Where to begin.
It has been an amazing and amazingly busy time for Nancy and me. I suppose it began in early September with DragonCon, which was great fun, as it always is. I don’t know how many more DragonCons I’ll be attending, but if this is the last, it was a good one with which to end. I saw many friends, received lots of support and love from people who hadn’t seen me since last fall. And my panels were uniformly interesting, well-attended, and entertaining.
I got home September 2 and Nancy and I spent the next ten days readying our house for real estate showings. We moved furniture, cleaned like dervishes, and made the house look like something out of Good Housekeeping. It worked, but more on that shortly.
A week and a half after DragonCon, we went out to Washington State for a wonderful wedding celebration of the daughter of dear friends and her partner. We were out there for a week, sharing a house overlooking the Hood Canal with a terrific group, a mix of old (college) friends and new ones — the newly formed Forbidden Freak Show!! (Long story . . . .)
While we were away, our real estate agent began to show our house to interested buyers. We received an offer the first day — for our asking price! — and had a preliminary contract signed after two days.
And then things really began to get crazy: We flew home from Washington on September 19th, were home for two full days — time enough to do laundry, take care of a few things at home, sign some documents for the real estate agents, and sleep a little.
On September 22nd, we boarded a plane in Atlanta and began the fifteen hour flight to Johannesburg, South Africa. For the next three weeks, we experienced what may be the most remarkable travel experience either of us will ever have. We spent the first several days in the Pretoria and Johannesburg area, the highlight being a full-day (close to nine hours) tour of JoBerg, which included visits to the Apartheid Museum, the township of Soweto, Nelson Mandela’s home in Soweto, the Hector Pieterson Memorial near where the Soweto Uprisings of 1976 began, the Constitution Hill prison where Mahatma Gandhi and Mandela were once held, and the Constitutional Court which is now located there.
It was a long, difficult day. Our African tour guides were fabulous — knowledgeable, passionate, patient with our questions, brutally honest with their answers. We learned a ton, and came away with a far deeper understanding of the anguish caused by Apartheid, and the continuing legacy of that cruel chapter in South African history.
Our host in Pretoria was a good friend, a Black American who lives there now and is, himself, steeped in South African lore, culture, and history. Our conversations with him that night were illuminating as well.
After Johannesburg, we flew to the Kruger National Park region for six days of photo safari. We stayed in two different game reserves, Manyeleti and Timbavati, which are part of the Greater Kruger area and share open boundaries with the national park, providing additional wilderness. The animals there are completely wild and the game reserves actually tend to have tighter restrictions on what visitors can do and where safari trucks can go. I intend to write in great detail about the safari part of our trip in an upcoming post. For now, it is enough to share a photo and tell you that the six days of morning and evening bush drives, twelve drives in all, were some of the most memorable days of my life. I was blown away again and again and again by the animals and birds we saw, and by the expertise of our driver and tracker, who worked so hard to show us SO MUCH cool stuff. Simply incredible.
From the Kruger area, we flew to Cape Town, for another week of sightseeing, wine-tasting, whale watching (yes, we saw Southern Right Whales!!), penguin watching, and general fun. We went down to the Cape of Good Hope, which was spectacular, and ate several terrific meals over the course of this last week away.
We flew home on the 11th/12th of October and drove home from Atlanta.
But wait, there’s more! On October 14th, still jet-lagged, we flew up to New York for what we thought would be the closing for our new home in upstate New York. As it turns out, it wasn’t — scheduling issues. Still we had a nice visit with my brother, sister-in-law, and niece. We flew back home on October 16th. Did more laundry, slept a bit more. And then flew on October 19th to Denver, where we had time with Erin and marked the one-year anniversary of the death of our older daughter, Alex. It was a good visit, hard for all of us, but also easier than it would have been had we remained apart.
Finally, we flew home on the 23rd of October, and then had the closing on the New York house the next day, remotely from the office of a notary and generous friend we have here in our little town.
We now have a bit less than four weeks to pack up the house, close on the sale of the house, and move on up to our new home. Piece of cake, right?
Actually, I expect that while it won’t be easy-peasy, neither will it be too overwhelming. We are living very much in the moment right now, both with the wonderful things we’re experiencing, and also with the stuff that just needs doing. Obviously, packing and cleaning the house falls under the latter category. But the promise of our new place is pretty wonderful, and that keeps us going. I plan to write more about the move sometime soon as well. But first, later this week, our unbelievable experiences in the African wilderness.
Until then, take care, be good to one another, and have a great week!
And in part, this is the fault of professionals like me, who talk about our work habits and, perhaps, create unrealistic expectations that writers with less experience then apply to themselves. I write full time. I demand of myself that I write 2,000 words per day. I am asked often how long it takes me to write a book, and the honest answer is that it takes me about three months, which is pretty quick, I know. Writers who are at the outsets of their careers should not necessarily expect to do the same.
We’ll begin with the assumption that the book we’re writing will come in at around 100,000 words, which is the approximate length of most of the Thieftaker books, the Chalice War books, and the Fearsson books. Epic fantasies tend to be somewhat longer; YAs tend to be shorter. But 100K is a good middle ground.
Feeling more ambitious? Say we can write for ninety minutes each weekday, and can manage to average 500 words a day, while taking our weekends off to recharge. Well, now we’re writing 2,500 words per week, and that novel will be done in less than nine months. Willing to write on weekends, too? Now we’re down to seven months.
What about the rest of my life? What’s next in other realms?
80,000 people. This year, in an attempt to control the crowd just a little, I believe attendance at the con has been capped at 65,000. Yeah, that’s still pretty big.
I also know that what has been a quiet year thus far is about to get very, very busy. Starting in May, we (
I have two other projects underway as well. A nonfiction thing that I am not ready to discuss in detail, and, at long last, the editing of the Winds of the Forelands books for re-release in late 2023 or early 2024. And I have another writing project — a collaborative undertaking — that I also cannot describe in detail, simply because I am not the organizing force behind the project, so it is not mine to reveal. But I am excited about it.
Very early in my career — like, one book in — I attended a very large convention as a guest. It was by far the largest, best-attended con I’d been, too, and at first I was a bit star-struck by the whole thing. Unfortunately, that didn’t last. Read on.