Ann Aguirre

First, there will be a

chat at 8pm central on August 30th

in the usual place. Be there or be an isosceles triangle.

I’ve created a

spoilers thread for Wanderlust on the forum

, so readers who want to talk about the book can do so without ruining anyone else’s day. You can find that here. You’ll have to register for the forum, and frankly, I get so much spam that if you’re not already approved, I’m not even looking at the registrations anymore unless I get an email telling me, “Heads up, I registered as (forumname) and I need approval.” So drop me an email after you register and I’ll get you hooked up with posting rights.

Finally, as you can see from the sidebar, I’ve finished first revisions on Doubleblind. I sent the book off to my agent and my beta reader. That’s right; it’s done!

And that’s all for Friday. Have a great weekend.

Hi, all. I had been planning on doing an update on the last couple of weeks since Ann lent me her blog, including the trip to Cuba and Matt Damon, but something more important came up.

It’s been about twelve years, give or take a few months (I can do that thanks to Fuzzy Guy Timing) since Ann and I first met. Dangermouse was there.

In that time, there’s been some good times and some bad times, upsides, downsides and the occasional inside out. We’ve had to celebrate her birthday in lean times and times of plenty: a few home cooked meals and baked cakes, an occasional trip to the Chinese place in Reforma where the ceilings are fifty feet high and you have six waiters hovering like uniformed shadows.

I’ve been a good man, a stupid man, a *man* in those years. But throughout, she’s been wonderful, forgiving, smart, understanding, funny and all in all, the best friend, companion and wife anyone could ask for. This year, we’re going out book shopping and exploring for her birthday, hoping to find some new ethnic restaurant… or, at worst, hoping for a new Bollywood musical to be playing at the Indian place in Polanco that we’ve not been to in several months.

Happy birthday, honey.

I know you’ve all been expecting an awesome slam-bang contest to celebrate the release of the second Jax book. I understand I’ve become known for this sort of thing, so without further delay, I will reward your patience.

The contest is simple: the book releases in one week. At that time, you will go and buy it. An Amazon (or other online bookseller) preorder counts as well. You will then report back with your confirmation number (if you ordered online) in comments. If you’ve already preordered, dig up that email and post your order number in comments. If you buy it next week on the 26th in a brick and mortar store, there should be a receipt number. Use that and post it in comments. That’s your entry.

Think of it as a drawing (hey, you were gonna buy the book anyway, right? Right??) where you can win:

$200 in free books from your choice of booksellers

That’s right; you get to pick. I’ll do a gift certificate from your favorite local indie store, or you can do BN, Borders, Booksamillion, Amazon, Powells, Coopersmith… the sky is the limit. Where do you want to spend my money?

So that’s the contest. It’s shiny and simple. Why this? Well, the street date is important, and I need lots of people buying the book right then in order to make bestseller lists. Do I care about that? Absolutely. So go, tell your friends, and then post your purchase info. I want to give away this loot! There might also be unannounced bonus prizes if y’all publicize this well for me.

(Contest runs two weeks, starting today. Winner announced on September 3.)

Void where prohibited. Standard restrictions apply. No purchase necessary to enter, but those entries must be mailed. Contact the author via email for further instructions. Snail mail entries must be received by midnight on Sept 2.

Edited to add:

I’m drawing for the second bonus round; we hit 50 entries! (If we reach 100, I’ll draw another. There, now you’re motivated!)

And the winner is…

ASHLEY H

Send me an email and I’ll hook you up with $25 in book money from your choice of retailers. (Winning a bonus round does not disqualify you from winning the big prize.)

Jeri Smith-Ready is one smart cookie.

A while ago, something she said sparked an epiphany for me. She was talking about how first drafts give her trouble. She likened it to “shaping the air.”

To my mind, she’s right in that the first draft is the hardest part of the book. I had never thought about it because I’m not prone to such self-examination, but when I got to contemplating my method, I realized Jeri was spot on when she said it’s “like shaping air”. I realize she and I are probably in the minority, but we both prefer rewrites. Because the framework is already in place. When I revise, I’m just fixing what’s already there, not creating something out of nothing. That takes an incredible amount of mental energy (at least for me).

What’s your favorite part of the process?

