An Exchange of Words: David B. Coe’s Weblog

So, for the second time in about three months one of our credit cards has been hacked.  Weird things about it:  First, it was the new credit card that we got after the last one was hacked.  (We have several cards, but this is the only one that seems to be giving us trouble.)  Second, the false charges put on the credit card last time were for about $2,000.00 each and were charged at bike shops in Europe.  This time the false charge was for about $1,500.00 and was charged (wait for it….) at a bike shop in Europe.  And both times, we had put in a legitimate charge at one online seller in particular about three weeks before the problem arose.  I can’t prove this last connection so I’m not going to give the name of the online merchant, but be careful who you order from, and if you can, place your orders by phone rather than over the net.

Tune in tomorrow for a new political cartoon from my friend Bryan Prindiville and me. 

Thanks to all for the great comments on yesterday’s post.  Woke up this morning and found that my newly-minted teenager was very much like the child who lived here yesterday and the day before.  One day at a time.  That’s the ticket.

I seem to be in the middle of another good writing week.  I’m making good progress on the book, and more important, I like what I have so far.  I’m even finding time to birdwatch every morning before I sit down to write.   Spring migration is starting to wind down.  We probably have another three or four days, but after that it’ll slow down and we’ll settle into a typical Tennessee summer — hot days, thunderstorms in the late afternoons, muggy nights spent sitting on the porch, listening to the crickets and frogs, watching the lightning bugs.  Sounds good to me.

As of today, I am officially the parent of a teenager.  A girl teenager.  A very pretty girl teenager.  I need a gun….

I am entering a phase of life during which I will become utterly clueless in the eyes of a child who once revered me.  I will be hopelessly unhip.  In fact, I already must be, since I can’t imagine that the word “unhip” has been in vogue since the release of “Hotel California.”  Oh, and my musical taste now sucks.  Once upon a time she thought it was cool to listen to not only the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Little Feat, but also James Taylor and Bonnie Raitt and Sting.  Now, if the musician’s name is more than one word long, and if it doesn’t begin with a lower case letter and include a number and six consonants, it’s not worth listening to.

For the next several years, my very existence will be a source of shame and mortification for her.  I will be able to make her cringe simply by opening my mouth or saying hello to one of her friends; I will be able to embarrass her any time I want. (Okay, so maybe there’s an upside to this….)

The phone will no longer be ours.  Oh, Nancy and I will still pay the bills.  But none of the calls will be for us.  My daughter will point out that this is the perfect reason to buy her a cell phone, but I’m not sure we want to go there either.  She also wants a facebook page.  And one (or more) of those online IM accounts.  She’s already emailing her friends all the time.  She makes me swear that I won’t read her messages, but even if I did want to read them, I wouldn’t be able to make sense of what she and her friends write.  We are all destined to live in a world without punctuation, capitalization, or traditional spelling, a world in which phrases become an indecipherable series of obscure acronyms:  nvm, omg, idk, l8r, g2g. 

SMN (Shoot Me Now…)

And boys.  Good God, there are going to be boys.  Lots of them.  (Of course she had to get her mother’s looks — it would have been too much to ask that she be short and funny-looking and bearded like her Dad….)  Hence the gun.  It’ll have to be a shotgun.  Something I can be cleaning on the front porch as they roll up to the house for that first date.  I should probably get a hound, too.   And a rocking chair.  They all go together:  hounds, rocking chairs, shotguns.  Then again, I’m not at all sure that as a Jewish liberal New Yorker with an earring I’ll be able to pull off the “Dad with the Shotgun” thing.  I wonder what it costs to put landmines in the front yard and driveway.

At least the second one isn’t a teenager yet.  Then again, she’s 9 already.  And very precocious.  

God help me….

Today’s post, “The Writing Imperative,” can be found at http://magicalwords.net.  Please take a look at the site and enjoy!

Pretty routine week so far.  Finished a chapter yesterday and started a new one today.  So far this week, I’ve written about 6000 words on the STILL untitled third book in Blood of the Southlands.  I like the way things are going right now, though I know better than to think it will go this smoothly start to finish.

Instead of going to the gym in the mornings I’ve been going out birding and and taking my camera along.  We’re deep into spring migration here in middle Tennessee.  Lots of warblers coming through — Black-throated Greens, Blackburnians, Chestnut-sideds.  Tiny, exquisite gems that flit from twig to twig so quickly and so high up in the forest canopy that you don’t know which will get you first:  the ache in your neck, or the dizziness that comes from constantly focusing and refocusing your binoculars.  And then there are the Scarlet Tanagers and Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, the Yellow-throated Vireos and Indigo Buntings.  No less colorful, but slower, mercifully.

Most of the wildflowers have finished blooming, although the May Apples are flowering and the forests are still filled with white dogwoods.  The trees are leafing out, providing the warblers with additional cover, which they really didn’t need, thank you very much.  It’s been a great spring.  In recent years, Tennessee has gone from winter to summer with only a week or two of truly spring-like weather in between.  Not this year.  This has been a spring to savor; cool mornings and warm afternoons.  And rain.  We’ve actually had rain.  Nancy’s garden is just exploding with irises this year — we’ve never had so many blooms.

So I get my nature fix in the early mornings and I get my pages written by late afternoon.  I could get used to this.

Today’s post on the great high school teachers who inspired me to write, can be found at http://www.sfnovelists.com

Check it out and enjoy!

Today’s post, “A Holiday for Storytellers,” can be found at http://magicalwords.net.  Enjoy!

Bit of a scare this morning.  Our younger daughter woke up complaining of a stomach ache.  Her tummy was tender to the touch, she was having trouble walking without it hurting, and she had a fever.  Nancy and I assumed appendicitis.  So I called our pediatrician and described what was happening, and they reached the same conclusion.  Long story short:  I took her in and spent the morning shuttling back and forth between the doctor’s office and the hospital (x-rays and blood work).  Turns out the blood tests were negative and a closer examination and the x-rays convinced the doctor that it wasn’t her appendix.

She’s feeling a bit better now, though her fever is higher.  We’re starting to suspect that the stomach ache isn’t the cause of the fever (although the fever might be causing the stomach ache).  Anyway, it was scary there for a little while — I really didn’t want my kid to have to deal with surgery. 

We’ve had a rough start to the year, though I know that others have had it far worse.  But between my older daughter’s pneumonia and this, I’ve spent way too much time taking kids to the hospital recently.  No more, thank you.

Still managed to get my 1,500 words written this afternoon.  I’m almost far enough along on this new book to start putting up one of those word-o-meter graph things that other writers have.  I’ll have to figure out how to do that.

Okay, question of the week:  Why is it that a haircut never looks good the first day?  Is it me?  Is it curly hair?  Is it a guy thing?

Yeah, got a haircut this morning.  I suppose I’ll get used to it.

Good writing days yesterday and today.  About 1,500 words each day on the second chapter.  I still don’t have a title for this book.  The first book in the trilogy was THE SORCERERS’ PLAGUE, and the second is called THE HORSEMEN’S GAMBIT.  I like both those titles a lot, and want something for this one that’s as good.  It’ll come to me eventually, but I’m getting tired of just calling it “book three”.