chez sweet chez

Stuff and Things


I put the werewolf smut up for pre-order. The blurb and the cover might change, and it will by all indications be out much earlier than the preorder date, but at least it’s there. I had fun writing it. Also, Rose & Thunder is a Kindle Countdown Deal until the 12th, if you’re into that. After that, I’ll be taking the book off KU and putting it back into wide distribution, so get it while it’s hot.

The thunderstorms we were promised didn’t show up until midnight. I woke to find a shaking, lip-licking, whining Miss B pressing as close to me as she could get while the heavenly cannons flashed and roared. Before you ask, no, we don’t use a ThunderShirt for her. She hates that thing more than she hates the loud noises I thought to save her from. The only thing that works for her is anti-anxiety meds and plenty of cuddles. Strangely, though she hates the compression of the shirt, she likes getting under the covers with me, with only her nose poking out. She won’t listen when I tell her they’re basically the same thing. *eyeroll* I guess it was the fact that I’d just washed my sheets that made it so attractive.

Odd Trundles, of course, spent the entire storm snoring in his crate, except for when one strike less than a mile away rattled the windows. He roused, sleepily barked at “what the fuck are you doing, it’s nap time” at the world, and went back to snore-whistling.

When the entire thing receded, it took a while to get Miss B back to calm, and she’s still nervy and needy this morning. Poor thing. It’s almost as bad as fireworks season. I hear that the new laws go into effect this year–no fireworks for the 4th/New Year’s inside the city limits, and it’s about goddamn time. It’s so bad for the pets. Go out somewhere else to blow up bits of your native soil in celebration, or, here’s a thought: just don’t. Ugh.

Anyway, it’s a Friday. I did a Friday photo yesterday, probably because the heat had addled my brain somewhat. Since I did my long run yesterday too (look, it was scheduled, I figured I’d get it out of the way, it was a bad choice but I don’t regret it) I’ll probably go for a nice easy bike ride today, just to wear me out so I can sleep through whatever happens tonight. There are no more storms in the forecast, unless one counts emotional ones.

So today I begin revisions on Afterwar, bite my nails over the upcoming Cormorant Run release, achieve some steady wordcount in Roadtrip Z, try to exhaust myself for sleeping tonight, and smile at the rain.

Because yes, it’s raining. 50F and raining, again, a nice break from two 80F days. I never sleep well when it’s that warm, anyway. The world is back on its regular track, and I’m happy enough. If I can just get Miss B all-the-way soothed, I’ll count today a win.

Humid Nightmare

I’ve twenty minutes before I should go and prep the rice cooker for lunch (brown rice! Leftover broccoli! Adult food choices to make up for last night!) and put some bread dough together. So I thought, instead of revising the last chapter of the werewolf smut (tentatively titled Bite because why not?) and deciding if I need to make it, well, smuttier, I’d blog instead.

I know, it makes no sense, but there it is.

Miss B is somewhat slow and nippy today. The weather’s changed, and even though yesterday’s run was slow and short, she still needs a little recovery time. This pisses her off–recovery, to her, is a dirty word, because it means she won’t go With Mum. And if there’s anything she hates, it’s being left behind while I go do Fun Things Without Her. Like doctor’s office visits, grocery shopping, long runs, or even checking the mail. Each time, she informs me when I return that I was Gone Far Too Long and will need to work hard to Make Amends.

Then she gets an itch, thumps down, chews on her bum for a second or two, and all is forgiven.

Odd, of course, doesn’t mind me leaving as long as he can sleep on my bed while I’m gone. He does notice when I return, however, and does a groaning pee-dance at the head of the stairs, yodeling the song of his people. It sounds suspiciously like a dying giraffe, with bonus ear-shattering banshee wails added for spice.

Any ingress to Chez Saintcrow is accompanied by these horns and drums, let me tell you.

They’re saying it’ll be 80F today, which is…not usual, for May. Currently it’s far cooler, with a lot of cloud cover, so it will probably turn into a humid nightmare later. Right in time for me to bake bread, of course, so that will, of course, be sweaty and uncomfortable. But I want good toast, and store-bought is not going to satisfy for the next couple days.

Now that I’m typing, I seem to have run out of things to say. Maybe I should go back and use the remaining time to dust and sculpt the werewolf smut. This, I suspect, will be a fun thing to do before I’m fully caffeinated. Losing track of whose hands are whose in the middle of a sex scene can bring much unintentional hilarity into the world.

