A note about Irish distances

This is especially for people coming to Dublin 2019: If an Irish person (or website, for that matter) tells you something is a 10 minute walk, they are almost certainly lying to you. It’s a well-intentioned lie. They reckon anybody can walk for ten minutes, I think, so if they say it’s ten minutes, well, that sounds grand and not a bother and you can manage that. But if it is actually a ten minute walk, that is a matter of sheer coincidence and should not be used as a…

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The Hugo Post

People have asked me, as they do every year, to put together a list of what I had published last year that could qualify for a Hugo nomination. I don’t normally get my act together enough to do this, but a combination of elements, including 1. Worldcon is in Dublin this year! 2. I’m very proud of last year’s novel! and 3. Somebody else did the hard lifting and I’m able to use that for the basis of my post means I’m doing a proper one this year. I’ll put…

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Take a Chance cover

Take A Chance thoughts / Patreon signal boost

I’ve been having a think, and here’s what I’ve been thinking. I’ve got an artist for the next TAKE A CHANCE story arc. I need to be able to pay him, tho. If I can get my Patreon up to 250 patrons, at the average of $5/m that people are paying, I could afford to pay him for 4 pages a month. 300 patrons? 8 pages a month. (I can’t afford to pay him very WELL, but I could at least pay him. :)) It’d be a sneak peek/early, probably…

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theoretically ideal

I went to bed around 10 last night and, not at all to my delight, woke up at 10 to 6. I lay around for a while sullenly considering that this was, in fact, the ideal I’m nominally going for: earlyish to bed, early to rise, get some work done before bringing Indy to school and all that. Except not on a Sunday, dammit. Anyway, I got up after half an hour or so and spent a couple hours getting increasingly tired while working on an e-book layout, and I’ve…

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home from Octocon

We are home from a lovely weekend at Octocon, where we saw many friends and had good conversations. I brought about eight pounds of fudge to the con, and passed it out to the attendees of the Golden Blasters film festival on Friday night. Probably the best two bits of that were saying to people, “If you’re allergic to anything except gluten you can’t eat this, but it’s gluten-free,” and having one woman LIGHT UP when she was told it was gluten-free and safe for her to eat. (Eggs, dairy,…

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