Tomorrow is April 1st. On this glorious day in world history, countless groups of people prove that making fools out of other groups of people is really, really funny. I look forward to enjoying many hoaxes and staring suspiciously at the published on date for all news and articles sent my way for at least the week or two after.

April 1st is also the beginning of Camp NaNoWriMo. (This is not a hoax.) A bunch of unfortunates have agreed to be writing buddies with me for thirty days. We've got a private virtual cabin at campnanowrimo.org in the great campgrounds of the inter webs. You can play too if you sign up before midnight. You probably won't be in my cabin, but you can still get a story draft down on paper. (And you might be in my cabin. The rest of the cabin slots are randomly assigned by Camp NaNoWriMo.)  

I'm going to be working on my Worlds of Honor 7 story during April. My goal is to complete a full first draft and revise it at least once by the end of the month. If all goes especially well I'll revise it a few times and be ready for my Honorverse beta readers to take a look at it by May 1st.

April 5th is Easter. May the day bring you joy and peace. (Most Easter celebrants will eat an exceptionally good brunch, but my favorite bit is the triumph over death.)

April 6th is Half Off Chocolate Bunny Day. There is no religious significance to this Monday of discount chocolate sales, but I consider it a very important food observance. I highly recommend people of all faiths partake.

April 15th is the U.S. government IRS tax filing deadline. Sadly this is not a hoax or a religious observance to be opted out of. The government is very insistent about taxes and does nasty things to people who don't pay up.  

While time in prison might give you more reading time, I strongly advise against it. You just can't count on being imprisoned for tax evasion anymore. The IRS is much more likely to freeze bank accounts and garnish paychecks. The result tends to be a harsh lifestyle reduction where you have to choose between buying books and paying rent. And that'd be an easy call except that if there's the least bit of rain it leaks through your cardboard box and gets on that new release hardcover you're trying to read.

So please pay your taxes. The future of storytelling depends on book buyers like you. //guilt trip//

Onward to the rest of April...

I'll be working on my Worlds of Honor 7 story all month, remember? But you could be frolicking about reading amazing things and enjoying great stories. Here's a few things I'm eagerly looking forward to.

C.J. Cherryh's Tracker (a new book in the Foreigner series) will be out on April 7th. (Tracker is going to wait in my Kindle unread until I at least finish my Worlds of Honor 7 first draft. Feel free to taunt me on social media about this. It'll make me write faster. I'll also cry. But I'll write while I cry, so it's all good.)

The Avengers: Age of Ultron comes out the end of this month. (I really want to see it opening weekend. If I'm slow about getting my work done, I'll see it during the following week.)

Charlaine Harris's Day Shift (number two in the Midnight Texas series) comes out on May 5th. If I blow all my self-imposed deadlines, this book's release date is my backup line in the sand. I must finish my work in time to be able to read Day Shift the moment the pre-ordered download hits my Kindle.

So that's my April. What are you planning for your month? Going to Age of Ultron? Reading anything new? Doing Camp NaNoWriMo maybe?

Last weekend (and part of the week prior) Charlottesville hosted the Virginia Festival of the Book. Some friends invited me, so I squelched my natural inclination to decline and  went. (My preferred level of social interaction is "lives under a rock but the rock has good wifi.")

I had an amazingly good time. (Note: I quite often have fun when I venture out into the the strange and wonderful world where contact with greater humanity is possible. But when good times happen, I still find it surprising. Thank you humans!)

At the Virginia Festival of the Book, Les Johnson, Toni Weisskopf, and Chris Oakley held an excellent panel on Putting the Science in Science Fiction. (There they are, left to right in the photo.) Les Johnson cowrote Back to the Moon among other things and works for NASA. Toni Weisskopf is my publisher at Baen Books. Chris Oakley, one of the friends who encouraged me to come visit for the weekend, moderated the panel and owns Oakley's Gently Used Books.

After the programming Friday evening, I got to talk with Toni. (Drum roll please...)

There will be a Worlds of Honor 7 anthology, and it will include another story by me!

I will now curl up around my laptop and hide from humanity while my introversion shields are overhauled. MantiCon is only 58 days away, and shields must be at con strength by then. Also, I have an Honorverse story to write. My rock and I are very, very pleased.

SFWA let me in as an active member in time to vote in both the Nebula Awards and SFWA elections. (I question their judgment. But if I were too proud to be a member of any organization with standards low enough to admit me, I’d never get to join anything. Humility; it’s a life skill.)

