Hi!
I write stuff. And here, I mostly write about writing stuff and about writing-related issues. I've been posting poems, lately, and am likely to keep doing so.

Do feel free to friend me -- I shall be thrilled. And do feel free to unfriend me -- I shall not be hurt. Though, if you are a real-life friend I'd like to know why -- because if I hurt your feelings I'd like to mend that, and if I didn't I'd like not to have to fret :)

I'd also love it to pieces if you tell me a bit about yourself, if I'm unlikely to know you from your lj name (my lj powers are weak). At some point when I'm finding it a bit less overwhelming, I'll be friending people back; I just haven't the focus to figure it all out just now.

I think that's everything for now :)

It's been two years, Arrowqueen, and I still miss you. On Fridays, and in December, especially.

I still attribute my hitting the caps lock to your left boob, too.
And I wish I could tell you that I've started writing better.

Hope you're resting in peace, or (more likely) partying it up in some afterlife and making everyone around you fall over laughing.

Driving up in the shiny! new car wot has brakes that work, and is also shiny*! And overengineered**. And shiny***, had a moment I wanted to get down in words:

Half-circle moon, reddening from porcelain to earthenware as it sinks, cut off by sharp-edged shadow mountains. Leonard Cohen throbbing from the speakers, all else nearly silent. elsmi driving, and as I turn my head to look at him he smiles.


Yeah.

----
* Blue! With sparkly glitter sparkle! glitter fairy shiny! Errr I mean, "metallic".
** Duuude Toyota, I still think the 2001 Prius is overengineered! The 2010 model, well, it gives me major skiffy glee. However, if you're catering to my sort of crowd, I have some advice about the speech synthesizer. 1) It needs to call everyone "Daaaave". 2) It should respond to us going the wrong direction by telling us to Trust the computer, the computer is our friend.
*** I can breathe! Even in LA rush hour! ...I can only just understand quite how badly the old car was hitting me, actually.

who celebrate it, or, well, notice it.

And happy birthday to my cousin Srin.  And to Will Stanton. 

May all your holidays be much nicer than Will's was.

and my comma key does not work -- does that mean I must be interested in death and death?

Er which is to say happy birthday to two of my favourite poets -- seajules and tithenai!

Apparently it takes two friends' birthdays to fall on the same day for me to remember just now...



(Status: too sick to really do much. But if you don't know about the appalling things the US border guards did to SF writer Peter Watts"> then consider this a signal boost)

*quote by Carolyn Kizer; remembered here cause Le Guin quotes her in Steering the Craft.

noticed on the 8:
"HMR 4 MEE", lipstick-red
driver on the phone

(I don't mean just in-person by rl, and I'm hoping you all know what I mean)

If I've missed your birthday or am not responding to your wish list or your posts or something, please know that it's not because I don't care, it's because I have had probably the worst health year of my life (including the last year of school, where I missed 70+ full days and more half days, which had the record before this year.) And I am exhausted, all the time, and it's just too much. And I cannot afford to get chained respiratory bugs for 6 months, again, and the drips and dribbles of energy are all going into the diss now, and I'm still having trouble with 300 words/day.

And that means I simply cannot manage to give anyone more than hugs this holiday, because the organization part is beyond me, and I'm going to stop reading my f-list now unless someone points me at a post, because I'm getting really stressed by the fact that people I care about are asking for things and I am unable to deal.

And if I get better I'm going to offer things, but, for Clarion, and I'm hoping you'll all forgive me; I've been meaning and trying to get the spoons to do that since July.

That's all.

ETA: Maybe that's not all; none of this lessens the really cool stuff, it just leaves me without the energy to really maintain excitement or whatever.

My biggest squee when time_shark emailed to say he'd accepted my story, Eyes of Carven Emerald, for Clockwork Phoenix 3 was of course that he was taking it and I'd get to be in the Clockwork Phoenix antho series :)

(And that it gets a genrebendy interstitial home, in general, because this one is not a genre story in shape or in intent.)

My second biggest squee was finding out that the wonderful frostokovich is also in the antho, and we shall get to be TOC buddies!

Not just 'cause I love his writing, though I do (It's often darker than I can always handle, so I can only read it sometimes, but those times I inhale it). And not just 'cause he was my week 1 Clarion instructor (though he is awesome and he really brought our group together as a supportive structure, subtly enough that I didn't even cotton on till week 5 or 6).

It's because my story wouldn't be what it is if not for advice that frostokovich gave us at Clarion. (If I remember right. It's six weeks of brain-changing, after all; things mush together. It's also possible that multiple instructors mentioned this. But even if so, Greg was first.)

The advice was: when multiple people have a problem at the same point in your story (or when someone you trust has a problem at that point), they're generally right about the existence of a problem, and they're generally wrong about the solution. So unless their solution rings true to you, it's best to look at what they say, think about why they would have the problem they think they have, and then figure out how you can best solve that problem in a way that's right for the story.

