rambo world tour 2014

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you to celebrate it; may the rest of you have a day also featuring pie.

I’m thankful for many things, and one of them is the past six months on the road with my splendid spouse, and all the adventures and laughs we had there. We put a lot of miles on the car. We kissed stingrays and fed hibiscus blossoms to three-toed sloths. We visited a lot of friends and family, and a number of roadside attractions. I’m very lucky to have had the luxury of that journey.

I’m thankful to have a home to return to, and to have all the things that so many lack: shelter, heat, food, clean water, access to health care, electricity, education. Grateful not to live in a war-torn country. And for all that I have beyond that, which is considerable.

I am, as always, thankful for my friends and family, both near and extended. For the chance to be part of a grand company of speculative fiction writers (including SFWA, which I am grateful for the chance to work with), some of whom have influenced me, others whom I hope I have influenced in some small way. I’m grateful for all the friends I don’t know yet, who I’ve chatted with online or tweeted at, but haven’t had the chance to meet yet face to face.

I am thankful for language and stories, and the gift I’ve been given in learning how to tell them. I’m grateful for new and wonderful stories, and re-reading others, finding them like long-lost friends. I’m grateful to be able to string words together in a pleasing fashion, and for the ability to appreciate it when others do it particularly nicely. I am grateful that I was able to write some good stories this year.

I’m grateful for this world and all its wonders, both of the heart and of the physical world. For the heroes and the volunteers and teachers and leaders and parents who keep the human race moving forward. I’m grateful for you, dear reader, and the fact that you take the time to read my words.

Goddess bless and godspeed. Have the happiest of holidays.

Last night in North America for a while. Here’s some of the books I’ve packed onto the Kindle.

Jeff VanderMeer’s ANNIHILATION and AUTHORITY.
Carol Beg’s DUST AND LIGHT.
Several free books in Spanish, including DONA PERFECTA.
QUANTUM ENGIMA by Brice Rosembaum
THE LEFTOVERS by Tom Perrotta
THE CHILDREN’S BOOK by A.S. Byatt
THE PRINCESS OF PANCHALA by Tom Wright
MORTE by Robert Reppino
WHAT THE PLUS by Guy Kawasaki
MR. MERCEDES by Stephen King
MINDTOUCH by M.C. A. Hogarth
THE TRANSPARENT SOCIETY by David Brin

Huzzah! We drove across America and it was an awesome trip, with lots of visits with good friends and relatives. Today we head off to NYC for a few days, after some time with the godkids, and sometime next week we head off to Costa Rica, where we have a lovely place on the beach secured for a month and the price is great because it’s rainy season. I’ve been practicing my Spanish and getting ready.

The major frustration of the road has been trying to get time to write. I find it takes me a while to get started and in the flow when I write, and for those of you writing in scraps and odd bits of time snatched from kids and jobs and other concerns – I don’t know how you do it, but I salute you. I’ve got a story simmering and partially written, which I really want to send out as the next Patreon installment, so I need to get butt in chair and finish writing it in the next couple of days. Contemporary horror, set in Western Kansas. (I know my cousins will appreciate the last bit.)

Here’s a tiny bit to whet people’s appetites. If you want to read it when it’s done, you’ll need to support the Patreon campaign. 😉

Penny saw the sign coming east along route 70. Yellow letters on a background the color of drying blood. 50 MILES – PRAIRIE DOG TOWN ““ WORLD’S LARGEST PRAIRIE DOG ““ BISON ““ KIT FOXES ““ BADGERS ““ FIVE-LEGGED STEER. Another sign followed it: BRING THE KIDS. GIFT SHOP!

She suppressed the urge to snort and glanced at the rental car’s gauges. She would have rather flown, but driving, she could carry gear with her the airlines wouldn’t have allowed past. Or would have arrested her for, much more likely. She might look like an ordinary, slightly heavy middle-aged woman, but the contents of her suitcase were suited to a world-class assassin.

Which she was, of course.

I’ve also been working on some nonfiction, including mulling over some posts on things like writer etiquette, self-publishing, and the idea of writing for “exposure” (which I am not a big fan of, and will explain why.) Stay tuned for some of those in the next couple of months.

Hello from Garden City, Kansas, where I’m at what was once the Wheatlands motel, where Truman Capote stayed when he was writing In Cold Blood. I’m visiting cousins here — tomorrow we’ll head up to Lawrence (with a brief detour through Dodge) to see more cousins.

The trip’s been great so far. Lots to see and time with some awesome folks. Wayne’s cousins Patty and Pete provided us with wine and ammunition. David Boop put us up in style in Denver and had an awesome birthday dinner with plenty of great folks from the local writing community. We did Yellowstone and saw a ton of hot springs and an indifferent teen-age moose. In Hays, I took a picture of the placard for my grandfather, Alex Francis.

I’d go on further but the hotel internet has gone kablooey so I’m writing this in the Target parking lot while Wayne goes for Gatorade. More when we have reliable Internet!

What I’ve realized I need is a system with a single notebook. One problem with decluttering has been the number of old, half-filled notebooks that have surfaced amid the piles and books, some taken from the storage locker after lingering there a literal decade. I’m writing this originally in one of those: 5×8, unruled, a stiff, translucent purple cover, originally intended as a spiritual journal. Since then it’s accumulated a number of to-do lists, some pieces of stories, a few book review notes, and some timed writings (including “Prophetic Lobster Man,” which appeared in The Mad Scientist Journal).

