It's been a busy week here in Casa de Duleigh. As I
promised, I was going to pause work on Stormwatch Chapter 16 and concentrate on
writing my Nude Day contest entry starting Sunday, June 7, and work through to
completion, and then return to Stormwatch today. And that mostly worked. More
about that later.
I
opened my new blog and so far I have three posts; my most recent went up this
evening. Two of the posts are all about the fun I'm having with AI. Not just
the cover art I've been creating, but the local history of my hometown that
I've been rebuilding with AI. First was the Lehigh Valley branch line through
my village, and now a rendition of the water mills that were built in 1811. It
was the first industry in my home village and there are photographs of it when
it was a huge sawmill surrounded by gigantic logs in 1826, but it was trimmed
down to the much smaller structure it is today, My complaint is that there are
no photographs between those two images, 1826 and today. So I made one with AI.
My blog is at:
As I
said, I took an entire week off to work on my nude day entry. I had really
hoped to have it completed by Wednesday or Thursday; I didn't expect to go past
8,000 words; that's just over two pages at Literotica. I took care of my chores
and duties at the sheriff's office on Monday morning, then cut the lawn when I
got home. I then had lunch and sat down at my PC to work on Nerds and fell
asleep. When I woke up, I made an outline, started an introduction to
nerd-games and called it a day.
Tuesday
was a waste as well. I finished my morning AI work (I try to make something
every day) and then tried to bring up my notes from Monday, but I couldn't get
to my storage drive in the cloud. Then my TV froze. I discovered I had lost
internet and cell service. The main cell "Backhaul" line went down
when a car hit the wrong phone pole just south of town. From ten AM to six PM
this little town was incommunicado; we were cut off from the world. All the
notes I had collected and put together for Nude Nerds were stored on the cloud,
where I couldn't get them. Lucky for me, I have many files of classic anime
stored locally. I had forgotten the headache it is too read subtitles on the
anime while someone screams in Japanese and you're trying to watch the action.
At six
PM, my phone was blowing up with all kinds of messages. Most of them were from
friends who texted me saying, "Did you lose cell phone too? Mine went out
this morning." I also had a voicemail from Doctor Voldemort, the head of
the clinic that I had mentioned last week. On Wednesday, I called Dr. Voldemort
back and left a message that I got his message. I had to go through three
people to do that. Now I know why that clinic gets top dollar; they need to
charge that much to pay all the paper shufflers. We got to talk, and he
accepted the fact that I'm not going to drive 100 miles for a non-vital test.
He then said, "This was my fault; my instructions were inflexible and the
nurses enforced them too strictly." Nice - he took responsibility, then
blamed it on his underlings. I was not surprised to discover he was an officer
in the US Army.
In the
end, I only got to work on Nerds in the Nude on Friday, Saturday, and today.
But it's finished! 10,010 words. Right now Madam Beta/Edit, KMaz, is going over
the wording and, as usual, she's coming up with fine suggestions. A new member
to this newsletter, MediocreAuthor, a fellow author at Literotica and WRIST, is
preparing to educate me on the changes in RPGs since I last played in 2009. I
was hoping to finish this on Thursday so it would be ready to come up for you tomorrow,
but life didn't want that to happen.
Nerds
in the Nude takes place on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. For those of you
who have never been there, the UP is beautiful. The white pine forests, the
cedar swamps, the countryside is just beautiful. Every time I visit, I want to
throw out a tent and stay (until it gets cold). For the story, I invented a
town next to a river that's so obscure, native Yoopers have no idea where it
is. The story is about three couples on a semi-isolated beach on a warm day on
the Upper Peninsula. I hope you like it. I'm guestimating that it will be ready
to read on Lit on June 17. That's just a guess; I'll send out a note when I get
a publication date.
Good
news: the friend that I mentioned last week, the blind girl who got so sick,
Gigi. She's ok and back to her chipper, happy self. Her dog, Fred, is still
grumpy about getting barfed on twice, but he'll get over it. It was a touch of
Food Poisoning; she called it Montezuma's Revenge. I said, "Gigi,
Montezuma's Revenge comes out the other end." She said, "It did. It started
when we got to the ER." and that's why I don't live in the Southwest
anymore.
Trivia
at WRIST was fun; I won so my record is 7-1-1 now. We had a player from
Australia in the game; he's an author at Wrist and at Lit. His time zone is twelve
hours ahead of the Eastern Time Zone, so he was playing trivia along with his
morning coffee. He then joined us for music on Saturday, which was a great
evening. We started out with four players, and folks joined in one by one.
I'm
starting to get some notes together for Gods Save the Queen 5. It's going to be
centered on the yule holiday season on Kodu, so I'm now hit with a puzzle I
wanted to avoid - how does one celebrate Christmas on a planet with no
Christmas? This story will be based in the Yuletide season, so I guess Yuletide
would make a good name for the book… but gathering yule traditions is the job
that I'm faced with now. So if any of you have a Yule tradition that you'd like
to see take root on the planet Kodu, just drop me an email and we'll see if it
fits. I had an idea. This book is five years down the road; everyone is used to
a witch for a duke and a wizard for a duchess. Octavia had handed out wreaths
that had something glowing in there, but after the season the light goes out.
But the people can bring their wreaths to Octavia and she'll recharge the wreaths
for a donation to the school fund. (the One Eyed Duke Pub is a school for the
kids of Elm Springs until three pm) I'm looking for traditions like that for us
to use.
That's
it for now. If you have any questions, comments, or complaints, feel free to
drop me a line, and if you want to chat live you can find me on Discord at
https://discord.gg/UJWb7tzX3P
(Writer's note - Nerds in the Nude went live the next day)
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