All Mod Cons Operational Again

On Tuesday, the Grand Dishwasher Saga came to a close.1 And thank goodness, too, because Wednesday night I came down with the stomach flu the Princess caught from her best friend, who brought it back from college in Seattle.

Consequently, a lot of bowls needed to be washed, and now that I’m on the mend (shaky, back and head aching from dehydration, but not spewing) all the cups we’ve attempted to drink from need washing as well. And linens. Gastroenteritis is a messy business, and with the sudden violent onset of this particular virus, there were a lot of linens needing some soap and water.

Thank God the washing machine wasn’t out of commission. Things could have gotten dire.

Anyway, our complement of mod cons is now complete again. I’ve lost most of this working week, though, and I was already behind. Guess we all know what I’m doing this weekend.

That’s right. Loading the (functioning!) dishwasher. And writing.

Over and out.

May Day Appliance Wizard

Season 4 of ROADTRIP Z just started, so if you want to get in on it, now’s the time. This is the very last season, and after it ends (probably sometime in October) I’ll be doing another serial. I’m not entirely sure, but I think it’ll be Robin Hood in Space, otherwise known as HOOD. (I have this thing for capitalizing serial titles, I guess.) I just have to figure out if that one’s a long standalone or broken up into seasons, too.

Good morning! It’s Beltane, which is lovely. It’s also (supposedly) the day we finally get the new dishwasher (still sitting in our garage) installed and can stop calling service people and the home warranty folks. After a bumpy start, the latter have been more than kind. The only problem is having to call them each time because I hate the phone…

*time passes*

Well, just as I was typing that, the doorbell rang, the dogs went nuts, and it was the installer. Several hours early, in fact. And despite one small snag (the water hose wasn’t long enough, so he popped out and grabbed a new one) everything went smoothly. So smoothly, in fact, that the NEW DISHWASHER is currently WASHING. I mean, there wasn’t much to put in there for its inaugural load, but dammit, I made do. I FOUND things to put in there.

A big shout out to: Trevonte, Renee, Samantha, and Kinetha at AHS for their patience and kindness, another big shout-out to the original installers who had a helluva day before they got to us, yet another to Mr Gates of Gates Plumbing who was kind, professional, and thoroughly courteous, and to finish it off, thank you, Tri-County, for coming through bigtime.

I’ve got to say the last installer–the Tri-County fellow–was a wizard. The dogs calmed down while he worked, he hummed to the dishwasher while installing, and he had the nicest, sleepiest, most genuinely pleased smile I’ve seen in a while. The May Day Appliance Wizard, I’ll call him, and dear gods above but this was a pleasant way to start a brand-new month. April was horrid, but the luck has changed now.

It takes a village to get a damn dishwasher in. The thing is running now, and I can’t hear it. The old one used to be audible even outside the front door. I’ve had to walk down the hall and check that it’s still running each paragraph.

*checks again* Yep, still running. Man, it’s nice to have that back.

Now I’m going to go for a run. No rest for the wicked, and my joy will probably float me for a few blocks until my heart, lungs, and legs figure out I’m making them work again.

Over and out.

Dogs, Dogwood

Yesterday, while walking the dogs, I passed a dogwood in exuberant flower. I love their notched blossoms and of course the canines are always happy to stop and sniff–or snuffle, in Odd Trundles’s case. Poor Trundles had a damp rear because he had to be half-washed that morning, and walking in the sunshine to air his nethers was apparently quite pleasing. At least, he’d forgiven me for soaping and rinsing him by the time we arrived back home.

Spring has definitely sprung.

RELEASE DAY: Pocalypse Road

That’s right, my hoopy froods! Season 3 of Roadtrip Z is now out in the world.

Winter has arrived, the walking dead are hungry, and Ginny and Lee’s small group of survivors is making its way towards New York. Other survivors, shaking off the daze of catastrophe, are moving as well. In a wasteland of snow and failing power, of course the zombies are dangerous…

…but it’s the other people you really have to watch out for.

Season 3: Pocalypse Road is now available direct, at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and at independent bookstores.

I had a lot of fun with this season. Things just had to keep going wrong, and more wrong, and more-more wrong, in the grand tradition of every zombie apocalypse tale. Be on the lookout for Tuckerized readers, callbacks to old zombie movies, how to haul ammo in a snowbound wasteland, and finally, finally, Lee Quartine getting a break or two, as well as the mystery of just what was in Colonel Grandon’s case from Season 1.

And now, since it’s a release day, I’m gonna go stick my head in a bucket and hope the anxiety dies down. Enjoy!

The Potential Pile

Rain. Rain, rain, rain, and I get to go running in it. Miss B is extremely excited, and doesn’t understand why I have to run the dryer before we leave. My running jacket just went through the wash, and I want to make it as dry as possible before I go out and…get rained on. I also just had to tell B to calm her multiple teats, since a neighbor is running a chainsaw in the back yard and B is Defending the Household with a bonus of Making Sure Mum Knows There Are Things Going On.

Speaking of the back yard, we’re going to have to keep the Mad Tortie in. She used to be an inside cat, but when we moved she darted out through the back door and has managed, by hook or crook, to be an outside cat ever since. She’s killing too many birds for that to continue, though, and she’s also getting older. Which means we’re going to have to get serious about blocking her escape-artist habits. Safer for her, and definitely safer for the feathered and furred denizens of Backyard.1

I got a grand total of a thousand words in yesterday, all layering in a scene that isn’t very sexy but is extremely important. I’m juggling umpty-scrump character arcs in the doorstop epic fantasy, and while I don’t personally like or get excited about all of them, they’re necessary for the book to have any depth. It’s also fun–for a certain value of fun–to stretch my narrative skills. You keep swimming or you suffocate.

