If you find yourself on the East Coast (of the US) today, you’ll likely be dealing with cold, cold temps and fresh mounds of snow.  For those of us in northern North Carolina / Hampton Roads Virginia, it’s likely your first snow of the year.  Soooo, everything is shut down.  As a result, the anticipated delivery of my proofs did not happen.  I’d love to show ’em off, but I gots nada.

In the spirit of the snow day, here is very different A Sword Into Darkness pic.  Newport, RI is blanketed under a fresh foot of the white stuff today, but this depicts a much warmer scene:

The Destroyers Return To Newport

This depicts a pre-refit Sword-class astrodynamic destroyer coming down to land in Naragansett Bay next to the Naval War College, coming home just as the destroyers did in WW-II.  Now, this pic is quite fanciful, in that those landing jets would essentially boil half the bay and blast everything around them with a concussive force of superheated steam just shy of a nuclear blast, and also that the crew would be standing perpendicular to their decks since they are designed for continuous acceleration forward, not landing horizontally in gravity.  The ship really should be pointed upwards like a tower.

But I like it regardless.

By the way, I’m getting a lot of visitors today, so if you are in the mood, I welcome you to check out a few of my short stories.  ALSO, my friend Nathaniel has put his radio play up for sale, a radio play based upon my Improbable Adventures of Dylan Darby story Gambler’s Cruise.  The goal is to raise enough money and interest to actually make an entire series of steampunk/rocketpunk radio plays in an alternate timeline.  It is a worthy project and you should go check it out here.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to bundle my blanket a bit tighter around me, cook a big ol’ pot o’ chili and some corncakes, then sit down with a few beers and irish coffees in order to forget about the snow.  Check back tomorrow for (hopefully) proof of proofs and a contest TO WIN ONE!