Home from Readercon and trying to not be depressed. Met lots of my f-list and hung out with tithenai (who won the short form Rhysling so GO CONGRATULATE HER), her awesome sister, csecooney, mer_moon,  sevenravens, alankria, cristalia, emilytheslayer, shadesong and mariness -- none of whom I'd met outside of the internets before Thursday evening.

More as I have time for it. The con itself was not as cool as the socializin'. (Panels were on the whole underwhelming though readings were on the whole dead cool.)
 
Is quiet here. Am lonely. Perhaps it's time to read my letter from Claire (which was waiting in my mailbox for meeeee), listen to some of the TONS of music people have given me, and maybe practice some knitting.

No visitors tonight! At least, no expected ones! Tomorrow morning. Will have to set ALARM. Gasp!

Oh, Threadless, why did you discontinue the one I really wanted but didn't buy before you discontinued?

Dan has found WILD BLUEBERRIES growing ALL OVER our backyard. My life is complete almost complete.

Parsley-cilantro-chard-pineapple-apple-ginger juice. Head feels a little odd. Green juices are fun.

For anyone attending the Goblin Fruit launch party on the 9th, let it be known that there shall be homemade cider-mead, courtesy of our new kitchen. It's boozy and dry as hell and at least 75% or so organic. Cider-mead makes everything better!

Have a pic of Julian playing Crisis Core. Just 'cause it's damned cute.



Man, that part sucks.

So I decided at the last minute to not sign up for any panels or a reading (between it being my first con and my having a volatile Changeling going conning with me, I decided it was probably Not My Moment). Next year!

BUT I shall be at the Goblin Fruit party on Thursday night, and will be reading at the Goblin Fruit/Mythic Delirium group reading at 2:00 on Friday afternoon. As well as, probably, the Meet the Pros(e) thingity, which is .. I'm not sure when. Unless there's overlap. I should maybe look into this.

I should dearly love to meet ALL of you. Come find me!

Will wearing my self-deprecating t-shirt at a poetry reading give other readers the wrong idea?

Poll #1425769 What do you think?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Will this make a wirewalking some enemies?

Dearest tithenai and mer_moon:

As dearly as I would have loved to plant my nonpartisan backside in a nonpartisan chair, possibly with a bowl of nonpartisan popcorn, and watch this charming debacle unravel itself like any skein of string from any labyrinth's heart, I have been called upon; no: further: I have been invoked to bring the shears to that quaint tangle and "put in a good word" for that erstwhile harborer of wayward doubles and scribe of missives conciliatory, one csecooney.

A good word my client requested, and a good word my client shall have.

SESQUIPEDALIAN.

Let that prove of service to you ALL in this enlightened age.

My lady's thankless champion,

Anonymous.

(No, I'm not disclosing my name to the questionable mercy of your violent tendencies! Discretion and valor, you know. Certain of you have Reputations. And whips.)

P.S. It is my sincere hope that all tiffs and quibbles and cavils can be resolved to the satisfaction of all parties by, say, Thursday next, when they otherwise might escalate into fisticuffs (the equidistance of your respective soapboxes having dwindled somewhat by that time), at which point I may have to lay by my peacekeeper's hat in favor of my bookie's, and take bets. I am, you understand, saddled with a mortgage, a child, and a rather extensive Etsy wishlist.

P.P.S. Let your gentle favor be not swayed by the fact that the time writing this should reasonably have been spent in assembling a futon, that a certain one of you should not have to sleep on the floor next week. Let it be steadfast and adamant despite the giant millipedes that prowl said floor -- as long as your humble correspondent's arm, they are, and hungering for the dainty flesh of Goblin Queens.

P.P.P.S. As for this: Above all, you must not feature the eldritch and perilous Mme. wirewalking as your Summer Poetess; she has powers undreamed of by the greatest minds of Man. Risk her writing, risk upheaval to natural order. -- I cannot speak to it, as it was penned by a Doppelgänger, and thus by someone wholly other than my client entirely. Perhaps that poor creature would lash out less if better nourished? Played with? Read stories to? But that is neither here nor there, and though I expect that in your magnanimity you will let this be water under the bygones and all that, if you in your infinite wisdom see fit to go seeking her with torch and pitchfork instead, well -- at the peril of sounding coldhearted -- it's all the same to me.

P.P.P.P.S. While your average Fetch enjoys a pleasant swim just as much as the next throwback of the cultural imagination, demoiselle El-Mohtar, I can assure you that there are better ways of treating her to one than, say, the tried-and-true expedient of "Catch the lot of them up, roll them into a carpet, and drop them into the Volga." Their skin being highly permeable (being diaphanous) and the smell of wet carpet being some few stops shy of ambrosia. In fact, why not adopt a wholly different course of treatment altogether? Say, a nice fruit basket?

