Since I needed a new author pic, and since I was in a play this weekend and actually had makeup on, I asked Martin to shoot me in the living room.  He was happy he could light it entirely with antique lamps:



Also, I am now blonde.

I've got Windycon on Friday. I'm not actually looking forward to driving to Chicago, which actually speaks to Chicago driving and how much I hate that, and nothing else. I love me some four hour car trips to see friends. I hate me some driving in Chicago. Haaaaate.

The good news is, I'm rooming with dendrophilous, and kelly_swails has promised that we will throw down some drinks in an appropriate locale, and iuliamentis has promised to stop in at the con on Sunday. I also have a panel. (Looks up panel info.)

Sunday 10:00-11:00 a.m.

Lilac C: Rowling and Meyer
What are our kids reading now? Is there truly a young adult revival of
speculative fiction or are these anomalies? Are our kids reading more
SF or still playing it on the Wii(TM)? Find out from our panelists.
M. Haskell, J. Hines, R. Neumeier, J. Smith-Ready


Oh! With Mr. jimhines, I see. And R. Neumeier, I believe, is Rachel Neumeier who wrote The City in the Lake, which I read at penmage's enthusiastic recommendation, and it was very good, and later, when I was shopping for agents and saw that She Who Ended Up My Agent rep'd Rachel, I remember thinking "That's a goooood sign." (Among many good signs.)

Okay, so that's Windycon. The next weekend is More Seriouser Retreat (as opposed to Feral Writers Retreat). I have a couple of extra beds for that, btw... And I need to send out the invites for Hastings Point in the spring. And at some point I need to confess to my friends that I won't be hosting New Year's this year, since I'll be in North Carolina. And then Thanksgiving. And then Christmas.

Somewhere in there, I'm supposed to write the rest of my last year's NaNo novel (I'm clipping along, but my progress is going to take a serious dive this weekend). And... She Who Ended Up My Agent said that she's going to do one last read on my novel, and start sending it out to the (tuba notes) Editors.

(Of course, this morning, at the bus stop, I started thinking, "But I didn't get that thing right! And I think I forgot entirely about that thing! And there's a dangling modifier on page three!" But in fact, I don't actually remember forgetting anything, and I don't actually remember any dangling modifiers, either. I remember finishing the rewrite, and double-checking the list of things She Who Ended Up My Agent wanted me to focus on, and saying, "Yay, I'm done!" So I have to trust that I was not crazy when I did that, and just because I don't remember typing in a specific sentence, I really need to not email She Who Ended Up My Agent and ask her if I forgot those things. For one thing, she will tell me.)

Okay, writer-crazy done. Mostly.

Other things that are making me tired:

The 154 unread items in my inbox.

And the stories I need to put back in circulation.

And the fact that my dayjob is a non-stop thrill ride. I remember when one had the leisure to read 154 email messages in a week at my dayjob. Those days are long, long gone, apparently.

And my husband's enduring insomnia.

And my mother's unexpected visit this weekend for her cousin's funeral.

I would suggest that things should slow down, but in my experience, if I let things slow down, I get sick. So I may as well keep going too hard, and just avoid that, eh?

Okay, that* was terrifying.

...and awesome.

ETA: Ha!  I fell in with a couple of folks during/after the basic safety class and they were all, "Climb with us tonight!  Join our Google group for additional future climbing!"  So I did, and glanced at a recent thread, and it turns out that I have apparently accidentally happened upon the very same group with which abyssinia4077 's friend--who had agreed to let me tag along on Thursday--climbs.  The world is teeny-tiny.  If this further turns out to be the same group as the davis_square climbers, I will laugh and laugh and laugh.

* Climbing.  On a proper wall.  For the first time since...2005?

This was one of those afternoons/evenings where I was an Awesome Freelancer. This is what we call those days where, if I was this productive and sharp and motivated and clever all the time, I'd actually be able to go freelance and not starve and it'd be fun and not just stressful. I get about four weeks' worth of those days in any given calendar year.

So I will just share with you that today I finished another mini-project for the Great OWW Home Reno (a self-directed site-updating production by Yours Truly), shovelled non-insignificant amounts of workshop support mail, dispatched a whole bunch of Ideomancer second reads to their various dooms, managed to get back in touch with two authors I'd lost touch with about their stories, wrote a book review for the December issue, tidied my apartment a bit, and blocked out my schedule for this week, since I appear to actually have a social calendar going this month.

