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| As an antidote to the broken washer, I want to talk a little about the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention. Please note that the pre-registration deadline has been extended to May 31st. One or two people have asked about the name, so here's the history as I recall it. There's a cartoon depicting a row of restaurants, with signs in order like this: "Best pizza in the city," "Best pizza in the country," "Best pizza on the planet," "Best pizza in the galaxy," and the last one, a tiny place with a long line of people outside it, says simply, "Best pizza on the block." During our first couple of years, Fourth Street was in a downtown hotel on, in fact, Fourth Street, and we used the motto "Best fantasy convention on the block" to indicate the combination of humility and ambition that we brought to the project. Other people probably would tell this differently, but that's how I recall it. I was supposed to write an essay months ago for the website, but I have been finding it difficult to bring up coherent memories. Fourth Street was a great deal like disappearing under the hill, visiting the very far lands of Faerie. It was, at least, if Faerie had chocolate-covered coffee beans and a wedding party leaving at six a.m. so that the participants, including the bride and groom, could be back at the convention for the start of panels at ten; if Faerie included Samuel Delany, leaving in the middle of a panel to catch his plane home and stopping the standing ovation he was getting with the startling words, "No, no, sit down and do what you're doing. This is valuable work"; if Faerie included Jane Yolen and Patricia McKillip doing a joint guest of honor speech; if it included Patrick Nielsen Hayden standing up out of the audience and demolishing the entire premise of a panel and providing a new one, all in a paragraph; if it included a membership so involved in the programming that moderators were sometimes obliged to say they would take only questions, not comments, until later in the hour; if it included sitting around at five in the morning while music was still going on in the other room, discussing simultaneously Dorothy Dunnett, the vagaries and virtues of fountain pens, the flavors of jelly beans, and the proper use of violence in fantasy. A few local writers, both established and aspiring, used to leave early on Sunday, followed by the pleas of their friends to stay longer, because the programming had made them want to do nothing except go home and write. Cally Soukup once stayed up for 72 hours straight at a Fourth Street, because there was always somebody to talk to. It's ten years later now, and we're all different, and some of us are gone, but we're going to try to recapture that feeling. Elizabeth Bear, known to many of you as ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) matociquala, is our guest of honor, and long before this revival was thought of, reading her journal used to remind me of Fourth Street. I'm looking forward to it with the same mixture of glee and trepidation as I always did -- it would take me a long way away and sometimes send me home again unsettled. It doesn't matter if you recognize any of the names I mention above. If you love fantasy, or are curious about it, do think about coming. Pamela | |
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| joculum advises: The signed limited edition (250 copies) can only be ordered on the Subterranean Press website, and then only through the page that contains the description of the book. Their catalog order page lists only the 1000 copy edition. The general edition is clothbound, the limited signed edition is leatherbound. | |
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| Some people have been sending me money in response to the request for an investor–sometimes a hundred dollars. I hadn’t been asking for donations; I appreciate them all the more for that. If you sent in a hundred dollars, I think you deserve something spiffy as a thank you; Reesa and Kit and I have been kicking around ideas for exactly what. When we come up with something, we’ll let you know. In the meantime, you have the thanks of a grateful writer.
Meanwhile, concerning the loan request mentioned earlier, if there are people interested in investing smaller amounts (technically, this is a note of hand, not an investment in the business, as it is unsecured), say 3-10k, let us know at the email addresses mentioned in the earlier post.
In other news, I’m working on chapter 10 of Iorich, and I think it’s going pretty well.
(Originally posted at Words Words Words by skzb. Please leave any comments there.) | |
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| Six quick links from the last couple of weeks:
- Kit Whitfield's Blog: Macho Sue :: "While basically a Mary Sue, in that the story attributes to his feelings far greater importance than they would merit in a realistic narrative, Macho Sue appeals to a primordial impulse: the impulse to truckle to the alpha male."
- Creating the Innocent Killer :: What's wrong with Ender's Game: among many other things, it tells kids, "Your mistreatment is the evidence of your gifts. You are morally superior. Your turn will come, and then you may severely punish others, yet remain blameless. You are the hero."
- Australian Antarctic Division - Icebergs :: Awesome pictures. Someone turn these into fantasy novel covers.
