Lost in Fallen Leaves

Blame it on Ginko

2008-09-23T13:48:00.003-04:00

Debbi started it! Put your answers in the comments, please.

01) Are you currently in a serious relationship?
02) What was your dream growing up?
03) What talent do you wish you had?
04) If I bought you a drink what would it be?
05) Favorite vegetable?
06) What was the last book you read?
07) What zodiac sign are you?
08) Any Tattoos and/or Piercings? Explain where.
09) Worst Habit?
10) If you saw me walking down the street would you offer me a ride?
11) What is your favorite sport?
12) Do you have a Pessimistic or Optimistic attitude?
13) What would you do if you were stuck in an elevator with me?
14) Worst thing to ever happen to you?
15) Tell me one weird fact about you.
16) Do you have any pets?
17) What if I showed up at your house unexpectedly?
18) What was your first impression of me?
19) Do you think clowns are cute or scary?
20) If you could change one thing about how you look, what would it be?
21) Would you be my crime partner or my conscience?
22) What color eyes do you have?
23) Ever been arrested?
24) Bottle or can soda?
25) If you won $10,000 today, what would you do with it?
27) What's your favorite place to hang out at?
28) Do you believe in ghosts?
29) Favorite thing to do in your spare time?
30) Do you swear a lot?
31) Biggest pet peeve?
32) In one word, how would you describe yourself?
33) Do you believe/appreciate romance?
34) Favourite and least favourite food?
35) Do you believe in God?
36) Will you repost this so I can fill it out and do the same for you?

It's been a while....

2008-09-11T14:02:00.005-04:00

I'm teaching as adjunct faculty at Ivy Tech Community College this semester. It's exciting to be back in the classroom, and I really enjoy working with these students. So many of them are at major turning points in their lives, whether the turning point is graduating high school, being laid off work, or returning to school after many years simply because it's time to do so. I have been warned that the attrition rate can be quite high. (Last semester someone started the semester with twenty students and ended it with fewer than five.) That will be tough to deal with.

My short story "The L.I.L.I.T.H. System" appears in the anthology, Lilith Unbound, edited by Elaine Cunningham. EC is posting excerpts of different pieces in the antho on her website. My story has recently been showcased, and its characterization of Lilith is referred to in the blurb. Check it out!

Work has kept both Ed and me busy throughout the summer. Nonetheless, we found time to do some painting in the house: willow green in the master bath, Caribbean blue in the guest bath, apricot in the half-bath; sunshine yellow in my office; lime green in his office. And we've chosen the colors for the master bedroom -- orange poppy -- and the LR/DR/kitchen "great room" on the main floor -- ripe mango on two walls and vanilla sugar on two walls. The stairwell and upstairs hallway will also probably be done in the vanilla sugar.

At my day job, we welcomed new students from Burma, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Korea, Liberia, the Netherlands, Poland, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, and Vietnam to start the fall semester. I think it will be an interesting year and look forward to getting to know them. That is the best part of my job.

Congrats to my brother Chris and his new wife Kristin. Their wedding took place at the end of August and necessitated a quick trip to lovely Rochester, NY. Ed and I were honored to serve as readers during the ceremony, and I think my new favorite poem is one of the readings -- Walt Whitman's "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing." It doesn't hurt that it reminds me of one of my favorite Russian folk songs, "Tonkaya Ryabina" (lyrics -- scroll a bit; YouTube performance).

That week also saw the death and funeral of someone whom I will miss very much and would have liked to know longer.

We have been putting together a website for me to try to drum up some freelance editing work. It's a slow process. We keep getting distracted by other things. And I have failed miserably at coming up with good content -- because I am writing with too much self-consciousness, I think.

The best movies I saw this summer were superhero flicks -- Iron Man and Dark Knight. The best TV we watch via Netflix; it's a toss-up between Weeds and Big Love, I think. (We need to catch up on Battlestar Galactica, which, admittedly, might win out over all of the rest.) The last book I read was Covenant by Mel Odom, the final installment in the trilogy based on the Hellgate: London game. To shake things up a bit, I've got Twenty Letters to a Friend, a memoir by Josef Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, on the bedside table next. Best music? Well, we were able to see Feist earlier this year, and that was fun.

A Worthy Cause

2008-03-17T12:34:00.006-04:00

My brother Kevin and his friends are a tight-knit group of folks. By virtue of being Kevin's sister and brother-in-law, Ed and I have met some really wonderful people and have been welcomed warmly at their get-togethers. Nearly two years ago, when Carrie died shortly after giving birth to twins, we were stunned and saddened. We had just seen Carrie and Lawrence at Kevin and Amy's wedding. We knew her as a lively, warm, caring person. (I think she first met Ed on an evening when we were playing Mafia, and she astutely called his bluff. It made me laugh.) There was just so much wrong about her death. We felt it, though we weren't part of that inner circle of friends.

There are a couple news stories online about Carrie's life and death.

Teacher's loving, generous spirit unforgettable by Bob Hill (scroll about halfway down)
Mom's Death Leaves Dad to Care for Twins by Ruth Schenck
Bicuspid Aortic Foundation (March 2007 newsletter)

The gist: She had Turner Syndrome. There were some medical problems. But the pregnancy wasn't expected to cause complications.

Lawrence and the twins are getting along, helped by family and friends.

And on June 7th, there will be a silent auction/walkathon sponsored by a foundation that they've set up. To honor Carrie's memory. To raise money for families affected by Turner Syndrome. If you'd like more information, please let me know. If you would like to donate something for the silent auction, you can contact me or Patrick and Ellen Holifield (give them my name). Also, I plan to walk and would welcome sponsors.

Short of that, how about giving someone a hug and telling them how much they mean to you today?

The Roof Over Our Heads

2008-03-17T09:17:00.004-04:00

It's been a buyer's market here for a while, and we had been idly talking about looking for a house. Idle talk turned to window shopping online at homefinder.org, which resulted in driving around town checking out places that had piqued our interest online. And that resulted in contacting a realtor. It wasn't long before we'd checked out a handful of different places with her and found two that we really, really liked. Then two became one that we liked more than any other place. After thinking about it a bit, we realized it wasn't just that we liked it more than the other places we'd seen; actually, we liked it a whole lot on its own merits, and we could see ourselves living in it. So we called the realtor and made an offer. Now, with counteroffers, the mortgage, inspections, assessments, appliance-purchasing, and movers arranged, we're counting down the days until we move into our new home: a 3BR, 2.5BA townhouse with a wonderfully open layout, a spacious deck, solid construction, excellent location... It's just so lovely!

FreeRice

2007-12-17T11:29:00.001-05:00

Heard about this on NPR this morning... FreeRice.com, where you can test your vocabulary and help raise donations. Nifty!

Finally

2007-11-27T13:25:00.000-05:00

Although the distributors don't seem to have succeeded in getting it to this part of the Midwest in a timely fashion, today is the day that Ed's novel, Neversfall, should be hitting shelves in the sf& f section of bookstores across the United States!

If you're so inclined, please drop us a note in the comments to let us know you've seen it at your local bookstore.

How Things Are

2007-11-07T09:12:00.000-05:00

Contracts are signed and in the mail, final edits done, brief bio still on the to-do list, so I reckon it's OK to say that I sold a story titled "The L.I.L.I.T.H. System" to EC's anthology, Bound is the Bewitching Lilith. It's a fun piece, and EC pretty much made the whole process painless. Look for the antho at Popcorn Press, and expect to see renewed commitment on my part to completing writing projects and sending them out into the world to find an audience by way of a publisher. (Encouragement on that last part always welcome, of course.)

I was at a work-related conference last week, and I had the opportunity to attend a luncheon where the keynote speaker was Dr. Robert Einterz, and he introduced us to the work of the Academic Model for Prevention and Treatment of HIV/AIDS (AMPATH), under the umbrella of the Indiana-Kenya Partnership. There's some incredible work being done here, building on the foundation of medically treating HIV/AIDS with prevention, education, empowerment, employment. I feel very lucky to have been present to learn about this program and the people whose lives have been touched by it. Determining how to act on this new-found knowledge is at the top of my to-do list. Letting others - even just the few people who read this blog - know about it is a start.

The cats have had a difficult few months, Gracie in particular. We learned that she is diabetic and tried to correct that through diet (a special crunchy cat food with a high-protein, low-carb formula, which is apparently modeled on the nutritional intake a cat would get from eating mice, a fact that always makes me think of Farley Mowat). Her glucose levels were still too high, so we had to learn how to give her shots and she's getting the tiniest bit of insulin twice daily now. We won't know until she's tested again, but she does act like a different cat now. Unfortunately, not long after she started the insulin, she picked up a cold from George the Plaguebearer. He shook it off, but not before she got sick -- to the point where she'd started becoming dehydrated by the time we got her to the vet. For about ten days, we had to pill her, give her nose drops, and do the insulin shots. Let me just say that I'd so much rather give her a shot than a pill: Ed and I are less likely to walk away wounded and bleeding when giving her a shot.

My brother Chris, the sculptor, is getting married next August! His lovely and delightful fiancee, Kristin, is also a sculptor. There's a link to my brother's website on the left, and I'll add this link for Kristin.

Ed's book, Neversfall, comes out at the end of the month! I'm really looking forward to seeing it on shelves. The cover art is gorgeous, and the novel's a fun read -- and I'm not saying that just because he's my husband! :-) (I'd love to tantalize you with teasers about action and intrigue, strategizing and fighting, characters who struggle to uphold their convictions, and enemies who are truly of a different ken, but there's a whole department full of people who are paid by WotC to do that sort of thing and I'd hate to, you know, step on their toes...) He's also given WotC a story featuring a character from the novel, and I assume it will appear here at some point in the not-too-distant future.

New link

2007-08-21T10:07:00.000-04:00

My brother Chris has been working on his website. I've added it to the links. Check it out!

August

2007-08-09T09:05:00.000-04:00

I started a new job a couple weeks ago, officially. Unofficially, I'd been working in that position for about a month. Before that I was working in my old position and training for this new position for, well, most of the spring semester. I'm in International Programs now, which is where I wanted to be.

It's the kind of job where I'm going to need to get through a whole year on the job to actually know what I'm doing. The start of a new semester looms just around the corner, for instance. This involves an orientation session for new international students, which is a pretty big project. There are also visiting scholars arriving to begin their year-long research projects. The closing out of the admissions cycle happens now, too. Keeping up with the daily goings-on in the office is just one more part of the to-do list.

What's really great and really terrible is that we've also moved into new offices. In the midst of the foothills of all the hecticness that leads into the new semester, we packed up three separate offices to move into one office suite. It's a nice setup, and the timing isn't as bad as it could be. But some of the details of moving make my workaday life a little more difficult.

The new furniture for the offices hasn't been ordered and may not get here until December, thanks to some bid problems and production problems.
The phones have not been transferred to the new offices, so there's a complicated setup that involves forwarding my phone to a nearby phone and attaching a wireless headset apparatus to that phone, so I can receive calls but I cannot dial out. (I can't fit the headset thingie around my ear, either, but that's a different kind of problem.)
There are no locks on any of the doors. I can't get a supply cabinet for the office even though we could really use one -- and I don't even know if one is included in the order of new office furniture that may arrive in December.
For a while, we didn't have working data jacks, but that problem was quickly resolved.

I'm grateful for that, and for the other things that are working out well.

I'm in a job that I enjoy doing.
I work with great people.
I have the opportunity to grow the job into something that's even more well-suited for my professional interests and goals.
I'm meeting some extraordinary people (who are friendly and nice) as the new students and visiting scholars come in, and being able to help them out is great.

Yeah, the positive stuff greatly outweighs the negatives, which are really only temporary, move-related items anyway.

Mimzy

2007-03-21T09:19:00.000-04:00

So what's new at our house?

Well, Ed finished the revision of his book and submitted it to his editor last week. I think it's a story that many readers will find interesting - a good blend of character development and action. I am curious to see the cover art, the synopsis -- heck, the final product when it goes on sale in December (plug, plug!).

I got another project from WotC, the first for 2007. I don't talk about this much, due to the NDA and to my own sense of ethics and etiquette. Basically, I get to read books before you see them on the shelves of your local bookstore, and my marks and comments have some effect on what you do see once the book's in print. I have yet to return to a book after it's published to see how any of the more substantive suggestions I made were attended to, even though I've been curious about a few things.

Within the last week both cats, Ed and I have all been to the veterinarian, doctor or the ER. We're all on the mend now, I hope.

GenCon passes purchased and hotel reservations made. We're planning to do True Dungeon this year, I think. This summer should see a couple D&D games come to a close, one because the campain's ending and the other because the DM is moving. I guess WoW and a PbP Eberron campaign will have to take their place...

We saw the sneak preview of The Last Mimzy last weekend. Two thumbs up! It opens nationwide this weekend. The kid actors are fun.

Mitya is sitting on Ed's lap

2007-03-05T10:22:00.000-05:00

(Originally published 3/7/2006)

My great-aunt Helyn loved cats. When I was a little girl, we used to visit her in Ft. Myers, Florida, where she lived with her husband, Uncle Hous (short for Houston, in case you’re wondering how to pronounce that), and near her brother-in-law, whom we all called by his last name, Potts. I have strange but fond memories of those visits to the house where she and Uncle Hous lived - the Florida room with its sliding glass door; the backyard with its citrus trees and the front with its palms; the dramatic afternoon thunderstorms; the skittering palmetto bugs and the lightning-fast skinny little lizards; the meals that were never quite what kids liked to eat; and, of course, the cats, who had funny names (like John the Baptist) and didn’t really appreciate having their routines interrupted by kids, even visiting ones that would eventually go away, so they tended to stay hidden or run in blurry streaks from one hidey-hole inside the house to another.

It seems a strange thing to me now, but while Aunt Helyn was living, I never quite understood her affinity for cats. That may have been because we had a cat, called Kat because that’s the creative kind of name you get from a one-year-old (thanks to Mom for the creative spelling!), who was an outdoors-only cat with an attitude that was, well, pretty scary. But Aunt Helyn even loved Kat, who turned into an altogether friendly furry creature whenever she was around. Was it the baby talk, the leftover fried chicken from dinner, or something in my aunt’s DNA that made her like cats and cats like her? It wasn’t clear to me, and I considered myself a dog person anyway, as I spent my early teen years filling the ears of our dog Tramp with the angst-ridden stories of my youth.

Time passed. Kat succumbed to a cancer when I was sixteen. Tramp got into some trouble in the neighborhood and had to be relocated to an even more rural home than ours. My brother Kevin spent a week on the old family homestead in southwestern Virginia, where Aunt Frances and Uncle Cecil ran a small dairy farm. He returned home with a kitten from one of the barn cats. We called her Tika, after a character from the Dragonlance series we had enjoyed reading. Eventually, Keefer, a young Shar Pei whom a friend of the family could no longer care for, moved into the house and, easily, into my family’s hearts. And now my parents live with Cleo, the meowingest cat I’ve ever met.

In college, my roommate Silvia and I raised finches and parakeets, but I wasn’t really much of a bird person. Living on my own while in graduate school, I decided to adopt my first cat, the perfect pet for someone who was at home odd hours thanks to classes and part-time work. At the animal shelter, Ziggy reached a front paw through the cage and grabbed my arm as I was walking by. There was no other cat in the place as far as I was concerned. He went home with me, and we had a couple good years together before he was hit by a car and killed. It was devastating.

A couple years after I moved to Indiana, I adopted Mitya from the animal shelter, and a year after that Grace needed a home when the friends who picked her up from a box of free kittens at a yard sale were unable to keep her. Mitya was a little bit past teeny-tiny kitten age when we first met. He was in a cage surrounded by three or four slightly younger kittens who were brawling with one another while he sat in the midst of the chaos on his best behavior, just waiting to be noticed. He stared me down with moon-colored eyes, I held him in my arms, mesmerized by the motorboat-sized purr coming from this big-eared, strawberry-blonde-furred, little creature -- and I took him home and loved him.

We lived together for nine years - through some kooky roommates, the lunacy of my Ph.D. exams, in a cute bungalow, a two-story townhouse, a two-room apartment, and then in our current place, where we made a home with Ed. As an older kitten, he grew up under the tutelage of my housemate’s cat Smudge. Theirs was a Garfield-Nermal relationship, with Smudge mostly tolerating but sometimes terrorizing the younger cat. Smaller than Smudge at first, once he hit his mature growth - he could stretch out on the coffee table and cover it from tip to tail - he never quite figured out that he was bigger and could whomp Smudge a good one, if he’d just try.

The cats loved to run around the house, up and down the stairs especially. One morning I was working at my computer, which was downstairs, while the cats were doing their thing. All of a sudden I heard my xlnt housemate fling open the door to her room, come running down the stairs, and throw open the front door. She stood there a minute until the cats breezed past her and up the stairs, when it dawned on both of us that she had heard them on the stairs and thought someone was knocking on the door. The stairs were a great toy. The day that Mitya realized he could beat Smudge down them by passing between the posts in the handrail is one of my favorite memories. You could see the light bulb pop on over Mitya’s head, and the confusion on Smudge’s face as he realized his prey was no longer in front of him was simply classic.

When Smudge moved out, it wasn’t long before Grace moved in. Though not related by blood (as far as I know), they were siblings. Oh, how they could compete for attention! Anyone daring to pet the one had best plan on petting the other, too. I think Grace would have been much less tolerant of people had she grown up with a cat other than Mitya. She has some tougher edges that Mitya softened. Still, even as a kitten, she bossed the poor guy around, and together they bossed me. Mornings had a routine: Lara gets out of bed and receives an escort to the bathroom and then down the stairs to the kitchen where she is encouraged by gentle mewlings to replenish the food dish and freshen the water. And if I didn’t get to the food and water right away, they stalked my every move until I did tend to their needs, as a good person should. Even when we moved to different places to live, the routine continued - no better escort from bed to bath to kitchen existed than this furry duo.

For the most part, Mitya was content to live a quiet life. He preferred being indoors and had little interest in skulking around outside. On the single occasion he got out the door without my knowledge, I found him sitting on the front stoop plaintively meowing and waiting for me to realize that he really, really, really wanted to come back inside. He grew a little more adventurous as he aged, and he really enjoyed lazing about in the sun on the balcony of our current home, which Ed cat-proofed late last summer with some chicken wire so that they can’t jump through the space between slats. In fact, in an unusual move, he showed more balls than Grace, metaphorically speaking, by venturing out onto the balcony ahead of her (and he followed this up by exploring the snow-covered balcony during the winter, to my surprise). The only other time I remember him being so much more blatantly curious and adventurous than Grace is when I brought home the water fountain for kitty-cats; he approached the burbling thing with caution, eventually drew close enough to stick a paw into the bowl, and decided it was safe enough to drink from. I was so proud of him for investigating and being so brave.

But my favorite memory of Mitya is long going to be the pictures I have of him sitting on Ed’s lap. I had long ago determined that anyone who came into my life was going to have to accept Mitya and Grace and, in return, be accepted by them. I figured acceptance on all sides was the best to hope for, but that’s so much more than what happened in our family. Mitya took to Ed like white on rice, and Ed, the self-declared dog-person, found himself mesmerized by the motorboat-sized purr coming from this bulldog-chested, cinnamon-dusted-doughnut-furred, extra-large yet incredibly gentle creature. Truly, before we’d really thought about it, Mitya blessed our relationship and upcoming marriage by so effortlessly accepting Ed, not just as a fixture in his environment but as his friend and companion. I grieve for my Mitya, and I sorrow for my partner, who also loved him.

Ed noticed he was breathing sharply and rapidly last Thursday evening, around 10PM. I called the emergency vet service, and they advised watching Mitya through the night and taking him to his regular vet if the problem persisted in the morning. And so we did. She ran some tests, explained what the myriad problems could be, and, after telling us what to watch for in terms of a worsening condition, sent us home with Mitya. Ed went to work for the afternoon, and I stayed at home with Mitya. The weather was nice, so I opened the sliding door to the balcony so that he and Grace could enjoy the sun. I had a deadline to complete for WotC, so I sat on the sofa reading and marking up a manuscript. The cats took turns sitting with me. I kept checking Mitya, watching him breathe, counting the breaths per twenty seconds, trying to determine whether the rapidity was slowing any, and watching for signs of distress. But he never really acted like he felt badly. He ate a little, he made use of the litter box, he sat outside for a while, he sat with me for a while, he took up his favorite station on the other sofa for a while. And when Ed came home, he grabbed his favorite seat on Ed’s lap as soon as he sat down.

I’d like to finish the evening there. Let’s just hold time back starting at that point. Mitya is sitting on Ed’s lap. Grace is on the chair beside me. An episode of Dead Like Me is playing in the DVD player. We’re all four cozy and comfortable. We’re family.

Nature Boy

2007-03-01T14:28:00.000-05:00

My youngest brother, Chris, is a sculptor.
He has participated in several exhibitions recently,
and he's got a piece at Arc Gallery in Chicago March 9th
through March 24th. Check it out here.
(His piece is at the bottom of the page.)


There was a boy
A very strange enchanted boy
They say he wandered very far, very far, over land and sea
A little shy, and sad of eye
But very wise was he
-db

Knit a River project

2007-01-25T09:37:00.000-05:00

Do you knit or crochet? Got a stash of yarn with something in blue in it? Do you have time between now and late February to knit (or crochet) a 6" block - or two or three or four or more?

Check out the Knit a River project.

If you want to send in some squares collectively (they have to ship to London, England), let me know (lgose [at] indiana [dot] edu). The deadline's listed as March 2007, so I figure the last week of February would be the last available time to mail squares from the States.

