You know, I’m still a decade away from middle age given my family.

All in all, 40 was a really fantastic year on the fiction front. Sold 2 novels, 10 short stories, made the Hugo ballot, and my 1st short story collection came out. I’ve been doing less puppetry over the past year, which gives me an identity crisis but nothing world-shaking.

In personal life, Rob and I moved back to Portland and it’s a lifestyle that suits us better than NYC. I miss my friends back there and, strangely, the subway, but I like getting enough sleep.

I look forward to seeing what 41 brings. It’s starting off well. Mom and Dad sang to me first thing this morning and I get to spend the evening with Grandma.

As we were getting ready to go, Mom was getting out of her chair, which is a little slow since she’s got a brace on her leg. Grandma looks at the effort it’s taking and with just a hint of a smile says, “Do you need to borrow my walker?”

I love my Grandma.

1. What Book Are You Reading Now?
2. Why did you choose it?
3. What’s the best thing about it?
4. What’s the worst thing about it?

Here are my answers…

1. Storm Front: Dresden Files #1 by Jim Butcher
2. I’d heard good things and he’s also represented by my agent.
3. The character, Harry Dresden, tells the book in first person. He’s a cynical, damaged man with a sense of humor and gallantry that makes him charming.
4. The magic system feels like it totally makes sense, except for the pseudo-Latin. I don’t understand why it’s that, although Harry Dresden does make a crack about the fact that it’s pseudo-Latin so he’s self-aware of it.

(via SF Signal)

I had been on a panel about research we were talking about the importance of primary sources.  One of the panelists said, “Of course, you can’t get a primary source if you want to talk about the Spanish Flu epidemic.”

It suddenly occurred to me that I could, because Grandma was born in 1905. It started me thinking about all the things she had seen in her life. In the story, the main character says:

I’ve lived through two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Collapse. I lived through race riots, saw us put men on the moon, the Spanish Flu, AIDS, the Titanic, Suffrage and the Internet. I’ve raised five children and buried two, got twenty-three grandchildren, eleven great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren with more on the way.

I’m not making any of that up (although I am losing track of the number of cousins I have).  I mean, the things she’s seen and the way the world has changed in her lifetime is staggering.  She’s an amazing woman, still sharp and interested in everything. I can’t introduce you to her for real, but the story comes pretty close.

Yesterday evening, I went out with M– one of the fine folks at Brilliance, who also turns out to be a writer. She and I hung out a Jumpin Java and wrote for a couple of hours. It was a very nice break from the routine.

After work today, I went out to dinner with J– at Kirby’s and it was so nice to just hang out and shoot the breeze. It helps with the whole mental fatigue that comes from reading for hours.

It is surprisingly tiring. I mean, on the face of it, all I’m doing is sitting in a chair and talking, but I have to be word perfect and that requires a weird sort of concentration. I’ll do a post at some point about what that focus is like.

For the moment, I’m heading to bed. We’ll wrap up the book tomorrow.

See, this weekend I sent this message to customer service.

I am deeply dismayed by Amazon’s removal of Macmillan books from their catalog. Since this covers a significant number of books I read as well as books I’ve written, I can’t see the need to maintain a relationship with Amazon.com anymore.

How do I delete my associate account??

Today, I got response and I thought you’d be interested in the way it opens.

Hello,

Thanks for sending us your comments. We will e-mail you when these titles are available again, which we hope will be soon. For more information regarding Macmillan books, please see the latest update posted here:

http://www.amazon.com/tag/kindle/forum/?cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdThread=Tx2MEGQWTNGIMHV

However, if you still would like us to close your Amazon.com Associates account…

So apparently, the key word in the original response was the word “ultimately” as in, “at the end” but not now.

I’m flying to Chattanooga on Saturday to help my folks out for a couple of weeks. I am, I think, going to try to teach my dad to cook.

I know.

But he’s clever and it’s just like mixing emulsion for silk screening, but not poisonous. Usually. We haven’t decided how long I’m going to stay yet, but I wanted to keep you up to date on which time zone I’m in.

Naturally, I said yes.

And then jumped up and down in the hotel room for a bit wishing I had someone to squee with.

Why can’t you pre-order my book on Amazon.com?

