Rebathroomed!

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As you can see from the strip of unmudded, unpainted drywall and the conspicuous lack of a shower door, we’re not quite done– the shower door is running late and should be here later this week, and they’ll take care of that part of the wall and a couple of other very minor tasks at that time. But I’d say we’re 90% done, and we threw a shower curtain on a tension rod on there so that we can shower in 24 hours after everything finishes curing, and the new floor is completely done.

So, progress? I’ll take it. Now we just have to figure out how to tie everything together, because the existing towels and bathroom mats and art on the walls do not work nicely with the blue in the new shower surround. But hopefully this fucker won’t leak.

Can’t post again, reading again

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Four days after taking the night off because I was 100 pages from the end of Book One, I’m taking the night off because I am 100 pages from the end of Book Two. I think I’m going to take a little break in between two and three, but not long, and if Jay Kristoff ends this one with the same level of cliffhanger that he did the second Nevernight book, I won’t have any choice in the matter. So we’ll see.

I have, like most of you, spent most of the day playing Schrödinger’s Senators, and finally found an upside to waking up at the ass-crack of dawn every day: several of my friends and family members woke up to a text from me reading “Good morning! Lindsey Graham is dead!”. As of this moment, Mitch McConnell’s office has released a statement that he is, in fact, alive, along with a still picture conspicuously featuring the sports section of a newspaper from today. I am unsatisfied; I’m willing to believe that he is alive (the notion that they literally had his corpse in a cold room waiting for, well, something never really sat well with me) but if I were a Kentuckian I would be raising pure bloody hell demanding 1) an explanation for why the fuck he’s been radio-silent for a month and 2) if not an actual press conference, at least a Zoom group interview or something. I’m not willing to go so far as to say the photo is faked, but a still photo of a (surprisingly healthy-looking) person and a written statement is not a proof of capability. I want to know if there’s still a person in there, damn it.

Aaaaaaand that’s enough

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Done with sports again, I think, because really all I have left is hoping for Argentina and England to lose, and they both keep winning matches in the exact same horrible way, so let’s just put soccer in the closet again until 2030.

Terrible Decisions: The Rebathroomening, Day 2

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So, today involved:

  • New subfloor in the bathroom and putting in most of the drywall;
  • Pulling up the vinyl in the laundry room to discover the enormous extent of the water damage in there (and I’m pretty sure those are asbestos tiles);
  • Pulling the washer, dryer, and slop sink and getting rid of the rest of the vinyl, then cutting out the damaged subfloor;
  • Installing the new, one-piece shower pan. I dare you to soak through that, water!

Two more days, supposedly, and given how fast they’ve been working (and that the new flooring showed up today) I’m pretty convinced* that it’s actually going to happen. They’re not working on Sunday, but we ought to be done on Monday.

(*) crossing fingers

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: Not this crap again

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Remember four and a half years ago, when we redid the master bathroom? Quite possibly not, as I doubt there are a ton of you who have been around that long. Well, it doesn’t matter, because we’re doing it again! Turns out that the new/old shower leaked. A lot! Which was the whole reason we redid it in the first place– because the first shower leaked, and we replaced it, and now the second shower has leaked, possibly worse than the first one did, and now we’re replacing that, and I’m down a bathroom again for, hopefully, just a few days. They’re telling us they’re going to be done by Monday, assuming everything shows up– we’re still waiting on the door and the flooring but that should be in tomorrow or Saturday, and it’ll be the last stuff to get done anyway, so it shouldn’t be a problem.

The flooring this time will extend into the laundry room, off there to the left, and we’re keeping the same vanity and cabinet and mirror and toilet and bidet we had before, and we are hoping not to have to repaint. We have gone with a built-in shower because I hate tile eternally and forever; I love the fact that the only tile in this house that has held up is the tile that I installed, in the hallway bathroom, and by “I love the fact” I need you to understand that I hate tile and I hate grout and I will hate them until twelve years after I die. At any rate, we’ll see how the new look for the shower works with the new floor tile (it’s not tile, it’s vinyl rectangles, but whatever) and then we’ll see if we need to do anything else with color to pull the room together. I’m worried that the room is going to look a little mismatched with the dark woods but no more dark tile.

At any rate, expect me to be screaming into the abyss for the next few days.

(Oh, also, summer school is finished as of today, so I’m on For Real For Real Summer Break now for the next month or so.)

Can’t post, reading

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I’m going to try to resist the urge to read the entire series back-to-back-to-back, or maybe I’m not. But my God, has this book been phenomenal so far.

On SKYLIGHTS, the Challenger, and my books

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

Other than the links on the right side of the page, you really don’t see much about my books around here any longer. I haven’t released anything new in six years or so, maybe longer, and most of the time I’m pretty convinced that that particular door is gonna stay closed. Part of the problem is that writing fiction, for me, has always been like pulling teeth– I can knock out any sort of nonfiction prose at length and quickly, but I would spend hours staring at a blank screen and not writing anything, and eventually the pain and the self-torture had to stop. COVID didn’t help, obviously, but it would have happened anyway, I think.

