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So, all ready for a Happy New Year? I've got to tell you, I just hope I'll get home by then!
I was at the airport after a treacherous drive Sunday morning, on time and ready to fly. The previous night, the temperatures dropped into the twenties and teens and we got several inches of snow. How many? It depends on exactly where you were, but at the airport I could clearly see six to eight inches.
We were slated to board at 8:20 for an 8:55 flight, but by the time I got there, the flight had been delayed until 9:40. With no pilot or flight crew having yet arrived at the airport, we were delayed to 10:40. That was about when the crew arrived. But they started hustling around and getting the airplane warmed up, so we were permitted to board a few minutes after 11:00. By that time, flight time had been delayed to 11:40. Deicer was sprayed on the aircraft and we pushed back from the gate.
Thirty minutes later, we were back at the gate.
Visibility and weather conditions had closed in on us and it was not safe enough to take off. Well, better safe than sorry, right?
We kept getting announcements that it would only be a few minutes until around 2:15 when they opened the door and said we could get off the plane and get food and restrooms if we wanted, but to take everything with us if we deplaned because we might not get back on. I elected to stay onboard. The restroom was right behind my seat and I'd already eaten, so I opened my computer to work for a while.
A few minutes before three, everyone was hurried onboard again for immediate takeoff. We were back from the gate by ten after and waiting for deicing one more time. The deicing truck, ran out of fluid. It had to go back to the garage to refill. At 3:25, we pulled back up to the gate and were told the flight was canceled. There was a lot of hoorah about how we'd be automatically rescheduled on the next available flight or we could call Alaska Airlines ticket desk. Better yet, just go online to use our convenient app. Hah!
By 4:30, I'd collected my luggage and left the airport just nine hours after I left the house to go there. About five, I got an email saying I couldn't be automatically rescheduled and to call about future arrangements. I went online to reschedule, I was told it couldn't be done online and to call. I called. "Call volume is extremely high and wait times are long. To avoid staying on hold, press '1' and we will enter you for a call-back. You will not lose your place in line." I pressed 1.
The next morning, having not yet received a call-back, I called again. Busy signal. All morning. Early in the afternoon, I finally got through to the same recorded message. I stayed on hold this time. For over two hours! That's before I finally pressed one again in the vague hope they might actually call back. Not yet.
In the meantime, I went online and purchased the first available ticket (and only available ticket this week that I could find) for departure Thursday morning at 8:55. You probably have already looked up the weather report here in Everett Washington and know that our forecast for Wednesday night and Thursday is for more snow and cold. The high since Sunday has not gotten above 25F.
Now, I'm dealing with the flight insurance because I have four extra nights in Everett WA, meals, and emergency heart meds since I didn't have enough to last the week. I sit here and wait for the gods to smile.
I'll just mention, by the way, that my daughter and son-in-law are slated to arrive in Las Vegas to visit me on Saturday. I'd really like to be there to welcome them.
It's a landmark of sorts for me. Today, I've posted my fiftieth aroslav story at Stories Online. (That doesn't include seventeen from Wayzgoose and one from J-Hop!) And with the publication of the "Wonders of My World" series on Bookapy this week, I now have thirty-five books available there for you!
Today's story is the rather embarrassing tale of my experiences with strip clubs. Of course, the focus is on one particular strip club I encountered in Los Angeles, but I had to bring other experiences in as well, remembered from the deep and murky depths of my imagined past. As the subtitle says, "Based on the true story of Aroslav's erotic journey around America as told to Devon Layne." In other words, it's the memoir of the avatar of the pseudonym of the alter ego of the author. If you can parse that, you'll know exactly how much to believe!
And in other news
The year-end holidays are upon us, and I'm headed to Seattle Monday to celebrate Yule (the winter solstice) with my family and friends. My daughter is keeping the family tradition alive by hosting the dinner at her mother's house. It's the first time for her new husband to be exposed to the depth of our pagan rituals. It's the best holiday of my year. Joyous Yule!
Of course, if you are celebrating Diwali, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanza, Krampus Night, La Posadas, New Year's Eve, St. Lucia Day, St. Nicholas Day, Boxing Day, Ganna, or Makar Sankranti, I wish you a very happy holiday season as well!
I've been writing (surprise, surprise). In November I wrote an entire 150,000-word first draft of Bob's Memoir: 4000 Years as a Free Demon. What a rush! Now I'm piecing it together in a rewrite and discovering how much I left out in my rush to finish the story. The first part has gone to my editors and I'm thinking a possible March or April release.
I've also been doing a final read-through of Team Manager COACH! to prepare it for its February 1 release here on SOL. And I'm managing to get three or four chapters a week written on volume four: Team Manager CHAMP! At the moment, I'm figuring CHAMP! will be the last volume in that series, but my editors have learned long ago to expect that anything I write is going to be longer than I said it would be. We'll wait for the verdict on that one. It's scheduled to start in mid-June.
And there are other projects I'm trying to get back to, but even with the long nights, there is a limited number of hours in a day. I'm writing as fast as I can!
Oh, and January will see another "Wonders of My World" story!
Enjoy!
