Reminder, and a Request of a musical sort

Contest the First has twenty-four hours left! Give me a haiku on why you want/deserve a copy of STAYING DEAD and you might win it! (Prizes awarded for best and worst offering, as judged by the judges). Contest the Second will be posted on 4/16. Yes, you can enter both.

And, in a different topic: cuing up for...something, I seem to be on a jazz kick again, acquiring several new albums over the weekend. My genre knowledge is scattershot, and I know that I'm missing out on a lot of new artists -- can anyone point me to a few folk I might like? For reference, this weekend I listened to Coltrain, Spyro Gyra, David Sanborn, Diana Krall, Rick Braun, Pat Metheny Group, and Stan Getz (off the top of my head).

Sax is a plus, as you may have gathered, but I'm a sucker for a well-played trumpet, too.

Time to stand up (or lay down) and be heard. Yes, again.

The Bush administration is bulldozing environmental laws to build a controversial fence designed to block illegal immigrants from crossing the Mexican border. To force through its construction, the secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, waived 35 separate environmental protection laws last week using provisions of the Real ID Act of 2005. The act allows him to set aside laws that might interfere with the construction of physical barriers at US borders. (emphasis mine)

Segments of fence totalling 750 kilometres are to be completed this year and will pass through many sensitive environments. In southern Texas the fence will run along flood-control levees between 100 and 1500 metres from the Rio Grande, creating what critics call a "no-man's land" between fence and river.

This section of the fence will cut through rich wildlife reserves, including the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge in Alamo, the Sabal Palm Audubon Center and most of the Nature Conservancy's Lennox Foundation Southmost Preserve near Brownsville. Other wild areas are threatened in New Mexico, Arizona and California.
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I am not surprised. Nothing this so-called administration does any more surprises me. Angry? Oh fuck yes. Let's see, we're in the middle of a worldwide climate crisis (oh wait, Bush and crew says nothing's wrong), our bees and bats -- essential to our continued well-being as a species -- are dying, water sources are drying up, and They think that plowing under precviously protected resrouces to keep illegal immigrants is a win-position.

Anyone in the area feel like chaining yourself to a bulldozer/laying down in front of a backhoe? If you can't physically protest, now would be a good time to raise your voice and make an angry noise, remind someone in D.C. that they're supposed to be of the people, for the people, not of their paranoia and for their wallets.

Excuse me, I feel the need to wind-up a bitchslap they'll actually feel in the Yellow House....

(thanks to windrose for the heads-up)

Silver and Gold

It took me longer than planned, but revisions for BLOOD FROM STONE are done. I've polished and tightened and still managed to add another 4,000 words to bring me within striking distance -- as always -- of the contracted-for word count.

I'll see it once more in line edit, and then again in proofs, and then it goes away, and... and as much as I really needed a break, I find myself feeling melancholy, too. I've had their voices in my head since 2001, more or less, for six books and three short stories, and while I'm enjoying the helll out of HARD MAGIC, Bonnie and the crew are good new friends, while Sergei, Wren and P.B. are old and dear comrades. Silver and gold.

Odds are good that there will be more Wren and Sergei stories. I think I know where they go from here, what adventures they will face. But even if Luna signs me up for more books tomorrow, they won't be written right away. HARD MAGIC and the two other books have first claim on my time and brain. And that is how it should be. And yet...

I've poured myself a glass of the good shit -- Glenmorangie 1989, single cask rare -- and am raising a toast: To Wren and Sergei. May their stories only grow in the telling.