- Pregnant? Eat Chocolate! - The Checkup - :: "Women who ate the most chocolate -- about a candy bar a day -- were about 70 percent less likely to develop preeclampsia than those who eat the least, the researchers report in this month's issue of the journal Epidemiology."
- City Farmers’ Crops Go From Vacant Lot to Market - New York Times :: For years, city dwellers have raised fruits and vegetables to feed their families, but now more and more of them are growing food to sell to a wider market.
- Monitor on Psychology - Husbands, rate your wives :: "The test taker would add up the total number of merits and demerits to receive a raw score, which would categorize the wife on a scale from "very poor" to "very superior.""
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| As Chad said today, after FutureBaby becomes an ActualBaby (knock on wood), we're leaning toward referring to him or her by a pseudonym on our blogs just to provide a mild amount of privacy (after a birth announcement with the actual name, probably). I've been having fun reading the pseudonym suggestions over at his blog, so I'll toss it open here too:
Recommend a post-birth pseudonym for FutureBaby, preferably one independent of age and sibling status.
Heck, if you're so moved, recommend a non-pseudonym for FutureBaby; it's unlikely that you'll come up with a suitable name that we haven't thought of yet, but since Chad's commenters got to offer suggestions, y'all might as well, too. Nb.: FutureBaby's last name will be Orzel (pronounced or-ZELL), with a middle name of Nepveu; probably no second middle name.
(Pseudonym, by the way, is a really weird looking word, or perhaps it only is if you've been awake since five this morning.)
And yes, we know about the Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager (Java applet). | |
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| It seems like time to start educating myself about childbirth in more depth. Since I will not be taking classes, I am now soliciting recommendations for books, videos, web sites, or similar self-study educational resources about childbirth.
I already own The Pregnancy Book by Sears & Sears and have a recommendation for Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn by Simkin.
( important note on giving me advice ) | |
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| "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."Albert Einstein, 1954, in a letter being auctioned this week. If I had a few easy grand lying around, I'd be tempted. | |
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| Today for my midday PT exercises, I stood on a pillow for an entire minute with my eyes closed without falling into the wall even once.
I didn't repeat the feat at the evening session; I fell into the wall three times. And some of the other exercises are still making me really ill. Still, this is the very first time, and it's progress, progress, measurable progress. Definitely time for a woohoo.
(That was your cue.) | |
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| Gwyneth Jones's short story "Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland," which I encountered in The Year's Best Science Fiction 14, ed. Gardner Dozois [*], has unsettled me ever since I first read it. I can't claim that I understand the story, but it fascinates me all the same. ( Spoilers follow. )[*] I own this one out of all of them because it contains what is perhaps one of my favorite sf stories of all time, Tony Daniel's "A Dry, Quiet War." It's a fairly standard anthology, Yoon-reader-wise: a double-handful of stories I really liked, and a bunch I found either unmemorable or incomprehensible (keeping in mind that I am a fairly dense reader; and ironically, the closing story of the anthology, also by Tony Daniel, "The Robot's Twilight Companion," bored me.) | |
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| It appears that Amazon.com is prepared to sell any interested party a copy or copies of a new small work of mine, Conversation Hearts, published by Subterranean Press in a signed limited edition, in two bindings. The work (story? Novelette? Thingie?) is a sort of centaur or hybrid, story-within-a-story, which parttimedriver and others heard me read at SUNY last spring (fall? Sometime) but which has otherwise never been put before the public. Actually it does not yet exist, however, as I have yet to sign all the signature sheets that will be bound into the finished book, which I am about to do. Those who (for one reason or another) do not wish to purchase a signed limited edition will have to wait even longer, but surely the piece will appear in some less exquisite form somewhere else sometime. | |
