These days I am on vacation from the unchallenge.  Still and all.  I can't shake the sense that Kit Whitfield is not nearly as appreciated as she ought to be.  So.

[#]. In Great Waters (Kit Whitfield).

The trouble I had with this book was, people kept asking me what it was about.

( "It's an alternate history England," I would say. "With mermaids." And then: "No! Wait! Come back!" )

So yes, it's an alternate history England with mermaids.  And it will eat your face.

Here is Torque Control's review of same.

* Not That There's Anything Wrong With That.

Hmmm...looks like we've got another growth surge on our hands, and we have to split part of the only unsplit level of the program. I feel more interviews and scrambling in the offing.

However, today hasn't all been work. A former student came back to visit. Okay, Leah wasn't actually ever my student, but she ran the anime club I sponsored for a long time. She was Bryon's student, and she took a few Japanese lessons from me. Essentially I've known about her antics since she was around sixteen.

A year and a half ago, she went off to art schoo in sunny Florida, and she came back today, loving what she's doing. She glowed. I loved talking to her and sharing her enthusiasm.

I think we feel really good when we realize that we've influenced someone in a good way. I'm not responsible for Leah going to design school, but I've sat through a lot of uncertainty as she's tried to figure out her niche. I've always wanted her to live up to her potential, and I'm as proud as any parent now that she is.

Never underestimate the human factor in helping you get to where you want to go.

***

Starting tomorrow at noon, I'm going on a writing bender. Lots of two-hour blocks of writing punctuated by brain unscrambling breaks. Looking forward to it.

Are you all ready for the holiday yet? I think we're going to get WEATHER. If it keeps me from getting to Mickey, I'll be unhappy.

Catherine

Mirrored from Writer Tamago.

Saturday I was shucking pomegranates all day.  At one point Martin entered the kitchen, looked at my hands, and ran away, shrieking "Madame La Guillotine!" Of course, he has been reading Tale of Two Cities to the kids.

A very happy birthday to feiran and kent_allard_jr!!!

Down by the river, that's where this day went. Walkies in the snow. Hours'n'hours of walkies.

There might have been a pub involved, halfway.

Now what I really want is tea'n'toast. What I really don't want is to be sitting here chiselling words out of this manuscript.

*chisels*

*scowly-face*

In other news: I appear to have written a climbing scene where nobody slips to hang perilously by their fingertips above a dire drop. They climb carefully and sensibly and get where they're going sans any intimation of disaster. What was I thinking? No wonder I'm not rich.

Missing Child in Chicago

Brianna Lacey, 15, is missing.

She is also known to go by the name of Brianna Wright. She was last seen Friday, December 18, 2009 leaving for school from her home in the vicinity of 80th Street and Eberhart and heading to Longwood Academy located at 95th Street and Throop, according to the Chicago Police Department. Brianna is described as a African-American, 5 ft. 4 inches tall, weighing 110 lbs., with brown hair, brown eyes, and a fair complexion. She also has pierced ears. She was last seen wearing a navy blue polo shirt, navy blue sweater, gray pants, and a brown coat. She had on black gym shoes, as well. According to police, she frequents the area near her home, as well as the area near 105th Street and Yates in Chicago, Illinois. Anyone with information on her whereabouts is asked to contact Chicago Police Area Two Detective Division Special Victims Unit at (312) 747-8274.
 
karnythia says: This is my son's cousin. She may have run away, but we don't know that for sure. The police are treating her as a runaway so there is no Amber Alert. If you have seen this girl and have any information please contact the Chicago police at (312)747-8274. Or if you are just willing to spread the link, please feel free to do so. She's a kid and we're worried about her. Thank you.

Books 1-10.
Books 11-20.
Books 21-30.
Books 31-40.
Books 41-50.
Books 51-60.
Books 61-70.
Books 71-80.
Books 81-90.
Books 91-100.
Books 101-110.

