Coming Home

I face the end of expatriate assignment in the FSU country of Georgia, as one might expect, with mixed emotions. I have made a great number of good friends here, I've experienced a rich and charming culture, I've been introduced to foods I didn't know that I couldn't live without, I've racked up a metric tonne of frequent flier miles, and learned a great deal about myself, the International business environment and the world in which we live in a way that I could never have done had it not been for these experiences.
With all that said, it's been a rewarding but also very tough thirteen months. Particularly on the family that I alternatively drug across nine time zones and abandoned to their own fate over the past year. I could not have done it this were my wife and children not possessed of a positive, adventurous and expeditionary disposition. Or set of dispositions, I suppose. So thanks to you, my family.

Back to the states on Thursday! Four days and a wakeup! I'll not be leaving the project, but rather managing it from the states, with regular site visits. It's a tough trip, but I'll be able to put the time in at home that I need to,

SO what do I need to do at home? Well, first kid stuff. Scouts, soccer practice, Karate practice. Next I have a million differed maintenance farm chores that have built up and are all now waiting for me. Trees, a garden and Hops that need planting, sheep that need all kinds of things. A son and daughter that may run this little race in the fall with me that we need to prepare for. A new Army job (remember I'm a colonel in the reserves) to in-process and learn. Little things like that. And, no, the Word Count meter on the WIP isn't broken, it's stalled out for the near term. But more about that later, right now I have packing to do!

Gudauri

The Caucasus Mountains are an impressive sight up close. This weekend I had the opportunity to tag along on a ski trip. (No, I didn't ski. I am better suited to clumsy sports where something heavy is picked up and bone breaking at high velocity is less likely.)

But I did partake of the Georgian tradition of the 'Supra', the excesses of great food, and the succession of toasts, and great camaraderie. (Georgians really are the best hosts I've ever met).

But the mountains are very impressive. We went to 'Gudauri'. Decades ago it was a bend in the road on the old Russian Military Highway. But over the past 20 years of independence, it's been developed as a ski resort . Panoramic vistas, lots of locals and a few dozen intrepid multi-national skiers (Americans, Brit's, Ukrainians, and some people I knew weren't Georgian, but couldn't figure out). The lift tickets were 30 Gel (about $20) for the day. Now that's super cheap by US standards, for such impressive slopes, but you have to get here, which is no easy task. And of course there is the Georgian tradition of queuing, which takes some getting used to, but overall, a worthy destination.
Oh, and it wouldn't do justice to the country to leave out a Georgian church. The one in this picture is perched on the lip of the gorge, maybe 2500 foot drop, just on the other side.

And no, I got a lot of work for work done, but nothing on the NIP.

The electronic anthology seems to be doing okay. So far.

Amazon too

Outside the Wire is Available (click on 'Available') on Amazon for 99c!

Now remember this collection was meant to be my own little anthological experiment in electronic publishing. It's been a little bit of a pain to work through, but not impossible, and if you follow the guides that are out there, straight forward. The hardest part of this experiment was of course writing well. (Which I hope that you think I have done, if you have read my 'stuff'). Then there was putting it together into a format that won't end up 'jacked up' on an e-reader ( 'jacked up' you see is the technical term for the default condition of documents typed out in word without disabling all of those helpful auto-functions, like tabbing and spill-czecking). The cover art was a picture I took at the Tbilisi zoo and had a fellow who knew what he was doing edit it into a cover image in order to make the whole affair look professional. Oh, and a little patience too, that was important.

I loaded the anthology to smashwords (where you can download it for free) and from there it is supposed to be made available on all e-reader formats except Amazon , and lets face it Amazon is the 800 pound gorilla of ebook publishing, so you have to do that one. The only challenge with Amazon online publishing was that I couldn't make the book free initially. So I loaded OTW for the lowest price I could- .99c.

Remember, I have alreay been paid for all these stories once, and it is only a 30K word collection, so I didn't feel like I needed to make any money on this. OTW is an experiment in online publishing, but it is also meant to collect all of the stories that are already out there in one spot and advertise my work to people who haven't seen it.

