The plague year changed things for me. Changed how I think about things. I had a non-Covid-related health scare myself last year — I was in hospital during the spring lockdown. It was rough and scary. Since then, I’ve thought a lot about what I value, what I want to do with my life. Which may not suddenly be as long as I always imagined. (My family is long-lived. I have grandparents on both sides who lived to be 100.)

So when my employer, ravaged by the Covid depression, offered early retirement at the end of the year — I took it.

When my friend Christian Martin moved out to LA a couple years ago to try to break into TV writing, I was happy for him. But I was ravaged by regret for myself. That I hadn’t done the same and given writing my all when I was young. That I had always played it safe.

I should have taken that leap of faith. I should have bailed on one of my succession of shitty McJobs, told my boyfriend (now husband) that he had to support us for a year, and worked full time on writing. Given it all of my energy and attention. Who knows how far I might have gone?

So, when the retirement option appeared, I thought, People don’t often get a second chance like this. A chance to make writing my full focus while I still have some energy and mental focus left.

(Okay, I’m making it sound like I’m at death’s door. I’m not. I’m managing my issues and doing well. But when I first got sick I was in a dark place for a while, and it colored my subsequent thinking.)

So I took it. The chance. It’s not even like I’m throwing myself on the mercy of the universe. I have a pension — that’s unheard of for Generation X! It’s less than I made, but better than I expected. And if things get tight, I can always get another job.

So, this year I have been working finishing my latest book. It is almost ready for publication. The genre is Solarpunk and the title is THE PONO WAY. I’ll tell you more about it in subsequent posts.

Come along with me as I put some actual skin in the game. Wish me luck!

I’m in Las Vegas for the 20 Books to 50K indie author convention, the largest of its kind in the world. 1000 indie authirs, and reps from a lit if the big players in the field – Amazon, Reedsy, Bookfunnel and more. I hope to bring back some good information for my indie peeps.

In the meantime here is a picture of a cat trying to help pack.

See this Instagram photo by @kcorbyauthor https://www.instagram.com/p/B4siZGynCb6/?utm_source=ig_web_button_native_share

I heard Billy Joel’s song “Only the Good Die Young” on the radio. And I thought, “Man, this is kind of ugly. I don’t think this would fly in today’s climate. Mocking this girl’s religion and pressuring her into sex?”

And yet. It’s just a song. Maybe we have gotten too sensitive these days.

Thoughts?

Some of the people in my writer’s workshop, and others, have started a second group to work on marketing our indie books together.  We have been meeting to study up on indie marketing and draw up actions plans to publicize our books.

The first thing to do, is to provide a professional presence for your books and yourself as a writer on social media.  Facebook, Twitter, whatever you like to use. A website/blog is also a essential.  Look for some changes at this blog in the future.  For example, I changed the primary domain name from atlantisfallen.net to kirstencorby.com, to reflect the fact that my current work in progress is not the next book in my imagined “Atlantis Fallen” series, but a science fiction novel.  The website is currently about all my writing, not just Atlantis Fallen.

The next step is to create a Facebook page:  Kirsten Corby, Author. Again, advertising myself, the author, not just Atlantis Fallen, the books.  I can always create an Atlantis Fallen Group or Page later, once I finish the next book, which is currently called, The Gift of the Lion . 

I’m thinking about Twitter or Instagram.  I kind of hate Twitter, but it has a strong #WritingCommunity based around that hashtag — it even has a newsletter.  Instagram has a friendlier vibe.  But the fact is, I’m already wondering about good, useful content to post on FB and more regularly here.  Not sure I can generate worthwhile content for four different platforms.

I’ll update if I add those platforms.  But probably, it’s better to concentrate on what I already have, this blog, and my new FB page.  Please visit it and tell me what you think: Kirsten Corby, Author.

Oh, there’s also Goodreads — I have a page there — but that’s a whole other thing. We’ll talk about that later.

 

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.  Neil Armstrong made his one giant leap 50 years and about one hour ago.

I at 53 am just barely old enough to remember the Apollo program.  I remember watching Apollo 11 lift off from Cape Canaveral with my parents and my newborn baby brother, on our little black and white TV.  I knew enough to know it was terribly, terribly important, although I didn’t understand why.  I do not remember the the actual landing, I don’t know why.  Maybe I didn’t see it; it was way past my bedtime. I was only three years old.