There are five actionable e-mails left in my inbox, and two of them are easy. Mwaha.

The other thing I have to do tonight is this post.

---

A while back, a gentleman from Golden Moon Tea dropped me an e-mail asking if he could have a link on the website (yes, sadly neglected right now; I'll get to it, I promise). I don't make a habit of linking things on the personal website that I don't actually, well, like and use; longtime denizens of here will probably have picked up that I am not really hot on advertising in general and prefer to have it blocked from my life whenever possible, never mind not being huge on being a conduit for it. Also, having been a bookseller for four years and change, I'm...in some ways a touch sensitive about my credibility when it comes to taste and recommendations: when your taste in something is being used as a barometer, positively or negatively, for people to decide which books they're going to buy, you get really hardcore about giving honest, unbiased evaluations of things and not recommending something unless you mean it, so as to not lose that customer's trust. I told the nice gentleman this, and he offered to mail me some samples.

Okay, thought I, mulling over whether this constituted selling out or not, and when they arrived, I brought them to work to share with ginny_t, who is among other things my Dayjob Partner in Fancy Tea Snobbery. We drank the tea over the past few weeks and Had Opinions on the matter.

Therefore, this is my tea review.

Sugar Caramel Oolong

This was okay -- not too sweet, not too tannic -- but really, really, really light. ginny_t noted she is not an oolong drinker habitually for just this reason; I have it sometimes, but also tend to prefer something stronger. I'm a Russian Caravan kind of girl. This is really light. So, kind of struck out on grounds of personal taste.

Honey Pear black tea

Okay, now this one was really awesome. Gutsy and sweet and sort of smooth, the way things involving honey are, and smelled and tasted distinctly like real pears. The balance was really good -- not too sweet -- and all elements were in there as advertised. I would have this one again. Nom.

Coconut Pouchong

I was feeling a little sicky the day I had this one, which may have spoiled my objectivity on the matter. What I do recall here was that the predominant taste was young coconut: if you've ever had coconut water or juice, it had that same strong, sharp mid-tongue kind of flavour. This decidedly did not taste like fake coconut, but it tasted a lot like coconut and in some ways not enough like tea?

I do like nice long pouchong leaves though. Pretty!

Nepalese Afternoon Tea

Advertised with "notes of honey, lotus, and fragrant sandalwood." While obviously a good-quality black tea, it didn't really strike me as fancy or awesome among black teas. It was there. It was there nicely enough, but mostly it was just there.

Tippy Earl Grey

This, though, was nice. There is a certain degree to which earl grey is earl grey is earl grey, but you can tell the good stuff from the mediocre stuff very easily, and it's to do with the balance of bergamot flavour to black tea ballsiness to other. This one apparently has lavender in it, and you can spot it there both in the nose and when you taste it. It really added something, and it was subtly different enough to make the whole thing interesting without taking this out of the subgenre of earl grey. Bergamot was light and not cloying and tasted oddly fresh. I'd possibly go back for seconds on this if I had to get specifically earl grey (not my favourite, although I'll drink it).

I split this one with a different coworker; ginny_t doesn't like earl grey and Other Coworker needed tea badly that morning, and knows my desk is where it lives. He gave good report.


So, general verdict?

1) I'll probably buy some of that Honey Pear sometime.
2) I probably won't actually link this tea place on my website, since I can only vouch for one unqualified win here out of five; otherwise, while it was good-quality stuff, I wasn't head over heels. That's maybe not enough to place an ongoing recommendation on the wider internets.
3) I find myself not opposed to people sending me free tea. I suspect it's not hurting my popularity at the office either.

This has been your first and hopefully not only Tea Review. Good night and good luck.

Today is the last day to submit poetry for the special winter editions of Goblin Fruit and Mythic Delirium.

I've been thinking about the recent PW Top Ten List Debacle (short version: somehow, yet again, we get an all male list and the insistence that this only happened because we were looking for "the very best writers"), and wondering whether I wanted to yet again go through all the explanations about how, while such a list may have been made with good intentions, it nonetheless indicates unconscious biases that you need to make conscious so you can examine them instead of denying them, because you just don't get all male lists over and over again at random (the odds of that would be about 1/1000), and you also don't get them because somehow all the best books are consistently written by guys (which we all know from experience that just isn't true).

