BlakeCharlton.com

Frenetic in the Frontcountry

Two days after returning to the pleasures of toilet paper and cotton bed sheets, I’m off again to the forest, this time with a gaggle of first year med students. After meeting them today, I’m excited and a bit nostalgic. Hard to believe it was a whole year ago that I was walking onto Alway Courtyard with a pack and high expectations.

The trip was wonderful. I fell in love with the higher trails–ridges of high dessert veined with narrow creeks that were themselves filled with boulders, flowering lupine and castillja. We slept the first night at Nobel Lake. I hopped into frigid waters and started to swim laps. Being a cardio-addict, I can usually go for 3 kilometers without too much of a problem. But at 10,000 feet, I nearly sank after a single lake crossing. Bit of a humbling experience. We would have continued in the high desert, but a member of our party developed acute mountain sickness that night and we had to hotfoot it down to lower elevation.

After coming back to El Palo Alto, the past two days have been frantic. I’ve been avoiding this post for fear that someone who was expecting to hang out with me would know I was spending time blogging instead of catching up with them. (If you’re reading this with a frown, I’m really really sorry. I’ll make it up to you when you get back and I have more free time…well, okay, when I’m in the civilized world more often.)

On the writerly side of things, there are a few goings on:

If all goes according to plain, tomorrow you’ll be able to check out my $0.02 about what should be changed in Science Fiction via SF Signals “Mind Meld” forum.

Also, Amazon temporarily sold out of Seeds of Change (looks like they’re back in stock at the time of writing). In my naiveté, I thought this was wonderful news: we exceeded their expectations. It was then pointed out to me, that perhaps the silver lining had a cloud: likely Amazon had little faith in us and bought few copies. Either way, I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Work on the final* draft of Spellwright continues despite the madness. I’m ironing out a few technical problems and tweaking the ending so as to better set up Spellbound. It’s amazing how much writing a chunk of book two helped me improve book one.

And with that, I’d better fetch my laundry out of the drier before my neighbors in the building wonder why i have so many dirty to wash socks.

*please, God, let me be right about this adjective this time.