Amy caught me falling in love with my technology a while back and reminded me of this plan. I approve of it.

I finished a Philosophy of Thieves, and found it an entertaining and interesting piece. I'll work on notes next. Today was a difficult day, multiple plumbing issues.

Thanks so much Gud!

(ok, arbitrarily moving this away from Bitches and the relationship conversation, but...) a. I must have loaned out my CSU book.
2. The work manual for Homicide detective says 2 things about eyes of bodies that I could find. Eyes become cloudy within eight to ten hours of death. And "an experienced investigator" can often look in someone's eyes and know they are about to die. Neither one is what Barb wanted but I thought they were worth posting about.

I had to research decomposition once, for a YA series. It was sort of fun, actually.

Not as much fun was researching slaughterhouses. No one wanted to tell me how the cows were actually killed.

Thanks erika. I'll keep digging (ha, bad death humor) to get info.

Cog is chugging alone nicely. I've got 8 chapters and 17,500 words. The first chapter will probably need a full rewrite and turn into two chapters (it rushes through things too much and there's a lot of past perfect tense), but it's a rough draft so I'm not sweating it much.

So far beta readers have really liked it, the same ones who were willing to tell me when things didn't work in my first novel. I'm feeling good about it as well.

Plot bunny I will never use - not the main plot, a really good McGuffin.

A wind farm would make a great cover for a large marijuna business. The villain (or anti-heroe?)start a wind farm that produces at peak about 10X the power their greenhouse needs. A typical wind farm will drop below 10% of peak less than 10% of the time. So 90% of the time there will be enough power to run grow lights and pumps and such. Add some flow batteries (doubling your capital costs) and it will probably give power more like 95% or 99% of the time. Occasional purchase power to fill the gap won't constitute enough demand to be suspicious. Since production is being drained for use, power sales will be lower than they should be for a plant that size but only by a third. That won't really look suspicious in "eybeballing", a little inefficient but not implausibly so. The only way to see that is beyond inefficient is to do an hour by hour analysis of output vs. windspeed - which somoone would already have to very suspicious to do. Also, it is completely reasonable to have strong security to keep trespassers out of a wind farm to keep idiots from killing themselves by stumbling into electrical equipment and such. The only thing that might be a red flag, is that if the farm was in a water constrained area someone might notice water usage was very high for a wind farm. (Wind farms use very little water, so a water intensive wind farm is an intensive thing.) This would be especially good if you wanted to have an newagey liberal uber-hypocritical villain. On the surface a "good guy" producing green power. Below the surface breaking a law many think should not be there in the first place. But using precious water for a luxury crop and (if you choose to make him or her so) being a murdering bastard drug lord under it all. Or maybe not hypocritical, maybe absolutely sincerely self-rightoues and convinced that he or she is in the right. Even show the person as genuinely kind and compassionate in between murders, make your villain a complex and rounded human being.

Again a McGuffin. But a really good one to give the villian you have in mind a scam that has not been used before and one that can be tweaked to fit whatever character you have in mind. Henchmen and Henchwomen could be colorful characters too. Being able to do the work keep a wind farm running and being able to the work to keep a marijuana greenhouse running is quite a combined skill set.

So I took a break from the story I was working on and wrote a 1500-word story of an idea that's been kicking around in my brain for years. I've finished the second draft and completely redid the ending. Still not sure how well it works.

Anyone want to read it? Profile addy is good.

Tommy, send it my way.