But It's a Dry Heat

Archive for the ‘New Mexico’ Category

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

We don’t need no steenkin’ repairmen. We’re Kirbys. Together, me ‘n my man have built a barn and an art studio, remodeled the kitchen, and converted a garage to a dining room.  Like a toddler who’s tied her shoes for the first time, we did it “all by ourselves.”

Unfortunately, in the absence of repairmen, our work force is reduced to one man and one small scrawny woman, meaning there isn’t much “heavy” in “lifting.”

The Discovery of Gravity
In the desert southwest, “air conditioning” is another way of saying “swamp cooler.”  Recently, there’s been a trend toward real air conditioning, but the majority of homes are still cooled by swamp coolers. Despite a simple design, the damn things never work right. At any given time, you can expect to see a neighbor on his roof, head buried in the cooler, curses echoing off the metal sides. Often, you’re that neighbor.

A few years back, our swamp cooler (more…)

How to Get Killed at a Crafts Show

Or three things you should never say at a crafts show. (Under penalty of death. You have been warned.)

Disclaimer: By and large, the people who frequent craft fairs are terrific. Friendly. Polite. Just plain nice. But at every picnic, there must be some flies. Here are three recurring humans pests at Art in the Park. (Corrales, NM, every third Sunday of the month, May to September. Promote, promote, promote.)

1. The Cheapskate.

I’m an artist and a writer. Ever-diminishing cash flow is a fact of life. I understand that not everyone can afford original art and handmade crafts created by first-world artisans.

Nonetheless, there’s a special level of hell for people who say, “I can buy something just like this for half the price at Wal-Mart.” Special level, where you’ll be forced to watch endless reruns of Jersey Shore while bamboo slivers are shoved under your fingernails.

No, you can’t (more…)

Win a Free Copy of The Music of Chaos!

Win a free copy of my quirky urban fantasy, The Music of Chaos.  In addition to a free book, the winner of the contest will also get free “arts” by me (Small Kokopelli or angel wall art).

It’s easy. Just click this link to go my contest page over on Romance Junkies. There, you’ll see the following question:

“What is the name of … ‘the brave soul who had dared the displeasure of my company’?”

The answer can easily be found in Chapter One of The Music of Chaos. (Seriously, you can just skim through the text. He is the only other person in the scene.)

The contest runs through August 31, 2011, so you have time to enter multiple times. While you’re there, check out some of the other authors/books that are participating in this contest.

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“Blind dates are always a train wreck.”
By day, Regan O’Connell is a highly respected project manager. By night, she’s a Wolfe, a paranormal agent working for a vampire syndicate.

Her two worlds collide when a co-worker sets her up with tall, dark and sexy Jason Lake. Jason is a Holder, a member of an ancient, all-human organization dedicated to policing the activities of things that go bump in the night. Things like half-vampire Regan.

Falling for the wrong guy is the least of Regan’s problems. There’s a murderer on the loose, and his favorite weapon is chaotic magic, an erratic force with the power to rip holes in the fabric of the universe. And the best way to catch the killer is to get close to Jason, the man who is not only her enemy, but her prime suspect.

Baby Quails, Ahoy!

Location, location, location. Perhaps that’s what a quail thought when she decided to make her nest under a rock in the rock garden. Maybe it was the sturdy construction, or the lovely view, but something must have canceled out the negatives for this nest location–first and foremost, the constant presence of a two-legged predator. I don’t eat quail, but many of my brethren do, so I can’t fault her for being a mite suspicious of my motives.

She moved in during the height of my battle with (more…)

Desert Garden in May

Life’s a beach.

Of sorts.  Casa de Kirby sits in the midst of a vast sandy desert. Lots of sand and sagebrush.  No rain. No large body of water, unless you count the Rio Grande, which, nowadays, isn’t so grande.

Provided you can stand the complete absence of moisture–hasn’t rained in months–it’s not a bad place to call home.

Being an avid gardener, when I first moved out here, I was horrified by the soil.  Soil is a generous term.  It really is beach sand.  The funny thing is, it turned out to be a great growing medium, especially for drought tolerant plants that demanded “well-drained soil.”  You don’t get any more (more…)

The Canvas Thief

So I stopped procrastinating and put the contract for The Canvas Thief in the envelope.  It’s now crossing the continent, destination Canada.  Actually, the fact that Harlequin/Carina Press–yes, as in Romance novels–is in Canada is news to me.  Shows how much I know about what has (sort of) become my genre.  (There’s a long blog posting about my weird relationship with romance sitting on my hard drive. I keep fiddling with it, trying to explain my is-shoes with romance tropes in a way that doesn’t alienate every romance reader/writer out there.)

The Canvas Thief (which, I hope will get a new title because I suck at titles) is a hybrid of romance, urban fantasy and suspense. Set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, it’s the story of an artist who accidentally brings two of her graphic novel characters to life.  It’s set in the same “universe” as The Music of Chaos and Breas the vampire is a secondary character.

Since I set out to write romantic fantasy, not a romance, it doesn’t adhere to some romance novel requirements.  Like that the hero and heroine meet in the first chapter, if not first page.  In The Canvas Thief, they meet in Chapter Four.

