Long time no type

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craneAs I’ve always said, if I’m not participating in online blogs, Facebook, emails, and anything else yet invented or yet to be, it generally means I’ve been busy with other things. A summer full of travel, a novel completed (a rough first draft, that is) and a lot of consulting work have kept me away from posting here. To get the ball rolling again, a photo of the loading *cranes in Alameda at sunset, looking north west towards the hills of San Francisco.

*the rumor is that cranes such as this in Alameda and Oakland are what inspired George Lucas to create the AT-AT snow walkers in the movie “The Empire Strikes Back”.

That seems about right

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notfoundA few months ago I attended a writer’s conference in Manhattan. At said conference there was a panel, and upon this panel sat an agent who spoke of how he likes to work with authors, how new authors are his particular favorites, how he likes the unique voice. How he enjoys the personal connection with a writer. I spoke with him briefly after the panel, he asked me to send him a query letter, I agreed.

This week I received the rejection email from the agent. It began “Dear Mr. Fitzgerald…”

I re-read my query numerous times, thinking I’d made the mistake. But, no, my name was clearly stated in all of the materials, in the email return address, everywhere.

In addition to getting my name COMPLETELY incorrect, he also misspelled the title of my novel. I guess being an agent means you don’t have to pay attention to the details.

Next!

Pfalz D.IIIa Model

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With the several model completions I’ve posted recently and with at least one more to come shortly, it might appear as if I’m turning these things out at an amazing pace.  In reality all I’m doing is finishing a bunch of projects I nearly completed in the past, lost interest in, and am now revisiting so I can clear the bench for a new project.

Here’s another WWI biplane.  Love those pretty colors!  For the final photos, click HERE.

Hour of the Wolf, Once More

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Saturday morning was Altered Fluid’s fifth outing on the Saturday morning radio show Hour of the Wolf.  While the process of critiquing a story is fairly rote for us anymore, doing it live on the radio does provide quite a thrill.  This time through we went at Rajan’s story “School Bus” and were as gentle with it and him as we thought necessary.

For those of you who didn’t feel like getting up at 5 a.m. to listen live, you can download an audio file of the broadcast from the Hour of the Wolf website, June 27th broadcast.

Manassas/Bull Run

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img_2374Besides visiting the NASM while in D.C. this past weekend, I also spent more than my fair share of time out at the Manassas National Battlefield Park. It’s a beautiful woodland area now smack dab in the middle of urban sprawl. I have to admit to not knowing a lot about most of the first battle of Bull Run, and I have only studied about one aspect of the Second Battle.

My area of interest is Brawner’s Farm, where the Iron Brigade first saw combat as a unit on August 28th, 1862. The farm remained in private hands after the war and up until the late 20th century. It’s still a relatively unknown part of the park, as the National Parks Service is still restoring the site and mentions it only in passing in the park literature. It took me a while to find the place amidst terrific thunderstorms that moved through the Washington area on May 29th, but find it I did, at last, and during a 15 minute break in the weather I was able to walk the field completely alone.

The photos are random shots from the Henry Hill area of the First Bull Run area of the battlefield, and the shots of the white two-story house are the Brawner farmhouse.

National Air and Space Center

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img_2456This past weekend Kristen and I traveled to Washington D.C. While she was in conferences all weekend, I rented a car and did my usual “visit old stuff” thing. I made several trips out to the Manassas battlefield (more on that in another post) and finally made my way to the National Air and Space Udvar-Hazy Center.  This center, far from the confines of the D.C. mall, is in a remodeled hangar at Dulles airport.  The facility is massive and houses dozens of rare and wonderfully restored aircraft.

It pays to be annoying sometimes

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img00006-20090422-1628One of my biggest pet peeves is the misuse and swapping about of the words “than” and “then”.  Drives me absolutely nuts.  So much so that at my old desktop support position I continually corrected the call tracking tickets of others and let them know of their mistake whenever they’d use one in the place of the other.  Flash-forward two years, I’m back at the law firm as a consultant for a Blackberry rollout project, and I see the reminder in the photo attached to a co-worker’s monitor.

Makes me smile.