Rob and I biked down down to the coffee shop. Jay Lake was there for all of five minutes after we got there. Karen recounted a little of her Vegas adventures before I settled in to write. David Levine and Kate came in about half an hour before Rob and I headed for home. It was good to see both of them. I really like meeting other folks for writing; the accountability involved just in showing up with the intent to write feels good.

I got about 900 words done with lots and lots of brackets. What’s the name of the neighboring planet? I dunno, haven’t thought about it yet, so I called it [planet]. Now I’m going through and doing a find-replace to turn it into Dahaida.

A friend of mine, Mr. Fisher, turned me on to a program called the Everchanging Book of Names, which really rocks for alien cultures. You can set up your own parameters and rules for naming systems and then the machine will generate them for you. It’s really helped me with consistency of naming rules on this project.

Here is a snippet from this evening’s work. This is my first effort to write an alien story with no human as an entry lens for the reader.

Duurir clasped his hands together in childlike glee. He uncovered the bowl of kamjipp melon that had so teased her with its sweet scent. “I remember you said that you didn’t like to mix food, so I only brought fruit..”

Pimi accepted a piece of melon and wrinkled her nose at the memory. “True. We were all dreadfully ill after your mother’s party.”

The ground slammed up against her. Duurir shouted, dropping the bowl of melon. A low rumble echoed through the dormitory, which pitched and yawed like the deck of a Tep-Tep’s ship. Pimi clutched the edge of the nest, gathering breath to scream.

And then it was over.

Duurir, on his hands and knees, drew in a shuddering breath. The bowl of melon had shattered into crockery shards on the floor. Pimi put her feet over the edge of the nest, but Duurir looked up. “Wait! There will be–”

The room shook again. Furniture creaked. Toppled. Pimi held on. She kept the urge to scream trapped in her throat.

When the shaking stopped, tremors continued in her arms and knees. If she had held any food, she would have vomited it in her desperation to flee.

I called Carlisle shipping, again, about our missing Audrey II puppets. The representative at one point said, “That poor little lost puppet.”

Hm… Audrey II, little? I don’t think so. I realized that she was thinking of someone’s sock puppet or something, so I said, “Actually, there were four puppets in the case and they were very large… They are theatrical puppets, not toys. You know, we haven’t talked about this yet, but $10,000 worth of puppets were in that crate.”

Stunned silence, interrupted only by a slight choking sound, fills the space between us. “I– I had no idea. I didn’t mean to be offensive when I said ‘little lost puppet.’”

“Oh, I know. But it made me realize that there might be a misunderstanding about what exactly was lost.”

So, I’m being passed off to someone else. She said I would have an email shortly but evidently our definition of “shortly” is a different as our definition of puppet.