From New Year's

Wow, it’s been a long time since I last checked in. By now, pandemic existence seems somewhat normal. We have masks, plastic gloves, and sanitizer by the doorway; we’ve been out for fast food maybe once a month and felt quite daring about it. The move to Portland is on hiatus for now as we wait to see how the world shakes out.

I have a StoryBundle up today, focused on glitter and hope! Please check it out and spread the word.

Writing-wise:

• I’m wrapping up the final edit of Exiles of Tabat and am on track to hand that in to the publisher on July 31.
• After that I’ll spend August working with Devil’s Gun and getting ready to hand that in at the end of the month.
• I’m up to installment 12 of serial novella Baby Driver, have found a publisher for it, and am also working on a comics script, while thinking about eventually funding that via Kickstarter as a comic book series.
• Forthcoming stories include “I Decline” in Daily Science Fiction and “Crazy Beautiful” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, as well as a story I co-wrote with my spouse in issue three of Dark Matter Magazine, “Stand and Deliver.” Anthology publications include “Snowflakes” in The Last Cities of Earth.
• I’m one of the three writers behind And the Last Trump Shall Sound, which appears in August, and I’m beyond the moon at the chance to work with James Morrow and Harry Turtledove. Thank you to David Boop for acting as our development editor.
• Also in the pipeline: an awesome space western collaboration; the final Tabat book, Gods of Tabat; book three of the space opera series, tentatively titled Flower Power; a 3/4s-written novella I’ve been tinkering with; at least three other novellas I would like to be tinkering; and a literary horror novel.

Other Non-Writing Stuff:

• I have an anthology project in the works and am establishing some of its structure. Stay posted for announcements and slush reader calls.
• I’m also thinking about a game module set in Tabat after having listened to Monica Valentinelli talking about adapting novels into games in her class last weekend.
• Continuing to build my Patreon, which is currently at 241 patrons (!), who are getting fiction, snippets, Zoom events, co-writing, chat server access, and free/discounted Rambo Academy classes.
• Finishing up the on-demand version of Writing Your Way Into Your Novel. There’s some other cool on-demand classes in the works from Evan J. Peterson and Jamie Lackey, along with others!
• I started some little bonsai trees and have named two of them, Groot and Augustus.
• Continuing to sous-vide all the things. Recently have been making homemade sandwich bread as well as my own butter. One recent success: garlic chili oil

Down to our last week here! We leave next Thursday and head to Miami where we’ll spend a day and then (yay!) hop on a cruise ship to take advantage of a last-minute opportunity. I’ve never been on one, so I’ve been reading up on the experience and am looking forward to it. We’ll be spending seven days on the boat and seeing a little of the Caribbean (which I cannot envision without thinking of the Sid Meier Pirates! game, which consumed a great deal of my time at one point. After that we’re headed up to the NYC/PA area for early October, where I think I’ll be around the time of the SFWA reception there, but I’m still figuring that out.

I’ve not gotten much writing this week, but for good reasons. First we visited the Sloth Sanctuary here and spent the night in the Buttercup Room of their B&B. We got to go for an early morning canoe ride along a placid salt-water river, seeing bats, birds, and beautiful vegetation, then spent a couple of hours touring and seeing sloths, including the babies, which are the essence of cuteness. Here’s a video from the baby sloth nursery.

They have a lot of adult sloths as well – close to 150 sloths there total. Sometimes the babies are removed from the mother in order to help both their chances. The morning we were there, for example, a mother sloth and baby had come in that had been mauled by a dog, and they were separated because the mother was severely dehydrated and hurt and couldn’t nurse the baby. They take good care of them. We would have loved to pet them, for example, but it’s so much better for the babies if that doesn’t happen, so it was all hands off.

Some of them were rescued or found by people, others taken away from stupid people who thought they would make a good pet. There were an awful lot of sad, sad stories. But the sanctuary works hard to get them rehabilitated and back out into the wild if they’ll survive there. The ones that stay permanently are ones like Gwendolyn, whose arms and legs got broken by HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE people, or another sloth (whose name I forget, unfortunately), who was paraplegic.

Sloths are amazingly docile creatures. And they are lovely and awesome. But they belong in the wild, if at all possible. I was really impressed by the sanctuary and the work they’re doing. Good people. There’s an Animal Planet series about it, called “Meet the Sloths,” if you want to see more about it.

We had rented a car and drove to the sanctuary, which is on the other side of Costa Rica, so the day after we got back, we used the last day to drive down to Marino Ballenas and a whale watching trip. Unfortunately, I have no video because I’d forgotten to bring a plastic bag to keep my phone dry, but we saw humpbacks jumping, including a mother and baby, which was freaking SPECTACULAR. Also an extremely surprised sea turtle. It was amazing.

I did get a little writing in, and a bit more yesterday and this morning, on two projects, the first being novella/novel Seed & Cavern, and the second a modern horror story about tourism, set on Jaco Beach. Heh. Here’s a teaser from the latter, which has the working title “Jaco Tours”:

Joshua had not meant to offend the American lady. Or her companion, for that matter, although the companion seemed less offended than amused by the whole thing.

At the time, though, everything had seemed fine. He was out in front of the tour offices, handing out flyers and coaxing tourists into coming in to see what marvelous outings Jaco Tours (the finest in Costa Rica!) could offer them.

It wasn’t quite rainy season, but it was edging up on it, and already most of the tourists had gone, unwilling to face the rains that came in every evening, full of thunder and lightning. In the full season, you didn’t have to go looking for tourists ““ there were plenty of them, all down in Jaco and ready to spend money on learning to surf or visiting Manuel Antonio Park or going out sportfishing. But this time of year, you grabbed them while you could, because soon enough you’d be settling down to wait out the rainy days, living on whatever you’d managed to put away while the putting was good.

So there they were, the American couple. She looked like the kind who’d like the monkey tour, so he’d stopped them, described how they would give them fruit, how the monkeys would come and eat from their hands, and he’d seen her eyes light up the way some people’s did at the thought of monkeys. They had no monkeys in America, he knew, and there was something about them that made Americans crazy about them, at least the ones who hadn’t learned better, like going to Manuel Antonio and leaving their lunch on the beach while they swam, only to come back and find the monkeys and raccoons had gone through all their belongings.

Her companion was slender, narrow-hipped. A handsome man. The woman was older, surely, and Joshua gave her a smile. She was hooked. Now to persuade the man to buy the tour to please her.

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