pameladean

Hey, you guys, my 1994 novel The Dubious Hills, one of the prequels to the new novel Going North is available for pre-order from Smashwords. There will be a Kindle and a trade paperback edition available as well, but we did the Smashwords editions first this time, since people who wanted those formats had to wait around for Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary.

Here's the link:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/617626

With regard to my previous post, many thanks to everyone who expressed an opinion. I went with an option I hadn't altogether considered, originally suggested by sartorias, I think: I just inserted the single word "now" at the end of a sentence.

I really liked bunsen_h's suggestion, even if it may have been tongue-in-cheek, of an academic preface listing all the changes. But where there's only one, I can't be quite that deadpan about it.

Pamela

First! The ebook version of Points of Departure, Pat Wrede's and my collection of all our original Liavek stories plus a new story by Pat and a new collaboration by both of us, telling the often-crossing stories of Granny Carry and the Benedicti family, is on sale for $2.99 from the following vendors:

Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/zppqh9d

ibooks: http://tinyurl.com/jpca42t

Kobo: http://tinyurl.com/jr7adpw

Paperback copies vary wildly in price, but I always encourage people to support their local independent bookstore if they are lucky enough to have one.

Second!

This is what actually impelled me to post. You may recall a cat-related saga earlier in the year when I lost most of our 2014 tax information and then rediscovered it. I'm afraid that I did not, in gratitude, immediately finish preparing the taxes. Sadly, I finished preparing the taxes the week before Thanksgiving, impelled by the realization that one is not eligible to apply for health insurance subsidies on the individual market if one has not filed one's taxes, but upheld by the knowledge that our accountants just last year went to all-electronic filing, so that once things were done the filing part would be instantaneous.

Well, it would have been, but, not really amazingly, there's a deadline for e-filing, and it's in October. So yesterday, after a horrified look at the calendar and a quick call to the accountant's office, I waylaid David as he was heading innocently out the door to take a thumb drive containing a concert video to friends. We went to the accountants' office and had a nice chat with the accountant while the taxes were being photocopied. Then we went to the nearest post office, helpfully pointed out by the accountant's getting me to stand behind a plant in a far corner of his office and peer out the window. We signed the taxes in the car and then, having stood in line for a while, I paid various amounts of money to get the tax forms to St. Paul and Fresno as quickly as possible.

I want to pause to extol the extreme kindness, sympathy, knowledegability, and helpfulness of the Post Office employees, not only to me, but to the many equally infuriating people ahead of me in line who didn't know what they wanted, complained when it cost money, had not packed up their boxes adequately or had forgotten the slips for the packages they wanted to pick up. Every single one of those Post Office employees deserves to be paid twice as much as they get, whatever it is.

Then we took the thumb drive along to our friends and had a lovely chat with them as well.

I was figuring that I would not be able to sign up for health insurance in time to get coverage by January 1, and would need to get some kind of interim coverage for that month. However, I got an email this morning saying that MNSure had extended the deadline to December 28th, which provides a much better chance that things will work out.

Third.

Thanksgiving went off pretty well, given how many people we had and the curious attrition that had occurred in our supply of dishes and flatware. David and I had Lund's sushi for lunch; the rice had suffered in storage, but it was still tasty and prevented sudden blood-sugar drops later on. I did not manage to make my small casserole, which is just as well, because the new-to-me mock cheese I'd been planning to use is really not up to snuff and would not have worked properly. I did make the roasted vegetables, and they were delicious. My youngest brother was a delight, and did cook the salmon for non-eaters of turkey. He called up recipes on his phone, and when informed sadly that no, we did not actually have any parsley or almonds, he just kept looking until he lit upon a reduction of mustard and balsamic vinegar with garlic and olive oil, which was so tasty that my other brother ate the extra salmon filet I'd had plans for. This continued a theme: arkuat had brought vinho verde because he knows that I like it, but I was too busy running around during the appetizer phase, and everybody else drank it all. Next year I am going to manage better.

My mother brought mashed potatoes, including a non-dairy version just for me; she also brought braised celery and leeks, which is about a dozen times as delicious as you think it will be, even if you think highly of the idea. fgh's cranberry sauce with ginger was excellent with salmon. Both her daughters came along this year, which was extremely pleasant, and they brought a very nice spread of appetizers. And my mother and local brother and I were very glad to see our youngest, even though he'd arrived at 2 am on Wednesday and was expecting the band's bus to collect him again around midnight on Thanksgiving. My family accordingly left around nine, and lydy kindly gave Eric a ride home so he wouldn't have to cope with the holiday bus schedule; but Felicia, Rachel, and Judy stuck around to keep us company while David carved the rest of the turkey and reduced the carcass into a form suitable for soup. The house smelled of turkey soup for the next day or two. I can't eat it, but it still smells lovely to me.

Fourth.

