Category Archives: Time Catcher

Worst Sky Rat: Seagull, Pigeon, Grackle??


Okay. So, I went walking out by the water today. It was a rather surfy morning with lots of wind and birds (royal tern, snowy egret, cormorants, pelicans, willets, first ring-beaked gull of the season, as well as herds and flocks of laughing gulls), and I saw these ladies feeding the gulls.

As I walked nearer, more gulls arrived. They were flying over from–from miles away, or it seemed like it. The gulls already present didn’t seem to be making much noise. No cries other than the usual, from what I could tell, and not many of those. And I decided that seagulls must have telepathy.

There must be some extrasensory sense they use to tell each other when somebody’s throwing food. Because there might be One seagull when the first breadcrumb gets pitched, and dozens mass out of nowhere to fight over it.

I’m pretty sure these ladies aren’t local. Most of the locals are not fond of seagulls. They’re too much of a nuisance to want to feed them. There are a few locals who will feed seagulls. The matriarch of a local restaurant kingdom used to feed the seagulls from the balcony of the hotel next to their flagship restaurant. There’s a statue in the restaurant of her, or someone, feeding gulls. There’s a story going round (I don’t know how true it is) that she died falling from the balcony while feeding the gulls. But let’s leave that depressing digression and return to my next thought.

Which was: Which is the worst nuisance? Pigeons, grackles or seagulls?

They are all known for gathering in great swarms. They are all known for pooping on everything in range. Frequently, with great disgustingness and stench. But which one is the worst of the sky rats?

My vote goes to grackles.

Seagulls? They’re stuck by large bodies of water. They have webbed feet , so they can’t sit in trees and poop on the cars parked under them. (Take note, director of 300 where a seagull sits on a spear–not possible. Webbed feet can’t grasp a spear!) Their cries aren’t that annoying. Laughing gulls have a lower pitched cry than other gulls, so it’s less annoying than those others. They’re also smaller birds, as gulls go, so they don’t poop as much as the big herring gulls. Also, I haven’t seen them sitting on the beach in groups larger than, oh, maybe 30 or so. Mostly less.

Pigeons have a wide range. We have pigeons on the beaches. Sometimes. They do sit in trees and on statues and stuff, and I think there may be a pigeon ESP as well, because they seem to gather instantly when somebody starts throwing bread crumbs. But they don’t seem to gather in flocks as large as the grackles. Also, they’re edible. And they coo. Nice, soft, cuddly-sounding coos.

Grackles? They’re as big as pigeons, beak to tail, but they’re skinny. No meat on their bones. And they collect in flocks that can take over whole city parks. Thousands of birds. We took this picture in February/March (around Mardi Gras). The power lines are not that thick. There are birds along every line, and they’re all over the lines across the street, and along the rooflines, and in the trees (there aren’t many) and Everywhere. Massive, Alfred-Hitchcock-worthy flocks.

Besides all the pooping and gathering and flocking, grackles do not coo. They do not tweet or chirp or cheep. They Screech. Like nails on a blackboard. Literally. And they clack. Sort of like a 3 Stooges “Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk,” but louder. And more clacky. And then they screech again. Endlessly. Back and forth at each other in their ginormous flocks.

If I have to have grackles, or pigeons, or seagulls, I will take seagulls. If I can’t have seagulls, I’ll take pigeons. If only I do not have to deal with grackles. Unfortunately, on the island, we have all three. Sigh.

Oh. I took a picture of a little sand crab too. It was very cool. I almost didn’t see it, it’s so tiny, and so close to the same color as the sand. Can you see it in the middle of the picture? It’s casting a pretty big shadow. The whole thing, from one end of its little legs to the other, is about the size of my thumb, to give you a size comparison. I only spotted it (and the other, smaller one I saw) because they were running across the sand. Back to their holes, maybe.

I did write today. I got all the way to the end of the action in the synopsis. I now need to write the emotional denouement. I am not sure what it will be. I also pretty much left all the romance plot out of the synopsis. I’m trying to lean harder to one way or the other in SF or romance. I do pretty much half and half, most of the time. I can write the romance in the story, but I’m having trouble writing it into the synopsis. It’s like–the romance happens while they’re doing this other stuff. We’ll see how it works. Maybe this story is the other way round. Ah well.

