Abominations both eldritch and insectoid

I did a good bit of vacationing this summer vacation, which is why there haven't been posts here. I'll make this round of blog apology brief and get to the more interesting stuff.

First of all, while canoeing with Girlfriend in Cape Cod I ended up taking my cell phone out for a swim. I also learned something from the experience about how deep you can sink into mud, and how hard it can be to pull your feet back up out of the bottom of a lake.

It was certainly time for my phone to go. I was still using the phone I got in 2006, which made it about 140 in phone years. So although it did not prove absolutely necessary, my unpremeditated swim provided a good excuse to get a new, "actual" phone, which is to say a small computer that is also capable, with some coaxing, of making phone calls.

What's more fun, the experience in the muck informed the Heroes' Tears adventure I was working on. It's a very swampy adventure, and/but I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. I'm hoping I will have the chance to share it with the world, and not just with the people who will be paying me directly for it.

What else? I wish the saga of my house and its vermin was complete, but it is not. The mice, I think, heard about the bedbugs downstairs and decided to leave. But bedbugs there are, and the Great Inconvenience has been scheduled for next week. And the week after that. And the week after that. Our landlord probably could have arranged for a less onerous treatment, but, of course, no inconvenience is too great when it's someone else's problem. If I'm overly bitter about this (and I'm sure I am), it's likely because there is still no sign of bedbugs in my house; this is all because of what's going on downstairs.

Enough of that, though. I'm writing an adventure.

Marriage, mice, and manuscripts

There are three kinds of sequel, although for the purpose of introducing this post I'm going to ignore the correct definition of "something which follows or continues" and focus instead on the more common usage, as "a rehashing of ideas previously explored to their logical conclusion."

So, there are two kinds of sequels, generally: those which improve or expand on their originals and those which fall short. Terminator 2 on the one hand, Speed 2 on the other. In terms of the themes it addresses, this post may be considered a sequel to the previous one, and in that regard I hope it falls into the former category rather than the latter.

A week ago I came home from the wedding which had occupied my time, one way or another, for the whole week previous. The wedding was successful, and a married couple was produced. The accompanying party was perfectly lovely (and on a boat, no less), marred only by one of the groomsmen reading a rambling speech made up mostly of in-jokes.* My friends continue to show a talent for having relatively sane and enjoyable weddings, and the weather in Seattle even cooperated to the extent that it was sunny when it needed to be.*

Before leaving I had been relieved to discover no evidence of bedbugs in the house. On my return we continued to not have bedbugs, much to our relief. When I stepped into the kitchen, however, I startled a mouse who must have thought he had the place to himself.

You would think, given the geometric way that these problems expand, that exterminators would make appointments on very short notice. This does not seem to be the case, however--at least not with the exterminator who our landlord prefers. We eagerly await his arrival this Saturday, almost two full weeks after our discovery of the problem, and hope that our furry squatters are not too fecund in the mean time.

While we wait we (well, Girlfriend, primarily) have attempted to drive the creature(s) out by blocking holes and spraying liberally with peppermint oil, including placing mint-soaked cotton balls in strategic corners. The hope, if I understand correctly, is to persuade the mice that our home is the lair of a cotton-pooping peppermint beast.

I worry, though, that we have attracted a singularly worldly mouse, who knows a good thing when he sees it and has no truck with tales of peppermint beasts.

So we lock our food up more securely and wait for Saturday. Our landlord helpfully asked if he could check our mattresses while he's here, because our downstairs neighbors are worried that they have bedbugs.

Bedbugs. Thought we'd dodged a bullet there, for a minute.

We still don't have bedbugs up here, so far as we can tell, but it will be very frustrating if they manage to make their way up here between now and Saturday. Not least because we leave on Sunday to visit my ancestral lands in Massachusetts, and I don't want to bring the little buggers with me.

Perhaps this will all be sorted out with a minimum of further fuss, but I am conserving my optimism for other endeavors.

At the urging of Girlfriend, some friends, my own good sense, and the very universe itself, it seems sometimes, I have agreed to send off my novella "Nenle and Death" to a potential publisher this Friday. The length (almost 15,000 words), rules out many publications, but a few potentials remain. I may even be able to send "The Long Dance" out shortly after that.

This week it looks like I'll have my plate full, of work at least, the most interesting project of which is writing an adventure to be used in playtesting the upcoming D20 RPG Heroes' Tears. The game itself is not unlike 3rd Ed. D&D, but with an approach to classes and levels reminiscent of Shadowrun. I'm pretty excited by the chance to craft adventures for a solid system (and I don't think there's a better chassis available to the public than the SRD) that still has room to grow. (I think I will be making all my own monsters for this one, for example.)

All in all, I should probably get off my blog and get back to work.

* This was me.
** Girlfriend and I were both well reddened over the course of the ceremony and reception, though.