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Happy first day of fall, give or take.

Frantic, frenetic, and frankly ugly start of the week last week, but things got better. Fabulous Publisher Babe and I drove to Ellensburg, WA on Thursday as a day trip. She’s researching her next book and setting it there, so we needed to go absorb the ambiance of things. And have lunch. At a place selling a cookie.

Take a sugar cookie. Add chocolate frosting. Stick baby marshmallows to that. Wrap it up for sale, with the added instructions to sprinkle brown sugar on top and hit it with the torch to melt everything into a s’more.

Did.

Yummed.

And had lunch with some friends on Saturday.

MOST of the drama from last week has abated some. Mostly. For now. Expecting shit to explode at some point and I might just have to get fucking medieval on folks when they decide they can get up in my face about it.

Didn’t start it. Didn’t ask for it. Didn’t want it.

Might end it. Brutally. Y’all been warned.

Have several writing projects going at once, but realized that they were tending to be too close to one another, so I put several of them aside (so I could, of course, start others). Wrote a fourth Red Branch short story. These are generally set in the winter of 1951-52 and will fall after Book 6, which is at the copy editor today and scheduled for the spring.

Originally, a buddy was going to do a group kind of kickstarter, and wanted each author to offer short fiction in universe. The project fell through, but the idea stuck, so I wrote a couple. Yesterday, writer-brain realized that the four I have (and one more planned at least) were tending to fill the same slot as Science Officer #9, The Bryce Connection, bridging the end of Season One (you’ll understand when you read the end of Iron Curtain next year) and setting up Season Two. The story I just finished up this morning before this was entirely Alois Voss and the Werewolf Legion and how they will fit into things.

This story got inspired by a modeling group I follow on social media. Guy in Japan posted a Heinkel P-1079A he had assembled and painted. He also did an AI image of the model flying against a nightscape. I asked and received permission to use his original model image for a cover. Cleaned it up. Merged it by hand because the Child Pornography machine is for losers, and made a cover that probably is the basis for what will be the full collection when I drop all of them. As noted, have four. Planning at least one more. No idea what other evil ideas might crop up between now and then, but I’m currently sitting on about 22k words. And my aviation library continues to get weird because I have the opportunity to do the research and the internet to find weird old books, like a book from the 1980s on designing fighter jets. (Seriously. Modern Combat Aircraft Design by Klaus Huenecke, copyright 1987 on the English translation.)

Past that, autumn is upon us. I’m about 6 weeks from testing for black belt, so that’s a weird amount of emotional stress. Physical and mental are fine. It’s the prep work. But it keeps me in shape when most guys are starting that long (or short) slide into irrelevance and death, and I got too much stuff to do first. Plus, if I want to still be writing crazy shit in my 90s, that’s the result of choices I make today. Healthy eating. Good exercise. Good attitude. Creativity.

What are you doing to defeat death’s approach?

shade and sweet water,

b

West of the Mountains, WA

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