We had originally planned to push straight through to Denver today, which would have meant leaving insanely early and then arriving at midnight.  At some point I think Rob and I both realized that this is, in many ways, a vacation and decided to slow down. In Denver, we’ll be staying with T. L. Morganfield.  The last two nights have been so enjoyable that we wanted to arrive early enough to actually visit with Traci instead of heading straight to bed.

The change in schedule was agreeable with her so, as we were traveling today, I looked up Bed and Breakfasts in the area.  We’re at the Black Swan Inn.  Normally they cater to hunters who come out to shoot clay but we’re the only ones here tonight. It is quiet and beautiful.

While I was at WorldCon, Howard Tayler asked me to swing by and participate in the Writing Excuses podcast panel.  He described it as a bunch of fifteen minute podcasts in front of a live audience, which, I must say, was great fun.

Brandon Sanderson, Howard Tayler and Dan Wells are very engaging hosts and made me feel quite welcome. For the first episode, Brandon asked me if there was anything I particularly wanted to talk about.  I said that lately I’ve been talking about how puppetry intersects with my fiction.  So we spent fifteen minutes talking about the four principles of puppetry.

They’ve just posted the podcast, so go give it a listen.

Then, if you are curious, you can go read the Puppetry Manipulation Clinic handout I have over on my puppetry website.

We stopped today with the Valenti family who we know from our time in Iceland. The driving was good today, so we took time to have a picnic at one of the rest areas and still arrived by 3:30. It has been wonderful to have time to visit and catch up.

Edited to add:
Here’s what my twitter stream looked like for the day. It gives you a sense of the rhythm.

• 07:54 We left @scalzi’s house at about 7:30 this morning. Had a lovely evening last night. #
• 08:45 Welcome to Indiana. #
• 10:23 Trading drivers, at the rest area outside Mooresville, IN. 1050 words plus a nap. #
• 11:38 Welcome to illinois. #
• 12:38 At a truck stop to refuel. The mullet is alive and well, lest you were concerned. #
• 13:00 Our cat Marlowe, wearing his basket of invisibility. It’s how he copes with stress. #
• 15:41 Welcome to Missouri. Woot. A four state day. #
• 16:10 Have arrived at destination in Des Peres, MO. 2019 words today, plus picnic and nap. #

We have spent a very pleasant evening at the Scalzi home in Bradford, OH. This was my first time meeting Athena who is clearly her father’s daughter. Garrulous and charming as only a Scalzi can be. Also…only 10? The man is going to be in so much trouble when she hits the teenage years.

Today, in general, was much more pleasant than yesterday. Rob and I slept in to the comparatively late hour of eight and then took our time to correct the packing mishaps from yesterday. Being leisurely in the morning made us both feel better, I think.

We trade with driving, two hours on and two hours off. I spent time reworking an earlier chapter to insert a scene and then corrected for the new scene by adjusting dialogue and reactions in later chapters. I also finished Chapter 16. So, while I didn’t get a huge wordcount in today, I feel like they were very productive words.

The only downside to today was that the inverter’s outlet loosened so I lost power to the computer while we still had an hour of driving left. Rob thinks he’s fixed it for tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

Oh, and for the Scalzi readers, yes, he did make stew and yes, it was quite tasty.

We hadn’t planned on stopping in Milesburg, but we were delayed getting out of the City this morning which pushed our arrival in Bradford, OH to midnightish. Not okay. We were also so fatigued from loading yesterday that collapsing into a heap in a hotel sounded better than collapsing in a heap with the truck.

Why are we so beat? Well, after the lengthy loading of the truck, yesterday, we had to stop, twice, to repack parts of it today. The roads in Manhattan are extremely uneven and all the bouncing caused my sculpting wheel — two discs of solid steel — to fall onto one of the wardrobe boxes, collapsing it and knocking over several other items.

And then the washing machine started to walk. Now, if we thought it would actually get to Portland on its own, I’d totally let it out to walk. Not likely to be the case though, so we stopped to buy straps. We got it a little more secure, but it was raining, so we couldn’t do as much as we’d like. Tomorrow, we’re going to pull some things out and really strap it down.

Marlowe has been traumatized by the whole thing. He’s never liked loud noises and there are many things that sound like ferocious growling when you’re on the road. He seems a little better now that we’re in the hotel.

Through a series of unfortunate events ranging from car robbery to boating accident — no really — our afternoon crew of friends who volunteered to help us move have largely had to back out. By largely, I mean everyone but one person.