Preserving constitutional democracy

2007-01-22T14:13:00.000-05:00

Last week I had lunch with a law student from Liberia. Already a lawyer in his home country, he is studying law here in the United States to deepen and broaden his experience in the field. He sees a brighter future for his country, and he plans to participate in building that future. Indeed, by the work he has done before coming to the States, he is already building that future.

Walking back to the law school after lunch, we talked about how different things are in the U.S. compared to Liberia. Specifically, we discussed the casual freedom with which Americans discuss and even complain about government policy, such as the President's continuation of the war in Iraq, without fear of recrimination, like being disappeared after a sharp knock on the door in the middle of the night.

Living in the forest, you can forget to look at the trees.

Earlier today while doing my infinitesimally small part to preserve the history of constitutional democracy in Liberia, I learned more about Charles Stimson's remarks of January 11th, wherein he chastised lawyers at leading US firms for representing detainees at Gauntanomo - suggesting that the CEOs whose companies employ the services of these firms pressure those firms not to pursue terrorists as clients - and hinted that such work may not be performed pro bono by everyone. I had heard about Stimson's comments, but it was news that had just sort of washed past me. But, as my Liberian friend noted, we can speak about this, and fortunately some people have been doing so.

A quick bit of Googling led me to some op-ed pieces I found interesting:

Pentagon Official Attacks Top Law Firms over Pro Bono Work Defending Detainees, at The Urbana Champaign Independent Media Center
Unveiled Threats, January 12th editorial from The Washington Post
Why I defend "terrorists," by Anant Raut (at Salon.com - may require clicking on an ad)
Guantanomo Pro Bono? Atticus Finch Meets Charles Stimson, by Nancy Rapoport

My outrage may be a week or so late hitting the blogosphere, but I do believe that Stimson's comments and the reactions to them are important to note. The latter offer a kind of hope that I haven't seen in a while.

Taking the plunge

2006-11-01T09:48:00.000-05:00

Earlier this fall, I took a two-session screenwriting class through Parks & Rec here. I was reminded how much I enjoy critique sessions and how much I - big geek that I am - miss being in the classroom, both as a student and as an instructor. We had a homework assignment to complete between the two sessions, and I wrote a first scene in screenplay format for one of the movie ideas I've been toting around in my head for what seems like forever. The instructor seemed to like it, and he took the time to really go over it so that I got a lot of useful feedback to revise and move forward on the project. It felt great! A part of me felt alive again for the first time in a very long time.

Unfortunately, for various reasons, I was not able to sign up for the three-part "advanced" class that followed this "beginner" class, even though I was terribly intrigued by the idea that by the end of the three sessions we would have completed the entire first act of our screenplays. In three weeks I could have had about a third of my screenplay done - albeit a first draft, but a first draft that had gone through a couple critique sessions... Words on paper, finally, instead of an idea rambling around in my head. Sounds like a bargain to me. The class will be offered again in the spring, and it's on my to-do list. The script idea's a sound one, I think. I want to work with it and finish it.

Meanwhile I've got these novel ideas floating around in my head, too, and I haven't been doing much with them at all, either. But here it is November, the month of NaNoWriMo, an opportunity to jumpstart a novel-long writing project. An opportunity not to let pass by. To encourage me, my husband devised a challenge: I do NaNoWriMo - writing a 50,000-word novel in a month - and he does NaNoEdMo - editing his 90,000+-word novel in a month. I think it will be good for both of us to be working on something.

I confess to suffering from nerves in a big, big way. I had thought about doing NaNoWriMo a couple months ago, figuring I'd take the time to finish the outline I'd started a while ago. Didn't happen. So I'm approaching this with half an outline (if that) and butterflies in my tummy. But it's past time to get off my butt and do it. Screw the fears: it's so much worse to sit around not trying.

Make Sure We Get Tomorrow

2006-10-13T11:44:00.000-04:00

I wanted to share an update about Lesley's condition. In the last couple weeks, she has experienced dramatic leaps and bounds towards recovery. No longer completely paralyzed, she can move her head and shimmy her shoulders, and while she cannot yet move her arms, she experiences sensation with her arms, hands, and fingers. Yesterday we heard the fantastic news that she was off the respirator for a little bit, sitting up in a special chair drinking coffee, and she'd even had some cream of chicken soup and orange sherbert!

She remains on the respirator, receiving air through the trach, but she has been breathing against the respirator for a while, which means she's using those muscles again -- all a good thing, headed towards getting off the respirator completely. She can enunciate much more clearly now that she has more control of her lips, and even without the "passy" in the tubes that lead from the trach to the respirator, she can put some air behind her speaking, which makes having a conversation with her much, much easier. She's not medicated as heavily as she had been, and that allows the spunky, funny Lesley to shine through. It's so great!!!

We've also learned, from speaking with her, that, mercifully, she only remembers the last couple weeks of her hospitalization.

Full recovery will take some time, and none of us - least of all Lesley - can wait 'til she gets back the use of her arms and hands. Her 10-month-old son visits daily, and she is so looking forward to being able to hold him again on her own. That'll be another great, great day.

who'll stop the rain?

2006-08-29T10:36:00.000-04:00

The past few months have been rough for some family and friends. Two families in my acquaintance come to mind, one in Louisville, KY, and the other in Bloomington, IN.

I've mentioned the Louisville family before. Carrie died from complications following a C-section due to a heart condition related to Turner Syndrome, and her husband Lawrence is left with infant twins, Sydney and Matthew, to raise on his own... and a sea of paperwork to try to figure out. How he coped, and continues coping, with the grief and the joy is beyond me. He and the babies have a community of friends and family around them that has been incredibly supportive. Carrie touched the lives of many people, and they want to give back to her family. There's also a fund: Melvin L. Godbey in honor of Carrie Godbey, FBO Matthew or Sydney, c/o Commonwealth Bank & Trust Company, 12906 Shelbyville Road, P.O. Box 436209, Louisville, KY 40253-6209. (Lawrence also set up a fund in Carrie's memory to assist women who undergo IVF at the facility where Carrie did, but I do not have that address handy at this time.)

While we were away at GenCon, my friend Lesley was hospitalized. The timeline went something like this: one day she was fine, the next she went to the hospital and by the end of that day she was on a ventilator. The diagnosis: Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS). Basically, her immune system is attacking her nervous system, so that now she is paralyzed. Last week she could raise her eyebrows to communicate, but now even that much mobility is gone. She can move her mouth, and she tries to talk--but mostly we ask yes/no questions and use a signal to determine her response. The good news is that most people recover 100% from GBS without ever having a recurrence of the paralysis--yet complete recovery could take anywhere from months to three years.

Family and friends have rallied 'round Lesley and her family, with volunteers taking care of her 8-month-old son, taking shifts sitting with her and serving as her advocate at the hospital, doing chores around the house, ensuring that her husband gets rest and food while he's basically trying to be Superman--taking care of her, spending time with the baby, dealing with the insurance, employment and other bureaucracies that "care" about her condition, and running his own business. She's in the long-term care section of the hospital, and while it seems as though she may have hit the plateau with the paralysis, it's difficult to tell. She's developed some complications that stem, at least in part, from not being able to move when, unfortunately, what her body absolutely doesn't need is more infections to fight. There's a fund for her, too: Donation for Lesley Davis, c/o Philippa Beatty Foundation, PO Box 2182, Bloomington IN 47402.

And I would be remiss if I didn't note Paul Kemp's most recent blog post (8/28/2006 @ 6:54AM) about his friend who is fighting cancer while scrambling to raise funds to help pay for COBRA as he lost both his medical benefits and his job thanks to a corporate acquisition that couldn't have been more poorly timed for his circumstances. Paul is accepting donations to help his friend via PayPal under his e-mail account, paulsvantekemp@yahoo.com.

Here's to better times for our friends and family....

GenCon Indy '06 -- snapshots

2006-08-15T12:30:00.001-04:00

Favorite quote: "Mom, I'm in utter awe!" or (as the names of the Young Dragons were announced over the loudspeaker on Saturday, just as their second signing session was starting) "Yeah, yeah! Ed Gentry! That's my uncle! He's cool!"

Favorite game: Zombies!!!

Games played: Game of Thrones BGM (Fantasy Flight); Battlestar Galactica CCG (WizKids); Zombies!!! w/ Mall Walkers expansion; Qwitch; My Word!; Blink; Etherscope RPG module, "Special Delivery." (And Ed counts Tracy Hickman's Killer Breakfast as a game, although I disagree; it's entertainment, it's a show, and it involves RPGs, but it's not really an RPG, imo, even if GenCon lists it that way on the schedule.)

Games purchased: Battlestar Galactica CCG; Zombies!!! with The Corp(se) expansion; three quick card games from Out of the Box -- Qwitch, My Word!, and Blink.

Events that were fun: Mythbusters Q & A; Killer Breakfast; How You Play the Game; demo-ing BG CCG; observing the Young Dragons' book-signings and hearing about their impressions.

Non-GenCon fun: Watching my nephew and sister-in-law as they experienced their first GenCon... J's all about returning next year for two days instead of one, and his mom seemed to think that wouldn't be a bad idea. He also wants to get in on a D&D game or two next year.

Things that we did this year that are worth repeating next year: Killer Breakfast; parking; getting a room in Indy; Hickman's How You Play the Game; having snacks and beverages (water!!!) available in the room.

Things we can do to improve upon the experience: register for fewer events in advance; register only for those few things that will sell out; on the very first day, test games at the demo areas on the showroom floor and then buy named or generic tix to play those games we like; consider doing RPGs only if you know the GM or can "stack the deck" so that the other players are folks you know. Schedule nothing for Sunday, other than, perhaps, brunch. True Dungeon.

GenCon Indy '06 -- snapshots

2006-08-15T12:30:00.000-04:00

Favorite quote: "Mom, I'm in utter awe!" or (as the names of the Young Dragons were announced over the loudspeaker on Saturday, just as their second signing session was starting) "Yeah, yeah! Ed Gentry! That's my uncle! He's cool!"

Favorite game: Zombies!!!

Games played: Game of Thrones BGM (Fantasy Flight); Battlestar Galactica CCG (WizKids); Zombies!!! w/ Mall Walkers expansion; Qwitch; My Word!; Blink; Etherscope RPG module, "Special Delivery." (And Ed counts Tracy Hickman's Killer Breakfast as a game, although I disagree; it's entertainment, it's a show, and it involves RPGs, but it's not really an RPG even if GenCon lists it that way on the schedule.)

Games purchased: Battlestar Galactica CCG; Zombies!!! with The Corp(se) expansion; three quick card games from Out of the Box -- Qwitch, My Word!, and Blink.

Events that were fun: Mythbusters Q & A; Killer Breakfast; How You Play the Game; demo-ing BG CCG; observing the Young Dragons' book-signings and hearing about their impressions.

Non-GenCon fun: Watching my nephew and sister-in-law as they experienced their first GenCon... J's all about returning next year for two days instead of one, and his mom seemed to think that wouldn't be a bad idea. He also wants to get in on a D&D game or two next year.

Things that we did this year that are worth repeating next year: Killer Breakfast; parking; getting a room in Indy; Hickman's How You Play the Game; having snacks and beverages (water!!!) available in the room.

Things we can do to improve upon the experience: register for fewer events in advance; register only for those few things that will sell out; on the very first day, test games at the demo areas on the showroom floor and then buy named or generic tix to play those game; consider doing RPGs only if you know the GM or can "stack the deck" so that the other players are folks you know. Schedule nothing for Sunday, other than, perhaps, brunch.

Fruit flies, house flies, and, boy oh boy, time flies!

2006-08-01T09:17:00.000-04:00

I've been really, really sick the last couple weeks, and even though I'm on the mend now, I continue to be amazed at how much energy I still don't have. Apparently a lot of people have been getting this same thing, only it's been turning into pneumonia, and I have to say that if pneumonia feels worse than I have been feeling for the last ten days or so, then I'm really, really, really happy to have avoided pneumonia.

Congratulations to

my husband for finishing the first draft of his book - just over the 90,000 word count and well under the deadline, I might add. I really like the story and the ideas that he presents, and I'm VERY curious to see how other readers respond.
my brother Kevin for getting into the accelerated graduate program in education at Spalding University AND for landing the full-time high school English/theater teaching position.
my brother Chris for getting his work into a show at The Parthenon in Nashville, TN, and for being invited to set up a one-man show at a gallery in Chicago.
Jeff, Harley, Marcy, JP Davis and other Folks Who Don't Get Much Sleep for writing-related Good News. Modules, books, book contests, ENnies... oh my!
friends Ginko and the Canadian for surviving the home renovation. I can't wait to see what you've done with the place.

GenCon will be here sooner than you think -- next week! We're catching up with Jeff and Marisa on Wednesday evening, and we'll all be staying in Indianapolis for the duration of the con this year. I'm looking forward to that! It'll be great to catch up with the LaSalas again, and sooner or later we're bound to run into some of the "Young Dragons," as Elaine has dubbed them, at the first book signing schedule in Authors Avenue if not earlier. Catching up with folks we've met, placing faces with names of folks we've only known in ascii... what fun! And then there are games and other things to do, too! Whoa... They oughta make you buy tickets to this - oh, waitaminnit, they did, and we did. And - I can hardly believe it - I have tickets for Life-Size Kill Dr. Lucky and Tracy Hickman's Killer Breakfast (the two events I've wanted to try ever since we planned to go to our first GenCon).

The con gets more interesting. We bought my brother Kevin and his son J day passes for Saturday as birthday presents. With Kevin's class schedule in this grad program (see above), he won't be able to make GenCon because his last class meets that day, 9AM-5PM. Rather than disappoint J, they've managed to transfer Kevin's pass to his wife, Amy... and now that we've explained a little bit more to her about what to expect, I think she's actually looking forward to the con - and especially to sharing this experience with her son. I do so hope they'll have fun!

Shout

2006-06-27T10:48:00.000-04:00

Sometimes you just need to shout. Open your mouth as wide as you can and scream at the loudest possible decibel until there's no wind left in you and the sound is reduced to a cough and a whimper.

Then you can cry because, despite the shouting, crying is what you actually need to do.

As my sister-in-law keeps saying, it's 2006, this is the United States we're living in, and women aren't supposed to die having babies. Even though we know there were special circumstances - a big heart figuratively but a weak heart literally - what my SIL says smacks of Truth.

The new father suddenly finds himself a single parent to premature newborn twins. If anyone has suggestions for resources that might be useful to him now or in the future, please drop a note in the Comments or e-mail me (remove the spaces: l g o s e @ i n d i a n a . e d u). He's got family and friends and goes to a big church, so emotional and spiritual support nets are in place. At least there's that.

Crazy Little Thing Called Love

2006-06-01T10:35:00.000-04:00

The wedding was beautiful.

My family arrived in town Thursday afternoon, and we all went to dinner that evening and then made plans for getting the things done on Friday that needed to be done. We had a late night, but sitting around talking and catching up was fun.

Friday turned out to be a rather miserable day. Somehow or other, my parents misunderstood the plan for the morning, which put us more than half an hour late getting started on the to-do list. And it was cold and rainy. Ed and I got locked out of the house. Deciding on gifts for some of the wedding party had become stupidly difficult. It continued to be cold and rainy.

Running late since the morning, my side of the errand-runners continued to run late, arriving at the venue for the rehearsal at the time we’d asked everyone to assemble rather than the thirty minutes earlier we’d planned on. But Ed and his side of the errand-runners had been able to arrive earlier, and, as I understand it, he found everything set up wrong and worked on getting everything into place where it should have gone. I felt kind of discombobulated at the rehearsal, but after it got underway, everyone seemed to agree that it was fine and we all knew where to go and what to do. So we were off to the rehearsal dinner at Turkuaz, the Turkish restaurant run by Metin Ayvazoglu, an extremely gracious man. Ed and I had our first date there, right around two years ago.

Ride-sharing meant that with my parents I drove my brother’s minivan to pick up my Aunt Jane and Uncle Sushil -- my dad’s twin sister and her husband who were in from Nebraska -- on the way to the restaurant. I dropped them off at the door and then took the minivan down the road to park it. So everyone was already there and the appetizers were on the table when I got there (late, again - see the pattern?). But this is where the magic began... I walked to my seat along a carpet of flowers and flower petals: Metin had decorated with balloons and flowers and flower petals - and a “Congratulations” sign that I only saw later. He was bustling about with plates and pitchers of water, giving hugs and offering toasts. It was simply grand.

After dinner, we gathered together at a local pub called The Irish Lion with out-of-town guests who were not part of the wedding party. I think we may have had forty or more people there, an amazing turnout. I got to introduce some local friends to some long-distance friends, and I hope maybe some connections were made, however tentative they may be. I enjoyed having the opportunity to visit with folks a little more. (Something I got to do again on Saturday, with the ladies, at a luncheon hosted by my mother-in-law at her home. It was a wonderful way to start a day that turned out to be so great.)

Then we parted ways, and Ed and I did not see each other again until the ceremony began Saturday evening. I don’t know if Ed thought ‘wow!’ when my parents and I entered the room, but I had my own ‘wow!’ moment when I finally saw him, so handsome in his tuxedo with the purple flower as his boutonniere. Everything glows in my memory, so there must have been a glow to the place while we were there. My cousin Nita, the judge, officiated. My brother Kevin opened things with a reading, and Ed’s sister Mindy read something just before we exchanged vows. And at the end of things, Ed’s friend - our friend, I think, but Ed’s friend longer and first - Staci sang the song we had picked out, “In My Life,” accompanied on the guitar by her beau Bill. That was one of my favorite moments: during the song, Ed removed the engagement ring from my right hand and replaced it on my left, over the wedding band -- our quiet moment. I know other people were in the room, but, for me, at that moment, it was just us.

What's New, Pussycat?

2006-05-03T08:39:00.000-04:00

The wedding is a week and a half away and most things seem to be in order, though I do have an appreciation now for the warnings we'd heard about how busy the last couple weeks before the wedding would be. I think part of the busy-ness is due to the fact that "normal" life doesn't stop or slow down just because you have a wedding coming up. To be sure, we're fortunate to be able to take time off from work the day before and the week after the big event.
One of the things contributing to my state of busy-ness is ongoing freelance work for WotC. Since January, I've worked on several FR and Mirrorstone novels, a Magic: The Gathering novel, and now I've got a re-issue to go over. I find that I'd like to hear something in the way of feedback from the editors with whom I've been working, but since that's not likely to happen (unless perhaps I bungle something terribly) I take comfort in the fact that they keep giving me new assignments -- so I must be doing something right!
Earlier in the year I interviewed for a writer's position in the Communications Office here where I work. The lack of a portfolio that has academic-centered work in it was listed as one reason I didn't get the job. But they want to help me use more of my talents and be happier with my job, so I've been approved to work as a freelance writer for that office while continuing in my current position. I've got three articles to complete between now and May 24th - and the observant person might notice that the wedding and honeymoon fall smack dab in the middle of NOW and THEN. Another factor contributing to the busy-ness....
GenCon registration briefly contributed to the busy-ness. We long ago bought our passes and made arrangements to stay in Indianapolis with friends Jeff and Marisa, booking a room at one of the hotels attached to the convention center. It seemed to take forever for May 1st-event registration to get here! We thought we'd try some games this year - and a good thing, too, as I found the seminars wildly disappointing (based on last year's experience) - and I have a game-packed schedule, indeed!

RPG events: Arneson/Clingman's The Comeback Inn; The Imp Game -- Traps, Mishaps, Mischief & Mayhem!; and the Interaction Game (D&D with no books and no dice); Hickman's Killer Breakfast
BGM events: A Game of Thrones w/ Storm of Swords expansion; Life-Size Kill Dr. Lucky; Settlers of Catan; and the OOTS Adventure
CGM events: Killer Bunnies; Tom Jolly's Trickery
SEM events: Dressing and Undressing your Character: Clothing in the Middle Ages; Hickman's How You Play the Game; Real Feasts: Menus and Entertainment from Medieval Cookbooks; Creating D&D (w/ Arneson, Bledsaw and Maker)
ENT events: the Costume Contest

I'm most excited to finally score LS Kill Dr. Lucky (a CheapAss Game) and Hickman's Killer Breakfast, which I've heard people talk about since before we went to GenCon the first time.

I'd have been happy to make time for writing-focused seminars with Kij Johnson or Brad Beaulieu (or, *nudge, nudge*, Elaine Cunningham), but, alas, such seminars were not included on the schedule.

Even though I attended Hickman's How You Play the Game last year, I'm looking forward to it again this year, not the least because the campaign I've been involved in for the last three years just ended - unfortunately for my 12th-level wizard Liliana, with a whimper rather than a bang thanks to my unfortunate roll of a 5 at a crucial point in battle. We're talking about getting some other games started, like a short-run evil campaign or a campaign in which all the PCs are clerics (or possibly clerics and paladins). But I do feel the need to rest and be rejuvenated, as well as reminded about what makes an RPG fun.

Almost to the chapel....

2006-03-23T10:33:00.000-05:00

It's 50 days and counting... Here’s a wedding update for anyone who’s curious.

Invitations are done. It took a while to find the right thing, but I love what we ended up using. The invitations are hand-crafted, following a design by our friend Kristin. A pale green cardstock has had applied to it a 3-dimensionsional lily-of-the-valley design and the words of the invitation printed on ivory card stock. It’s a really beautiful design, and each invitation looks great.