So the warlord-turned-Emperor is facing his own mortality, his sons are jostling in the succession, his wives and concubines are afraid for their children and themselves, the foreign princess bartered to the Crown Prince in return for a peace deal is nervous, her lady in waiting keeps having to fend off assassins, that one prince is being a dick, the general-turned-prince-by-adoption is having tricky feelings, and then there’s the assassins and the court ladies and and and.

Man, I love this book. I’m in the slough in the middle where it feels like it’ll never get done, but I still love the shit out of it.

I also meant to do some Robin Hood in Space last night, but I got sucked into piano practice and also watching the Blade Runner sequel. I didn’t finish it–leftover exhaustion from the weekend rose up and laid me flat–and I have…thoughts about the whole thing. Like, I’m really tired of female bodies being disposable things for spec-fic “hero” characters to transact through. So tired. And the Dickensian workhouse as a hallmark of dystopia and shorthand for “here is a morally grey character running this place” is just…come on, people, stop with the shortcuts, let’s do something new or at least change up the visual shorthand.

As usual, if I want something like that, I’m going to have to create it myself. At this point I’m just adding it to the list of potential projects, and telling myself that the gods can’t take me yet, I have too much work to do.2

There’s no shortage of work, and I’ve taken on a short-term editing project as well as some comic book scripts. Because of course I’m not happy unless I’ve got a glut of work to get through. There’s also a break in the rain coming, so it’s time to lace up and drag my laundry out of the dryer.

*narrator voice* And so, Tuesday begins…

Half-Brain, Dishwasher

Robin Hood
© | Dreamstime Stock Photos
I’m bouncing back and forth between an epic fantasy in a preindustrial world and a sort of Robin Hood in Space thing, where Robin is a sniper home from interplanetary war with PTSD and mecha are a thing. Each half of my brain is fighting with a different story, and I’m left standing on my corpus callosum and looking rather baffled.

As long as I don’t cross the sewage treatment technologies, I’ll probably be fine?

One of the things I want to do in the epic fantasy is show things that were hand waved or glossed over in the fantasy books I read growing up as a kid. How does the water for bathing get there? What happens when a woman has her period? I know there’s a chunk of fantasy out there that answers questions like that, and the chunk has been growing all the time, but I want to come up with my own answers. I want to solve the problems in my own way.

And I can’t read other epic fantasy right now. I can’t read in a genre I’m currently writing in, mostly because I don’t want to poison the well but also because it’s exhausting. The same brain-muscles used for creating would start trying to revise and build in other directions, and I’d end up a pile of exposed wires, sparking and writhing.

On the bright side, I finally got a repairman out to look at the dishwasher. The bad news is that at 15+ years old and with no model number, the poor thing is irretrievably dead. (Cue Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch.) This is not, however, the worst news, because it means the home warranty will (begrudgingly, I can only suppose, but we are all helpless in the face of obsolescence) replace the damn thing.

I am overjoyed at this, but the true beneficiaries are the Little Prince and Princess, for they chose the kitchen as their daily chore and once the dishwasher stopped, were initiated into the great mysteries of Washing Up Completely By Hand, otherwise known as The Entire Reason Dishwashers Were Created. Not that they complain, really, since they chose the kitchen as their chore of choice ages ago.1 They split the work according to whoever has the most time off that day, and largely get along without any trouble at all.

They’ll make good roommates or spousal units someday, I’m sure.

I spent a fair amount of time yesterday looking at dishwashers. I had no idea there were so many options. Basically all I want is a stainless steel tub and a filer that isn’t too bloody difficult to clean; but if you have Dishwasher Advice, now’s the time for it.

Speaking of advice, I had to get rid of Disqus as a commenting system. They updated their plugin and broke syncing as well as started hard-selling ads. I don’t want advertising on my bloody site, dammit–you could make the case that it’s already an advert for my books, but I like to think there’s some value added in other parts. Anyway, the look of the comments section has changed, but it’s still the same old field of sweetness, punning, light, and my comment policy. So hit me up with your Dishwasher Advice, my friends.

Now it’s time to get out the door for a long-is run, and block out the next assassination attempt in each book. Technology may come and go, but murder remains ever the same. *sips drink*

Over and out.

Caesar, Sibilant

More Latin. During the day it’s Caesar’s Gallic War, when I go to bed it’s at least one page of Pliny. Right now, the Belgae are besieging Bibrax, and one of the things I like about reading aloud from a Loeb Classical edition is sometimes I hear a fellow writer using words for effect. Case in point:

Cum finem oppugnandi nox fecisset, Iccius Remus, summa nobilitate et gratia inter suos, qui tum oppido praefuerat, unus ex eis qui legati de pace ad Caesarem venerant, nuntium ad eum mittit, nisi subsidium sibi submittatur, sese diutius sustinere non posse. The Gallic War, Loeb Classical, p.98

By the time we get to “subsidium” Caesar’s having a bit of fun, and throws the alliterative sibilants down with what I imagine is a languorous dinner-party wave of one manicured (but manly!) hand. The entire page is really a joy, especially once one catches the rhythm. Sentence by sentence, one gets a sense of a man who liked writing almost as much as he liked winning battles.