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| Welcome back to insane cracktastic Gothic land! In a moment of synchronicity, last Friday I was invited to share some Belgian chocolates labeled individually by province. Unfortunately, the font's capital I looked much like a small l, and so when asked to choose, I said, "I'll take the leper!" I do not often come across books containing leprosy, though when I read Darcourt I immediately regretted forgetting about the YA novel in which the heroine develops leprosy, watches her mother agonizingly die of rot, is shipped off to a leper colony, and dies, the end -- I would have certainly included it in my YA agony award nominations if I had. I was also reminded of Thomas Covenant. Normally I don't find characters whiny if they have something to whine about. But Covenant managed to be so whiny that I thought, "Oh, get over your leprosy already!" Young journalist Sally Wainwright impersonates a friend of hers in order to get hired as governess for a wealthy teenager on Darcourt Island. The island is owned by reclusive billionaire Tristram Darcourt. Sally is ostensibly doing this to write an expose on him, but really because her mother was jilted by him and she wants to find out what happened. (She can't ask because both her parents are now dead.) Teenage Alix is wild and has a Mysterious Skin Condition for which she takes Mysterious Meds. Darcourt is high-handed and arrogant. He is also said to have let his brother die in the super-quick quicksand which is featured in the Mysterious Marsh surrounding the house, into which Sally is forbidden to go. Sally is promply menaced by snakes and scorpions released in her room, plus Mysterious Figures, and people shooting at her, whomping her over the head, and trying to kill her dog. Could it be the Mysterious Mrs. Darcourt, alternately said to be in the south of France and lurking in Mysterious Marsh?! Or the off-stage Mysterious Middle Eastern Group which is the subject of a code-named Pentagon study? Or Andre, who is a cousin or something? Or some blonde kid with a cowlick? ( LEPER OUTCAST UNCLEAN!!!!! ) | |
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| Because I desperately want to babble about shoujo manga to people:
Shoujo Bodies
Most bodies in shoujo manga are thin and wispy, with an emphasis on androgyny. Many of the men tend to lack muscle definition (think Yuu Watase), while the women are much less curvy than their shounen manga counterparts. What does this mean to us? What other body types are there in shoujo manga? We will hopefully talk about gender-bending, cross-dressing, body image, and the fashion industry. Suggested series to discuss: After School Nightmare, Paradise Kiss, Walkin' Butterfly, Angel Sanctuary, Fruits Basket, W Juliet, Rose of Versailles, and Princess Knight.
Time and place should be decided on Thursday at Wiscon; keep an eye out on the spontaneous programming board. | |
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| [11:42] matociquala: I like this sentence: [11:42] matociquala: "Sebastien. Tell me you didn't know any Vikings in the ninth century." [11:42] matociquala: Abby Irene FTW. [11:42] jmeadows: hee [11:42] cristalia: hee [11:42] matociquala: She's 88 years old and not taking his vampire nonsense any more. [11:42] matociquala: By god. All right. 2026 words on Seven for a Secret yesterday, and 2254 today. If I can keep producing like this, I will have a manuscript sooner rather than later, as it stands at 10,250 words manuscript count, which is a little more than a third of the contracted length. And I think I figured out the Master Plan today, which makes me happy. Her love is like a candle. You light it up at night.
Her heart is like a pack of cards. One chance at guessing right.- Tags:abby irene
- Mood:jubilant
 - Music:Jethro Tull - White Innocence
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| (Cross-posted to ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) wiscon) If spontaneous programming is still going on this year, I'm going to be trying to grab some space for a couple of program items that came up after the programming suggestions deadline/didn't make the official program cut-off. Please check the board in Madison for scheduling details if you're interested in attending. ( Seal Press Boycott )( Octavian Nothing Book Club ) | |
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| If you were going to insert a detective into one of Shakespeare's tragedies, would you go for a character like Philip Marlowe [1] or one like Miss Marple [2]? The Chandleresque character strikes me as more likely to live to the end of the story but Marple could be played as a kind of wise fool.
1: I started off with Hammett's Continental Op but Marlowe's speech patterns are more amusing to me.
2: Or Tommy and Tuppance if you want the detectives to have a confederate with which to converse. | |
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| Words: 1348
Total words: 63842
Files: 4
Tea: Spring tea
Music: no music, didn't feel like
RSI: not very good
Reason for stopping: end of bit.
Getting on with it.
It's so odd checking details for a date I remember in the way I would if it were a historical period.