November is nearly over, and with it, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I'm feeling pretty good about my NaNo project, Bob's Memoir: 4000 Years as a Free Demon, with 140,000 words so far. I've been averaging 5000 words a day! I plan to finish the story by Tuesday.
That doesn't mean it's ready for release, unfortunately. I'll start rewriting it at the same time that I'm drafting the next Team Manager book. Then I'll get it off to my overworked editors. Maybe we'll be ready to start posting in early January. Maybe.
Yes, that's the number of words I've written this year for your entertainment and enjoyment. Well, mostly for that. It includes a few words I wrote just to spout off about something that bugged me.
Yesterday, as I ran past 100,000 words for November's NaNoWriMo, I also passed the 1,000,000 mark for how much I've written this year. It's not the first time I've hit that mark in a year, but this was something a little special in my mind. I started the year slowly, struggling for every word I was writing in two different works in progress. Then I discovered I'd gone back into a-fib and that explained a lot of January and February. I still managed to get The Assassin finished and released.
Then, on March 15, I had a dream so vivid that I had to stop writing anything else I'd been working on. I started writing and sending chapters to my editors at once. In a month, I had the first draft of Team Manager SWISH! written and was deep in writing Team Manager SPRINT!
I had to take short break from the Team Manager series and write Wayzgoose's Jackie the Beanstalk because it was just demanding that I write it. It was scarcely in the hands of the editors when I was back to writing Team Manager COACH! I took a drive one afternoon to let the characters work out some difficulties when my thought process was interrupted by a new character I'd never heard from before but was demanding mindshare. I finished the draft of COACH! just in time to begin Bob's Memoir: 4000 Years as a Free Demon for NaNoWriMo. Now, 100,000 words into that story, I'm seeing the third act take shape and am confident I'll finish it by the end of the month, at which time I'll be ready to start writing Team Manager CHAMP!
It doesn't take that long to get a million words written! Fun!
I was reflecting on some of the humorous searches that come up when I'm writing. (Like "How much does a barrel of wine weigh?" or "What was the monetary unit in the third century in southern India?") I doubt there is a person who has ever searched the internet for information who hasn't at one time or another ended up with a dozen open windows, music or voices coming from an unknown source, and some anti-virus software telling them their computer is at risk. It happens more often than I care to admit.
But there are also sites that try to just be helpful and overdo it a little.
I needed information on pirates of the Indian Ocean in the first century CE. Wow! What a bunch of useless information! Until I came upon an academic paper titled "Before the Somali Threat: Piracy in the Ancient Indian Ocean." How often do you find such a specific answer to a question? I downloaded and read the paper with great interest. And it was good. I dealt with the subject and moved on.
Nearly every day since then, I have received a suggestion that "A related paper is available on Academia." Here are some of the papers that have been recommended to me this week.
"Early Greek and Latin Sources on the Indian Ocean and Eastern Africa"
"Lost Port of the Red Sea"
"The Notion τὸ πέρας τῆς ἀνακομιδῆς and the Location of Ptolemais of the Hunts in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea"
"The Coastal Arabia and the Adjacent Sea Basins in the 'Periplus of the Erythraean Sea'"
"The Nabataean in Eastern Desert in Egypt"
Since it was mentioned twice, I had to look up 'Periplus of the Erythraen Sea' and found that it was a document that recorded the distances and sailing time from port to port around the Indian Ocean. Fascinating.
And you thought I just wrote entertaining adventures with a little sex tossed in!
Enjoy!
I was thinking this week about how retirement (age) has made me forgetful about some things. For example, this week I totally forgot why I was supposed to be happy it was Friday!
I think there is also something about my brain running out of my fingers onto the keyboard. I went to take a nap and could not stop thinking about San Francisco--one of my favorite cities--the location of a scene I was writing in Bob's Memoir: 4000 Years as a Free Demon.
Speaking of which... The writing of my current NaNoWriMo project is going well. I've averaged 5,000 words per day so far, which means the story is currently 70,000 words in length. Likelihood is that I'm about halfway through it. I've really enjoyed letting Bob take control and run on about his adventures over the past 4000 years. At the same time, I've had to do insane amounts of research in order to not sound like a total idiot when I'm talking about Alexander the Great or ancient India.
And then there is the sudden bouncing to, say 1955 San Francisco and the beat generation. Here's something funny. Back circa 2000 BCE, a fellow received some gifts from a god of war that included a drum. I didn't say much about the drum in that episode, but in '55, Bob gets enthused about the beat crowd in SF and pulls out his old drum to go join them. But I didn't know exactly what the drum looked like or how it was played. I just had a vague notion of what I wanted.
I sent a message to a drummer friend and asked if he'd ever come across an ancient Persian war drum that was held between the knees as it was played with hands and changed pitch when it was squeezed with the drummer's knees. If so, what was it called?
He wrote back that he'd check it out but it sounded like he needed to get one. Within half an hour I got a response to the question indicating he thought it was called a djun-djun and was most popular in West Africa, but extended all across Northern Africa and was probably around Persia as well. He sent a picture and it was exactly what I imagined the drum to look like!
So, now you know that the reason my stories sound like I know so much is all research. And asking friends who know things.
BTW, what coin was used as a monetary unit in India, circa 300 CE?
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