I hope your Wednesday is not a humid nightmare, my friends, and that someone is as happy to see you as Odd Trundles is to see anyone coming in the front door. Be kind, be safe, be excellent to each other.

Over and out.

Bloody-Haired Beltane

Last night I did dream of flying–a good omen, indeed. Happy Beltane, my friends, and may your bonfires be fruitful.

And yet, even though it’s Beltane, it is a Monday. How can I tell, you ask?

Little Prince: *taps at the door*
Me: *groans*
Miss B: SOMEONE AT THE DOOR! ALERT! ALERT!
Little Prince: I always wait until you grunt, so I know you’re awake. I’m going to school.
The Mad Tortie: FINALLY I AM IN YOUR ROOM, HUMAN.
Me: …have a good day at school, kid.
Little Prince: You too…oh, hey, there’s the cat.
Me: Thanks.
Odd Trundles: *snorefartwhistle snore*

Fast-forward about ten minutes.

The Mad Tortie: I SHALL NEST IN YOUR HAIR, AND KNEAD YOUR SCALP.
Me: Cat. Please. No.
Miss B: JOB? IS THERE A JOB FOR THE DOG? *snoot-boops the cat* *repeatedly*
The Mad Tortie: CURSE YOU, FOUL BEAST! *digs claws in*
Me: Well, I’m awake now. *bleeds on pillow*

Five minutes later.

Miss B: JOB? JOB FOR THE DOG? JOB, MOM?
Me: Go away.
Miss B: SNUGGLES? IT’S DAYLIGHT. THAT MEANS GET UP AND DO FUN THINGS.
Odd Trundles: *fartwhistle snore*
The Mad Tortie: YOU’RE AWAKE. THAT MEANS YOU CAN PET ME.
Me: Stop. Please. Just stop.
Miss B: COLD WET SNOOT BOOPS FOR THE HUMAN!
The Mad Tortie: RUB MY EARS, SLAVE.
Me: …I hate you all.
Odd Trundles: *snortsnore* HUH? IS IT BREAKFAST?
The Mad Tortie: *nibbles at my fingers, kneads at my scalp again*

Another five minutes of vainly but determinedly trying to get back to sleep passes. Finally, I sighed, and started unwrapping the sheets and blankets.

The Mad Tortie: ACK! ALERT! MOVEMENT! KILL IT! CLAW! BITE! DESTROY!
Miss B: ACK! ALERT! WET SNOOT DEPLOYED! I’LL SAVE YOU!
Me: *punched in face, clawed, and trapped in blankets* AUGH!
Miss B: WHAT? IS IT A JOB? JOB FOR THE DOG? OOOH, A CAT!
The Mad Tortie: KILL YOU AAAAAAALLLLLLL!
Odd Trundles: *fartsnorewhistle snore smack lips* HUH? BREAKFAST?

Bleeding, wounded, and more than slightly miffed, I struggled mostly free of the blankets and shook the cat away from my head. Miss B, excited past all reason, clawed and nosed at the covers to unpack me, her hind end wiggling so hard she hip-checked the dresser with a meaty sound. Which the cat thought was something Coming To Get Her, so she leapt, twisted in midair, and streaked for the (closed) door to the hallway.

And ran right into it.

Which startled Odd Trundles, who began barking “ALERT! ALERT! FIRE! FLOOD! ANARCHY! SQUIRRELS!” from his crate. Since it’s pretty lightweight–more an idea of a crate than an actual prison–his muscle-dense ass, of course, tipped it back into the closet doors.

Which made Miss B think there was an invader coming through a closet portal. Since I was sleepy and purportedly defenseless, that could only mean one thing: ATTACK.

And all this before coffee.

So, yeah. The dogs have had their breakfast, and the Mad Tortie is safely outside, since I stumbled out into the dining room to find her batting at the French door and cursing me loudly for being an ineffective monkey-slave. Miss B is currently sleeping the sleep of the just in a corner of my office, content to have defended her human, eaten, and unloaded her bowels outside all in the course of twenty minutes. Odd Trundles, freed of the crate and amnesiac of this morning’s events, is *snortwhistlesnore*-ing on my bed, sprawled and deliriously happy that breakfast was had.

Me?

I have the closet doors to get back onto their rails, and dried blood to pick out of my hair. It’s not even 10am yet.

And that’s how I can tell it’s a Monday, my friends.

