11:43 pm - Polaris, and After General observation, without specifics (because specifics draw dicks, like shit draws flies): I step away for a minute or two, and do things improve? Do they, hell. All over the 'Net, people continue to act like dicks to each other, get called on it, call other people out for calling them on it and act like dicks while doing so, ad infinitum. Sometimes I wonder why any of us bother to talk to each other at all.
Ah, fandom. I'd say "never fucking change", except--well; I guess you already have. Thank God almighty, however, I no longer much care.
Anyhoo. Polaris was fun, if exhausting. We parked Cal at my sister-in-law's, where he apparently had a tonne of fun, and Steve and I did Saturday in style, moving pretty constantly from panel to panel. Things I liked included the crazy surprise of seeing my own face blown up twice life-size on an official guest poster, parked somewhere between genuine stars like Matt Frewer and Michael Hogan in an endless rogues' gallery wall-spread. I was moderator more often than I might have asked to be, but almost every audience I dealt with was large, vocal, enthusiastic and intelligent, while my fellow panelists were universally fun rather than jaded. The hotel was beautiful and fairly easily navigable, with an attached mall full of cheap, plentiful food alternatives, and free parking. Not to mention that the signing table was run by Chapters, who had actually ordered copies of both my books! Heaven.
Stuff I didn't like quite as much included having to do my reading while parked next door to the Vid Suite, with some anime blasting at full volume through the wall--but overall, whatever other annoyances cropped up were both small and forgettable. I'd gladly do it again next year.
Best of all, of course, was deeing old friends/meeting new ones. And my most useful conversation was with David Nickle, who wanted to know how Book of Tongues was doing. When I told him I'd just cracked 80,000 words yet was (maybe) only halfway through the book, he gently suggested I should probably tell my publisher, and start thinking about ways to compact the rest of the action. "It's a lot harder to cut 40,000 words out of something later on than it is to cut 10,000 words out of it now," he said, which I heartily agree with.
So...yeah. That's thing next. But for now: Sleep. I feel like my eyes are trying to vacate my head by force. Current Music: "house at pooh corner", josh pyke
Spent the weekend in Seattle, visiting with scarlettina.
We had several very nice meals with her, including her birthday
brunch with jackwilliambell, varina8, and
others. We had tons of fun playing with
Sophie
the new kitten and Spanky the not-so-new cat -- it was like LoLCats
Live! 24/7 and my jeans are covered with little kitten-claw
snags -- and although my allergies did act up it was never a serious
problem. We attended the Clarion West party in honor of
matociquala at marykaykare's; always nice to
see Bear, however briefly, as well as many Seattleite friends (both
old and new, permanent and temporary). We went to a steampunk swap
meet where I scored a fabulous floor-length leather coat and we ran
into alicebentley, philfoglio,
kajafoglio, jerrykaufman, and Suzle WINOLJ,
followed by a fine lunch with the latter two. We had a nice walk
around Fremont and visited
Cleopenguin
in her new home. And we bopped down to Kent for an excellent Chinese
dinner and a game of Apples to Apples with akirlu and
libertango.
But the main event of the weekend, and dominant emotional note, was
markbourne's
heart valve
replacement. The plan was to hang out with e_bourne
at the hospital on Friday and then attend the Clarion West party
after Mark came out of the operating room.
It didn't work out like that.
The operation went smoothly until they went to take Mark off the
heart-lung machine and close him up, at which point his heart did
not start up as it should have. Since then Mark's situation has
been a continuous medical crisis and a hell of waiting for those
who love him. The details can be found in e_bourne and
scarlettina's LJs, but at last report his chest had
still not been closed (they don't want to do that until they are
100% sure everything is working properly in there) and he's still
in critical condition. The good news is that he's been unconscious
this whole time and when he wakes up he won't remember any of this.
The model I've been using is that one's social support system
resembles the roots of a tree, with the weight traveling down the
trunk and being spread out to successively smaller and more distant
roots, putting less and less weight on each smaller root until it
eventually vanishes into the ground. The weight of this crisis
falls on Elizabeth, of course, and I think Janna's in second position
(she and Mark are Evil Twins and share a birthday, which happened
to be the day of the surgery); I viewed my role as supporting them
(especially Janna) with my physical presence, stupid attempts at levity
and light conversation, and occasional errands. It didn't feel
like much but I hope it helped. I then turned around and depended
on Kate and our Seattle friends, and so on. I thought I was handling
it well until I showed up at the Clarion West party and EBear commented
that I looked wrecked.
Anyway. Home now. Managed to write at least 500 words every day,
if by "at least 500" you mean "well, anything more than 250 as long
as it's a good-faith effort". Haven't yet written today but there's
still an hour or two before bedtime; I expect to complete a first
draft this week with a week to cut it back to 10,000 words before
the next critique group deadline. All in all things are going well.
