I wish I could say that working on the “scuba story” for over a dozen years means it is freaking brilliant. I mean, I think it is a mighty good powerful piece. Maybe it is brilliant, who knows. But it’s important to me because it’s been like an advanced (albeit slow) college class in writing. It keeps being good, and I keep feeling it can be better. And so it has been the side project which has been forcing me to learn what and why and how of storytelling. So, who knows it’s future, but it is always exciting and fun for me to work on it.
Sounds like you need to listen to “Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads. 😉 http://www.lyricsfreak.com/t/talking+heads/once+in+a+lifetime_20135070.html
Classic! 🙂
How long you in Sante Fe for? (Also: you do know Bubonicon is coming up right? Would be an excellent venue for you to display some art/webcomic-y stuff)
You know, I signed up to do Bubonicon 7 years ago, and then had to cancel. But it looks like a great con, and plau, Scalzi! I would love to go and maybe be on a panel with him.
But not only do I imagine it’s a bit late to get a table, but I have no books with me to sell. I’ve been kinda waiting to start tabling again at conventions once the next Spacetrawler book comes out in a year or two. 🙂
Let me know if you want me to put in a word with the Con Leaders. -I do know most of them…
Tell her to get a bag of meal worms. Chickens run to you the second you shake the bag.
Oh yeah. Second that. Meal worms… OhMahGerd, do chickens love meal worms….
A friend of mine, who travels far more than I do, remarked during one brief return that if you spend too much time outside of the United States, all the little things to which we’ve become acculturated just feel weird. The way toothpaste comes out of the tube. The odd way women and ONLY women end half their sentences with rising inflection like a question? Seeing police mostly in their cars, watching you. Money seems so bland as to be fake. And the feeling sticks. She warned that if you spend enough time away from the States, you lose the feeling of belonging here. All the world becomes a collection of cultural differences and habits and traits that you must learn when you come back, and you are never home again.
And ways, you know, I am already there.
I have never traveled enough and never will be able to. And only in the USA when I did back in the 1980’s so I will never have that feeling. Though it would behoove anyone who can to see other places and experience other ways of doing things then coming back and have fresh eyes on things here in the USA.
Though I cannot imagine how there would be any difference in how tooth paste comes out of a tube would be in Thailand or Luxembourg or Wisconsin.
When you’ve gotten used to tooth powder, the tube thing seems…. weird.