Where have I been?

A reader wrote to ask me what I've been doing for the last 18 months.

That's a good question. The answer is: Nothing spectacular, just trying to keep my head above water. That's proven to be more of a challenge than I anticipated.

My mother's death hit me harder than I expected and I've spent months in a semi-depression. I'm just climbing out of that now, as evidenced by this post.

One positive thing is that I had a short story published in Analog (May issue) which represents the first fiction I've completed and sold since my heart surgery in 1999.

So I guess I'm on the upswing. Watch this space.

--RC

WarBots game

Someone asked if the game Warbots, which is referenced in "The Wizardry Cursed" actually exists.

The answer is "yes and no".

There's no such game as Warbots, but the fictional game is patterned closely on RoboTech, the popular tabletop and computer wargame that a wide variety of robots to fight battles hundredss of years in the future.

--RC

Next Section Up

After way too long, I'm back to posting the bits of Wiz 6. I hope to post one section a week until I have it all up.

That's the good news.

The bad news is that from here on out you're going to have to work to follow what's going on. What I've been posting so far is the section I completed and sent to Baen as an advance sample. It's all pretty complete, modulo some copy editing and editor's input. What follows is a series of scenes and fragments strung together more or less by subplot. The first part, for example, are the scenes of the children in captivity and the dragon who is guarding them.

All of this stuff is in more-or-less chronologial order within the subplot, but it was meant to be intercut with other plot lines in the finished novel.

As usual, blank lines indicate breaks, either between scenes or bits I hadn't written when I went into the hospital.

Anyway, enjoy

==RC

Problems and copy protection

A little more on my problem.
The hard disk itself is fine. The motherboard is toast. The logical solution is to replace the motherboard and go to work.

Unfortunately that runs square into Microsoft's copy protection fetish. If you replace the motherboard the operating system thinks its been loaded on a new computer, so it won't work until it is reauthorized by Microsoft. To get it reauthorized you need the OS serial number -- which I didn't get with the computer (remanufactured). So I'm stuck.

This has been very frustrating.

PROBLEMS

Thanks to computer problems posting "The Wizardry Recapitalized" has been serious disrupted.

In the last month I've had not one but two computers turn into expensive doorstops and discovered that my backups weren't recoverable. Wiz 6 is safely sitting on a hard drive on a dead computer.

It's going to take a fairly elaborate recovery process to get the novel back -- essentially I've got to take the hard drive out of the system, connect it temporarily to another box and download the data. One complication is that the drive is IDE and the box is probably going to use SATA. The other complication is Windows copy protection.

My tech says he can do it, but it's going to take time. In part because all this has put me seriously behind on my paying work and I'm just getting caught up on that.

Oh well. If it was easy everyone would do it.

--RC

Chapters 10 and 11 are up

Okay, I just posted Chapters 10 and 11 of Wiz 6.

That's the good news. The bad news is that after this you're going to have to work. I had this first part of the novel pretty well done as an excerpt for the Baen Free Library (Note I said "pretty well" it still needs work). The rest of the book is a lot more fragmentary and organized by sub plots rather than in a continious narrative flow.

I'll start getting that up in a day or two.

Meanwhile, thanks for sticking with this.

--RC

Chapters 3-6 up

As promised, I'm now posting several chapters at a time. I just put up 3-6.
Enjoy.

--RC