It's a lovely day today, and the leaves are opening on the trees across the way so that when I'm working on Caliban and look up, I can almost see more leaf than sky. | |
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| Unless of course the Metropolitan line does go there [1] because then I made three people wait six extra minutes. (No, they weren't together. The weird one was the lady who walked half way down the platform to ask me about Paddington. I would think she'd heard about my awesome Paddington knowing abilities, but the other guys did not speak much english and "Two trains. Hammersmith" was a bit of a stretch.) Important writer tipsBusy week this week as I begin the Wiscon countdown. Which means everyone wants something now-now-now, particularly on the Dubai swimatorium[2] - Important swimatorium note, it's going to be cladded in gold.[3] In other work news, the Georgian society is protesting the demoilition of a fake Georgian building built in the 1930s on the site of the British Museum's new wing. That's right FAKE! Go team too much time on your hands! (Otherwise that project's slow this week as two folk are on holiday.) In other, other work news, boo meetings that start at 4.30 which mean I could not have dinner with Liz-in-London. *Shakes old man fist of impotance!* I have just started reading Things Fall Apart and you all should go buy it because it is made of awesome.[4] [1] It doesn't - I'm totally helpful [2] Fine, aquatic center. They are developing a number of world class sports stadia to bolster their chances at hosting an Olympics and this would be the swimming/diving venue. [3] Possibly painted gold, but as this is Dubai, we can't be sure. Sadly there are no pictures on the internet that I can shock and amaze you with. [4] Seriously, how often do I say a book is made of awesome? I am well known to hate everything. | |
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| Wow. I look away for a bit, and a whole bunch of new peoples appear! Welcome, new peoples! Feel free to step forward and introduce yourself -- this is, ideally, an interactive journal, not just me nattering on to myself (no matter how much it seems, some days). Thanks to my mother graciously gifting me with her Mother's Day Cold from Hell (thanks, mom!) I was all "oh hai! Haz sick. Cannot brain." So I took the last 48 hours to sleep, drink wonton soup, sleep some more, and catch up with my movie-watching. ( and, on that topic, some thoughts about SciFi's Never Cry Werewolf )Also managed some reading, while my headache would allow. Some time ago ellen_datlow gave me a copy of the reissue of Black Thorn, White Rose, one of their Fairy Tale anthologies (originally published in 1994, but don't let that freak you out). Some stories I loved, some I really disliked, and some I just went 'huh' over, but taken as a whole this is a really good sampler of how to take old material and make it -- if not new, then your own. I'm also reading Set the Seas on Fire by Chris Roberson. It's one of those books I really, really want to enjoy, because I can tell it's well-written and interesting, and should be hitting all my buttons...but just isn't. Sorry, Chris. If you like sea-faring adventure mixed in with some subtle horror, though, you might want to give it a try. And, although I read it some time before, I just got my copy of Jeri Smith-Ready's Wicked Game. Do not let the somewhat cliched cover fool you -- yes, it's OMG More Angsty Vampires, but this book also made me laugh in sheer readerly joy at parts, and the entire thing pleased even me, the vamp-jaded. And now, with brain mostly-restored, I have to get back to that Life-and-Deadlines thing. Feline and Equine picspam to come. Don't say you weren't warned! | |
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| So, for reasons that do not need exploring at this juncture, I had to charge the camera batteries and take some pictures this morning. And while I was at it, I thought I'd take some (very bad) pictures of the albino bristlenose plecostomus who joined the household on Saturday. This is a seriously awesome fish, people. My crappy pictures do not do it justice. (Of the four small household predators, only Catzilla has actually noticed the pleco; he is baffled as to why he can SEE it but not REACH it, but does not find it particularly enthralling. Which is just as well.) | |
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| For future settings where the setting is limited to one small region and only makes sense if one assumes the rest of the planet has been mysteriously depopulated so as not to take advantage of the setting's inherent weaknesses?
San Angeles in Demolition Man, for example, seems to be simultaneously incapable of defending itself and yet has not been occupied by Canadian troops pursuing our legitimate territorial claim to that region. | |
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| Well, this isn't the way I'd meant to break my silence, but the washer is leaking. If you can recommend a place that repairs appliances in the Twin Cities, please let me know. I have asked on Natter and gotten some good leads, but I prefer to have a lot of information to compost in these situations.
Thanks!
P.S. No, it's not the intake hose; yes, the hoses are new; no, I do not propose to take apart the washer, and neither does anybody else here. Helpful suggestions of this sort, however, are definitely encouraged if you feel the impulse.