So–what’s your vote? Grackles? Pigeons? Seagulls? Which is the worst nuisance???

Writer’s Weekend


I had a wonderful weekend. A Writer’s Weekend.

My best friend–the one I went to New Mexico and Arizona on a research trip with a couple of years ago–came down to the island on Friday with her husband, because she didn’t want to drive through the big-city traffic by herself. My fella was out of town on business, but her guy did very well staying out of the way. 😉

I took them out to lunch at my favorite “local’s hot-spot”, and then we went downtown to see the hawk show they were having for FeatherFest. (This bird is actually a Sea Eagle, and he’s checking us out.) After the hawks and a walk around town to look in a few shops, we had ice cream at the son’s favorite ice cream parlor. (Mine, too. But I won’t let myself go there unless we have company in town.) We drove around the historical district a little bit, and then headed back to the house for a little while.

B and I (we sign our e-mails by initials only–I think I started it because I’m bone-lazy, but our little group all started doing it, since we all have names with different initials–and now we call each other by our initials) had exchanged a few pages for critique, so we went out on the back covered patio to go over our pages, and while we were out there, it rained. We were under the roof, so we didn’t get wet, but after an hour or so, it started getting cold and we went in. Had supper at Tortuga’s Mexican Restaurant and watched the wind blow the palmettos around. Then we went back home again and plotted a book for B.

She brought her sticky notes and her big foamcore plotting board and her tape recorder (which kept stopping intermittently unless she smacked it–we decided it had become masochistic…) and a spiral notebook and her AlphaSmart. I never realized just how much equipment was necessary for plotting a story. 😉 She had a huge cowboy boot box for the sticky notes, because the first time we tried plotting with sticky notes, we kept saying things like “We need more colors–we need a color for the villain, and for the hero’s internal conflict, and for the suspense subplot, and for–” So every time she sees sticky notes in the store, she checks to see if they’re a color she doesn’t have already. I think she has enough sticky notes to last the rest of her life.

By this time, we were really tired, so we went to bed. Her fella had crashed a while back–the driving stress tuckered him out.

Saturday, we got up, drove to McDonald’s for some breakfast take-out, and after we ate it, we plotted a book for me. Of course, I have more books plotted than I have time to write, and am having to take a week off working on Old Spirits to drive back to the panhandle this week and supervise the moving of the rest of the furniture, so I’m going to be writing even less (which upsets me no end), but we plotted yet another book for me. While we were plotting, her hubby went out walking down the seawall. He went into every souvenir shop along the way, and wound up walking all the way to 6th Street. Which is almost 5 miles from our street. And then he had to walk back. We’d have come to get him if he’d called, but he never did…

B and I went out and walked a couple of miles on the beach-or maybe only one. I was too busy talking and looking at all the birds to pay attention. I even saw some terns. We did walk out on one of the jetties–one with a paved walking path. It was quite chilly, or we might have gone walking earlier, but we wanted to wait for it to warm up. And we still wore out windbreakers to go walking. We weren’t really hungry, so we went back to the house and had peanut butter cheese crackers and watched movies, then went out to one of the better seafood houses on the island for supper. (Had the charcoal grilled/fried shrimp combo–very good.) The man in the house was snoring by 10 p.m., because of his 10-mile hike…

Sunday, we got up and did speed-writing drills. We wrote 10 opening sentences. Not opening sentences to anything in particular, just opening sentences. Then we switched pages, and drew numbers, and wrote scenes to go with the opening sentence that matched that number. I got one that said, “Oh, honey, with a package like that, I’ll do ya for free.” (B is a stinker, because she KNEW I would have to write from her sentences, and put that one in just so I’d have to write something beginning with that… :P) It was a lot of fun, and we laughed a lot.

