This unusually warm, wet summer is winding down. After the remnants of Hurricane Polo passed over a couple of days ago, some cooler, drier air moved in. Light jacket weather. It’s wonderful.

I wrapped up the first draft of Chaos Agent a little over a week ago, and since then have been playing catch-up with this and that. I need to refill the freezer with autumnal soups, and started yesterday with a small batch of Turkish Lentil-Carrot Soup. An Italian green lentil soup with be next. Some type of curried butternut will join the line-up. Some bean things.

Chaos clocked in at about 173K, which makes it the longest Jani book to date. It needs cutting. Tightening. Some things I felt would work at the beginning did not work and need to be excised. I plan on giving the newish printer a workout and print the thing—double-sided—for the first read-through. Reading that way is just different, especially when you’ve been staring at screens all day.

Here’s a rough synopsis:

On the way to the idomeni homeworld of Shèrá and her new posting as Speaker of Humanish to the Oligarch, Jani Kilian receives an urgent call from Dr. John Shroud and detours to a Neoclona clinic. What she learns there is something that endangers the hybrids of Thalassa and threatens the stability of the Commonwealth and delicate negotiations with the idomeni.

Then she arrives on Shèrá and struggles to adjust to her new role amid culture clashes and misunderstandings while trying to dig into the above threat and deal with other mundane and not-so-mundane matters.

Meanwhile, Roni McGaw, the documents examiner who worked with Jani in Law of Survival, has recovered from her injuries…mostly, and now fights paper crime as a Registry Director-at-Large. It’s in this capacity that she finds herself aboard a Service vessel that’s headed out on a routine exercise. Except the exercise proves far from routine. And the commanding officer is someone she knows…except he wears an eyepatch now.

In other news, after delaying way too long, I am having a new driveway and front sidewalk/step installed. The project is currently at about the halfway point, give or take. Concrete driveway apron and sidewalk/step are in. Asphalt and brick trim to come. Weather interfered a bit—thanks, Polo. But the weather looks like it will cooperate for the next week and a half, at least at this point. Fingers crossed.

In Nature is Weird news, during my walk the other day, I was oohing and ahing over the clear blue sky when I spotted a single tiny cloud puttering along. At first, I thought maybe it was a toy rocket or some other thing that someone had launched—I watched it until it vanished, then continued walking.

I was wearing a hat, and the brim blocked that part of the sky from view. A bit later, I looked up for some reason and saw that the cloud had reformed? Recoalesced? As I watched, it struggled to remain intact before once again disintegrating. I checked a few times to see if it would give it another go, but I couldn’t tell because it was heading towards the sun and, well, I’ve become rather fond of my retinas over the years. I don’t believe it did, but I’ll never know for sure.

The Little Cloud That Tried and Tried.

It was one of the weirdest things I’d ever seen.

[ALT text: progressive shots of a tiny cloud moving across an otherwise cloudless sky, falling apart, vanishing, reforming, then vanishing again]