(Amy, Kristin, and my brother Kevin and I worked on assembling the invitations one weekend. Our mantra for much of the process was, “At least the glue dries clear. Thank goodness the glue dries clear.” And, indeed, it does! *smile*)

I addressed the envelopes, and then Ed and I stuffed them. The invitation, a half-sheet with a map, directions to Bloomington, and hotels info, a stamped response postcard, and - for those involved - an invitation to the rehearsal dinner are all went out in the mail. It feels good to have this much accomplished! And the RSVP postcards have been coming in…

We have registered for gifts at a few places, and a couple showers have been planned, one back home in Virginia (this weekend - so we’re on the road) and one here in Indiana (in two weeks). Before we got into it, I had thought that this part of things would be fun - I love shopping for dishes and bed linens almost as much as I enjoy shopping for shoes and books, after all - but trying to work with this so that friends and family have registry info to reference regardless of where they live and which stores are available to them has been a little bit more difficult than it has been fun. Oh, well… I like the choices we’ve made, including the unexpected, like the telescope and the croquet set.

We got word from a friend about a good DJ who works at a rate that fits our budget, so we’re hoping to hire her. The word is that she’ll play what you want, and she doesn’t get excessively loud and cheesy with her commentary, which is important. I hope this will work out.

Saturday morning we met with the caterer to finalize the menu. Catering has been the biggest nightmare part of this wedding planning, but, truth be told, we haven’t had an absolutely terrible time with it. It’s just that the original three caterers we met with, despite recommendations and reputations, proved to be flaky. While that’s good in a pie crust, it’s not so good in a caterer.

One forgot she had a meeting with us and thought our request to keep the cost of the food at a certain dollar amount per guest ridiculous. From talking with her, it also seemed like she would have been determined to do things her way even if we had definite ideas and agreements about how certain things should be. It seemed that we’d probably spend a certain amount of time arguing with her about how things should be done, and, really, who wants to deal with that?

Another seemed to listen to us with an understanding and sympathetic ear when we met with her initially, but when her sample menus arrived in the mail, it turned out that she really hadn’t paid any attention to our concerns at all. Plus, she skewered everything, from fruit to chicken to vegetables. Then, I felt, she tried to strongarm us into accepting her as our caterer by calling to say we needed to make a decision because she had several other people interested in that date and waiting to hear about her availability. Hello… try selling used cars because you just might have a talent for that, sweetie.

But the worst was the woman who dangled the menu we really, really wanted in front of us and then failed to deliver on promises of a follow-up meeting or a tasting where we could invite eight to ten family and friends to try things before we settled the menu. There was a lack of professionalism in our exchanges, or lack of exchanges, that made this incredibly frustrating.

However, after this most recent meeting with the caterer, I feel confident that we have found someone who is not only wonderful to work with but who has goals and strategies for entertaining that match our own goals for this event. The caterer is affiliated with a restaurant we both enjoy, and he is able and willing to work with a menu that is vegetarian- and vegan-friendly, while not being off-putting to the omnivores who perhaps aren’t as adventurous in their vegetable-eating experiences as are the vegetarians. It’s going to be a tasty selection of heavy hors d’oeuvres!

Plans are also settled with the florist, who is also proving to be the perfect person to work with. After we met with a few other florists - at least two barely acknowledged Ed’s existence at these meetings and one gave us a shocking quote while two others insisted that they couldn’t work with us until they had fabric swatches of my gown and the bridesmaid dresses - I e-mailed this woman after viewing her website. We met over coffee, she brought a huge number of photo albums with her, and we looked through her portfolio while talking about what I like and don’t like in flowers. (After being ignored by two other florists, Ed refused to deal with florists anymore. So we split responsibilities - he took on the caterers while I took on the florists.)

My cousin Anita is officiating at the ceremony, and we have devised a meaningful exchange of vows, readings, and -- well, I guess ‘platitudes’ is the word -- with her help. My brother Kevin is going to open the ceremony with a welcome to the guests and a reading, and Ed’s sister Mindy will do the second reading. His amazingly talented friend Staci is singing a song we picked out that will, I think, surprise and please most folks, and we kind of hope she’ll feel like performing some more as the reception gets underway.

I have taken my dress in to the seamstress to see about taking in the parts that need taking in; with about five pins in place, she helped me see how lovely the dress will be once it’s fitted properly. We ordered the tuxes last weekend; Ed and his best man in vests and Windsor ties while our dads wear cummerbunds and bow ties. I think the men will look dapper!

The to-do list has grown smaller. We picked out the rings, and now we just need to pick them up. We’ll have to get the license, and to do that I need to dig up proof that I had some inoculation or other when I was a child. And we’ve got some decisions to make about what to do for a honeymoon. That’ll be nice. I’m really looking forward to spending some time away from all this with my husband.

Mitya is sitting on Ed's lap

2006-03-07T11:00:00.000-05:00

It's candle-blowing time...

2006-02-28T16:49:00.000-05:00

Someone's having a birthday. And getting roasted butternut squash ravioli with sage brown butter sauce (Emeril's recipe), cheesy broccoli and cauliflower (a favorite from his mom's recipe files), and carrot cake with cream cheese frosting (thank you, Betty Crocker). And some gifty surprises. And lotsa love.

Octavia Butler (1947-2006)

2006-02-27T13:19:00.000-05:00

Thanks for the books, Ms. Butler.

An update for EC and Janet

2006-01-31T08:05:00.000-05:00

Here's the quick update... I left the interview last week feeling a bit like I'd been roughed up by one interviewer in particular. My fault - I let her get to me. As a result, I don't have high hopes for getting a job offer out of this -- she made it clear, I thought, that in her opinion I don't have the kind of experience they're looking for and she's skeptical about transferrable skills. Now, maybe her opinion doesn't hold enough sway with the rest of the committee to matter, but from what I know about her, she's one of those squeaky wheels. I applied for two more jobs last week -- something in publishing and something in writing/editing.

The dress fit. More importantly, it needs to be altered by taking it in not letting it out. I was relieved. My future MIL has been kind enough to store it at her house for the time being. She's also found a seamstress whom I want to talk to about getting the alterations done.

We got Amy's gown for my wedding - in a color and style unlike anything else we'd looked at earlier. But it's beautiful and she looks great in it. Then after she had tried on about ten or eleven gowns during the course of our shopping, she stumbled across a gown that had many of the features we'd liked in other dresses she'd tried on -- with an exceptionally low price that just couldn't be ignored. She looked great in it, and, more importantly, she seemed to feel comfortable in it. We think it will fit the feel and theme of their wedding, too. (The guys will be wearing Hawaiian shirts in different colors. The groom's shirt, following tradition, will be white. And, no, neither family has any links or ties to Hawaii.) So she got her wedding gown, too!

And I received a second assignment from WotC which will probably go back to them this evening.

Idle Hands

2006-01-23T13:31:00.000-05:00

A week ago I finished the first freelance assignment from Wizards of the Coast. It was a fun read, and I have figured out a few things that I need to work comfortably: background noise; extremely fine-point pens with inks in a variety of bright colors; an expandable file folder; a better dictionary. I think I found a few things that needed to be clarified or made consistent with the rest of the text. I suppose feedback that I submitted good work will come in the form of another assignment. Since I'm feeling a little restless, I hope a new one comes my way soon!

I completed an editing test for a job as an editorial specialist with an academic journal published out of the university. I should hear by the end of the week whether they are impressed enough with my work to want to interview me for the position. And I learned that I was moved straight into the second round interviews for a writer/editor position in another part of the university -- but I have to take the editing test this afternoon. The interview is scheduled for Wednesday afternoon; get this: 7 people interviewing one person. Suddenly, I have a stomach ache...

A different kind of editing position at the university press was posted by human resources last week. It sounds really interesting, so I'm planning to file an application this week.

All this and wedding planning, too. My dress is ready. I'm meeting my mom and my maid of honor this coming weekend to pick it up. Coincidentally, we'll also do some shopping for my maid of honor's wedding dress. Three weeks ago, she and my brother announced their engagement -- and they selected June 3, 2006, a mere three weeks after our May 13th wedding, as their wedding date. My parents are flipping out -- in a good way!

We have been discussing the ceremony with the officiant, my cousin the judge. I'm so excited that she is able to conduct the service! And it seems like everything is in place, at least as far as the really big stuff is concerned. We're working out the details involving the invitations now; those things have to go in the mail soon, after all.

Life is good. I wish I could wave a wand and make it so for everyone.

news

2005-12-20T16:38:00.000-05:00

UPDATE (12/29/2005): My poem "Visiting Grandma" has been published at strongverse.org. Check it out!

Back to the old news from 12/20/2005...
The foot is healing. There are a few sore places, some light bruising and swelling left. But it's getting better, and I know from experience that I really need to wear my tennies, even though I'm sick of wearing them every day, because they provide a lot more support than my Clarks mules.

Wedding plans are simmering, and I expect the result will be a fun and pleasant day. It looks like the biggest things are in place - the venue, the caterer, the florist, the photographer, the rings, the officiant and ceremony, the wedding party... Yay!

I've got applications in the works for four different positions, two writer/editor jobs and two student services (academic advising) jobs. Will crossing my fingers help? A new job for the new year might be kinda fun....

While the search for a full-time job is slow, I've had some luck with finding, and landing, a freelance gig. With WotC.

2006 is going to be so interesting!

have a seat on the liars' bench

2005-12-05T10:41:00.000-05:00

Got a story to tell? My friend Zack may want to read it.

As one of the editors for Liars' Bench, a new literary journal, he is looking for some well-crafted stories, not necessarily genre-specific, for publication.

For Issue No. 1, folklorist Henry Glassie will contribute a feature article, and Harlan Ellison will contribute a story. Maybe your story will be a good fit, too!

Questions about submissions go to this e-mail address: submissions@liarsbench.net.

Submissions go to this snailmail address: Liars’ Bench, P.O. Box 1177,
Bloomington, IN 47404.

[What's a liar's bench? Check out this photo...]

My Left Foot

2005-12-02T10:17:00.000-05:00

Sunday evening I fell down the stairs. Thunk, thunk, thunk, *splat*. At least I think I was only three or four steps from the bottom of the stairs.

Ed says he found me with my left leg bent unnaturally beneath me. (See his blog.) I know it hurt. I thought I had heard something pop. Momentarily, I was afraid that I had broken something.

It took forever to get me to the car so that we could go to the emergency room. We employed a desk chair as a wheelchair type of conveyance, and I moved from the bottom of the stairs to the car by a combination of hopping on my unhurt leg, leaning a lot on Ed, and sitting in the desk chair as Ed rolled it. It took us maybe 40 minutes to move me maybe 20 feet. (I'm a wuss. Plus, moving made things hurt a lot more.)

The ER had a battalion of wheelchairs waiting for someone to put them to use. Ed put me in one and we stormed the waiting room, claiming it as ours - which actually wasn't difficult because there was no one else around.

[Then came the most surreal part of the evening for me. After taking my vitals and asking what had happened, the nurse explained that by law this question must be asked of any woman over the age of sixteen who comes to the ER with an injury: Are you the victim of domestic abuse? What a time to be reminded of how lucky you are.]

In what seemed like less than ten minutes, I was whisked back to a room in the ER. Then the waiting began. Eventually I was taken to X-Ray, where I had to perform some seriously painful acrobatics in order to assist the x-ray tech in getting good film of my left foot and ankle. Difficult and painful acrobatics -- like resting my foot on top of the negative and turning my foot to the right. I was shaking so badly that I was surprised the x-rays were viewed as acceptable.

After some more waiting back in the room, the doctor came by and did some poking and prodding. Something made him go look at the x-rays again. Toe wiggling was beyond me. Yet he was certain nothing was broken and assured me that they would call if the radiologist felt that something in the x-rays had been overlooked. (Nobody has called me back to the hospital.) A nurse wrapped the foot and ankle in an ACE bandage, put a soft splint on the ankle just for some added stability, demonstrated proper crutch usage (and swinging like a pendulum between the two crutches is actually NOT recommended), and sent me on my way with a couple handouts about sprains and a prescription for Loratab.

How have things progressed since then? The foot has stayed pretty swollen, and it's been turning all sorts of colors. We closely examined it last night; there's definitely a line where things start to go wrong with it: on a diagonal from the left side of the third toe to about the midpoint of the arch. The bruising wraps around my foot and is darkest at the pressure point (the ball of your foot), kind of where your foot naturally bends when you walk (which explains the impossibility of toe wiggling, I think). Deep purple bruises now.

As of this morning, the swelling seems to have abated to the point where it's not so uncomfortable, and that's a big relief. I'm moving with the aid of a cane rather than the crutches, and that's also a big relief. The initial pain dampened considerably, but over the last day or so I've been experiencing flashes of pain in the arch, along the big toe, in my ankle, and so on. Sometimes my toes feel like they're curling up or kind of vibrating. I think it must be muscles dealing with being stretched out of shape. At least that's my theory.

I'm an impatient kind of patient. Ed has been wonderful.

Ponderings

2005-11-22T15:51:00.000-05:00

I may as well admit it straight up: I'm a sucker for the holidays. About this time of year, I start missing family and friends and the routines that have become tradition for us at Thanksgiving and Christmas over the years. In particular, I miss helping my mom plan the dinner menu and work in the kitchen to get ready as relatives and friends descend on the house. The big oak table standing on its clawed feet will proudly bear its burden of mashed potatoes, turkey, stuffing, gravy, baked ham, cranberry sauce, macaroni and cheese, green beans seasoned with salted country ham, rolls fresh out of the oven, sweet potato casserole, steamed broccoli, pickled beets, deviled eggs, and whatever else she's decided to make or asked folks to bring, since my aunts are always eager to chip in with the food preparation or the cleanup.

After dinner, when we were kids and the weather was nice enough, we'd run outside and toss a football, play on the swings, or kick a soccer ball around. These days after dinner, everyone tends to linger a while, to sit and talk. And those of us who were the little kids then now find ourselves running around after the newest group of little kids, watching the football game (or SciFi channel, depending on what's on), or playing card games like canasta and Phase 10.

There's something soothing about ritual and tradition, and I guess what I fall for, every time, is the nostalgia. Memories are viewed through the Vaseline-smudged lens in my head, so the lighting is extra soft.

--

My job is usually pretty, well, mundane. Today, however, I faxed and then FedExed documents that could help to save a man's life by keeping him from being returned to his homeland, where his life would be forfeit the minute he crossed the border, thanks to his efforts to establish a democratic government there.

--

Congratulations go out to Ed, of course, for his new job; friends Lesley and Matt on the birth of their son, Paul Laszlo, yesterday; Debbi at Ginko Designs for practicing patience and thereby facilitating her recovery post-surgery for CTS; Harley for continued success with the WoD contest; Jeff for the many interesting projects that have landed on his lap; Mike for the contract with Goodman Games; Chris for the positive new developments in his life with school and family; EC for getting more projects with Arilyn and Danilo greenlighted; anyone else whose reason for celebrating has slipped my mind... (It's the nostalgia, I swear!)

--

I'm working on an index to a book I line-edited several months ago. And I've been flexing my developmental editing skills on a friend's manuscript. Two very different projects, both fun! Maybe the future holds more work of this nature: a writer/editor job is opening up where I work now, and I'm going to throw my hat into the ring for it. The woman who would be my boss anticipates making a hiring decision by mid-December. Hey, Santa... how 'bout a new job for Christmas, please!

The Anniversary Waltz

2005-10-24T16:17:00.000-05:00

So about a year ago, I found myself involved in a conversation with this guy I'd been seeing a lot -- let's call him Ed, since that's his name. In the course of this conversation, we agreed that just maybe there was a little something more than a pretty darn good friendship going on between us.

Looking back, it seems like that was simple to say, not to mention easy to see. But that was probably the singlemost important day of my life, at least until June when Ed proposed. So we're getting married next spring. And this past weekend was our time to celebrate that moment when we made it crystal clear to each other that this relationship was something special.

Ed planned a surprise, something he hinted at in his blog, if you saw it. He's a great surprise-planner. I know this from the weekend he proposed, and this anniversary celebration... well, it was one surprise after another, and it was a lot of fun!

The surprise started with a short road trip. Unlike last year at this time, the day was clear, and the autumn scenery was simply gorgeous. Beautiful colors in the trees this fall. The first surprise: a visit to Keystone at the Crossing, a mall that has several stores that sell beautiful clothes... and had sales on. We found some good deals, but I lingered too long to make a decision. Still, we shared a couple pieces of Godiva chocolate, found some excellent bread with pesto rolled into it and a tasty spread to top it, and may have come across - quite by accident - a new perfume for me and a necklace to wear in the wedding.

The next stop was The Russia House Restaurant. To keep the secret and prolong the suspense, Ed asked me to close my eyes as he drove through town, and once we arrived I did manage to get out of the car without stumbling, even with my eyes closed. I had had lunch at this restaurant once before a few years ago with friends, and I'd been wanting to return ever since. The food is great, a wonderful reminder of the Russian cuisine I grew accustomed to while living in Moscow.

The chef pulls his menu mainly from Russian, Moldavan, and Georgian specialties. We had two appetizers - lightly breaded and then fried zucchini served with a sour cream and dill sauce, a healthy serving of the Russian vinegret (beets, potatoes, onion, carrot, peas, pickles, and a light dressing of vegetable oil), which was full of flavors that transported me back to Moscow - and we shared a Russian wheat beer, the Baltika No. 8, which I'd highly recommend.

For his main course, Ed selected vareniki, a crock full of dumplings, some of which he chose to have filled with potatoes and mushrooms and others which were filled with a soft farmer's cheese that's similar to ricotta. The vareniki are served with a light sauce that is flavored with dill and sour cream and onion. I had a similar dish, pelmeni: meat-filled dumplings served with butter which you then top with sour cream. Excellent stuff! We topped off dinner by sharing a slice of apple cake, which was also delicious. Everything was just yummy, and I got to get some practice in with the Russian skills in order to verify that Ed's food would be vegetarian-friendly. We were also pleased to see that the small restaurant was quite popular; by the time we were leaving, having had dinner reservations for 6PM, nearly every table in the place was full.

From there we walked over to a store called Half-Price Books, where we scored a used copy of the most recent edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. Quite exciting, but you'd probably have to be a big geek to understand why!

A dash over to the hotel - The Marten House Hotel, which has a cool tie-in with a local hospital that kind of makes your hotel stay a philanthropic venture - allowed us some time to moan and groan about being over-stuffed with yummy food before we headed out to the final surprise of the day.

We navigated our way some 70 blocks through town to find The Morris-Butler House, where a special event was going on: From Dark Pages. Ever heard of a progressive mystery play? Neither had I. But we were greeted by H.G. Wells, then led about by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his literary creation Sherlock Holmes, and in each room of the historical mansion (and sometimes even the staircases), scenes involving Queen Victoria, Ophelia, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her creature, the witches from Macbeth, Christine Daae, Meg Giry and the Phantom, a medium called Madame Alexandra, and Jack the Ripper and Mary Kelly unfold. It turned out to be a haunted house, only missing the gross-out factor. We really enjoyed it.

Any time we spend together is always enjoyable. But this weekend was especially lovely; everything made for a wonderful way to remember another special time in our lives, when we took the tiniest steps towards building a life together.

Can't Stop the Signal

2005-09-30T16:10:00.000-05:00

In about 2 1/2 hours my butt'll be planted in a movie theater where Joss Whedon's Serentiy will be about to roll, once we sort through the 10-15 minutes of commercials and trailers that precede the feature film. (Whatever happened to cartoons and newsreels? Oh, how I loved Matinee at the Bijou as a kid... but I digress...)

The reviews tend to be more positive than not. The film's got a healthy - respectable, even - Tomatometer ranking at www.rottentomatoes.com and an 8.4 out of 10 at IMDB.com.

And I've been looking forward to this debut for months!

Add to that the fact that this is the first weekend in a while when we don't have big plans involving elephants, out-of-town guests, and three jars of Nutella, plus the fact that the weather has taken a turn towards that beautiful crisp fall so characteristic of this part of the Midwest, as well as the fact that my fiance is a wonderful, wonderful guy, and we're looking at a weekend that's bound to please. And possibly even be relaxing.

How the heck am I so lucky???

The 2005 Lotus World Music Festival

2005-09-26T11:59:00.000-05:00

Loved it!

We started the evening with Seu Jorge. If you saw Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, then you saw him singing David Bowie covers in Portuguese. While he didn't do any Bowie while we were at his set, the contemporary Brazilian music was energetic and awesome.

From the muggy outdoor venue where Seu Jorge performed to the contemplative - and air-conditioned - sanctuary in the First Presbyterian Church... we saw contemporary Scandinavian folk band Frigg. Again, excellent music. (Tho' Hedningarna continues to be my favorite Scandinavian band, at least from among those I've been exposed to so far.)

We avoided the street parade in favor of grabbing a quick dinner at The Trojan Horse, a locally-owned Greek restaurant. Yummy, yummy gyros and fries. Then we dashed over to the First Christian Church, where the Palestinian group Le Trio Joubran wowed us and everyone else with their masterful performances on the oud (a large, sort of pear-shaped stringed instrument, in case you were wondering). We had hoped to hear Ana Moura sing Portuguese fado during this set, as well, but the line to get into the venue where she was performing wrapped around the corner. Instead, after Le Trio Joubran finished playing, we went over to First United Methodist and heard the last two pieces by Rachael Davis with Jake Armerding, both singer-songwriters. With its bluesy tone, the last tune showcased Rachael's voice.

