Summering the Winter Away in Rancho

Tonight will be my third night down south, and life has been good. I'm settling in quite easily, I think (having already been here twice made it even easier, I'm sure). School has been going pretty well, so has writing. Change of place used to throw me off my game a bit, but that doesn't seem to be at all true here. I certainly don't mind the change!

The weather is beautiful here. It's been around 65-70 degrees, mostly clear and sunny with a few white clouds hither and thither. Somehow the whole atmosphere here seems very conducive to physical fitness, and as I had already planned to get my exercise back on track here, things look promising for my oft-neglected musculature. I won't be satisfied until I can say in a month or so that I've lived up to it, though.

I took a walk today. It was a really long one, long enough to leave me a bit pooped out by the end, but it was very worth it. I got to go through some very nice neighborhoods and make a circuit around Lago Santa Margarita, a nice little lake and evidently something of a social hotspot. I wisely took a camera, and here are some of the results:

The little neighborhood path that runs behind our house (complete with chin-up and bar-dip bars along the way!)

From what I can tell, a fairly typical Rancho street.

My cool sun shot. :)

I betcha I won't see too many of these around Hillsdale!

Rancho is surrounded by some bold hills; as you can see here, this one was doing something of a "Battle in the Clouds" effect during my walk, although I didn't see Hooker's corps.

Lago Santa Margarita.

And the other end of it...

And now looking along the shore (I think the eastern shore, given that the sun was setting at the time) toward the end shown in the first shot.

Pretty cool, huh? I've also been having fun starting on the pirate books David lent me (thanks!) and learning all about buccaneers, filibusters, privateers, and the whole scurvy lot of 'em. Oh, and I'm finally working in earnest on the last chapter of Kiriana. So much for my "end of January" predictions, but such rules are made to be broken. Or at least we tardy authors had better hope they are! :P

Cheerio, all.

Possible Faceless Theme

This song is really beautiful, and I like the lyrics as well. I think it might make a good main theme for Faceless. Listen to it with the sound up a bit; it really opens up at the end. :-)

Not bad for a senior in high school.

I'm of the age where old Corollas and Toyota Matrices are a good deal. When I get my own car it's not going to be anything fancy (or even respectably professional) until and if my authorial ship comes in and I'm not, for example, paying tribute into the collegiate coffers. I have, however, had the chance to drive some fancy cars since I started putting the pedal to the metal. I learned on Dad's car, a very fine and businesslike Toyota Avalon. Today, in the process of moving a truckload (literally) of books out of the house--more on that later--I got to take the tiller of this monster:




The Cadillac Escalade, to be precise. It's not exactly a lean mean fighting machine, being what one might call a gentleman's SUV, but it had a bit of a growl when one punched it up and was surprisingly lithe compared to what one might expect (or at least what I expected). I felt like I was driving a bus, though. I haven't looked down on the roofs of so many sedans for a long while. Anyway, I doubt it's the kind of car I'd ever want for myself (especially since its base price is slightly above $50,000), but it was corking good fun to drive. :D

Important Happenings

Yesterday I believe it fair to say that I officially began Faceless, my latest novel project. I provisionally started it in January, but I found my opening page lifeless and scrapped it for the new prologue, which I find considerably more interesting. This novel is concerned with the life and times of an intriguing Japanese-American secret agent with a very special ability, and if God blesses the writing of it, it promises to be an extremely enjoyable (and perhaps in some ways slightly challenging) story to write. Right now I'm going to estimate its length at 300-350 pages, but that is about as an exact science as predicting how far the barometric pressure will fall tomorrow. (Doubtless there is someone out there who could predict that with relative accuracy, but I couldn't, and thus the analogy holds.) I've been deliberately cultivating a different tone and feel for this story, and so far I've been quite pleased with the result. I would say that I'm somewhat influenced by Cormac McCarthy, at least in some respects: for instance, gutting a lot of sentences of commas to give them a kind of spare and hard-edged force. Commas tend to soften things, I think. Periods or simply nothing harden. So far those who have heard the prologue have been confused as to what's going on, which I also consider a success, as that was my intent. :-)

On a different subject, I think it's time I sum this up on my blog, as I realized I have been giving this news out rather piecemeal. By the end of this month I shall have moved to Southern California, which will be my permanent residence until the end of August, at which time I shall drive two-thirds of the way across the country and live in Michigan for most of the year (but it is to So Cal that I shall return for breaks, though not exclusively, as I plan to revisit Oregon fairly often, to see my grandparents and keep contact with the Deckers and my very dear church). This is a general note, therefore, that after the beginning of March anyone combing the Northwest for my whereabouts is going to have a big headache and no Connor Hamilton by the end of the day. ;-) I do find it rather amusing that the county in which I'll be living is more than three-quarters the size of my home state. But California has no Columbia Gorge, no Mt. Hood, no proper winters, none of Portland's quaintness. I'm going to miss old Ore while I'm away--after all, I've never been out of the state for more than two weeks at a time for 18 years, as I can recall.

Although I have no idea where I'm going to end up after college, I do imagine I would fancy living in the Northwest again, so it's quite possible that in five or six years I'll be back where I started. We'll just have to trust God and see. :-)

Oh, I should also note that, God willing, I am now officially going to Italy this summer. :D Destinations: Rome, Pisa, Florence, Pompeii. Duration: 12 days. I'm not specifically very excited right now, oddly enough, but I imagine that as the summer draws closer that will change.

And now, I'd best go work some more on Faceless. Valete!

Ha!

Kiriana has now reached 400 pages! In Merkhatin, one very enjoyable journey is about to end...in the streets of Washington D.C. and Tokyo, another is about to begin. :D