Home of Author Patricia Briggs.

July 9, 2008 [Mike]

Books

The Science Fiction Book Club, affectionately known as the SFBC, has an omnibus version of the first three Mercy books, called Preying for Mercy out, for those of you who like your books hardcover (thank you, Dave, for reminding me). Cry Wolf is due out the end of the month . . . and I think there should be an audio book release of it at or near the same time.

Patty has just done the copyedits of "The Star of David" for the Toni P. Kelner/Charlaine Harris anthology Wolvesbane and Mistletoe and turned in the short story "Seeing Eye" to Pat Elrod for the St Martin's anthology Strange Brew. That leaves only finishing the story for the Dabel Brother Comic books and she's out of the short story business again for a while. No more short stories until she's caught up with her already contracted work.

Back Surgery

Patty had back surgery last month. She had broken her spine many years ago, without knowing it, and it had healed improperly. For the last year she's been having increasing trouble with back pain, which was getting bad enough that she frequently couldn't walk. The surgery basically cut off part of the broken vertebrae, and used a bunch of screws and hardware to relieve the pressure on the spine, then grafted bone back together to fuse the lowest lumbar vertebrae with the her tailbone so it can't move again. The surgeon was superb, and the operation was a complete success.

Patty was pretty confident, going in, that she'd be up and running in a few days. The doctors told her that this was a very invasive surgery, and that she'd be down for a while, but she didn't believe them. As it turns out, all those folks with fancy titles and extra ititials behind their name are pretty smart. Most of last month was kind of a blur of pain meds, missed deadlines, and too much travel. Yes, travel. More on that in a minute. The good news is that Patty's brain finally came back on-line reliably a couple of weeks ago, she's getting around far better than she has in the last year, and she's continuing to improve. Let's hear it for modern medicine!

The Perils of Relocation

Butte has been very good to us, but many of our friends live in the Tri-Cities, and we miss them. The area may be hot, dry and scenically-challenged, but home is where your friends are, so we've decided to move back. We've gone back a couple of times this Spring looking for properties with enough land for Patty's horses. Ten years ago we could have bought large tracts of desert for nearly nothing, but times have changed. I can count the number of properties with more than ten acres on my fingers. If you look at those within our budget, I only need one hand and I could probably still play guitar with the unused fingers. Slim pickins' indeed. Still, we found a likely-looking place, and we've made an offer . . . and the wheels of loans, inspections, more inspections, surveys, appraisals etc. are turning slowly forward.

Naturally, we need to sell our current home. I was "mostly" done with a couple of large outbuildings, and the house just needed a little "spiffing up". A couple of months ago we figured we'd need a couple of weeks to spruce things up. Apparently, we're both optimists. I laid new laminate in much of the house, and we paid a professional to recarpet the remainder. New paint, trim, window shades. The outbuildings that were "mostly" done turned out to be a huge time sink. It's all the little stuff that takes time. I've installed the underground electric and sub-panel, and wired the hay harn. Doors are hung, windows set, and the cedar siding is nearly complete. I'm still fighting soffets, roofing and painting. We finally dediced that if we waited for me to be done, we'd be back to winter before we even listed the place, so we called our realtor yesterday, and had him put it on the market. So if anyone is looking for a little place on fourty acres outside of Butte, just let us know. I should have everything fixed in (you guessed it) just a couple of weeks.