Because on Friday, amazon.com stopped carrying all the Macmillan books. My publisher, Tor is an imprint of Macmillan. You can still buy some through third parties on Amazon.com, but no new books, which means you won’t be able to buy Shades of Milk and Honey there.

How did this happen?

According to Macmillan CEO John Sargent:

This past Thursday I met with Amazon in Seattle. I gave them our proposal for new terms of sale for e books under the agency model which will become effective in early March. In addition, I told them they could stay with their old terms of sale, but that this would involve extensive and deep windowing of titles. By the time I arrived back in New York late yesterday afternoon they informed me that they were taking all our books off the Kindle site, and off Amazon. The books will continue to be available on Amazon.com through third parties.

Basically, Macmillan wanted to be able to control their pricing of e-books and offer them in a dynamic price range from $14.99 to $5.99. Amazon wants to cap e-book prices at $9.99.

Now, Amazon is perfectly within their rights as a company to decide what they will and won’t stock.

I also have the right to decide where I send my website traffic, so I’m swapping out all the links to books to point at Powell’s Books, which is after all, my local independent book store. Meanwhile, I also changed my author bio on amazon.com to explain why you can’t buy my book there.

For fuller analysis of the situation, I recommend the following links:

Tobias’s Buckell’s “Why My Books Are No Longer Available on Amazon.com”

Charlie Stross’ “Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider’s guide to the fight”

Edited to add: You can pre-order Shades of Milk and Honey from Borders!

My sense of what it means to be elderly is wildly skewed since my grandmother will be 105 next week, is sharp as a tack and still lives on her own. Sadly, fantasy has a narrower view of the elderly, and they get short shrift when it comes to adventuring. Fantasy ageism posits that old people have either had their turn, or exist to support the youth who are really getting things done. Thus, if you have gray hair in a fantasy flick, you probably fall into one of three camps.

Read Call the AARP! Middle Earth’s Ageism Needs an Intervention – SciFi Scanner – AMC.

Yes. Yes, there is more than one Southern accent.

To complicate matters, my parents are from East Tennessee which is entirely different from either of the  Carolinas AND I was surrounded by folks transplanted to the Research Triangle Park so while I can sound authentically Southern, it’s a weird hybrid. To someone from South Carolina it won’t sound fake, but it’ll sound like I’m from some other part of the South. Because I am.

I also had little to no accent growing up which we blame on two things, the abundance of transplants in Raleigh and a speech impediment when I was little.

See a sizable part of southern accents is the dropped R. I couldn’t pronounce the letter at all and had it trained into me when I was little. But there are things that betray my regional origin. Words that, because I don’t have an accent, sound like I’m just mispronouncing them.

Two of them, I learned when I was reading A Local Habitation. I’ve said “unfortunately” and “definitely” wrong my entire life.  Since I’m using a southern accent for this other book, I called home to find out how my folks pronounced those two words.

The same way I do, which means it is a regional variation.

I’ve always said “unfortunantly” and “definently.”  Which explains why I’ve never been able to spell either word… It also means that I should switch pronunciations depending on if I’m reading the narrator or a character. That should be fun.

Accents… they fascinate me.

Home in Carolina (Sweet Magnolias)

Rosemary and Rue: An October Daye Novel

Edited to add: Um. I’m actually in Grand Haven. I flew into Grand Rapids.

I know exactly how Mr. Puppeteer feels. In fact, there are parts of this conversation that could be a direct transcription of my life.

Of course the rest of the staff is made of awesome.  A chance to work with Ann VanderMeer and Paula Guran on the world’s oldest fantasy magazine? Heck, yes. I’ll take that, thank you.

If you’d like to read the full press release, step over to Weird Tales

• John Scalzi for President
• Bob Howe for Secretary
• Amy Sterling Casil for Treasurer
• Sean Williams for Overseas Representative

Here is the letter I posted in the 2010 Election area on the SFWA discussion forums.

Dear SFWA members:

I’m running for the position of Vice President. For the last two years, I’ve been privileged to work with an extremely active and committed board as Secretary of SFWA. We’ve made great strides in organizational issues, such as the new Nebula rules, the new website, and the draft of the new bylaws. I’m excited by the changes that are coming to the organization and I would very much like to continue helping SFWA regain solid footing so that it can continue to inform, support, promote, defend and advocate for our members.

