Category: castle frostbite.

books. castle frostbite.

Bookshelf tour, July 2025

The house has bookshelves everywhere, but the one in my office is kind of like the RAM to their SSD, the stuff I want to have close at hand for reference or as my next entertainment.

The top shelf holds all of my books, including the ones to which I have contributed over the years (that would be the Wild Cards novels, the Love Death + Robots anthology, and the Unidentified Funny Objects volume.)

The middle shelf is my current TBR pile, plus a few quick reference books and stuff I want to read again.

The bottom shelf is for books from writer friends as well as some signed copies.

(There’s another shelf below that for large-format books and my Holy Scripture–the Calvin & Hobbes and Far Side compendiums. And the top shelf is filled with the positively unwise amount of A5-sized notebooks I stocked up on just in case the manufacturer suddenly stops producing them.)

aminals. castle frostbite.

Baby snek

This is Cinnamon the corn snake, child #2’s new pet. A friend of mine said that this shot should be on the r/accidentalrenaissance subreddit.

If the progress bars on the right are moving a little slowly right now, it’s because I took on another super-secret project that has a tight schedule, so I had to bump it up ahead of everything else on the production schedule. Can’t say what it is just yet (and probably not for a while) or whether it will pan out, but if it does, I’ll be sure to tell you all about it. Rest assured that it’s super cool and awesome.

castle frostbite. weather.

Whoopsie

That’s how the last week has been going for me. How was yours?

Kid #1 put the Jeepito in the ditch as he was leaving for work. Not really his fault—the conditions were pretty bad, and the road was treacherous even for an experienced driver. But it definitely kicked off a chain of work-disrupting events for me.

I had it yanked out by a tow truck, and at first I thought there was no damage done. Going up the hill back to the house, however, the 4×4 refused to kick in when the front wheels slipped, and I slid all the way back down the hill in reverse. Turns out the transfer case is busted, so now the 4×4 is strictly FWD until it gets fixed. That’s a major repair, and I still don’t have a quote on it from the transmission guy, so we’re down to one car at the moment. And the attendant calls, arrangements, dealing with two different garages, and tentatively looking for a new set of wheels ate up a lot of my writing time and peace of mind over the last week.

Oh, well. Life happens, and at least nobody got hurt. Everything else can be fixed.

UPDATE: Jeepito has a fried rear differential. It’s not a cheap fix but not as expensive as I had feared, so we’re getting it fixed, and the little offroad banana will soldier on for a few more years. (It has fewer than 70,000 miles on it, so there’s still life in it unless it blows something that exceeds the seven grand or so it’s still worth.)

castle frostbite. health. travel.

A belated Worldcon souvenir

I made it for over a week after Scotland and all the attendant travel, but it looks like the Worldcon COVID wave has finally caught up with me. (My wife tested positive on the weekend and has been mildly sick ever since, so I knew it would only be a matter of time.)

The weird thing is that I tested negative all week including just yesterday. Alas, this isn’t the first time for me, so I’ll do what I did before–get Paxlovid, take it easy, and drink lots of water. I feel fine right now, and if this round is like the last one, I’ll feel a little crappy for two days and then be mostly fine for the rest of the week.

 

aminals. castle frostbite.

Klohund training

This is the tip bowl we keep on our bathroom counter.

Who needs a tip bowl in the bathroom, you may wonder, and why is it filled with cereal?

Well, imagine you have a dachshund who is scared of the shower, and getting her bathed is always a stressful endeavor for both parties. One day, you get the brilliant idea to desensitize her to the unpleasant environment, so she’ll start associating the shower with positive things and stop being anxious about her baths. And because she’s a dachshund, the logical positive reinforcement is food. You keep some cereal in the bathroom and occasionally throw a few pieces into the empty shower stall when she’s around so she can go in there and get a free snack.

Now imagine you’re so successful that the whole approach backfires, and the dachshund gets so used to the routine that she follows you into the bathroom every time to collect her “tip”.

In the public bathrooms in Germany, they usually have a (generally female) bathroom attendant out front who has a little plate on a table for a small customary tip. Colloquially, they’re known as “Klofrau”. Well, we managed to train ourselves a Klohund.

On the plus side, she’s much better with baths now.

(The cereal is a high-protein, grain- and sugar-free alternative, not grocery store sugar bombs, in case you’re wondering about the health aspect, and she only ever gets two or three little pieces at a time.)

castle frostbite. gadgetry.

Spicy Pillow Syndrome

I was typing on my old MacBook Pro today and noticed that the bottom case was wobbling back and forth a little despite being on a flat desk.

