I’m back from spending a few days at Center Parcs, where I managed to get a bit of Heavy Ice written on my husband’s laptop. I won’t quite say that I was gladder to see my ergonomic keyboard when I got in than I was to see the cats, but it was a close-run thing. The holiday was a lot of fun, and included the stellar line of dialogue ‘Are these all your personal owls?’
Meanwhile, my mother has also been on holiday, and has read the first book and liked it, and apparently read bits of it aloud to my father. I thought it was about fifty-fifty whether she would like it, or whether she wouldn’t be able to get into it and would tell me off for taking the name of Artemisia Gentileschi in vain. Apparently she tried to leave a copy in the cruise ship’s library, but the library was closed because of the norovirus. So it goes.
Sales of the books to people other than my parents are puddling along – the most recent ones have all been of The Hawkwood War, which I find kind of cheering, as I assume no one would buy the second book unless they’d at least moderately enjoyed the first one.
Ankaret Wells 
The word is spreading, slowly but surely 🙂
Glad you had a good holiday, I was just thinking you hadn’t been about for a while and was going to message you to check you were okay!
Yes, we had a really nice time – though I did break one arm of my glasses on the first day and lose my purse and have to cancel all my cards on the second, which meant that the rest of the holiday could only get better. The swimming pool complex was great, and we had fun going for walks in the forest and being crap at miniature golf.
Sorry to drop out of circulation and worry you! The wifi at Center Parcs only worked if the wind was in the right direction and you’d sacrificed appropriately to the wifi gods, and since then I’ve been unpacking and running an all-day D&D game and sorting out a new pair of glasses. 🙂
Not the best start to a holiday ever, glad it improved from there!
Don’t mind me, I should have realized you’d be on holiday given you had been talking about it before you left.
I’m just grateful if people notice whether I’m here or not, really. 🙂
The replacement cards have just shown up, which is a much faster turnaround than the last time it happened, so I can now pay for the glasses when they arrive which is a relief. Fortunately the opticians are a small firm I’ve been going to for years, and trusted me enough not to ask for a deposit.
And were they? (Personal owls, that is.)
Yes! She ran an owl rescue, and had some very sharp things to say about the Harry Potter books causing people to think you can keep an owl in a cage for months on end with no ill effects.
I helped rescue an tawny owl once. It had been hit by a car and was sitting on a branch in broad daylight looking pathetic so I fetched a neighbour who was a wildlife warden. He got it down and brought it over for my sister and I to stroke before taking it off to a sanctuary. It couldn’t be released back into the wild because it was blind in one eye so couldn’t hunt properly, but they kept it there. In a nice big enclosure. (poor owls, I hadn’t thought about that as a consequence of the Potter craze).
The woman on the plane whose seat I was inadvertently sitting in took a good look at The Hawkwood War as she passed my stuff to me, but I fear it was more in the lines of “anything that contaminated woman has touched is going nowhere near me again” than inspirational!
I am so glad, by the way, that you mentioned Heavy Ice as a first contact story recently, as despite having a First in English I can be very obtuse and completely missed the significance of ballads being collected by the First Solannan Survey…
Eh, I figure that the chapter headings are mostly there for re-readers, anyway. I hoped people would have fun with how garbled the ballads had got – the Tarmaskaya Ballad seems to think that Sorszenna and Tzenni are the same person.
My mother is staying and the first thing she said was “your sister lent me those books you gave her for Christmas” but she hasn’t got very far yet and didn’t bring the first one with her because it was apparently too heavy to take on the train. If I’d thought about it, I could have bought them for her too and boosted your sales.
I’m glad they’re making the rounds. And also confirmed in the idea that splitting the thing into two books was a good idea, for the sake of readers’ back and knee muscles.