The launch party at Akon 22 was wonderful. The cake was chocolate sheet cake with a white cake shaped into a red corset and very generous cleavage. It was adorable, cute, and none of my pictures came out very well, so I’ll have to find something from one of the other authors to post in a bit. I’d just been to another, longer, convention the week before, so I came home exhausted.
Walking out of the airport Sunday was not fun. I nearly choked. The air smelled of smoke until Tuesday, when the air became smoke. A thick blanket of miasma, covering the entire city. I saw ash falling Tuesday afternoon (Schindler’s List had it right, except this wasn’t people ash). Next to no visibility on the roads for several days. People were leaving town just to get some fresh air. We had a brief respite on Thursday morning due to a thunderstorm, but by Thursday afternoon, the smoke was back. Another storm yesterday afternoon seems to have cleared the skies, but I can still smell it.
The Okeefenokee Swamp is on fire (again), as are several nearby counties. For some reason, the weather seems content on sending the resulting miasma in my direction and it’s pretty much killing me. And all the other residents too. The smoke got so thick, I started thinking Twilight Zone and Outer Limits kind of thoughts. Oh, now that’s story fodder. Too bad I was too sick and too busy to write about it.
On top of all this, I had to finish my Shadowrun novelette. So here I am, unable to breathe, barely able to think, and I have to finish a story. I stayed up late three nights in a row, hydrating like crazy, using my saline spray, and trying to keep healthy. Exhausted and brain-dead, I ended up re-writing the story because I was unhappy with the way it was going. So what started as a "I’ll be done by Monday night" ended up as a 3 day, 15,000 word writing spree. (My ending ran away, I could not find it!). Apparently, exhaustion does funny things to my mind.
The good news is, my editor loved the final villain confrontation scene (and emailed me before he sent any edits just to tell me so). That makes me happy. It also makes the pain of the past week entirely worth it.
FYI: I will be at GenCon, signing autographs for my books, and for any Shadowrun books, Friday from 3-4 and Saturday from 10-11. If you’re in the area, I’d love to see you. I’ll be bringing a limited selection of all the anthologies with me (you’ll have to buy the Shadowrun books at the Catalyst Game Labs booth). If you have a special request, let me know and I’ll keep a copy aside for you.
