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Hello and welcome to the April 2019 issue of Aphelion!
The polen is gently foating in the air of Northeast Georgia. Everywhere
you look there's a patina of greenish-gold powdering. Lyn and I aren't
having a very good time of it this year. I came down with a sinus
infection that is starting to resemble that old SNL sketch "The Thing
That Wouldn't Leave." And as it turns out, Lyn has an alergy to juniper
polen. Guess what is the most common tree and bush in my home's
landscaping? Yeah, junipers--tall, dwarf, and ground-hugging
varities. In my defence, almost all of them were planted long before
Lyn and I got together.
At least, we've had plenty of rain to wash a bit of the stuff out of
the air. we're both looking forward to getting back out into the yard,
nevertheless. I have several projects to finish up--left over from when
the weather turned cold last Fall. I'd like to get them out of the way.
I've been writing more, lately. In fact, I have a new Tom Darby story
that I'm hoping will be finished in time for the May issue.
I posted part of it on Facebook a few months ago, and got some valuable
feedback. I went in and made the recommended edits then, and let the
story percolate in my mind for a while. This week, I pulled it back up
and did some serious editing--adding in more details, giving some
characters more dialog, fixing the times that different sceens ran for
so that it flowed without too much choppiness. The plan is for Tom to
relate a cross scetion of his adventures during his early life and on
into middle age. Then the real work will begin: rewriting "Abducted" to
take into account how I've changed Tom as a character over the past 20
years.
That is going to be a serious undertaking. I've learned so much since
then. There's also the fact that I originally wrote Tom as a much
younger man than he turned out to be as his history developed. I'm
going to have to go back to my story timeline and nail down his exact
age in each story he's been in since I created him. That'll take time,
LOL!
In other news: I'm almost finished with the first phase of the map
of Bethdish! Just a bit more coloring around the edhes of the
mountains, the coasts of a few islands, and it'll be ready to reduce to
poster-sized so that I can begin adding placenames. I'm so excited
about getting my map back!
For those of you who missed the announcement last month: I was recently able to recover a scan of a
photo of my original Map of Bethdish--the big, poster-sized thing that
I spent months hand drawing and hand-coloring as I wrote my earliest
Mare Inebrium and History Of Bethdish stories back in the early
1990s--before the Internet was a thing. I'm involved in
computer-coloring the faded out photo of my map--the original was destroyed in
a house fire back in 2007--so that I have a reproducable copy of my old
artwork. The same artwork that was essentually a mnemonic device to
help me remember all the details from my planned stories from back in
the day. The map is like a huge notebook of planned stories, history to
make said stories work within the framework of my created universe, and
between the map and my Timeline file, it's how I want stuff to go when
I make it go. And things are still going, all the time!
I've also got to get back into writing more new Mare Inebruim
stories. I'm sure there's another book's worth, lurking in my head, LOL!
All right, it's about time I shut up and let y'all get to reading the
new issue of Aphelion! Enjoy!
Dan
ON
THE COVER
Title: Outbursts
from a newborn star
Photo Credit: ESO/M. McCaughrean
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