Haven't:
Written (yet)
Gone to Blues Festival (not today)
Loaded dishwasher
Allowed DS to update Mac software
Have:
Ridden horse
Signed up for Facebook
The Facebook thing is an experiment. I've been told it's a good networking thing, and so I'm going to give it a try, especially during the summer when I have time to figure out what I want to do and don't want to do to manage it.
Meanwhile, I rode Miss Mocha inside--it was already up to 78 degrees F by the time I reached the barn, so I didn't want to play in the sun--that, plus horses were turned out in the grass arena. She showed much more energy and no more of that funky loss of rhythm that she shows in the sand arena, so it's clearly footing. I even got her to settle back down and round up like she should. We worked a lot on transitions--when she is Miss Queen Butthead of the Universe, those are some of the first things to go. Not that she avoids them, but the accuracy and timeliness of them. When I want a transition, especially a down transition, I want it now. Period. I can get them back in fifteen minutes, but it's a pain when that's her primary rebellion. For some reason she's in a challenge authority mode. Sigh. The joys of strong-minded mares.
I'm still playing around with the worldbuilding on Shadows. I did a rough outline of the first third of the novel yesterday, and I know where it's going from there. But I need to figure out some questions--who are the Nameless Ones and why do they have it in for humans and Otherkin? Who is the Mysterious Stranger who comes to James's aid, and how soon should he make an appearance in the story? What makes a fishing lake in Central Oregon a pivotal part of the struggle between Otherkin and the Nameless Ones? I also did an extensive rewrite of Chapter One while listening to the blues, but I think I still need to answer a couple of these questions before I should put it down on paper. Maybe that's what I'll do this afternoon/early evening, while DS and GF are napping in his room, and DH is at Blues Festival. It's almost like having the house to myself.
I'm also really tired and feeling a little ick. My body's reaction to heat, sigh. I am so not a summer person--that is, when the temps get above the low 80s!
"All have won, and all muist have prizes," as (I think) the Dodo proclaims after the Caucus Race. Very clever, all of you. This is the best I could come up with:
And let their pretty passions rise
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matociquala was on hand as well. I simply love everyone who was there. *muah, muah* - more hugs and kisses for all of you - jeanineers, kate_schaefer, frabjouslinz</div>, mikigarrison, bhagwanx, tbclone47, csinman, kehrli, criada, nisi_la, eddvick, amy_thomson, marykaykare , Art (who teased me with tales of perfecting cupcake recipes for lisamantchev's reading at U Books on July 16!), Duane, Jack, Nancy, another Jack and more who I can't remember because there was wine and beer. Oh wait, I met Angie and Audrey, I think I have their names right :) And of course the CW students.After a late breakfast of scrumptious chicken fried steak at Mad Dog's in Bonney Lake, I am now heading to Portland for to celebrate good things with
karindira and company. I've got my guitar, I trust she has the wine... it's going to be a good night.It's a vacation from the music scene this weekend. Billy is on vacation for a few days before the big push begins, so I'm making the most of this time off.
Be there soon, PDX peeps! :D
- Location:outta here
- Mood:
happy - Music:PAD all the way to PDX
Good times.
And now it's just me, a sofa, a laptop, a cup of strawberry peppercorn tea, a Saturday, and forty student manuscripts.
Excelsior.
(348 miles to Isengard.)
- Mood:
working - Music:Emmylou Harris - The Pearl
Fourth of July already!?
Went to the Iron
Springs Writers Retreat on the Washington coast, where I was
"writer guru" along with jaylake. Very strange for me to be
Big Name Writer Guy. In addition to leading two critique sessions I
also gave two informal talks, one on plotting and one on using sets and
props to build character and display emotion. And of course there was
much eating and chatting and walking on the beach (though my it
was windy on that beach). Jay and I will be
doing
it again next year, though at a different location.
I also used the retreat to force myself to stop researching and start writing on my Wild Cards story. It worked. I wrote an outline and 1400 words of prose, and have continued to write 500-900 words per day since for a total of 6753 words so far. This is supposed to be a 10,000-word story and at this rate I expect the first draft to come in at about 12,000 words, but I can already see some places to make cuts.