Avoiding the second street parade wasn't a possibility, so we stood on the sides waving a flag to the beat of the percussion for a few minutes. Then we took off in search of restrooms, air conditioning, and more great music back at the First Christian Church. A woman approached us and asked if we would mind participating in a short survey for a graduate student doing research for her dissertation on the Lotus Festival. We agreed to answer a few questions; the crux of the survey seemed to involve what we felt about using local churches as venues for performances during the festival. Apparently she'd heard a lot of stupid stuff about how the environment was great (AC, plenty of seating, good acoustics, etc.), which misses the point, I think. Every performance I've ever seen at Lotus has been by someone who is really, really into his/her art, and there's a special joie de vivre that they have, that their music evokes, and that you're allowed to partcipate in as a member of the audience; and I just feel that the churches contribute to that feeling with their architecture, stained glass, and so forth. Make a joyful noise and all that...!

Spent the last set entranced by Nawal, a singer who resides in France but is from the Comoros Islands (off the east coast of Africa). Her performance was where I found the essence of the Lotus Festival for me. I can' recommend her music enough, although I can't tell you if what's special about her live performance carries through to the CD because her CDs sold out! (But amazon.com has it in stock. It's called Kweli. I recommend it - or seeing her live. She's on tour in the US through October.)

Afterwards, we heard some music from Funkadesi and then a few songs from the Creole Cowboys. All in all, it was a great night of music. The organization that runs Lotus has made some changes that, I'm afraid, make the showcase concerts less appealing, in some respects, and I worry a little for the future of the festival because of this. But as long as it's around, do consider visiting Bloomington for the festival. I hear next year it's going to be October 5th through 8th. Mark your calendars!

LRHWOTF

2005-09-16T12:10:00.000-05:00

Two of the workshops that I attended at GenCon were run by Brad Beaulieu (he's posted his notes on the site, in case anyone's interested), who won the WOTF contest for the 20th anthology (last year, I think). In one session, he asked if anyone else had entered the contest. Of 15 or so audience members, I was the only person who had entered a selection. I was surprised because entering this contest seems like such a logical thing to do. There's no reading fee. The judges are established authors in the sci-fi & fantasy genres. There are quarterly deadlines throughout the year. If your story places in any quarter, it's published in an anthology. There's a sizeable check involved if your work is the big winner for the year. Seems like a no brainer.

The story I entered last year is one I'm rather fond of. While it didn't place high enough to be considered for publication, I was informed that it had reached the quarter-finals, that the judges were impressed by it, and that I was encouraged to keep writing. That made for quite the positive experience.

The piece I've been working on with the aim to submit it to LRHWOTF this year (ooh, the end of the quarter is this month!) is also fantasy but quite different in tone and flavor of fantasy (modern rather than medievalesque). I like the piece, and I'm curious to see how readers respond to it. I feel like it's a winner, but I'm less and less convinced it's right for LRHWOTF. We'll see what happens... I have to decide it's finished first!

I need to follow the lessons I've learned from Marcy Rockwell and Harley Stroh. Write something every day. Keep sending stuff out regularly. Sleep is for folks who don't have aspirations to write for a living.

Update

2005-09-13T10:45:00.000-05:00

Sold a poem to Strong Verse. Not sure when it will appear on the site. It's called "Visiting Grandma," and the form is a sestina. (Recommended reading: Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina.") Got the greatest note ever from the editor, too!

I posted links to a couple interesting contests to the forums on Ed Gentry's website. Check 'em out! One encourages you to take the cliches of a particular genre and just run with them while the other is for shorter genre fiction and will be judged by prolific genre-bending writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch, who writes the Retrieval Artist series (a favorite I recommend to anyone who enjoys a little noir with their sci-fi).

Waiting to hear on a couple writing-related things. Attempting to work with a small group of folks to establish a critique group. Finishing a story to submit to LRHWOTF.

What I Have Learned from GenCon

2005-08-25T13:20:00.000-05:00

I thought I’d fill you in on what I’ve learned from my two years attending GenCon (2004 and 2005). Right off the bat, let me tell you that I think it will take another couple excursions to GenCon to test this knowledge and come up with the Ultimate Guide, or at least my favorite options, for getting the most out of the experience, depending on my goals.

1. One day is not enough. Paradoxically, four days may be a little too much.
Rationale: At least for the vendors, the first day is very much about getting settled in, the second day sort of just holds the date, the third gets really crowded, and the fourth is all about getting rid of stuff so you don't have to cart it back home with you. Bearing that in mind, if you have to pick, it's probably optimal to attend the middle two days of the con to get the full flavor. But there are workshops and seminars happening all four days, and I'd really like to try staying at one of the hotels to see if that makes the 4-day experience easier (instead of commuting the hour and fifteen minutes from Bloomington).
Solution: Get a hotel room.

2. The floor can be overwhelming.
Rationale: It's a visual and aural buffet.
Solution: Spend more time at the mall at Christmas. On the sale days. On the really big sale days. Or the day after Thanksgiving.
Better solution: Take an hour to just soak it all in. Then take a break and come back to it later.

3. Don’t schedule anything for 8AM, especially after the second day of the con.
Rationale: I just seemed to get more tired after the second day of the con. We didn't make it to a single 8AM session that we had planned to attend. I'm not sure that we missed much, judging on the hit-or-miss quality of the other presentations made by the presenters in question. Perhaps there's a rule about programming during less peak hours that explains this.
Solution: Imbibe more caffeine.
Better solution: Get a hotel room; it may be completely do-able to make an 8AM seminar if you can roll out of bed at 7:50AM and take the elevator downstairs to the meeting room.

4. Seminars and workshops on the same general theme, even when offered by different personalities, will probably still be repetitive.
Rationale: I selected to attend seminars with an emphasis on writing and editing. I heard a lot, for example, about character development, avoiding passive voice, and editing dialogue. Again and again and again. Totally my fault.
Solution: Don’t overload on seminars and workshops on the same theme.
Corollary to solution: Sign up for the seminars and workshops that interest you, go to as many as possible on the first day, then decide from that exposure to the presenters’ styles with whom you want to spend the next few days of the con in the remaining sessions.

5. Bottled water is always more expensive the closer the vendor is to the epicenter of the con (that is, the floor), yet staying hydrated - especially wearing your Wookie costume - is essential.
Rationale: Cons bite into the budget a little bit. Parking alone was stupidly expensive. Starting to save now for next year's GenCon is a smart thing to do, especially since we'd like to try the hotel option.
Solution: Don’t wear the Wookie costume in Indiana in August because it *will* be hot and humid.
Better solution: Make like your D&D character and pack your own water. This will enhance your role-playing abilities, too, because suddenly those penalties you take on certain Skill checks when you’re overburdened by weighty items will make all sorts of sense.

6. I want to play the Life-Size Kill Dr. Lucky, and I want to attend Tracy Hickman’s Killer Breakfast.
Rationale: Anything Tracy Hickman does is going to be interesting, and I keep hearing great things about the Killer Breakfast - a GenCon tradition. Gotta be part of it sooner or later.
Solution: Register even earlier (than the end of May) on-line.
Corollary to solution: E-mail Cheap Ass Games to encourage them to do more than two sessions (of 8 players each) of the Life-Size Kill Dr. Lucky.

2005-08-15T04:49:00.000-05:00

Update #1:
I'm afraid to say much about the interview, but I certainly enjoyed the conversation. I feel like I learned a lot about the job, the office climate, and potential co-workers, and I think I presented the relevance of my experience and goals as clearly as possible. Everything about the interview only affirmed for me that I really want this job. So here's hoping....

Update #2:
Chris has an art show coming up in Pittsburgh at Washington and Jefferson College. There's a little photo and two-line publicity blurb on the main page of the college's website.

A shout out to my brother Chris, whose birthday is August 11th, and to my brother Kevin, whose birthday is August 14th.

Rejection from Lone Star Stories for the story "Lives Insured." Very professional: quick turnaround, as promised, and a nice note.

I've got a job interview next Monday for a position that I'm really quite interested in, so here's hoping it goes well.

Take a deep breath.... exhale slowly

2005-07-14T10:33:00.000-05:00

What's been going on?

Wedding planning. Who knew flowers were so freakin' expensive? And let's not even get started about the catering. Anything labeled with "wedding" as an adjective seems to get a huge markup. The date and the venue are settled, though. It'll be lovely, fun will be had.

Attempting to formalize a critique group. Here's hoping the details get worked out in the next week or so. It'd be nice to get this underway.

Wedding dress shopping trip combined with both families meeting. Cincinnati is still standing, as far as I know, so I think it all went OK. *And* a dress was bought.

The job search continues. But that's boring and depressing news.

Moving will serve as an excuse to take off from work at least one day next week. Maybe two. But I had forgotten what a PIA it is to move. Find boxes. Pack stuff. Move stuff. Unpack stuff. Discard the boxes. Why, oh why, hasn't transporter technology been invented yet? The whole process would be simplified by that! Keep your eye on the prize: sharing one home instead of two will be worth the effort.

A summer cold - or sinus infection. Ugh.

Weird (unseasonably cool) weather for Indiana in July, thanks to the hurricanes. How strange to reap a reward from something that caused so much destruction elsewhere.

A new project in the works... a fun way to distract this mind from wedding planning and the frustrations of a, so far, fruitless job search. More on this later, when there's something to discuss.

A trip to Virginia at the end of the month. GenCon next month. A few days off work will be very, very nice.

Goin' to the chapel....

2005-06-09T13:14:00.000-05:00

On Saturday under a beautiful shade tree in Towpath Park in the historic little town of Metamora, IN, Ed asked me to marry him.

Ever the genteel lady, I first said, "You bum!," smacked him and hugged him, and finally, when prompted to answer the question, replied "I will!"

He had surprised me with the trip as part of my birthday celebration. He surprised me again with the ring and the question, even though I knew about the ring and we had discussed getting married.

April 2006.

The Good, the Bad, the Facts of Life

2005-06-01T10:23:00.000-05:00

The littlest of boys is home and doing really well. Recent photos reveal an adorable little fella who's got quite the personality. Continue to thrive, little one.

I learned last week that the perfect job hired the perfect candidate, who, as it turned out, wasn't me. The ding letter was thoughtful. But who really cares about that? I wanted the job, not a well-written ding letter that expresses respect for my abilities and regrets for not offering me the job. What it boils down to: I want a job where I actually get to use what I know, yet for some reason that's not happening.

No news from the slush pile at AHMM regarding "The Middle of Life."

Since things at RoF are in flux as Carina is leaving and a new person is taking over the slush duties, I e-mailed her to find out what's up with "Storyweaver." She got back to me very quickly with the news that a rejection letter is forthcoming, but she was encouraging and explained a bit of her critique. That feedback may prove itself invaluable.

My birthday weekend was really pleasant. I ended up taking an extra day and a half off because I was sick (OK, that part hasn't been pleasant), so I had a little extra time to rest and relax. My treat for myself -- a croquet set. We played croquet in the park Sunday evening. I can't wait to play again! *hee*

Last night we had dinner with several friends to celebrate the birthday. My older younger brother and his soon-to-be wife and her kids drove up from Louisville to join us. It was really good to see them. I think everyone enjoyed dinner and had a good evening -- I know I did. *grin*

My friends see something good in my writing. I know this as I hear this from them every now and then, and it was made all the more evident to me by a gift I received from C and K: the 2005 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market. Thanks for the encouragement.

Update: The Littlest of Boys

2005-05-19T11:29:00.000-05:00

(See April 13th post, The littlest of boys, for background.)

The littlest of boys has been doing quite well. In fact, he was slated to come home from the hospital this week. The latest news, however, is that he has developed a problem that is apparently common in baby boys: pyloric stenosis, the thickening of a valve between the stomach and small intestine. This problem is corrected by a quick, simple surgerical procedure, which requires his transfer to another hospital. Doctors are being reassuring that this is not a major problem or a major procedure & that his hospital stay will only have a few more days added to it.

UPDATE: The surgery went well. He should be able to go home on Saturday. Yay! His parents have been advised to keep him in the home pretty much for at least the next year - just to avoid exposure to things - like people -- that might make him sick. But at least he'll be home.

The Waiting Game

2005-05-16T13:48:00.000-05:00

Waiting to hear from two different slush piles for stories and one for six poems -- and approaching the critical 3-month average response time for the stories. Is there any truth to what I've read elsewhere about how the longer something you've submitted is kept the more positive a reaction it's generated in the readers?

Waiting to hear the results of a job interview for a job that seemed to have been written specifically for me.... How many other folks in my neck of the woods are fluent in Russian and have teaching and career counseling and editing experience? If there are more folks with my unusual background in this neighborhood, maybe we should form a club! Still, it would be so wonderful to have a job that uses my somewhat unique skills set. Please, please, please call me with a job offer this week...!

Waiting for my lease to be up so that we can simplify life a little bit. One home instead of two... How nice that will be!

Waiting... *sigh* At least it's all for good things, eh?

On Reading & "Reading Up"

2005-05-09T13:30:00.000-05:00

I've spent a little time considering what "reading up" means to me, as EC had encouraged in a blog entry way back in December 2004. The concept isn't exactly new; after all, my lifelong career as a reader has had both amateur, or hobbyist, and professional sides to it, and the examination of theories of reading was part of my training as a professional reader, aka grad student in comparative literature.

My reading life has almost always had this schism, a rift separating reading material that is "good for you" from reading material that is "not as good for you." The genre fiction I enjoy has typically fallen into the latter category, with notable exceptions as certain authors have managed to cross over into the canon of what is traditionally labeled acceptable, high-quality literature, at least by academics. Orwell and Le Guin come to mind, for instance.

That said, having reached the decision that I will not be writing the dissertation, over the last several months I have found myself balking at the idea of reading anything that might attempt to fit into that "good for you" category. This reticence, combined with the suspicion that any book that makes a bestseller list or a tv show's book club has got to questionable in quality simply because of its popularity, has meant that I've stubbornly persisted in reading cheap paperback after cheap paperback. (At $7 and $8 a pop, can they really be called "cheap" paperbacks anymore?) Until I finally started to crave something a little -- well, deeper, more meaningful, more aesthetically interesting, more challenging to read.

So I went on a shopping spree, bearing in mind EC's advice about "reading up" and my own inclination to find something a little more intense to read than what I've been pulling off the bookshelf recently. And I have to say that I have really enjoyed the books I picked up, as well as some others that had been loaned to me.

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger: I fully intended to have the book handy as I composed this blog entry so that I could pull out of it some of the bits that I found stunning, but since I don't have it handy, I guess you'll have to read the book yourself and look for what impresses you. This is a genre-bending story, bringing together sci-fi, romance, mystery, and a kind of realism. And then in addition to that astonishing blend of generic tropes and tendencies, the prose is beautiful, even lyric in places. For those of us writing, I think we can learn a few things about writing as a craft from Audrey Niffenegger.

The Winter Queen and Murder on the Leviathan by Boris Akunin: Akunin is the pen name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, one of those brilliant Russian writers who is also renowned for his other work. In this case, Chkhartishvili is a philologist, critic, essayist, and translator of Japanese. I'm betting he's also an Agatha Christie fan. Akunin's protagonist is Erast Fandorin, who has keen powers of observation that would put Sherlock Holmes to shame. Fandorin sort of stumbles his way up the Russian bureaucracy, becoming a diplomat-cum-detective as much by chance as by talent. According to what I've read, there are nine Fandorin volumes, three of which have been translated into English so far (although apparently the second and third volumes in English are actually the third and second volumes in the original Russian). I really enjoyed the first book, largely because the narrative style seems as if 19-century Russian literature and Agatha Christie mystery novels have come together to produce The White Queen. I found myself chuckling at the familiar tropes that were being used so uniquely. It was a fun read, and I couldn't wait to get my hands on Leviathan. The narrative structure in this novel is quite different from that of The White Queen - and I understand that the author has worked with different narrative strategies in each of the nine books in the series - in that each chapter is presented by a revolving cast of main characters, each of whom is a suspect in a grisly series of murders. It's like you're invited to participate in sleuthing with Fandorin, as reading the novel and deciphering the points of view puts you in the detective's shoes. Again, it was a really fun reading experience. When I can find the opportunity, I'd like to pick up the originals in Russian to see for myself how they read, but I am certain that translator Andrew Bromfield has done excellent work, or else the novels wouldn't be half as engaging. Again, I think there's something in these books that those of us who are writing can learn about; probably the best lessons would be about sophistication in the narrative structure and in the art of literary allusion.

(By the way, The Turkish Gambit, the third (E)/second (R) book in the series, has also been made into a film that looks like a lot of fun.)

His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman: I had to make several long road trips between Indiana and Virginia last summer, so I went through a few books on tape. One was an abridged version of the first volume of this trilogy, The Golden Compass. I absolutely hated it. But when with earnest recommendations someone offered me his copies of the trilogy to read, I decided to give it another try - surely the experience would be better actually reading the book in its unabridged print form. Well, yeah...! Pullman just tells the story, and as the reader you either go along with his narrative, or you set it aside because you can't follow the rules of this world. It's a little challenging that way, I think; I certainly couldn't give over to it as an abridged audiobook, for instance. I distinctly remember thinking it was oh-so-much nonsense. And, indeed, it is something that's highly imaginative to the point of being fantastical (which I think is something more than fantasy because, as a genre, fantasy sometimes lacks the fantastical - hmm... perhaps because so much has become cliche?) and at the same time it is philosophical. Something to read that encourages you to imagine and to think... Gee, what will they think of next? And that's what I think we who are writing have to learn from Philip Pullman: challenge yourself and your readers to imagine and to think. Surely, you'll be well on your way to producing some of your best writing.

The Wild Swans by Peg Kerr: Two different plots evolve in this novel, one involving a young woman living in Puritan New England and the other about a young gay man in our contemporary society. I really liked this book and found the author's style to be another example of delightfully lyrical prose. I have long been a fan of this kind of fantasy wherein a fairy tale -- in this case, the one referred to by the title -- is presented in a new way; in fact, I'm working on a re-telling of one of my favorite fairy tales, and I may even produce a nonfiction article that incorporates some of my research for this story. Kerr's re-telling takes place in both plots, but the more successful of the two is the one which is so much more closely identified with the original tale. Still, I think this is a book worth investing some time in reading, and for those of us who write the best lessons from Peg Kerr are about weaving something new from something old and crafting lyrical prose.

Something to do in Indiana when it snows in April

2005-05-03T13:24:00.000-05:00

A couple weekends ago, in the wee hours of the morning (well, for a Saturday) we ventured to Indianapolis to spend a day at the Indianapolis International Film Festival. From 10AM on Saturday 'til 1AM or so on Sunday, we took part in seven different screenings - five feature-length movies and two sets of shorts. Here's a mini-review (links to IMDB's entry on the film when available)...

If I understand correctly, this festival is a fairly new endeavor, the brainchild of Wm. Brian Owens, who must have cloned himself or something because he was everywhere. We met him when we picked up our passes; he introduced nearly every film we saw; he mingled in the lobby area and actually found the time to talk with festival-goers about the movies they had seen; and he sat in on at least one screening we were in. I have to say that I really appreciate his efforts. Because of the way he maintained a presence in the goings-on and made himself available (in person during the four-day event and via e-mail before and after the event), it kind of felt like we were guests in his amazing home theater rather than two of more than 3,000 attendees at a film festival. Kudos to Wm. Brian Owens!

The Features:

Lonesome Jim
This movie marks Steve Buscemi's directorial debut. Filmed in and around Goshen, IN, it was also one of the "locally grown" movies that were screened at the festival. Casey Affleck stars as Jim, a Hoosier boy who returns home after having spent some time in New York City, where he had hoped to make his living as a writer. Through a few clues given in conversations with the parents (Mary Kay Place sparkles as mom), the viewer understands that Jim isn't just lonesome -- he's been exiled from his roots and from his family, albeit willingly, and returning to his hometown and the house where his parents raised him and his brother Tim (nice work by Kevin Corrigan) makes him extremely uncomfortable. After Jim's homecoming, the rest of the film depicts some of the crazy things that happen to his family, largely because of Jim's discomfort with his life, and the budding relationship between Jim and Anika (Liv Tyler in a stand-out performance), a nurse and single mother. Buscemi uses the settings well. The bleak midwestern landscape seems to be a reflection of Jim's mood. The house where his parents live with their adult sons seems connected to mom's personality, as well. Everything is in its place where it should be, but the house is welcoming without being inviting, much like mom is efficiently cheerful without really being friendly or warm. The pace is slow and the resolution of so much familial angst is abrupt, but if you're in the mood for an indie flick, you'll probably find something interesting in Lonesome Jim.

Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea
This was the movie that least interested me, and it turned out to be one of my three favorites from our day at the festival. I wholeheartedly recommend tracking this down to watch. Briefly, the Salton Sea is a manmade inland sea located some 50 miles south-southeast of Palm Springs, CA, and after going through an economic boom as a tourist attraction, the place is now an ecological nightmare (about to worsen drastically) where a hearty, or foolish, handful of folks hold on to their part of the American Dream, either remembering the glory days or speculating on a revival of the area. Plagues & Pleasures is a documentary that at time feels like it simply must be a mockumentary because the Real Live People - chiefly, residents of the dying communities that surround the Salton Sea - who are interviewed are such outright eccentric characters: the retirees who refuse to sell the properties that they bought back in the heydays because their investment may still pan out; the owner of the local diner who was a star fisherman back when the fish in the Salton Sea were still OK to eat; the Hungarian emigre and the Mexican emigre, both of whom see the communities around the Salton Sea as places of far greater opportunity than were those they left; the families who have more recently moved to a Salton Sea community from L.A., who see their new hometown as a safer place to raise their kids than the gang-riddled neighborhoods they left behind; the always naked old man who enjoys the freedom living in this "last frontier" gives him; the artist who has a commission from God to create his art so that it will be ready for folks to see when the area goes into another "boom" phase. The more the eccentrics talk and the more you learn about the area's past, present, and potential future, you can't help but become more attached to these people, and I think that's where this documentary so overwhelmingly succeeds. There are potentially devastating ecological problems in the Salton Sea area, and as you learn about the current problems (high salinity in the waters yields dead fish, which creates botulism, which kills the seabirds that have been pushed inland from the California coast), you also learn about potential future problems (a dead seabed and alkali windstorms blowing into Palm Springs) and you have the faces of all these people living in the communities around the Salton Sea in front of you... so the scientific facts are married to the personal stories, and you can't help but care.

