The Change of Seasons

This is the first year I can say I felt the season changed. It was about a week ago. The humidity dropped overnight. We had clear blue skies and cooler temperatures the following day. I felt like someone had flipped a switch somewhere and we were now coasting down toward winter.

Trees are dropping leaves already. Nights are in the fifties now.

This summer was unusually hot in a very consistent manner. Every day was pushing 90. The vegetable garden needed watering almost every day. We didn't have a lot of rain.

I have heard that the El Nino will bring us either a mild winter or a brutal one. I guess it depends on how the weather systems travel once they hit the mountains.

August ennui has me ignoring the garden just when the weeds are creeping in. Everything needs attention, but I am in the middle of line edits on Scattered Seeds and that is taking all my time. In fact I should be working on it right now.

Computer Lunacy

I only have myself to blame. I didn't think before I hit the Upgrade button. And worst of all, I didn't do a backup first.

Sigh.

Microsoft sent me a nice little email saying I could upgrade to Windows 10. So I did. Without considering that it was going to change a bunch of things and maybe lose some stuff. It looked a little different, but I expected that. I didn't expect to lose my internet connection.

I work online. If I can't access the internet, I can't do my work. So I panicked.

After trying to connect umpteen times and failing I chose to downgrade back to Window 8.1. I assumed that would make things just like they were before.

Nope. Still no wifi.

I am not tech savvy. I know enough to get in trouble. And I did. I found something that offered to refresh the computer without affecting the files. Cool. I clicked on it.

Bad news. Still no wifi and on top of that I lost all sorts of software...like Word.

It kept telling me that I needed to plug in my Ethernet cable. This laptop never had one. In an attempt to appease the wifi gods, I dug though an assortment of wires and cables to get the right one. Then I took the laptop over to the router and plugged it in. Bingo. Wifi came back.

Great gusty sigh of relief.

Then I spent the morning reloading a ton of things that I use every day because I couldn't open any files. Ugh.

Needless to say - lesson learned.

New Banner!

Alex has made me a wonderful new banner to use for social media. This is a portion of the back cover for the print edition. Unfortunately, anyone who purchases an ebook will not get to see this cool artwork.

I also used a potion of the artwork for the book trail. Click here to see my first trailer. I had a lot of fun making it, and I think it tells a pretty good story.

Scattered Seeds is now in line edits. Woo Hoo! Now for the nuts and bolts work. It isn't fun and takes a whole lot longer than you ever expect.

A Changed World Update

First of all there is an incredible review of Lethal Seasons over on Nonlocal Science Fiction. I've had good feedback, for the most part, on this book, but this is the first professional review. And it blew me away. They will also be doing a pre-release review of Scattered Seeds as soon as I can get them a copy. So please visit the website and give them some love for me.

Secondly, the book trailer for Scattered Seeds is almost done. This time around I am doing it myself. I discovered Windows Live Movie Maker was already on my laptop. And Alex had delivered the final cover. So it looked like I had everything I needed to get going. I had a lot of fun playing around with it. I think I may be doing more of them in the future.

Next point of interest, I got Scattered Seeds back from my third reader. She only had a few, but important, notes. I expect to start tweaking today with hopes of getting it to line editing by early next week. Woohoo! Still on target for my pub date.

Finally, I have brainstormed and tweaked the titles for my space opera, which I might start calling a space fantasy. I am going with Façade as the title of book 1 and Transmutation as the overall series.

With all the various incarnations in my head, I actually wrote an outline for this book. Since I have rewritten this story 3 times, I know it intimately. And chopped it all up to drop out excess herrings and extraneous plot lines. I think this will be a cleaner, clearer, more intense story about a new species hiding in plain sight.

Now I just need to write it.