Monday Didn’t Break Me

Sunday night, the washer stopped working, and the Little Prince spilled a whole glass of ice water all over his nightstand. Plus there was the dropping of things, a couple other breakages, and even though I’d managed to get my housecleaning chores done, the entire thing just made me want to go to bed.

Cue up Monday, a flooded utility room because of the washer–I love my children, but I swear to God, the next time one of them puts a chunk of duct tape through the washer they are cleaning that goddamn room to white-glove–and finding out the major medication I rely on to allay the panic attacks somehow, mysteriously, just tripled in price since last month, and it wasn’t cheap before.

Needless to say, I was more than ready to crawl into bed and just consign the whole day to the dustheap. I rolled with it, sure, and it was even funny in places, but that shit is exhausting. I challenged Monday and it didn’t break me, it just made me tired.

On the bright side, I may get a zero of the werewolf novella out today. That will set it up for revision and release in a little while, and I’ll have to start thinking about cover design. I want to do the Beguine books/novellas myself; we’ll see what happens. Meanwhile, once the werewolf zero is done there’s the Veil Knights book to revise, then it’s into the wilds of Afterwar to make that book as good as possible before it goes off to the editor as a Reasonable, Grown-Up First Draft. In between all that I do have to prep the genie-and-accountant story, and there’s a suspense book I want to write, not to mention the sequel to The Marked.

Now if all this work would just pay me a living wage, I’d be all set. *sigh*

I’m not very cheerful today, so if you see me around and I don’t wave or make eye contact, it’s because I’m buttoned up tightly to keep the stabby-stabby from escaping.

First order of business: that damn washing machine.

Over and out.

Weekend Reading

The weekend, with alternating sun and drenching cool rain, has spun spring into high gear. Fortunately, the winter’s hard freezes seem to have put a dent in the slug population, or my hostas have the jump on the things, I can’t tell which. It’s nice not to have them blasted by slug-trails as soon as they sprout this year. The apple trees are in bloom, the cherries are exuberant, and even the hail has been moderate. Of course, the squirrels dug up most of my favas, so I have to replant those to get some nitrogen-fixing into the soil, but after the winter I kind of don’t blame the little furry fuckers.

They’ve grown amazingly fat now. And they’ve taken to showing up on the deck during our dinner hour, which makes me frantically check to make sure everyone’s wearing shoes. The kids laugh at me, but I don’t find it very funny.

I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Last American Man this weekend. I thought it would feed Roadtrip Z, and my writing partner was reading it for her own purposes, so I picked it up from the library.

It’s been a long time since I hate-read a book, and this one I had to get furious over to finish. Not because of the author–Gilbert has serviceable prose, and does her best to present the subject fairly and honestly. I do wish she would have read The National Uncanny before spouting off about the “frontier”, though. (To be honest, I think The National Uncanny should be required reading for every American.)

No, what pissed me off to no end was the massive, entitled selfishness of her subject Eustace Conway. It’s similar to how I felt reading Krakauer’s Into the Wild–here are white boys from comfortable if not wealthy homes, leaving a trail of broken promises and people behind while they go off “into the wilderness” and, as if that’s not enough, have the sheer unmitigated gall to look down their noses at other people’s embrace of modernity. These jackasses keep being treated as if they’re somehow special, and it irks me to no end. Selfishness on this scale, while de rigueur for mediocre white men, is always irritating. I’ll use just one example here: Eustace Conway’s TED talk. Not only is it billed as him living a “deeper life” somehow, since he shits in the woods, but you’d have read Gilbert’s book to know that the horse trips he talks about were taken with other people–his brother and a female friend in the first case, and Conway’s then-girlfriend for the buggy ride. He completely discounts the work of others that make his little Davy Crockett dreams possible.

…yeah, you can tell what I thought of all of that. Massive, blinding privilege is all over this guy, and yet he gets kudos for being somehow “natural.” How many indigenous speakers could have used some of the PR air his blowhard self took up? Imagine, if he was a minority, how differently several parts of his story would have played out.

My fury, it has many parts. Suffice to say I finished the book, read some news articles about Conway’s legal troubles, and rolled my eyes so hard it probably caused a few of the neighbors to think there was spring thunder. To be stringently fair, my feelings about camping may have influenced me somewhat. Thousands of years we’ve spent as a species, getting away from being naked in the woods with no toilet paper, and some idiots think they want to go back.

