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Eliza the Great/CHARGIN MY BLOGGLES
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| Is it just me |
[12 Jul 2009|11:38pm] |
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Or was Agatha Christie fascinated by the idea of orphans, adoption and identity issues related to orphans and adoption?
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| Shadow Year Wins Shirley Jackson Award |
[12 Jul 2009|10:45pm] |
 Just got back from Readercon in Burlington Mass. a little while ago. I'm beat. There's quite a bit to report on tomorrow, but wanted to get this news posted tonight. The Shadow Year has won The Shirley Jackson Award. I'm thrilled to have won as I have great respect for Jackson's fiction and the fiction of my fellow nominees in the category.
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[12 Jul 2009|09:10pm] |
Today I went clothes shopping- clothes shopping often makes me feel drained and vaguely wistful- wistful because I know that people of my gender are supposed to have a flock of lady friends to go clothes shopping with and this is supposed to be an enjoyable thing to do. But for me I want to be finished with clothes shopping as soon as possible, I only enjoy *finding* the clothes so I can leave rather than enjoying the process of shopping. Most of the times I've gone clothes shopping with a friend, I get impatient because it takes much longer and I get bored. And whether or not I'm with a friend, not finding anything I like or can afford during a clothes shopping excursion makes me feel defeated and as if I've wasted a lot of time. Sometimes I can be fun while doing other things, but don't go clothes shopping with me- I'm a real stick in the mud.
However, there is one part of clothes shopping that I really enjoy- the mannequins. I love mannequins or most any automatons. I love anything that is the same size and has roughly the same form as a human, but is not alive and not a human. The last time I went clothes shopping at the Cambridge side Galleria I found this at Macy's:
I wasn't the one who pants-ed her, but I wish I was. Also odd that somebody bothered to put shoes on her but neglected her pants.
That day in Chile when Jon and I still had no luggage and had been wearing the same clothes for three days we finally ended up going to the mall for clothes and found these:
Since they're naked they're obviously not showcasing any of the clothes at their store and so they must be trying to sell bagpipes to the Chilean teenagers. I wish I had plaid skin.
I liked her, the happiest mannequin in all Greece-
I've heard that the Thai mannequins have the same expression as she does. I think it's commendable! Why do people in the US think that mannequins have to look so ticked off all the time, anyway? I've been searching on craigslist and eBay for many months now, off and on, for a mannequin of my very own, but I haven't had much luck because so many mannequins seem so standoffish and resemble the sort of girls I would never be friends with. If I'm going to adopt a mannequin, she needs to look like she and I could be compatible.
Today at Macy's, while clothes shopping and hoping I would be done with it soon, I found these mannequins-
I would never buy one of these- they have no heads! Not only that, but there's something else wrong with their basic anatomy. They look like the Padaung Hill Tribe women visiting a western shopping mall for the first time after their brass neck coils have been removed. Though maybe these wouldn't be such a bad choice for me. I could make heads for them! I could make them as friendly and approachable as I wanted to! Or if I was feeling lazy, I could just take the giant eyeball Residents heads I made for Jon and myself for Halloween. How lucky would I be to have my own Residents mannequins?
To cheer myself up after clothes shopping, we went to the zoo. Today was the day that they were unveiling some shaggy French mammoth donkeys, which I hear are >800 lbs and aren't terribly amenable to moving out of their shipping carts and will be jackasses about it for hours on end. Nevertheless, they were very friendly to us, the zoo visitors.
What I never noticed about the zoo before was that at some point somebody decided it would be fun to pepper a series of CLUES all over the zoo. I love finding clues! My favorite clue was this one- look in the tree:
I thought this was a surprisingly macabre clue for a family zoo and I fully approved. Using this clue, you were supposed to deduce that a leopard had dragged his prey up into a tree to keep it away from competitors.
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| Greetings and Salutations! |
[11 Jul 2009|05:34pm] |
So for as long as I can remember I've always loved scoping out abandoned places. Heres a few of my favorites I have on hand...
( Read more... )
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| hay everybody |
[12 Jul 2009|07:41pm] |
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So … I haven’t gotten any writing done this weekend, but I have an excellent excuse. See, for awhile now I’ve been talking about throwing a website up for the alternate-history universe in which my upcoming book Boneshaker is set. This universe also holds a novelette that’s up for free and immediate reading over on Subterranean Press’s website, as well as an upcoming novella through that same publisher (Clementine) and the upcoming novel upon which I ought to be writing right now (Dreadnought).
Since these stories cover three separate fiction forms and two different publishers, I thought that a website dedicated to their world setting would be a useful, unifying device to give curious readers a chance to poke around and try out the idea, just to see if they like it. And then, through a convoluted series of events that do not warrant a dry retelling, it turned out that I might very well need such a site for reference purposes within oh, say … real soon.
