Peak Amygdala

I’m somewhat “meh” about 2024. I can’t say that there was a lot of amazing stuff that happened in my life this year. If anything, it seemed like there were a lot of hills to climb and scrambling to get nowhere. Honestly, in a lot of ways, the best thing I had going this year was the new horse, and unfolding where the two of us are going as horse and rider.

Oh, it wasn’t all that bad. There was the aurora in May which was pretty spectacular, even if I couldn’t find a way to make my camera capture it properly. A number of other small joys. Completing a carefully-plotted trilogy to wrap up my Martiniere saga. Encountering a den of young foxes on the route to the horses’ summer pasture and watching their antics before they ran and hid. Observing other wildlife around the house and town. Having visitors who enjoyed our lovely natural setting.

But 2024 has also been the era of coming to terms with certain parts of my life. Much as I love writing and telling stories, I have reached the point where I realize that I am never going to be a big name. Doesn’t mean I’m not going to keep writing and putting stuff out for people to read. However, any aspirations toward winning awards or anything beyond the occasional good review are seriously tabled. I’m just not the sort of writer who wins awards. It’s not a lack of quality (judging by the majority of my feedback) but that I seek to blend the contemporary and historical Western elements of the Pacific Northwest with science fiction and fantasy while also including relationships that continue beyond the happily-ever-after. Maybe I haven’t found my market yet, but I’m not holding my breath.

Along those lines, I’ve also reassessed some of my volunteer activities. I left one organization because I realized that yes, I was contributing a significant amount of time doing stuff for them. However, not only was the organization developing and transitioning into a new level, it was changing in ways that didn’t fit where I am in my writing life. Happily, I’m seeing other people step up to fill those positions that I left and I wish them the best. The fact that I’m feeling relief at leaving with only mild regrets is telling–those who I want to remain in contact with are already integrated into my social media.

All the same, I’m spending a lot of time thinking about what I want to do in 2025, in writing, in community life, and with the horses. In past years I’ve overplanned and overcommitted, leading to feeling overwhelmed and not getting anywhere. This year I’m leaving things flexible–which I suppose is my word for 2025. Flexible.

The fantasy novel stubbornly resists being poked into life, though I think once I get some other projects out of the way I’ll be able to give it the time that it needs. I’ve committed to updating my entire backlist. In some cases that doesn’t just mean new back matter, it means going through and cleaning up typos or–in the case of the Netwalk books–adding in new formatting because my formatting program now has a tool that makes the layout look better. The Goddess’s Honor covers don’t work so I’m redoing them–again. A couple of books still need to be converted from a previous format and recopyedited.

But. I will work on the fantasy. I also plan to write a horse memoir something along the lines of Will James’s Horses I’ve Known. I grew up in an era of horsemanship that is fading for various reasons, so I want to chronicle it. Just today I realized that maybe I might want to try my hand at Gothic horror, and that one of my worlds might work if I make it Gothic, so…that research is going to be happening.

Horse-wise, I’m wondering if this is Mocha’s last winter. I’m glad it’s been relatively mild here, because it’s easier on the old lady. Meanwhile, Marker is making progress. It’s been nice to have a horse who comes when called (and I’m not rattling a grain bucket to make it happen). The vet thought he was seven years old and that would match a lot of his behavior. I have training goals in mind–get him solid in canter leads, maybe take him to the local show if the heat isn’t too horrible this summer. Otherwise, I’m enjoying having a gaited horse. He has his quirks but…he’s steady under saddle.

Community-wise, I’m continuing to be active in a local service club and probably will be putting in some in-person hours in the coming year.

I’m also thinking of ways to do something with the craft materials I have around here. I can make quilts for a local group, as well as devise some artsy stuff that I hope to sell eventually.

More than that? Probably not. Spouse and I are aging, and while we’re active, that can change quickly. We’re slowly working on simplifying our lives and reducing what we have. I’ve done pretty well with clothing because I’m still using a lot of older clothing from work days. I’m trying to figure out a way to get rid of my back stock of books I’ve written that don’t fit current editions, without spending a lot of money sending them out to people. A lot of the back stock is copies I ordered planning to sell in-person before the pandemic hit. I’m not doing in-person events anymore, and in any case some of those books are not as nicely formatted as my current editions are. Between the ongoing Covid stuff and our health, as well as expense in energy and money, I just don’t see in-person happening for me these days.

So I would say that my attitude is that of a quiet walk into the next year. Taking a deep breath. Continuing to be flexible because things change.

Well, I’m back after cataract surgery and some other stuff I was dealing with.

I didn’t expect my first craft work after surgery to be beading. I’d pretty much given up on that craft, simply because I couldn’t find a market for my work and didn’t really have the time to go beating the bushes locally to find venues…even if I could break in. Honestly, I figured that my return to craft work would end up being fiber art-related, just because I know there’s local interest as well as in other areas, more so than there is for stone bead jewelry (the spouse is trying to sell some of my work on eBay and…crickets chirping, like there is with anything I do, it seems). Sad, but true. I went back to doing the stone bead work for a while in the late teens, but I’ve never been able to sell as well as I did online in the late ’90s/pre-9/11 period. I was getting ready for my best online sales year in 2001 when…guess what knocked the bottom out of the market for online sales. Oh, I did some sales at science fiction convention art shows, but they never took off as well as the online sales did. At some point I decided it was far too much work, and ended up going back to school and getting a teaching certificate instead.

That said, I’ve always liked working with stringing stone beads, and was working my way up to experimenting with different types of bead design by 2001. I had a pretty good backstock of inventory, and was contemplating just how to disperse it because I just couldn’t see doing much more with beads in the future. Between arthritis and vision issues, it was getting harder to do. Plus I didn’t really have a dedicated place set up for craftwork, which slowed me down significantly, even with that big bead board I own.