Pamela | |
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| The proof edits of WINTERSTRIKE have arrived, so this is mainly what I've been doing. However, due to a sudden patch of hot weather, we've also felt obliged to do something about the vegetable garden and today I have planted sweetcorn, spinach and lettuce. The greenhouse is filling up with different varieties of tomatoes and peppers, plus butternut squash, cucumber and pumpkins. Beans, potatoes and onions are already well on their way and some friends of ours are using a spare vegetable bed for kale and courgettes. I think we might be having more help with the vegetable patch soon.
Editing and gardening. Could be worse! | |
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| For mendax and louiselux, a RH Plus apocalypse drabble: "I'd rather the world didn't end," Michitaka said, hoping to sound calmly resigned. "Wouldn't we all?" Kiyoi said quietly, gazing at the empty desolation. Michitaka drew in a lungful of the cold air, savouring the feeble sunlight. He might not see it again. Their food was running low, and Kiyoi was considerate in seeing Michitaka got more than his share. But the supplies would run out, and there would be but one food source left. Kiyoi looked alarmed at his shiver. "Let's go in," he said. "We need to keep you healthy." Michitaka followed. He had nowhere else to go. | |
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| First item on the radio news this morning was that, after the terrible devastation of the 7.2 quake in China, the government there was gratefully accepting all offers of international aid. Who would have thought that Myanmar would make China look enlightened in its treatment of its citizens? | |
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| Because the sum of all human knowledge is on the internet, thanks to minotaurs I can say that the elusive Korean SF movie is 2009: Lost Memories, and is an alternate history. Yay! (Note that there are numerous and total spoilers for the movie in the article). | |
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| 1. As I work on "Five Ways to Ruin a First Date" (which is about radio astronomy), I keep thinking, "Perhaps I'm not being subtle. Perhaps I'm merely being obscure." I keep putting in e-mails to people, "I can only do this as I can do it." Which is true but not perhaps ultimately helpful.
I refuse to do the kind of prose that jumps up and down and points frantically at its own subtlety, though. That's just not going to happen.
2. I woke up at 5:15 this morning. Since I was already tired from the weekend, this did not thrill my soul. We're trying a new method of keeping my back from getting quite so banged up with the falls in PT; hope it works. It requires an extremely high-tech solution: a larger rubber ball from Walgreen's. At least Mom got me the swirly sky blue kind.
3. I find I am really, really not emotionally attached to most of the library books I try being any good at all. Of the five I got yesterday, I have already discarded two unread. And this does not bother me even slightly. Go library.
4. I am trying, with moderate though not universal success, not to be cranky with people with the continuing vertigo ick, since it's not their fault. But inanimate objects are not receiving the same consideration. I have been cutting the tags out of shirts with wild abandon. There is one T-shirt I've been sleeping in for over a decade (because physics T-shirts are tough, apparently), with the tag in. No problem. Until this weekend when the Tag! Must! DIE! This seems like a harmless enough pastime, so I'm just going with it.
5. I am instituting a new policy. I am no longer going to listen to my friends making disparaging remarks about themselves without protest. If my friends were making disparaging remarks about each other, I would protest, so I don't see why it should be different when it's about themselves; certainly it doesn't make me any less uncomfortable. I certainly don't expect my friends to pretend that they are perfect and without flaw, but gratuitous self-directed nastiness is not the same thing, and not okay. I don't care to put one of you on the spot and say who it was that inspired this new policy, because it bothers me more frequently than just the one person; if it was just the one person, I would e-mail just the one person.
For handy reference:
X: "I'm worried about this thing, because I have such difficulty getting myself organized."
me: "I'm sorry to hear that. Do you think it'd help to blah blah, or etc.?"
BUT
X: "I am such a disorganized loser!"
me: "Kindly don't speak that way of my friend X." | |
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| My son Raphi sent this to me and we agreed that this is just what our house needs, even if it doesn't have that whole "gothic mansion" thing going for it: http://www.hiddenpassageway.com/ | |
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| We're in for another bout of severe storms today, tonight, and tomorrow; if I'm not posting or responding, that will be the reason.
We were lucky here last weekend; we had two tornado warnings, but didn't even get the large hail that was falling all around us. But it was the first time in the 28 years we've lived here that I've ever seen six tornado warnings on the tv screen lined up one above the other all at the same time. In |
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