Before I could get the price dropped to zero on Amazon, I even sold a few copies. It also appears to have knocked my two novels, STG and GOB off the peg, selling a few copies of both the paperback and kindle versions on Amazon.

So there you go. Experiment was a success. One more step forward in my plans for world domination and becoming a legitimate pulp-fiction genre writer...

Available Now

My epubbed anthology is now available at Smashwords (Click Here). I promised that you would love the price, and I hope you will; it's free. I figure that I was already paid once for each of these stories (three times for one of them), and it didn't cost anything but time to put this together (and the cover image), so I thought I would pass the savings on to you. (If you really, really want to pay something, put an extra fiver on the plate on Sunday, or stuff it in one of those boxes that charities leave at the counter of stores, say thanks for the book and pretend it was to me. )

I mentioned in previous posts about the changes in the publishing industry, self-publishing, electronic publishing, etc, so I wanted I to see how it worked. Outside the Wire is my contribution to the movement.

Smashwords (my profile) seems to be a great venue for those that want to publish, but as I have said, there are many many works of varying quality.

Another online community that I have found which is a good outlet for authors is Goodreads (my profile). It's also a great place for people that are interested in books, especially genre fiction, and connect with others with similar interests.

So my next step is to figure out how to get it on Amazon...

Barcelona

January 24th is an epic day in my household. (And by Epic, I mean that I had better treat it epically or there may repercussions.)

My anniversary!

Okay it's also my wife's anniversary too.

This past 24th marked 25 years of blissful matrimony. I say 'mostly' tongue in cheekily as we've been through a lot together and there have been with us, as with everyone else that marks this silver milestone, many ups and a few downs; we have walked side by side raising four wonderful children, having twelve or so changes of residences over five states (and 2 countries), six churches, college, graduate school, postdoc, Houston (need I say more), attack helicopter flying. deployment to the war in Iraq, nursing school, family (hers and mine), farm chores, all of this with the day-to-day effort of growing together and not apart.

Friends and aquantances often ask how me have managed to 'Make It' to having a good marriage. I try not to laugh when they ask. You see, I don't think we've 'made it' because it isn't over, right? It's like asking a fit person how they 'made it' . They haven't made it to 'being fit' they 'are fit', and the minute they stop working on it is the minute they will begin to atrophy and soon will no longer be fit. Fitness is a state of being, not a goal with a beginning middle and end. Our marriage is like that. We didn't make it to having a good marriage, we are having a good marriage. It is something we continually work on, together, and the minute we stop working on it, it will begin to atrophy and soon will no longer be good.

So how do I commemorate twenty-five years of working together? Well, this year it was Barcelona! (being in Tbilisi and my wife in the US, it was the nicest midway point I could find). It is a lovely place. I highly recommend it. When we got there the weather was lovely, the scenery is lovely, the food great, great museums, arts. I would go back in a heartbeat, and long before Paris..just sayin'.

We started the actual day watching the sunrise over the Mediterranean. Then a starbucks (I really miss starbucks in Georgia) and then went to the Sagrada Familia. A lovely cathedral dedicated to the Holy Family, designed by the architect Goudi. Really awe-inspiring, and I thought an appropriate place for an anniversary. We found a bar with a real American IPA (also very missed in Tbilisi) and ended the day with a fabulous paella.

So, to my wife Kelly, thank you for twenty-five Wonderful years!

(That's her in the scale model of the cathedral arches- isn't she cute?)

Coming in 2012

Outside the Wire; seven andrenaline-filled, spine-chilling tales from the Author of 'Succumbing to Gravity' and 'The Gift of the Bouda'.

Coming in 2012.

This is an anthology of six previously published short stories, including:
Succumbing to Gravity
The Gift of the Bouda
The Long Road to Sanctum
BEKs
Dougie's Hand
The Sacrifices of Automated Tabulation

and one previously unpublished short story;
The Virtual Huntress

The tales feature fallen angels, demons, lycanthropes and those with perception challenges set in the steampunked past, the postapocolyptic future, and the hardboiled present. Genre-wise; horror, urban fantasy, steampunk and near future science fiction. You'll love it. And you'll love the price.

