Category: Personal

Yesterday I finished The Sorcerer’s House by Gene Wolfe, and found it to be entirely awesome. It has all the usual Wolfean unreliable narration, elision, indirection, misdirection, and nested weirdnesses, but in an altogether more accessible mode than in many of his other books. It was quite a page-turner. (I was a bit trepidatious about reading it, since I have an idea for a book that involves someone inheriting a house owned by a sorcerer, but I was pleased to find pretty much zero overlap between the things I’m thinking about and the things he did. Though of course my book won’t be as good as his; because he is Gene Wolfe.)

My wife banged her head at the playground on Friday, hard enough to make her nauseated, and has been a bit woozy ever since. (A visit to the emergency room and a scan of her head indicate no lasting damage or blood on the brain, but they think she got a concussion, and she may suffer aftereffects for days or weeks afterward.) A bit scary, but she’s all right.

We had a picnic in the park on Saturday, enjoying the insanely warm weather. (It’s been in the 80s in recent days.) The picnic was our kid’s idea, actually, so we packed up sandwiches and hummus and fruit and cheese and other goodies, spread our blanket on the grass, and had a wonderful lunch before setting the boy loose on the playground.

Did I mention I turned in that book that was due on April 1? I did. My wife read it last week and spared me from some terrible continuity errors. She continues to make me look smarter than I am. Glad that’s done. Next on the to-do list is a new short story, which I started plinking away at on Sunday.

Wife and kid went to Wondercon on Sunday. There’s photographic evidence: My son on the Iron Throne, with my wife as the power behind the throne. (He dressed as a pirate for the con. Though he debated about going as a monkey, or a monkey-pirate hybrid, as revealed in this brief video.) After they got home, I took the kid for a long walk around Berkeley, ending up at a playground, where instead of building sandcastles he dug sanddungeons. Or maybe sandoubliettes. (Seriously: dig a hole, put toys inside, cover hole with the lid of a bucket, and finally cover lid with sand, making the hole invisible.)

A good weekend. They usually are. And next weekend, we’ll be in LA for the Literary Orange festival, and Disneyland, and swimming in the hotel pool, and going to the beach, and so forth. Should be glorious.

I thought I didn’t have anything to write about, but looking over my recent entries they’re all word count this and e-book that and look here’s a story the other. So here’s what’s going on that’s not writing related.

I commented to my wife Heather this morning, in a tone of some alarm, that nothing in our lives right now is actually wrong. This situation cannot endure, of course, but for now, I’m cautiously pleased about it.

I went to FOGcon last weekend, except I didn’t actually go to FOGcon at all — I did briefly enter the hotel lobby a couple of times. (Heather actually did things at the con, but I wasn’t feeling well Friday night, and so stayed home, and I took kid duty while she did fun convention stuff on Saturday night.) We took our kid into the city on Saturday and had lunch with a bunch of convention-going people — Jenn and Chris and Jed and David. Nice to see so many people all at once, though the need to keep my child from hurling his lemonade at passers-by made me a bit distracted. Afterward Jenn and Chris joined us for a stroll to Lafayette Park (right next to the mansion where Danielle Steele lives), which River loved — they have an old-school metal merry-go-round of the potentially-lethal sort I adored as a child, and the boy and I spun ourselves unto heights of extreme dizziness. (And despite walking too far and spending too long out and losing track of time and letting our parking meter expire, we didn’t get a ticket. Small miracles.)

Parent-child interactions are going pretty well. The boy is basically potty trained at this point, which is awesome. He hasn’t even had an accident in days. (To provide context for people who haven’t shepherded a child through this process: this is easily the biggest deal in my LIFE at the moment. I no longer cope with vast quantities of feces on a daily basis. Life is, therefore, wonderful.) The boy is a total sweetheart, except for brief interludes where he’s a fire tornado of apocalyptic rage. I took him to the dentist last week (his doctor’s name is Dr. Lopez, but he calls her “Dr. Locus,” which may indicate he spends too much time at the office with me), and he was awesome, totally chill, no freak-outs, just curious about the whole process. (His teeth are good, too.) He gets a bit stir-crazy when we can’t go to the playground because of the incessant rain, but the rainy season will be over soon, so that problem will take care of itself.