After that, I had mentioned a free reception and tours of one of the big mansion museums on the island, so we went to that–looked at all the stuff on display in the basement, and went upstairs to look at the living area and take pictures on the spiffy-cool front porch and such. (This is B and her fella on one end of the porch–yes, it’s a round gazebo-y area.) Then we went to eat at a Louisiana-style seafood place downtown, and look at the stores on that end of the street. And then, alas, it was time to say goodbye.

Most of the time, there are at least three of us on our Writers’ Weekends, but our third couldn’t get away this time. But since, despite his ten-mile hike and aching legs, her husband had a good time on the island, I don’t think I’ll have a lot of trouble convincing them to come back. Maybe if my fella’s here next time, the guys can go fishing. I know mine likes to fish, and I think hers does too… We didn’t even ride the ferry or go out to the state park. And maybe our third can come next time too… Can’t wait.

Now I have to just get busy writing Old Spirits, so I can write another couple chapters of Thunder, and get a little farther toward finishing it, and then I can write Time Catch, and then I can write the third, still-nameless blood-magic universe book, and then I can write this book we just plotted. Sometime in 2010, maybe???

New Orleans Rises


Actually, New Orleans is still about the same height it always was from everything I remember, but downtown and the French Quarter never did flood, even during the worst of Katrina. Anyway, just got back from a few days there where I had a great time, but pretty much walked my legs right off. Yep, that’s right, I’m walking around on nubs now.

They had Katrina tours you could take, right from the hotel where we stayed, downtown, across the street from Harrah’s. I didn’t take one because I sorta felt like it was battening on somebody else’s misery. Maybe it’s not, but I felt that way. And after the four hours of walking we did on Saturday, I was afraid any tour might involve more of that, and I wanted to know exactly how much walking I was going to do and where I was going.

The St. Charles Street streetcar is back in operation, but it only goes out to Napoleon Street, about half as far as its normal route. I didn’t think the Garden District was under water, which is mostly past Napoleon, but maybe it did get wet. The route out to Napoleon Street had just recently reopened, but Copeland’s, a restaurant on that corner we really liked, was all boarded up and didn’t look like anybody had any intentions of re-opening it. We did ride the streetcar, if you couldn’t tell. Didn’t take my camera out that day, though, and when I did, the streetcars were rather elusive.

The hotel where we stayed was maybe half a mile from the French Quarter. It took us about ten minutes to walk down to the Cafe du Monde on Sunday morning. There was a line waiting to get in at the Cafe du Monde, however, and no line at the little Cafe Beignet across the street, so we–the fella, me and one of his co-workers–crossed the street and had our beignets and coffee there. Except I was the only one who had beignets (the fella being allergic to wheat), and I had milk with mine. The pregnant lady had decaf caffe latte, and the fella had ham and eggs. Which you can’t get at Cafe du Monde, so really, the alternate was a better choice for us.

I had beignets every morning we were in New Orleans. Frankly, I pigged out the whole time we were there, though pigging out on fish isn’t quite as piggy as pigging out on…well, pigs. Or cows. The hotel backed up to the riverfront mall, and there was a little Cafe du Monde branch office on the first floor of the mall, that opened up an hour before the rest of the mall did. So Monday and Tuesday, I walked over to the mall and had my beignets there. Sat outside and watched the river. (That was the view–the cruise ship wasn’t always there leaving port, but that’s the bridge over to Algiers…)

The rest of this might as well be a list of what I ate too. Saturday night, we took the college folks to dinner at Carmelo’s–corner of Toulouse and Decatur, a couple of blocks from Jackson Square. Italian-style fish. The fella and I shared some calamari (the kind with squiggles included), then had redfish with a fresh tomato-caper sauce, and I had my very first cannelloni, believe it or not. Deelish.

Sunday night, we had dinner with an old friend from the fella’s doctoral class who’s a bigwig in Kentucky now. Went to Ralph and Kakoo’s on Toulouse Street, and–after some fried crawdad tails (aka Cajun popcorn) (our friend got his first taste of crawfish) I dined upon the Shrimp Henry, which the Chef Henry apparently made up that night. It was grilled shrimp stuffed with cheesy spinach stuffing over angel hair pasta with Rockefeller sauce on top. Very yummy.

