What I've Been Up To

December and January have been a bit weird for me. There’s been a lot of work, but also a lot of down time. I’ve spent tons of time with family, from gatherings with my now-local parents, sister, niece and nephew and respective significant others, to a visit from my son, who’s still headquartered in Colorado while he finishes up college. December saw the release of Call Me Zhenya, a book I still really like. Based on the reviews, some other people like it, too.

There’s also been a big drop-off in client work, which is typical for the holiday season. It always worries me, though. I’ve been filling the time planning for 2017, promoting Zhenya, and working on some new projects. I’m writing a sequel to Zhenya with the working title Code Name Anya. You can follow a rather cryptic chronicle of my progress on Pinterest. This is where I dump research material, inspirational photos, and other bits and pieces while I’m working on a book. Zhenya has a board, too. Just think of it as a glimpse inside my brain.

I’m also tackling a big project I’ve been picking at for ages, and that’s reformatting all the books I’ve published through Notes on Vellum. I’m making the interiors way prettier using Vellum (no relation), and I’m redoing some covers. The first book to get the treatment is Sweetest Songs. (For some reason the new cover isn’t showing for me on Amazon, although it’s showing on my KDP dashboard. This is what it should look like—)

Sweetest Songs is a little darker and sadder than most of my books, with a bittersweet ending. The hero goes through a process of change that’s painful for him, but at the other side of loss he finds his way to a new and better version of himself. I hope you’ll give it a look.

Christmas Blog Hop--Let's Talk About the Weather

Weather in Colorado is whacky. You might think weather in your state is whacky, but it’s got nothing on Colorado.

When I moved to the mountains west of Denver after seven years in New Jersey, I had to learn new weather words. Words like sublimation and virga and graupel. I had never heard of this nonsense. (I shall now define these terms for you so I feel all smart and stuff.)

• Sublimation. When a solid moves directly to a gas without stopping at liquid or passing go or collecting $200. Basically this looks like snow or ice on the road turning to a massive evil cloud attacking your car as you attempt to go grocery shopping.
• Virga. This is rain that hits dry air and evaporates before it hits the ground. It looks like a big dark rain cloud with long, gray stripes coming out of it. Or sometimes like a ginormous jellyfish hovering over your car, attempting to eat it while you try to go grocery shopping.
• Graupel. The official definition http://www.weather.com/glossary/g.html of this is snow pellets. They tend to be kind of soft. They look and feel like some nutcase in the vast heavens is pelting you and everything around you with tiny balls of Styrofoam while you try to go grocery shopping.

So what does this have to do with writing? Well, I have this bad habit that drives me to use new words in stories when I find out about them. So when I found out about these weird weather phenomena, I had to work them into a story somehow. What better way than to make one of my delectable heroes a meteorologist?

Now you might not think this is sexy. You would be wrong. A guy who knows something about the weather is totes sexy. And so was born Carter Allen, the meteorologist hero of Mostly Sunny with Chance of Belgian Chocolate. So basically, I wrote that novella so I could use the words graupel and virga in a story.

So what does this have to do with Christmas? Not a lot, except that our Christmas weather is shaping up so far to be particularly weird, and I wish I had Carter around to tell me whether we’ll have snow or not

Bits and Bobs for Christmas

I've put a few items online for the Christmas season. They're at Yahoo! Voices. The reason I decided to post them there was that it was a quick and easy way to make the stories/poems available for free to you. I'll still make a bit of money if you read them at Yahoo, so please click over and take a gander.

This is an experiment, really, both in distribution and in content. I don't usually write poetry, for example, and I don't write to prompts all that often. But I've been doing both with this little venture, and I've been enjoying it. So I hope you'll take a look, and let me know if you like what you see!

Thanks!

Short story: Santa Gets a Job. I wrote this a long time ago, and I don't remember now why, except that I was thinking about kids' stories at the time. It's a goofy little tale about how Santa can't afford to feed himself or his reindeer. After he's done with his Christmas Eve business, he sets out to find a job. Santa, it appears, is a bit of a failboat.

Poem: Christmas Lights

Poem: Snow: A Winter Haiku It's a haiku. About winter...

Short story: Up on the Housetop. A short romance. Four days before Christmas, a man falls off Ash's roof. Could this be the start of a beautiful friendship?

Short story: Christmas at Farhallen. I published this story here last year for Christmas. It's a tie-in to the Starchild and Earthchild universe, but stands on its own pretty well, I think.