• I have been an Active member of SFWA since 2007 and served on the board since 2008.
• In addition to my Board duties, I have also supervised the team which built your new website, sourced and manage the new membership management software, and researched options for health insurance.
• I was the 2008 Campbell Award Winner for Best New Writer.
• I’ve sold two fantasy novels to Tor, with my debut novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, appearing this summer.
• In addition, I’ve sold 30 short stories to markets such as Asimov’s, Strange Horizons and Clarkesworld as well as appearing in several Year’s Best. Last year my short story, “Evil Robot Monkey” was on the Hugo ballot.
• Besides writing, I am a professional puppeteer and voice actor and have worked in the arts for the last twenty years. I served on the Board of Directors and as the Vice President of UNIMA-USA, the American branch of the international puppetry organization.
• My work in the arts has give me experience in how effective non-profits function, as well as grant-writing and volunteer management.

• I live with my husband, Rob, in Portland, OR.

My primary focus as Vice President would be to continue the work that the current board has done to give SFWA organization stability. In addition, to the points in John Scalzi’s overall goals I would like to improve our outreach to industry professionals. Since our new website went live last summer 132 new members have joined SFWA, compared with 98 total in 2008. While this upward trend is good, it is obvious that we can improve our communication to both the membership and the larger SF and Fantasy community.

I look forward to continuing my work for SFWA as part of the 2010-2011 Board of Directors.

Yours,

Mary Robinette Kowal

]]> http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/im-running-for-vice-president-of-sfwa/feed/ 12 http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/okeefe-merritt-under-the-hood-before-and-after/ http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/okeefe-merritt-under-the-hood-before-and-after/#comments Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:01:34 +0000 Mary Robinette Kowal http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/?p=6352 I started the day by biking down to Voodoo donuts to meet Cat and Mr. Rambo for, well, donuts.  Powered by sugar, I came home to spend more time with our stove.

Which means it’s time for before and after pictures of stove!  We’ll not the whole stove, but just the under the hood part. This is what it looked like with all the burners pulled out.

And this is what it looks like, after cleaning.  I think we can probably get the last little bits of rust off the enamel, but largely I’m pleased by how well this part has cleaned up.

Most of today has been alternating between scrubbing things and attacking the grease trap for the griddle with a wire brush and my dremel tool.  It has serious rust, although as I clean it off, it sort of looks like it might be grease with a dusting of rust on top, because the metal underneath is in good shape.  Rob has been dealing with the mechanics and working on the regulators and such.

Behold! Four burners, a griddle, oven, warming oven and a broiler. It is a thing of beauty. The chrome and porcelain are in great shape and it just needs a little cleaning to be ready to go. We aren’t sure the year and model of this one. The closest I can find is the 1954 model 405.

I think the fellow who was selling it was a little taken aback when we bought it because the first thing we did was disassemble it as far as we could. These things are really heavy and if you pull out the burners and such the stove becomes manageable.  It felt a little like being an auto-team which is enhanced because the interior looks very much like it is made of engine parts.

This is our project for the next week. I’ll post photos as we go.

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The teaser:

A Piece of Valiant Dust

Harloyd walked through Loveman’s department store, swinging his brass thurible from its chain. A fine dust of fern, stream-smoothed stone, willow bark and all the other little things that made up a chilling spell fell from the tiny holes in the cone and drifted to form patterns of cool in the air.

His dark blue uniform, with its double row of shiny brass buttons and neat brimmed cap, marked him as Loveman’s heating and cooling magicker. As he went, the patrons smiled gratefully at him for keeping the venerable building comfortable. Sure, lots of folks bought ready-made cooling powders for their homes, but the temperature always fluctuated as the dust settled out. Only Loveman’s had heating and cooling men working to keep an even temperature, so folks tended to come in to shop more than at other stores.

It had gotten so Harloyd couldn’t walk to catch the streetcar home from downtown Chattanooga without someone tipping their hat to him and saying, “Evening, Mr. Varnell.” Some days he felt like everybody in town knew him. His wife joked that he should go into politics.

