{"id":304,"date":"2017-01-25T19:09:32","date_gmt":"2017-01-26T01:09:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/?p=304"},"modified":"2017-01-25T19:09:32","modified_gmt":"2017-01-26T01:09:32","slug":"cold-welcome-signs-of-spring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/2017\/01\/25\/cold-welcome-signs-of-spring\/","title":{"rendered":"Cold Welcome: Signs of Spring"},"content":{"rendered":"

Spring flowers are coming out here (including the non-native little white daffodil-shaped things) and not having a cold welcome from the weather at all.\u00a0 Dandelions, a honeysuckle that flowers in winter and smells like lemon, swelling buds on all but the most wary trees and bushes.\u00a0\u00a0 So…what about Cold Welcome<\/em>?\u00a0 You’ve seen both the covers.\u00a0 You’ve made “interesting” guesses at what’s going on.\u00a0 And some of it I can’t tell you because of spoilering too much.<\/p>\n

But you might be interested in some of what’s happened between Ky’s victory over Gammis Turek & Co., and the start of this book.\u00a0 So here’s some background.\u00a0\u00a0 I will be tip-toeing around the story that’s going to appear in the anthology Infinite Stars<\/em> later this year.\u00a0 It’s in between the two, but fairly close to Cold Welcome,<\/em> and is titled “All in a Day’s Work.” \u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

As is often the case, the excitement and gratitude following that victory soon faded away, and with a big, obvious enemy vanquished, the political support for Space Defense Force diminished.\u00a0 Big space military organizations are even more expensive than ground forces of the same size.\u00a0\u00a0 Governments began to find reasons why–with Turek dead–they thought they could make do with just the same local military they’d had before.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 How likely was it, after all, that another Turek would arise any time soon?\u00a0\u00a0 The Moscoe Confederation, an early adopter\/supporter, found that having a multi-system force based on Cascadia Station meant having even more foreigners who didn’t live up to the standards of Cascadian demeanor…with resulting legal and diplomatic problems.\u00a0\u00a0 Ky was encouraged to keep the fleet’s ships in space–but that cost more, and nobody was really willing to have them all in active training all the time.\u00a0 Besides, Ky was also wanted for all the desk chores a senior commander must complete.<\/p>\n

Eventually (I think this was mentioned in a bit I put here months ago)\u00a0 political pressure within the Moscoe Confederation government saddled Ky with a senator’s daughter as her aide.\u00a0\u00a0 You will meet Jen in Cold Welcome<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 She’s a decade and a half, at least, older than Ky, and a woman with many talents that may or may not match with the skillset of an admiral’s aide.\u00a0\u00a0 She’s taller than Ky, a poised, sophisticated woman completely at home in Cascadia’s very formal society.\u00a0\u00a0 She’s very aware that Ky is younger, shorter, darker, and more famous, besides being less formal, and she regards herself as especially gracious for agreeing to subordinate herself to this outsider.\u00a0 She has received advice from her father the senator, and other elements of Cascadian high society, and is expected to report to them on Ky…which starts her out with divided loyalties.<\/p>\n

The SDF is now working out of Greentoo, not Cascadia.\u00a0 Greentoo is farther out, but it does have superb shipyards.\u00a0 On the surface, it’s less attractive–Cascadia settled it to divert the some of its industry from Cascadia itself, so that more of the forest would survive.\u00a0\u00a0 But its mores are more relaxed than Cascadia’s, and its three orbital stations do very well for their populations.\u00a0 In the few years since the Battle of Nexus,\u00a0 the SDF headquarters has developed into a typical military bureaucracy (smaller than ours!)\u00a0 including offices sized and decorated by rank.\u00a0 Although there’s not a lot in this book about the rivalry within the SDF, it definitely exists.<\/p>\n

So for the past several years (when Cold Welcome opens) Ky has been dealing with situations she didn’t ask for or anticipate, and she’s doing so without working her way up through the ranks, without experience in staff work.\u00a0 She doesn’t get to go places on her flagship very often; she’s “stuck” as she calls it, with the dull side (to her) of being the top-ranking person.\u00a0\u00a0 She deals mostly with political appointees and senior officers, and misses the interaction with “everybody” that she had when captain of a ship…because now, of course, there’s a flag captain who actually commands the ship.\u00a0 She’s finding it less satisfying, and she’s trying not to let herself realize that she’s bored.<\/p>\n

And that’s enough for now (and I have an earache.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spring flowers are coming out here (including the non-native little white daffodil-shaped things) and not having a cold welcome from the weather at all.\u00a0 Dandelions, a honeysuckle that flowers in winter and smells like lemon, swelling buds on all but the most wary trees and bushes.\u00a0\u00a0 So…what about Cold Welcome?\u00a0 You’ve seen both the covers.\u00a0 Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,34,5],"tags":[8,6],"class_list":["post-304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-background","category-cold-welcome","category-vatta","tag-cold-welcome","tag-vatta-universe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":305,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions\/305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}