I just kept looking at my bead storage and thinking that maybe I need to find a way to get rid of the backstock without losing too much money in the process. However, no matter how much I thought about it, I just couldn’t come up with a good option.

Then came the second cataract surgery. The first cataract surgery didn’t have as much overall impact on my vision as this one has. I find myself in the position of needing to take glasses off frequently because the current ones don’t work at certain close and midrange distances (I got the basic lens on the recommendations of two ophthalmologists and my regular optometrist, all of whom emphasized that my natural focus is near-sighted–there were two years in between surgeries so going for a distance lens was NOT advised). When I went to the local optician to check out readers, none of them worked. The person working with me handed me a test card and…at normal reading distance, I could read it without glasses. I can almost but not quite do that with computers, depending on the screen and how tired my eye muscles are. She told me that I needed several more weeks before making any major changes and that…I might need computer glasses but not readers.

Okay.

Meanwhile, I’m taking both sets of glasses off frequently. It’s not an issue with my reading/computer glasses because I use them in a particular area, but my distance glasses? I needed to drop them for mid range work in the kitchen and other places.

(I do not use bifocals or progressives. Neither work for me. Neither do contacts. No suggestions, PLEASE.)

So…this morning I started thinking about glasses chains. I had made some in the past…did I still have any? Alas, no, I did not. But–I had a necklace that wasn’t up for sale on eBay and a convention tag holder meant to replace lanyards. I’m not going to in-person conventions, nor am I wearing necklaces these days, so…I have all the findings needed. I sat down this morning and put together two chains, one with a blue/white color scheme (the tag holder) and one with a green and red theme.

It felt good to be making jewelry again. Maybe I’ll figure out a way to market it…or something, until I use up this backstock. Meanwhile, here they are.

I think they’re kinda pretty.

The last month has been…complicated. Between getting the last of the firewood cut and a bunch of other stuff, I’ve felt like I’ve been running, running, running.

And then there’s been this past week. Not going to say anything more than that, other than I have a few theories of my own about what happened but no one wants to hear them. Besides, I’m tired of thinking about them. Let’s just say I have moments where The Fear strikes hard, and then I push them away. I’ve been here before, and, well, we’ll see what happens. Could be better than I feared; could be worse. At least we aren’t gonna have The Gizmo zipping around causing problems, even though otherwise it looks like we’re on track for a Netwalk Sequence future which…is not exactly a good thing. Then again, the Martiniere Multiverse wouldn’t be that much better, so….

Or…I could be wrong about that. We shall see.

I find myself saying those three words a lot right now.

We cut our last load of firewood in a couple of inches of snow. The storm brought down a big dead white fir that we wouldn’t have tried to cut down anyway. That tree plus a couple of much smaller ones next to it filled the truck, so we ended the season well. Oh, we could go out for one more load but that would mean driving further for lower elevation cutting since the place where we cut now has up to six inches of snow or so. This one was easy-peasy since it came down right next to the road so us old folks could cut it up easily.

The horses are now in winter pasture. Of course, they both developed scratches on their corneas before they left summer pasture that required a trip to the vet, then twice-daily treatments. I’ll be writing about that more in another blog that’s just about them.

Fall is definitely here. This year the tamaracks on the mountains are big enough to really make them golden. I’m enjoying the view, coupled with the gold of the cottonwoods and aspens. We’re having a couple of rainy/snowy days a week so far, enough that prescribed burning has kicked into gear before it gets too wet in the mountains. I have to be careful coming back from the horses because it’s just wet enough for the boots to get muddy. Husband dug up the front yard carrots and, to our pleasant surprise, we had a nice crop. Not a huge one, just like the onions weren’t a huge crop, but enough to enjoy for the fall.

I’ve been poking slowly at the first book of Goddess’s Vision, Vision of Alliance (more about that in another blog). It’s coming along slowly, but part of that is by design because I have a lot of things on my plate before the end of the year, business (non-writing) stuff that has been in the works for a while. Plus the cataract surgery. While this cataract is developing slower than the first one, it’s enough now that protracted reading, especially on my tablet, becomes an issue. I can do work on the big computer, some work on the laptop, but the eye fatigue is a very real issue. Well, that gets handled in December.

I’m not going to work on quilting until the cataract is fixed. There are several things with the status of “wait until the cataract is fixed.” Then I think I may start putting in some more effort toward getting creative things done that way.

Changes are ahead. I’m done with the Martinieres, and right now I’m still dealing with some issues with Vision of Alliance. The Alice Clarissa story has been rejected from two markets and I’m somewhat doubtful about its overall appeal, along with the dragon stories. Every time I think about dealing with short story marketing right now, I flinch. Maybe I’m better off just slapping them together as short story originals and putting them up to sell on their own. I don’t know. There’s also another short story that I may do the same thing with. Gotta consider it. Might end up being my focus for Christmas sales–or not.

Overall, I’m just kinda down and discouraged. The Cost of Power: Return has received a couple of good reviews, but nothing’s happening with sales. I have the omnibus edition ready to go, but…will it even be worth the effort to put it up for sale?

Eh. This is a gloomy blog. But I suspect it reflects the situation right now.

Anyway. That’s it for now.

Shameless self promo time! You can subscribe to my monthly newsletter here. As always, the Cookies Fund for the horses could use a coin or two. Contribute here.

And…The Cost of Power: Omnibus Edition, is now available! That’s all three books of The Cost of Power plus related outtakes and snippets. A real deal at $7.99. You can get it here. Or if you’re nervous about the series, the first book, Return, is on sale throughout November for $2.99. You can get it at the ebook retailer of your choice, here.

