Update on my unusual life
I’ve settled into a seven-week sit in the little village of Tala, just outside Paphos in the Republic of Cyprus. The population is a mixture of Greek Cypriots and British expats. The scenery is stunning, the architecture is generic eastern-Mediterranean, and the climate is hot and relatively humid. They not only grow olives and figs, but little sweet bananas.
I’m looking after two rescue dogs – that is dogs that have been abandoned and rescued, not St Bernards with brandy casks, although one of them is coincidentally named Brandy. The other one, Bailey, had a spinal break late last year that has left her back legs mostly paralyzed. Still, I take them for a walk every morning, before the heat gets too heated. Bailey has a custom-fitted pair of wheels that take the place of her back legs, and she rattles along like Ben Hur.
She also has no bladder or bowel control, so there’s a certain amount of cleaning up to be done – although I’ve learned how to position her over an enamel chamber pot and squeeze her abdomen to express urine before she leaves a puddle.
And you thought being a world-wandering author/housesitter was all beer and skittles. Actually, the beer here is good and cheap, a euro or so for a half-liter bottle and I’m still trying to figure out how they can sell a liter bottle of Jim Beam bourbon for less than it retails for in the States.
In authoring news, before I finished the last sit in Athens – three months in Exarchia, the anarchists’ quarter – I wrote a 15,000-word novelette featuring my Dying Earth-era thief, Raffalon, and sent it to Gordon Van Gelder at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He’s just sent me a note to say that he’s buying it. When it runs, it will be my twenty-fifth appearance in F&SF, which when I think about how I used to buy used copies of the mag to read in the early sixties (couldn’t afford a subscription, and we were always moving house), always amazes me.
During the week since I arrived in Tala, I have done the first draft of the fifth episode of The Kaslo Chronicles, the serialized novel about my hardboiled PI who becomes a wizard’s assistant when the universe’s operating system abruptly switches from rational cause-and-effect to will-powered magic.
The first Kaslo episode, “And Then Some,” originally ran in Asimov’s and is now appearing as a reprint in Lightspeed Magazine. Future episodes will run every two months. I’m going to be very interested to see where the story goes (I can’t outline; I just start and out it comes, a thousand words a day).
A week or so ago, I set the price for my 9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn story collection ebook to zero, just to see if it leads to more sales of the other ebooks. If you’d like to pick one up for nothing, check Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords, or the Archonate bookstore.
I’m looking after two rescue dogs – that is dogs that have been abandoned and rescued, not St Bernards with brandy casks, although one of them is coincidentally named Brandy. The other one, Bailey, had a spinal break late last year that has left her back legs mostly paralyzed. Still, I take them for a walk every morning, before the heat gets too heated. Bailey has a custom-fitted pair of wheels that take the place of her back legs, and she rattles along like Ben Hur.
She also has no bladder or bowel control, so there’s a certain amount of cleaning up to be done – although I’ve learned how to position her over an enamel chamber pot and squeeze her abdomen to express urine before she leaves a puddle.
And you thought being a world-wandering author/housesitter was all beer and skittles. Actually, the beer here is good and cheap, a euro or so for a half-liter bottle and I’m still trying to figure out how they can sell a liter bottle of Jim Beam bourbon for less than it retails for in the States.
In authoring news, before I finished the last sit in Athens – three months in Exarchia, the anarchists’ quarter – I wrote a 15,000-word novelette featuring my Dying Earth-era thief, Raffalon, and sent it to Gordon Van Gelder at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He’s just sent me a note to say that he’s buying it. When it runs, it will be my twenty-fifth appearance in F&SF, which when I think about how I used to buy used copies of the mag to read in the early sixties (couldn’t afford a subscription, and we were always moving house), always amazes me.
During the week since I arrived in Tala, I have done the first draft of the fifth episode of The Kaslo Chronicles, the serialized novel about my hardboiled PI who becomes a wizard’s assistant when the universe’s operating system abruptly switches from rational cause-and-effect to will-powered magic.
The first Kaslo episode, “And Then Some,” originally ran in Asimov’s and is now appearing as a reprint in Lightspeed Magazine. Future episodes will run every two months. I’m going to be very interested to see where the story goes (I can’t outline; I just start and out it comes, a thousand words a day).
A week or so ago, I set the price for my 9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn story collection ebook to zero, just to see if it leads to more sales of the other ebooks. If you’d like to pick one up for nothing, check Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords, or the Archonate bookstore.
No comments have been added yet.
