Weird Clouds

So, they looked more like jet contrails when I first saw them, but by the time I took a picture it looked like the wind had smeared them to the north. At first I thought they were contrails, as I saw them over US-131 and they pointed toward the Grand Rapids airport, but they stayed due east as I headed south, so they must have been much, much higher.

What’s funny is that if you look close (or click on it and select the embiggenest one on Flickr), you can see an actual jet contrail in the middle of them. They stayed recognizably up there for at least an hour. I wish I had taken a picture earlier, but at the time I was thinking about stopping. Then I worked out a way to (more or less safely) take a picture while driving and there you have it.

Don’t worry, I won’t make a habit of it.

Crossposted with klech.net

Are We Having Fun Yet?

Last night I started going through some of the stuff I wrote in high school (including a novel I subbed to Baen when I was 17–woohoo!) in preparation for a reading I’m doing at Penguicon this weekend. SOMEone, I don’t know who, volunteered me for this Juvenilia (a word my spell check seems determined not to recognize) thing on Friday night, and so I finally got around to looking up some stuff to read.

It’s mostly really bad, and should be fun to read.

What surprised me, however, was how it evoked memories of being very fun to write, and I realized with some sadness that I had lost some of that over the past few years. Actually, last year I had a lot of fun writing a fantasy novel, in part because I was trying very hard to avoid convention, so I was throwing a lot of stuff at the wall to see what stuck, and now that I think about it, it felt somewhat the same. I think last year was a more informed experience, and I think I learned more than I did when I was doing the same kind of thing at 17.

But, I also think I was learning more than I have been the past few months, revising what now seems to me to be a more-or-less by the numbers novel, and writing something else I’ve been toying with, but not really excited about. Especially because I think I was deliberately trying to play it safe, trying to write with one eye toward critics and whatnot, which I think is the very definition of putting the cart before the horse.

So I’ve more or less decided to scrap what I’m working on and pick a different project, something I can get more excited about. Not sure exactly what yet, but I think I’ll take this weekend to mull it over and play with some ideas. Thankfully, I never have a real hardcore lack of novel-length ideas, so there’s plenty there for me to choose from; the question is, what can I get excited enough about, what can I have fun with?

Right now, I’m far from the point where I have to muscle through something in order to make a deadline, or stretch out a series or something, so I may as well enjoy the freedom to have fun.

Crossposted with klech.net