Pearl Diver
Like Lonesome Jim, Pearl Diver is another movie set in Goshen, IN, but this time the story focuses on conflict between two sisters, one who leads a more secular lifestyle and the other who has stayed true to the Mennonite way of life in which she was raised. On the surface, the difference in lifestyles seems to be the point of contention between the two women, but you come to understand that the source of the conflict stems from their reactions to the murder of their mother some 20 years earlier. Eventually, you learn that they are also reacting to the actions that each of them took the night their mother was murdered. This revelation should be the payoff. Finally, the jarring bits of flashback come together to tell the story of what happened that night, bringing together the perspectives of each young girl. And, in a way, this scene does reward. But there's a heavy-handedness to the way the plot unfolds that left me dissatisfied with the film. I found most irking the scene in which one of the sisters explains the title of the film to another character; surely, the title must be explained because this is not a film set in Japan or dealing with Japanese women pearl divers, and that's problemmatic. It's what makes this film seem more amateur than some others. Still, as someone who appreciates narrative filmwork, I liked it more than I disliked it. There's a story involving some fairly interesting, non-Hollywood characters, and that's nice to see.

Sud pralad (Tropical Malady) and
Mei li de xi yi ji (The Beautiful Washing Machine)
There were two international features that we were interested in seeing, Tropical Malady because we couldn't think of anything we might have seen from Thailand and The Beautiful Washing Machine because the story sounded like a delightful piece of magic realism. More often than not, when I've chosen an international film to watch, it's come from the European or Russian cinematic traditions. Evidently those directors have been treating moviegoers with kid gloves because these two films were very different and very difficult to watch. I still wonder how my experience would have been different had I not seen the two back-to-back or at the end of a long day of movie screenings. I'm not convinced that I would have appreciated Washing Machine any more. It's a difficult movie, full of long sequences in which little happens or the same kinds of events happen over and over. None of the characters - not even the girl who springs forth from the washing machine - comes across as sympathetic in any way, and the anti-consumerist, feminist (or, as I'm still debating with myself, possibly anti-feminist), and masochistic themes and images are disturbing. Similarly, Malady has long sequences in which little happens, and there's even a disjointed spot in the middle where it appears that a whole 'nother movie has started, even though other than a slightly extended fade-to-black, there hasn't been a clear ending (in terms of plot resolution) to the movie that you started watching. But it's in this second part that the magical realism I was expecting in Washing Machine shows up, as a young soldier on patrol chases a tiger - no, a shaman - no, a tiger - no, a shaman - through the forestland. The screening left me a bit confused about what I'd just seen, but I also had the feeling that I'd just seen something kind of beautiful, even if I didn't quite understand all the nuances. Reading more about the film later helped me understand some parts better. Of the two, I have to recommend Tropical Malady, although with some reservations. I can't stress enough that it's not an easy film to watch, but if you can get through it, mull it over, and check out a couple of the reviews you can find by googling it, there's something good and interesting in it. (The title, I learned from googling, when translated into English means "strange animal," and this seems important to the film.)

The Shorts:
from the "Cartoons for Grown-Ups" screening

9: One of the best. In my top 3. The animation wows, but the story is just as excellent. A lovely and exciting piece of fantasy.

Ryan: An animated documentary about the animator Ryan Larkin, whose work you may recognize. The animator who created this documentary depicts people in a shocking manner. The only problem with this short is that it's too short and comes across as a little bit disjointed and light in content.

Seventeen: All hail the hand-drawn animation! The plot is nightmarish, but the hand-drawn animation is done well.

Through My Thick Glasses: Claymation used to tell a WWII story, as a grandfather tells his grandchild about his youth in the Resistance fighting the War Machine, and we see how the child understands - very literally - his words. I thought this was precious, and I actually liked it more than Ryan, at least as far as content is concerned (as both are stylistically interesting).

Arj & Poopy: Really short (less than a minute to 2 minutes, perhaps) animation depicting conversations between a guy and his cat. The really short ones are funnier than the longer ones. No listing comes up on IMDB, unfortunately.

Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me: From the director behind Arj & Poopy, this turned out to be a music video.

from the "The World Laughs With You" screening

Dutch Bird: A pleasant short film featuring the actor from Waking Ned Divine. Reminiscent of Saving Grace. A thumbs up!

Mary: If you've ever wondered what would have happened to Joan of Arc in the contemporary Age of Medication, then you'll probably get a kick out of this (really, really) short short. Apparently it's being shown, at least in some theaters, with Woody Allen's flick, Melinda and Melinda. And given his penchant for neuroses, the pairing makes a lot of sense.

Tama tu: This is a little gem. If you can find it, watch it.

West Bank Story Another gem! In this short film, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is placed into the framework of the musical West Side Story. They go for the overstatement rather than subtlety, and the results are pretty funny.

The Regular Guy presents a running gag that appeals to elementary school students and/or adults who haven't outgrown elementary school gags, and it goes on waaaay too long. Icky, icky, icky.

We packed a picnic lunch, but we ended up eating our hummus and cheddar cheese sandwiches in the car. After a couple weeks of pleasant spring weather, this particular weekend turned cold and windy, making the short walk from the venue to the car something less than pleasant. But the picnic was cozy, and the day was great for memory-making. Even getting lost on our way out of town - at 2AM in the snow! - was fun, in its own way. Which just proves that, more often than not, it's who you're with, not what you're doing or where you're going, that makes the day special.

The littlest of boys

2005-04-13T15:18:00.000-05:00

Through a friend, I've come to know about the birth of the littlest of boys. He was born three months early, at just over two pounds, and now, at three weeks of age, he appears to be thriving. Thanks to the Internet, even though we're some distance away from this littlest of boys and his parents, we have seen photos, and as one of his aunts, my friend has been privy to some family stories, a few of which she has shared. Still, it is difficult to comprehend the size of a two-pound newborn. He is so tiny. In one photo, the littlest of boys presses the tiniest of feet against his father's thumb: The foot barely reaches from the tip of the thumb to the knuckle. He is so tiny.

The littlest of boys has touched me so much. I know that at least part of the connection, if I may be allowed to call it that, I feel to him comes from the frightening premature circumstances of my own, much earlier, birth. I have heard the stories from my mom - going to the hospital way too early; dad being sent off to work because the medical staff assured them that she was not actually going into labor; the confusion in labor and delivery and the brusque announcement that the other baby was dead, when no one had known that she was carrying twins; her visits during my month-long hospital stay; holding my head in her palm, my feet barely touched her arm at the crook where her elbow bends; my dad being afraid to hold me for the first several weeks of my life...

For comparison's sake, as far as nine months' gestation is concerned, I was born only a few weeks after, and a couple pounds heavier than, the littlest of boys. Until meeting the littlest of boys, I've (thankfully) never really had a way to comprehend how small I was as a newborn.

I intend to report in coming months that this littlest of boys continues to thrive and develop normally. We preemies need to root for each other. Life is precious and fragile.

Bippity-boppity-boo

2005-02-28T16:15:00.000-05:00

Writing

At the beginning of February, I blithely stated a list of goals:
"In February, I will
1) submit "The Middle of Life" to another slush pile;
2) complete the modern pop-fantasy story I’ve been working on piecemeal, find a venue where it might best fit & send it there;
3) find a venue for "Storyweaver" & send it there;
4) draft an outline for the fairy-tale based story in order to get the details out of my head and on paper;
5) and, while I’m cleaning closets in my mind, draft an outline for an as yet untitled project;
6) resume work on an RPG project, with the goal of completing my portion by the end of the month."

At the end of month, and with a certain amount of embarassment, I state that this is what I actually accomplished:
1) Submitted MoL to another slush pile (2.21.05)
2) Submitted Sw to another slush pile (2.21.05)
3) Started what really cannot be called an outline for the as yet untitled project

Ispravljus'! Ispravljus'! Obeshchaju, ispravljus'! OK, well... enough with the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

The list continues for March, then... This month I will:
1) Complete the modern pop-fantasy story, tentatively titled "Post-Millenial Fairy Godmothers, Inc." Send draft to critique buddies.
2) Draft an outline of the aforementioned fairy-tale based story; begin rough draft of story & send to critique buddies.
3) Draft an outline of the aforementioned as yet untitled project; begin rough draft & send to critique buddies.
4) Resume work on RPG project: This is short and interesting, and I may even be able to do most of the crunchy stuff myself, so I just need to write it. Mwahahahahaha...

Committing to finishing my to-do list for February is going to have to be enough for now. Should I find myself running low on things to do mid-month, I'll supplement the to-do list at that time.

Job Search

It also occurs to me that I might do myself a favor to keep track of progress in the job search, too. Researching jobs (in international programs/study abroad offices, primarily) and writing cover letters takes up a certain amount of my time, after all. There haven't been a lot of jobs posted that, as a newbie to the field, I'm qualified for, but I'm hoping the trend changes as the director positions that have been posted are filled and more positions that require less direct experience working in the field open up (presumably as the people who held those jobs move up the ladder). I'm also investigating another possible career path, thanks to a nudge of encouragement from one of the faculty members I work with now. I'm a little curious to see how that develops.

Since December, I have applied for these jobs:
Indiana Univ. Continuing Studies AcAd
Marist College IP
UNLV IP (result: ding)
Plymouth State IP (result: ding)
Purdue Univ. IP
NC State Univ. IP
Albany IP
New School Univ. IP
Indiana Univ. Kelley School of Business AcAd (result: ding)
Hanover IP
Hartwick IP

This week I need to submit application materials to these jobs:
UNLV-USAC IP
Oregon IP
Pace Univ. SA
Georgia SA
Purdue Univ. IP
Wisconsin-Madison IP/SA
CEA SA

Goal: This month I will continue researching jobs in an effort to apply for three positions per week. (That's below the average recommended in career counselor circles, but I'm looking for a position in a field that's a bit more specialized than accounting, finance, or other business-focused jobs that are so easily found on boards like Monster.com, so it seems like a good average to strive for, based on the trends I'm seeing in the job ads.)

Ah, winter...

2005-02-01T13:51:00.000-05:00

Summing up January

Should you ever find yourself in Seymour, IN, drive away from the so-called outlet mall in a westerly direction, past all the strip malls and chain restaurants that purport to replicate your neighborhood, to downtown, where the storefronts feature lovely and intricate architectural details and you can find a restaurant & bakery called Grandma Carol’s on the corner across from the Chamber of Commerce. You’ll probably find Grandma Carol there along with at least one other family member. If you’re really lucky, you’ll find that the soup of the day is potato, and you’ll settle in for the tastiest bowl of creamy potato soup you’ve ever had. Grandma Carol has creamy peanut butter fudge, moist pumpkin bars, plate-sized cinnamon rolls with cream cheese icing, peanut butter cookies, chocolate chip oatmeal cookies, and other assorted goodies, too. But mostly you ought to have a bowl of potato soup.

Stalled during the holidays, the job search continues. No interviews yet, but I’m hoping that a couple of the more promising leads will yield interviews, at the least, and offers, at the most. I’ve been advised to make an effort to attend the national conference in Seattle later this spring; while I would love to see Seattle again, I’m not sure I can make that work… airfare, hotel room, meals – these expenses add up. But I’ve got to research my options before nixing the idea entirely.

I joined (an incredibly literate, based on what I’d observed in other games) PBP game a few months ago. This is an exercise in writing, too. It’s been an interesting way to think about character development, and it’s helping me better understand some of the details in the rules that I haven’t necessarily had to pay close attention to in my other gaming groups. I’m curious to see if I can also develop a better feeling for describing combat and action, which is, I think, the aspect of the Eberron writing sample that required the most work – aside from an inspired move with something resembling a peach pit.

Ah, yes – writing… I probably wrote about 200 words during the whole month – and January is a pretty long month! Excuses for not working abound, but I’ve tried reaching out to a couple folks who seem a lot better at the motivation side of things than I am, just to try to find something in their methods that might help me find my own ways to Get Some Writing Done. I am starting to think that the 100-words-per-day plan is beyond feasible. According to the word count feature, at “feasible” this little post is 271 words, after all, and that’s been 10 minutes of my time, grabbed just before lunch.

I’m going to try announcing my writing goals here, as a few others do in their blogs. So in February, I will
1) submit “The Middle of Life” to another slush pile;
2) complete the modern pop-fantasy story I’ve been working on piecemeal, find a venue where it might best fit & send it there;
3) find a venue for “Storyweaver & send it there;
4) draft an outline for the fairy-tale based story in order to get the details out of my head and on paper;
5) and, while I’m cleaning closets in my mind, draft an outline for an as yet untitled project;
6) resume work on an RPG project, with the goal of completing my portion by the end of the month.

Six goals…. Let’s hope that’s a good start!

Postscript: February begins with a bang

Congratulations to my youngest brother, who just learned he received an arts grant of reasonable size, and to my older-younger brother, who has landed a new job which he enjoys and at which he excels.

It's all about leaves

2005-01-05T10:09:00.000-05:00

Lost in Fallen Leaves... Leafing Through... There's the start of a pattern here, maybe.

Please support your local ezine...!

Huh? Whuzzat?

Well, inasmuch as the Internet is seemingly boundary-free, an ezine would kind of have to be considered local, no?

Issue #3 of Leafing Through, featuring my short story "Alla Petrovna," is now available at http://www.gorlan.co.uk.

My first semi-professional sale.... I must say, it's pretty cool to look at this and see my name attached and feel good about what I wrote.

ADDENDA

1. A sample from the current issue of Leafing Through is available on the website, as well. Brief descriptions of each story are included along with the first page of a story.

2. Katharine York, editor and founder of Leafing Through, has included a link to an independent review of the November issue of the ezine at
Yet Another Book Review Site.

Musings

2004-12-30T13:41:00.000-05:00

A NEW HOBBY
What's kept me so busy that I haven't had a chance to post since the beginning of December? Knitting! I knitted my first project in March of this year. Supposed to be a scarf, it turned out to be a misshapen mass of knitted material. Too short, too wide, and too oddly shaped to be a scarf or anything useful. Consequently, I didn't feel confident about trying another knitting project, but a friend was getting rid of some of her yarn stash and passed along some bits and pieces to me so that I would be encouraged to try again. Indeed, necessity - flavored by the conviction that making Christmas presents can be way cooler than straining an already tight budget to spend heaps of money on stuff friends and family may not want, need, or like - is the mother of invention.

I ended up knitting several scarves as Christmas presents: a "boa" yarn in teals and blues for my mother; a red cotton worsted complete with tassels for my dad; a lime green and robin's egg blue "eyelash" yarn for a friend; an orange, pink, and purple "eyelash" yarn conjoined with an orange acrylic worsted for another friend. And I received some yarn, knitting needles, knitting books, and so on as presents, so I want to continue putting together scarves (and maybe try to make sense of patterns and try some other kinds of projects). Actually, I have a couple scarves in process - one in a tricolor (gray, black, chocolate brown) soft and fuzzy merino wool for myself and one in "boa" yarn the colors of autumn leaves for a friend - that require finishing. And sooner or later, I should earnestly try to figure out how to purl, too. The textures you can put into the project are a little more interesting when you can work with both the purl and knit stitches.

HOLIDAY TRAVEL
I made it out of the midwest and home to Virginia just ahead of the snowstorm that dumped 18+ inches of snow here. That got me an extra day at home for the holidays, but it still feels like I was barely there, like I hardly had time to visit with family. I think part of that just comes from staying busy -- since my grandmother died, my mom has taken on hosting duties for holiday family dinners. There's a lot of work involved in getting things ready for a group that can range from 20 to 50, depending on everyone's schedules!

I drove back on Monday. In Kentucky (somewhere around Lexington, I believe) in the afternoon sun, the trees sparkled like they had diamonds on them. Eventually, as I traveled further west, I could see thicker layers of ice on the trees and grass, but catching that first bit of sparkle was magical.

The snow created some problems, as well. The one which most directly affected me involved frozen gutters, runoff, and collapsed acoustic ceiling tile. Fortunately, that's in my office at work, not in my apartment. Unfortunately, this is a terrible week to try to get anything done simply because so many folks are able to take this week off. I've been temporarily relocated to a very pleasant faculty member's exceedingly well appointed office. I could feel the tiniest bit spoiled. I just wish I'd backed up my computer files on the network before I dashed out of town... especially since the story I was working on (and thought I had saved on a floppy) apparently is only on the work computer's hard drive. Another technology lesson learned the hard way...!

THE HEART AND THE HOME
It's really, really, really nice being home.

Drumroll, please....

2004-12-03T10:50:00.000-05:00

"Alla Petrovna" sold to the ezine Leafing Through.

Look for it in the January 2005 issue.

Thanks to Ralan's for the tip on Leafing Through.

On Holidays, Blogs, and [gasp!] even Writing

2004-12-03T10:27:00.000-05:00

Thanksgiving was nice, although I got a little homesick. When I was growing up, Thanksgiving was a day spent with family and friends -- and we didn't always know who the friends would be as it always kind of depended on circumstance. The day was about family and community and sharing and warmth - and it was fun. Missing out on spending that time with my family is more difficult than it might seem. Fortunately, I was "adopted" into a family for the day, and then I spent the rest of the weekend in Ohio with some of my closest friends. What great reminders that folks hold me in their hearts as closely as I hold them in mine.

I finished knitting two scarves and started a third. Christmas presents, don't ya know.

I also ended up at the doctor's, where I was diagnosed with a sinus infection. After that, I was feeling OK until Tuesday afternoon. All I could think about was how much I wanted to go home and curl up in bed under the blankets.

Elaine Cunningham has replaced her first blog with a new one, Elven Bard. An excellent post about "reading up" caused me to cringe a little bit at what's on my current reading list. There's nothing like an advanced degree in literature to suck the enjoyment right out of the act of reading. After years - even, one could say, decades - of splitting my reading time between the two diametrically opposed camps of Great Works of Literature and Literary Theory and Criticism and genre fiction, these days I sometimes find it difficult to pick up something to read that isn't... well, mostly schlocky genre fiction. The stuff of guilty pleasures. I appreciate Elaine's recommendation of Robin McKinley's Sunshine. I like this author's work a lot. Maybe this will be a good book to read to start adding a little more richness to my reading diet.

In the last post she made in the now defunct blog, Elaine addressed professionalism. She said it much more eloquently, but the basic idea was about thinking of yourself as a professional, treating yourself as a professional, and managing your work time as a professional are key habits to develop in order to be professional. Yet as a writer working from the home (or working full-time at a job that pays the bills and part-time at writing), it can be easy to treat one's self, one's writing, and one's time less than professionally because so many other things and other people (and other cats, of course) demand your attention. That really spoke to me. I sense a New Year's resolution coming on....

More update

2004-11-17T10:53:00.000-05:00

Received rejection letter from EQMM for "The Middle of Life." Now the question is whether to turn it around and back to AHMM or to look for other venues. I don't feel like the problem is the story, which I do believe is pretty strong; rather, I think it's with the whole breaking-into-publication thing. By limiting submissions to those publications that I know, maybe chances for catching someone's eye are drastically slimmer. Have faith in my work and broaden my list of alternatives - yes?

Last week sent "Alla Petrovna" to an ezine that purports to have a 10-day turnaround. No word yet, but it's only been a few days.

Rotating work on three new stories, though I fear I've lost the thread of the idea for one of them. With any luck, writing through the "block" will prove helpful and I can get past the shadowy feeling that I know I had a great idea for this once... Note to self: make better story notes when an idea grabs you.

Regarding the job search, I've revised the resume and sent it to a few folks for feedback. A handful of job postings have caught my eye, and it's time to get those application materials ready to send out. I'm feeling more confident about how my credentials measure up in this field, and, given some recent developments, researching jobs has become more interesting.

And, *ugh*, please send Tums. I had some coffee this morning. What a bad idea!

A New Look

2004-11-11T15:34:00.000-05:00

Woo-hoo...! Courtesy of Ed Gentry, Lost in Fallen Leaves has a revised look! Hope you like it.

Into the Whirlwind

2004-11-10T09:07:00.000-05:00

Week 12 of an average 3-month turnaround and so far no word from EQMM on "The Middle of Life." Is there any truth to the theory that the longer it takes to hear about a piece the more likely it is that it will be published? This writer can only hope. AHMM returned "Alla Petrovna" last week. Browsing Ralan's website for other venues for these stories. Happy happy dance in Borders last night when I discovered that an anthology I'd thought defunct isn't: ta-da! a possible venue for "Storyweaver." A few hundred words into a new story with the biggest plot elements outlined and discussed with my critique partner, Ed. With two weekends of travel behind me and things at work slowing down a bit, finishing the first draft seems like a very do-able thing. Yay!

What's been keeping me busy and the blog from being updated? A little of this, a little of that... As has been published elsewhere, Ed and I were in New York for Jeff and Marisa's wedding on October 31st. The wedding was lovely & the weekend was great. We met Harley Saturday morning and made a most memorable journey to West Point together. *grin* We met Jeff, his brother John, and his friend Dan for lunch and were able to hang out with these guys and catch up with Jeff for a while that afternoon, despite how busy they were with wedding preparations. While everyone else was at the rehearsal later that evening, Dan - who, like Jeff and John, grew up at West Point - led us on a tour of West Point and Trophy Point in particular. The weather had turned misty, and this lent a slightly eerie aura to the grounds. Back in town, we had dinner at another (the other?) restaurant that had eggplant fries on the menu: they had to be sampled and proved to be absolutely delicious.