International Bad Cat Day, pastry version. So I went to a monthly gathering of fellow writers at a bakery that sometimes has olive-oil pastries flavored with orange and fennel. I don't know if there is egg in them, but they don't do me any harm, so there can't be much. They had the pastries, so I got half a dozen and ate one while socializing and drinking tea with all the lovely people. Then I met Eric for a date and gave him one. Then I gave Raphael one. The following day, I ate the fourth, and reminded Raphael that there were two left. We had a late dinner that night. If it's just the two of us, we often eat dinner in Raphael's office, with the door shut. My office has no door. If you eat where the cats can see you there are various behaviors that make finishing your food difficult, let alone reading or watching TV or even conversing while consuming it. So we had our dinner and watched whatever we were watching at that point (Dr. Who or Parks and Rec, probably). When we came out, it was time for the cats' own supper. Ordinarily the two of them pour into the office with the appearance of about a dozen, tails upright, voices proclaiming starvation.

No cats. "WHERE ARE THEY?" I said. "WHAT HAVE THEY DONE?"

There was no depredation in the kitchen. In my office, however, the brown paper bag containing the last two pastries -- which I had carefully set on a tall filing cabinet that Cassie couldn't get onto in one jump, and that I believed Saffron could not, less because of the height than because she couldn't get a good run or a good view of the top first -- was on the office floor with the bottom torn out, and both cats were feasting on the pastries. Raphael took the bag away from them and then I cleaned up the crumbs, to much feline protest. They had had quite enough to be going on with. Next time I am just eating everything at once. Possibly with some nice vinho verde.

I wish I had five things, but I don't seem to.

I wish you light in this season of darkness.

Pamela

I have, not exactly in my hand right now, but very near by, and honestly I think I might sleep with it under my pillow, the termination paperwork for The Dubious Hills AND the cancelled and as-yet unpublished sequel to Hills, that is, the work sometimes known as Going North.

This has been imminent for some weeks now and I have been trying to figure out what to do. I will let you guys know as soon as I have.

What I can say is that Going North needs to be re-expanded, not to its former two-volume length, but by perhaps 20,000 words; that probably not all of them will be words that I have already written; and that I am very well, indeed painfully, aware that people have been waiting for far, far too long for this book; so I will do my best to be expeditious.

One might well ask why I didn't do the revisions while I was awaiting the paperwork, but I can only say that they had not come properly into focus, and in fact I needed to write a short story first to get things to line up or clear up or whatever this analogy thinks it is doing just now. I would apologize for my creative process, but that wouldn't make it any less annoying.

Pamela

Here's the link for pre-ordering Points of Departure, Patricia Wrede's and my Liavek collection (all of our old stories reprinted with a few corrections; a new story, "Of Fish and Fools," by Pat; and a new story, "Shards," by both of us), coming from Diversion Books in May. It looks as if, should you want a paper book rather than an e-book, Amazon is your only option. [Edited to add: This is incorrect! Barnes and Noble is also offering the chance to pre-order a paperback. Thanks to sovay in comments for pointing this out.]

https://ganxy.com/i/102292

In less exciting news, I finally got a Twitter account. My name in many variations was taken already (about what you might expect if you waited until 2015 to get a Twitter account), so I ended up as pamelacdean. This has led to enough thoughts like, "Pamelac! A cooking spray AND an infant formula!" that I may need to change it. I have not posted anything and am following people as they pop up, so very desultory all around, but I hope to get up to speed eventually.

Pamela

I don't always sleep very well. Last night was pretty good to start with. I went to bed around 1:30, petted the purring, kneading, face-patting, wrist-licking, belly-showing Saffron, and was asleep before I looked at the clock to see how long it was taking me to go to sleep. I woke up at six and used the bathroom and actually got back to sleep rather than lying awake worrying about things I can't do much about. Into this unusual sleep, after two and a half hours, came a strong sound of music. I sat up groggily. Saffron was sitting on a stack of storage tubs, swiveling her head around and looking inquisitive. Cassie was sitting in the middle of the bed with her ears back. It was a rather pleasant piece for violin and flute, and I thought that under other circumstances I might recognize it. I got up and went into Raphael's office, since that was, I believed, the closest possible source of music. All was dark and quiet there, however. Both cats followed me, campaigning for breakfast.

I went back into my room and there was the music. I finally remembered that the clock on top of the dresser, which Raphael and I got long ago either in Arizona or in Bemidji, I can't recall, because we needed better weather reports than the Weather Channel could provide when we were planning on being outside all day hiking, actually has a regular radio in it as well. The button that turns on the weather radio is on top, and Saffron has stepped on it before. But I did not awaken to the automated voice describing the weather. I hit the button, and there was the weather radio. When I hit it again there was supposed to be silence, but the music came back. I finally had to turn the volume down all the way because I could not figure out what Saffron had done. The time-setting controls and the weather radio button are on the top of the clock, but everything else is on the sides. She might have been sharpening her face on the sides, I suppose.

I didn't feed the cats, partly because it was only 8:30, but mostly because I didn't want to encourage whatever it was she had done. I wouldn't put it past her to remember what it was.