 

Becoming Solo is one of my favorite little works because it’s rooted so strongly in my past experiences. No, I wasn’t part of a family spell matrix, nor did I undergo the sort of family dynamics that my character Yesenia did. Nonetheless, my county fair memories and life as 4H member, parent, then club leader intensely shape that novella. The role that the Bright Star Magic Fair plays in regenerating the local magical strength was in many ways reflective of a role that the old county fairs used to play (and, in some communities, still do play) in community life.

Back in the day, my county had a 4H program that was big enough to separate into a separate fair for the 4H program. As you can see from the pictures above, I eventually excelled in showing chickens. That’s a picture of me with a Grand Champion Poultry Showmanship trophy and the Araucana pullet who helped me win it. She was a friendly little hen, and in spite of me getting pooped on by the duck that my closest rival was showing in our division, we won big. This was also the days of “hands on” poultry showmanship, not guiding them with a stick as I believe is currently the situation, at least in my state.

Fair, even just the 4H fair, was a lot of fun. I learned about food service working in the Empire Builders (4H service club) booth. When my son showed an interest in having a pet rabbit, we joined the local 4H which was part of a much-scaled-down version of Fair, in a metropolitan area. Because there were no other clubs in our neighborhood, I became a club leader, first for small animals, then for a lot of other projects including electricity, rocketry, geology, forestry…you name it. The little metropolitan fair had an interesting mix of urban and rural elements, plus it was placed at an old amusement park, which added a further dimension to the whole thing.

I won’t get into many details of the power dynamics that popped up at that fair, however, based on adults with competing visions. Because a number of home schoolers used 4H for rudimentary science education (which, to be fair, those programs are pretty darn solid), I ended up learning about the Quiverful movement since several leaders were part of that cult. They wanted the kids to be wearing uniforms and, well, had other issues going on, generally related to controlling what they saw were problematic kid behaviors. Then there were the adults who wanted to remake the Fair into what it had been in the ’50s and ’60s, when the metropolitan area was much smaller and more conservative. Those were the louder voices and, unfortunately, they played into the agenda of more liberal county commissioners who wanted to cut county funding for 4H. But so much energy was going into the different struggles for control that….

Despite our organization and appeals, the program got cut. Members who wanted to remain active fled to other counties. I don’t know who went where, just that the group representing the Quiverfuls and some of the other factions didn’t end up in the county I went to. I ended up being the leader of an even larger club (Technobunnies!) who became part of an even bigger, even more traditional combined general and 4H county fair. And oh, were there some shocks.

One of our most talented members swept in and cleaned up in the sewing and artistic areas. The reaction to Shadow in Becoming Solo was based on how this one young woman calmly came in from outside and won a LOT. Granted, she had been regularly attending State Fair and winning there, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise. That was somewhat the foundation for the novella–what happens when an outsider challenges the Fair regulars?

It took me some time to develop the whole story. I knew it needed to be about sewing, because I originally devised the seed story for a witch-based anthology with sewing in the title. When the story got rejected, I let it sit for a while. Then…things began to stir. Shadow the Question and the sabotage of Magic Fairs started to play a greater element. I didn’t fully rough out the magic system because, frankly, I couldn’t see this story as being more than the novella it is. That got me dinged hard in a review that still makes me steam and got me booted out of a self-published novella contest in the first round, because I didn’t provide a detailed RPG-type magic system.

I still consider that review to be my worst so-called four-star review ever. It put me off of entering any more self-published novel contests and…well, a whole group of reviewers tied to said contests. But enough about that.

Becoming Solo is about choices. About the role of individual achievement over family needs. It uses a county fair competition structure set in a world where magic is a real thing, but under siege for various reasons, including the degree to which it is wielded by nonwhite practitioners. Where magic skills combined with technology provide little necessities and luxuries to the mundane, but heaven forbid if the witches reach out for any sort of real power or control, especially if their skin isn’t pale.

I still like this story. And now, for the month of October, it’s on sale for $1.99 at all ebook vendors. Check it out.

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Shameless self promo time! You can subscribe to my monthly newsletter here. As always, the Cookies Fund for the horses could use a coin or two. Contribute here. And The Cost of Power books are now all out in ebook and paperback–I hope to have the paperback links added soon, but for now, you can go to these links for a kickass science fantasy neoWestern with Carolingian elements. Click on each title for the link: Return, Crucible, Redemption.

Sometimes anniversaries sneak up on you. We are halfway through our tenth year of cutting firewood for heating our house–earlier in the year we didn’t think this was going to happen at all, but things changed and we’re cutting wood this fall instead of spring and summer. Every year as we age, there’s the question of is this the last year we’ll be able to cut wood? So far, so good. I’m glad to be out in the woods and regenerating my soul, plus gathering not just the wood but important details for the stories I write.

But before I talk about my stories–why do we cut firewood in this era? Well, winter weather here can get rather intense, with temperatures below zero F and occasional storms that take out the power. Our other heating system is an oil-fueled furnace and boiler combination that is dependent upon electricity. Our house location is not the best for solar and we’d just as soon not mess with generators. It’s a common practice in this small mountain town to use wood as a primary or supplemental heating source. We get a permit from the Forest Service which has certain restrictions, including only taking dead trees of certain species. A lot of our wood comes from former logging sites. But we also take downed trees from winter storms–in this dry climate, it can pile up and be a wildfire hazard. In some cases the wood is going to be stacked into a big pile and burned anyway, so why not in a woodstove with a catalytic converter to reduce emissions instead of a big open-air burn? Plus it’s good exercise, and a way to enjoy the outdoors. Spring cutting is about mushrooms (morels) and flowers. Watching the land and wildlife awaken from winter. There’s one spot where I’ve watched a big snowbank slowly melt into June.