Sunday turned out to be a gorgeous day, so we returned to West Point early enough before the wedding to explore Trophy Point in bright sunshine. The contrast of Trophy-Point-in-gray and Trophy-Point-in-yellow was amazing. It also still strikes me as odd to see monuments depicting famous men who are dressed in contemporary (more or less) clothing. Of Eisenhower, Patton, and MacArthur, Patton looked most soldierly and combat-ready in the statue that memorializes him. The wedding was in Cadet Chapel, which someone remarked looked like it belonged in a Harry Potter movie. The huge, dramatic space managed to hold a wonderfully intimate ceremony, and the service was really beautiful. (It's a bit cliche, I know, but other words just don't work as well!) The masquerade reception was festive. The costumes were delightful, although I felt terribly underdressed and uncreative in my oh-so-normal street clothes. I love this "tradition" of leaving disposable cameras on the tables for guests to use, and I hope that the photos we took turned out well because I did try to capture some of the festivity with the one on our table. :-)

I felt like I spent all of last week trying to catch up from missing one day of work (due to the return flight on Monday). Then the weekend hit, and it was time for more travel. On Saturday, we made a quick dash to Louisville for a surprise party that my brother K threw for his girlfriend, A. It was fun, and I'm glad to see K so goofy in love -- with the feelings being returned, which is kind of the important part. Midnight found us dashing back to Bloomington since I had to meet some folks in order to leave Sunday afternoon for a conference in Evansville. I fulfilled my volunteer obligations for the conference, and I was also able to attend several informative sessions, as well as meet some people working in the field. I got a couple leads on job openings, too. We'll see what happens. What I find most important is that nothing I heard during the conference made me start to think for even a moment that breaking into this field is the wrong move for me to make. I feel more encouraged, actually, that this is a good decision and that it's simply going to be a matter of finding the right niche. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be completing several packets of application materials in the hope of finding the right niche sooner rather than later.

So now I'm back at work, armed with a plan for the job search and also facing another challenge - maintaining time for (OK, paying serious attention to) writing. A twenty-four hour day just runs a little short sometimes.

Odds and Ends

2004-10-25T09:57:00.000-05:00

Blogworld
What happened on October 20th? There was a post on Choose Death - I saw it, but now it's gone. There was a post on Elf Notes - I saw it, but now it's gone.

At the writing desk
Ten weeks since I sent stories to EQMM and AHMM. So far, nothing interesting in the mail, but no rejection letters, either. Could the slush piles at these publications really be so much more overrun with submissions than the slush pile at F&SF?

I started a new story last week. I think it's a nifty little idea. The more I work with it, the more the idea keeps evolving, so I feel like that's a pretty good sign. I will have a draft finished by Thursday.

At the movies
Two thumbs up to the latest zombies-take-over-the-world flick Shaun of the Dead. Imagine that a group of friends who are both more eccentric and funnier than the gang on Friends fight for their lives against an ever-growing population of zombies. There are any number of scenes well worth the price of the movie. I'm afraid that telling you mine would give away too much of the plot!

Team America: World Police.... I find it difficult to say that I liked the movie. Yes, I laughed at some of the gags, but the songs were the best part of the movie - so much so that I found myself watching the action onscreen in anticipation of getting to the next song and phooey with this other stuff, like plot points. My favorite -- a love song which uses a simile that involves director Michael Bay and the movie Pearl Harbor.

On the bookshelf
I've been reading Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax Trilogy - Hominids (2002), Humans (2003), and Hybrids (2003). The trilogy looks at the question, "What if evolution had happened differently, so that the Neanderthals thrived and the homo sapiens died out?" Sawyer uses the quantum computer as the plot device that allows the reality in which that did happen to connect with the contemporary period that is essentially our own. I think the exploration of 'the other' works pretty well, largely because Sawyer presents both the Neanderthal culture and the 'human' culture and admits to the quirky features of each instead of simply making one seem more (or less) appealing in comparison to the other. Sometimes there's a little too much happy coincidence going on - as in the way Neanderthals and 'humans' learn to communicate rather easily - and sometimes relationships between characters seem to develop too quickly, particularly given that he had three books to allow those relationships to develop. Many of the ideas that Sawyer presents reminded me of Daniel Quinn's Ishmael (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553375407/qid=1098722629/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/103-9209317-7315031). The trilogy read in conjunction with this book might make for some interesting discussions. The final book won't be released as a paperback until next month, and I'm soooo looking forward to it.

The only other book that I'm looking forward to with as much - ok, to be honest, even more - anticipation is George R. R. Martin's fourth novel in the Songs of Fire and Ice series, A Feast for Crows (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553801503/qid=1098722757/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/103-9209317-7315031). The end of the third novel left me reeling. I'm tempted to break my rule and buy the hardback when it comes out simply because I must know the rest of the story. The GRRM RRetrospective (http://www.subterraneanpress.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=martin&Category_Code=B&Product_Count=65) released by Subterranean Press also looks really, really interesting. Good luck finding a copy, however!

Update

2004-10-19T10:43:00.000-05:00

OK, at the six-week mark for submissions to EQMM and AHMM, and so far no word received on those pieces. At the ten-day mark, a rejection letter from The Slush God received. Somehow hearing "thanks, but no thanks" sooner rather than later makes the message a little less disappointing.

In the odd bits of "down" time that have popped up over the last couple days, I've been playing with Hero Machine (http://www.ugo.com/channels/comics/heroMachine2/heromachine2.asp). First, my RPG characters - the wizard Liliana, the rogue Fizzy, the Marine Col. Judith St. George. Then just futzing around. The main character from one of my stories. A pirate. A pink and purple figure with spots, wings, and a tail. The bruiser. A superhero figure called Electric Ice. Oh, it's very, very, very bad.

The deadline for Harley's antho is fast approaching. Has everyone but me already submitted something?

Welcome to the slush pile...

2004-10-08T16:25:00.000-05:00

Well, the Slush God (http://www.tuginternet.com/jja/journal/) keeps posting about having time on his hands at work, so off goes another little story in the mail to him....

Just doing my part to keep him from growing too bored at work.

It's looking to be a writing-intensive weekend, and I'm looking forward to it!

--

We watched Walking Tall (the 2004 remake with The Rock) and Spartan (starring Val Kilmer and written and directed by David Mamet). WT was eh-eh - really, it's a wysiwyg kind of movie, so if wys is what you're in the mood for, it's OK, although the pace seemed slow, especially at the beginning, for a 78-minute movie.

Spartan was interesting and gives you more to talk about. I've long had an interest in special forces / black ops action-adventure stories, so this was a good fit for me. Val Kilmer plays a guy who typically operates quite deep undercover, and he finds himself in a bit of a pickle in this movie. There are all sorts of plot twists and turns that you have to try and follow as the character is also figuring them out. In some ways, I was reminded of The Recruit. I think you could make an interesting movie if you took the best parts of Spartan and mixed them with the best parts of The Recruit.

WotF news

2004-10-04T13:13:00.000-05:00

The story I submitted for the third quarter (ending June 30th) of the L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future contest was a quarter-finalist.

That's kind of cool, no?

So here's the score so far:

one story rejection from EQMM
quarter-finalist for LRHWotF's third quarter

I've also got one story in each slush pile at EQMM and AHMM; a proposal submitted to the editor of a collection of fairy tales; and something in the works for Grims. Another story is about ready to head out into the world, once I've decided where I want to send it. It's all progress.

On the road again...

2004-09-30T16:26:00.000-05:00

I'm heading out of town for the birthday celebration for my Dad and his twin sister in Chicagoland. The two sides of the family are getting together, and this is the first time I've seen these cousins in more than fifteen years. When we were kids, we were two distinctly different sets of children with strikingly different sensibilities, and on the few occasions that our families got together, I don't remember that we got along very well. To this day, my brothers and I still have a pretty strong "us versus them" way of thinking about this side of the family -- probably because we simply don't know them well at all since they lived in Nebraska and we grew up in Virginia, where we were surrounded by Mom's side of the family. I'm more than a little curious to see how we all get along as adults.

I don't know if anyone else keeps up with Jimmy Johnson's website for the cartoon Arlo & Janis (I've got a link to it). He's been a great source of 1st-person news regarding the weather in Florida. Today he posted a link to one of the craziest things I've seen in a while, so in honor of Elaine's new blog, I'm posting the link to the Oxford English Dictionary [or Omnificent English Dictionary, according to the site] in Limerick Form here:

http://www-b.oedilf.com/db/Lim.php

Enjoy! And have a great weekend!

Ouch

2004-09-28T14:49:00.000-05:00

Today it's not the leaves that have fallen -- it's Lara!

One minute I was walking up the stairs outside the building where I work, and the next minute I was falling up the stairs.

My right knee seems to have suffered the worst. After icing and elevating it for a while, I stood up, couldn't bear weight on it, and decided a trip to the clinic was in order.

While trying to isolate the pain, the doctor managed to manipulate the joint in such a way that I cried. Bad pain. Bad, bad pain.

Two x-rays and two more ice packs later, it appears that nothing around the patella is broken or chipped. Hurrah! The knee's bandaged, and I'm supposed to keep it elevated and iced, as is practical (considering I'm at work), and the doctor gave me some drugs - a pain killer and an anti-inflammatory.

The drive home may be a bit of a challenge. But my co-workers have been a great help in getting through the day. And Ed makes the best ice packs! :-)

Here's to healing....

Open Up Your Loving Arms

2004-09-22T08:37:00.000-05:00

(It's probably all sorts of wrong to talk about Whirling Dervishes under a title that is a line from a Dead or Alive song. And, of course, now I've got this 1980s earworm gnawing away in my head....)

Lotus weekend was great, as usual. (What's Lotus? See my earlier post on the subject and/or http://www.lotusfest.org.) For the past several years, I've hosted a gathering that coincides with Lotus for friends I know from a Usenet newsgroup. This year four of the regulars - J, CnC, and K - came to town for the festival. It was great to catch up with friends I hadn't seen in several months.

J arrived Friday evening. Ed joined us for dinner at the Tibetan restaurant, and then we walked around downtown to check out the music playing at the outdoor venues. We caught the end of a performance of traditional Québécois music by Le Vent du Nord (http://www.leventdunord.com/) and watched the drumming of the African Showboyz (http://www.fastlaneintl.com/showboyz.htm) for a little while. Then after exploring the commercial aspects of the festival (the artists sell CDs and get to keep most of the money from the sales), we caught a performance of scratch band music by Jamesie & the All-Stars (http://www.jamesieproject.com/), who had to fly into the States from the Caribbean during all the trouble caused by Hurricane Ivan.

Saturday morning J and I did a little shopping downtown. J has been teaching me to knit. I bought some yarn and another pair of knitting needles. She had also brought me some yarn from her stash that she no longer wanted, and before she left on Sunday she helped me start two scarves. Of course, I came home from work Monday evening, carefully knit a row, and still came up with two stitches too many at the end of it. I think it's hopeless, although I'd been hoping to do scarves for a couple people for Christmas presents. Oh, well!

We also stopped by the bead store and spent a huge amount of time playing with beads. I put together a necklace from some moukaite beads. (This isn't anything like the necklace I designed, but it gives you a good idea of the beautiful and bold color variations in moukaite: http://store.oneilljewelry1.com/mojachch1.html.) We met CnC for lunch, returned to the apartment to unload their stuff, then visited a quilt shop. Interesting. One day I would like to try to put together a small quilt - something decorative to hang on the wall. Right now I don't trust my sewing skills, although at this rate they're probably better than my knitting skills. *heh*

K eventually arrived. We had time to sit around and talk a bit before heading out to dinner at one of my favorite restaurants in town, a family-owned Turkish restaurant. The owner is one of the most gracious people you'd ever encounter, and the food is always tasty. Ed joined us for dinner, and when the owner came by our tables he explained that he had overheard our group's earlier conversations about the food and complimented us on the way we had explained what things were to the out-of-towners. *preen*

After dinner we dashed off to the venue where the Sufi Music Foundation (http://www.sufinight.com/) would be playing. Only we found that lots and lots of people had dashed there ahead of us. The line stretched all the way down to the corner and around the block by the time we were able to take up a spot on line. By the time the line started moving as we were let into the auditorium, it had reached the end of the block we were on and started around that corner! The performance had two parts - a music concert followed by an intermission and then the Sema ritual, which, according to a pamphlet we were given, "represents the human being's spiritual journey, an ascent by means of intelligence and love to Perfection (Kemal)."

The pamphlet further explains the symbology of the turning. "The semazen's camel's hair hat (sikke) represents the tombstone of the ego; his wide, white skirt represents the ego's shroud. By removing his black cloak, he is spiritually reborn to the truth. At the beginning of the Sema, by holding his arms crosswise, the semazen appears to represent the number one, thus testifying to God's unity. While whirling, his arms are open: his right arm is directed to the sky, read to receive God's beneficence; his left hand, upon which his eyes are fastened, is turned toward the earth. The semazen conveys God's spiritual gift to those who are witnessing the Sema. Revolving from right to left around the heart, the semazen embraces all humanity with love." (Oh, I just noticed an author's name, so let's give credit where credit is due: Dr. Celalettin Celebi wrote this pamphlet, "The Meaning of Sema, the Universal Movement.")

The performance was incredibly beautiful. If movement can be described as lyrical, then the movement of the semazen is that.

As far as the Lotus experience is concerned, the Sufi Music Foundation really deserved to have its own separate concert. The showcase concerts take place at seven or eight different venues during three different blocks of time, and the Lotus Festival tradition usually involves seeing two or three performances at different venues during a given block of time; some people stay in one venue for the entire block, but many people stay for a few songs and then leave for another artist's performance in a different venue. The Sufi Music Foundation's performance wasn't really set up to allow for this coming and going of audience members. Maybe the Festival organizers weren't aware of how this show would work, but I think the group should have been given their own night.

During the rest of the evening, we saw Le Vent du Nord, Peruvian singer Eva Ayllón (http://www.therootsagency.com/), the Australian acoustic pop band Fruit (http://www.fruitmusic.com.au/), the Basque trikitixa player Kepa Junkera (http://www.kepajunkera.com/), and the high-energy Cuban group Tiempo Libre.

Le Vent du Nord were excellent. It was especially interesting to have seen them on the street the night before and then in a church Saturday night. They managed both venues well, but I think they're a group that makes you want to get up and move to the music -- which is a little less daunting to do on the street compared to inside a United Methodist church building. *hee*

Although the website includes two guys in the lineup for the band, the three women in Fruit were the only performers for the songs I saw Saturday night. They had two guitars and a couple brass instruments, plus their outstanding vocals. I just don't remember the last time I saw acoustic guitars paired with brass. OK, maybe never.

Kepa Junkera was excellent. The accordion he plays has a distinctive sound, but the other Basque instrument, a txalaparta, allows for a really active, dramatic performance as the two percussionists play the instrument and respond to each other's antics. The whole group of musicians just seemed to be having fun, and I think that makes an impact on the audience.

So my Lotus showcase night started with a performance that was all about introspection and balance and harmony and ended with lively Cuban jazz... Pretty wild. We went back to the apartment, fixed drinks and snacks, compared notes on the performances that we hadn't seen together, and played two games of Kill Dr. Lucky (http://www.cheapass.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=CAG&Product_Code=CAG001).

Breakfast on Sunday morning was brown sugar cinnamon bread French toast, bacon, scrambled eggs, coffe and orange juice. And more conversation before folks started packing up and heading out. Rather than face an empty apartment, I met Ed and crew for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Fun!

T.G.I.F.

2004-09-17T16:35:00.000-05:00

It's been one of those weeks you don't want to repeat because so many stupid, annoying things happened. At least it's behind me now. Forward and onward....

I got the translation mentioned in the previous post. The most unusual phrase I had to translate would probably be "fusion seafood."

I submitted a project proposal for a story-plus-critical article in a book collection. I hope to hear about that soon. Whatever the decision, the story part of the project, at least, will be written. I believe I may have another venue for it if this person decides she doesn't want it.

I've been working on a family history project - something to take to the get-together in Chicagoland that my side of the family is having with my dad's sister's side of the family at the end of the month. We're celebrating the milestone 65th birthday of my dad and his twin sister. While I was home in August, I grabbed a number of old photos, so I've been scanning those and working with one of my brothers to create a PowerPoint presentation. That's been fun, actually. And there's something reassuring about the photos... I'm not sure how to explain it. I was just struck by the fact that the largest envelope of photos, once I'd broken the whole mess into categories, was of those that include my dad with the three of us. Sure, part of that comes from the fact that Mom always played photographer. But it's also a testament to how Dad was always there for us. That's just - well, pretty cool.

The Lotus World Music Festival (see earlier post) is this weekend. I'll let you know how the Whirling Dervishes are!

Dancing Down the Street

2004-09-10T08:42:00.000-05:00

In recent weeks, I've made a conscious effort to do some volunteer work, picking up a couple things to do that allow me to exercise some skills that just don't get used - and won't get used - on this job.

I've always believed that volunteer work is a really good thing to do. Working in the career lab at the business school and teaching English composition, I often encouraged students to seek out volunteer opportunities as a way of investing themselves in their time at university and of actively doing something to put good stuff back into the community. Yet aside from volunteering as a candystriper back when I was in junior high school and different volunteer gigs that came up in the small church my family attended when I was growing up, I hadn't really done much to practice what I was preaching to those students.

So I've got a few volunteer jobs under my belt now, and I have to say I'm a little disappointed. The first big commitment I made originally required an hour-long training session the week before the event started. As it turned out, I had to contact them to find out that there would be no training session. The lack of organization only increased from that point. Ultimately, I was able to do the job that I had volunteered to do - and that's the important part - but much of the event was poorly planned or poorly executed and, unfortunately, this had an effect on the experience had by the people we were trying to help. In my student services background, this sort of slapdash work has never been acceptable, so, yeah, that really bugged me.

Now I'm working on an English to Russian translation. The coordinator has two documents that she still hasn't given me, and the deadline for this project is Tuesday morning. And, as of yesterday, she's out of town for the weekend, so I probably won't get these documents until Monday morning. Just by nature of its content, this last bit that I have yet to see is probably going to be the most difficult part of the materials to work with (because things like "creamy Romano salad dressing" just don't translate well!), and apparently I must have it ready to turn over to her on Tuesday morning. Gee, I sure hope that I don't have anything else to do Monday after work....

I have another volunteer commitment coming up in November. It's a little bigger deal, involving travel to another campus and being out of town for a couple days. I've been looking forward to it, but I'm also feeling a little anxious about it. I don't want to find myself in the middle of another poorly planned, poorly organized event, especially in a city I don't know well at all.

Maybe I've just chanced upon projects that need a little tweaking in the way they're organized. Still, based on my generalized experience so far, it seems that people who work with a cadre of volunteers take for granted the commitment of energy, time and other resources that the volunteers have made. Yet working as a volunteer isn't about being less professional, and it also shouldn't involve being treated less than professionally.

Despite this string of experiences, my belief in the importance of volunteering hasn't been shaken so much that I'm ready to quit before I really, truly get started. Each experience gives me one more reason to keep looking for that full-time job where I'll manage my own cohort of minions and cadre of volunteers - and to strive at managing better than some of the folks I've worked with have done.

Random Acts of Reading

2004-09-08T08:42:00.000-05:00

Jeff posted something thoughtful about reading, and my comment for his weblog got long-winded, so here it is as a post. (Note to self: Add the link to Jeff's site already!)

I majored in English and Russian undergrad, and I took enough English classes to meet the requirements for the major twice over. (Lots of room for electives in my schedule and no one encouraging me to finish college in three years instead of four.) The English Department offered a three-course Irish lit cycle - a survey of Irish literature, James Joyce's major works, and Joyce's Finnegans Wake; I took them all, naturally.

Flann O'Brien was a lot of fun. At Swim-Two-Birds is still one of my favorite novels. That was also the semester that I took a couple survey courses - Irish lit, African American lit, and some Russian stuff. Between the two classes offered through the English Department, I had something like 21 books to read. Big, heavy books. But it was a blast. The themes and motifs that overlapped from one literary tradition to the other fascinated me.

I think that "The Dead" tells a tale that you appreciate more as a reader as you grow older and gain more experience in life. Some things are just like that.

My favorite story from Dubliners is "Eveline" - and I love it more because of the situation told in the story than because of any prose that stands out to me as particularly lyrical. I used it as a text in a class I taught on the character of The Dangerous Woman in literature, and I found myself really fighting with my students to make the case for Eveline as dangerous. I guess they were expecting femme fatales to be recurring figures.

I read Ulysses from cover to cover. We devoted most of the semester to it in the major works class. I wouldn't have wanted to read it on my own or in a class with a different professor at its helm as Mark Hawthorne was simply wonderful. He gave us reading notes for each chapter to affix to the book (and mine are still stapled to the first page of each chapter), and this helped so much with understanding the text. I'd still rather sit down and re-read Ulysses than try to contemplate some of the crap that passes as the experimental and avant-garde today.

Say what you will about how Tolstoy near-flawlessly depicts the feminine voice in Anna Karenina, I was more impressed with Molly's chapter in Ulysses. (Check out Kate Bush's musical version of those infamous 8 paragraphs.) Joyce then so neatly outdid himself in Chapter 8, the washerwomen's chapter, of Finnegans Wake. That prose just blew me away when I first read it - and then repeatedly as I re-read it - and it still makes my list of greatest things I've ever read.