Tag, I’m it, courtesy of the lovely Christine.
Here’s how this works. Copy the list below. Mark in bold the movie titles for which you read the book. Italicize the ones you’ve watched. Then tag 5 people to perpetuate the meme.

1. Jurassic Park
2. War of the Worlds
3. The Lost World: Jurassic Park
4. I, Robot
5. Contact
6. Congo
7. Cocoon
8. The Stepford Wives
9. The Time Machine
10. Starship Troopers
11. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
12. K-PAX
13. 2010
14. The Running Man
15. Sphere
16. The Mothman Prophecies
17. Dreamcatcher
18. Blade Runner(Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
19. Dune
20. The Island of Dr. Moreau
21. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
22. The Iron Giant(The Iron Man)
23. Battlefield Earth
24. The Incredible Shrinking Woman
25. Fire in the Sky
26. Altered States
27. Timeline
28. The Postman
29. Freejack(Immortality, Inc.)
30. Solaris
31. Memoirs of an Invisible Man
32. The Thing(Who Goes There?)
33. The Thirteenth Floor
34. Lifeforce(Space Vampires)
35. Deadly Friend
36. The Puppet Masters
37. 1984
38. A Scanner Darkly
39. Creator
40. Monkey Shines
41. Solo(Weapon)
42. The Handmaid’s Tale
43. Communion
44. Carnosaur
45. From Beyond
46. Nightflyers
47. Watchers
48. Body Snatchers

Well, holy crap. I clearly watch a lot more SF than I read. No wonder people “criticize” my SF by saying it’s like reading a TV show. Go, visual media in written form!

Anyway, I tag:
Carrie
Kelly
Lorelie
Patti
Angie

Mwahahahahahaha!

Ann’s busy doing catch-up writing.

So to fill the long tea-time of the soul until she can spare some more of her attention for this space, you’re stuck with me for a few more days.

It’s been good having Ann and the kids back home. We’re slowly settling back into our everyday routine, give or take some details: we’re no longer playing ‘beat the dog to the cat food’ and our daughter has taken up reading. We’re slowly working to turn our son to the Literary Side, but it’s slow going. I’m considering tricking him into reading more using comics, but Sandman, Planetary and the Authority are probably not quite right for a nine year old as reading material. He already laughs way too much at cartoon and fantasy violence.

I listened to bagpipes and fiddles on the way to the office this morning, but it just was not the same.

I have come to realize that being the director of IT is a little like flying a plane. When everything runs smoothly, you only get some muttering as background noise, with everyone more or less content and happy to whine about the airport security checks, the food and the other passengers while ignoring how a marvel of technology is currently transporting your backside 30,000 feet in the air.

Then, something goes wrong and you have a lot of screaming, use of air-sickness bags and a hollow void in the pit of your stomach. There also seems to be a lot less air between your backside and the hard, hard ground. Even when the plane levels out again, all you remember about the trip are those twenty seconds of gut wrenching panic…

(I did not post this while Ann was travelling to avoid giving her that visual when she had planes to take. I am not, contrary to some testimony, completely cruel or devoid of a sense of self-preservation. Unlike, say, our cats. Or our son, sometimes. Our cats jump on window screens on the second floor, our son speaks before thinking… but I digress.)

The past couple of weeks have been more or less smooth sai… ah, flying. But there was a moment of turbulence when one of our backups… well, not to get technical, it was lost. Boom. Gone. The tape was no more. Which in and of itself is not a big deal, since we had other backups from a few hours previously… but that was the ONE incident that made its way to the Boss.

Now, the boss, my father, is a brilliant man. He’s built his business from a two room house in downtown Mexico to a five company corporate group in Health care. He’s worked hard, still does, shows no signs of slowing. By his own admission, though, when it comes to computers, he does not understand them nor does he really want to as long as they do their job. That’s where I come in.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing quite as difficult as trying to reassure someone that does not know much about computers that glitches happen, that a missed backup is not a catastrophe. Especially when you have an external auditor-consultant that has the best interests of the company at heart but has all the tact and people skills of a rabid weasel telling him differently.

So, I girded my loins, put on my weasel fighting gloves and mixed my metaphors, then headed into the Boss’ office. A half hour later, I emerged with my team and their salaries intact, a standing order to ride their… backs… like they were wild broncos and I were some sort of… rodeo… type… person… and an admonishment to not let it happen again. All in all, not bad. Oh, and the weas… er, consultant will be conducting regular checkups. Forewarned, forearmed, and so on. I’ll even use my shins if I have to.