I grabbed my trusty iFixit toolkit, took off the case bottom, and found this:

 

That’s what we call a “spicy pillow”, a lithium-ion battery that has chemically degraded to the point of releasing gas. The only way to fix it is to (carefully) remove the battery and professionally dispose of it because it’s a fire hazard.

Sadly, the battery pack in this model is glued into the case with a strong adhesive. To get it out, I’d have to disassemble pretty much the entire bottom case and then loosen the adhesive with solvent, all the while working around a battery that may turn into a tiny volcano if it’s pierced by a screwdriver or the corner of a spudger by accident. That’s $100 or so for a new battery, plus two or three hours of tricky labor, all to fix a laptop that I bought in 2017. I decided not to spend the time, money, and effort to keep a 9-year-old laptop going, so I pulled out the SSD storage, closed the case again, and set it aside for disposal.

I used that MacBook Pro pretty steadily for the last seven years, so I’d say I got my money’s worth out of it. Still, it has traveled to a lot of places with me, and I wrote more than one novel on it, so I’m a little bummed to have to retire it. It couldn’t run the latest MacOS anymore, but it was still working just fine for daily computing. Alas, it’s not safe to use like this anymore, so out to the great computer lab in the sky it goes.

castle frostbite. writing.

Quick office tour, February of twenty-four

 

I had to clean up and reorganize the desk today, so I took a picture of its pristine state while it lasts.

The artwork on the wall: John Picacio cover for one of my Tor.com Wild Cards stories, Michael Komarck cover for LOW CHICAGO featuring my character Khan, and (above the pulse rifle prop from ALIENS) the cover of the Polish edition of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT, kindly gifted to me by Fabryka Słów. The framed art on the left next to the corkboard is a pencil drawing of my home city in Germany.

The corkboard has various motivational trinkets and some of my reference index cards on it, and the whiteboard is mostly blank right now except for the motto of the month.

I’m currently using an Alienware M17R5 AMD with a 25″ Dell UltraSharp display and a Keychron V1 keyboard and M3 mouse, for those of you interested in the hardware. Still writing in Scrivener, with final polishing and editing in Word before submission because Word is the industry standard. (I’ve gone back to longhand for the first draft, so the stuff that ends up in Scrivener and then Word was written with actual ink on actual paper first.)

AND THAT CONCLUDES THE OFFICE TOUR. Make sure you hit the gift shop on the way out!

aminals. castle frostbite. writing.

17AUG23


I don’t have much to report because I am busy pushing this draft along (as you can see on the progress meter in the sidebar), so have a picture of a Dinky Dog in her favorite habitat–a cozy dog bed in a kitchen where there’s food preparation in progress.

I’m a slow correspondent at the best of times, and I am downright neglectful of my email inbox in the middle of a draft, so if you have sent me anything lately, please don’t be surprised if the reply (if applicable) takes a while.

books. castle frostbite. health.

ARCs and progress bars and also Readercon


The ARCs for SCORPIO are in, which officially means it’s a real, actual book now.

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that the progress bar for DESCENT hasn’t moved a whole lot in the last two weeks. That’s because the whole family came down with COVID two weeks ago, and now that we have recovered, we are hosting family from abroad for a little while. Family visits always keep me extremely busy because I have to function as tour organizer, translator, interpreter, driver, and so on. But the bar is moving again, and I predict that the draft will still be done on schedule.

Lastly, I’ll be at Readercon in mid-July for a few days, so drop by and say hello if you’re going to be there as well. I’ll also have a bunch of these ARCs with me for reviewers and bloggers and so forth, so hit me up for one if you are such a person and you bump into me at Readercon…unless I see you first, in which case I’ll try to push an ARC on you.

castle frostbite. digital housekeeping.

Not a sponsored post (but I’m available for endorsements)

After five and a half years of steadfast and reliable service, I semi-retired The Beast, a 17″ Alienware laptop. I replaced it with…another 17″ Alienware laptop.

The Beast served me so well that I decided to go the same route for its replacement. I stuck with the same brand and screen size, picked a model I liked, and moved the configuration sliders for the hardware options all the way to the right for almost every component. I’m hoping that this system will last as long as the old one, which is still trucking along and now serving as a spare gaming rig for the kids in case one of theirs goes out of commission.

The new one is much faster than the old model and over two pounds lighter. But the killer feature for me is the mechanical keyboard they managed to squeeze into the laptop chassis, ultra-low profile Cherry switches. It’s a $100 upgrade from the regular keyboard, but let me tell you that it’s OH SO WORTH IT. It makes every other laptop keyboard I’ve ever typed on feel like mushy garbage. It’s firm and tactile and very clicky, and I want this keyboard on every laptop from now on.

(Keyboards are an important component when you’re in the business of typing a quarter million words or more a year.)