But via jimhines, I found this Politics Daily article by Lizzie Skurnick that ( says it better than I can in so many ways )

The Amazon page for my forthcoming collection shows an actual ranking. Which means someone preordered the book. Which means I'm going to be obsessing even worse than usual. (Even though I know better than to keep refreshing the page. Really I do. I can stop anytime I want. Um, maybe.)

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who have a warm fresh-baked crusty loaf of sourdough to munch on while they work, and those who don't.

*smugs*

I thought I'd lost my sourdough-fu for a while there, but apparently I was wrong. This is just gorgeous. (Oddly, tea-towels may be the key: I had tried substituting clingfilm, but that didn't work half as well.) And I, I point out, am a man who has been to San Francisco and sampled the sourdough that is so famous it has a yeast named all for itself, Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis. It's very nice - but for my palate? I think this is better. This is certainly sharper. I think they sweeten the dough in SF, to offset the sour or else to feed the yeast.

I name this yeast Lactobacillus novocastriensis, and let dispute with me who will. I have the ferment, and you don't.

Happy birthday to Mike Munsil, Liberty Hall founder. Hope it’s a good one!

In other non-related news, here’s some linkage: the other interviews on SF Signal of the contributors of the Apex Book of World SF include French dark fantasy author Mélanie Fazi, horror writer and AR author Kaaron Warren, and Croatian Aleksandar Ziljak (whose story “An Evening in The City Coffeehouse, with Lydia on my mind” is up in the November issue of Apex Magazine).

Cross-posted from Aliette de Bodard

Leave a comment at original post, or comment here.

In an epic saga like the Mahabharata, two mythical families destroying each other is certainly a major event, and it is no exception here.

Krishna decides that he will give his armies to the Kauravas, but he himself will help the Pandavas. Krishna is Vishnu, the king of the gods incarnate, so it's probably a good thing for the Pandavas that he's on their side.

The Kauravas and the Pandavas go to war for 18 days. Bhisma is commanding the army against the Pandavas. The Pandavas love Bhisma like a father. Arjuna, the great bowman, does not want to kill his beloved uncle.

This is the point in the battle during which Krishna takes time out to deliver the Bhagavad Gita to Arjuna. The Bhagavad Gita summarizes Hindu theology. Krishna convinces Arjuna that human life is ephemeral, and it is better for him to act than to not act. Arjuna, seeing the tapestry of existence in a wider way now, decides he can fight Bhisma.

You might remember that Bhisma has vowed not to attack a woman. Shikhandi, who is a reincarnation of the princess Bhisma ruined the life of, is placed in Arjuna's chariot, and from this cover, Arjuna fills Bhisma full of arrows.

Everyone is very sad, including the Pandavas. Bhisma is literally a pin cushion of arrows. Arjuna places 3 arrows under his head so he can rest. Bhisma is allowed to choose the time of his own death, and while he no longer the commander of the Kaurava forces, he lives until the war is finished. and then chooses to die.

Next up: Karna enters the battle.

Mirrored from Writer Tamago.

Lately, I've been doing several experiments re: Internet and creativity. I'm trying to understand whether or not the Internet hinders or helps my creativity, hoping for a definitive answer on either side of the fence. But what I'm finding is really yet another gray area. It helps wonderfully to have a supportive community out there and to see others being successful. But sometimes it hinders, too. In my experience, the sheer amount of time spent on social networking sites can painfully reduce my creative output. I am apparently not as good at multi-tasking as I'd like to be. And yet, sometimes, it's very inspiring to have web pages of art exhibits and videos and things of that sort open. Right now, I've got The Evolution Store and MoMA's Wunderkammer Exhibit site open, using them as visual touchstones to inspire me along the path in the novel.

John Taylor, my Very Favorite Bassist, has this to say about it:

When artists today are asked to Twitter their every thought, their every action, to record on video their every breath, their every performance, I believe they’re diluting their creative powers, their creative potency and the durability of their work.

And in the long run I believe they’re also diluting the magical power and the magnetic attraction that they can or will ever have over their audience.

