Martha Wells

Donation for a Chance to Win Early Copy of The Siren Depths

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 13:41:04 GMT

When I get my author's copies of a new book, I try to do cute photos of the book with my cats. Cats were not cooperative this morning:

I also usually do a drawing for signed copies, but in light of hurricane Sandy, I wanted to do something a little different.

To enter the drawing for an autographed trade paperback copy of The Siren Depths, the third Books of the Raksura novel:

1) Make a donation to an organization for hurricane Sandy relief, such as the Red Cross, or any of the organizations listed at the bottom of this post by TimeOut New York, or here on this post by Forgotten New York, or one of the organizations doing relief for Sandy's damage in the Caribbean, like Global Giving. The Huffington Post also lists a bunch of organizations you can donate to, including some international ones.

2) The donation can be any amount, though a minimum of $5.00 would be nice. (This is on the honor system, but I will ask the winners to send me the e-receipt for their donation, with the address you want the book sent to, how you want it personalized, etc.)

3) To enter, make a comment on this post with the name of the organization you donated to. It would be good if you listed the amount, but if you really don't want to you don't have to.

4) On Wednesday morning I'll draw a minimum of five winners (more if we have a lot of entries) randomly and announce them.

5) Please spread the word!

ETA 6) If LJ or Dreamwidth won't let you post here, email me through my web site and I'll put your entry in the drawing.

The things you must remember:

* these are my author's copies so they arrived early. I don't know when the book will start showing up in stores, but I bet it will probably be around mid to late November.

* the original release date for the book was December 4, so the ebooks will not be available until that date. This is something that is decided by the publisher, just like the price of the book, the availability, the cover, etc.

***

If you can't donate, you can enter the GoodReads giveaway, or you can enter both this giveaway and the GoodReads giveaway.

Night Shade Books has put the Kindle US version of The Cloud Roads on sale for $1.99. (Down from normal price of $7.99)

Several Things

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 14:17:12 GMT

We have a heavy mist this morning, like a gothic novel is happening in the neighborhood. I hope it comes back tomorrow, when we're going to the Renfair with friends. Also finally got a good night's sleep last night. The bottle of hard cider probably helped.

Cheap Book thing:

Night Shade Books has put the Kindle US version of The Cloud Roads on sale for $1.99. (Down from normal price of $7.99) Probably a promo for The Siren Depths, which will be out next month. (You can read the first two chapters on my web site here.)

Hurricane links:

* How to help in New York City after Hurricane Sandy A list of organizations to donate to is at the bottom of the post.

* The donation page for the Red Cross.

* My agent, Jennifer Jackson, is doing a charity auction for hurricane Sandy relief: You can bid on a critique of a partial manuscript.

* Solar Water Disinfection I keep a collection of empty plastic soda bottles as part of our hurricane kit.

* Writer Marie Brennan has an autographed book sale to benefit disaster relief.

Fun things:

* Kickstarter for The 2013 John Picacio Calendar This would make a great Christmas gift.

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 15:22:45 GMT

A few things:

* The GoodReads giveaway for The Siren Depths, the third Books of the Raksura novel, is now open. (You can also read the first two chapters and see the preorder links on my web site here.)

* Dave Gross has posted the first four chapters of the new Pathfinder novel, Hail to the Queen.

* My agent, Jennifer Jackson, is doing a charity auction for hurricane Sandy relief: You can bid on a critique of a partial manuscript.
There is much to be thankful for. My power’s been restored. The enormous old pine that fell in my yard didn’t hit my house. My family came through the storm safely. I’ve now heard from all my co-workers at DMLA and they are all safe as well. I also want to take a moment to thank and appreciate all those who are out there getting more power, supplies, and help to those in need. There were certainly people who extended a helping hand to me, and they were a treat.

In support of those people, I’m going to auction a critique of a partial manuscript of a novel. A partial manuscript will consist of up to 50 pages in standard manuscript format (approximately 12,500 words). In order to maximize benefit for the bidder, I’m going to limit this to the kinds of projects I represent, which includes both adult and YA fiction (not MG). (See my guidelines for more information.)