Not that I am nervous or anything, but if you are at all available this afternoon or evening, would you drop me a line? We’re at 107th and Amsterdam. There’s a big truck there. You can’t miss it.

I am sitting in the moving truck on our corner, waiting for the street sweeper to come through so that we can put the truck right in front of the apartment. In case anyone is wondering why we picked a Thursday to load out, it’s because of opposite side of the street parking. Aside from things we need tonight, everything is in a box, packed and ready to go.

I am, of course, melancholy about this. At the same time, I’m anxious for it to be over. It is interesting watching the people from the truck like this. I walk down this street all the time, but never watch my neighbors. I will miss the broad mix of people and cultures that happens in New York. I love Portland, but it is going to feel awfully homogenous when I get back.

So how are you spending your morning?

Today around noon, we’re turning off the internet.  Gasp. I know.

We have to return the box to the cable company and the only way to do that is either in person or by having a technician turn up and unplug it.  I mean…really?  There’s not a way to just mail it in?  I guess I should be thankful that I have the option of dropping it off.

Anyway, the plan is to drop it off, pick up the truck and come home.  We’ll finish packing the kitchen and the bathroom tonight and then on Thursday, well, Thursday we load the truck.  By we, I mean Rob and me and a passel of friends.  It’s supposed to be cool tomorrow.

Friday morning, we head out on our grand cross-country adventure.  I’ll be tweeting and updating the blog from the road thanks to my handy phone.

But my big focus when I’m not driving is to finish the novel.  I’m in good shape to have the first draft wrapped by the time we roll into Portland.

So, that’s what I’ll be doing this week. How about you?

My short story, First Flight, is up at Tor.com. It has absolutely goooooorgeous art by Pascal Milelli, which looks enough like my actual grandmother that my mom was disappointed that she didn’t have earrings on.

Why is it cool that she looks like my grandmother?  Because she’s based on Grandma, even if the name isn’t the same. My grandmother, is still alive, well, and sharp as anything. She was born in 1905.

I got the story idea because we were sitting around talking about things she had seen and it is staggering.  She remembers World War I, for crying out loud, and the Titanic.  Anyway, when she turned 100, she said, “I figure the Good Lord put everyone on this earth for a reason. I just haven’t done my yet, so I better get busy.”

To celebrate, I’d like to share these recipe cards with you.  I made them for Grandma’s 101st birthday and they are some of my favorite things she makes.

Here’s a teaser of First Flight.

Eleanor Louise Jackson stood inside the plain steel box of the time machine. It was about the size of an outhouse, but without a bench or windows. She clutched her cane with one hand and her handbag with the other. It felt like the scan was taking far too long, but she was fairly certain that was her nerves talking.

Her corset made her ribs creak with every breath. She’d expected to hate wearing the thing, but there was a certain comfort from having something to support her back and give her a shape more like a woman than a sack of potatoes.

A gust of air puffed around her and the steel box was gone. She stood in a patch of tall grass under an October morning sky. The caravan of scientists, technicians and reporters had vanished from the field where they’d set up camp. Louise inhaled with wonder that the time machine had worked. Assuming that this was 1905, of course—the year of her birth and the bottom limit to her time-traveling range. Even with all the preparations for this trip, it baffled her sense of the order of things to be standing there.

So, go on, read about my Grandma.

My dear friend, the 2009 Campbell-winning, David Anthony Durham has ARCs of The Other Lands, his new book. And he’s giving one away!

Okay. Here it is. My first The Other Lands giveaway. There may be more to come, but this one is purely from my own stash. I’m offering one of the three advanced copies of The The Other Lands (Acacia, Book 2) that I received from Doubleday, and I’m tossing in a shot at the mass market paperback of the UK edition of Acacia: The War with the Mein. This is them:

You can enter for them separately, and you can enter up to two times. But I’m going to make you work a little bit.

You will be happy to know that fundable.com has issued a refund to my donors.

Mr. Pratt sent me screenshots this morning of a PayPal payment going to Donor 2 and checks going to my dad and Donor 1. I’m paraphrasing, but if I get permission to post the email, I will — He reiterated the explanation that they were overwhelmed by fraudulent fundraisers back in January. My fundraiser looked to them like a classic example of a fraud, at a time when they were scrambling with no way to tell what was genuine. That is why there was a “delay” in issuing refunds in my case.

I am sympathetic to the issue of my fundraiser looking like a fraud.

I am less sympathetic to the seven month delay and to the woeful lack of communication. I want to be very clear about this.