Doorways

It's natural to reflect as you hit a milestone. We do this collectively at the turn of the calender from one year to the next. Being overseas I've been missed most of the US end-of-the-year retrospectives; only CNN's unbiased voice to let me know what happened last year. And some of the slightly left of CNN English-language Euro channels (I get more channels, but they in Georgian or Russian and it's a great exercise to learn the language, but I have no idea what they're talking about, generally). I ussually prefer to look to what's on the other side door, rather than spend too much time reflecting what has past, and 2011 was a heck of a year.

So 2012? Well, the end of the Mayan calender is in 2012, food for some good end of the world speculation. Sorry if I sound like an apocalyptic buzz kill but I think for the Mayans it already happened; the Mayan civilization (as such) was pretty much done in the 1200's, so I'm not planning on digging a fall-out shelter. Just sayin'

I'll be redeploying stateside in 2012. Will very much miss the friends I have made here in Georgia, but looking forward to getting back to the family and farm in Virginia. From a writing perspective I'll be self-publishing an ebook anthology this year. I also plan to finish up my Mil SciFi epic and begin to shop it around.

The picture should be obvious metaphorically right? And you know, Georgians have some really cool doors.

The Louvre is closed on Tuesdays

So if you ever travel across Europe, and layover at the worst airport in the world (CDG) remember, the 24

Euros you pay to store your bags, and the 18 Euros you spend on the train, and all the time you spend trying to see one of the most renowned museums in the world will be wasted if you are doing this on a Tuesday...because unlike every museum in the rest of the civilized world, the Louvre is not closed on Monday, it is closed on Tuesday. I know, serious bummer. If I were smarter I would have planned this out better and checked the website. Instead, I show up like a dumb American asking...why isn't there a line?

Duhh.

The worst part is that in trying to get to my first choice museum on the day they were closed, I totally got behind the other 8,000 people that wanted to go to the Louvre and went there second choice Museum, the Museum d'Orsay, instead.

But hey, I did do a little cafe on the banks of the Seine, and had a cappuccino and a croissant and was dissed by a snotty french waiter, so it's not like I missed out on the whole Paris experience.

The last photo is entitled 'self portrait with jet lag and bed head'

Merry Christmas

I hope that you all had a Merry Christmas (or if Eastern Orthodox, will have in about a week). Mine was great, including a whorl-wind trip from Georgia, through the world's worst airport (CDG), two days on the ground with my wonderful wife and kids, and back. I reindeered my way back and forth, spreading as much Christmas cheer as humanely possible...and I even worked on my NIP on the plane, and the train, and sitting on the floor of the terminal of the worst airport in Europe (CDG).

Yes, It was a little cloudy in Paris, but no lines at the tower!

Good listeners

One of the things I enjoy the most about performances in Tbilisi is the audience. Performances that I have attended in the States,ballet, classical, opera have much more staid responses (with the exception of country and rock concerts of course- those people go nuts). But not here, Georgian audiences are really generous. And it's a heartfelt generocity that seems to be part of the culture. I attended a Concert at the Didi Darbazi (Grand Hall) with some friends Saturday night. The 200th Anniversary of Liszt played by Alberto Nose (this is a performance with orchestra in 2005 but last night he was up there all by himself), a well noted Italian Pianist. His performance was great (though I was on the lookout for the Hungarian Rhapsody -how can you have a Liszt concert without that?) but alas, other pieces were played that I didn't know. The audience didn't seem to mind. After the performance they wouldn't stop with the clapping. Poor Alberto came out for four ovations after.

The only thing that would have made it better would have been if my wife could have gone as well, but alas, she's back in the states. I'll join them for Christmas in less than a week. So excited...

Oh, and I'll have the long, long flight, with the long long layovers to work on the WIP. You keep telling me you want to see it done, and I'm trying to be a good listener too.