Although knowing me, I'm just as likely to be checking email or playing chess as I am actually producing any pages. I'll try to post another picture once I get the rest of the room filled up with books.
Actually, this was my first full day working in the new office, and I had a better day than I'd been having elsewhere. Writers get funny things in their heads. I was convinced it would help to be facing north again, with a window over my right shoulder, just like it was in my old studio. We'll see.
Livia has posted several pictures of the new house over on her blog, if you want to take a look at where we're living and working now.
This is the first post from the new house. We moved in today, and while there’s still a lot of stuff in the mobile home and we’ll be carrying things over here for days, if not weeks, we now officially live here. It’s hard to believe that it’s only been a little over ten months since the wildfire destroyed our original house and my studio. That seems like a whole other lifetime.
I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who’s helped us get here. I’m not going to start listing names, because I’d be bound to forget someone. But scores of people – family, friends, total strangers – came forward to help us. People sent money and books. Some showed up with money, books, household goods, furniture. It was amazing. So thank you all for everything you did to lift us up out of the terrible situation in which we found ourselves.
The one person I will name is my beautiful wife Livia, who picked this family up, put us on her shoulders, and carried us to the point we are now: in a new home, starting a new life. Thank you so much.
Regular blogging resumes tomorrow. Life goes on. And thank God for that.
My brother and one of my nephews came over today to install a TV antenna on the new house. Out in the country where we are, we can’t get cable TV, so we just watch broadcast. Maybe we’ll go the satellite route eventually, but not now.
But to get back to the antenna . . . The brackets my brother brought with him to attach the mast to the house weren’t long enough for it to clear the eaves. He and my nephew are both engineers, so they just went to Lowe’s, bought a yard-long strip of steel, and modified the brackets so they’d work. It’s amazing what you can accomplish with some steel, a hacksaw, and a drill if you know what you’re doing. My dad was one of those guys who was raised during the Depression and had a knack for fixing anything mechanical or electrical. My brother inherited that skill and has raised it to even higher levels. (Needless to say, I didn’t get any of that particular talent.)
So, the modified brackets work great, the antenna is mounted right up at the peak of the roof, and a nice long length of coax is attached to it. Then my brother hauls out another piece of equipment he brought with him: a Spectrum Analyzer, with enough buttons and dials on it that I think in a pinch you could use it to talk to the space station. (My brother does talk to the astronauts on the space station, but that’s another story.) He hooks the coax to the Spectrum Analyzer and then goes back up the ladder to rotate the antenna until it gets the strongest signal. If you have one of these babies, you don’t have to hook the antenna to the TV and then have somebody watch it and yell out when the picture gets better. You get the best signal locked in before any TVs ever get hooked up.
After that comes the clambering around in the attic and hooking the coax to the signal amplifier and then sorting out the cables that go to the various wall plugs. Even though we haven’t moved in yet, when we do we should have the best TV reception we’ve ever had out here. So we’re one step closer, and I had a good time helping out, even though I didn’t actually do much. I sure got a kick out of that Spectrum Analyzer, too.
Yesterday was a busy day, with the plumber, the electrician, and the foam insulation guys all working in the new house at the same time, plus new appliances being delivered. Livia and I were kept hopping, making decisions and running to Lowe’s and Home Depot to pick stuff up.
In the midst of all that, I was emailing back and forth with one of my editors concerning a new series I’m going to be writing. I was under the impression that the three books would be written next year, but as it turns out, the publisher needs the first two ASAP, with the third one to follow fairly quickly after that. I’m about a fourth of the way through another book, luckily for the same editor, so he asked me to put that one aside, write the first two books in the new series, and then finish the one I was working on now, followed by the third book in the new series and then the next book in yet another series. Me being me, I said sure, no problem.
And it really shouldn’t be. I have a pretty good outline on the current book, and I’m at a point in the story where it should be easy to suspend things and then pick it up again in a few months. All this really does is tighten up the lead time between manuscript delivery and publication date for several of these books, and that’s more of a problem on the publisher’s end than on mine. Still, there’s not much leeway for anybody involved in these projects, so we’re all going to have to be pretty efficient, starting with me. I think I’m up to it (he said hopefully).
Livia has a couple of new photos up over on her blog. The porch goes almost all the way around the house, so I was thinking that when the weather is nice I can sit on the back porch in the morning and work, and in the afternoon I can sit on the front porch. We'll see how much work I get done that way, especially if I'm sitting in a comfortable chair.
Livia has some new pictures up on her blog. My office will be in the little room above the garage.
The rebuilding of our house has finally gotten underway. It took us a long time to make up our minds what we wanted to do. Livia has some pictures of the first steps posted over on her blog.
