The Same and Never the Same (pictures I like)

The Light of Clouds (pictures I like)

Stately Little Guy (pictures I like)

The Back-splash (pictures I like)

Runoff (pictures I like)

How Doesn't Your Garden Grow? (an IWSG post)

We were late planting our garden this year. There were issues with softball, softball that I've been mentioning on and off since March and which started in February, softball which still has two weeks to go.

That's a picture of my daughter hitting a double.
Basically, since March, we've had no weekends, so the garden didn't get planted when it should have. We had the last weekend of May and the first weekend of June, the interim between the spring season and the travel ball season, and that first weekend in June is when we finally got everything planted, a full two months late.

Some of you are probably wondering what would be the point, at that point?
It's a good question.
I mean, here we are in August, and our garden still really hasn't started producing. I didn't pull the first tomatoes from it until July 23.

Yeah, that was the first of our harvest, all five of them. There was one very early and overly ambitious pepper, back in June, right after I planted it, but there haven't been anymore since then, but they're working on it. This year, I'm also trying watermelons and pumpkins for the first time in my experimental garden area. I think I missed the watermelon window. That or the birds keeping eating my baby melons, because they keep disappearing. The pumpkin has become a monster.
Here it is a week after I planted it (that's it in the lower right):

And not long after that:

And now:

And you might think that looks great, and it does... except that everyone else already has orange pumpkins. And we haven't had our tomatoes, which are a big thing for us during the summer. Tomatoes everywhere. All of which brings me back to the question: Why bother with the garden at all when we started it so late?

Fortunately, the area of California where we live has a long growing season. I think I was still pulling tomatoes off the vines in October, last year, so, even though we planted late, we should still actually get a pretty decent harvest. Eventually. Not that that makes it easier to look at everyone else's gardens with all of their abundance of produce. I mean, I actually accepted tomatoes from someone else last week, something I've never done before because we've always been overflowing with tomatoes at this time of year.

All of this is how I sometimes feel about my writing career. That I planted it too late. My sales are like those few little tomatoes in the picture. I'm just hoping I prove to have a long growing season like the area where I live!

Abandoned Places: Pripyat

Pripyat was founded in February of 1970 as a housing development for the workers of Chernobyl, which went into construction at the same time. The city was laid out on a brand new triangular layout, unique at that time, although it became very popular  in Russian cities for a while. By 1979, two years after Chernobyl had become operational, it was finally declared a city. In 1986, the population just shy of 50,000 people, an explosion occurred at Chernobyl sending a plume of radioactive gas into the atmosphere over Pripyat. The entire population was evacuated in two days. Ultimately, more than 350,000 people were evacuated from the fallout zone. One interesting fact: Russia had originally wanted to build Chernobyl just outside of Kiev, but the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences protested.

There is a plan to have Pripyat cleaned of radioactivity by 2065.

The following photos are used by permission from www.pripyat.com:

A radiation warning sign.

The consumer center.

The Prometeus Cinema.

Stained glass in a cafe window.

The following photos are used by permission from http://www.justwalkedby.com/:

Part 1: February Was Weird, What the Heck? (an IWSG post)

February was a weird month. Not that February isn't always weird, but this one was especially weird. Don't get me wrong, I like February. It's my birth month; I'm obliged to like it. And I like that it's weird. I like that it doesn't know how many days it ought to have and all of that. But none of this February's weirdness has to do with the number of days it contains.

To be fair, the weirdness sort of started in January. That was when I finally broke down and joined that whole twitter thing (that's a link to me on twitter, by the way, not just a link to twitter (like you'd need that)). Twitter, just by itself, is weird. Seriously, I fail to see the appeal of speaking with this arbitrary 140 character cutoff, especially when people then just tweetspam (Is that a thing? That should be a thing.) a dozen times so that they can say the 1500 characters they wanted to say to begin with. That's like making mini-cupcakes so that you will eat less but, then, eating all of them.
Because they're so tiny.
You know.
Anyway...

So I'm on twitter, but I don't really know if I'm doing it correctly, because no one tends to respond to anything I tweet unless it's, in and of itself, a response to a tweet. Am I the only one actually reading what other people say? I don't know. Plus, twitter adds this unexpected pressure on me of coming up with tweets that at least approach the 140 character cutoff. Because why use just 50 characters? And it feels like they, the tweets, should be profound in some way. But once I throw it out there, no one responds, so it feels like I'm one of those guys walking down a crowded street talking to himself that everyone stares at and moves away from.

Of course, most of those people these days are just on the phone, but that weirds me out, because I'm never quite sure if the person is on the phone or just talking to him/herself.
But I digress... really, way off target here.

The weirdness started when John Scalzi replied to a tweet. I mean, I was replying to one of his tweets, but he replied back, which was kind of a jaw dropping moment. I had to tell Rusty about it just so someone else would know and, well, make it real. If that makes sense. Still, it's not quite the same as Offutt having Neil Gaiman tweet at him (which has happened more than once, if I'm remembering correctly), but it is something.

That was at the end of January, and, for a while, the most exciting thing happening on twitter, unless you count Nathan Fillion announcing that he was learning to play Magic, was the push up competition going on between Briane Pagel, Rusty, and myself. Yeah, I know. I'm sure all of you were waiting with held breaths to see our tweets on that subject. But, then, one day, I sat down at the computer to find that Jim Butcher was following me. Wait, what? I know! What the heck?! Again, I tweeted Rusty about it. But what the heck?