ArmadilloCon and Hurricanes

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 13:55:04 GMT

Getting ready to leave for ArmadilloCon!

***

Everybody in the path of the hurricane please be careful. We're about a four hour drive from the Gulf coast, and a lot of the hurricanes that hit us flop at the last moment, but they're still scary. The ones that don't (hurricane Ike) are even more scary.

Here's a couple of my favorite hurricane preparations:

Solar water disinfection I've collected a bunch of soda bottles to do this if we have to. They're handy, because you can also use them to fill with water before the storm. (You do want to have a lot of drinkable water on hand in case the water is contaminated after the storm. And fill the bathtub, too, because you can drink it if you really have to, and also use it to water your animals or wash dishes and so on.)

This is an ebay link but it shows a bunch of different models: battery powered fans This was a recommended by a friend who spent about two weeks in Houston with no power after Ike. In our climate, once the hurricane is over, we go back to heat and killer humidity, and the fans can cool the room enough to let you sleep.

During the late summer, I always try to have a few days worth of canned food, plus extra dry food for the cats, on hand, so if one turns toward us unexpectedly I won't have to buy too much at the last minute.

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 15:32:31 GMT

Got some stuff done this weekend. Re-watched some Doctor Who episodes to refresh my memory for an essay I'm writing, plus made a little advertising booklet for The Cloud Roads to hand out as a freebie at the conventions I'm going to. It's got the first chapter, plus the description, some blurbs, etc. The printing was expensive (would have been more expensive without the helpful Office Depot coupon) but I'm hoping it'll be a more effective promo item than just a bookmark or a card with the cover and book description on it.

Still working on the third Cloud Roads book, and I'm now back to the point where I like it again, and really hope the first two do well enough that the publisher will want to publish it, too.

Couple of articles:

From Bill Crider: Boston.com After Ike, a deluge of reinvention
Hotel employees whose homes were uninhabitable were invited by owner George Mitchell to move into the Galvez, with meals and lodging free of charge. After all, the luxury hotel still had to prepare for weddings and cruise passengers later that fall, while an $11 million renovation geared for the centennial was already underway.

“We could have said, "We're gone," and started over somewhere else, but we stayed," said chef concierge Jackie Hasan, 60, whose apartment building was condemned because of Ike damage. "We are the stewards of the people who came before us, who went through that terrible 1900 storm but said, we're going to stay, rebuild, and withstand the forces of nature thrown at us."

Jackie Kessler: Making the Darkness Visible
Heads up, WSJ: Life isn’t always beautiful and joyous. That’s not the real world; it never was. We just know more today about the issues that have been around for a long time — and we’ve come to a point where we’re not afraid to talk about these issues.

Speaking of conventions, here's my schedule for the rest of the year:

June 24-26. I'll be Guest of Honor at ApolloCon 2011, in Houston, Texas.

August 17-21. Renovation, the 2011 World Science Fiction Convention, in Reno, Nevada.

August 26-28. ArmadilloCon 33, in Austin, Texas.

November 11-13. I'll have a table at the Austin ComicCon, in Austin, Texas.

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 13:16:33 GMT

Sorry I've been missing lately -- my fifteenth wedding anniversary was last week, we went on a quick trip to Galveston, and this week I've been kind of swamped with stuff that needs to be done immediately.

I'm going to be at World Fantasy this weekend, in Columbus, Ohio. If you're going to be there, come say hi!

My panel is:

Saturday Noon: Panel B16: Sword & Sorcery. Scott Andrews, Martha Wells, Howard Jones, Patricia Bray. Sword & Sorcery. Clearly this "literary fossil," as Alexei Panshin once called it, is not yet extinct. But has it evolved? A discussion of the continuing appeal and the nature of the form.

I'll also be at the mass autographing Friday night.

There was talk of a Black Gate Magazine Group Reading on Friday, but it's actually on Saturday:

2nd Floor, Madison room* (or immediately next door), Hyatt Regency Hotel
Saturday, 8:00 pm - 10:00 pm

A number of Black Gate authors will be doing ten minute readings of their stories, including me, so come on by. It's not on the official schedule, so probably won't be listed on the program.