His rounds took him onto the ladies’ floor, where gleaming cases of walnut and glass held the latest in jewelry and cosmetics. His wife, Addie, worked in the evening wear section helping the most notable society ladies find the right dress for whatever event they needed. She was with one of her regulars, young Miss Priest. Harloyd just tipped his head at the ladies and kept walking with his thurible. While it made him proud to see Addie working here, there was always that worry that her powder might wear off while she wasn’t paying attention. Loveman’s didn’t let the colored in. Not that Addie had more than a touch of the paintbrush, but there was no telling what they’d do to her. Him either, since mixed marriages were a illegal in Tennessee. For all that, the day she’d come into his life, looking for a spell to help her pass had been the best thing that had ever happened to him.

Meanwhile, I realized that I badly needed to update my bibliography, which has been ignored since my bilbiofly plugin broke. I kept hoping that there would be an update, but alas, no.

This led to two further realizations.

1. There is a pre-order sale on Shades of Milk and Honey at Amazon right now, so the hardcover is only $16.49 instead of $24.99 Edited to add: 1-31-10 Amazon has removed all Macmillan books, including mine.
   
2. I’ve sold stories that start with every letter of the alphabet except I, K, M, N, O, Q, U, V, X, Y and Z.

Clearly, I need to consider my next titles carefully.

If your first pro-sale has appeared in print in 2008 or 2009, make sure you contact them to get included on the list of Campbell eligible authors.

One of the things I found interesting was that on “Some Other Day” he said that the first time he read it he focused on the mosquitos and that this time he focused on the love story. The difference? I’m fairly certain I didn’t add a word. But I rearranged them. In the draft Dad read, I started with what is now the second scene in the story. It was really hard to decide to move it because it has one of the best opening lines.

“The summer the mosquitoes died began as the best one in Josie Landon’s childhood.”

I hated losing that opening line, but as my Dad has noticed, it puts all the emphasis on the mosquitoes.  The published opening is “Josie Langdon leaned back from her microscope and rolled her neck to ease the kinks.”

While this opening line isn’t as attention grabbing, it sets the scene, tells you that she’s been at it a while and that she’s some sort of scientist. Two lines later I introduce the boy and this puts the emphasis on the love story by making it the first source of conflict I introduce.  All by flopping the first and second scenes.

This is an example of fixing the ending of a story by changing the beginning and I’d totally forgotten that I’d done that until Dad called today. Pretty cool, huh?

In epic battles of good vs. evil, the outcome often comes down to a one-on-one combat. A duel if you will. Historically, duels have been fought to settle a disagreement: Don't like what someone called your mother? Out come the swords! Fantasy movies, as it happens, have some of the best duels — and the best reasons for fighting them.

via Mary Robinette Kowal – The Top Ten Fantasy Duels – SciFi Scanner – AMC.

Maddening.

I’m not even getting loads of writing done because if one of those brief bars show up I pounce on the machine.

Technical support has no idea what’s wrong. They are very apologetic and sending someone out. Just not until next Tuesday.

I’m anticipating a lot of coffee shops this weekend. If you want to do a writing date, call me.

I’ve bolded my favorites. If the story title has a link, you can read the story online.

Short Story

The Conciousness Problem — Asimov’s, August 2009

At the Edge of Dying — Clockwork Phoenix 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

Jaiden’s Weaver – Diamonds in the Sky (February, 2009)

Ginger Stuyvesant and the Case of the Haunted Nursery — Talebones #38

Prayer at Dark River — Innsmouth Free Press

Novelette

First Flight — Tor.com

Body Language — Intergalactic Medicine Show #15

My copy editor is Deanna Hoak and she has given me permission to post the stylesheet for Shades of Milk and Honey. If you are curious, feel free to download the pdf.

One of the things that fascinates me is that there are a few names and places in there that I have no memory of writing.  Like, what is the Spider’s Collonade Colonnade*? I also changed a character’s name mid-novel, which Deanna caught for me.

And this is only a tiny part of why a good copyeditor is worth her weight in gold. Or more, since Deana is slim…

*Deanna emailed me to let me know I’d just misspelled Colonnade here. See! A good copy editor see everything.
Edited to add: Deanna has two great posts about copy editing and style sheets. The Importance of Style Sheets and A Funny Note on Style Sheets

You should check out the Montreal Caffe Art Java youtube channel if you want to see amazing things done with foamy milk and coffee.

via epicftw.com

All in all, Scenting the Dark makes it clear that Kowal can do in 5 pages what other authors can’t do in 50. It’s going to be interesting to see what she does with 300 or so pages to play with in her debut novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, due out from Tor this summer. I expect huge things.

via Stomping on Yeti: YetiReview: Scenting the Dark and Other Stories.