It’s not something we would do in an urban area due to airshed concerns and, frankly, the distance that would need to be traveled to gather firewood. Here it’s a short drive.

Besides–it’s a means of reconnecting with the land. Fall woodcutting is watching the land and wildlife ease into winter. Leaf color. Perhaps a little bit of grouse hunting, depending on whether one shows up or not. Listening to the wind roar through the treetops as a cold front moves in.

Firewood cutting is also a means of touching base with many of my characters. Do my characters cut firewood or do other outside things? Well, yes. So firewood cutting is a means for me to gather seasonal sensory input for my writing. In past years, I brought my laptop along. Some of my books have had major segments drafted while I waited in a safe place for the husband to cut down a tree. Or I’ve daydreamed about story elements while loading wood into the truck. I’ve had numerous epiphanies while out woodcutting.

Not all of my characters would have cut firewood at some point in their lives. Of the Netwalk Sequence characters, only Sarah and Diana would have had that experience. Sarah would have cut firewood with her husband Dan Andrews, when she was a ranchwoman and not the savvy politician she later became. Her daughter Diana would have continued to cut firewood with her father after Sarah divorced Dan and left the ranch (Diana stayed with her father while her older brother went with their mother). But Diana’s daughter Melanie? No, because Melanie wasn’t raised in a setting where firewood was anything more than the occasional fireplace burn, and even that would later be replaced by substitutes. Melanie’s daughter Bess would not have had any exposure to anything more than the substitutes for fire.

Naturally, the Goddess’s Honor fantasy characters would have cut and gathered firewood. Not with chain saws, of course, given their levels of technology. But big crosscut saws? Probably. Gathering fallen limbs for campfires while traveling? Absolutely. Many of the lodges that the people of the Two Nations lived in had metal stoves for cooking and heating; and definitely so for the peoples of Larij and Medvara. Even the desert Stauleur have clay-based stoves used for wintertime heating in their towns. Katerin has the occasional ability to see important events in the flames of an open fire. Her daughter Witmara first realizes the sickness in the realm of Daran when she learns that some wood is magically possessed, dangerous and toxic to the touch, while gathering firewood.

And then there’s the Martiniere books. Ruby and Gabe definitely cut firewood in their younger years on the ranch. In The Cost of Power, firewood is a supplement to the main heating systems that are primarily fueled using solar power and a power wall battery. Gabe cuts and stacks wood in one Broken Angel scene, during a discussion with his brother-in-law Rafael Alvarez about him becoming a part of Rafe’s mercenary militia defending small towns in the Southwest. He splits wood during one of the Martiniere Christmas stories, where he gets visited by a digital thought clone version of himself from another universe. The need to cut and stack firewood is one of the details that separates exiled, struggling Gabe from rich and powerful Gabe.

Until this latest woodcutting session, I hadn’t thought about the degree to which these expeditions have shaped my writing. It was a fairly easy session, the third one of probably five trips we’ll make (we have enough permit tags for ten trips but winter and time will probably intervene). We found part of a downed Douglas fir that had split upon falling, so it was left behind by a logging crew that took the viable part to the mill. Then there was the aged old white fir that flopped across another downed tree that was mostly rotten. Because most of this tree was off the ground, it was cured but not rotted. Between those two trees and smaller pieces we scrounged around and found on the forest floor, we filled the truck bed.

I didn’t work on writing (even though I had an outline in my travel bag), but I thought about woodcutting and the role it plays in my writing. My attempts to replicate those moments when I stand on the forest’s edge, breathing deeply as I gaze over the canyons. That moment when I come across a line of morels, or spot a deer lurking around to eat the black moss from a fallen lodgepole pine. There’s been times when we had deer come to black moss when we’ve been just fifty feet away, having moved on to another set of trees to cut up.

At some point this part of my life will go away. That time is nearer than I really want to admit.

But for now? I’m savoring these moments in the woods. And I will enjoy the warmth when the winter winds blow hard.

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Shameless self promo time! You can subscribe to my monthly newsletter here. As always, the Cookies Fund for the horses could use a coin or two. Contribute here. And The Cost of Power books are now all out in ebook and paperback–I hope to have the paperback links added soon, but for now, you can go to these links for a kickass science fantasy neoWestern with Carolingian elements. Click on each title for the link: Return, Crucible, Redemption.

I’ve been really satisfied with how things are going with the horses as we move into fall. Mocha is holding her weight nicely, and now that she gobbles up her supplement she’s starting to get a little shine on her coat. Though she’s still scratching on one of the junipers in the field…little telltale pieces of juniper branches in her mane give it away. She’s been providing a good example for Marker about standing behind the pickup for grain, grooming, and tacking.

And Marker boy is…making significant progress. Between the curb bit and me learning a little bit about the quirks of training gaited horses, he’s come a long ways. Oh, I still need to get firm with him about boundaries. He’s definitely a human-affectionate horse. Today when brushing him after our ride, he turned his head to rest the side of his nose against my leg and free hand while I brushed him. He likes to rest his chin on my shoulder at some point during the tacking and grooming, just about every time. I’m working on getting him to lick less because it becomes obnoxious after a while…then he turns it to licking the truck tailgate. A mouthy boy. Oh well, he’ll grow out of some of it. All the same, he’s very inquisitive about some things–today he decided he needed to supervise when I was putting on his front hoof boots. But–he stayed solid on all four feet even though his nose was six inches from the ground while I worked. Not something that Mocha could do.