I'm still worried sick about Mark, of course, but I know that he's
in good health, is in one of the best cardiac units anywhere, and
has the best circle of friends one could hope for.
Got the book in the mail yesterday, read it well into the night, and finished it first thing this morning. An incredible book--suspenseful and emotionally draining. Your voice/tone throughout the book really kept me reading, and pulled me through the tough moments. I'm really glad I bought this book, and hope you get many, many more readers.
schleprock63 writes "NASA has delayed the launch of Endeavour due to inclement weather, mostly lightning. According to NASA, 'Officials at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida have called off today's liftoff of space shuttle Endeavour due to inclement weather. Cumulus clouds and lightning violated rules for launching Endeavour because of weather near the Shuttle Landing Facility. The runway would be needed in the unlikely event that Endeavour would have to make an emergency landing back at Kennedy. Endeavour's next launch attempt is 6:51 p.m. EDT Monday. NASA TV coverage will begin at 1:30 p.m.'"
Kate Bush Cloudbusting: a great song and film I miss this style of video that tells a story rather than showing the singer clutching their lumps or someone else's.
It was the second single released from her no.1 1985 album Hounds of Love. "Cloudbusting" peaked at no.20 in the UK Singles Chart. In the UK it was shown at some cinemas as an accompaniment to the main feature.
The song describes Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich's arrest and incarceration through the eyes of his son, Peter, who later wrote his father's story in "A Book of Dreams," published in 1973. The video was directed by Julian Doyle, conceived by Terry Gilliam and Kate Bush.
Wilhelm Reich's cloudbuster was the inspiration for the song. The cloudbuster (or cloud buster) was developed by Reich with the ostensible purpose of draining clouds of "orgone energy". Reich believed that such energy surrounded the earth, and that a cloudbuster would act as a rain-maker. In Reich's view, clouds and rainfall were natural accumulations of orgone energy, and cloudbusters used "orgone accumulators" attached to pipes. These were intended to focus and direct the collected energy into the atmosphere, thus stimulating cloud growth and rainfall. This is considered pseudoscience, despite Reich's claims of evidence of their operation in experiments he undertook.
My favourite piece in the Spring 2009 issue was Tony Pi’s “Come-From-Aways” about a Viking ship that washes up in a Newfoundland harbour with a single survivor on board. Tony Pi, a linguist by profession, handles the technical material well without swamping the reader, and the ending is up-beat and satisfying.
09:20 pm - Home Oof. Home from Readercon about an hour ago. It was awesome. Airports are not awesome. I will never fly American Airlines again if I can at all help it.
I will do a con report sometime this week, but right now I need to get some food into me (confidential to barbarienne: the giant breakfast plan worked) and start dredging through the several hundred e-mails in my inbox. 0.0 Current Mood: tired Current Music: none
05:21 pm - HOT It is officially damn freakin' hot here in SoCal. When we left for rainy Maine two weeks ago it was still in the balmy, breezy high 80s, which are perfect, but now it's in the baking high 90s, low 100s and I'm sorry but that's just too ' hot for me, and even for many native Californians I know.
This heat is really the same thing as all that rain in Maine and the Eastern seaboard in general. You can go out, but you need special gear and it's really not all that pleasant and there are lots of things you can't do. The good news is that it does go down into the 60s at night, which provides some relief. Maybe I'll become nocturnal for awhile. Or take siestas. Current Mood: hot
I'm at Pearson -- Toronto's airport -- changing planes on my way back to Saskatoon from Readercon 20 in Boston.
It was a great, great convention -- and I made a point of telling both Eric Van (this year's programming chair) and Bob Colby (who founded Readercon 20 years ago) that.
It was startling to see myself referred to as a "Readercon stalwart" in the program book -- but, according to the chart in the book, I'd been to 10 of the 20 Readercons, and most of them in the past decade, so I guess I am.
I seemed to be the only person from Toronto present; highly unusual for Readercon.
Great catching up with old friends Michael and Nomi Burstein, Ian Randal Strock, Warren Lapine, Nick DiChario, Rick Wilber, Paolo Bacigalupi, Jacob Weisman, and Bernie Goodman.
The Senior Editor of the journal Neuron came to my kaffeeklatsch -- how cool is that?
Catherine Asaro is looking amazingly hot. Just sayin'.
At the request of Cary Meriwether, who came all the way to Boston from San Diego, I read from Watch, the second WWW book, instead of Wake, the first one; it went over well.
Fitzhenry & Whiteside shipped down 10 copies of Distant Early Warnings: Canada's Best Science Fiction, edited by me; it was the first I'd seen of the book. I gave a copy to Tor editor David G. Hartwell and to Pulitzer-Prize winning critic Michael Dirda, and sold the rest like that -- boom! The book looks fabulous.
Also sold out our stock of The Savage Humanists, despite the absence of editor Fiona Kelleghan, and of our two Nick DiChario titles (thanks, I'm sure, to Nick's smiling presence).