As it turned out, the heck was that Butcher's account had been hacked and, for whatever reason, used to follow back about 1000 of his followers. When I got home later that night, he was no longer following me. For a few minutes, though, I thought I was one of the cool kids.

However, a real thing did happen: Howard Mackie, a longtime writer for Marvel Comics and the writer of one of the best runs on any comic ever, dropped by my blog and commented. That, in many ways, is an even bigger "what the heck?" moment than the thing with Butcher. I mean, I've mentioned Butcher here on the blog on numerous occasions, but I've never mentioned Mackie. At least, not by name. I only talked about Ghost Rider and, that, only in passing. So I'm still wondering how he ended up on that post. I'm sure there's a lesson here, somewhere...
Oh, but we'll get to that.

On top of everything else, February was my lowest blog traffic in a year. Way below my current average. Way below. Way more than can be accounted for by the loss of a couple of days from the month. It's one of those things that makes you stop and go, "Whoa... what the heck?" And without wanting to you're suddenly wondering if blogging is actually worth the time it takes. Or if you did something wrong and offended a bunch of people. Or... something. It doesn't matter that your head is telling you all sorts of rational things:

• It's just a fluctuation.
• Blog traffic in general is slowing.
• It's not about you.

Because your head is also telling you all sorts of irrational things, and you can't help hearing those things.
So... why blog?

And that's what we'll talk about next time. See you on Wednesday for "Part 2: Why Bother To Blog (That's Not a Question)"

This post has been brought to you in part by the Insecure Writers Support Group.

Me and My Star Wars (an Indie Writers Monthly post)

Drop by Indie Writers Monthly to hear how I learned to avoid Star Wars spoilers. There's a volcano involved. A whole planet of them.

Also, don't forget; until the end of February, I'm giving you the chance to earn FREE books. Go find out how.

the saddest day of the year and some review news

The tree is gone and all of the ornaments and decorations are packed up. Including that Santa Clause and the nutcracker that sat out on the piano this entire past year because I forgot to pack them up the previous Christmas. Everything is plain again. But the room is bigger now.
Okay, so it's not bigger, but there's no longer a tree in it, and, even though the tree was in the corner, it was a tree in the house, and that takes up some room.
But it's all gone, now, and the tree is outside in a big, black can looking so much smaller than it did when it was in the house.

I think I managed not to clog up the vacuum cleaner with pine needles this year.
Of course, I thought that last year, too.
And the year before.

In some ways, it's a shame we have to start the year by putting away all of the celebrations and make everything plain and normal again.
Then, I remember the year that my mom left the tree up until well after my birthday, which is in February, and how it had almost just become this part of the house that we all just accepted and no one noticed anymore.
We have to have that discussion with our kids every year, about how it's a good thing that Christmas is not every day, because, if it was, they would stop enjoying getting presents. It would be one of those things that my daughter would try to get out of because she wanted to go out to play, and the younger boy would be too busy playing Minecraft to bother with.

So, yeah, today was the day of ending the big Christmas event and packing everything away. A sad day.
But not so sad. It's time to get back to regular life again. Time to do some more writing. Almost time for the kids to get back to school, and that will not be a sad day. At least not for me. My daughter's ready to get back, too, even if the boys are not.

Well... so that's that. 11 months to go...

In other news, I have some reviews I'd like to highlight. Mr. Alex Cavanaugh himself read The House on the Corner during the holiday and had this to say about it:
"Once it got to the Imagination Room and the troll, it was incredibly compelling."
I can't really argue with that, now, can I? His whole review, which is fairly short, is located here along with his four star rating.
One other thing that Alex said is that the he found the character of Ruth to be the "most annoying creature in the world." I take that as a huge compliment, because it means I really did the job I set out to do in creating the characters for the book.

I really love hearing from people which character was their favorite. Ruth tends to be favored more among the younger readers, but it's not younger female readers, just younger readers as the boys favor just as often as the girls. Adult males have tended to prefer Tom. Sam has a good spread among all ages. I find it interesting and can't wait to see what people think as the story progresses.

The other review I want to highlight is one left for Shadow Spinner by a fairly high ranked reviewer on Amazon. The complete review is posted on "The Tunnel," but let me just share this one little bit here:
"The thing that really distinguishes this book and elevates it to the category of very happy find, is the careful and realistic way that Mr. Leon builds up the tension, the dread, the reveals and the threat in this story."
Then, he adds:
"There is room, though, for a thinking man's fantasy-father tale. There should be signs and portents. There should be odd things happening around the edges. Mom should be a little damaged and a little mental. Suspicious things should happen and there should be a slow unfolding of what's going to happen and what might happen. That's what you get here.
And you get it with real style."

Getting good reviews from anyone is great, and there is something special in having a friend genuinely like your work. You know, that person you hand it to and say, "I hope you like it," because you really hope that person likes it, and, when that person does it like, it gives you a little glow inside. But there's something else entirely when someone you don't know at all leaves a great review for you. It's an entirely different type of gratification.

So... it may be the saddest day of the year (Thursday, January 3, as I write this), but, you know what? Maybe everything's not so plain after all.