Training him is vastly different from training Mocha. She really didn’t get warmed up and ready to roll until about thirty minutes or so into a ride. He doesn’t take as much warmup, plus he doesn’t do as well with intensive schooling as she did. It becomes pretty clear after a while when he’s hit the wall mentally, and giving him time to just gait along in his fox trot is the break he desires. It’s not so much a matter of endurance as it is mental overload, it seems. She had a greater mental tolerance for longer schooling sessions than he does. However, he also learns faster than she did. Today he made it clear to me that we didn’t need to two track before I asked him to canter; he’s picked up enough on the cues that I just need to weight the appropriate seatbone, bring the inside leg forward slightly, and touch him with the outside spur and he’ll launch quite appropriately into the correct lead from the walk or near-halt. It’s still a rough transition, but his anxiety about cantering is starting to fade. His fast canter can still pop me a little out of the saddle but uphill or the third set of canter he relaxes into a very nice rocking-horse canter. And as we refine the cues and work on softer, lighter signaling, he becomes less worried.

It’s just learning how to work with, as one gaited trainer says, the quadridextrous horse. I read an old-timer’s history about the Missouri Fox Trotter, and one of the old trainers flat-out said “don’t canter them until they’re solid in the fox trot.” Now that I know he’s gaited and that I need to approach some things differently, I really start understanding why he got so wound up earlier in training–it was a case that he couldn’t do some of the things I was asking of him, at least not until his conditioning was better and he was more solid in his gait. He still gets all mixed up about leg sequence if we don’t start from a walk or near-halt before asking to canter, which sometimes leads to a true trot that doesn’t feel right because he’s mixing it with fox trot and there’s that sensation of legs going everywhere. Asking him to stop, settle into a walk, then asking again really seems to help. While two-tracking helps him understand the cues for canter, he still gets tense about it, especially in one direction. But following Lee Ziegler’s direction of ask for canter from the flat walk, don’t canter very far, then let him gait as a reward really seems to have accelerated our progress in that as well as other areas.

He’s also getting more responsive to seat and leg. While I use vocal cues (cluck, kiss, and words), today he cantered without the kiss cue. He’s responding to weight shift and leg cues in serpentines. We’ve also been working on bending while going down the road in walk and fox trot.

Nice progress. Verbal praise also goes a long way with this horse…as does scolding him. Oh, he likes to play little tricks. Some of them, like grabbing for the grooming caddy, are clearly plays for attention, even negative attention. There are days when he is pure Trickster boy, and makes me glad I didn’t give him a Trickster name.

But then there are the days when he’s just chill and cuddly (at least as cuddly as a 1200 lbs horse can be), and just wants those little bits of attention.

It’s an interesting experience.

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Shameless self promo here. I plan to send out my monthly newsletter soon which will have some announcements about sales and writing projects. You can subscribe to it here. As always, the Cookies Fund for the horses could use a coin or two. Contribute here. And The Cost of Power books are now all out in ebook and paperback–I hope to have the paperback links added soon, but for now, you can go to these links for a kickass science fantasy neoWestern with Carolingian elements. Click on each title for the link: Return, Crucible, Redemption.

This rant got set off by a thread from Xitter, whereupon a person in an English lit grad program was openly mocked by a prof for their dislike of a particular white male author in the sainted canon. Publicly. And said person was also dismissed with the comment that they were a speculative-only reader and couldn’t appreciate the good stuff.

What? People are still saying and thinking such things in 2024? I was gobsmacked, not only because said prof made this statement in a public setting (apparently academia is free from the myriad of trainings that k-12 teachers go through about such behavior) but because this attitude is…so out of date. Archaic, even. Speculative fiction has moved beyond the so-called Golden Age of pulp fiction and into its own lyrical, eloquent modes of storytelling. I defy said prof to be that dismissive of Ursula K. Le Guin, to start with an older example that said prof might actually have some awareness of. But then there’s Ann Leckie, Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemisin, and, and, and…that’s just a start. Oh wait. My examples are all women. Perhaps that’s really the issue with said prof. Only a certain type of white male experience is valid.

To which I say hah!

Furthermore, the assumption that writers of speculative fiction only read within the genre is rather discouraging, shall we say. And not exactly the case, even with the Golden Age writers. As I recall, Heinlein in particular referred to classical literary readings once in a while, and I’m sure he’s not the only one, just the writer that immediately comes to mind. Then there’s Cordwainer Smith, who undeniably has a literary readership background.

I can’t speak for other writers but my reading has always extended beyond genre. One of my early influences was John Steinbeck, thanks to a high school teacher who used Travels with Charley as a textbook for an advanced writing class. We studied Steinbeck’s word choices and imagery, and reading Charley led me to the rest of Steinbeck’s work, including some of his early writing which…verges on the speculative side.

Then, in college, I spent time reading not just Tolstoy but several other Russian novelists, as well as the more traditional contemporary literary options. I suppose it says something that I don’t remember most of the work. If anything, I veered back to American literature, particularly authors with western settings. Willa Cather. Ken Kesey. Ivan Doig. Norman Maclean. Molly Gloss. Jamie Ford. Luis Alberto Urrea. H. L. Davis. James Stevens. And many others over the past forty-some years of post-college adult reading life.

Contemporary western authors have had more of an influence on my writing most recently, including the development of The Cost of Power trilogy. I’m not talking about the pulp version of westerns but the more literary elements that set their work either in the recent past or modern era. Part of that influence has to do with the reality that I’ve lived in Oregon my entire life. It’s a setting I know well, both the Portland and Willamette Valley variants as well as the many different aspects of the world east of the Cascades. Not only is it a big landscape, but there’s a lot of stories that can be settled in the vastness of the western ecosphere–from the rainforests on the Coast, to the oak savannas of the Valley, to the logging towns of the Cascades, both east and west sides, to the wide open grasslands with the westernmost edge of the Rockies poking into the state. So why not include this setting in my work?