So it's thanks to frostokovich that I fixed this story in almost exactly the opposite way time_shark recommended.

See, I originally sent Eyes of Carven Emerald to Mike early, and he sent it back as a near-miss in... Septemberish? He suggested a specific rewrite; after thinking about it I replied saying "I can't do that, but if XX is your problem I am failing to make its emotional arc clear, and will be working on that anyway. Would you like to see a rewrite even if it doesn't do anything you suggested?"

And he said sure.

So! I added 500 words, two scenes, complexity, and a few years to the part he suggested I tighten/prune down/clarify. I was pretty confident that it was right for the story, but figured it probably wouldn't be right for Mike.

And I have seldom been more thrilled to be wrong :)

----

Have I mentioned I'm thrilled? Maybe once or twice? And looking at the lineup I am even more thrilled. There's so much awesome there!

(I cringed when I realized that John C. Wright was the perpetrator of the "homosex activist" rant. But hey, that means he can have my "homosex" in his contributor copy, so maybe we're even.
Also? So! much! awesome! Way too much for that little man to ruin things for me.)

Actually even more good news than I'd realized!

1) My story, Eyes of Carven Emerald, has been accepted for the Clockwork Phoenix 3 anthology!

I've been pinching myself somewhat, but since time_shark posted about it, I guess he can't back out now :)

(I have writing-thoughts about this, but I'm splitting them out into another post.)

2) And the Clockwork Jungle book, which contains The Mechanical Aviary of Emperor Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar and my illustration of scriitor's Otto's Elephant (as well as lots of other awesome stuff) is now officially here!

I guess I jumped the gun a bit, before, but now it's available, and there will be goodies on the Shimmer site. Specifically, us reading from our stories. Starting with Jay Lake!



...So that means all three! of my clockwork-bird-character stories have homes (the other one being Sultana Lena's Gift, at RoF) and I should really get in the research I need to write that fourth one that's been poking around in my head. It shall be fun.

Via several people on my f-list -- 20 years ago today, A misogynist asshole who thought feminism ruined his life murdered fourteen young women -- for being women at l'École Polytechnique de Montréal.

To have been at a prestigious Engineering college in 1989 -- well! They must have been amazing people. We all lost.

I somehow didn't hear about it till today, but if I'd heard it at the time, knowing of Canada as "safer" than the US, would I have dared move out here for college? I was 12, then, and clueless, and I've surely dared more so far because of cluelessness (and the privilege to be clueless) than because of courage. Would I have been able to focus on anything at college if I'd understood that every man who walked in every door was a potential threat?

I just don't know.

And, 20 years later --

Via rm, ‘Whitening’ the Résumé

And via a friend who locked the post about it, Why you need to write like a bad girl.

It is all still so very far from over. But we keep going. I've been clueless, but I'll just have to learn to be brave.

...But I think I'll post my good news later, when I'm more in a good news mood.

Three things!

1) The Clarion Workshop (Clarion "Eastish", Clariondiego, etc) is now open to applications, and wow what an instructor lineup.

( instructor babble cut for overall post length )

*looks at GRRM's picture in the instructor lineup* *looks at Delaney's picture* *looks at Jeff Vandermeer's picture*
Jeff, I meant to mention this at WFC (so I could see your reaction) but if you're reading this -- you might want to start growing out that beard :)

2) Clarion needs money, you guys. UCSD promised some funding, but that's before the State of California screwed all the UCs over quite so badly and all sorts of funding evaporated.

( My reasons why Clarion Matters, cut for length )

So! Here's my Clarion Appreciation: if there is any specific art or writing stuff I can share that would encourage you guys to donate to Clarion -- either a number of smallish things you'd consider shelling out $5-20 for, or something bigger that people might crowdsource -- please suggest in comments? I don't know if it'd work, of course, but I would like to try doing something. And I'll match donations up to some amount that I discuss with elsmi :)

3) While looking for the photograph in my story plug, I found pictures of our chalk art. Here's the background: both Jeff Vandermeer and Cory Doctorow had birthdays during their Clarion week. So we made them birthday chalk-art (though Jeff's almost didn't happen cause he stayed up late with us the night before; we ended up doing it from about 1:30 to 3am, I think.)

(We also had three classmates' birthdays during Clarion -- julieandrews and Drew's on the same day, and evilprodigy's riiight at the end, but I don't have the chalk art we did for them conveniently online.)

( birthday chalk art cut for length (well, for biggish pictures) )

So! At Clarion, I wrote crap. But my classmates wrote some frickin' wonderful things, you guys. Stories where I fell in love with even the Clarion-first-draft, and loved so much that I wanted to crit more than write. And I've wanted to share them ever since, and some I'm still waiting on.