***

While we were in Galveston, we got a chance to do the Ashton Villa Haunted Tour, which is actually the Ashton Villa Post-Hurricane Ike Restoration Tour, with bonus ghost stories. The house, built in 1859, got three feet of water in it during hurricane Ike. (This sounds like a lot, but it got nine feet of water during the 1900 storm that killed between 6000 and 12,000 people. It flooded, but didn't wash away or implode and kill everybody inside, so go house.) The Ike flooding ruined the downstairs floor and damaged the entire collection of ground floor furniture. The furniture has been restored now and is stored upstairs in the bedrooms. (For a mansion, it's not actually that large a house, especially compared to the Moody Mansion or the Bishop's Palace, which is built like a combination castle/bomb shelter.) The floor is still being replaced and the walls are being worked on.

(One of the people on the tour with us wanted to argue about all their decisions, particularly why the older women who were working in the house during Ike didn't save the collection (chairs, tables, couches, the piano) by carrying all of it up the 30-40 foot grand staircase designed by the human mountain goats common in 1859. If I never hear the words "why didn't you just--" again, I will be a happy, happy woman.)

One of the cool things we heard was about the buried basement. After the 1900 storm, the seawall was built and the grade of the island was raised by several feet. A lot of people at the time had their houses jacked up to the new level, but the Ashton Villa didn't bother, and the family just had the basement filled in with dirt. (Which is why the house sits flat on the ground now, unlike the other mansions on Broadway. The short ornamental iron fence in front also extends several feet below the ground -- the only thing they moved up was the gate.) After Ike when they had the floor torn up, they started excavating the basement to find out what was down there.

They found a crypt under the basement.

They have no idea who, if anybody, is in it. But it certainly casts the family's decision to fill in the basement on top of it in a new light.

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 14:32:43 GMT

Yesterday was the two year anniversary of hurricane Ike.

Here's a link to Boston.com's Big Picture One Year After (I've actually met the man in picture #11. He's the owner of Bistro LeCroy on the Strand in Galveston, and we've eaten lunch there several times. Which you should all do if you have a chance, because it is truly delicious and worth far more than the small amounts they charge for it.)

***

From jess_ka: Abra SW is posting a serialized steampunk novel, to get donations for her mother's cancer treatment: The Circus of Brass and Bone

Cracked.com: Five Things You Think Will Make You Happy (But Won't) It's all good advice, but the section about power strikes me as especially true.
The thing is, it's the desire itself that's poisonous...These are the people who are only nice guys because of fear of retribution if they do otherwise, so their main goal is to become strong enough that no retribution is possible...

So it's not just that power will destroy you. It's that the urge itself is bad news. That desire for power is a vicious, ravenous animal and feeding it only makes it strong enough to tear its way out of your belly and go on a bloody rampage.

I think there's a lot of bad online behavior that goes back to a desire for power, like trolls, online dogpiles, etc.

Thu, 27 May 2010 12:36:34 GMT

He's only posted the first part, but I suspect this is going to be a good story: The Time I Met J.K. Rowling by Lev Grossman You wouldn’t think it, but Time has some major-league Harry Potter fans on staff. Senior staff. They can rattle off trivia like they were Newt Scamander or some shit. But I was the books guy, and the most visibly nerdy staff member. So I went.

And another good story: Ursula Vernon reviews the book Life List It’s the sort of inspiring story that would make a great movie, if it wasn’t about something as incomprehensible to the average viewer as birding–she was told that she had terminal cancer and perhaps six months to live. Given few treatment options and a near-certain death sentence, she decided to forgo treatment and to go birding around the world as long as her health would permit.

She lived for eighteen more years and was the first person to ever see more than 8000 birds.

Oh, for those of us who are about to start hurricane season, (or anybody who might end up in a situation where the tap water is contaminated), I've been meaning to post this: Solar Water Disinfection is a method of disinfecting water using only sunlight and plastic PET bottles.