I’ve told cyberpunkish tales (The Netwalk Sequence), mostly set in the Cascades and Portland area. High fantasy (Goddess’s Honor) that happens primarily in an alternate world version of the Columbia Plateau and the north Willamette Valley. Contemporary fantasy (Klone’s Stronghold, Becoming Solo) that happens in an alternate world version of the Blue Mountains (Klone’s Stronghold) and an alternate world version of the west side Portland metro area (Becoming Solo). And then there’s the Martiniere books, also set in an alternate world version of northeastern Oregon.

My most significant influences are the writers (both well-known and not-so-well-known) who use a western setting. Who go beyond standard cookie-cutter tropes to tell stories based in the environment I know and love. The foundation for the Martiniere books was a talented but struggling rancher looking for funding to create her vision of biobots that could improve disease resistance and water uptake in grain crops. The Netwalk Sequence played off the notion that adventurous skier types might be able to create wireless communication implants (and there are a couple of stories that feature dust skiing on the Moon as a means for dealing with a crisis). Goddess’s Honor took the quest and hidden hero tropes and placed them in the Columbia Plateau/north Willamette Valley.

But to get to where I did with these books, I had to read beyond speculative fiction, to the literature of the region.

Am I successful? Well, one recent reviewer of the first book of The Cost of Power, Return, commented that he wanted to photograph some of the settings I describe. That’s a high compliment and one which I cherish (check out what Paul Weimer has to say about it here).

Hmm. Looking back over this post I guess it’s not as ranty as I feared it would be. Nonetheless, I still say “hah!” to any antiquated literature professor who thinks that speculative fiction writers only read within the genre.

Guess what, bub. We don’t.

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Shameless self promotion here. All three books of The Cost of Power are now available in ebook and paperback. Check out the link here to investigate it further. Or, if you want to toss a coin to the writer (visualize two pleading horse faces here begging for cookies), donate to my Ko-fi. And thank you to everyone who clicks those links!

It seems as if fall just sneaks up on me over the past few years. Once, it meant back to school, first as student, then parent, then teacher. But it always seemed as if those first few weeks were hot before a gradual cooldown.

Not so much these days. Now it seems like one day it’s hot, dusty, and dry…the next overcast with wet, followed by cooler weather and a certain light in the sky even when it’s a bright blue heartbreaking September day (September days without contrails in the sky bring back certain memories, alas).

For the past few years, fall means transitioning from late afternoon/early evening horseback rides to avoid the heat to midday rides to beat the sunset. I made that shift this week, because earlier it was getting into that hot afternoon mode, and I do not do well with heat. Too many years of pushing physical activity through hot weather have taken a toll, along with aging, and I can’t take the heat as well anymore. But as we approach the equinox, especially with mountains to the west and south, sunset ends up coming earlier and earlier. One week it’s too late to be out with the horses at eight. Then seven-thirty, and now it’s almost that way at six. Soon enough I’ll be getting up, eating breakfast, then riding in late morning because winter sunset comes around two p.m. at the ranch where the horses spend their winter. But that’s just a handful of weeks for that timing, just like it is for those long exquisite evenings where I can be out riding safely until eight or eight-thirty.

Other things mark fall. It used to be hunting season, which meant a chance to get away from the city and out into the woods for a short camping expedition. We don’t hunt anymore simply because it’s too much work. After finding the deer that’s legal to shoot and actually shooting them, then it’s skinning and gutting to get the carcass cooled quickly. Then hanging it in a rented cooler space to age before the butchering job–and with deer, anyway, that takes time because we want to get as much fat out of the meat as possible. Fat carries the gamey taste. I like eating well-handled venison, but too many people don’t take the time to treat it properly–therefore the gamey taste that many people associate with wild meat.

I used to do more canning, and jam making. These days, not so much. We don’t eat that much jam and there are fewer friends to give it to these days. I never got as hard core into food preserving as my mother did, with the quarts and quarts of peaches, pears, and assorted vegetables that required firing up the pressure canner on a hot day. That’s all right because this new stove of ours is cranky about a water bath canner, much less a pressure canner. Fancy sensors that clearly aren’t designed for a preserving household.

Fall also means chanterelle mushrooms. We don’t always manage to get to the Coast to visit the friend who has his own secret location for mushrooming, but this year we did and found a plentiful batch. We dried them and will be eating them this winter.

This fall, too, is a woodcutting fall. Springtime had issues and we couldn’t get out to cut wood. But the issues are gone this fall, so we’re out to cut wood for most likely next year–we like to carry over a few cords so that when there’s a situation like last spring, we have a stash on top of buying wood. Which can have its own issues, depending on who’s cutting the wood and how precise they are with meeting our preferred stove size. Woodcutting is an excuse to get out in the woods and get some exercise–husband cutting, me loading the truck. But we can see cool stuff–watch the first dustings of snow on the mountains, spot deer and elk, see a turkey or two, sometimes (rarely) a bear. Plus the various birds who are passing through on their migrations. There’s always something interesting to observe.

Flies are still bothering the horses, but not like before. I pulled the fly masks because they were collecting stick-tights, more so than the horses’ forelocks do without the masks. The flies are still bothersome on hot days but not so much as they were a few weeks ago. They’re shedding out their summer coats as the fall and then the winter coats come in. This year Marker is growing a heavy coat, unlike last year before his first winter here. Mocha did the same thing during her first year of mountain life. Now she looks like a Shetland pony in the winter. I don’t think his coat will be that heavy, but one never knows.

We don’t do a big garden–just a small area in the sunny front yard–but it’s time to bring in some of the plants and harvest others. Instead of leaves we rake pine needles, and watch for migrant birds. Right now the white-crowned sparrows are showing up at the feeding ground, along with a young Cooper’s hawk who has discovered that the feeder works for hunting birds.

