Many details TBD, but prospective attendees are advised to mark your calendars and begin making arrangements. I expect to fly in/out of MIA and stay somewhere in South Beach, possibly Thu/Fri/Sat nights. Expect most activities to occur on Friday the 21st and Saturday the 22nd.
Diversions
A Serious Temptation
So – I established the practice of wearing late Victorian or Edwardian-style outfit when out doing a book event; everything from a WWI-era grey nurses’ dress with a white apron and kerchief, to a black taffeta bustle skirt and jacket with a blue ribbon sash hung with orders and jewels and a white widow’s bonnet (a la Queen Victoria). It’s an attention-getter in a room full of other authors and readers, and a wonderful social icebreaker/conversation starter: Hi, my name is Celia, I write historical fiction, so I like to dress the part!
A Trivial Diversion – The Right Royal Ruckus
Although ruckus is perhaps too mild a term for the flaming dumpster fire, train wreck or thirty-car pile-up on the interstate, for the public relations disaster that has been called down upon the Windsor family by the present king’s younger son. One isn’t so much drawn to look, in horror – just that one can’t look away from the international spectacle of a man napalming relationships with his own family, all egged on by his wife and the news/entertainment media.
Christmas Story
Below the jump. Notes:
- This is the free version, which I am posting, à la Sarah Hoyt, for feedback. It’s ≈6,100 words, so reading time is 15-30 minutes unless you divert to checking the math and science—which is probably something I would do if somebody else were dropping a reading assignment like this on me. If so, consider it extra entertainment value (but see #5, below). Still more entertainment value will accrue to those familiar with a certain educational establishment we should all know, if not necessarily love.
- The paid version will be one story in a collection that is well underway and which I hope to publish by about the end of 1Q23. I expect all the stories in that collection will be science fiction; all the ones I’ve worked on so far are. Most will (unlike this one) be alternate histories.
- The paid version will also have been revised and lightly edited for, among other things, internal consistency and a general … excess of Manifoldness in spots.
- I already have an editor. Publication will, at least initially, be for e-reader devices only.
- This is a work of fiction. It includes fictional devices, in the technological as well as literary sense. Attempts at explaining to me how nonexistent technologies really work may be met with “Sir, this is a Wendy’s.”
- Math corrections are OK, though.
- As no less a personage than David Goldman (“Spengler”) said about his The Quantum Supremacy: An Entertainment, if you have half as much fun reading this as I did writing it, I will have succeeded. (FWIW, I had fun reading TQS.)
Leaves