(You can read all of JT's speech at Duranduran.com)

Part of me agrees and part doesn't. (Case in point, my obsession with him and his band has only grown stronger the greater their Internet presence, honestly). But as I'm aware of my own experience with the ebb and flow of Internet influence on my own work, I'm sure it must be even more invasive and difficult for him and his bandmates to be constantly creative under the ever-watchful eye of so much media.

You can only do so much, but the one thing you must do at all costs is protect and nurture that creative well however you can. I suspect for each of us that protection and nurturing is a constant balancing act.

What say you?

Specifically, chatting online with Vania of Reverie Book Reviews, reading from Thief Eyes at TusCon in Tucson (spell that three times fast), and reading from Bones of Faerie at the Phoenix Faerie Festival. Stop by and say hello!

=-=-=-=-=-=

Tuesday, November 10 -- 8 p.m. EST/6 p.m. Arizona/5 p.m. PST
Teen Author Chat with Reverie Book Reviews
Chatroom is here (password is bones)

=-=-=-=-=-=

Friday, November 13 & Sunday, November 15
TusCon Science Fiction Convention
InnSuites Hotel, 475 N Granada Ave., Tucson, AZ

* Friday, 6 p.m.: Panel on The Geek in Us All
* Sunday, Noon: Reading from Thief Eyes
* Sunday, 3 p.m.: Panel on Partners Who Live and/or Work Together

=-=-=-=-=-=

Saturday, November 14
Phoenix Faerie Festival
Estrella Mountain Regional Park, 14805 West Vineyard Avenue, Goodyear, AZ

* Noon: Reading/book signing with James Owen, Aprilynne Pike, and Janette Rallison & Janni Lee Simner
(Sunflower Meadow Stage Area)

Good morning!  Know what's a great way to start off your week?  Reading a brand-new story at Strange Horizons.

"True Names" by Stephanie Burgis

We hope you will like it!

Fans of the lovely Ms. Burgis may be excited to know that her young person's novel, A Most Improper Magick, will be coming out this spring. Here is a quickie book trailer:

 

And for something completely different, check out last week's story:

Nomadology, by Chris Nakashima-Brown

I watched the muted television. On-screen, stop-motion set pieces illustrated a science fiction fantasy of the destruction of the state apparatus and the abolition of private property mediated by alien invasion and natural disaster. The only sound in the room was the soft clicking of aluminum knitting needles, like a DIY Geiger counter monitoring our entropic half-lives.

Damn. What's the nautical word for when a cable has snapped and you weave the two broken ends back together again? I know this, damnit, but it has slipped me, and my google-fu is weak today...

ETA: thanks, folks. It is, of course, "splice". Too many mainbraces spliced in this house, that's the trouble, my brain has gone to goo...

Wooot! I was soooo happy today to click onto Strange Horizons and see my story "True Names" published there! "True Names" is the historical dark fantasy/horror story that I wrote for my brother Dave as his Christmas present last year. I really hope some of you will have the time to read it, and I hope even more that you'll enjoy it!

You can read the story here.

I have lots of photos to post in the next day or two from our trip to Raglan Castle (LOVE that castle!), but right now we're on our way out for a day trip into Bristol, one of my favorite cities. I'll be wandering around bookstores, eating good food, and glowing the whole time with the happiness of getting this story published in my favorite magazine. :)

My con report for Utopiales is up on the World SF news blog (I was not going to produce one, but Lavie nagged me). You can read it here.
Lots of text, but sadly no illustrations–given that the BF and I had managed to forget the camera in the somewhat precipitous departure from Paris. Next time, we’ll do better…

Cross-posted from Aliette de Bodard

Leave a comment at original post, or comment here.

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

I have a strong suspicion that I will not actually have 50K written for NaNoWriMo at the end of the month. But that’s okay with me. NaNoWriMo is fabulous for some books (it really helped me get the first draft of Fortune’s Folly written) but sometimes pushing to writewritewrite for wordcount isn’t the best thing for a book. I am finding that for the current project, my pattern is to work on one particular scene for a day or two, then take a day to mull it over, revise, and dream about the next scene until I am excited to write it. I am having a lot of fun and feel good about the book. But my wordcount isn’t NaNoWriMo-level by any means. I will be lucky if I get 30K. So maybe I won’t “win” the marathon, but I will (hopefully) have the start of a novel I can keep working on and feel good about.