Modern love gets me to the church on time

2004-09-01T12:45:00.000-05:00

I'm heading back to Virginia for the weekend to do my duty as my cousin M's maid of honor on Saturday. Sometime around 3PM on Saturday, I'll be all gussied up in a long black dress with something interesting done differently to my hair and cosmetics on my face (that hasn't worn make-up in at least eight years, maybe longer), ready for the 5:30PM service and trying to keep M from getting too nervous.

I expect that I won't look much like myself at all. (Different friends have asked me to be sure to return with photos because they can't imagine me so attired. Hm. I don't know if that's a sign to dress up more often or just a general comment on my preferable, more or less casual attire and demeanor.) But at least everyone will be looking at the bride and not so concerned about me. Yay!

I still don't have a speech/toast ready for the reception. This worries me a little.

The weekend at my parents' house will be lively, I'm sure. M's wedding also coincides with my Dad's 65th birthday. He's getting private guitar lessons as his birthday present.

Ed and I are returning to the regularly scheduled 2,000-word critique, so I plan to grab some time upon my return to town Monday to get some writing done. Driving will give me lots of time to think through some ideas.

There's a part of me that doesn't want to leave.

I'll catch up with you folks next week. Have a lovely weekend.

Lotus Festival

2004-08-31T09:12:00.000-05:00

The Lotus World Music Festival (http://www.lotusfest.org/festival.html) is, to my mind, one of the things that makes this town special. I love it!

I've been able to see so many amazing and interesting performers. Lila Downs. Hedningarna. Les Yeux Noirs. Tracey Grammer. The Wrigley Sisters. Kanenhi:io Singers. The Senegal American Project. Odette. Oh, the Italian bluegrass group - Red Wine or something like that. Oh, woe....There are so many truly great folks I'm forgetting!

I've learned how much I really, really like Nordic fusion and certain styles of drumming and gypsy klezmer music, and how much I don't particularly care for Italian trance music (or at least not the way it was performed by a certain group last year).

The magical thing about Lotus is that it often doesn't really matter who's performing or even how much you like or don't like the music. What you immediately notice about the artists is that each person just seems to radiate this kind of joy that spills over onto the crowd so that crazy things like a mosh pit to klezmer music happen.

The lineup for this year's festival looks fantastic! Eva Ayllon. DaDon. Frigg. Fruit. Sufi Music Tradition (with the Whirling Dervishes from Konya, Turkey). Vasen. Le Vent du Nord. Warsaw Village Band.

Whirling Dervishes, people! I mean, c'mon! How often do you see something like that in the Midwest? :-)

This is probably the closest that I'll ever come to getting preachy here: If you can't make it to Lotus this year, remember it for next year - it's always in September. If you simply can't find your way to Bloomington, then look for the performers listed on the LotusFest website coming to a venue somewhere near you because they're usually touring North America and Lotus is a stop along the way. If you can't catch 'em live, buy a CD. This is music that touches your soul, tapping into the collective unconscious so that the very spirit of it grabs you and it doesn't matter that you don't understand Polish or Luganda or know what sort of instrument a kalangou or nyckelharpa is.

Slipping into the future

2004-08-30T09:31:00.000-05:00

Thanks to a little comment over on Jeff's site, I can't get this earworm out of my head this morning. So let's fly like an eagle to the sea....

I took the weekend off from writing to catch up on some reading and a little bit of housework. Time was slow-paced, the urgency to get things done minimal. It didn't feel right, not having the Eberron proposal to work on. I haven't figured out yet where to put the campaign manual and my notes. Shelving these materials is appropriate for right now - neither of my D&D games is using Eberron at the moment, although one of the DMs may start an Eberron campaign in the next several weeks - but, again, it doesn't feel right. Weird.

I also left something off the "to do" list I posted last week. Yeah, all these other projects are important, but I also need to write a speech/toast kind of thing for the wedding this coming weekend. So I'm being assailed by writer's block, which is ever so much worse than fear of public speaking.

Sufferin' Succotash!

2004-08-26T16:12:00.000-05:00

The War-Torn proposal is in the mail, due to arrive in WA by noon Friday.

A short story is in the mail to Alfred Hitchcock's.

Another short story is in the mail to Ellery Queen.

And, boy, am I looking forward to working on something that's not for the WotC open call.

What's in the works?

Not one, not two, but three ideas to work on for PCP's antho (deadline: November 1)
A proposal for a feminist revision/re-telling of a fairy tale + some sort of psychoanalytic interpretive essay about it (deadline: September 15)
Finishing a short story best described as "speculative fiction" and sending it out (deadline: self-imposed, so let's say September 10)
Researching and outlining the idea for a folklore-influenced fantasy novel with a modern setting (deadline: self-imposed, so let's say October 15)

I'll be completing some other interesting projects, too, so life should be full a-plenty. And ain't that grand?

GenCon Report

2004-08-23T11:32:00.000-05:00

Could there be a better way to spend an afternoon than entertaining and informative conversation with Richard Lee Byers or Elaine Cunningham? And Ed and I got to spend time with them both!

Richard could - and probably should, if it wouldn't be giving away too many of his secrets - hold a seminar on networking as a freelancer. WotC, his career, his books, and writing in general were subjects we had anticipated discussing, but the unexpected and invaluable lesson we learned from RLB pertained to writing as a business. He guided us through the vendors, and then we set out on our own. When we ran into each other later, we were able to let him know about some information we had learned that he hadn't yet uncovered. How's that for learning the lesson well, eh?

Elaine is stylish and gracious and lively, even when tired from the con hustle and bustle. I so appreciate that she is this fountain of creative ideas and projects. I think our conversation began with an explanation of a new project she's considering taking on, and then as we spoke longer, we learned about a handful of others she's either considering or in the middle of. I was reminded of Harley's boundless energy - and a little bit, too, of myself as an instructor for freshman composition. (Odd, no? But there's creativity in teaching, in the search to find interesting ways to deliver information to your students and to get them to participate in the learning process.) It was a great afternoon.

The seminar on freelancing for WotC was most informative. Let's see if I get the names right... Chris Perkins, Peter Archer, Kim Mohan, Matthew Sennett, James Jacobs, Erik Mona. The best advice: Freelance for Dungeon or Dragon. Chris Perkins freely admits to trawling among their freelancers for folks to add to the list of freelancers at WotC. Corollary to that piece of advice: Do excellent work for Dungeon or Dragon; be communicative, be professional, deliver your stuff by deadline. Interesting piece of news for fiction: The "open call" format will continue as it's been pretty successful so far. Corollary: Freelance for Dungeon or Dragon; use the open call as your backup plan. Kameron's name was mentioned a couple times when MoP came up. Gave me shivers, or perhaps that was the air conditioning.

The Eberron seminar was interesting, although what I really wanted to know was how many people in the room would be completing proposals for the open call. Precious little scoop on that. If you are already gaming in Eberron, then this was a really good place for you to be. Also, the new and improved slide show of art for Eberron (complete with soundtrack) contained some pieces that were new to me. Nice work. I got sidetracked, however, and despite good intentions forgot to mention to Perkins that WotC really ought to bring into the fold the guy on the 'boards who's got such awesome drawings of shifters and warforged - "DMAC" is what he goes by. Oh, and just in general, if you're a 2D or 3D artist with a good feel for fantasy characters and settings, then you might want to look into freelancing for WotC and/or Dungeon and Dragon. Really.

The vendors were an interesting mix. The WotC display was a little bit into the ostentatious, but there were scores of indies holding their own amidst all the glitz. That was impressive, and I have schemes - er, plans... umm, suggestions - for Grims based on what I observed.

Other, random impressions.... How the vaguely slutty nun managed to walk in 12" platforms with something like 18" heels is beyond me, but she was one of the most photographed costumed attendees, for sure. The dragon sculpture was great - even when bundled up in alumninum foil. The art exhibit featured some interesting artwork, but none of the dragons we came across were exactly right for catching Ed's attention and gaining his appreciation. (I'm still a little confused about what makes a good dragon in his eyes, but I did think perspective in the painting of the hunter tracking a wounded animal and looking up as the shadow of a large flying creature - dragon, perhaps? - fell on him was a different take on that kind of scene. Which is scarier, the dragon or the suggestion of the dragon? *hee*) Three dollars for a 20 oz. bottle of water is ridiculous. Scheduling a football game at the RCA Dome the same weekend as GenCon is also stupid. Oh, and if you run into The Genetic Mutation... well, it's probably too late to get your money back, but there are certainly better ways to spend your time.

While there are some things that I'd encourage GenCon to do differently (like, get a more user-friendly website), I was impressed at how everything ran pretty flawlessly. We left saying that we really needed two days, and thinking back on it now, I'm inclined to go with at least two and a half days, depending on when certain events are scheduled. There were some workshops held on Friday that my friend C got a lot out of, for instance. There were also some games that I could have been convinced to play if I'd had more time at the con - and maybe I've got time between now and next GenCon to get Ed hooked on a couple of them, too.

The Slow Wit of the Sleep-deprived

2004-08-20T08:49:00.000-05:00

Let's see... What's been going on? Hm. Well, I didn't get the job that I interviewed for last week. The "good news" side of that less-than-good news is that I'm setting up a short meeting with one of the people on the search committee to get some feedback from her - not about that particular interview as much as about what I can specifically do to make myself a better candidate for this type of job. Since I'm making certain decisions about what I'm doing over the next couple of years based on the assumption that I'm going to be able to get this particular kind of job sooner or later, it would be most helpful to get some suggestions for how to be more competitive so that things come together sooner rather than later. I'm tired of being among the highly qualified applicants and of hearing that despite the excellent case I've made for my transferable skills someone else with actual experience. Take advantage of those transferable skills and hire me already!!!

Oh, I mentioned the possibility that Ed is a clairvoyant. Well, if the results of his prediction for Saturday, August 14th are any measure of that ability, he's most definitely not. Still, the results of his prediction for the week ending Saturday, August 21st are pending.

My older younger brother K (not to be confused with my baby brother C) has been working on his Eberron proposal over the last week and a half. We briefly compared notes last night, just to be sure that our sibling ESP hadn't kicked in so that we'd separately be sending in more or less the same proposals. (There's really something to this sibling ESP, or at least that's the joke in our family. More often than not, if K, for instance, calls C or Mom or Dad, then within minutes of the start of that phone conversation, I will call C, or C or I will call Mom or Dad. Often, by the end of the initial conversation, all of us will have checked in at some point, thanks to call waiting.) I'm happy to report that there's been no inadvertent idea leakage. In fact, K's work is such an interestingly different take on the war-torn atmosphere which permeates Khorvaire that I'm feeling self-conscious about that aspect of my own proposal. I don't know what else to say except that I'm adding my brother to the list of folks I'd be really pleased to see selected as the winner of this open call.

GenCon is the big event this weekend. Ed posted about that in his blog (see Your Mother's Love...), so there's not much I can add. I tend to be more of a nocturnal creature when I don't have to be at work at 8AM, so I'm not all that keen on being up and ready to travel by oh-dark-thirty Saturday morning, but what a small sacrifice for something that promises to be fun!

Word of the Day: Paraskevidekatriaphobia

2004-08-13T15:38:00.000-05:00

I'm still waiting to hear about the job I interviewed for on Tuesday, and I'm growing less hopeful by the hour. I have a sneaking suspicion that the phrase "You made a great case for your transferable skills, but..." is lurking in my not-so-distant future. It's become quite the tired and worn phrase, I think. Sooner or later, the "great case" will be heard by a search committee who will actually decide to make use of those transferable skills by employing me.

I feel like the Eberron proposal is in a good place, especially for having "lost" a weekend from being on the road. Granted, it's not finished, as I'd prefer it to be, but I am confident that I can get things closer to finished over the weekend and still meet my volunteer commitments. This is good. :-)

As I've been putting more effort into this, it's come to my attention that I'm kind of attached to my characters and the ideas and story elements. "There can be only one" becomes a hard, hard truth to face.

Tomorrow is the last day for a prediction Ed made to come true. If it turns out he really does have precognitive powers, I'll let you know.

*****

On a different note.... I got medical insurance again when I took the job here. Oh, what you can learn from an actual, honest-to-goodness physical. But that's beside the point. I can afford to go to the dermatologist again to seek treatment for psoriasis. The topical treatments are working to an extent, but my condition is definitely not in remission and the last week or so I've found myself wanting to just cry because my skin hurt so. This has me thinking more about other alternatives for treatment. My doctor has said that he will leave it up to me to decide, as far as what I can live with for both the condition and the treatment. However, the next more aggressive treatment, he said, is a drug you take orally that can stay in your body for two or more years, and it's something that they don't like to give young women: if you get pregnant, the drug in your system will harm the fetus - no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

I resent being asked by my property management company to renew the lease on my apartment six months before the lease ends. You can imagine how much more I resent a drug that demands that I know my plans for sex and reproduction for at least the next 3-4 years, allowing time for the meds to build up in my system, send the psoriasis into remission, and then work out of my system. No, having a child isn't even remotely in the offing right now, but in two or three years.... I don't know. I don't think anything in my life has prepared me to make a decision like this. The more I hurt, the less progress I see with the topicals, the more appealing this option sounds, and damn the consequences.

Butterflies

2004-08-09T11:35:00.000-05:00

It's Monday, and I'm tired! This weekend I made another trip back to Virginia for events related to my cousin M's wedding, which will take place over Labor Day weekend, on September 4th. M asked me to be her maid of honor, so I've been doing a lot of traveling back and forth between Virginia, where the wedding will be and where most of the family is, and here this summer for wedding-related stuff. It's been interesting to watch this wedding evolve into the event of the year. This weekend was for a bridal shower and a gown fitting. And I just learned that I'll have to give a toast at the reception. Public speaking wasn't part of the deal!

I got to catch up briefly with my brother K in Louisville when I stopped for gas and a short break from driving last night. He's considering putting together a proposal for Eberron. I'll be interested to see what he comes up with. He's always been the more devious of the three of us (our younger brother C lives in Columbus), and the intrigue and adventure built into Eberron strikes me as just the kind of thing he's good at developing.

Aside from a crazy dream I had last night, the weekend wasn't good for Eberroning. I'll have to make up for that this week, especially since there's only one weekend between now and GenCon *and* I'm already slated to do some volunteer work that weekend. I've got some stuff on paper, and I've been working out details of the writing sample; I think it'll come together - at least when I'm not panicking about running out of time. Oh, the good stuff continues: I have a job interview in the morning.

What I am is what I am

2004-08-04T16:02:00.000-05:00

Have you noticed? Good stuff's been going on.

Some of it, like GT's publication, has created euphoria that I get to experience second-hand, just from knowing certain folks. Some of it, like freelance work, some excellent informational interviews helpful towards the (non-writing) career change I want to make, and encouraging (albeit minor) news on the health front, has resulted in a wave of my very own experience of euphoria, first-hand.

I don't want it to end.

I really like living on this edge, so close to achieving some goals that they've become something more than barely limned outlines.

I do so want to keep bingeing on this positive energy!

The Game's Afoot

2004-07-30T16:14:00.000-05:00

Sunday's D&D game promises to be interesting. Last week C (the DM) let me know that he's been planning for some things to take place that will deal more directly with my 9th-level wizard's own story. He has provided some interesting challenges for us in this campaign for the last year and a half, and I'm really, really curious to see what happens next, especially in my character's storyline.

Other than this, I'm counting on the weekend to be rainy and relatively distraction-free in order to spend some more time on Eberron.

Update: OK, that was pretty sweet! My wizard's been given a certain artifact to protect; protecting it requires using it; using it more than doubles her levels in wizarding; with her skills so attuned, she vanquished a particularly nasty creature and, at the least, damaged and intimidated the main adversary. Oh, the power! Oh, how it has the potential to corrupt!

The Girl w/ Combination Skin

2004-07-28T16:04:00.000-05:00

Last night I went to the county fair with co-workers B and P. I'd never been to a county fair before, despite growing up in a rural area. The house my parents built is relatively isolated - and, unfortunately, is growing less so every year. Our nearest neighbor (my mother's youngest older brother and his family) had chickens and turkeys in a pen between our houses at one point, and he had two ponies, as well. The next nearest neighbor had dairy cows, and his pastureland borders on my parents' front yard, a picturesque rustic barbed wire fence separating the two properties. During summers when we were kids, playing outside often included sessions of mooing at cows (sometimes they'd moo back, which was the whole point, of course) as well as occasional calls over to the neighbor to let him know a cow or two had gotten out and was wandering down our driveway.

The farms were around us, we didn't live on one, and the only thing I recall doing through 4-H is growing a garden at the bottom of the backyard one summer. I won a blue ribbon. I remember that the extension agent was highly appreciative of my squash and cucumbers.

There are rides and concessions and contests and animals at the fair. B and P were really into the concessions as certain foods are only available during the fair - like elephant ears and pineapple whip ice cream cones - and each had her favorites (not to mention the list of things P was supposed to pick up for her family). The corn dogs were excellent, I must say. We checked out the 4-H displays and the different contests. (I began to suspect that my blue-ribbon garden was not such a big deal, after all. Goodness knows the gardens I've planted since then have only yielded excellent tomatoes - it's hard not to have good tomatoes in this part of Indiana. Eggplant were puny and downright obstinate two years in a row. It's easy to lose heart.) The tractor parade was something my dad would have loved. The horses were beautiful; there was one named Shadowfax.

The evening was interesting; I learned more about my co-workers, and I saw a different side of this area. I'm a little disappointed that we didn't go look at the chickens and rabbits.

The night before last, someone's dart game drastically improved while someone else's drastically unimproved. The first win was a bit of a shock. The third really built up my - er, someone's confidence, even with the other someone's nicotine-withdrawal excuse.

Writing? Oh, I'm Eberronning - so much so that I'm having weird dreams starring friends and acquaintances I haven't thought of in years. Apparently since we last spoke, many of them have taken up residence in an Eberronesque world. At least one of them is a changeling now.

Dried wells and dead horses

2004-07-21T13:38:00.000-05:00

Sounds like a title for a western, don't it? ;-)

Grims posted something that reminded me of a book-length project I've thought about, a lot, and put off, a lot. When I was putting together a little booklet of the best and worst of my poetry the other day, I was reminded of it again. So maybe it's time to talk about it a little more! I have always envisioned it as the writer's Holy Grail - you know, The Next Great Novel (or, for 'mericans, The Great American Novel), complete with aspirations to appear on Oprah's Book Club before she started selecting from among the classics.

The inspiration is the life of my great-aunt Helyn. If our family had a matriarch, it was Aunt Helyn. One of my earliest memories is of Aunt Helyn standing over me at the end of the counter in the kitchen at our house (where my parents still live - wow!) asking me if I wasn't excited about my new baby brother. (I think this was when K was born, so I was about three years old.)When I was a kid, most of our summer vacations as well as one or two Christmas holidays included making a trip to visit her and Uncle Hous in Ft. Myers, FL. Theirs was a romantic kind of tale; they met when boarding at the same boarding house and eventually married, never mind the social rules of their era and the fact that she was in her forties and he was fifteen years her junior. (As time passes, their story always gives me hope for romance and a loving partnership to happen in my life, too. *grin*)

She grew up in a small mining town in southwestern Virginia. She left home and traveled with a theatre group all around the US, even out to the West Coast. That was the 1920s. Back in Virginia, she taught school in the Shenandoah Valley and became one of the first women school superintendents in the state. (We were also always fascinated by the fact that some of the original Statler Brothers had been among her students, and one of them had been the bagger at her local market.) She didn't worry so much about segregation and forged a lifetime friendship with someone she wasn't supposed to have taught because of those stupid laws. With her mother, she practically raised my dad when things were tight in his family. She'd hold her own with the filthiest sailor cussing you out one minute but then coo over a baby the next. And she adored cats.

In her 89 years, she impacted a lot of people's lives, mostly in a positive way. She led the sort of life that, I think, not only deserves but needs to be chronicled, even as fiction. And that's what I want to do. I know how I want to structure the novel and the particular narrative devices I want to use in it. I know at least some of the stories I want to tell. Yet I keep considering it and putting it off. At one point, it seemed like such a visual idea that I decided to try to write it as a script rather than as a novel; changing formats didn't make me work on it any faster. I think the biggest part of what plays into putting it off is that, whenever I get around to telling this story, more than anything else I want it to be as close to great and perfect and as worthy of its inspiration as possible. Seems like a heavy burden for an idea, no?

Something I noticed in reviewing the poetry is that I seem to write about memory a lot. Not memories, specifically, but remembering as an act, something you do or don't do. I knew that I was writing a cycle of Alzheimer's poems, but I had not realized how many other pieces could be placed in that broad category, as well. I was about to say that the motif hasn't yet appeared in the prose, however, that's not entirely true. Wherever it surfaces in the prose, memory/remembering is approached differently from the way it appears in the poetry. It's not faulty.

You know, I love thinking about this stuff. Puts a new spin on the academic stuff I've written when analyzing the work of this or that writer. *hah* Well, for the time being I continue to stand by Jungian archetypal criticism as a reliable way to interpret a text. OK, let's go tap into the collective unconscious...

Patience for the Unvirtuous

2004-07-21T09:14:00.000-05:00

So it's been a month and five days since I put a little story I call "Anna Petrovna" in the mail to EQMM. Turnaround estimated at three months. Twenty-one days have passed since I submitted "Storyweaver" to the LRHWOTF contest. Results announced in 8-10 weeks.