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:07:41 GMT

How often do other people have anxiety dreams? Lately I've been the Anxieticia, Queen of Anxiety Dreams of Anxietica. (These are dreams where you're specifically trying to do something fairly simple -- find a sweater, get to class, make a phone call, put your shoes on, open a door, remember where your phone is OMG, etc -- and you just can't, either through fumbling, interference, whatever.)

Couple of Halloween links, from Rick Klaw:

10 Awesome Homemade Halloween Costumes

and Historical Halloween House Tours. This includes the Ashton Villa in Galveston, TX, which is doing haunted tours this October. They have a little blurb about the house's history, but leave out the part about Miss Bettie during the 1900 hurricane, standing on the second floor balcony with a pole and a rope, trying to rescue people who were being carried away by the water. In better pictures you can also see the tiny little foot-high ornamental iron fence around it. That fence is actually over eight feet high, and was buried when they raised the island after the 1900 storm. They didn't bother to lift the house, just buried the lowest floor.

Hurricane Ike Anniversary

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:33:26 GMT

The Big Picture: One Year After Hurricane Ike. There are some really poignant before and after photos of Galveston here. From photo 2 on, click on the photo to get the alternate version.

One of the big differences that's hard to see in photos is the dead trees. Galveston used to have tree-lined streets, but the saltwater killed a huge number of them.

We were in Galveston on vacation when Ike was about to come in, and left at the first mandatory evacuation, so we were back home by the time it hit. Here's my before and after photo set.

And this one, showing the Ike waterline on the Strand:

ETA: Photo 10 on The Big Picture, where it says "Murdoch's Pier and restaurants amid the debris..." That debris was Murdoch's Pier. There was nothing left of it but the pilings, but it's being rebuilt. It was originally built in the late 1800s and rebuilt after the 1900 hurricane.

ETA2: Dallas Morning News Before and After Pictures

ETA3; The Short but Eventful Life of Ike from The Big Picture, September 2008.

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:53:53 GMT

Another great informational post from tacithydra: Freivald's Flash Fiction Online is a Queer Unfriendly Market. They refused an ad for Crossed Genres Magazine LGBTQ issue.

BTW, the lovely art for the ad is by Paul Davey: Mattahan and he's got some new art up on his deviantart site, including some Dossouye portraits (from Charles Saunders' fantasy novel Dossouye).

On the personal front, things are not good. As far as we know, Troyce is still scheduled to be laid off at the end of this month. He's applied for the few IT jobs that are listed at the university, here in town, and outside of town, but there's been no word back yet. The jobs tend to appear for a short time in the listings, then get pulled, probably because there are so many applicants.

I got a hellaciously painful cramp in my left hand from typing Tuesday, so bad I thought I had actually sprained my hand somehow. It started to feel better fairly soon and was pretty much gone by yesterday afternoon, but damn. I think I have a better idea now of how much I can type in a ten-hour period and how I shouldn't do more than that. stina_leicht said that calcium can help, and I noticed I had been slacking off on my calcium pills lately. So let that be a lesson to the rest of you.

And the weather has been much better. There was a cold front last week that dropped the temperature to 90, and the past couple of days it's been raining. It's also hurricane season, so I need to remember to start stocking up on canned food, cat supplies, etc.

And here's a link to a list of Hurricane Ike Anniversary Events at Galveston

ArmadilloCon Schedule and Tattooed Librarians

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:11:41 GMT

Someone had asked, and yes, it's absolutely fine to friend me. I may not friend you back, because I don't do a huge amount of reading on LJ anymore. Oh, and my writing question posts are here.

And I'm also on Dreamwidth at marthawells.dreamwidth.org.

ArmadilloCon Schedule August 14-16, in Austin, TX.

I'll be there Friday, but I'll be one of the teachers at the writers workshop, so I'll be in that all day.

Sa1100DW City Building
Sat 11:00 AM-Noon deWitt
R. Rogers, S. Lynch, M. Wells, S. Shinn, V. Docherty, J. L. Blaschke*
Creating a city that both works for your story, and makes sense for the world it is in.