If the problem had been that my fundraiser had looked like a fraud and they didn’t release the funds to me, that would have been understandable. To reiterate, the problem is that I heard nothing from anyone, except a brief — admittedly undocumented — chat session and that they kept $1410 of what they thought were ill-gotten gains.

Though I do appreciate that Mr. Pratt took time to work with me personally when the situation came to his attention this weekend, I wish it had happened before I raised a public stink.

Again, comments are closed on all but the original post because I think having the context is important to conversation.

For the benefit of those of you who read this via rss, LJ or Facebook, I wanted to let you know that I exchanged a series of emails with John Pratt, co-founder of fundable.com. With his permission, I’ve appended the series to the end of my original post about my fundable.com fundraiser. I did that rather creating a new post because I think it is important to read them in context and chronological order.

Meanwhile, I’m closing comments on this post, because I’d rather have all commentary happen in one place.

Chapter 6 was a seriously fun chapter to write.  Why? Because I’m dealing with the part of my world that is entirely made up and the one that excites me most.  Jane visits a school for glamour — which is my magic system.  The thing that often  bugs me about other worlds is that magic seems to have come to a standstill, without anyone inventing new spells.  There’s a big tome and it contains every spell ever known.  In this scene, Jane gets to see a new, experimental use of glamour.

The fun, and also hard part, was to write the explanation of how the glamour worked in such a way as to make it logical within the structure of the world.  I really want the readers to be able to follow way things are done so that the progression of new glamours makes sense.  The tricky thing is that this means that I have to really, really know the deep structure of the whole system.

For instance, it’s an almost entirely illusionary form of magic, but as you’ll see in this first bit of Chapter 6, which is spoiler free, I do allow heating and cooling.

The school that Chastain operated was beyond Jane’s imagining in scale and concept. Seven young men and two young ladies studied with him learning far more than the basic elements of glamour which the young ladies of England were required to know as part of the womanly arts. Aspects of glamour such as the principal of temperature displacement, which Jane had struggled to acquire through books and experimentation, these fortunate few were learning the way another student might learn the catechism, as if it were a simple, solved and knowable problem.

The tricky thing about allowing heating and cooling is that it could open up a can of worms. If it were an easy thing, fire would never have been invented as anything but a natural phenomenon.  Yeah.  That would have changed the entire world.  No fire, means no ready access to charcoal. Means no matches. Means… you get the idea.

I didn’t want to shift the world of the story that far from our world so I needed to put some serious constraints on what the glamour can do.  Heat and cool, yes. But it takes an enormous amount of energy, which means they can only shift temperature a few degrees, and needs to be managed constantly.  This is consistent with both the real world and the magic world.

How?

• It takes less energy to produce light than it does to start a fire, here, so there’s it makes sense that the same would be true with glamour.
• In the real world, a thermostat adjusts a furnace or a.c. to maintain a constant temperature in a room, so it’s reasonable to think that you would need to constantly adjust the folds of glamour to keep the temperature level.
• In the world of glamour I set up that visual glamours become frayed and faded over time.  In the real world, heat is hard on materials, so extrapolating that the folds for heat would degrade faster than visual ones makes sense to me.

But really, all I’m doing is looking at the effect I need and then working backwards to make sure that the foundation under it is supporting that goal.  Most of it is still just smoke and mirrors, like any magic.

I always welcome readers as I’m working, so if you’d like to offer comments as I go along, drop me a line and I’ll give you the password.

Edited to add: October 1, 2009.  Fundable.com has apparently shut down.

Edited to add: Sunday, August 23rd, 12:50 am

John Pratt, Co-Founder of fundable.com, has emailed me privately to work out refunds for the people who donated money to me through Fundable.  He has given me permission to post his emails, which I am going to do at the bottom of this post because I do think it is important to read things chronologically.

Further edited to add: Sunday, August 23rd 8:24 am
The paypal refund to Donor 2 has been received.  Mr. Pratt sent screenshots of the checks to Donor 1 and my dad.  Those are scheduled to go out on Monday and arrive by the 31st.

Original Post begins here:

You know. I wasn’t going to blog this, but I just saw a friend thinking about using fundable.com and realized that I ought to provide a warning.

Back in January, my computer died and several friends and family members offered to chip in and help me buy a new one for my birthday. I found fundable.com and did a little research on them. There were no negative references to them and they seemed completely legitimate.   Seemed is the operative word here. Continue reading My very bad experience with Fundable.com