Today is my grandma's 80th birthday. We're having a big party for her on Sunday--where by "we" I actually mean my folks are doing all the work--but today is the official date. I don't mostly put birthdays on here because I don't want it to seem like a statement if I miss one. But 80, 80 is a big, round number. Eighty is a thing.

Grandma is my last grandparent standing. I mean, I have Grandpa Lyzenga, but I married into him when I was full grown rather than having memories of walking with him when I was tiny; and as much as I will sometimes introduce Aunt Ellen and Uncle Phil as my Lingen grandparents, and as much as they are doing their darnedest, they are in fact a really really special great-aunt and -uncle, which is its own thing and not to be denigrated.

But Grandma has enough personality for four grandparents all by herself. (So, I know firsthand or hear quite vividly, did each of my other grandparents in their own ways. Lack of personality: not an issue in this family.) Grandma is an Energizer bunny. I wrote in her birthday card that she embodies the adage about blooming where one is planted, and I really think that's true. She does well with new people and new situations. She just dusts herself off and tries again, whatever she needs to try again, and I have never once heard of a situation she couldn't eventually make that work in. Never once. Her persistence inspires me. I hope it lasts long past 80.

Dear lovers of fantastical poetry,
Signal boost from mitchell_hart:

I am pleased to announce the unveiling of my new magazine, Through the Gate, a quarterly devoted to fantastical poetry.

timprov is having a print sale--his photos are 33% off for the rest of May. He's been taking all sorts of gorgeous new things. Go check it out!

Cover art for my novelette "Faster Gun,"  (Working title: "John Henry Holliday is Sick of the These Time-Traveling Assholes") forthcoming on Tor.com this summer.

The artist is Richard Anderson.

I'm working on "The Deeps of the Sky" tonight, and generating a regular festival of Words Word Don't Know:

luminesced, tropopause, sheeny, thicks, unnavigable, dartlike,

Meanwhile, I had a little argument with myself on twitter as to whether I should use some modestly bogus science to create a cool special effect. I went with it. ;-) Now I'm stopping because I have to figure out how the protagonist intervenes to stop the Bad Thing from happening, or how he mops up afterward...

Oh, I might have just done so. Woot!

So I'm doing this thing.

Well, okay, I'm doing a lot of things. I'm a Mris; even when one of the obligatory things is resting (and oh, is it ever), I'm still doing a lot of things.

But there's this thing coming on the horizon. I feel it like a storm, and now papersky knows how you can feel a storm coming days and days away across a prairie. This thing is large, and it's science fictional, and it's mine, my precioussss.

But this thing is not close enough that I can see the sheets of rain and the individual bursts of lightning and the bits where the sun peeks through. No. (I like storms. This is a positive metaphor.) This is far enough away that I'm only starting to get the shape of it.

So I'm working on other things, and those are going well, and for this thing, I call what I'm doing cantilevering. It's how I write SF at the small scale; for something this big it's...daunting and exhilarating and lots of fun.

So when you have a cantilever, you go leaping on out into space anchored at one end, right? We do that! That's what we do! But you have to have a darn good anchor at the end. You have to know where you've been to know where you're going. You'd think this was called doing research, but doing research is when you say to yourself, "My book is going to have all kinds of geology in it! I will read up on geology!" Or else, "My book is going to be set in Ukraine! I will read up on Ukrainian history and culture!" When I am cantilevering I am trying to figure out what the heck. And so I am just taking in data and taking in data so that I have the best deep-sunk foundation I can get. I just start grabbing nonfiction and kind of humming to myself and turning it over and seeing where it fits and whether it fits.

Eventually some of it starts to look like it's more important than others of it. Here is what I know I need more of so far: 1930s, worldwide; science of sense of smell and perfume chemistry; neurology; cultures on very large rivers. Here is what I do not need a lot of: major central large war-type military history. The entire rest of, um, whatever I might get my hands on? I do not know. We'll see what proves useful. I will keep just getting things from the library and seeing what they tell me. And some of the things they tell me will be very interesting things that go into other stories or just go into my brain for later. And some things will not show up on the surface in any way that anybody else can identify for this book, because it's not like I'm writing historical stuff here, where the 1930s are going to be useful that way. It's...patterning. It's having good footing for taking a leap.

