Well, it's a picture anyway. There is a certain difficulty in taking pictures of a small black dog.

But Ruby has found the sunbeam. And the open shelf that sits above the heating vent. And she is happy.

To quote For Better Or For Worse, "Why does the house smell like dog?"

Here are Katie and Julie, dressed up for Halloween in the costumes that daisy_knotwise made for them.

Katie is Strawberry Shortcake, while Julie is Pinkie Pie from the My Little Pony Equestria Girls -- mercifully easier than a full Pony costume.



Conditions for trick-or-treating here were miserable, with a high around 40 degrees and 20 mph sustained winds combined with snow flurries. The girls made out like bandits as they went out with a couple of their friends and the friends' mother while I chickened out and stayed somewhere warm. :)

I think we had three or four groups hit our house, which may be a new low. Not surprising, given the weather.

Today was Katie's first day of first grade. We got to school and she happily trotted off to her new line.

Julie will start kindergarten on Wednesday.

Wow!

And so, after weeks of waiting, Halloween finally arrived and it was time for me to take Katie and Julie out trick or treating.
( Yes, of course there are pictures... )
We didn't get a lot of kids in our neighborhood, but we never do, given that we live on a 18 home dead-end street where not all of the houses participate. Ah, well. We did get more than a dozen groups, I think (daisy_knotwise was handing out the candy and would have a better count), which isn't too bad.

The upcoming ISFiC Press book for Windycon is "Assassins and Other Stories" by Steven Barnes, our Author Guest of Honor. shsilver, our editor, saw this lovely shot of Mount Alamut, one of the major locations in the novel, and thought that it might make a good basis for a cover. Unfortunately, it was shot by an Iranian photographer and there's that whole nasty embargo thing going on which would make licensing potentially entertaining.

At one point during the process, I went out looking for licensable images that might be used to pull a cover together. I found this for an image of the mountain and this for a skyscape. And when you pull it all together and work it over in Photoshop, you get something that looks like this:
( Big old picture inside )

Unfortunately, it turns out that the chances of this turning into mud in the printing process are something on the order of a hundred percent, so we're going to be doing something else. (It's amazing how much brighter things are on the screen than they are when you print them out. I loaded new cartridges into the color laser printer last night, because I really needed to see if this was going to look ok in print. It won't.)

On the other hand, I had fun doing it and I kind of like it, so I figured I'd let you all look at it.

We paid for the licenses, so somebody should. :)