive changes the local ecosystem with the result of a lot more ticks. (More ticks and thus more tick disease are already a climate-related problem; let’s not add to it!)
Continue readingWe are funded!
I’m currently at Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ Colorado Gold conference, both speaking and learning from some awesome authors and publishers. But also, we just wrapped up BackerKit’s first ever Booktopia, with my new epic fantasy series The Eyes of Mandoral, and we rocked it!
Continue readingAn Adventure on Fuji-san
On relatively short notice (just less than a month), I decided with two friends to climb Mt. Fuji.
This wasn’t quite as ridiculous as it sounds. I had traveled with these friends in Japan before, specifically for a week of mountain hiking on the Kumano Kodō. While I live in a former swamp at just 400 feet above sea level, I know from other hikes that I handle altitude well enough to transition quickly. So I hopped a plane and burned some miles to Tōkyō.
But I didn’t land and immediately start hiking; I love visiting Japan, and we made a few stops first.
Continue readingOrigins Game Fair: A Trove of Legacies
The Origins Game Fair theme this year is Legacy of Gaming, and that was reflected in the anthology of short fiction, A Trove of Legacies.
Each year the Origins authors collaborate to put together an anthology of short fiction. My story, “A Signet to Save,” is a side story featuring Lisveth and Galen from The Poet’s Eye. Copies of the anthology are $20 here at Origins — and you can get all the authors’ signatures (and that of the cover artist) as well!
Continue readingWhen Aliens Invaded Rural Kentucky
In 2017 I traveled to Hopkinsville, Kentucky, which was the location of longest totality for the solar eclipse. You can read about how that went over at this post. But during this season of celestial event anticipation (we have another total eclipse happening this spring, this time in my backyard), I want to re-visit a story I told back then.
Totality
I’d seen partial solar eclipses before, but never totality, and wow. I’d read repeatedly that there is a real difference, and it’s true. The partial coverage was fun, especially as it advanced, when the sunlight got all weird like someone had screwed up the Photoshop brightness/contrast settings. You want to worry that you have eclipse blindness already (you don’t, it takes a day or two to show effects even if you stupidly stared directly into the sun), but it’s just the atmosphere refracting the reduced light.
Totality was a very trippy experience. The sun was SO BLACK, and my poor phone camera just wasn’t equipped to handle the contrast. Cicadas sang as twilight fell. I could see the corona with my naked eye. There was a 360-degree sunset. It was really cool, and not nearly long enough even at the country’s longest totality. (See the photos on the original post.)
I’m sad to be missing the eclipse this year, but at least I got to experience it in 2017!
Little Green Men
That eclipse trip prompted me to look up details on the alleged alien invasion in that area decades before.
On August 21, 1955 — yes, the 2017 solar eclipse date was an anniversary — 8 adults and 3 children reported an assault on their farmhouse by “little men” they claimed were extraterrestrials. (The color green was added in later media reports, and this may be the trope-namer for the phrase.) They fled to the Hopkinsville police station to ask for help, saying they’d been fighting the creatures for 4 hours.
The whole affair started when one of the men went out to retrieve water from the well. He saw a bright rainbow-colored light which he described as a flying saucer shoot overhead and land beyond a nearby treeline, hissing. He went inside and reported it to the family, who laughed at his tale — until not long after when the little men, with gangling arms, stumpy legs, and a swaying gait, approached the house and began to peer in through the windows.
Continue readingHurray! ONLY THE DEAD FACE NORTH is a go!
Thanks to all of you wonderful people, Only The Dead Face North is fully funded on Kickstarter.
Actually, it’s more than fully funded.
It’s over 5x funded.
Continue readingAbe 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.
Continue readingLuggage Panic and Time Travel
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.
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