But I learned about Apollo 11 by reading the commemorative issue of Newsweek magazine that my mom kept and carefully preserved, and is still at her house.

I am old enough to remember the later missions.  I clearly remember seeing incredibly vivid live color pictures of Apollo 17 bouncing around the Taurus-Littrow valley in their “moon buggy,” as it was nicknamed, the Lunar Rover.  I also remember thinking that we were going to see a lot more of that, that we would build a moonbase and it would become a regular thing.  And being excited.

I loved the space program as a kid. I wanted to be an astronaut when I was tiny, not a nurse or a mommy — until I suddenly realized that my eyesight was far too bad to ever become a jet pilot, and so I would never be allowed into the space program.  (That was still the case back then.) Lego had a giant “Moonbase” set that I wanted so badly, but never got because it was hella expensive.

My second grade reader was all about the space program, and I learned about the Mercury and Gemini programs that preceded Apollo, about the astronauts and their capsules — Friendship 7, Freedom 7, Liberty Bell 7.  It was not lost on me that they were named things like Friendship and Freedom, not Javelin or War Eagle or anything like that.  I was young enough to completely accept the propaganda that the moon shot was an endeavor of pure science and human achievement, conducted in the spirit of exploration and inquiry, nothing so grubby as politics.  That propaganda probably contributed to my lifelong disdain for money and the profit motive and the balance sheet, and my choice of a career in public service. As I grew older and realized Apollo had been a tool of the Cold War all along, it was bitterly disillusioning.

(But still, that war was fought at least partly by these peaceful means after all, exploration and discovery, not weapons and conquest.  They turned missiles into spacecraft, not the other way around  — the Redstone rockets that launched the early Mercury missions.)

That, the race having been won, America and the world turned its back on the moon and space exploration has been one of the biggest disappointments of my life. I grew up reading Heinlein juveniles and watching original Star Trek and 2001:A Space Odyssey.  I thought our future lay in space.  I still do.  It is our very nature to explore and expand.  We, homo sapiens, walked out of Africa over 70,000 years ago, and we walked, sailed, swam to every habitable corner of this planet.  To see what’s beyond the horizon, to pierce the new frontier, is in our very DNA. We turn our back on that urge at our peril, I think.

To my mind, Apollo is still the pinnacle of human achievement.  Apollo is my touchstone to the thought that the human race is capable of true greatness, true excellence.  That our reach does not exceed our grasp.  We went from Kitty Hawk to Tranquility Base in sixty years.  We did the impossible.  Apollo proves that we, the human race, can do anything we want to, if we have the will.

Many of the challenges that face the human race right now seem impossible to solve. But they’re not, if we face them squarely and have the will to meet them.  I want us to have that will again.  I know we can, because I saw men walk on the moon, who went in peace for all mankind.

 

Hey, just wanted to give everyone an update. I live in New Orleans, LA and we are awaiting Tropical Storm Barry. So far nothing much happening, as you can see. It’s raining but not much else.

The concern this time was that the storm surge Barry pushes up the river could overtop the levees. The river is already at record levels for this time of year, due to all the flooding this year in the Midwest. Most of the concern is for parts farther south of the city. But it’s a concern. The levees have never been overtopped in my lifetime.

Luckily, the surge is looking not to be as large as feared, and the levees appear to be in no danger.

 
In case you didn’t know, this is climate change. This is it. It’s here, now. Not some Boogeyman of the future.

 
Wednesday morning we got a feeder band spun off in advance of the storm – a line of squalls – and it was crazy! We got EIGHT INCHES of rain in NINETY MINUTES! This overwhelmed the pumping system, and we had street flooding in places it’s never happened before, like the French Quarter. The city was at a standstill. More such rain is expected when the storm makes landfall later today.

 

This storm is unusual in that all the moisture is on the back end, “behind” the eye as it travels.  So for us, the really heavy weather is yet to come.

 
The government instructions are to “shelter in place.” No evacuations. So my family is hunkered down with storm supplies – water, snacks and batteries. We’ve done this before. But every storm is different. The only way to know what Barry will do is to wait and see.