Then Monday night, we went out with the college folks again, to a place called Tommy’s in the warehouse district. On Tchoupitoulas (I may have left a few vowels out of that streetname, or moved them around in the wrong places, but that looks really close…) Street. Tommy’s had Italian overtones, but wasn’t too, too Italian. At Tommy’s, I had a Caesar salad, then had Veal Sorrentina, with eggplant and cheese and Marsala mushroom sauce on top. (I can get fish & shrimp here, but veal is harder to come by.) It came with these really neat matchstick sweet potatoes cooked almost dry–really good, and different. Then the pregnant lady and I each had creme brulee and the other lady in the group had strawberries with homemade ice cream.

This doesn’t count the fudge I bought that I snacked on way too much. They had it in New Orleans praline flavor, and it tastes JUST like pralines. I told the fella that the chocolate fudge was for me and the praline was for him…but I’m eating too much of the praline flavor too. There are a couple of candy shops downtown here…good thing I don’t go downtown too often, huh?

I did finish my Christmas shopping…”best of the best” Louisiana cookbooks and specialty measuring spoons. And I wandered the French Quarter and took lots of pictures at the perfect time of day to get some good shadows and shots.

I also got a little writing done. Not much, but a few pages. Still working on the SF story, though I need to switch to the WWII story long enough to get my pages done for the month. Don’t know if the brain is working that way though. I’m writing stuff, but may have to slash the whole of it. Oh well.

Have one more week before the daughter, s-i-l and grandboy come for the holidays. She’s supposed to be bringing the tamale recipe. Need to buy a pork roast to cook for the filling…or maybe brisket. Brisket makes good tamales too… but you GOT to have tamales for Christmas Eve, or it’s just not Christmas…

Cold front supposed to be moving in today. It’s been hot. Hot in New Orleans (okay, it was mostly just humid, but that made ME hot) and hot at home. I’m ready for that cold front to get here.

Dickens, Victorian Christmas and stuff like that

Had a busy weekend, so I’m just now getting here. This past weekend was a big one for the island, because it was the Victorian Christmas festival weekend downtown. This is a huge deal around here, and people come from all over the state to hang out, dress up in costumes and drink glogg. Or wassail. Or whatever. The costumes are supposed to be Victorian, but since she ruled a really long time, the costume-wearer has a wide variety of choices. Everything from hoopskirts to bustles. Some people wear pirate costumes, which are about 50 years too old for Victoria, but hey–they look cool, so nobody cares. There are also Civil War soldiers, cowboys, frontier floozies, beggar urchins, London bobbies, kilted soldiers and pretty much whatever else anyone might want to wear. Lots and lots of top hats.

The fella’s college had a booth on Ship’s Mechanic Row, so he felt he needed a costume, and went out and rented one. (Though I think he bought the top hat and cane.) But since we left it so late, I decided it would be too hard to find something really “authentic” for me, so I did “Victorian-ish.” I found a Victorian-looking top, and already had a long, tiered denim skirt, so I did a variation on the frontier look, I suppose. If I can get my sewing machine down here, though…maybe next year.

So that’s what we did pretty much all day Saturday. Wandered around all the old buildings downtown and gawked at all the dressed-up people. There were plenty who didn’t dress up, but you’d be amazed just how many did. I would post pictures, but I didn’t take my camera, and the fella wants to download the pictures himself, so who knows when that will happen…

I have made it back out to the beach. It was very warm and sunny Friday, and my knees were whining at all the walking on concrete I’ve made them do lately, so I took them back to walk on the sand again. Tiny little rocks all over everywhere. Lots of the kelp-like seaweed. And some ring-billed gulls have showed up. They seem to be a little more solitary than the local laughing gulls, a little larger too. But the easiest way to tell the difference, since the laughing gulls don’t currently have their black heads, is that the ring-bills have yellow beaks (with a black ring) and legs, and the laughers have black beaks and legs. It will be nice when they turn black-headed again… Make it easier for me. The other local black-headed gulls don’t have black legs, so that’s a help too.