I fully admit that I am also feeling a tiny bit lazy — and also a tiny bit nervous about getting the house cleaned and prepped (I need to paint the living room trim, eek!) for my parents’ Thanksgiving visit. Not to mention a number of other mundane-life things that were stressing me out to be putting off. And the soulful, neglected looks the dog keeps giving me.

So I may not be going full-tilt for 50K, but I am still trying my best to write 1K per day. And I’m definitely cheering the rest of you on toward meeting whatever November goals you have set!

In other non-guilty-admission news, I wanted to spread the word to any librarians out there about a big contest we are holding over at the Debs of 2009 community. We’re giving away 46 (!) of our novels to one winning library (public OR school). Details on how to enter are in this entry. Please pass it on to any librarians you know who might be interested!

And a few miscellaneous fun links:

I am coveting these Star Wars Trash Compactor bookends! (Thanks to Pinot and Prose for the link)

Did you know a baby echidna is called a puggle?

I've been thinking about my desire to try to experiment a bit more with my writing and try some new things. In particular, I've been thinking about how two writers I particularly admire for their prose (Laini Taylor and Maggie Stiefvater) both have outlets where they practice/play with writing outside of their work on novels (The Sunday Scribblings and The Merry Sisters of Fate, respectively).

Then I was chatting with my friend and critique partner callenghast and we got onto the topic of writing and I said how it might be fun (and good for my writing) to do something similar (though perhaps a bit more casual): to write from a common prompt once a month, and post the results in our blogs. The intention is to practice our craft, to have fun, and to branch out stylistically. So we're going to do that, probably starting in December. Whee!

The reason I'm posting here is that we figured there might be others who would be interested, either in playing along (there's no minimum participation requirement), or in reading the results.

Edited to add:
I decided it seemed like there were enough of us interested it made sense to form a community to keep everything in one place. So I've created an lj community called Chasing Inspiration over here. Please feel free to join (I made it moderated for now) and comment on the starter post I put up with thoughts you might have on logistics.

So, Leah, what did you do this afternoon?

I'm glad you asked, Little Timmy! I went with cszego to the Hockey Hall of Fame Legends Classic!

Pics or it didn't happen.

You drive a hard bargain, Imaginary Interlocutor...



It's the warmup skate! We spent this mostly going: "OMG IT'S MARK MESSIER--NO WAIT! OMG! IT'S WENDEL CLARK!"




Some Stanley Cups, hung from the rafters.




Of course, we can't have a hockey post without snapping a nice one of Bill. Hello, m'dear.*

*For those who don't know already, I am the only girl in all creation with a #5 Leafs Heritage jersey.




Carpet Man trains six days a week to roll out that carpet on cue. Here he is, crouched like a tiger in readiness. It's a hard job, but he does it for the privilege of serving his country.



The ceremony where they gave out the blazers to the 2009 Hockey Hall of Fame inductees (Brett Hull, Brian Leetch, Luc Robitaille, Steve Yzerman, and some team owner dude who is not a hockey player and thus not important to this post) featured things like fireworks and Mounties. Really, this is the perfect confluence of all the things that make my heart happy.

(Note Carpet Man executed his duty duly and well.)



Vague and blurry shot of the Skydiggers playing between the two 30-minute periods. This lacked a crucial ingredient: Gord Downie.

There are no actual pictures of the hockey game. Pfft. You think I'd be taking pictures? I was watching hockey.

But as to the game itself, this was pretty much the world's fanciest casual game of pickup. It was pretty obviously rigged, in a sense that they weren't going to let the Canadian Legends lose no matter what went down (and really, they were winning by three goals anyway) and they didn't call any offsides, penalties, or anything else. The clock maybe stopped once. The linesman was more an emcee than anything else.

It was hella fun though. Wendel Clark played in a little ballcap, and you could practically see him thinking must...not...check...old men! Lanny MacDonald still has a totally fearsome moustache, and his moustache was playing this game before you were born, whippersnapper, so get out of the way! Robitaille and Leetch actually suited up and played a few shifts, and that was cool. Glenn Anderson has that whooshy Pantene hair when he skates; you get the feeling he doesn't wear a helmet not due to any safety thing, but because he's humming shampoo commercials to himself as he skates by. And we will still dork out and holler for Borje Salming even when he's on the wrong team.

In sum?



ME LIKE HOCKEY. ME WATCH HOCKEY. OM NOM NOM.