In other news, we got the final digital files for Points of Departure from the publisher, and I'm going over my stories looking for errors. There is an error spreadsheet one is supposed to use to locate and describe what should be corrected. I had to ask the nice person in Production how to use it, but it's simple enough.

By this time I am extremely tired of "The Green Cat." It being the oldest of the stories, the digital version had not survived translation from format to format and repeated backups, so I ended up typing it all in again not really that long ago. I was a little impatient with "Two Houses in Saltigos" too, but am both pleased and abashed to admit that "Paint the Meadows With Delight" still makes me laugh, even though I wrote it. Then again, Silvertop is not my character, but Emma's; so perhaps that explains it.

Pamela

But good news just the same. Patricia C. Wrede and I have sold a collection of all our Liavek stories plus a new one by Pat and a new one by Pat and me, to Diversion Books. I just got the signed contract back in the mail this week, so now they have 270 days to do their thing. The collection is presently called Granny and the Benedictis, though I think we are hoping for a better title to present itself.

We did this because when we were writing the Liavek stories originally, our stories kept intertwining and our characters kept running into one another. When Pat first proposed the collection, I did not plan to write anything new, being in a bad slump as far as writing went and struggling mightily with far too many stalled-out projects of my own. So Pat wrote the new story, a kind of overview (a kind of one, it's gorgeously strange) and gave it to her critique group. Then she came to me and told me that most of the questions they had were about my characters, and she could not answer them. She said she would write the necessary additional scenes if I would consult with her. The story is such that scenes can be written in a variety of times and places. They need to connect to one another, but not in the way of a usual narrative. So I told her I'd try to write a few, and went home and suddenly hammered out several in the course of a few days. Then I did some more, and then Pat did some more. Then I gave the story to my critique group, who had a number of pointed comments about muddy parts, which we have tried to clear up, at least to the extent that we did not want them to be muddy. It was all far more entertaining and pleasant than I'd expected. The scenes that I wrote were also germane to the Liavek novel I'm still plodding through, so they served as a kind of research into my own imagination.

Pat did most of the work of assembly, including becoming impatient with my slow pace and retyping one of the two stories whose files had gotten corrupted. I did the other, "The Green Cat." The form of corruption was weird and fascinating. Parts of the story were there, but parts had been replaced by sections of several of my novels. I have a very vague recollection that this happened because I had failed to remember the difference between double- and single-density disks while doing backups, but it's all a long time ago now.

The stories held up amazingly well. I did find a couple of instances of problematic language. In some cases I tweaked them a little. In others, the language was part of the relationship between two characters and is explicitly addressed by one of them in the novel, so I let it alone.

Our timing was not completely fortunate. Will Shetterly and Emma Bull had decided that they wanted to reissue the Liavek anthologies, but by the time they told us so and asked for permission to reprint our stories, we had already signed the contract with Diversion Books. Still, there are new stories, and I had a lovely time working with Pat again; so I can't at all regret the project.

I'll let you know when the book's available, and also when the other Liavek reissues are available, so you can have a complete set if you like -- or at least as complete a set as the vagaries of time and chance allow.

Pamela

The snowdrops came up all of a piece, leaves and drooping white flowers, three or four days ago. The purple snow crocuses are blooming in the front flower bed. The peony on the south side of the house is showing red shoots, as is the evil but beguiling Japanese knotweed. The bleeding-heart in the front flower bed has put up red-and-green shoots, already frilled with proto-leaves, right out of its mulch. The blue-and-yellow thug irises are putting up leaves, as is the burgundy one that hasn't bloomed much in recent years. I should feed that one.

The dames' rocket and the motherwort have greened up. The daylilies are four to eight inches high, depending on where they are. The bare earth of the south side yard is filling up with tiny violet leaves, a bit of periwinkle, and the aforementioned Japanese knotweed. The grass is greening up. There are small leaves on both mock-orange bushes, and on the neighbors' peabush hedge. I really ought to rake the leaves off the remaining plants, but I have a deep conviction that we are going to pay for this weather with sub-zero temperatures and a raging blizzard, pretty much ANY TIME NOW. So I walk around in bemusement instead.

Ari and I saw a morning-cloak butterfly a few days ago, sunning itself on the back of a lawn chair. I've also seen various small flies and beetles, but no queen bumblebees yet, and no green darners.

Juncoes are still here, and there are so many I think they may be either passing through or preparing to leave. We have a pair of cardinals, which is always cheering. The chickadees and house sparrows and house finches are singing in their various ways, and crows are rattling.

In a rash frenzy, I ordered a bunch of plants from the Lake Country School just down the street. They used to send out six-year-olds with forms to go door to door, and you never knew exactly what you would get when you went to pick up your plants. But now everything is online. I confidently expect that the edited manuscript of my book, with a short deadline for return, will land on me on the weekend I am supposed to pick up the plants.

The mint hasn't come back yet, which concerns me. If it doesn't, I had better buy three plants of it and put them in different locations. This is a good recipe for disaster, but maybe the mint can fight back the Japanese knotweed.

Pamela