Bernie Goodman and Jacob Weisman from Tachyon Books made the con for me: I had more than half my meals with them. Despite them being much more experienced small-press publishers than I am, they treat me like a colleague, and we had a blast.
Friday's dinner party included Nick DiChario, Allen Steele, and Rick Wilber -- what a great time! We went, at Rick's suggestion, to the Capital Grill (and a Nick's suggestion, we walked there).
Saturday's dinner party included Michael Bishop and Geri Bishop (two of the nicest people in the world) and SFScope editor Ian Randall Strock.
Tor editor Stacy Hague-Hill -- who has been working very hard on my behalf at Tor -- and her husband took my out for lunch on Saturday -- w00t! Her husband is South African, and so I talked with him a bit about my work on Charlie Jade, a Canada-South Africa co-produced TV series.
I'm one of four judges for the Cordwainer Smith Rediscover Award, which is presented at Readercon. I introduced fellow judge Barry Malzberg to the crowd on Friday night, and he gave the award to A. Merritt (1884-1943). The other judges are Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg.
I bought a paperback copy of Thomas J. Ryan's The Adolescence of P-1 from Judith Klein-Dial in the dealers' room, one of the seminal novels about computers gaining intelligence, and certainly an influence on me and my Wake. I own it in hardcover, and had read it back in the summer of 1980, but re-read a bunch of it on the long trip back to Saskatoon. Fun.
This is my attempt to make a post with my eyes closed. I covereed the Tigers game today. They beat the Indians 10-1. Yjete was a [;ame yjay le[y f;uomh pbet yje syado,/
I think I mhjy jabe ,essed yjay ;ay semyemce i[ a noy/
Mpw O jabe yp p[em ,u eues. nvaise ,u gtoemd Jeayjer os hpomh yp ne dpomh yje Vjamme; 4 s[prys mews/
Philip K Dickhead writes "Bloomberg is reporting that the World Health Organization discovered a single, surprising characteristic that's emerged among swine flu victims who become severely ill: They are all fat. Infected people with a body mass index greater than 40 suffer respiratory complications that are harder to treat and can be fatal. The virus appears to be on a collision course with the obesity epidemic. WHO officials are gathering statistics to confirm and understand this development. 'It's very likely that if we went back retrospectively and looked at people who did poorly during seasonal flu, what would shake out is that obesity would be one of the risks.' Fat cells secrete chemicals that cause chronic, low-level inflammation that can hamper the body's immune response and narrow the airways, says Tim Armstrong, a doctor working in the WHO's chronic diseases department in Geneva."
03:22 pm - Whatever Skin You Wear: Zero Draft New words: 200 on "Whatever Skin You Wear." And it's at zero draft, two weeks from inception to "the end." Productivity win!
Except I think it may need an epilogue... Current Mood: accomplished
12:45 pm - Pondering actors again Lazy Sunday afternoon and I'm wondering if there are any twenty-something actors who'd fit as Seregil. (Always good to have something to fixate on when things are slow.) So many of the ones I've fixated on over the years are just plain too old now. So sad!
11:49 am - Tea: Matcha In my continuing exploration of the wide world of tea, I have invested in some good quality matcha tea from Kyoto, with the appropriate equipment-- I do love equipment!
Matcha, for those of you who don't know, is made of the powered leaves of the tea plant, which are drunk, rather than just steeped, so you are getting the entire goodness of the beverage, with all its tannins, vitamins and so forth. The powder is measured out with a curved bamboo implement called a chashaku into the tea bowl, or chawan. Hot water is added and the tea is quickly whisked to a froth with a bamboo whisk called a chasen. It's quite delicious and not at all bitter if you use a good quality tea and the water is the right temp.
It's a very pleasant process, visceral and tactile, and I find that matcha really perks me up. The caffeine content is on the high end.
**Note: I should add a word about water quality. I brewed my first cup with Redlands Tap, which is very hard water, with some chlorine/general yuk taste to it. I wasn't happy with the taste of the tea, which came out overly grassy and a little bitter. However, when I used filtered water that had been boiled for two minutes to get ride of the chlorine, the tea was excellent, very smooth and mellow. Soft, unadulterated water is best, even if you have to buy bottled. Current Mood: awake
01:00 pm - A Meme SStarted By My Wife Your task: TO write an entirely journal entry, touch-typing blind. You are not allowed to go back and correct anything you ty[e once you'veseen it live. Gini tried this when she had a migraine and couldn't see the screen, so I' was curiosus to see how I did. So close your eyes and get typin'!
Or not. Really, it is kindas sislly. Oh, Christ, how'd I do?
(EDIT: Okay, I guess it could just be a comment. Still. It's an odd skill to have, really it is.)
(EDT TOTHE EDIT: Yes, I'm typing all the edits with my eyes closed as well.)
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