111. Slaves of Spiegel by Daniel Pinkwater. Funnier than Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, half as long, and goofier; Sargon the Great, junk food pirate king of the planet Spiegel, concocts a cooking contest in which earthlings Steve and Norman, owner and assistant chef of the Magic Moscow--the most popular restaurant in Hoboken--are among the abductee contestants. There aren't really any twists here, but that's OK because Pinkwater gives planets names like Fred and Schwartz. I mean, that's not the only reason to like this book, but it's a good one.

Saw in year's long night by roasting marshmallows in the backyard firepit of a friend's new house. The air here is chill, but not cold, no sign of that just-might-freeze edge it sometimes takes on this time of year. Haze dimmed the moon, gentled its edges, made the night a little darker than it might otherwise be.

The smell of woodsmoke still lingers on my clothes. Tomorrow, the days will start getting longer again. We have mixed feelings about that around here, but in this season of cool nights and warm days, it's hard to truly believe in 110 degree summers anyway--and the extra light will be welcome, even if the cold is not something we seek to escape.

And so the year continues turning round. A good and joyous solstice to all.

Via lucy_anne, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Daleks.

Ah, the passage of time. There is no simple meme that can cover a decade, at least, not a personal one. Because, seriously, when you're talking about a decade that spans such important years as age 24-34, how do you sum that up in "What song reminds you most of your mid-twenties to your mid-thirties?"

Eh.

In the past decade, I have lost one parent and both maternal grandparents; gone back to college, and graduated; gotten married; written three books & started a writing career; quit my job to go back to college; gotten two other jobs; moved house; become a home-owner; traveled to some foreign countries; attended my first science fiction conventions; started and quit graduate school; driven halfway across the country and back; watched my stepdaughter grow from a saucy four-year-old into a saucy fourteen-year-old; visited something like 20 new states; learned at least one new language (well, for to read in, anyway); &c. I suspect some decades are not quite as jam-packed with such explicit changes, but I would be surprised that my list would be any shorter or less varied in 2019 as it is in 2009.

However. I have been writing online journal entries in one format or another since 1999, so I do, in fact, have a decade's worth of blog posts to look back on. The online archive prior to 2002/2003 is spotty; most of that stuff is happily offline. (And, having gone and looked at those early 1999-2000 entries, I'm really, really glad they aren't widely available.)

Anyway. My very first online entry began like this:

I used to write diaries, as a child, as though I were writing for an avidly interested public. As a teenager, I wrote things that to this day I would blush if anyone else read. (And often, upon rereading, I blush anyway.)

It was titled "The Alpha Entry" and I have apparently lost the metadata for it. But the entry clearly states that I am 25 in it, and there is a later entry nominating December for "The Worst Month of the Year 2000."

So, let's do it, shall we? The Retrospective Decade Journal Meme, as far back as you can go. Take either the first sentence or the most compelling paragraph from each month of each year of the decade (or whatever mix works best) and slap it down with the date. Comment on each entry--if you wish--or don't.

This is going to get long, and I'm probably going to spread it out over a couple of days

( 2000 )

( 2001 )

( 2002 )

( 2003 )

Okay, folks, here's a challenge for you: define the difference for me, between being gratified and being grateful.

I may or may not have participated in a Bear Dance yesterday w/the Guild of St. Andrew at Elizabethan Christmas. I'm withholding photographic evidence. However, I will admit to making gingerbread dough (we're making gingerbread bears today), amaretto bread, and raspberry-walnut fudge. Also a peasant's edition of coq au vin. Much more cooking and prepping to be done before my peeps arrive on the 27th, however. I'm spending the New Year w/BFFs from home and I *cannot wait* until they get here.

And since I have very little computer time these days (my computer still isn't fixed and husband's back-up mini comp is also borked), I probably won't be on social networking sites past this post. Every moment of precious computer time needs to be spent on the writing.

But I'm looking down the barrel of 2010, and frankly I want it to be so much better than 2009. Resolutions give me hives, honestly, and maybe that's because I don't like to be held accountable for things that always seem to get out of my control. As soon as I set my sights on something, I seem to jinx it utterly. But, it could also be that I don't make achievable goals (viz m_stiefvater's post).