But it must go in a box and soon. I can’t trail fifteen gazillion notebooks along on a trip. I need one at a time, and preferably one that fits easily in a purse so I can have it ever handy but still has enough page space that I don’t feel cramped. Writing on scraps of paper when no notebook is handy has been my undoing in the past.

At the same time, I need to back up what I’m doing, so I’m contemplating a system where I write in my (solitary) notebook and then transcribe either every night or as time permits.

Things are shaking out and it looks like we’re headed out next Tuesday morning and leaving Seattle for six months! It should be interesting. Among the places planned on the itinerary are (en route to the East Coast) Couer d’Alene, Yellowstone, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Chicago, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Baltimore, and NYC. Later on there are more nebulous plans involving other continents. Back come January, with plenty of stories.

The remodel is almost completely done; I’ll post pics Thursday.

Wayne sent me this. I thought it a lovely way to celebrate what I’m leaving.

Continuing to pack and sort and dispose of stuff. This morning I’ll take a box over to PC Recycle, send my brother yet another box of books, and haul one more trunk’s worth of stuff to Value Village. I find myself increasing ready to pitch things, but I still cling to some: a plastic crate full of notebooks I want to sort through, a few knick knacks, a favorite mug. Taco goes to the vet this afternoon and will be suitably appalled by the process, I’m sure, but I want to make sure the cats get all their shots and a good check-up before I leave them.

All the art is off the walls, carefully bubble-wrapped and ready to be stored, and the apartment is starting to feel empty. There’s plenty of little (and some major) maintenance work to do, including putting Pergo down in the bedroom, and culminating with painting all my turquoise and pink and green walls white again. Two weekends from now, I’ll rent a truck and take a couple of pieces of furniture over to my mom’s but all in all, we’re not keeping much. My bookcases, luckily, were bought several decades ago and disassemble easily to pack small. They’re recycled rainforest wood, purchased through some green catalog, and have served me very well through all my wandering. There’s a storage unit’s worth of stuff to get through still, but the ultimate aim is to get it all in a storage pod while we’re gone.

Stress levels are high but manageable. I find myself talking to the cats during the day, and worrying about them, despite the fact that I know both will be in excellent hands while we’re traveling. I am afraid that Raven will die while I’m gone, and I won’t be with him and that will break my heart. At the same time, I can feel an exhilaration creeping up as some stuff falls away, and right now there’s plenty of possibilities as we continue planning. Worldcon has become more optional — it ties us to Europe in August and we’re wondering if maybe there’s more pleasant ways to schedule that visit. Yesterday I was reading a book and ran across mention of the gardens at Menton, which hold the oldest living olive trees in the world. Now there’s a new push pin on the map, because I want to go commune with those trees.

If you’re interested in taking a class with me this year, be aware there aren’t many chances left. There’s a Podcasting Workshop on April 27 and a Flash Fiction workshop May 14, and that is it for 2014. I’m very happy with both the Writing F&SF and Advanced workshops in this last round; they’re full of strong and interesting writers, and that’s a nice way to end this round of teaching.

So much left to do. But so many possibilities are opening up. Planning how I’ll write on the road is something I’m thinking about. I think ipad plus wireless keyboard plus Dropbox should serve me well, as long as I’ve got a notebook and pen along too.

I’ve been very absent from the blog of late, and I apologize for that. I’m actually in the process of radically trimming down our belongings, packing up Chez Rambo, moving us into temporary housing, and then getting this place ready to sell. Then Wayne and I are going to travel a bit while we figure out what we want to do. There will be plenty on that to come, but it’s why I won’t be teaching in the latter half of 2014 and will generally be unreceptive to anything other than requests for stories or reprints during that period as well. I do plan to write steadily while on the road, which should be a new and interesting experience. Advice from other road-warriors is welcome.

For people wondering how that’ll affect my tenure as SFWA’s vice president, which seems increasingly likely barring the eruption of a singularly well-organized write-in campaign: not too much. That’s one reason I’ve cut a lot of other responsibilities. As before, I’ll be stepping down as head moderator of the SFWA boards, which takes a good slice of stuff off my plate. I did commit to driving the third iteration of a SFWA cookbook (more on that to come as well), but I’ve got the capable Fran Wilde co-leading that effort as well as a nice long deadline, so all’s good there.

Various publishing news: Just turned in the last edits for “Rappacini’s Crow”, which will appear in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. There’s another story going through edits there right now, “Call and Answer, Plant and Harvest,” which features a city, Serendib, that I sense will become a working part of my mental universe as far as story production goes. “English Muffin, Devotion on the Side” will be popping up in Daily Science Fiction. “The Raiders” (formerly “In Andersonville”) will pillage in the pages of Fiction River’s Past Crimes issue, edited by Kristine Kathyrn Rusch and “Marvelous Contrivances of the Heart” will unfold in Fiction River’s Recycled Pulp issue, edited by John Helfers. “Elections at Villa Encantada” will appear in Unidentified Funny Objects 3.

Christy Varonfakis Johnson, aka Folly Blaine, will be narrating both of my collections and is currently working on Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight. PseudoPod will include “The Worm Within” in an upcoming podcast.

I will pick up the “You Should Read This” posts again soon! I’m finishing up a review of two new Jo Walton books for Cascadia Subduction Zone right now, but once that’s done, I’ve got a number of old as well as recent reads I want to talk about.

So…plenty to do. And plenty more to come.