Anyway, I’m on Sydenham’s The Girondins, after finishing Mathiez’s After Robespierre and a newer edition of Bruun’s Saint-Just: Apostle of the Terror. There really are no good in-depth biographies of Saint-Just, at least, in English. Part of that is probably that Robespierre eclipsed him, and another part is probably the paucity of documentary evidence. I have to say Tanith Lee’s The Gods are Thirsty has the best portrait of Saint-Just around, and it’s a novel, he’s only a secondary character.

The weekend encompassed much else, of course, including the washer acting up. Now that the coffee’s sunk in, I’m going to go prop it up and take a whack at fixing what I think the problem might be. Wish me luck, and if that doesn’t work, let’s hope the home warranty covers washers.

Over and out.

Bear, Storm

Pouring rain one moment, blinding sunshine the next. It’s definitely spring.

Along with muting a few Certain Keywords for a week, I decided to take yesterday mostly off social media. It was nice to sink fully into a story and not check what new beast was slouching to Bethlehem and Armageddon at the same time. I also turned my phone off once the Little Prince was home. That was welcome, let me tell you.

This morning I’m listening to an old radio show featuring Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie. Guthrie admits to not reading Grapes of Wrath, but “I seen the movie three times.” It may be time for a reread, now that I’ve listened to Ballad of Tom Joad with my mouth slightly open and my eyes closed, hearing history.

Maybe it’s the hail and the occasional thunder, but I’m curling up inside my shell this week. The sheer amount of hatred in the American air is overwhelming, and I have very little left to fight it with. I’m sure I’ll feel better after I recharge, but right now I’m channeling a polar bear–leave me alone, or I will stand up in a blizzard and wallop a head or two clean off.

Which reminds me, I’ve never seen John Carpenter’s The Thing. I hear the remake was dismal; should I even bother with it, or only admit the existence of the original, like I do with Star Wars? (No, I refuse to watch any more of those movies. You lost me with Jar Jar fucking Binks, Lucas.)

ANYWAY. Polar bear. Spring storms. My hackles are up, and I’m not even in my final fighting form.

Over and out.

Bicycle, Back Spasm

I did ALL THE CHORES yesterday, and got a back spasm or two for my pains while taking apart a bicycle.

…perhaps I should explain.

Last summer (I think? Or maybe the summer before?) I spotted a bigger bicycle than the one the Little Prince currently had at a garage sale. He liked it, I dropped a few dollars, and he rode it until the wheels both blew. (He’s, uh, very active.) Time passed, a small royalty check came (hooray!) and I managed to save enough of it to get both kids new bikes.

That left the problem of what to do with the Prince’s old one. We could give the small one to the next-door neighbour’s little boy, but I couldn’t put a “free” sign on a bike with two blown wheels and feel reasonably good about it. So it sat behind the garage for a long while.

You know, I thought one day, while spreading compost, if you took the wheels and stuff off, it would make a reasonable trellis for peas and cucumbers. You could even string some twine from it to the uprights… The idea teased and tickled, but the time (and let’s face it, the weather) never seemed right. Cue up yesterday, when I was up at five AM to take another set of neighbours to the airport. Maybe lack of sleep made me ambitious; I took both tool sets outside and hoped I wouldn’t need anything gigantic.

There’s a certain satisfaction to looking at something and figuring out how to take it apart. The seat was easy, the handlebars were rusted tight–that’s okay, they’ll provide support for peas–but the wheels were a little challenging. Nevertheless, I bloody well persisted. After a bit of kneeling on concrete and wrestling, my back started to inform me that my Earth shoes were not proper for this sort of work, and furthermore, it was goddamn unhappy with quite a few things going on that day.

There was a lot of creative swearing. I think the term “monkeyfucking sideways bruncher” came out, and I’m not sure what exactly it means, but it sounded good at the time. thank God I left the dogs inside–their brand of “helping” would have had dire results. Of course, Miss B was pissy with me for daring to perform such surgery without her supervision, and Odd, having been freshly washed, complained of being looooooonely while I was outside for a mere half-hour. *eyeroll*

I have a long scrape down my right leg, and my back’s a little happier today. The denuded frame is in the garden, and of all the things I feel good about accomplishing yesterday, that’s the biggest. Go figure. I didn’t take the chain off, that can happen later.

Now, if only the damn squirrels would leave it alone…

I’m feeling pretty redneck gardener.