The butterflies are still going strong. I rode by a ditch today where lots of Painted Lady butterflies were hanging out–must have been a mineral in the mud because they were definitely interested in that. I think I saw around fifty of them. But there’s also the little yellow butterflies, as well as a black and red one that I don’t know the name of. Then there’s the last hurrah of praying mantises flying about. They’re about three inches long by now and brown. I know they were around in Portland, but I’ve never seen so many or mantises the size of these except here.

Sliding into fall. I still have plants to bring in, a couple of which need to be repotted. We brought the Lemon Drop peppers inside today, because temps are dropping into the thirties at night. Hopefully we’ll harvest enough before the pollen gets too much to bear–I end up pollinating the peppers by hand over the winter using a Q-tip, but our last batch had to be abandoned because it was too much pollen for the spouse’s allergies.

The cool as sunset approaches reminds me that winter is on its way. A relief after the hot summer. Oh, I know that soon enough I’ll be tired of the hassles of winter, just like I am the hassles of summer. But I’m ready for cold, and snow.

Fall is here.

I guess you could title these two photos as what a difference a year makes. In the first photo, I had no idea that I was working with a gaited horse. I just knew I had an unknown horse of unknown background, more or less, and that he desperately wanted to have his own people. Plus he had absolutely no sense of boundaries, much less that “whoa” in hand meant “stand still.”

How things change. I pulled hair on Marker about midsummer and sent it off to Texas A & M for DNA typing. I was half-expecting Morgan to come back in the mix, but what did come back was…Quarter Horse, Missouri Fox Trotter, and Tennessee Walker. A bit of reading revealed that the Walker influence is strong in the Fox Trotter breed, and that there are some who are crossing QHs with Fox Trotters. As a result, I suspect that this is what Marker is–QH x Fox Trotter. His temperament matches that of Fox Trotters, for the most part, but where I see the huge influence of Fox Trotter? Under saddle work.

It’s probably a good thing that I had nearly a year’s worth of riding on the boy before I learned about this mix. I knew he needed to come into condition, but had no idea about his past training or anything along those lines. So I followed my training instincts, honed by nearly 28 years around assorted professional trainers. I’ve never been particularly wedded to any one training school of thought but have taken in bits and pieces that seem to fit what each horse I’m riding needs. I figured out pretty quickly that Marker needed conditioning before I moved up to canter with him, and noticed that not only was he inclined to swap leads easily on the lunge line (which can also be a sign that the horse needs to work on building strength) as well as under saddle, but that he had a lot of problems picking up leads, period. Plus he needed to work on seat and leg aids, accepting contact, and comfort with a rider who uses seat as well as hand and voice.

All of that takes time. That plus I wanted to expose him to Life while under saddle, so…we spent a lot of time on gravel roads just schooling, working on contact and aids in the snaffle bit while exposing him to Scary Stuff. As his trust in me grew, I became able to talk him past things that worried him. I also noticed that while he Saw Things, he was much less reactive to them and more likely to check in with me about “is this something scary?”

But then there was the gait. Once we moved into the Western saddle, it became clear that what I thought was a smooth jog was some sort of easy gait that wasn’t walking or trotting. And that he really, really liked doing it. But the real “AHA!” moment was when we went to push some fence-creeping calves back into their field, and he lined out after them in a big fast trot. Mocha would have gone into a gallop but…he was really covering ground with that trot. Hmm. I pulled hair, got the results, and decided it was time to find out what, if anything, I needed to do differently in training him further. The gaitedness explained why he might have some cantering issues–amongst other things, once I started reading, I realized that it was harder for him to pick up a good canter from his easy gait, which I think is fox trot. That gaited horses do better when you ask them to canter from a walk, reversing what’s typical with a non-gaited horse, where canter from walk is harder than canter from trot or, in Marker’s case, from an easy gait.

Meanwhile, as it turns out, my focus on just riding while developing contact and responsiveness to leg and seat as well as voice and hand was just the thing to do. I had figured that he was ready to move up to a curb bit by midsummer, but that the bits I had weren’t going to work for him. Searches online didn’t turn up the bit I wanted, which was a loose jaw medium port curb with a copper roller that had snaffle loops as well as curb rein loops, so that I could turn it into a Western Pelham. As it turned out, I found it in the local feed store, on sale, and that I should have been looking for it under a different name. Not that it mattered. I started him out in the curb with two sets of reins for a week or so, but moved him on to one set of reins and neck reining. He’s making great progress at this level. We’ve edged into doing short canter pieces, per what I’ve been reading from experienced gaited horse trainers, but I’m holding off on big stuff until we can do more work on the flat. Right now this work happens in a sloped pasture field.

Under saddle work isn’t the only place where he’s showing improvement. Last summer he was very pushy at the gate, very pushy when being handled, and had issues with standing still on a ground tie when given the whoa command. We made some progress on this throughout the winter with the guidance of the old Mocha mare, but this summer when they moved away from the big herd and there were fewer distractions really gave us the time needed to focus on improving the behavior.

Now I can open the wire gate wide. Marker stands and waits for me to finish. I halter him, then halter Mocha. Lead them both out, ground tie them, then close the gate. Old Mocha has preferences about where she walks on the road, so for part of the way she walks on one side of me, then exchanges sides with Marker, then switches again before we go to the truck where I sit on the tailgate and hold their buckets while they eat their grain. These days they’ll just about automatically do the switch without me cueing them. They stand quietly next to each other for eating grain and grooming. And…Marker has learned to stand quietly. Much of that is Mocha’s influence. The old mare has always had strong opinions about proper horse behavior, and she’s been busy doing her share of the training. Sometimes just having her stand there, cock a hind leg, lower her head and drowse has had a soothing effect on him.