That could, I guess, change during editing. I’m pretty malleable, editorially, but I’m rather adamant that this story not have the usual forced, first page/first chapter meeting of H/h seen in many romance novels.  It just doesn’t work. Not for this story.

Beware of the Guinea Hen

Because I never posted the finished version of this, here.

The guinea hen crossing sign.

For anyone bored enough to wonder, the basic process to create it is as follows:

Again, sketch a design.  Transfer the design to plate steel with a projector.  (Sometimes I draw designs right on the steel, but it usually works better to project it onto the steel.)

Next, I cut out the design with a plasma torch. I do this by hand, although it can be done with a computerized plasma torch.  (Which is like the offspring of a printer and a plasma torch.) I enjoy this part and so I’m no hurry to go with the high-tech approach.

Once the design is cut out, I use an angle grinder to remove the rough edges and industrial scale (black stuff on the surface of steel).  I hate this part. It takes forever. It’s messy and I always end up snorking up black boogers afterward.

Then, I do any welding and assembly. For this design, that means bending the steel rod that makes up the base and stake. Then welding on the letters and guinea hen.

More grinding–ugh!–to clean up welds.

Finally, I do finishes.  My favorite finish is polished steel with heat alteration.  But it’s a pain in the ass (requires loads of grinding).  Paint is actually easiest.  Apply a primer coat. Then color.  I did this design with spray paint, and dabbed the white dots on with a brush. I then finish with a clear coat. And it’s ready to go.

Courage Is

A quick doodle that got out of hand.  Featuring Talis, a dark elf, and a character from my novel The Music of Chaos. (Click image for full view.)

This is totally non-canon since Talis is a pacifist. I was listening to the song “Courage” by Orianthi and this image came to mind. The Music of Chaos is set in modern day Albuquerque, NM and Talis’s usual apparel is blue jeans and a ratty T-shirt, not the D&D get-up he’s sporting here.

Talis is one of those characters who originates as a bit of background flavor and then devours page space like a rottweiler on a steak. He started out as a passing character in a single chapter.  Literary oblivion was the fate I’d chosen for him, since the chapter didn’t advance the story at all.  Then I made the mistake of giving him a drop of backstory.  The drop became a flood as I got more and more fascinated with him.

Before I knew it, he was Regan O’Connell’s (the protagonist) best friend. And then he started popping up in every short story I wrote.

One of these days, he’s getting his own novel.

The Music of Chaos, Now Available!

I spent the weekend on yet another home improvement project.  Some people tithe at their local house of worship.

We tithe at Home Depot and Lowes.

Anyway, come Monday morning, I find that my debut novel, The Music of Chaos is now available from Decadent Publishing.

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Here’s the blurb:

Regan O’Connell seems to have it all. She has a PhD and a good paying job as a project manager with a consulting company. Unbeknownst to her co-workers, she’s a one hundred and thirty-year-old demi-human, with a magical pedigree that includes vampires and elven royalty.

Harnessing her magical ability has never been easy. Immature by the standards of immortals, she has little-to-no control over the magic that simmers in her blood. For more than a century, she has worked as a secret operative for the vampire syndicate the Grey Brethren. For just as long, she has hidden her magical disability, struggling with one paranormal misadventure after another. Tired of her shenanigans, the Grey Brethren station her in Albuquerque, far out-of-the-way by paranormal standards.

The arrival of a mysterious user of chaotic magic—a world destroying power—spells the end of Regan’s trouble-free existence. Soon after, her vampire employers issue an ultimatum: find and neutralize the chaotic magic user or find a new job. To make matters worse, she has inadvertently started a war and developed a surprising attraction to a human. Sorting the mess out will require a little help from her friends, some growing up, and acceptance that she will never be a practitioner of conventional magic.

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It is available from Decadent Publishing and in Kindle format over at Amazon.  You can also get it at Smashwords.  (Hint: It’s about a buck cheaper if you buy it directly from the publisher.)

That Home Time Religion

Wednesday night. Under a gray sky, a mass of fat rainclouds rolled over the house. So low you could almost touch them, but opaque and thick like dark gray cotton balls, not misty, like fog. They moved fast. Lifelike spooky, leviathans that hurried east across the valley where they collided with the Sandia Mountains, and broke apart as rain.

Husband critter and I watched, delighted by the first rainfall in months.  Outside, rain collected in puddles on the brick pathways.

After a few minutes we looked at each other and said, “The roof!”  We made for the master bathroom.  (“Master bathroom” being such an incongruous term for a room the size of a closet.)  Once there, we studied a section of ceiling near the ventilation fan.

See, the homebuilder didn’t bother to hook the bathroom fan vents to the exterior vents (Tiffany/Collatz Builders, I’m lookin’ at you).  So for nearly a decade, the ventilation fan had been pumping humid air into the gap between the drywall and roof.  Ruining the roof, insulation and some of the roof framing.

Husband critter and his parents repaired most of the damage.  But that section of roof still leaks on the rare occasion of a real rainfall.

Fortunately, the roof held on Wednesday night.  So scratch “roof-tar-goopy-stuff” off the weekly Home Depot/Lowe’s list. Nevertheless, we both surveyed the bathroom, silently cataloging a litany of dreams.  A new vanity.  Fresh paint.  And did the mold just move?

Our household doesn’t just shop at Home Depot. We tithe there weekly.