This is not safe for work or family if the sound is on. But it is… um. Oh, just watch it.

And no, no that’s not why we keep going back to Iceland.

I also turned in the copyedits for Shades of Milk and Honey
this week. It was surprisingly painless. Pretty much everything that my dear copyeditor, Deanna Hoak, caught made me wince and nod my head. I don’t think I reversed any of her changes. Whew.

I say “attempting” because I’ve got a seat on a flight today, but it’s delayed an hour and other flights have been canceled. Hopefully, I’ll make it home tonight.

If you look at the new Active SFWA members since July 1, 2009.*
14 joined with short fiction
66 joined with novel sales

I am interested in your theories on the difference in numbers.

*(I can’t track prior to that because the information was not gathered with any consistency. What data I have suggests that it’s fairly consistent.)

Edited to add:

Two interesting things pointed out to me.

• SFWA has 17 qualifying short story markets and 40+ qualifying novel markets.
• Total number of qualifying slots in short fiction is approximately 550-600 per year.  Total number of qualifying novel slots is approximately 5000 (Amazon actually lists 9,343 SF & Fantasy new releases in 2009)

We take an hour off for lunch and then back into the booth.  In the afternoon, I think we took two breaks and then wrapped up for the day at 4:30 just after finishing Chapter 19.  We normally would have gone till 5:00 but it would have had us stopping in the middle of a scene.

I came back to the hotel, surprisingly fatigued. Granted, some of this was lack of sleep from travel, but I’m also surprised by how tiring sitting in a chair and reading can be.  One of the interesting things about the process that one might not think about is that I can’t move around when I’m reading. It changes my relation to the mic which would change the sound. It also introduces clothing noise.

I went to bed about 9:30 and naturally woke up at 3:30. Sigh… this is the downside to only needing six hours of sleep.

My biggest challenge so far was on page 35-36 which has eight characters in conversation.  Eight. I ran out of highlighter colors and had to move to doing two lines of color for one of the characters.  Eight.

The interesting thing about reading is that I’ll go for a giant stretch with no stumbles and then have a page where I stop every other line. Most of that is related to going to fast so I have to constantly remind myself to slow down.  Slooooow.

And now to bed, perchance to dream.

January – 4 cups chopped pears

February – Hey! Evil Robot Monkey made Locus’s 2008 Recommended Reading List.

March – New York was scheduled to get fourteen inches of snow today.

April – In the world of “my life is completely bizarre” yesterday’s antics have led me to pick up a new gig.

May – Yay! Maggie swatted at Marlowe.

June – Well worth reading for the view of theater in the early 1900s.

July — I had the strangest experience while reading Jay Lake’s Green.

August — What did I do this weekend?

September — Black Swan Inn provided us with a lovely breakfast this morning and then we hit the road.

October — The article I wrote for the October/November issue of Asimov’s is online.

November — Cory Doctorow, at Boing Boing, has given my short story collection a seriously amazing review.

December — Rob has headed off to Hawaii to visit his folks so I’m playing bachelor girl tonight.

I made black-eyed peas and collards, with Grandma’s pear relish. Rob made ozoni soup so we had a very traditional meal, albeit from two different traditions.

Also, I just have to point out that it’s 2010, which is such a science-fictional year. It is also the year that my novel will come out, which seems like dream-land.

One the way home the extra weight was definitely noticeable on the very slight rise between the store and home.  More noticeable was the wind which was pushing me as though it wanted me to not go home.

I walked into the apartment, set the bags down and looked out the window. There were small white flakes floating past the window. Hm… what’s that?

Snow? That wasn’t in the forecast.

I checked the weather and was reassured that it was supposed to melt off. Except, it was sticking.  And coming down very fast.  I checked gain when the yard looked like this:

With a forecast of one to four inches, I decided to call folks and postpone the party.  They say it will stop by eight tonight but it’s still coming down really fast.  I’ve got no complaints, really. Having just returned from the grocery store we are well stocked if it turns into a snowpocolypse.