.. for the benefit of tithenai and mer_moon:

It is in fact possible to drag the inestimable csecooney onto gchat. But only unintentionally. Try and she will elude you, but turn your head for one moment and when you least expect it, there she is. Looking for you, of all the oddities. I am apparently first-class, grade-A, nonpareil csecooney bait.

Hijinks ensue.

wirewalking : My hamartia. Or one of them. There are OH SO MANY.
csecooney : Must look up beautiful word I do not know... WAIT!
wirewalking : ...waiting!
csecooney : Ah! So happy now.
wirewalking : It's a good one, innit? Not least because it has such APPLICATION to my person.
csecooney : One knew there HAD to have been a word to mean that. They talk about it all the time in theatre, but though they'll say things like "hubris was his tragic flaw," they'll never say "hubris was his hamartia." I think they're afraid of too many H's.
wirewalking : That would be a lot of Hs, yes.
csecooney : The twins, Hubris and Hamartia.
wirewalking : This sounds like it wants to be a limerick. Not that I could turn it into one.
csecooney : There once was a man named Hamartia
                              Who dated a woman named Marsha
                              whose one tragic flaw
                              was the size of her craw
                              when she stood to declaim from Siddartha.

As you were.

It looks like I've made most of my LJ friends over the past few months. Not sure how that happened, but there it is. The downside is I don't know many of you very well, and the sorts of things I love learning about people don't tend to come up in conversation.

So!

Tell me, if you're so inclined, something interesting or amusing or fascinating about yourself. Not necessarily something you keep (mostly) hidden, though it certainly can be -- just something that people don't tend to know about you, for whatever reason.

Here's something amusing about your humble narrator: The biggest crush I've ever had on anyone was on a video game character. And that's lasted .. um .. almost half my life now. Sad but true.

Your turn.

All comments screened.

.. VEGGIE MONSTER!!







He's his mother's kid.

You know you've spent way too much on Amazon recently when you get no fewer than 5 of the $25 rewards points gift certificates in the same envelope.

.. the other day, when I'd JUST finished taking the last of the house pics and put the camera on the porch to walk down with Julian to check the mail, there was a hawk being mobbed by six crows in the trees just by the driveway. A five-minute screaming match ensued and the crows flew off. All talk.

( Cut! ).</div>

I appear to have some manner of mild allergy to wasp stings.

Yesterday was my first one! Somehow, in all my outdoorsiness, I have never managed to get stung by one before. Bees, sure. And there was that bout of Lyme. But wasps? Not till yesterday.

Thing is? It was FINE yesterday. Today it's swollen (the sting is in the palm of my hand between my thumb and index finger and that web of skin there is now about an inch thick) and went from hurting like hell to itchy as hell. Abruptly. Pretty much like a healing cut does, going from painful to itchy. Annoying! Luckily it's on my left hand, which is well-nigh useless anyway. Although it's attached to the stronger of my arms. Riddle me that one.

As I have just gotten official permission to shout this item of coolness from the rooftops of the internets ..

I shall be the featured poet in the Summer issue of Goblin Fruit.

Meaning that the featured poets will then have been Cat Valente, JoSelle Vanderhooft, Jennifer Crow and me.

For those of you who grew up watching Sesame Street, feel free to sing along here: Three of these things belong together! Three of these things are kinda the same! One of these things just doesn't belong here! etc. etc. etc.

In short, am giddy and bewildered in fairly equal measure. Launches July 9th! Be there or be square!

Apparently I am incapable of taking pictures of me. I make the strangest faces while trying to keep from laughing at myself. (Not looking at the screen when I take said pictures seems to help. Marginally.) However, I needed to send a photo to the lovely Readercon program people, and, as those of you who've asked for such are aware, there aren't any photos of me floating around to be gleaned from. No, really. There aren't.

So, without further ado, on a scale of puke-on-your-shoes to .. um .. not-puke-on-your-shoes, is the following likely to cause gastrointestinal catastrophe among the program-reading public?

My new favorite almost favorite thing ever, courtesy of the CSA and our inimitable juicer. Pineapple-cilantro-pear-carrot greens juice. It's lime green and utterly delicious. And now we can't get more fresh-picked cilantro for a week. Curses!

My books have come out of storage.

All 75ish boxes of them.

I have an obscene amount of folklore.

That is all.