My sense of time passing is distorted. It seems like more time has passed than a few weeks. And I'm just not a patient person.

Other work is basically done - formatting and a final review called for, and that's about it. So where to send them? Hm.

Eberron has turned into a long-term relationship that's reached the point where those idiosyncracies that once seemed endearing are becoming the tiniest bit annoying. (If I think too much about the dinosaurs, I just want to start throwing things. You'd be perfectly correct in assuming that dinosaurs probably won't have a place in my proposal.) But I really, really like the characters I'm working with and the narrative I'm putting together. I also seem to keep finding ideas for using Eberron in narratives, and that is exciting. (So maybe I can live with the dinosaurs. Oooh, it hurt to write that.) J is talking about moving his game (my character: Fizzsparkle Wherrymere, Rogue 2) to Eberron, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it plays. I've been so focused on working with the info in the Campaign Manual for the purposes of writing, it strikes me as funny to return to the same info, only for the purposes of gaming.

My brother C has invited me to relocate to the city where he lives, as his housemate is leaving in a couple months. Right now, I'm not sure how to begin to reach a decision about this. Moving might be good. Giving up a full-time job with its salary and benefits might not be good. And I don't know of any place to play darts where C lives!

You may be a rock star

2004-07-09T14:30:00.000-05:00

Grimsy asked about Baba Yaga. I had no idea that Baba Yaga had been co-opted by D&D! I found some info on the 'net about the module and stats for Baba Yaga's hut. Those chicken legs pack a powerful punch, eh? I'd be curious to hear more from you all about what Baba Yaga is like in the D&D world.

Baba Yaga shows up in folktales like "Vasilissa the Beautiful" and "Vasilissa the Wise." Vasilissa's story is a little bit like Cinderella's, except it hasn't been watered down quite as much. Have you read the version of Cinderella in which the stepsisters cut off parts of their own feet to force the slipper to fit? I was always fascinated by that when I was younger. One of my other favorite tales was in this old book that had belonged to my great-aunt Helyn; I believe it's called "The Almond Tree," although there may be variations of it known as "The Fig Tree" or "The Ash Tree." It's pretty bloody and gory.

But back to Baba Yaga... As I recall [and the memory's a little rusty], in the classic tale, Vasilissa's mother dies and leaves her daughter a magic doll, which becomes her only source of succor and advice once her father remarries this old bag who has a spoiled, selfish, rotten daughter of her own. The father dies or goes on a trip or something, and the stepmother and stepsister make Vasilissa's life miserable. She doesn't come apart under their demands, and this provokes the stepmother all the more. She orders Vasilissa to go deep into the woods to Baba Yaga, and Vasilissa does so. The doll - spirit of her mother? - advises her to do exactly what Baba Yaga tells her. Vasilissa arrives at Baba Yaga's hut - gate made of bones, skulls running atop the fence, vermin in the yard, hut on chicken legs, and hidden door to hut that only opens at a ritual saying.

Baba Yaga is a skinny old hag - quite the long-toothed crone. She rides around in a mortar and pestle (which has always struck me as a clunky mode of transportation), although I think I've also seen her depicted as travelling by way of a very large spoon (perhaps that's more streamlined than the mortar and pestle). Baba Yaga does her best to torture Vasilissa with fear, but Vasilissa doesn't flinch. She's so good and pure that even the vermin help her. Baba Yaga sets impossible tasks for her to complete, but with the help of the doll, the vermin, and her own pluckiness, she is able to complete task after task. She does so well that Baba Yaga rewards her and sends her back home.

The stepmother sees the jewels or gold or whatever it is that Baba Yaga gave Vasilissa and sends her own daughter to the witch, thinking to get some of these goodies for herself. But this girl is mean-spirited, sullen and hateful, and she provokes Baba Yaga instead of completing the challenges that Baba Yaga sets before her. So she gets tricked and eaten. I think the stepmother gets some additional kind of comeuppance, as well - losing her only daughter not being quite enough punishment for her treatment of Vasilissa.

In another variation of the tale, Vasilissa ends up marrying the tsar. But I think this is accomplished through her own cleverness - kind of different from Cinderella's marrying the handsome prince.

What's it all mean? You can read your Vladimir Propp, Bruno Bettelheim, Carl Jung, or Erich Neumann and discover a few suggestions. Does Vasilissa's tale warn children to behave a certain way? Does it instruct girls to embrace all aspects of their femininity, even the menopausal hag? The symbology certainly suggests something about the Mother/the Feminine and about sexuality (isn't that pretty much the only way that the mortar and pestle make any sense whatsoever, after all?).

What if Cinderella had left the ball with both shoes on?

2004-07-07T09:27:00.000-05:00

I'm having an identity crisis.

When it comes to creative writing, I've usually identified myself as someone who writes poetry. I wrote some angstful stuff in high school, and it was usually picked up for publication by the editors of the school literary magazine. I won the prize in English my senior year. In addition to a playwriting course, I took poetry writing seminars in college and completed an independent study in poetry writing during one semester of my senior year. Unlike high school, my submissions to the college's literary magazine were often returned. However, I did eventually manage to get two poems published in it. And my senior year someone - probably the poetry writing professor I had worked most closely with - nominated me for the English Department's award in creative writing.

So I left college thinking of myself as someone who writes poetry, and I entered grad school in order to complete a degree in Russian literature, first, and comparative literature, eventually. At the time that I was making these decisions, I considered applying to MFA programs in creative writing. But I couldn't. Even though I thought of myself as someone who writes poetry, I didn't believe enough in myself or any talent I might have to try to do anything more than "write for the drawer" - and not in that noble, samizdat kind of way but more out of cowardice and (at least a little bit) embarassment. (I cannot rhyme or produce a reasonable verse in a classical form like a sonnet to save my life. Give me sestinas to play with any day, however.)

Writing poetry was one creative outlet. I also wanted to write narrative - the next Great American Novel, in particular. But how scary is that when the longest thing you've ever written is either a one-act play (creative writing) or a master's thesis about Jungian archetypal analysis of the early short stories of Nikolai Gogol (academic writing)? What's a girl to do? Well, don't do any creative writing at all, of course. But that's not really a solution to anything. Eventually not doing any creative writing became not doing any writing. That's really not a good thing for an academic career, particularly when you're supposed to be doing research towards completing a book-length dissertation.

So here I am, several weeks into a critique deal, writing short stories and sending them out into the world; planning to produce something for the Eberron open call; and re-reading my old poetry files and wondering, just a little bit, why I came to think of myself as someone who writes poetry. Yes, some of that work is, I think, good and should be brought out from the drawer to the light of day. But some of it really isn't. Reading through some pieces yesterday, I was struck by just how personal the poetry I've produced has been. And the "spice" that Ed usually says he wants to see more frequently in my prose tends to show up in the verse.

Maybe what I'm learning is that I don't have to be someone who writes poetry or someone who writes prose or someone who is writing her dissertation. Maybe the emphasis should be on the verb. Let me be someone who writes.

In the mail

2004-07-01T08:38:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I mailed a story to the L.Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future contest. It's a fantasy story that sort of answers a question you often hear when you're in college: "What are you going to do with a degree in that subject?" - where "that subject" refers to a degree in anthropology with a minor in something like creative writing.

Since I'm traveling this weekend, I don't anticipate spending any time writing. I sometimes wish I had a little tape recorder to carry with me on road trips. I do some of my best thinking while toodling along I-64. :-)

My Eberron Campaign Manual arrived in Monday's mail. (Overstock.com worked quite well; I got the book for a little over $24 with postage in just under a week.) The first thing I did was check the pages. All present and accounted for. So I'm taking the manual with me in case I actually have time to do some reading.

Stupid People

2004-06-30T11:28:00.000-05:00

Got a physics lesson this morning - the one about two objects occupying the same space at the same time. As I was pulling into the parking lot, a guy was pulling out of the lot. This particular entrance into the lot is an alleyway, only large enough to fit one car, and it's a blind alley, so that neither driver can really see whether another driver's in the way until you're right on the entrance. I stopped as soon as I saw him - and, fortunately, the car behind me stopped - but the guy coming out of the lot kept coming and tried to make the left turn into the one-way street I was turning off of.

He hit my car. And drove away.

Fortunately, the damage to my car is infinitesimally minimal, and I'm OK. But he drove away. I went ahead and pulled into the lot after watching him drive thirty feet up the street and turn into a strip mall's parking lot. And I waited at the car thinking he might have been flustered and trying to figure out how to get back to the lot. But he never showed up.

I got the numbers on the plates and the colors, but I didn't catch the make and model of the car. The local police have all the info, and they've run the plates with no real luck. The more the officer questioned me, the less certain I became about what I know - except I'm so sure about the numbers and the colors on the plates, the older man as a driver, and the color (at least) of the car.

I don't know how people can testify in court about what they've seen. And I guess that I'm less observant than I think I am. Not to mention too accustomed to the idea that most of the people around me follow the same sort of legal, ethical, and/or moral ideals that I have. You don't just drive away when your car crunches someone else's car. And getting the plates is supposed to *helpful*.

TGIF

2004-06-25T14:56:00.000-05:00

This week for the 2K words deal, I gave Ed a significantly revised story to review. It's a bit longer than 2K words, but it's not the 8K words that it was. Much tighter, I think, and that's an improvement. He seemed to like it when he read it earlier, and I'm curious to learn what he thinks of it since it's changed rather so much and the biggest of those changes came about at his suggestion.

Today I finished the fantasy story he has critiqued on two previous occasions. The work on this final draft involved writing the part that made the transition from the end of the middle to the beginning of the end (which I'd already written because it had kept distracting me from the middle) and addressing some of the concerns that he had brought up in his last critique. When he got to the part that just read BLAHBLAHBLAH and then skipped to the end, his comment was that it was going to be tricky to pull this off. But I think maybe I have. I think that I finally pulled together some of the details that I knew I wanted to bring out. The real test will be how the reader responds.

If these two stories really are at a finished point, then that's three of the four ideas I started working on when we started this deal done. Every now and then, I worry a little bit about running out of ideas. So far, every time I've started to worry, something has come along and caught my attention. I have an idea that may put a new and different spin on a SFF standard, if I can figure out the logistics. Then there's this idea that my friend K and I have tossed back and forth for a while that I want to try to work on, although I expect I'll need to have someone clean up my science when I do get started on the writing. And there's this idea that came to me last week that seems nearly perfect for a juv/YA novel - that is, if the juv/YA crowd actually reads anything anymore.

And, of course, there's this Eberron open call. According to overstock.com, my manual has been shipped from IL. I hope it arrives on Monday, but it would be a great thing to have it arrive even sooner, like Saturday - a welcome distraction from the housecleaning that simply must be done this weekend before the dust bunnies start attacking my cats, Grace and Mitya.

Kameron asked about writing fiction set in the world of a game I've played. That's not something I can say I have ever expected to do. Having spent the better portion of my life working towards a specific career goal that didn't really have anything to do with writing (at least not as a creative activity), investing time and energy into some kind of creative writing isn't something that I had expected to do, either.

So let's roll the dice and see what happens now.

Immunization against the heebie-jeebies

2004-06-22T14:16:00.000-05:00

"I haven't tried writing anything in a shared world yet, but I have this feeling that it might drive me nuts. I just envision pages and pages of 'Thou shalt nots' and get the heebie-jeebies."

That's what I said in response to a question posed by Ed last week in his blog.

Then the Eberron open call is posted. After work, at a local bookstore, I peruse the manual. Meet Ed later to compare notes. By the end of the night, I've jotted down a page of story ideas and hashed out one in particular that seems like it will work as a novel.

Have I mentioned how much fun I'm having?!

Wow.

V okeane nepominanija

2004-06-17T15:09:00.000-05:00

RPGs... I've got three characters in three different games right now - two are D&D and one is Stargate SG-1. Both D&D games are set in worlds created by the DMs. I don't have stat blocks or anything like that available at the moment, so this is from memory.

The SG-1 character is Mjr. Judith St. George, USMC. She's a Scout and the team leader for this particular mission. I distributed scores and points so that she's big on physical stuff - which is good since the other team members are a Tok'ra and scientist types - because the D&D characters are so *not* physical, or at least not strong. We agreed to set this campaign in a future time, some seven years since the Tauri and their allies have apparently defeated the System Lords. We're on a wasteland of a cold planet with an unbreathable atmo where the ruins of a civilization (if that's what they are) would appear to be underground, and the session ended as we'd just figured out how to get from aboveground to belowground.

The SG-1 GM (J, which could be practically anyone since nearly everyone I know seems to have a first-initial J) also runs one of the D&D games. The world he has created has some really interesting features to it, though, as the party has only been traveling in it for a little over a week in gametime, we haven't seen much more than the road and the capital of the area where my gnome rogue Fizzsparkle Wherrymere has lived. Her travel companions include a would-be paladin, a cleric, and a bard. We just converted to 3.5 and leveled up at 2. We completed the Challenge of Champions featured in some issue of Dragon, and if I ever meet the person(s) responsible for writing that, I'll probably smack 'em on Fizzy's behalf. (Admittedly, though, it was her idea to go through the Challenge, just for a lark, and the last little bit was pretty darned hilarious, at least the way we played it.)

The D&D campaign run by C has been going on a bit longer. We're converting to 3.5 and leveling up at 9 this week. Liliana Galanodel is an elven wizard. The other members of the campaign include a druid, a half-elf monk, and a cleric. C started out by messing with our minds a bit, so Lili *may* have been a student in a school in this city - or maybe not. Lili hasn't specialized in any particular school of magic, but she's recently decided that blowing things up is a pretty darned useful skill, particularly when gods and goddesses and would-be gods and goddesses keep using you and your friends as their playtoys and wreaking havoc that for some reason or another falls to you to stop, or at least make less havoc-like. Rolling 8d6 for a fireball spell is kind of satisfying; 9d6 has got to be even more fun. So we have a keep with demons in the basement, and we need to get to an artifact in the basement in order to stop the havoc-wreaking of one of those would-be goddesses.

In the mail... Oh, there's the challenge, Kameron -- summarize a 1000-word story without giving away too much. OK, the story depicts the unfolding of an attempted murder with flashbacks to events that sort of explain why the murder attempt takes place. Ed says - and, yeah, I actually *spoke* to him instead of throwing something across the cubicles or sending him an e-mail - that's good but doesn't do it justice. So here's some of the spice, without giving away the secret ingredient: The flashbacks take the reader to Moscow, Russia, in the 1930s during the Terror under Stalin. I sent it to EQMM, which I enjoy reading; plus, the story reminds me of different pieces I've read in their pages, at least in tone, so it seems to me that it would fit.

TNHTPP*

2004-06-16T15:55:00.000-05:00

One short (1100 words) story finished.

And I mean "finished" in the sense of a perfective verb in Russian: the story isn't just written -- it's written, printed, paper-clipped, sealed in an addressed and stamped 9x12 manila enveloped along with an extremely brief cover letter and #10 SASE, carried across the street to the nearest postbox, and dropped through the slot of said postbox where it will be picked up by 6PM and sent along its way.

Whatever happens next can't be any worse than grad school. (No, seriously!)

Wow.

I mean, Wow!

Thanks for the nudge, Ed.

*That Never Happened to Pablo Picasso

Wish I Could Be More Like Karen By Night

2004-06-15T08:50:00.000-05:00

Sometimes 2000 words rears up and bites you in the ass. When I left work on Friday, I planned to spend a significant part of the weekend finishing the fantasy story Ed had critiqued and starting something new. Best laid plans, blahblahblah.

Saturday started with coffee and Car Talk, and darned if the second caller - Simon from Roanoke, VA - wasn't a friend from high school. Sometimes his absence among my circle of friends and acquaintances these days is more palpable than others, and these last several weeks have been one of those times. And there Simon is on my radio, talking to Click and Clack about how his car goes click-click-click whenever he turns to the left. His solution is to adjust the routes he travels so that he doesn't make left turns, which gets a good laugh from the guys and is just so reminiscent of the friend I remember.

It took a while before I sat down to write - like, around 10PM on Sunday. When I started doing housecleaning chores Saturday afternoon, I knew I was in full-blown procrastination mode. I hate housework. If I'm doing housework, then I'm avoiding doing something else. And I wasn't just dusting and vacuuming, either; I was sorting through stuff, re-organizing stuff, and basically making a bigger mess (to the eye of a Martha Stewart type unaccustomed to the cleaning and organizational skills of a pack rat, at least) of the apartment than it had been when I started out. So this was heavy-duty procrastination. Sunday was more of the same until I left for the D&D game (in which we finally trounced the lich and his vampiric minions, were rewarded with a keep with a healing pool and caverns of demons below it [I'd call that a double-edged reward], lots of gps, and a few spell scrolls - and XP to level up). Home after the game, I finally sat down to work on the story, deciding around midnight that it would just have to go unfinished and I'd have to renege on the deal with Ed since I didn't really have anything new to give him.

Then Monday turned into a r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w d-a-y. So most of the day I worked on that story, so by ten to 5, it had doubled in size and reached a more finished point where I felt like I could toss it to Ed and not be wasting his time or mine. And I basically felt this odd sort of envigorated-yet-sapped kind of energy. Still went to play darts later.

John, I'm Only Dancing

2004-06-10T15:32:00.000-05:00

OK, I think I can see how blogging might be used as a procrastination technique. Let's change colors! Let's learn how to make a bulleted list! Let's add links.... ooh, haven't been to that site in a while...Ooh, fun! Anyone with the attention span of a cat is suddenly chasing color schemes and hunting websites.

Driving Too Fast w/ Ecstatic Music On

2004-06-10T09:40:00.000-05:00

First, thanks for the welcome. In the last several days, I've done a bit of reading in your blogs and/or heard about you from Ed. It seems funny to me that I may know a little bit more about you than you know about me, so I ran through my bookmarks this morning and added a few links. They might tell you something about me.

Your Mother's Love...: Well, you know Ed.

Arlo & Janis: A cartoon you may have seen. Jimmy Johnson's been archiving his work on the web for a few weeks now.

Rotten Tomatoes: Reviews -- Movies. Or games.

Orisinal: Morning Sunshine: Surprisingly addictive (not to mention deceptively simple) games you can play on your browser.

Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoons (Slate): 'nuff said.

NASA: Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive: Go browse, if you haven't already.

Russian Feminism Resources & Seventeen Moments in Soviet History: Sort of related to that dissertation we're not talking about.

If you've read Your Mother's Love..., then you know that Ed and I have struck a deal so that each Monday we trade a minimum of 2000 words we've written and do a read and critique. Ed gives great critique. The first piece I sent his way was a 7500-word mystery story I cranked out last fall after reading Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing and deciding to try out the "just sit down and write" thing. The story had been read by a few people, but they were reading, not critiquing. I got a great listing of strengths and weaknesses from Ed, and some of the problems I'd seen with the story suddenly became resolvable. I'm still working on the re-write. And I have a few other ideas for working further with the main character, her backstory, and the setting.

Next I gave Ed the start of a fantasy story - not quite 2000 words, I confess. Again, the critique was really helpful. I've added a couple hundred more words to it. I'm not sure how this is going to work out, but I've written the ending because it was bugging me yet I'm still working on the middle part - you know, where stuff actually happens.

I wrote two stories over the weekend and gave them to Ed on Monday. I consider one of them the weakest thing I've given him to read yet. The more I think about it, the less I like the piece, actually. I'd been trying to work out the backstory for the main character in the other one, and then Sunday night it just fell into place: "No, Lara... It's not the Holocaust in the background, it's The Purges from the Stalin era." So obvious it took me forever to figure out. I got Ed's critique on this one yesterday and started revising immediately. I think it's a nice, creepy little piece. I think that I can even see it in EQMM.

In exchange, I've critiqued the beginning of a first-person story (for which "go read Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor" may not have been the most useful advice), a completed story (that I'd kind of like to see re-worked, perhaps so that it stands independently - *nudge*), and another piece that was simply a joy to critique.

So after months and months of not writing much more than e-mails or cover letters for job applications, I've got re-writes and stories to complete and ideas to start. I'm still not thrilled with the way the job search has gone or the job I have taken or the Ph.D. program/dissertation, but I'm finding so much more fun in each day, just by making myself sit down and write.

Testing, testing... 1, 2, 3... Testing

2004-06-09T15:50:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about starting a blog, so now thanks to the encouragement of a couple different folks, here I am.

Right now, I figure I'll follow part of the plan that Ed (one of the aforementioned folks) set for himself with his blog (listed somewhere in the frame whenever I figure out how to do that), so this is a forum for me to help keep myself on track with writing projects. And there are a few of them out there:

a dissertation, which has become a heavy, dark cloud

poetry - it took a while, but I outgrew the Angstful Teenager tone and have written some stuff I actually like and don't mind inflicting on people

short stories - I like genre fiction, especially SFF and mysteries, and I figure that I can write something that's at least as good as what I enjoy and better than some of the dreck that I've read (and I'm hoping these aren't famous last words!)

movie treatments - See the comment with 'short stories' but replace 'genre fiction' with 'movies' and 'read' with 'seen'

novels - So far, these are ideas. Maybe they can be more.

creative non-fiction - Oh, the projects I've started and not finished... How embarassing!

reviews - The other member of the aforementioned "couple of folks" (whom I'll refer to as J until I get permission to use a name or come up with an appropriately funny nickname, although that seems a little silly since all of what... three people might be reading this!) almost made me cry by giving me a wonderful compliment related to movies and critiques, so maybe the blog will also be a place to write about movies and pop culture, too, because I definitely have opinions.

Other than saying that, for right now, I'd rather not talk about the dissertation, this is a good place to stop for this, my very first blog post.