Yeah, I’m glad they’re home.

There’s nothing like having someone ready to listen to my weasel-wrestling stories at the end of a long day… or distract me from the hassles of traffic with a ten minute rant on Pokemon’s evolutionary paths.

So, Monday morning, bright and early:

Grab Alek (literally) and turn him away from the TV and toward his closet. Ask him to get dressed while I go shower, shave, swear to never again stay up until three in the morning watching an Azumi and Azumi 2 double feature on late night cable. Emerge, half dressed, to find Alek standing in his underwear, a shirt around his neck, watching TV again. Turn the TV off, go search for my shoes (cats are holding one for ransom in the linen closet).

Pull Alek out of his room so he can put his shoes on. Head out for breakfast, after calling work to make sure there was no sudden server tragedy during the weekend that they forgot to tell me about (yes, it’s happened). Breakfast: Spanish food festival, Alek has eggs and cheese and molletes (toasted baguette with beans and cheese) while I have eggs with meat on meat mixed with meat. Cholesterol level rises, can feel veins scream in agony. Mmmm. Steal Alek’s bacon.

Drive up to work. 3 buses, 2 semis, 15 cars dodged, evaded, missed and narrowly avoided with Alek calling out “cut him off! cut him off! We need a cowcatcher to clear traffic!” and a bagpipe and fiddle song playing in the background on repeat. It’s about this time that I realize that I still have a very strange life sometimes, even if it involves less alcohol and waking up in parking lots than it did in college. Oh, and cigar-smoking car enthusiasts.

Get to work: we’re having issues with one of my guys in IT, need to either let him go or pull a trick out of my… sleeve. He’s a good guy, big family (5 kids at 25? I consider offering to buy him a TV for those cold nights), but we found some data on his laptop that seems to indicate he’s running a repair business on the side using work resources. Tsk. Alek is wondering if he can watch while I fire him, I start to wonder if we’re raising a little Lex Luthor. Speak to the guy and our IT liaison director, we end up agreeing to just shift his responsibilities and engage in a lateral move.

Biz-speak translation: We’re changing his job so he won’t have time to do anything on the side, and will be on the move so much none of his old clients will be able to track him down. He’s going to be one tired kid, but at least he keeps his job.

Alek mildly disappointed he did not get to watch ‘his getting canned’. Yeah, Lex, yeah.

We pop on down to see the boss: “Mister Grandpa” to our children. We tell him we’re off to pick up the wimmenz, he just… grins. And tells us, I kid you not, ‘god bless you, see you tomorrow’. You’d think I would be better at picking up on things like that, but no. I know there’s some construction going on on the way to the airport… I DON’T know just how bad that is, that my father knows, or that he derives so much amusement at having us head into that mess. Oh, well. 2:02, we’re out of his office and in the car.

2:25. Making good time so far, we take the offramp to get on the freeway that heads for the airport. We’ve seen a couple of construction signs, but no men working so far. Then, I notice that there’s new blue signs, flashing lights and cones. I turn to follow the airport sign and we head…

…into a parking lot-like gridlock where six lanes are trying to merge to three with people parked on both sides of a street heading downtown. It takes us twenty minutes to advance two blocks… where I spot another airport sign off on the far right while I am on the left lane. Ten minutes, a lot of honking and after almost pushing a compact that thought I would stop for him (the fool) into a lamp post, we’re on a different freeway and seem to have a clear shot.

3:10. The clear shot clogged. They have torn out the street to build a bridge. We’re off on an access road and I have spotted a couple of airport cabs. Assuming that they know where they are going, I slide in behind them and ask Alek to help me keep an eye on them and tell me if they turn off anywhere…

“Son, see the yellow and white truck up there?”

“Which one?”

“The one with the 348 on the side, right in front of this car in front of us…”

“…no.” “What do you mean no, it’s…” “…I see the 346, though!” “…”

I love our son. Even if he’s trying his damnedest to give me a stroke before I’m 40. We follow the cabs. Not hard, considering we’re not moving. Alek is playing his gameboy, the fiddle and bagpipes are still playing, no one is moving and I am trying to consult a map of the city to see if there’s any way that we can move again.