Came home from Iron Springs to find a rejection in my email box from Catastrophia for the story I read at Wiscon. Darn it. Very encouraging rejection, though, and it's already back in the mail. On the plus side, Space Magic is a finalist for the Endeavour Award and "Firewall" and "Sun Magic, Earth Magic" both got honorable mentions from Gardner Dozois in his Year's Best SF. (Hmm... never noticed before that the titles of the latter story and my collection form an implied trilogy.)
Way too many of my friends have been in the hospital lately. M's having a heart valve replaced, P shattered his humerus and collarbone while ice skating, D's having a quadruple bypass, B was in a very serious car wreck, J's got cancer, R has had two surgeries for a duodenal ulcer, E was hospitalized for exhaustion... It's not even the usual "we're all getting older" thing; every one of those people but R is younger than me. Stop it, y'all.
Yesterday, at kateyule's instigation, was a rock climbing
party. camillealexa, tinaconnolly,
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fshoulders, and Camille's and Tina's partners joined
us at a local rock gym for a laid-back "rock climbing for
novices" evening. None of us had ever climbed before. Much fun
and very impressed by everyone, especially Tina's spider monkey
clamber and Felicity's patented "Falcon Girl" descents. I didn't
reach the top myself, but I did manage to go higher on each ascent.
Afterwards: drinks and snacks at Doug Fir.
lrcutter is using the halfway point of the year to
review her
progress on her goals, which strikes me as a fine thing to do.
My New Year's Resolution was to celebrate the holidays with friends;
I don't think we did anything for the Vernal Equinox but we'll be
attending a potluck tonight for the Fourth of July. Other goals
for the year are to write every day, exercise three times a week,
watch what I eat, and keep the house clean and decluttered, and
I've been doing quite well on those (except for the exercise, but
I have been managing at least two sessions most weeks except when
traveling). I've also sold two stories, which puts me on track for
my usual four sales a year.
Looking into the future, I'll be in Seattle July 9-11, visiting
with scarlettina and markbourne and
e_bourne and attending matociquala's Clarion
West party at marykaykare's. See some of you there!
I should, though. It's going to be hot.
Maybe I'll take it easy.
Yeah right. Miss M will be ready to go after a day off.
For the last two parades, I stood down by Piccadilly Circus. Today, I stood on Oxford Street, across from John Lewis. Next year, I'm going back to Piccadilly Circus. The curve of Regent Street is a nicer backdrop for the photos and the Piccadilly crowd seems to be more extroverted. I found the spectators on Oxford Street practically sedate.
Gay Pride is for yelling, laughing, singing, blowing your whistle, and waving at everyone, not for the golf clap.
OK, it wasn't quite that sedate. But I'm used to being in the midst of a group of people cheering and not being the loudest one.
Still, it was a lovely parade and I got a lot of photos, which will go up on Flickr as soon as.
- Location:Planet Gay Pride
- Mood: proud
- Music:something gay
A link in Rhe Dizzies homepage opposite led me to this:
site.xavier.edu/polt/keeler/story.html
Can this really be possible? Is it the sort of elaborate hoax that the Net invites and obsessed over-stimulated and highly intelligent college students create? It has to be real; follow the links and you get an actual novel, published by McSweeneys -- but then again McSweeneys is a doubtful enterprise and seems itself somehow impossible even when yhou hold its products in your hands.
Instead of relying on LoudTwitter to fill out my blog I'm going to try to kick it up a notch with the spice weasel of more real posts of substance. Hurray for you!
But I also lurv Twitter and want to encourage y'all to check it out, so I was thinking of posting a summary sentence of the previous day's activity as a teaser. For example, yesterday I talked about newer versions of D&D being better than older versions and about why my wrist hurt terribly. How's that?
The aforementioned posts.
Highlights:
- Congratulated nisi_la on her Tiptree in person instead of a lame e-mail
- Met matociquala and jointly hollered "FISH SEX," to the shock and consternation of surrounding writerly types; also collected Bear hugs
- Ogled Susan & Bill's gorgeous house and even gorgeouser cat (who followed us almost to the car)
- Became a facet of a magic eightball (well, a sixball) of writers who helped Nancy Kress plan a
fictional deathcharacter murder! - Worked out a one sentence summary of my book with nisi_la, criada, and Eileen Gunn: "A humorous fantasy quest as told by a foul-mouthed, closeted thief." (But I now think I might change "closeted thief" to "kleptomaniacal closetcase.")
