Well, there wasn’t an accountability post last week and this one is late for a very simple reason.
Late on that Friday afternoon, right after we returned from woodcutting, we got a call from the contractor who was supposed to reroof the Portland house, where our son and a housemate live. He was pulling the schedule up by a week.
That meant instead of having nearly a week to prepare for this trip, we only had three days. And since the work involved removing old, first-generation skylights that were no longer a good thing (admitting heat, for one thing, leaking, and concern about replacing the glass), that required a lot of preparation on our part including a deep house clean afterwards. So, hurry-hurry, running around, packing and organizing and getting ready for a prolonged stay in a hotel because every bedroom in the darn place (except for the housemate’s) has a skylight. It wasn’t just an issue of replacing a skylight, however, it was also the need to seal up vaults for the skylights because…sigh…they went through an attic. Interior work needed to be done.
Furniture moving. Covering things. Preparing protective measures in case the contractors were of the careless type.
It all came together much better than we thought it would, but wow. I am so glad that I had made finishing up Federation Cowboy a priority because I wasn’t fretting about writing. However, as a result, a lot of June has already gone by.
Not that it hasn’t been a useful time, or all dedicated to construction prep and housecleaning. I blocked out the remaining elements in The Cost of Power, enough that my morning reading today opened everything up so that I know where I’m going with that particular subseries (hint: I realized I’ve been dancing around the implications of transhumanism/longtermism with the digital thought clones, and this series is going to deal with those pieces. Including the multiversal element).
I did some thinking about Dragons of the Raven Alliance and what it’s going to focus on–for one thing, I’m dropping Tales from the title.
And this morning, I was able to block out some requirements for promotion in June (oddly enough, June and December are the only months where I don’t have a major book release to talk about).
I’m cautiously excited about where I’m going with the work from now. There are lots of possibilities. We’ll see where they go.