So...here's what I'm going to do in 2010 writing-wise:

-Finish THE UNNATURALISTS. I hope this will happen before the New Year, but much depends on recovery of files post-crash. Otherwise it'll happen within early January.
-Finish MARKED. I'm halfway there, and if I'm let loose on it, I think I could wrap it up very quickly.
-Finish FOSSIL RAIDERS. This may take the bulk of the year. It feels like a big book, and there's still plenty of research to do. (Hopefully involving more museum trips! :))
-Write up a nonfiction proposal. An artist friend of mine and I have a really cool idea that I'd love to explore, and I think we have the platform to do it.
-I will continue to do short work, but am not going to invest as much emotional energy into it. Not really worth it, imo. (For whatever reason, short stories and I have a rocky relationship. I fret worse over short story rejections than I do over novel rejections, honestly. Not anymore).

Of course, I hope all this leads to selling more books and work, going to conferences, meeting people, living a more settled life, etc., etc. But I can't control all that. All I can do is keep showing up at the keyboard.

Personally, I plan to:

-Make one piece of art a week. I always say I want to make art, but perhaps that's not concrete enough. One piece every week seems do-able. Maybe as part of this one, I'll agree to share it here, because that way I'm held accountable.
-Learn a new art. Either knitting or weaving are the most feasible candidates.
-Get involved in some form of movement. Definitely checking out the kung fu school here, but yoga is also a possibility.
-Be more mindful and thankful every day. This means daily meditation and journaling.

There are plenty of other things I want and hope to achieve. But I think that's enough for now.

How about you?

And since this is probably the last post of 2009, I wish all of you happy holidays and a brilliant new year!

Originally published at devafagan.com. You can comment here or there.

Thank you to everyone who entered my Bookish Cheer giveaway. The winners are:

Ghosts: Livejournal user stuff_on_a_stik
Fairies: Ying Lee

I’ve sent emails to both winners, but if for some reason they don’t go through, you guys can email me at deva at devafagan dot com with your mailing addresses.

I wish I had copies of these books to give everyone who wants to read them! If you didn’t win, I encourage you to see if you can get them from your local library, or even order a copy of your own!

It's a hundred and two miles to Chicago pages to the end of this revision. I've got a house full of food*, all the coffee that isn't in Brazil, and three days to finish. It's bloody freezing, and I'm wearing thermals.

I really ought to get this done. Tho' friends may get in the way; you know what people are like.

This particular page I'm looking at, though - I guess I didn't like it very much. There seem to be scribbles on every line. Could take me half an hour just to fix this one page. Urk. I'm goin' in...

*I'm thinking chicken-and-mushroom risotto tonight, but I forgot to get any parmesan, oh noes. What I'm thinking, truffle paste. As compensation rather than substitute, you understand...

1. What did you do in 2009 that you'd never done before?
Well, for one thing, I got a literary agent.

( Read more... )

I've been watching Avatar: The Last Airbender (also known these days as "The Other Avatar"), and enjoying it, for all that it's messages lie rather close to the surface -- there's enough done well with this series that I can mostly forgive the things that aren't (as always, in writing, it's what you do right, not what you manage not to do wrong). But today, I came to a bit that got me thinking about a very common trope in fiction that doesn't always work for me.

( Thoughts on fictional guilt and responsibility )

Books 1-10.
Books 11-20.
Books 21-30.
Books 31-40.
Books 41-50.
Books 51-60.
Books 61-70.
Books 71-80.
Books 81-90.
Books 91-100.
101. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman.
102. Brown Harvest by Jay Russell.
103. Dab Neeg Hmoob: Myths, Legends and Folk Tales from the Hmong of Laos, Charles Johnson, editor and Se Yang, associate editor.
104. Summer of '49 by David Halberstam.
105. The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter.
106. Black Betty by Walter Mosley.
107. She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea by Joan Druett.
108. Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars by Daniel Pinkwater.
109. Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock.

110. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. These books, man. Holy crap these goddamn books. I feel pretty incoherent trying to talk about them, because my enthusiasm is at full gallop. (Given that I spent a sizable chunk of my day today reading this entire book today, I should probably wait to cool off before talking about it, but I won't.) Back in September I read the first book in this series back to back with Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go; I loved The Hunger Games but disliked the Ness intensely. At the time I chalked it up to feeling manipulated by Ness's authorial hand, but that doesn't really wash, in the end--storytelling is manipulation, after all, in that we all choose what information to share, and we all try to guide our readers' emotional responses. No, I think that where these books differ (for me) is that, in Ness's work, there's nothing but the vicissitudes of narrative fate to (poorly) conceal the manipulative authorial hand; with Collins, there is the structure of a dictatorship, and the Games themselves, putting the characters through their paces. Collins is actually peeling back the curtain, showing us the people who are manipulating appearances and events both, whether it's composed, heroic Cinna and the rest of Katniss's sheltered but sincere design team, or the blood-and-roses menace of President Snow. The tension here is constantly being ratcheted up, and coming from unexpected directions--in fact, once we're back in the arena much of the urgency of the narrative actually falls away, because we know (at least in part) what we're in store for. But what leads up to that, and what it leads into, is subversive and socially aware in a way that I'm not sure I expected. There are times when Collins's world feels a bit too glossy and unsubtle; but overall, this is a hell of a series, and I can't believe I have to wait until next August for the third book.

See? Incoherent.

Books 1-10.
Books 11-20.
Books 21-30.
Books 31-40.
Books 41-50.
Books 51-60.
Books 61-70.
Books 71-80.
Books 81-90.
Books 91-100.
101. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman.
102. Brown Harvest by Jay Russell.
103. Dab Neeg Hmoob: Myths, Legends and Folk Tales from the Hmong of Laos, Charles Johnson, editor and Se Yang, associate editor.
104. Summer of '49 by David Halberstam.
105. The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter.
106. Black Betty by Walter Mosley.
107. She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea by Joan Druett.
108. Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars by Daniel Pinkwater.

109. Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock (Reread). It's dangerous to revisit books that loom large in one's mind--there is always the danger that a second look will reveal flaws that one had not suspected. For the most part, that isn't true of this book. Just yesterday this post reminded me of something I'm not sure I ever knew--Holdstock was a science fiction writer before he became interested in the concepts that suffuse Mythago Wood and its descendants. It makes perfect sense. This is a fantasy novel with an SFnal approach: in Part 1 a concept is introduced, in Part 2 it is made manifest, and in Part 3 the protagonist and the reader are carried inside it. That it's not science, exactly, but Jungian theory melded with a sort of deeply speculative anthropology--really, the "leaf-mold of the mind" that Tolkien spoke of--is what makes this book feel at once so rigorous and so richly fantastic; Ryhope Wood and the phenomena that surround it begin to seem not just wondrous but somehow enchantingly, horribly plausible.

If there's a caveat, it's that this story is very much out of the boy's-adventure-tale tradition, and while the outsider/conqueror/colonist dynamic is subverted at least in part, the gender dynamic is problematic in a way that's never really explored. Guiwenneth is a construct of Steven's or Christopher's or both, a literal dream girl, and yet the implications of this with regards to her own identity and their relationships are almost entirely ignored. Still, as Justine has recently discussed, it is possible to love something and accept that it's flawed. After all, a perfect novel may well be an impossibility; maybe it shouldn't even be the goal.

It's a bit unsettling for me to think back to when I first encountered this book--somewhere around the mid-'90s--and realize that I remember very little of it, not even why precisely I liked it so much. I was absolutely a less critical and less cognizant reader back then, and yet Mythago Wood hit me at a time when I was slipping out of the grasp of trilogy fantasy, looking for something more substantive and interesting; if I hadn't found this and books like it I sometimes wonder if I wouldn't have moved out of the genre entirely, at least for a time. I wish I had had the opportunity to thank Mr. Holdstock for his books while he was still alive.