And Monday, we went to the college Christmas concert. The choir is basically a community choir–most of the members are my age or older. I enjoyed their music, though a lot of it was a little esoteric. The other half of the program was the Island Steel Drum Band, which was lots of fun. This is only its second year in existence, but it was totally cool. They ought to perform at the Dickens festival next year, I think… Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree works real well on steel drums…

Plodding away on Time Catch. I’ve done a few POV/scene changes now. Maybe finished a chapter–though I never really know till I get it typed in. Still, I like the story and it seems to be going well, although slowly. I’m working stuff out as I go, which means a lot of stopping and making notes and re-writing when I think of something that will work better than what I originally came up with. It’s the details that can trip you up. I know the general outline of what my hero’s going to be doing, but the specifics keep slowing me down.

I was thinking I’d have this “city boy” dress up like a scruffy street tough, to go snooping around out in the outer sectors of the space empire. He is a lot tougher than he looks, but he’s pretty ignorant of life in the outer sectors, and he’s smart enough to know that. So after I’d already written the scene with him in grubby space-suit clothes, I realized he was indeed smart enough to recognize his ignorance and play it up. So he’s dressing like a company bureaucrat from headquarters who doesn’t want to be in the outer sectors, (with hair dyed red with hot pink streaks) so he’ll at least have the element of surprise on his side if any local tough guys try to rough him up. He’s very good at personal violence. So anyway, I had to write that at least twice today.

But the plot is coming clear, and I ought to be able to write the synopsis pretty soon… I’ve learned a couple of things I didn’t realize as I’ve gotten even a couple of pages in that I think will play a great big part in the story. Not sure how, yet, but I think they will. I’ve established the hero and heroine’s goals. I’ve established the primary conflict between them, and hinted at some internal conflict–or maybe self-conflict. I hope I’ve established enough of the universe that people can follow the story. It’s coming together, I think.

Time’s a-Wastin’

Yep. I did it again. Found yet another time-waster. This one’s not on the web.

I was feeling sorry for myself because I can’t get the new Sim Societies computer game, since my computer isn’t smart enough or fast enough for it (even if it isn’t a year old yet). And I saw a different, older video-game that the computer IS fast and smart enough for. And I bought it. THE MOVIES. I get to run a movie studio and make movies and create stars and it’s way too much fun and addictive… Anyway, I’m still here, and still working, believe it or not.

Hmm. I haven’t posted since Thanksgiving, have I? Well, we had a good holiday. The boy came down from university for the weekend, with his dog. It got cold. It rained. The dog got a bath, and went right back outside and got in the mud. (sigh) She’s a sweet dog, though. We ate too much. I did not make a pecan pie, but an apple crisp, besides the cheesecake for the menfolks. I thought the apple thing might be better for me than all that pecan gooey goodness.

The menfolks went fishing. Caught a little sand trout that got thrown back. It rained again. We went to the cell phone people and got new phone numbers to match the new hometown. We went to WalMart and bought me a new phone. We watched a few of the new DVDs I’ve bought and hadn’t got round to watching. We played a lot of videogames. (This was before I bought the new one…)

Yesterday, I mailed White Elk to the agent, and today, I wrote almost 8 pages on Time Catcher. Or Time Catch. I can’t decide which title I like best. Catcher, I’m beginning to think. Anyway, I got a bunch of new stuff written. It’s about time for me to switch POV to the hero, and I wish I knew what his enneagram type is… I do a lot of Eight-Nine couples. (Eight’s the Boss type, and Nine’s the Peacemaker–or the sea and the seacliff…) I think probably because I’m in an 8-9 marriage, but also because Eights make really good action hero types, and Nines are strong enough to stand up to them. But then, I’m not sure what the heroine’s type is, so… Maybe this will be an Eight-Eight story… That would be a clash for the ages…

Once I get Asker’s story to proposal format, I’ll go back and work on revising Devil in a Red Dress. But I have a busy weekend ahead of me, first.