Pass the buck

Last week I saw a buck deer for the first time while biking to work. I saw a group of seven deer, and they were remarkably fearless. I walked my bike up to within twenty feet of them. One of them actually moved a few steps toward me.

I took ten photos with my cell phone camera, but it has no zoom: none of them were worth looking at. You couldn't even be sure there were deer in the frame at all.

I'm nearly at my year's goal of 100 rides already: the price of gas, and my car's doddering ways, have been phenomenal motivators. Next year I think I'm going to aim for 150 or more rides. And I've been trying to work from home a little to reduce the number of car trips even further. The idea there is to work from home on days when I need to run an errand...because the need to run an errand with my car is the prime reason for ever using my car at all. If I can solve that, then really rainy days are the only ones that'll get me into the tin box.

Space Dwarves in Mjolnir-shaped Cruiser!

If you're gonna geek out on Lego, I can think of no better way than to build a Space Dwarf his own Mjolnir-shaped spacship.

This is right on so many levels.

• It's a creative use of Lego.
• It's an interesting spaceship with lots of interior detail.
• The choice of a Space Dwarf is a nice oddity, and the thing has lots of dwarf-specific details, like a beer stein, a pig for later eating...
• Mjolnir brings in a nice Thor and comics reference and is highly recognizable. Ordinarily I think I'd hate a spaceship that was shaped like something else. But Mjolnir is holy!
  

I told my wife about this. She was completely unimpressed. I can't understand this. Did she fail to read Norse mythology, dwarf stories, and Marvel comics?

Oh yeah. She's a girl!

_The Career Novelist_: Don't quit your day job too soon

I am still enjoying The Career Novelist. It's filled with audacious ideas, when you approach it as someone who always-wanted-to-be-a-novelist-with-10,000-maniac-fans-and-a-pony. I just finished a chapter that's all about advising you not to quit your day job too soon.

Maas advises you to wait until your royalties pay enough to cover your expenses. This makes a lot of sense. Other writing monies, especially advances, are more likely to fluctuate.

He also advises getting 3 to 5 books in print and selling well first...saying that this is a strong indicator you've got a tidy authorial brand going, a long-term business. And he admits people aren't likely to follow his advice...that they make this decision from excitement and from the heart.

This is an exciting idea and scary way to think. Why plan on writing one novel? Let's dream about the day when you've got five novels in print and making money at the same time.

But heck, if you don't dream about it, plan for it, how will you ever get there? It's not like I haven't thought this way all my life. But Maas's expression of this is very practical. I know I always saw myself as a published novelist, but I don't think I thought about what it would really take to make a living from novels. Developing a string of books and a loyal readership will take years, and that's what you need to make noveling pay the bills.

I was kind of hoping Madonna would have herself frozen or something

Madonna turned 50 on the 16th of this month. You know you're getting old when the pop star you lusted after in your high school days turns 50. She has plenty of money; I was hoping she'd use some of it to preserve herself or something.

I remember having Madonna posters all over my bedroom when I was 17. I thought they would shock my parents, what with all the crucifixes she wore. I didn't actually have the gutsbad taste to put up posters of someone scantily clad. My mom would have taken them down then, and I'd have been out $5.

So she's 50 now. And I'm almost 40 and I have three kids. So I'm going through the terribly usual feelings, I think. I have days where I wonder what the heck I've done with the 39 years I've had so far. I usually laugh those off, but it's not always easy.

I know: I've been accumulating life experience for future writing...while being a technical writer. Hmm. Perhaps I should have gone into military technical writing. More experience, faster. But in that case, I think I might be dead. Of boredom. Having to number section in 5.4.3.7 format would just about kill me.

But then I pick up my littlest one, or debut a new juggling routine, or actually turn a phrase that I like in a piece of fiction, and I know one thing: I'm getting better at all the things I care about, day by day.

Madonna, if you ever start feeling your age and you need to talk about it, you know where to find me.

Kerbey Lane North has moved

The Kerbey Lane North location has moved ...further up highway 183, to the Anderson Mill shopping center.
Apparently this happened 8/21. I had to hear about it from an out-of-town friend who had the news from in-town family.

Recommended: To Court the King

"To Court the King" is a card and dice game. I played it at Armadillocon and got a kick out of it. It was elegant and easy to learn, and it had pretty cards. I liked that it has a lot of knobs you can twist: every turn, I felt like I had a lot of options...but not so many in the beginning that I felt paralyzed.

The basis of play is throwing dice and choosing to retain or reroll them. You start with three dice on your turn; you roll them, and choose to "lock" one or more of them. Then you reroll the others. Each time you lock a die, you can reroll the rest, until all of them are locked.

You make your choices in order to achieve poker-like combinations such as a straight or three of a kind. When you achieve one of the combinations on a chart, you get one of the game's character cards. For example, if you roll 3 of a kind, you get the Guard, who allows you to bring an extra die into your hand every turn. Every card you acquire improves your dice-rolling abilities.

Some of the character cards allow you to change the values on dice, others add additional dice. In the game I played, it seemed like you had a good chance to achieve one useful combination or another every turn, so your choices centered around which card to aim for in a turn. You're only allowed to have one card of any given type, and there are always fewer cards available than there are players (that is, if there are four players, then there are less than four Guard cards available).

The top card is the King, and when someone acquires it, the endgame begins. Everyone gets one more turn to try and court the King to themself, and the last person holding it wins.

Lolbat references for PVP readers

I love the webcomic PVP, but it has a long history now. Lately when the comic refers to old storylines, I want to go back and reread them. But there's no easy way to find them. I know Scott Kurtz tried a tagging system at one point, maybe it didn't work.

In any case, recently the Lolbat returned to the PVP saga. The Lolbat first appeared back in June.

There, I feel better.

The cat who walks through hamstertown

I told you so. I really told you so. I told you that if we got a cat, we shouldn't get a kitten, because they're nothing but trouble. And I told you that the fact that we already had two hamsters would be a problem.

We let the kitten have the run of the house for the first time yesterday, and while we were out, it knocked one of the hamster habitats off its table, separating it into its many Lego-like components andspraying wood shavings everywhere.

I'm beginning to think that putting the kids' computer next to the hamsters may not be a great idea.

We came home to find the hamster AWOL. Later he was discovered in the mouth of our terrier, a little damp but otherwise fine. Apparently our dog is more than willing to be a hamster taxi.

Mushroom Men stories are up on two magazine sites now

I didn't realize the Mushroom Men stories were going to be published on RevolutionSF as well as Space Squid. I'm excited to see that.