Sat 12:00 Autographing

Sa1300R Reading
Sat 1:00 PM-1:30 PM Robertson
Martha Wells

Sa1700DW Religion and Mysticism in SF/F
Sat 5:00 PM-6:00 PM deWitt
J. Vinge, K. D. Wentworth, P. Benjamin, S. Lynch, M. Wells*, M. Cardin

Su1000DZ If I Knew Then What I Know Now
Sun 10:00 AM-11:00 AM deZavala
J. Vinge, E. Moon, L. S. Carl*, M. Wells, D. Webb

***

Also: Tattooed Librarians The Texas Library Association is selling a 2010 calendar called “The Tattooed Ladies of TLA.” Twenty-one librarians show off their tats over 18 months. The calendar is a fundraiser to assist libraries that are still recovering from damage caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:35:57 GMT

The FACT auction benefit writer Aaron Allston will be July 19th: Aaron Allston Fundraiser and Auction
Austin, TX -- A fundraiser and auction to benefit the Aaron Allston Donation Fund will be held on Sunday, July 19, from 1-5 p.m. at Arbor A in San Gabriel Park, 445 E. Morrow, Georgetown, TX. The Aaron Allston Donation Fund is a medical fund established by his friends to help Mr. Allston, an internationally known science fiction writer and author of several Star Wars novels, with large medical expenses recently incurred as a result of emergency bypass surgery. Mr. Allston is a long-time resident of Central Texas.

I sent some autographed books in for it but I can't remember which ones.

***

Some good news for Galveston:

Delegates vote to keep all Shriners' hospitals open: Separately, the delegates voted 756-482 to reopen the Shriners Hospital for Children-Galveston. The burn hospital has been closed since Hurricane Ike hit in September.

Wetlands Rescue: The money for West Galveston Bay will be used to rebuild 328 acres of marshes with dredged sand...
The intertidal wetlands are critical because they act as nature’s speed bumps against wind and waves. They also serve as a productive nursery for a variety of sea life, including white and brown shrimp, blue crab and red drum.

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:27:49 GMT

links:

Jennifer Jackson is doing a drawing for free books to celebrate her 16th anniversary as an agent.

A.M Dellamonica's new book Indigo Springs is now up for preorder and you can read the first chapter online.

looniewolf let me know MSNBC did an article on Galveston: Galveston still hurting from hurricane’s beating 8 1⁄2 months after Ike slammed Texas, island city struggles to recover.

Tue, 05 May 2009 13:00:54 GMT

redplasticglass asked: So you're reading a story and it's trotting along great - what irritating thing, either content or style (or both), will throw you out of the story and either ruin things for you or just makes it really difficult to immerse yourself again?

There's a lot of things, actually. In fantasy (unless it's comedic fantasy) anachronisms will really throw me off. People who are at the swords and spears level who tell each other, "I'll meet you in fifteen minutes." Basically anything that feels like an intrusion of the author's real-world culture into the imaginary culture of the book. POV problems will also do it, like switching from third person personal to omniscient so fast you get reader whiplash.

***

Here's the picture of where the hurricane Ike waterline was on the Strand:

***

I'm going to be dog-sitting today for a friend who has to spend some time at the hospital waiting for a partner to have minor surgery. So yay, I get to hang out with a little dog! Though it'll be interesting to see how the cats react.

Mon, 04 May 2009 13:01:21 GMT

Galveston photo I forgot to post:

Obey the sign

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:26:32 GMT

Just got back from Galveston, and we had a great time.

There's still a lot of visible damage from hurricane Ike. Most of the old oak trees down Broadway are dead or dying, from being saturated with salt water during the flooding, and there are dead trees and crepe myrtles everywhere. Lots of stores and restaurants and clubs are still closed, and this was especially obvious in the Strand. (Hendley Market, my favorite store, was still closed.) You could see houses with missing walls or roof sections, or hotels or condos with their outsides peeled off. The beaches are still much smaller in places, with missing sections of greenbelt. At the far end of the east beach area a lot of little buildings were gone and there were random chunks of concrete everywhere. Murdock's Pier is completely gone, but is being rebuilt. The poor Balinese is completely gone, with all its long history of illegal gambling and booze and celebrities and being raided by the Texas Rangers. We saw a big fishing pier that was mostly gone, and the part that was left had a pickup truck wedged into it.