And several of 'em have come out in print markets, which I can't plug as easily. But here's one available online at Expanded Horizons -- Introducing Jim, by Justin Whitney! I don't want to spoiler it, so here's the second paragraph (since the first is just a sentence):

As I scratched my beard, Mom sipped her coffee, eyes glancing over my partner, taking in every detail. Zee, bless him, just smiled back without a care in the world. His hair draped off his shoulders like a curtain of black agate. He had a sharply trimmed goatee and mustache that set off his deep indigo skin nicely. He wore a plain white t-shirt with khaki shorts. His hairy, muscular legs, the midnight blue of a twilight sky, were folded. He hovered about five inches above the sofa.

Oh and, Justin is the one who's winning below :)



Info via our Clarion classmate keyan_bowes, who took all the pictures and therefore isn't in 'em, grmph.

And! Extra plug! While checking Keyan's lj, I realized I'd missed her post from yesterday, in which she reports two flash pieces up now! I haven't read/heard them yet, but I am confident that they will be lots of fun!

Er, for some value of fun, with Lepers, out at Big Pulp. To quote Keyan:
"Eyes averted, Vijay hurries past the group of lepers clustered round a small trash-fire on the sidewalk. Bombay has so many, with horrifying gargoyle faces..." But Vijay's about to be called on it.

And there's She Shall Have Music from the podcast anthology Theme and Variations. Which I can't listen to until this sinus headache's better, but look forward to :)


And I have my own good news to share, and shall probably post again today, but this cool stuff is out right now, so it comes first :)

...but suddenly discover to be fascinating alternatives to writing the dissertation, I got to wondering where the word "paragraph" comes from. para + graph, obviously, but it doesn't, y'know, mean "the bit next to the graph" no matter how appropriate that description is to my own work.

So! The OED (No, the other one, the canonical one requires a password) came to my rescue!


Since I'm currently writing notes that go with my pretty pretty tables of DOOM, and are also rather beside the damn point since they're just saying the same thing the tables do in prose form, this seems pretty appropriate.

Okay, random nerdity shared. Back to the diss.

From now, till full.

eeee! I have to send them something. Only, what. Maybe Entanglements? Everything else of mine may be out...

Entirely unrelatedly, yuki_onna wins the internet today IMO.

Instead of bothersome thinkythings that I have very little coherent thought on -- Periodic Table Cupcakes! Via lutin.



There's a discussion (plus links to bigger pics) here. Also, a link to Watchmen cupcakes!

I so want to make the periodic table out of cupcakes, now.

/week/year/lifetime...

Abusers typically, in the moment they are exercising their power, believe themselves to be the victims. The Nazis feared the Jews, the slaveholders feared the slaves, rapists feel humiliated and controlled by short skirts. There's something much scarier about this detachment from reality than there would be in mere cynical political manipulation. The most dangerous people in the world are the powerful caught in a fever dream of victimhood.

Thoughts? I'm not sure it's scarier, but that's because I have trouble comparing infinities.

ETA: via cristalia.
I always forget to do that, sorry; my lj-foo is still weak.

...Or at least, it's available for order in print, or immediate electronic gratification, though the last news message still says coming soon.

Besides my story*, The Mechanical Aviary of Emperor Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar**, this book has stories by mrissa, scriitor (with illustration by me), gwynnega, tithenai, and (as a bookend!) astrobolism! Er, and Jay Lake :) And some people I don't know but know from the blurbs will be lots of fun to read!

(ObPlug: there is an interview with me here. Though, of course, you already know me.)

Squeeee! I know this book will rock, and I've been looking forward to it so much!


In other news entirely, the nephew is even cuter in person. Also, I am tired. These things are not unrelated.

* This is my first Artificer Bird story. The second (though chronologically earlier; so far I've been working backwards) is forthcoming in Realms of Fantasy and has that awesome Steph Pui-min Law illustration).

** I win longest title :)

Peak flow 20 minutes ago: 340.

Peak flow after one varnam: 370
Peak flow after two varnams: 410, or maybe 440, depending on which reading was more accurate (can't do too many).

...Okay, the pain & coughing from making interstitial muscles loosen up aside, and the neuroses from never being as good as my brother aside, and the neuroses from said brother dismissing Carnatic music as being for the old aunties aside...

Why don't I do this more often?

I can feel my brain slouching towards clarity, here.


ETA: holding steady at 420-440, which is as good as it gets for me.
Oh and, if anyone wants a bit of fun, here's the song I stopped on, though obviously I can't sing it like Yesudas does. (And for a bit of linguistic/sociocultural fun, Yesudas translates as "Servant of Jesus". He's an interesting guy on several levels.)

Quote:




What's not to love?

Anyone wondering, it's at the end of this page on placeholders. But if you skim, you'll miss gems like Tweebuffelsmeteenskootmorsdoodgeskietfontein.

(About the funding drive, I do love wikipedia, largely for sociological reasons, -- buuut my top donation recommendations are Clarion and Crossed Genres, though I've been too tired to do a real post on 'em.)