Oki. So. The next novel, hopefully to be begun continued after Readercon, is currently in the stage of I have some-thousand words written, but I've reached an impasse, as I really want to research it a bit more before I dive back in. Meaning it's time to buy some books. I'm looking for recommendations.

It's set in the late 1800s, probably in the Northeastern U.S. I can hear you thinking steampunk! from here, but it isn't. I had this thing set in its time period before I knew what steampunk was. That said, it may pick at a few tropes in a tongue-in-cheek way. It's more occult than anything. Aaanyway.

I'm looking for recommendations of books on that place 'n time. You know the sort of book that really gets into the minutiae of daily life? I want me some of them. And I want something on the weird-ass relationships people had with the "other world," be it life-after-death or Faerie. (For instance: it seems to have been fairly common to actually believe your kid had been swapped for a changeling. At the same time, it certainly was common to drug the living daylights out of babies/toddlers with opiates. Descriptions of the side-effects of this read remarkably like descriptions of changelings. Go figure.) I want to explore that further.

Am also after modern novels set in that time period that AREN'T steampunk. I want to know what degree of verisimilitude seems to go over best. Don't want to browbeat people. But I do love me some details.

(Please don't assume that if it's popular, I'll have read it. This does not often follow. Recommend anyway!)

Also, anything else you think might be of use for me to know when writing this (elsewhere described as a "semi-occult, semi-steampunk Victorian-era novel, possibly written all in documents, complete with quasi-Tarot and unintentional incantations and lady explorers and a real-life setting spiked with Surreal Happenings .. ").

I know this is all quite vague. Brain is somewhat on strike at the moment. Part of this might be the rum I just stuck in my decaf along with the maple syrup and coconut milk. Part might be .. no, it probably is precisely that.

Thanks in advance, guys. I really do want to get a (bigger) chunk of this thing written this year. There's a lovely agent waiting on some finished novels and I don't want to let her down.

Yup, that's our moving truck. And the front yard of our old apartment building. Thanks to Matt and Lora for the pictures!

So I has me a deadline (can't tell you what for -- yet! Soon!) and, true to form, my brains have gone on holiday. Much of this is the gear-switching between Real Life Channel (moving and its satellite annoyances, predominantly) and Writing Channel -- combined with anxieties about another project that's up in the air waiting to see whether it's going to go anywhere or get shot down where it stands. Besides all that, this is a Very Cool Thing, this deadlined thing, and I want to make sure I do my best by it. And you know me: the harder I try, the harder I suck. DILEMMA.

I find that deadlines work best for me when they're imminent. Especially if short-notice. Sure, at the outset I hate short notice, but I get things done that way. Longer deadlines just give me more time to waffle over whether what I've done any modicum of justice to whatever it is, or whether to scrap it and start again, and usually the latter urge wins out. Rinse, repeat. So I end up spending a month on what could have taken me a week. (Or something.)

Must work on this.

How do y'all react to deadlines? Work better under pressure? Given certain parameters? Or tend to flail a lot and waste a bunch of time? Or something completely different?

.. instead, I present to you the House Wishlist. You may notice a theme. I am all about the sustainable living.

Paint rooms in pretty colors in zero-VOC paint
Seek out wild foodthings growing on/around property (Blackberries, black raspberries, mulberries, wild onions, wood sorrel. The neighbor's apple trees stare at me every time I walk past. I stare back.)
Acquire worm composter and worms
Organic fruit & veggie garden (Okay, we have heirloom tomatoes growing in somebody's Freecycled cat litter buckets. Next year!)
Scatter grass seeds out back where it's all torn up and muddy and soon to erode (I hate lawns but I hate mud more.)
Replace lightbulbs with CFLs (where we can. Every light in this house is on a dimmer. NO, REALLY. This makes it harder than it ought to be.)
Replace showerheads with watersaving ones
Set up recycling
Find sugar maples and tap them in the spring! (And try not to give self diabetes with resulting yum. Bloody genetics.)
PROPER organic fruit & veggie garden. See above.
Apple trees
American Persimmon trees ('cause Fuyus and Hachiyas won't grow here, alas, alackaday)
Wild blueberries!
Clear all the boggy woodland out of the front and plant the living daylights out of it with tasty foodthings
Clear the trees in the back that are obstructing our precious southwest-facing roof from potential solar array
Solar array!
Guest house! (Want to hand-build this, something easy/sustainable/cheap like cordwood or strawbale.)
Apiary!
PUPPIES!! (But for the love of all that's holy not yet. A toddler is like a puppy with opposable thumbs. Mercy!)

I'm sure there's more. Any suggestions to add?