Smale Christmas 2019

Greetings to one and all, and welcome to the 2019 Smale Christmas Letter! This year brought the usual smorgasbord of gigs, writing, and photography, along with a tour of the (original) Emerald Isle, and some other notable trips.

2019 started out with a very long Christmas vacation, otherwise known as a Government shutdown. Alan was legally required to ignore his day-job altogether, forcing him to fall back on writing to entertain himself, and Karen had to stay home as well, but she worked from home to guarantee that she got paid — as a contractor, it's not a given. We did get out of the house for a few local excursions during this time: chilly hikes at Sandy Point State Park and Quiet Waters, a behind-the-scenes tour of the National Cathedral (booked prior to the furlough), and our first visit to the Newseum (free to furloughed Federal workers). Not so bad, but once we did get back to the office... well, the chaos caused by the shutdown reverberated through the rest of the year. Overall, Alan might have preferred to just go in and do his job.

After last year's 25th Anniversary spree, we'd already intended 2019 to be a quieter year for The Chromatics. We learned new music and didn't seek out as many gigs, but still had some fun performances. In June we put on an astronomically-themed show at the Greenbelt Arts Center aimed at educators, kids, and the astro-curious, which went well. July marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landings, and we were invited to perform at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage. After our hour-long show to a packed house we went out to the National Mall for the Apollo50 son-et-lumiere festivities, with spectacular images projected onto the Washington Monument. In July we performed for the Fox 5 DC (WTTG) Morning Show as part of their Greenbelt Zip Trip, with a brief interview followed by Alan and the group singing Little Bit of Rock for the massed DC TV audience. In November our worlds collided when we did a StoryLab show at NASA Goddard, discussing the history of the group and how we communicate science to a general audience, and performing our favorite AstroCappella songs. Later that day we also got to sing three songs in the giant centrifuge where satellites are tested prior to launch, inside which the echoes persist for a very long time. A spooky and fun experience. In December we performed at the Brookside Gardens Festival of Lights, a perennial favorite Chromie gig, and we will have our usual Greenbelt Arts Center concerts on the weekend before Christmas.

This was also a consolidation year for Alan's writing career. He completed an alternate-Apollo novel and made good progress with another book, the first in a trilogy set in the Mediterranean in the fourth century AD. A couple of editors want to read the full Apollo novel, and at least one publishing house has shown interest in the trilogy. In the meantime, the Director's Cut of Alan's original "A Clash of Eagles" novella appeared in the "Making History" anthology, edited by Rick Wilber (only available as an ebook, unfortunately). Alan's long novella, "The Wandering Warriors", cowritten with Rick, will be released in hardback and ebook next year from Kevin Anderson's Wordfire Press, along with some bonus stories, and his short story "The Game, and After" appeared in "The Best of Abyss & Apex, Volume 3". This year Alan was on panels at Awesome Con in DC in April, the Maryland Library Association Conference and Balticon in May, Worldcon in Dublin in August (see below), and Capclave in October. Next year he's an invited guest at ICFA, the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, in Orlando in March, and has several other irons in the fire for other events.

Karen continued her photography exploits, showing 18 photos in nine shows (four of them juried exhibits) this year. She joined the Bowie-Crofton Camera Club — the only club nearby that has competitions, and thus, critiquing. She's learned quite a lot in the past year from the judges' comments at those meetings, and was rewarded with a Photo of the Year award in two categories: Novice Color Prints and Novice Digital. Karen continues to serve on the board of the Goddard Photo Club, and between the two clubs keeps rather busy taking photos, showing photos, and attending meetings and workshops.

Alan and Karen went to England in March for his mother's 80th birthday and Alan attended his 40th reunion at St Edmund Hall (Oxford colleges start the clock when you arrive, not when you leave, so Alan is a full three years younger than this implies). He reestablished contact with several college-era besties, and had a really pleasant and nostalgic time surrounded by awesome architecture and fine beer. In May Alan went to Japan for a XRISM Science Team meeting (XRISM is a Japanese-US X-ray astronomy collaboration slated for launch in early 2022). But August was our big trip of the year, with a visit to Alan's parents followed by a ten-day tour of Eire with a bunch of other science fiction writers, followed by the World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin. The tour took us to Newgrange, Dunsany Castle, Birr, Galway, Connemara, the Cliffs of Moher, Killarney and Kenmare, Dingle Peninsula, Blasket Island, Blarney Castle, and then back to Dublin. During an otherwise-awesome horseback ride in Killarney we crossed "Participate in Stampede" off our bucket list when a bad dude on a motorbike revved his engine at an unfortunate moment and terrified the crap out of all our mounts. We survived the ensuing chaos unscathed, but several in our party were thrown (Karen included) and suffered injuries (Karen not included). More happily, Alan had a packed program at Worldcon that included a panel about NASA's Artemis program with an astronaut and several other notables. Alan and Karen went to the Hugos reception, ceremony, and the after-party at the Guinness Storehouse (Alan would have accepted a Hugo on behalf of an artist friend if she'd won), and also went to dinner with Alan's literary agent, Caitlin Blasdell.

In our ordinary day-to-day life we bought new bikes, and have been pedaling them around the area quite a bit. We did our first ever Escape Room for Chromatic Michelle's birthday, and survived to make a successful exit with less than two minutes on the clock, murderous clowns notwithstanding. We attended Shiva Brachot for an ex-student of Alan's, where he sang A Parting Glass to those members of the company who remained at the end. We sailed with friends, and went to dinner with many other friends. We tore out the driveway and had it repaved. We're both still healthy and gainfully employed. Next year brings a new decade, a trip to Hawaii with Karen's mother, an Alaska cruise with friends, and many other planned adventures. Join us again in December 2020, if not before!

Alan alansmale@gmail.com
Karen karen.smale@gmail.com

Alan's writing life
The Chromatics
AstroCappella: our astronomy-related singing
Alan's Facebook
Karen's Facebook (including lots of photo albums of the above events)
Karen's Flickr albums
The Chromatics Facebook
AstroCappella Facebook