Smale Christmas 2022

So, 2022! The year everything went back to normal!

Suuure. Well, sort of. We did get out and about more. But we're still working from home, and spending most of our time there. And balancing the risks when we do decide to venture forth.

That said... In March we took an awesome road trip to Florida, stopping in Florence (SC), Charleston, Beaufort, Savannah (GA), and St Augustine (FL). Our eventual destination was the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (taking place in Orlando), where Alan was an invited guest. And it certainly helped that the conference hotel had palm trees, swimming pools, and decent weather for March, along with some great dining companions. While Alan was participating in writerly pursuits, Karen worked part time by the pool.

In April we went to visit Karen's mother in Arizona, and in June we took our long-awaited and oft-postponed Alaska Cruise. Let's just draw a veil over the fact that Alan and four other members of the six-person group of friends on the trip came home with COVID (with Karen the mystery lone holdout). Aside from that, it was terrific - lots of mountains, wildlife, and beautiful scenery. But if you want to see glaciers, go soon. Last but not least, after several long years, we were finally able to visit Alan's parents in England for two weeks In July.

Alan's writing year was quite eventful. In July his latest novel Hot Moon, an alternate-Apollo "technothriller with heart", was published to general acclaim. Some famous writers, including Larry Niven, Robert Sawyer, and Eric Flint, gave it favorable blurbs, and Publishers Weekly called it "a nail-biting thriller." On the strength of all that, Alan is now hard at work on the sequel, Radiant Sky.

In other writing news, Alan won his second Sidewise Award for Alternate History for his story Gunpowder Treason in last year's anthology Tales from Alternate Earths Vol. III from Inklings Press. He accepted the award at the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago in September. Alan is also now writing a regular non-fiction column for SF magazine Galaxy's Edge, on historical, cultural, and scientific turning points. Other cons Alan attended this year include Balticon in May, Awesome Con in June, and Capclave in October. He did a reading at Charm City Spec in Baltimore in September, and participated in various online panels, workshops, and podcasts.

Karen went on several photo outings this year (beyond our travels listed above), to photograph architecture, and animals in the wild and at the zoo. Her photos are currently being shown at the Bowie City Hall and at BWI airport. She continues to serve on the boards of two photo clubs and enters photo competitions to get valuable feedback from the judges. You can see the photos the judges liked best (scroll down for the new ones).

On the home front, we had about 15 Leyland Cypress trees removed after a heavy snow caused them to slowly bend over to rest on the house. Several had broken or been uprooted in the process. We haven't yet replaced them with anything else, but we probably will put a few strategically-placed evergreens in to block the views of neighboring houses. All in good time, as they say, because we are now starting the process of remodeling our 200-square-foot, badly-laid-out primary bathroom. As of this writing, we're finalizing the fixtures, and sometime next year we will have a spa-like retreat and we are looking forward to it!

What else? Well, the Chromatics are ramping up again after our COVID hiatus. In March we played to a packed house at the Greenbelt New Deal Café. In September we performed our astro-music to appreciative crowds at Udvar-Hazy (the Virginia wing of the National Air and Space Museum), performing under the tail of Space Shuttle Discovery. And in December we rocked three Christmas concerts at the Greenbelt Arts Center. We're back, baby, and still going strong after all these years.

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
• Karen's Pixels site
• The Chromatics Facebook
• AstroCappella Facebook