But there were lots of people there, swimming and surfing and having a good time, and a lot of places along the Sea Wall had been repaired and spruced up. And the beach house we stayed in last summer was still there.

Gaido's is also still going strong and though we had an hour wait to get in, it was worth every minute. And we got up at 5:00 am this morning and walked down the beach, and it was wonderful.

The Flagship is toast.

The Galvez is also on the Sea Wall, across the street from the Flagship, and it was built in 1911 and laughs at hurricanes.

Damage near Stewart's Beach

View from the top of the Sea Wall

The other direction down the Sea Wall

The 1900 hurricane memorial on the Sea Wall.

The San Luis, hotel, spa, and bunker. It was built on top of a WWII gun emplacement, and the bunker was the command center during hurricane Ike.

The Strand

I don't have the picture of the high waterline that was marked along the Strand, but it was well over my head.

The Elissa. This was the view from the second floor of Fisherman's Wharf, the place we had lunch at.

The waterfall volcano at the San Luis/Rainforest Cafe on the Sea Wall.

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:25:05 GMT

Some good news for Galveston and UTMB: UT Medical Branch rehiring after layoffs.

***

Unrelated, here's an interesting Clay Shirky link passed on by Rick Klaw: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable:
Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of "When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem."

***

We've had thick ground fog for the past two mornings now. Around 7:30 am today it was so thick I could barely see the neighbor's house. Troyce said he was going outside to search the driveway for the Newspaper of the Baskervilles.

I haven't been doing much except being sick. For most of last week I had exactly zero working nostrils. We did clean out two small corners of the garage, so I have more stuff to take to Good Will.

Also, when cleaning out the guest room closet, I finally went through the box of stuff my father gave me after my mother died a few years ago. A lot of it was things she had saved for me, like all the cards my relatives sent her when I was born, a letter she wrote to my sister when she was still in the hospital after having me, a picture of my cousin who was killed in an accident when he was 14. And a bottle with all my baby teeth. I have no idea what to do with that. I guess if I ever disappear and the cops need DNA, they'll come in handy? I have no idea.

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:10:58 GMT

I've been having an LJ hiatus this weekend, and after this I think I may continue it for a bit longer. My offline life is very stressful at the moment, and restricting my online presence helps (it gives me less to worry about), even though I miss all the people I keep in touch with this way.

But I've debated this for a while and I do want to mention how I feel about the discussion about race in SF/F that's been going on for the past couple of months on Live Journal. (I've followed it in other SF/F venues since I first got active in fandom in the 80s.) I think it's a vitally important discussion, and I don't think I can contribute much to it except listening to the people with a far deeper understanding of it than I could have have. I also feel very strongly it's part of my job as a writer to take criticism.

I'm going to steal from naominovik's post, and suggest that people check out rydra_wong's links and summary, and to recommend a few LJers I've read on this: zvi_likes_tv, ciderpress, and ktempest.

***

Something I'm extremely worried about at the moment:

Texas House Bill #6: http://www.legis.state.tx.us/tlodocs/81R/billtext/pdf/HB00006I.pdf

This is the bill which will supply funding for the UT Medical Branch in Galveston, which was terribly damaged in Hurricane Ike. For more info, here's an earlier post with links to articles about how important UTMB is:
For poor Texans considered "indigent," 160 of the state's 254 counties use the UTMB system for affordable health care.
...
"This is going to be devastating to every county, not just to our county," Alfred said.

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:09:27 GMT

Storm-tattered Sails: The Elissa, the tall ship docked at Galveston, is getting the sail repaired that was damaged in hurricane Ike.
Brink, 54, will use the experience gained over 30 years of sailmaking to craft a new 630-square-foot fore lower topsail, also known as a storm sail and the last of the Elissa’s 19 sails to be furled in a storm.

