Journeyman

Hot morning in July. The temperature's over 70 and the humidity is somewhere between 88% and 94%. I took a quick walk and...I'm advised to expect lower than optimum air quality today, so it may be an air conditioning kind of day.

So, there's grass growing where the DEP clear-out work was done on one side of the house, and there may be wildflowers growing on the other site -- something green is poking up between the straw, and we'll hope the genuine Martha Stewart brand flowers will thrive.

On the day lily front: I've been bad about updates. This morning we have five, yesterday we had six, the day before five, the day before that, seven. With the old DEP shed out of the way we can see the flowers much easier and they seem to be doing well without the extra shadowing the shed provided.

The air is very, very still. Took time out yesterday to mount the flag pole we got while in Old Orchard Beach; on it is the sort of Halloween black cat with moon rising behind him. So what if this is July? Yesterday the cat was flying in a very nice breeze. Today... still, still, still...so it may be an air conditioning kind of day.

On work front...went to Augusta yesterday and came back from the printers with a half-dozen advance reading copies of Gunshy, which will all go out, I guess, with several now obvious problems. The old PDF/windows font bug hit and so we had a mismatch on one font; in several sections of the ARC the type's a but funky. I'm working on fixing that for the final...and that's one reason we drive the extra miles. My desk copy of the Gunshy ARC sports twenty three purple stickies...each one showing a section that needs fixing... in some cases that's one word, in some cases that's multiple paragraphs. This is how errors get introduced into books after they've been copy edited, so please don't blame the copy editor.

So today's work-order will be Gunshy, Buffalogenesis, and some modest web page fixes. Also, if the trimmer is actually charged up now, I may get a chance to neaten up around the old-style rose bush that survived the shed-moving.

And feels like that vague between the eyes allergy headache wants to act up...so it may be an air conditioning kind of day.

In the last week some things came together for us, including the unexpected opportunity to spend several days in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, where we soaked up sun and walked ...perhaps a bit too far one day. The day after we walked too far we didn't walk at that far at all...

The good folks at the Skylark (#2 Brown Street, Old Orchard Beach, Maine) let us know they'd had a cancellation for the start of the July 4th week, and though we couldn't afford the whole week we got two days plus at the ocean plus two nights worth of amazing fireworks. A bonus? We got our regular room overlooking the ocean and with a view of several islands. A minor technical glitch with the in-room stove made one of our meals a bit of an adventure, but we enjoyed our time, even if the 4th of July itself had a high temperature there at the beach of 62 degrees F. I should mention I love the intermingled sounds of the surf and Amtrak's Downeaster running by as high tide comes in... Oh yes, we would not have been able to take advantage of this opportunity without the assistance rendered by folks who have visited the Liaden Universe World Tour Trip Jar , which essentailly financed this getaway.

Since our return I've been updating the SRM catalog to include the preorder page for Lawrence M. Schoen's Buffalogenesis as well as for Rolanni's Gunshy , both of which will be published in the last half of August. There will be more updates as we choose a sample of Buffalogenesis to whet your appetite.

Today's links: Lawrence M. Schoen is Klingonguy on Live Journal and Rolanni is Sharon Lee in real life, Kit Jimenez in Second Life, and and has remodeled her Live Journal fairly recently...

More soon, but duty, in the form of letters and email to bookstores re the upcoming publications, calls. If you know a bookstore that needs to know about any of SRM Publisher's books, let me know. If you know of a bookstore that needs to know about any of the Lee & Miller fiction juggernaut, please talk to them and encourage them for us.