Our house is on the market. We’re getting ready to move (hopefully back to Colorado.) For the past few years, we’ve been slowly working to fix some of the many issues with my parents’ house, which we live in. We’re working on purging, packing, and cleaning to prepare for the eventual move.
This is not my childhood home. My parents bought it when I was in college. When they retired to North Carolina a few years ago and were unable to sell the house (it’s a BIG fixer-upper) we moved in so that it wouldn’t sit empty. A few months ago, they decided to sell it even though our still-needs-to-be-fixed list is still rather long.
Our strategy is to condense our living space into just the upstairs, with the exception of the teen’s room on the first floor, and the bare minimum in the kitchen. The workroom upstairs (which is the biggest room…hubby and I chose a different, quieter room to sleep in) used to be just my writing desk, clean-laundry-sorting (our closet is being remodeled) and my sewing table. Now it’s been expanded to include two old comfy-chairs for me and hubby, and a desk and computer for each of the girls.
Strangely, this is working better than I thought it would.
Even when we had the living room with chairs and a couch, the girls were rarely there. Like Mom and Dad, they spend a lot of time on the computer. (Both hubs and my careers depend on it.) At the moment, my girls are playing Minecraft, communicating out loud (“Dude! Give me all your torches!”) while they each control their own aspect of the game.
They’re having fun. They’re comfortable.
So am I… my writing corner is much the same. Like Thufir Hawat taught us, I don’t have my back to a door or window. My desk always has been and always will be free-standing so I can look up and see what’s in the room. Behind and around me is a collection of shelves, souvenirs, and kid-art on the wall. If someone comes back here, it is immediately obvious that they are in my space.
After we move, we’ll have a chance to arrange our living space however we like. If the girls’ computers were in different rooms, they couldn’t as easily communicate as they play. (Just now: “Dude! I’m on fire!” followed by something about golden apples…) It’s also good that I can see what they’re doing, even though it’s a distraction when I’m working.
Yes, I’d love to have a family room with a spacious couch to cuddle on. I want a nice parlor where we can be a little more formal with guests. (My daughter has special needs…I regularly have visitors who are social workers, mentors, or other ‘village people’ lol!) It would be great for hubby to have a man-cave where he have the things that make him happy and comfortable.
No, I don’t want a tiny-house that has all kinds of origami furniture that folds out of the way when not in use. I don’t want to sleep in a loft with no door or force my kids to share everything.
But something in the middle right be just-right. When I was an architecture student I loved the concept of The Right-Sized House. This is more than simply downsizing. This means figuring out how we really live instead of fitting ourselves to the spaces our grandparents found comfortable.
I still want a comfy-chair for me and one for hubby. That might end up being a love seat. Having a couch is nice. When we didn’t have one, I discovered that I really missed being able to lie down on the couch when I wasn’t feeling well. Maybe we’ll get a couch, maybe we’ll make do with a single nice piece where either the girls or a guest can sit. But I spend most of my time at my desk. So does the rest of the family. I think our preferred living space would consist of comfortable desk spaces for each of us. We still need a few comfy-chairs, but I don’t think we need a traditional living-room set.
When I’m writing SciFi, I try to imagine how people in another society, be it aliens or futuristic humans, will live. Some things will likely be very similar. Many others will be different. (Ever seen a Japanese bathroom? Neither have I. But I hear they’re fabulous!) A kitchen of the future might not simply have a zillion fantastic appliances; it might be practically non-existent. A family room might look like a ball-pit.
If you examined the way your family lived, and you had the budget to make changes, how would you live differently?
Huzzah! My story comes out in a couple of weeks, and we have a great cover!
More of my writing time this week has been brainstorming promo and finalizing the details of this first release. We also finalized another, shorter story, Schrodinger’s Cookies, to go up on the blog as a freebie. This version of the cover is a quickie… I tossed the appropriate items together on a baby blanket, and snapped it with my cell phone. I think it turned out pretty good. We might not do ‘fancier’ covers for the stories that are only going to be freebies.
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AmyBeth Inverness 
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Ma Lune Est Faite de Fromage Vert
OK…the stories in The Cities of Luna aren’t that cheesy. They’re more hommage than fromage. A long list of writers, including several Grand Masters of Science Fiction, have gone before me.
What does a writer—mostly unknown and in the early years of her professional career—do to pay respect to those writers who inspired and paved the way? I can’t set my own story in the worlds they created. That’s fanfic, and it’s not always flattering. But I don’t want to ignore them. I can’t ignore them; their influence is pervasive in every story I write.
This first story, Grands, is dedicated to two of my favorite lunar writers. Heinlein (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) and Hickam (The Crater Trueblood and the Lunar Rescue Company books.) It’s a small thing, and I doubt they or their heirs will ever notice (The world lost Robert Heinlein in 1988, but Homer Hickam is still writing. His latest book, Carrying Albert Home: The Somewhat True Story of a Woman, a Husband, and her Alligator comes out in October,) but it was important to me to make that gesture.
One of the characters’ favorite authors is Homer Hickam. His wife’s favorite is Robert Heinlein. Both have elaborate exhibits in the museum. Instead of building on the worlds that H&H created, I extrapolated the very plausible idea that, someday, the Loonies will enjoy the stories that were written centuries before Lunar life became a reality.
I’ve been sick. Just a mild cold, but it’s enough to make me feel just bleh and not able to accomplish much of anything. Very little work has been done. I spent most of the last few days sitting in a comfy chair, watching Tiny House Nation and sketching floor plans for a fantastic castle designed for a fabulously wealthy polyamorous family who live on a Ringworld.
I was completely oblivious to the irony.
I’m playing catch-up now. Grands is out on Saturday…YEAH! So I need to do promo for that. With a short story coming out every full moon, I’m only doing some basic, relatively low-key promo for the first couple of months. I have some bigger things planned for November and December, after several stories are out.
Tis the beginning of something wonderful.
Something started long before I was born, by those before whom I bow in grateful adoration. Thank you. Thank you so much.