And next month: a big road trip down south to L.A., ostensibly so I can be on a panel at the Literary Orange festival at UC Irvine, but the reason I happily accepted the invite is so we can take the boy to Disneyland. (I’ve never been. Is it fun?) Yay for adventures!

Oh: and I’m reading Lawrence Block hitman novels, and playing lots of Oblivion (still sniping and thieving my way across the country — great fun), and really, that’s about it, but what more do I need for entertainment?

That census thing!

2011: I’m 34, living in a south Berkeley CA apartment with my wife and son, approaching my tenth year working as an editor at a trade publishing magazine, with a thriving career as a story writer and a cobbled-together career as a novelist.

2001: I was 24, recently relocated to Santa Cruz CA, sharing a house on Maple Street with my friend Scott and an astronomer of our acquaintance. I worked as an admin and copywriter for a disability advocacy company. I was in a long-distance relationship with a lovely young woman from back home in North Carolina. But on St. Patrick’s day I met Heather Shaw at an event held at her house, and promptly fell for her, courted her, and eventually moved from Santa Cruz to Oakland to live with her in a shared house, and got a job at the magazine where I still work.

1991: I was 14. Living in Dudley NC with my mom, dad, brother, and sister in a doublewide trailer. In, what, eighth grade and then ninth grade? So maybe hanging out with my friend Scott, watching TV, running around in the woods behind my house, and writing extremely bad stories about zombies, along with Twilight Zone and The Dark Side pastiches. I think that was the year I got my first ever rejection from Weird Tales.

1981: I was four. Living in, maybe, West Virginia? I’m not entirely sure. My mom moved around a lot with me until I was 5 or so.

1971: I was not even a glimmer. Heck, my mom was only 13 at the time…

Events of eventfulness in recent days include:

Getting our taxes back from the tax guy. The terror I feel holding that envelope is unlike any I’ve felt since, oh, applying for colleges, or my first two or three ever rejection letters . (Or, well, last year, holding the envelope from the tax guy. Or the year before that. Or…) But in the end, the damage wasn’t too extensive. We owe a bit less than my own best-case-scenario back-of-an-envelope calculation suggested, which means we can actually afford to pay taxes without going to a guy named Slick Eddie and taking out a loan with kneecap collateral. (Because as bad as it is to owe Slick Eddie, it’s better than owing the government. The government doesn’t screw around.) Don’t get me wrong, paying what we owe pretty well wipes out my savings, but that’s fine. Having no money in the bank is pretty typical. And now that’s done for another year, at least. For once I’m not paying last year’s taxes with this year’s income, which is a nice change.

I wrote: only about 8,000 words over the weekend instead of the 10K I’d hoped for, but it’s fine. They’re good words, and I should still finish the first draft in a week or so. I think the book’s structure is solid, so revision should be limited to cleaning up character stuff, seeding in some foreshadowing, line-editing, etc.

I played video games: still playing Oblivion, a game which contains vastnesses. I did the Mage Guild quest-line this weekend, and am now the Arch-Mage. Nothing like shooting necromancers in the back with arrows and blasting liches in the face with magical fire. Quite satisfying.

I played with my kid: he is awesome. He actually spontaneously apologized to his mother after he had a tantrumy tired freak-out meltdown. He was all screams and kicking, and after he calmed down, he said, “I’m sorry I yelled mommy,” and went on to specifically apologize for the specific things he’d yelled at her about. We were stunned. We always try to tell him we’re sorry if we do mean loud things, and apparently that’s made an impression on him.

So, really, another wonderful weekend. Library books were acquired, and brunch was eaten (at La Note — yum), and the kid and I dug in the muddy back yard and discussed the beneficial qualities of earthworms, and generally enjoyed life.