For those of you who don’t know yet: Charles E. Gannon has another Nebula finalist novel this year in TRIAL BY FIRE. Gannon’s FIRE BY FIRE was a finalist last year. I like the Caine Riorden series. There are also a lot of very good other stories on the Nebula slate. But I may have been urging eligible writers to join SFWA just to vote for TRIAL BY FIRE. I admit nothing.

Voting for the Nebulas involves many hours spent reading to decide which stories to vote for.  Voting for SFWA board members involves a couple minutes thanking the volunteers willing to take jobs no one else wants (those running unopposed) and maybe an hour reading up on the few contested elections.

So which did I do? You guessed it. I’ve finished the Nebula slate and submitted my ballot.

I need to take a road trip tomorrow, so there will be no pie making for me. Luckily I live in America, Land of Pie. If any of you doubt me, I'd like to point out that even McDonald's has pie on the menu.

Please enjoy your delicious homemade pies you True Devotees of Pi. (And then please also make me a pie when next I see you.) I will be pie-less and crying at 3-14-15 9:26 tomorrow. Remember, I'll be totally and completely distraught.  (Except for the fact that America is the Land of Pie, so I'll be in the McDonald's drive through achieving road trip Pi nirvana.) But ignore that parenthetical. Think of me as crying, because then you'll feel sorry for me and I'll get more pie. More pie is definitely the goal. Look at my empty Pi pie plate. Feel my pain! Let the pie rain down from the heavens!

And to everyone else who was considering ignoring the Pi Day of the Century in favor of that Irish holiday, I say to you: Pi can be green and Pi can be Irish. Enjoy some shepherd’s pie tomorrow with your green beer and Celebrate All The Things! (Also bring me pie. I don't care if it's green.)

If I could copyedit reality, I'd make ISIS pick a new name. The International Space Station has first claim on all combinations of I and S.

In English it's ISS. In French it's SSI. When I see ISIS, my first thought is that's Typo for the international space station. Then I read about how muslim girls from Britain have been stopped from going, and I'm thinking, yeah, yeah, I know, we all want to go to space, but you have to apply like everyone else…

Is it a problem that I like my version of reality better than actual reality?

ISS should have more name recognition than ISIS. And those kids are need better dreams. If they knew a little more they could act out properly by going to Oxford to get a PhD in theoretical astrophysics.

Photo credit: NASA

Dave Seeley is doing the cover art for THE ROAD TO HELL. He posted an early draft of the art online. You can see it here. This sort of thing really delights me, and I can’t wait to see the final cover. I'd especially like to see it printed on a book I can hold in my hands and possibly even sign. I'd wish for royalty payments too, but I try not to get too greedy.

I may have squeed about the cover art rather a lot on social media. Dave Seeley noticed and emailed me. He has a book of his own coming out this September. He thinks I'm a fan. He's right.

What happened to February?

Yeah, I got nothing. I wrote stuff, honest. There was that Multiverse scene rewrite that kicked my butt repeatedly and some new fiction, and I probably spent too much time on social media again.

David Weber has THE ROAD TO HELL. He has not yet threatened me with bodily harm for the damage I’ve done to our original outline. Also, Sharon Rice-Weber has not said anything about yours truly never being allowed to work with him again. This is all a very good sign.

There are contracts and rumors of contracts. And I will now take this opportunity to not so stealthily point out that I could be drafting work for any of those possibly-to-be-contracted works even now as you read this. 

I know that some people ::cough, cough, David Weber, cough:: have built the mad skills necessary to turn out a 200,000 word novel in a month and edit it in the next six weeks. I’ve studied how he does it. A large portion of the success criteria involves him sitting in a chair in front of his computer for sixteen hour stretches day after day. Working to a very detailed outline seems part of it too. I can emulate some of those work ethic behaviors, but the highly developed storyteller’s instinct for what’s working and what isn’t is not a part of my tool kit yet. I wants it! We wants it, My Precious! 

Ahem! Excuse me.

Mere mortals such as myself still write ourselves into dead ends routinely and need longer to produce a legible first draft. I have no idea when delivery dates for the next book or story might be. I don’t even have a contract. But I’m a natural worrywart. And I have begun fretting about missing a deadline for work I haven’t even been contracted to do. Some people might consider this a sign of borderline psychosis. I like to call it “planning ahead."

So if anyone out there would like to send me money for words, please go ahead and tell me what you want. The sooner you do, the sooner I can start engaging in hand-to-hand combat with my muse. The words who are about to die salute you.