And it’s pretty.

Because Rob was out of town until Monday and I’ve been working a lot, we hadn’t had a chance to get a tree until yesterday. You know… Christmas Eve. We walked to the tree lot that’s two blocks from our apartment but they were gone.

That was okay, because there was another one at the foot of the hill, so we walked down to 42nd where that tree lot was also gone. It turns out that all the tree lots wrap things up so by four o’clock there’s no where to buy a tree.

We figured that Fred Meyer would be open and have leftover trees so we walked down to 30th and on the way passed a tree lot. With Trees! But it was locked and the attendants had gone home.  Although we joked about hopping the fence, I suggested taking the somewhat more legitimate route and going into Freddie’s to actually purchase a tree.

They had five.

Five dry, needle-dropping trees that were free, probably because they were fire hazards.

So we walked back to the abandoned tree lot and Rob hopped the fence. We took a tree and left a note and $20.  Actually, poaching a Christmas tree has a long tradition in my family.  For decades my [unnamed relative] has poached a cedar from [redacted] on the grounds that it is growing in a place where it has to be removed anyway.  It’s nice to have these family traditions.

Check out my complete list at of Six Fantastic Candidates for the Next Santa Claus.

Normally, we go to Chattanooga to spend Christmas with my family.  At this very moment, they are sitting down for a dinner with 32 people, all of whom I’m related to. It’s great fun and I am very sad to miss it.

Fortunately, Santa, being a wise man, knows how to cheer me up and sent me an entire box of Scenting the Dark! In hardcover! Yay!

I hope you are having a Merry Christmas, too.

If you are a logic based person, then skip this film.

Question: If every life form on the planet has nostrils in their necks and six limbs, why do the Na’vi have noses like we do and only four limbs?

Question: Where do the feathers on the bow and arrows come from since we never see a feather creature, ever.

Question: Kiss? What is this thing you call kiss, James Cameron? I mean really, there are HUMAN cultures that don’t have kissing.

I could go on. That said, it’s some damn impressive CGI.

One of the men working in operations came up to me at work last night and said, “Does the phrase, ‘It happened in Narnia,’ mean anything to you?”

I hedged my bets and said, “It might…” because all I could think of was that someone had told him about the white spandex suit I used to have to wear in a production of the show.

The he said, “Do you remember little K— P—?”

My jaw dropped. Really. That’s not a metaphor. When I had last seen him, he had been twelve or thirteen years old playing Edmund. Now, I know that people age and realistically, I recognize that it has been 13 years or so since we worked together, but– but… he was twelve and now he’s an adult peer.

Now. If I were dressed in normal clothes, even with a Christmas flavor, and tried to give a total stranger or a small child a cookie can you imagine the reaction? Dubious distrust. How about hugs? Sure, there would be some takers in both cases, but on the whole it would be seen as completely weird and a little sketchy.

But put me in a bear suit, so that you can’t identify me even by gender, and suddenly everything is fine. Weird.

There are few authors who have had as profound an influence on the fantasy movie genre as Roald Dahl. It's not just that so many of his stories have been adapted for the screen, but also that he was himself a fantasy screenwriter. You might think you know a Roald Dahl movie when you see one, but I'm willing to bet that a couple of his masterpieces will surprise you.

via AMC – Blogs – SciFi Scanner – Mary Robinette Kowal – The Many Fantastic Flicks of Mr. Roald Dahl.

I knew I’d be accompanying the bear, but I didn’t know that tv was on the agenda when I left the house this morning.

There was nothing obviously wrong. So the awesome mechanic at Bike Gallery lubed it, tightened a couple of things and didn’t charge me, since he “didn’t really do anything.” It’s riding like a dream now, so I disagree.

While it was there, and in the stand, I noticed that my saddle was crooked. At first I thought it had just spun on the mount, but no. No, the rails were actually bent and probably had been since we moved back from NYC. I know the bike fell at least twice while it was in the back of the moving truck. So, I invested in a new saddle.

Today, my toes went numb during the last ten minutes of the ride both to and from work.

So, back to the shop today and I have a new, different saddle. Another awesome mechanic took the time to check the fit to make certain that there wasn’t anything else going on.

Let’s hope the new saddle does the trick. It’s funny though, how when you change one thing a cascade of little changes begins.