Monthly Archives March 2016

The Cochise Writers’ Group, which I co-founded with Cappy Hanson, has gone through phases of growth and contraction, as every group does. We’ve been as small as four members, and as large as 17! We hit that number about a year ago and it became obvious very quickly that if we didn’t do something, the group was going to be unmanageable. The first thing we did was close the group to new members.

Our only saving grace was that not everyone in the group was submitting work. A lot of the new members did initially, in that burst of enthusiasm that comes with being new at something, but that tapered off over the months. Now we’ve got about half a dozen members who submit work more or less regularly, and that makes things easier to handle, both from a critique standpoint and from a management one.

The interior is beginning to look like a house! Last week, actually starting the week before, the interior got its first two coats of paint. “Agreeable gray” turned out to be an agreeable choice. Not white, exactly, but certainly not dim or dismal. It’s a color that will let others stand out.

The big news, though, is cabinets–in the kitchen, the pantry, the laundry, and the bathrooms. And what a difference they make! The kitchen went from this…

…to this…

…and this…

…and the island looking like this.

Here’s a peek inside the pantry.

And one into the laundry.

And in the master bath…

… those cabinets standing in the door into the closet will be towers on either side of the central mirror.

The lighting in these pictures isn’t so great because I was working only with ambient light...

I’ll write more later this week on what’s happening on the inside of the house but for now it’s time to get caught up on what’s been going on outside.

For starters, the decorative stone work on the short walls at the front is almost done.

I’ve discovered one of stone-mason Ramon’s techniques, however. He doesn’t just grab a stone out of the box and place it on the wall, he plans his work.

Not sure exactly where those stones will all go, exactly (OK, OK, on that wall in the picture) but clearly he lays the stones out so he can see what he has to work with.

Speaking of stones, and moving around to the west and south sides of the house, the gravel and plants continue to go in. A cloudy day week before last lets the differences in color between the larger and smaller stones stand out.

The l...

Got home late from TFoB yesterday, so now I’m catching up.

Did I say yesterday there were crowds at the Festival? Let me show you.

Did I say there was food? (And crowds)

That’s just one side of one of the two food courts.

And there were panels. LOTS of panels. From one on the “first folio” printings of all of Shakespeare’s plays, to Kick-Ass Women of Sci-Fi, to Surviving the Future (panel below),

L-R: Austin Aslan, Paolo Bacigalupi, Charlie Jane Anders, Jonathan Maberry

to Ask a Sci-Fi Editor, to My Hero Can Beat Up Your Hero (panel below).

L-R: Paolo Bacigalupi, Greg Bear, Sam Sykes

Did I have a good time? Writer-pal Lisa Vogel and I did, even standing in line.

Yeah, definitely going again next year.

Save

Day 1 of the 2016 Tucson Festival of Books is in, well, the books. (Sorry.) (Not really.) Hosted on the University of Arizona campus, it’s the fourth largest book fair in the entire country, and 99% of it is FREE! (Pictures tomorrow, I promise!)

Check out this (very) partial list of authors in attendance: Paolo Bacigalupi, Greg Bear, Terry Brooks (yes, the Sword of Shannara creator), Jared Diamond, Diana Gabaldon (yes, the Outlander creator), Tucson writer J. A. Jance, Jeff Mariotte, Sierra Vista’s own Yvonne Navarro and Weston Ochse, cartoonist Stephan Pastis (creator of the Pearls Before Swine strip), R. L. Stine (creator of the Goosebumps kids’ series), Chuck Wendig, and over 100 others...

My writers’/critique group, the Cochise Writers’ Group, has been going through some changes lately and that’s gotten me thinking about critique groups in general: their purpose, size, makeup, and so on. This post starts an occasional series as I collect my thoughts and observations about them.

One of the most argued about questions in writer-dom is whether writers should join critique groups or not. There are some people who are absolutely certain they know what the right answer is for everyone. Multi-published author Dean Wesley Smith is death on writers’ groups. I guess he had a bad experience with one once, but if he did, that’s not a sufficient reason–not a reason at all, really–to declare all groups bad all the time for all writers.

Here’s the thing...