I’m happy with how things have gone with the training this summer. Where we go from here–well, we shall see. But it’s gonna be fun.

Burnout. That’s something we all dance with as writers.

I hit the wall late last fall and didn’t work my way past burnout until just recently. Oh, I could keep writing on the work-in-progress, though it felt like a slog to get my usual 2000 words a day composed. But it was the only thing I could even begin to do on the writing front. Everything else–other stuff I had committed to, including volunteer activities as well as participating in virtual conventions just felt like I was getting more responsibilities piled on without any benefit to me. I did everything people recommend to organize my life and keep it going, but…I still kept feeling like I was dragging my way through the ’60s TV version of soul-sucking quicksand. And I had taken several organizing courses for writers just that spring!

Nothing helped. I couldn’t think of ideas outside of the work-in-progress. No short story notions. Even contemplating prompts made me flinch. I couldn’t write blogs beyond the weekly writing accountability posts I had been forcing myself to do. Keeping up with certain tasks became really difficult. I didn’t do any quilting or embroidery work. TV–which is something I’m not wild about to begin with–just didn’t appeal. I couldn’t make any headway with promoting my work because no matter what I did, nothing seemed to happen to get more sales–which fed into a continuing sensation of why am I doing this? Add to that getting cut in the first round of an indie writer contest with one of the nastiest four star reviews I’ve ever received, from a reviewer who openly admitted that this particular story’s soft magic system was a style they did not enjoy, and…that killed any notion of me writing further stories in that world.

Worst of all, I couldn’t find much enjoyment in reading–and I am one of those voracious readers who devours books eagerly. Now some of that is due to a developing cataract, but I also just. couldn’t. do. it.

I was irritable, annoyed at the world, and the only bright spot besides the work-in-progress was working with Marker. Last winter was a training struggle for us, but I’ll write about our current training status in another blog.

Yeah, there were things happening around me in real life that made the burnout worse. Politics. Aging stuff and dealing with long-term planning. Decisions to be made there. A wakeup call on the health front–not me, fortunately, but the spouse. Downsizing decisions. Books to sell–and absolutely nothing was moving, including things that normally sold well such as the fantasy series. On top of that, Substack appeared to be on the brink of imploding, I was losing my newsletter program (TinyLetter), and there were major changes happening on the email newsletter front (DMARC, DKIP, etc etc etc) as well as the Substack political mess. I bounced between several platforms before I found one that seemed to work, only to see my subscription numbers collapse. I couldn’t justify the expense of the top-rated programs based on my numbers.

What a mess.

Solving this issue didn’t happen very quickly. It’s fortunate that I do not depend upon my writing income to survive, because otherwise I would have been screwed over big time. It’s taken nearly a year to pull myself out of this mess and I’m not entirely sure it’s completely gone.

But. I started thinking about things late last spring. The first thing I realized is that I’ve turned out a LOT of work during the pandemic and following social isolation. The four books of the Martiniere Legacy. Beating the Apocalypse. The three books of People of the Martiniere Legacy. Federation Cowboy. The A Different Life duology. Becoming Solo. Bearing Witness. The Cost of Power trilogy. Something like sixteen works of novella-length or longer, since the fall of 2020. At times I was juggling a Kindle Vella serial, a Substack serial, and another long form writing project, while telling myself that yes, I could multitask. Oh, and I also released a short story collection, Fabulist and Fantastical Worlds.

Then I recognized the phenomenon…my ability to create was falling into the same sort of brain fade that I and other teachers experienced on a yearly basis with regard to reading. I had the great good fortune to work with experienced, long-term teachers who loved reading and creative pursuits. We even had a small exchange library in the staff room. One of the subjects that sticks in my mind from our lunchroom discussions was how the ability to read complex books faded over the course of the school year. At the beginning of the school year, complex books weren’t just easy to read, they were fun. As the year progressed, it became harder and harder to focus on those books, until at the end of the school year, our preference was for lighter reads. The ability to read improved over the summer, just in time for the cycle to start all over again.

I realized that the structures I had started to create for myself at the end of 2022 into 2023 just weren’t working, in part because they were, bluntly, a time suck. Yeah, it was great to have an executive meeting with myself every week and use that to plan the week ahead–but writing it up as well as taking the time to think about it ended up being a chore. I wasn’t getting stuff done because it was too overwhelming and in all the push to get stuff done I wasn’t recharging myself.

So. I stopped flogging myself with the weekly executive meetings. I gave myself permission to stop writing anything unless I really wanted to do it, with the exception of editorial work on the work-in-progress. I kept putting off attack ideas. I looked at what was bugging me about my office–primarily rampant disorganization that made me tired every time I looked at it–and asked myself what was missing. As it turned out, I needed a place to sort paper and write by hand comfortably. I pushed out my expectations for the next big project. I looked at why I wasn’t blogging and realized I needed that little endorphin rush from Substack feedback for my blogs instead of the black hole of nothingness that happened elsewhere.

I gave myself space.

Am I back? Not entirely. But I have ideas for several blogs, some of which require research and planning. I’ve finished a short story draft and will be revising it next week. I have a half-finished concept that I’ll be poking at for the next few months which mixes already-written work with new additions. I need to revamp my website and make it leaner, more effective. All sorts of little, niggling things that need to be simplified that I now have time to do. I’m not planning to start the next big project for a couple of months, depending on some things lying ahead.

At the very least, I feel like I’m getting away from that dire swamp. I’m not completely clear of the burnout–but I’m reading again. Ideas are stirring.

I guess that’s enough.

Sigh. This is where I put in the plug for the new release and a plug for the Fund for Horse Cookies.

Link for The Cost of Power trilogy

Buy the horses some Cookies!