3:25. Out of the gridlock, on the on-ramp to the airport. The revamped, expanded airport that has detour signs all over the place.

3:45 Finally find the parking access, screech to a halt when we see someone pulling out, and we’re in. Nachos, chili and fajitas for lunch, we’re both starving, I am tired and headachy and he’s chattering happily. I envy him, hah. We wander around, in, out, up and down: have too much coffee, check the arrivals screen to make sure they don’t change her arrival gate last minute… or worse, that they don’t change TERMINALS last minute (yep, has happened too).

5:15. Their flight’s landed. 5:55, after a couple of false alarms and waiting, we finally spot Ann and Andi as they wait for customs to let them through.

We hug, and kiss, and hold on tight. So good to have them home.

…eventually, after getting a little lost when taking a detour on the way home, ending up going the wrong way until I found an access road that let us turn around and get on the freeway. We even stopped at Starbucks.

And it doesn’t write much either.

This is just a brief note to let everyone know I’m home. I’ll be working hard to get Doubleblind wrapped up this week, so I still won’t be on the internets, but if you need me, send an email. I do have wireless on a regular basis now at least, and I’ll be in my email more. While I was traveling I wasn’t checking it more than once a day, and sometimes not even that often. I had some truly unforgettable experiences, but I’m a homebody at heart. I couldn’t be happier to be back.

What have you guys been up to?

Is all that and a bag of chips.

She totally chatted with me for an hour and a half before our panel. (I had a panel with her! *dies of bliss*) Then I sat next to her at the signing. Her line was a sight to behold and I had a few people stop by as well.

I know I had a goofy happy smile on the whole time, but hello, I was sitting by Sharon Shinn! It wouldn’t have mattered if people had been throwing fish at me. I’d have still been beaming. The fact that I had a few books to sign was just frosting on the cake.

It’s so awesome when your idols turn out to be every bit as amazing as you have imagined over the years. Today was pure win.

The final week is winding down.

Looking back on them, the past two and a half weeks have taught me a lot about life without Ann.

Firstly, I am used to her company and the very palpable presence of the munchkins. Before Alek returned, I was getting to the point of holding conversations with the pets late at night. Much as I value my personal space, still, said space needs to be constantly prodded and poked at with requests to play video games, go to the store, give opinions on which Pokemon would be a better choice, get random questions about the weirdest crap while I am at work… or it just is not appreciated.

Second… finding myself fretting about whether she was okay when the quake hit… and having her not even BE aware that there had been an earthquake, well. Yes, I love her, and I worry about her even if now and then we have our disagreements. And I miss her terribly.

Third. Leaving Alek and me unattended is just a bad idea. He’s too much of the little guy already, and it’s way too easy to give in to ice cream, new video games, movie and late bedtime requests when all I see when I look at him is myself thirty years ago.

Fourth. Staying up until four in the morning because I can, then having to drag my sorry arse to work the next morning is not as much fun as when I was in college. It’s also a lot more achey, annoying and headache-inducing, no matter how much fun the session of Conan the night before might have been.

Fifth. Beer and Burgers just do NOT cover all the necessary food groups, my previous beliefs non-withstanding. It’s a sad, sad day when you find yourself CRAVING a salad.

Sixth. Did I mention I miss Ann? She trained me too well, now, to come home and sit and tell someone about my day and do the whole ‘opening up’ thing that is just so contrary to my programming. I discovered in those first couple of weeks that the dog may be sweet and loving, but she sucks at listening. I never had to scream at Ann to stop chasing the cats or to stop sniffing herself while we talked. And do you have any idea how BIG a Cali-King bed can be for one person?

Seventh. Uhm. Something about two pounds of meat and vodka. Oh, and to not mix chocolate covered raisins and dark beer.

Eighth…. a lot of short tidbits, such as: the five second rule turns to two seconds when there is a dog around that is more than willing and able to ninja a burger that one sets down to prevent drink spillage. Cats disapprove of garlic soup. Doughnuts and Bacon do NOT go together. There is indeed such a thing as way too much sugar in a drink. Just because you can, does not mean you should… especially when it involves poprocks and cola. It’s okay to occasionally read a manual if no one is looking. You can ask for directions and your manhood license will not be revoked.

Did I mention I miss my Ann? Co’.