- Squeezed mikigarrison and lasirenadolce and listened to them plan "burlesque pigs in space," as well as revenge for the double prank I played on Miki and jaylake last weekend
- Squeezed tbclone47 while he helplessly tried to escape
- Met quantumage in real life and found him quite entertaining
- Interrogated Clarionites, including the charming Sara Ryan, on what they found useful about their Clarion experience (I bet they never get sick of that question. Sorry, Sara!)
- I didn't ever get to meet Karen Joy Fowler (whose party this was!), but watching her get a tentacly gift from her students and turn it into an impromptu hat was unforgettable <3
- Came home to insightful and mostly positive reviews of my latest novel (the one we tagged above)
- Location:our fuzzy brown couch
- Mood: cheerful
- Music:Running Up That Hill - Placebo
mckitterickToday, I am gay. Today, I am trans. Today I am every variety of queer and bi. Today I am every mother of, father of, sister of, brother of, daughter of, son of, friend and/or lover of. Today I am everyone who has ever finally worked up the courage to take that big step and come out; today I am all the people who wish they could. Today, I am standing in for the friends I lost to a big disease with a little name (as Prince so eloquently put it in Sign of the Times).
Today, it's me.
--------------------------------------
That's how I put it last year and, try as I might, I can't think of a better way to put it this year.
What I love about Gay Pride London is its utter inclusiveness. Every time I've been to the parade, I've enjoyed a celebration not just of gay pride but of human pride, of life itself. And it makes me think that someday, humanity as a whole will actually achieve the higher level of enlightenment where we understand that what matters is not who we love but that we can love.
- Location:Planet Gay Pride London
- Mood:
crazy - Music:whatever's playing
gregvaneekhout's debut novel Norse Code. I was talking with friends today about something that the book does really well, which is that it gets a peculiar and wonderful aspect of Norse mythology: Einsteinian time. Time as a navigable dimension,as it were (and I love that he has Fenrir, among others, explaining this.)Essentially, in Norse mythology, all events are inevitable because they have already happened and are eternally happening. A wyrd or fate is not an inalterable future, so much as a part of the present we have not yet experienced. It's a tremendously fatalistic worldview, it's true, and so inimical to modern American culture that it's rare to see it done well in English-langage fantasy, or even touched upon--acknowledged--at all.
Greg does a great job with it, and that delighted me, and I meant to mention it before.
What's also tremendously cool about Norse myth is the way things are both symbolically and literally their names. So Thor (as an example) can be an individual--the god of thunder, who carries a hammer which strikes like a thunderbolt (which IS, in fact, a thunderbolt, Mjollnir that smashes...); and he can also symbolically be the god of thunder, a personification of random violence and flash-fire temper; but he is also, all at the same time, quite literally, thunder in his own person.
Ahem.
Anyway, it's really really cool.
- Mood:
tired
( Cut for strong language, trenchant personal remarks, and general ire. May only be safe for fans of alt.peeves )
Special current issue sale at the Talebones website! I've got copies, and I'd like to move them to good homes.
FIVE BUCKS gets you a copy of #38. That's two dollars off the regular rate. AND FREE POSTAGE!
www.talebones.com
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Page Summary
- joycemocha : Hot summer day [+0]
- holyoutlaw : Standing Wave [+2]
- crowleycrow : Passions [+1]
- lasirenadolce : the weekend, she is rockin'! (without music this time) [+1]
- supergee : (no subject) [+1]
- matociquala : she sewed my new blue jeans [+8]
- davidlevine : Whiz, whiz go the days [+0]
- joycemocha : Slow moving today [+0]
- fastfwd : How Much You Enjoy The Gay Pride Parade Depends On Where You Stand [+3]
- crowleycrow : The Case of the Impossible Author [+15]
- mysticalforest : Spurred into action [+0]
- supergee : (no subject) [+8]
- csinman : Clarion West party [+18]
- supergee : (no subject) [+0]
- fastfwd : Gay Pride Parade In London Today And You Know What That Means-- [+5]
- matociquala : (no subject) [+17]
- akirlu : Open Letter to a Craigslist Abuser [+13]
- libertango : Deep Thought [+3]
- flankleft : pics from wendi's party [+0]
- tbclone47 : Need a copy? [+1]