Or possibly it's just very comforting to the parts of my brain that go whirrr while they're trying to figure out the bits of a very large project. Either way. Whirrrr. Hee. Whirrrr.

You're visiting Madrid, and you go for a stroll in its justly famous Retiro Park. You stop at one of its cafés, you pick up the menu — and suddenly you are scared, not just by the prices. What is this stuff?



As a public service, here's the menu in its original Spanish, the bad translation, and what you really get:

Berberechos al natural
Cockles to the natural one
Cockles in their own juice, au naturale

Navajas al natural
Knives to the natural one
Razor clams in their own juice, au naturale

Mejillones en escabeche
Mussels pick leed
Pickled mussels, in spiced vinegar dressing

Almejas al natural
Clams to the natural one
Clams in their own juice, au naturale

Boquerones en vinagre
In vinegar anchovys
Anchovies in vinegar

Sardinillas en aciete
Sardines in oil
Small sardines in oil

Aceitunas rellenas
Olives stuffing
Stuffed olives

Almendras saladas
Saliferous almonds
Salted almonds

Bon appetit.

— Sue Burke

Many months ago...
Let's see. A bit longer than that actually:
On the 14th July last year, there was a tweet from Amanda Palmer mentioning that Neil Gaiman had fed her some answers over breakfast.
My mind immediately pounced on the image and much nonsense ensued. A poem was created but for some reason I thought that this one would never get published.

Which just proves how much I know about what gets published or not.
A Few Lines Magazine has just published its Volume I, issue IV and it has taken "Adrift" on board.
(You can access it also via the Magazine's Blog)

Wheeeee!

With many thanks to @amandapalmer and @neilhimself

Finishing two out of three priorities for a day isn't bad.

I did write. Hit 1k for the day, which was good. If I had a week off work, this book would be finished. Time is the issue, not plot or knowing what happens, or how to get to the end. It's all about the number of hours in a day.

Priority two was posting pendants in my Etsy shop. I got 12 up yesterday, with more to come. Photographing those suckers and getting a good picture is difficult. And everything in life takes longer than it should.

I did put a permanent link to the shop in the sidebar on the left. This is not going to become the pimp Etsy all the time blog, but selling a few of these would be good.

Now off to the dayjob, which doesn't pay near enough.

A friend of mine was talking about a work-in-progress yesterday and asked what I/we look for in love interests in urban fantasy, and I'm afraid conversation turned and I didn't really answer. So I'm putting it here because I feel contrite and hope that someone else will answer too and help her out.

I don't think my answer is different for urban fantasy than for anything else. If there's a clear main character who has one or more love interests in a book, first and foremost I want them to be people with their own agendas and problems and interests. And second I want it to be clear why at some point they might have wanted to hang out together. They don't have to still be good to hang out together, because all sorts of things shift and change in people's lives, and all sorts of people who once loved each other or even still love each other are not really good at spending time in the same room any more. But I like to be able to see how at some point they were.

I feel like if something is going to not work for me in the "love interest" department of a book, it's quite often having characters who supposedly have "chemistry" in a physical/sexual sense but don't actually like each other. I can almost never pick that up off the page. I mean, I expect there are lots of people who could hypothetically have reasonable sex if they wanted to but don't like each other enough to find out. This does not interest me, and having a character I'm otherwise supposed to want to spend an entire book worth of time with going, "Yes, we have nothing in common and I feel like punching him every time he opens his mouth, but he is Such A Hottie," makes me far less sympathetic towards that character. The world is full of quite reasonably attractive people who don't make one feel like punching them; go find one. (I will very very occasionally make an exception for this if the characters have a long history that does not consist entirely of wanting to punch each other. Complicated relationships are okay. Antagonism and sex: no thanks, not for me.)