Brink began the task a week ago by spreading panels of sailcloth over a pattern taped to the floor of the ballroom at the 1859 Ashton Villa, one of the historic homes maintained by the foundation.

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 15:03:44 GMT

Hurricane Ike, long gone but still wrecking everything:

Galveston Daily News: Rental Assistance Slow to Arrive: Ford, who has been living in a rental house on the federal Disaster Housing Assistance Program, is worried she soon will be evicted because the Galveston Housing Authority, which is administering the program, has not paid her rent in three months.

Some Galveston County residents who are enrolled in the program have received eviction notices from their landlords, who say they haven't been paid the promised rent from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The agency is contracting with the Galveston Housing Authority to administer the program.

Of the 7,000 Galveston County families who qualify for federal housing assistance, 1,800 or 26 percent, have found houses and 74 percent have not.

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:10:55 GMT

Happy inauguration day!

Now I need to figure out the station with the least annoying commentators so I can watch it.

***

Damage From Hurricane Ike Threatens Seawall: Ike left so little sand to shield the Seawall's base that the underpinnings could corrode or wash away, causing the 17-foot-high concrete structure to collapse.
...
Ike pounded the seawall with waves and debris for at least 12 hours, damaging pavement, causing sinkholes along the sidewalk on top of the wall and swallowing up the protective beach.

The Seawall maintained its structural integrity, but will require the first major repair job in its 105-year history, said Harrison Sutcliffe, chief of the engineering branch of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Galveston office.

Dickens on The Strand

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:16:32 GMT

Galveston's December Dickens on The Strand Festival to Raise Money for Post-Ike Recovery. That's next weekend, December 6 and 7. If you'd like to throw some money Galveston's way, tickets can be purchased online through that site and it's only $9.00 for general admission. Even if you can't go, your ticket purchase would help.

There are a lot of restaurants, shops, and clubs on the Strand that employ a lot of people, and if those could get going again it would really help.

ETA: Other places to donate: Gulf Coast Ike Relief Fund
Coastal Recovery Fund
The Rosenberg Library

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 14:31:26 GMT

encorecrazay found this link where the New York Times finally prints something on the FEMA situation down here.

***

Another neat abandoned buildings link: 7 Abandoned Factories, Mills, and Mines. Some nice ones in the US, too.

***

I've been reading Dial Me for Murder by Amanda Matetsky, which is part of a mystery series set in New York in the 50s, where the protagonist is the first female writer on Daring Detective Magazine. Sounds good, doesn't it? And the setting and situations are really good, and the writing is good, but the voice of the protagonist is sort of borderline annoying, at least for me. I'm still going to finish it, but I may not get any more in the series until I read another bunch of books first.

Next I'm reading Why Mermaids Sing by C.S. Harris, a mystery set in the Regency period. After that it's probably The Aware by Glenda Larke or Flesh and Spirit by Carol Berg.

ETA: More book recs in the comments

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:14:53 GMT

Couple of fun links:

Book View Cafe a new site offering free and subscription fiction by twenty authors, including Katharine Eliska Kimbriel, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Madeleine Robins.

Adventures in SciFi Publishing podcasts with interviews and news.

***

Hurricane links:

From KFDM in Beaumont:
The group that spoke before council this afternoon, did so, after receiving letters from the city that they are not allowed to begin repairs, until their flooded homes are elevated five feet. To most aging residents, and the children of those residents, that demand is unreasonable.
...
The city says the five-foot rule is a requirement of FEMA, one they unfortunately cannot alter on their own.

From Galveston Daily News:
The festival will be held, in part to draw attention to a recovering Galveston, even though the hurricane left The Strand battered and abandoned.

Two months after Ike, businesses along The Strand have not reopened. Shattered windows are blocked with butcher paper or newspaper. Doors are padlocked and chained shut. The streets are still littered with trash, Sheetrock, broken glass and dirt. (If you want to help, buy tickets for Dickens on the Strand.)