Therefore, with some help from the hubs, I got down to business and up to no good. It took a couple of days, some blood sweat and tears, and a whole lot of jaw-clenching, but now it’s live and fully operational — just like something that isn’t a moon. So it is with great nervousness but significant pride that I present to you all:
TheClockworkCentury.com
Please, if you have a minute (and if you are so inclined), feel free to click that link and go poking around the site you find on the other side of it — and then by all means click whatever other links you find. Flip through the tabs. Do a little reading. Tell me if there’s anything else you’d like to see included on the site, and let me know if anything isn’t working.
And if you could find it in your heart to link the site, or add it to your bookmarks, I will love you forever. The Clockwork Century will be updated periodically with artwork from the series, including maps and future book covers, publication and release information, progress on upcoming projects, and anything else even marginally pertinent to the universe. I hope it gets a little love, and maybe inspires a little pre-ordering (though right now, Boneshaker is the only thing available in that capacity).
Anyway, thanks for your time and thanks for reading, and I hope that every single one of you has a most excellent evening. I’ll see you online again tomorrow morning.
[Crossposted to/from my website. If you'd like to comment, you can do so either here or there.]
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| [cancer] Some days you fly, some days you fry |
[12 Jul 2009|04:29pm] |
Had a cancer meltdown over lunch with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kenscholes. Not a full tilt, crying-screaming fit. (I've had a few of those, too, just not in the middle of the Lloyd Center Stanford's.) A lot anger, a lot of grief, some good old-fashioned rage, and a whole lot of fear. I said a bunch of irrational things about myself, about the cancer, about calendula_witch, about my writing, about my publishing career. He was very patient and loving and thoughtful.
I don't suppose the details matter much, but they felt very real to me in the moment. Still do. And some of them are real, or at least meaningfully possible pending we see how hard chemo hits me and what comes next with the lung scan on the CT, etc.
This disease turns me inside out, makes me not myself. And it drags everyone who loves me along through the hole. Emotional terrorism, courtesy of rogue cells within my own body. Who ever expected it, eh?
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| [writing] Endurance progriss riport, day 27-28 |
[12 Jul 2009|04:19pm] |
Day 27 was lost to illness. Today I managed 2,400 words in an hour, making 18,400 for the past week (measuring Monday-Sunday), so I did manage goal in spite of illness.
Manuscript now stands at 105,900 and is going to end considerably shorter than predicted. I think Fred is trying to outrun the chemo.
Writing up on revision will be a novel experience for me, as I am usually madly cutting down. Live and learn. (Or hopefully so, in my case.)
( WIP... )
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| Readercon |
[12 Jul 2009|07:46pm] |
Back from a terrific Readercon -- in three years, two Inferiors have been guests of honor -- first Lucius, then, this year, Liz. Surely DiFi is due this honor as well.
A really first-class line-up this year, with panels featuring Liz, Paul, and me, along with such heavy hitters as John Crowley (who revealed his childhood and adolescent obsession with theatrical design in a charming presentation that was all "snakes-hands"), Michael Swanwick, who presented a riveting (or so I heard from everyone; alas, I was crashing at the time) interview with the ghost of honor, Hope Mirlees, and Michael Dirda, who hosted a panel on . . . well, does it really matter what your panel is on when your fellow panelists are John Clute, Liz, Gene Wolfe, Chip Delaney, and Howard Waldrop? At this panel, almost as an aside, Clute launched into a radical reading or rereading of <i>Huckleberry Finn</I> that when expanded would serve as a great companion piece to his essay on <i>Heart of Darkness</i> of some years back. He also had some interesting remarks at another panel situating the origin of the superhero in the Count of Monte Cristo. And one of my personal highlights: listening to Jeff Ford read a very disturbing and funny new story, "Daddy Longlegs of the Evening." Jeff just keeps getting better!
Lucius was there in spirit -- almost literally, for Liz reports that the waitress at the hotel bar was wondering "where's the big guy who drank all those car bombs?" That was two years ago, and the legend only grows!
Quite a few people came up to me and commented on how much they enjoyed the blog. That was much appreciated, though I know my efforts here have been lacking of late.
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[13 Jul 2009|02:35am] |
An abandoned house in the woods in the county of Põlvamaa, Estonia.
( +3 )
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| Swearing mitigates pain |
[12 Jul 2009|03:18pm] |
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/dmKzNQkIRSE/swearing-mitigates-p.html Some experimental evidence to suggest that swearing makes pain less traumatic, though the mechanism by which is does this shit is unclear:
The study, published today in the journal NeuroReport, measured how long college students could keep their hands immersed in cold water. During the chilly exercise, they could repeat an expletive of their choice or chant a neutral word. When swearing, the 67 student volunteers reported less pain and on average endured about 40 seconds longer.
Although cursing is notoriously decried in the public debate, researchers are now beginning to question the idea that the phenomenon is all bad. "Swearing is such a common response to pain that there has to be an underlying reason why we do it," says psychologist Richard Stephens of Keele University in England, who led the study. And indeed, the findings point to one possible benefit: "I would advise people, if they hurt themselves, to swear," he adds.
Why the #$%! Do We Swear? For Pain Relief
(via /.)
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