Beyond that, there's a mishmash of things I'm a sucker for in any character and the sorts of things I look for when my friends start dating someone new. It depends on the book whether my answer is "good with a soldering iron" or "good with an axe," but "good to random old people" is probably on the list. May be less likely to show up in a novel than axes or soldering irons, though....

That title reflects perfectly what writing has been like all week.

This was a difficult week all around, physically exhausting and emotionally trying. To say it blew my focus all to hell is a major understatement.

But I still buy those stubborn bitch tiaras by the gross. After a half day of errands and necessary things, I shut myself off from the world and found that focus again. Took me awhile, but I ended the day with 1400 words. That is a really good day for me, a run out of story in my head day. The well refills overnight, but for today, I'm done.

I even have a rough, raw, out of context and totally subject to revision darling for the week. Behind a cut for the darling phobic. ( Read more... )

Gabe is still not having a good time. And it's about to get worse. Imagine that.

Tomorrow's priorities include more writing, a decent blog post, and posting pendants on Etsy.

Wish me luck.

Goodnight stars............

So if you decide to use large tomatoes instead of ramekins or dinner rolls as implements for holding raw eggs to bake them in a moderate oven, it'll work just fine, but the acidity of the tomato will interact with the egg and increase the needed baking time to about 40, 45 minutes for a moderately firm yolk. I salted the inside of the tomato lightly and lined it heavily with basil before cracking the egg into it, and then I stuck a thin slice of baguette over top and put a little cheese on that. I'll use more specifically chosen bread (likely Swedish rye) and cheese next time, but I didn't want to go to the store for this experiment, so I used the bit ends of what we had, and it turned out fine once we figured out about the acidity. Pretty tasty, worth remembering.

And now you know, and knowing is, if not half the battle, at least some appreciable fraction.

The book I'm reading right now seems to think that the rest is breeding the right horses, but since it's regarding 1812, I'm not sure it's universally applicable.

During his visit, alecaustin and I watched the Doctor Who "specials" discs, and markgritter watched the last two with us. (timprov apparently has a self-preservation instinct.) And it triggered a theory or perhaps a reminder for the writerly types:

If you feel that you have to have sympathetic supporting characters reminding the reader/viewer at every turn of how Just Plain Gosh-Darn Wonderful your central character is, this is a warning sign that your central character has not been acting Just Plain Gosh-Darn Wonderful enough in plain sight of the reader/viewer.

In the seventh grade we were solemnly taught a list of things you can know about characters, and they included things other people say about them and things they believe about themselves. But these things cannot trump actions. If you have somebody being a megalomaniac onscreen--if you have them being self-indulgent or self-involved or a whiner or whatever else that is not sympathetic and amazing and gosh-darn wonderful--after a certain point, the sympathetic character saying, "Jinkies, you're swell," does not give us information about the non-swell person. It gives us information that the sympathetic person is willing to self-delude and/or ignore evidence. Which is also important information! Just not in the same way. So beware the protag who suddenly seems to have people declaring, "You're dreamy," in herds and droves. This is telling you something, and the thing it's telling is often pretty sketchy.

I thought I had a physical version of this Twitter anthology but apparently I do not.
And it seems it doesn't exist as a physical thing. Which would explains a lot.

So I guess I shall have to enter the Goodreads giveaway for eBook versions... (although I am pretty sure Joanne sent electronic files to the contributors, I'd just have to dig it out).

And here I would have posted a picture of a Lisa Snellings poppet on top or near the book, but be it as it may...

....that there's going to be an Annual Booksale when I get back from WisCon, as there are giant boxes of books all over my house again.

You have been forewarned!

Also, I will be doing an r/Fantasy (that's Reddit) Ask Me Anything on June 5th. Questions may be posted all day in the appropriate thread, and I will answer them in the evening.

Because y'all don't get enough of a chance to listen to me babble...

Look what the Book Elves left on my porch today!



You can get yours here.

Also, some other good news today, which I will share when I can.

Nature abhors a (power) vacuum...

...but alecaustin doesn't.