I'm having to delete some of the old blogs from here. A lot of them are no longer relevant. Others have the comment section packed full of stuff that has nothing to do with me or writing or cons. Rather than sacrifice writing time to painstakingly deleting comments one at a time, I'm going to discard them.
On the flip side of that, I'm going to make a sincere effort to blog here more often. I still enjoy Instagram but X-Twitter has become mostly a time waster. And Facebook harvests more information than I am comfortable with. I'll still post there occasionally, but mostly I read other people's posts and sometimes comment. It is not a good way to contact me, as I hardly ever look for messages there.
So. My current life. We finally have a good soaking rain after months of drought. I hope my pond will fill up and the streams start running again. The spring we use as a water source for the guest cottage is horribly low. This on a piece of land where large sections of it are designated as wet lands. It's horrifying I'm grateful every night that I hear my frogs croaking. So many wild mallards have taken refuge with us, but the pond is so low it's a hazard for them to land and then struggle to wade out through the mud and silt to the feed troughs. I've had this land over 40 years, and never seen it so parched.
But I had a bountiful crop of apples, so I'm putting up lots of dried apples and applesauce. I'll check and see if any grapes remain for me to harvest. The birds are very efficient at finding them.
Meantime, I write in my head, even if I'm not at the keyboards. It is disturbing and saddening to discover that all my works as Lindholm and Hobb have been 'scraped' from a pirate site to feed AI. The Authors Guild (I am a member) has brought a class action suit, and I hope they are successful. That's all I'm going to say about it now. I will add only that things like this trash the Muse and I spend too much time worrying about this when I should be trying to write a story.
So that's about it. A day for wet dogs, muddy floors and I hope words on the screen.
Catch you later.