Category SunSpots blog

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...

I know it may not seem like a very interesting thing, but putting up the interior doors is one more step to making the house seem complete.

While right now most of the doors are still stacked up, waiting to be installed, like this,

that will start Monday.

While trim carpenter Lonnie or his assistant is doing that, the shelving in the office storage room, all three bedroom closets, the guest closet, linen closet, and another closet will go in as well. (That’s the “stores” in the title of this post–for storage.)

Another kind of storage got sorted out recently too. The original plan was to have an 1,100 gallon rainwater storage tank outside of my office, harvesting the water from the office roof and part of the shed roof.

To be honest, I never liked this option...

One of the things I do outside of my writing life is to be a judge at a local science fair. The Youth Engineering and Science (YES) Fair is sponsored by the local electrical co-op and the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, or AFCEA. Each spring, students in grades 5-12, from schools in the co-op’s service area, compete first in fairs at their schools, unless they’re home-schooled, and the top projects come to the YES Fair.

The judges are all volunteers from the area. Some are active scientists or engineers, some are retirees, and then there are the oddballs like me who have never been a practicing scientist or engineer, but we’re interested in the fields and can talk a good game. (Or as Kristine Kathryn Rusch says, “we play one on TV...

I know I’ve written about lighting before (like last time!) but this has been one of the biggest things to work on lately. The good news is that we’re now well on our way to having everything sorted out. Last week I approved one part of the order, for much of the decorative lighting, but then lighting expert Faith and I had to sort out some details regarding the under-cabinet lighting in the kitchen: would each bank have to be turned and off individually, how long could they be (these are LED light strips), what I might want besides outlets in the tracks between the light strips, etc. By using this kind of lighting system, we can mount the outlets, USB charging stations, and all sort of other gizmos (which I won’t be doing, but could) on the tracks...

Man, what a busy couple of weeks it’s been since my last post! One of the key things we’ve needed to finalize at this stage is all of the light fixtures and switches. You might think this would be a simple matter, but no, not in this house, anyway.

Take the lamp that’s going to hang over the table in the dining room. First of all it’s heavy: 35 pounds! Second of all, it’s going to hang from a high ceiling. Third of all, that ceiling is sloped. Can it hang from a sloped ceiling? One that’s that tall? How do we mount it to the joists? Are we going to have to redo the drywall? If so, we need to do that while the drywall guys are still on site.

Then there are the outdoor lights. Cochise County has a “dark skies” lighting code to keep the night-time skies, well, dark...