Part of the problem is Skylights. Skylights is near-future science fiction, which is always rough, no matter what, but I was stupid enough to attach certain events in Skylights to actual dates, which put the book on a timer for when bits would become Objectively Wrong, and several of those years have passed by now. In addition, the prologue of the book is explicitly tied to the main character’s recollection of the Challenger explosion. That’s not automatically a problem, not yet, but it made Gabriel the oldest character in the book, and he’s going to keep getting older until his inclusion no longer makes sense.

I have been tossing around the idea (for years now, for the record) of doing a second edition of Skylights that basically gets rid of all of the dates and adjusts the prologue so that it doesn’t automatically age my main character into his late forties or early fifties for a while now. I’ve not done it because 1) it’s kind of pointless, especially since I’ve blown up the sequel more than once already, and 2) I feel like if I’m going to bother revising Skylights, it ought to be in the context of relaunching my writing “career,” such as it is, and I’m not at all prepared to do that.

And then I hit a throwaway detail in Adam Higginbotham’s Challenger book, and bam, everything fell together. I’ve got a way for the prologue to work now, based on something that actually happened, and I can slide Gabe’s birth forward enough that by the time the book is out of date again I won’t have to worry about it. I even came up with a better reason for him to be on the trip in the first place; I was never entirely satisfied with Zub’s reasoning for bringing him on, and I think I’ve got a better idea now.

I’m not sure why I’m telling y’all this, other than another example of my habit of working through my thoughts by writing about them. I mean, I could just quietly update the text on Amazon and not worry about it; I might have to adjust the cover by a fraction of an inch somewhere or something like that, but once the writing part is done, it’s not a lot of additional work. And there are times where I miss being able to call myself an author. The problem is that authors have ideas, and I don’t have any. It’s not like figuring out how to move Skylights onto a floating timeline helped me solve the plot snarls and ridiculousnesses that multiple drafts of Sunlight kept falling into.

I should probably at least put a document together and write out some notes about how it was going to work, though, so that I can get it back later if I need it.

#REVIEW: Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, by Adam Higginbotham

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In what might be the least surprising book recommendation in the history of the blog, I thoroughly enjoyed reading a history of the Challenger disaster. This is known; I’m an astronomy nerd, and I’m 50, so I was in fourth grade when the Challenger exploded, and I dressed up as Ellison Onizuka for some sort of history performance thing later that year that I can’t really remember the details of. I do remember several other people in my class were other Challenger astronauts; I don’t think we had all seven, but there were a good three or four of us, and the thing involved everyone standing around in the gym dressed as their chosen person and giving speeches about our lives and our contributions to society to whoever happened to walk past. A history fair of some kind? Maybe. We finagled matching fake space suits from somewhere, I remember that.

I also set part of the prologue of my book Skylights on January 28, 1986, and the Challenger disaster is what gets the main character interested in space. The book is dedicated to the fourteen astronauts we lost in the Challenger and Columbia explosions, but I had to look up the names of the Columbia astronauts. I have been able to rattle off the seven Challenger astronauts by name since 1986.

The book begins with the Apollo 1 disaster, where the pure-oxygen environment in the cabin caught fire and burned the three astronauts to death before the rocket even took off. Higginbotham then goes into the history of the development of the Space Shuttle, which, my God, was an incredible clusterfuck, and it’s amazing that any of them ever flew at all. There’s a fair amount of attention paid to the process used to select Christa McAuliffe as a payload specialist, some biographical information of each of the other six astronauts, and then once we get to about mid-January of 1986 the book shifts to practically an hour-by-hour description of the run-up to the explosion and the multiple investigations afterwards. Higginbotham is an impressive storyteller– I’m going to find his first book, which was about Chernobyl, as soon as I can– and the book is detailed and authoritative without ever getting dry, with an impressive amount of footnoting at the end for anyone who is interested in checking his sources.

This is– okay, I can’t say objectively, really, but I’m gonna do it anyway– objectively a good book, but it’s also a book that there was no way I was going to be able to put down once I picked it up unless it was an absolute travesty of a hack job, and it won a bunch of awards. I read it in a day, mostly because I couldn’t put it down. I learned some things, and I remembered some other things I’d forgotten, and I’m much angrier at 1980’s era NASA than I was before reading it. None of these people should have died. None of them.

I think a lot of you are like me and knew from the title whether you wanted to read this; I would recommend you follow that impulse if you do, and if your initial impulse wasn’t immediately “This book exists? I should read it!” you should read it anyway. I will talk about it again in December, there is no doubt of that.