My poor misanthropic husband is worn to a frazzle with all the public interaction this evening, but I feel socially satiated. It helps that the wedding I attended this evening was largely populated by people I respect and admire and like and yet don't get to see very often--combined with the fact that, though I don't see the bride and groom as often as I think we'd all like, I do see them more often than 95% of my acquaintanceship that I respect and admire and like--so I wasn't sitting there feeling greedy for their attention. In other words, the perfect sort of wedding for me.
But, now, my feet hurt and I'm tired. I've taken off my makeup and my party clothes, and I'm going to settle in with M'ris's book, since I have approximately a day to get it back to her without being a schmuck. I like M'ris's book; I like it as much as anything I've read this year, in fact, which I believe bodes well for its future, though I'm not a book editor. Which is a shame, really. After that, I have Catherine's book and a stack of Milford manuscripts, and I should also read some things on stepmothers since I have to fill a half an hour with nattering about stepmothers in fiction at WorldCon. (It's not a panel. It's a talk. Yes, I'm frightened. But at least I'll be in a country where no one knows me.)
All right, another unfunny entry. Megan will be sad. Anybody got any jokes??
As if this summer weren't crazy enough on its own... I just accepted a new
job. No official start date yet, but I will either start as soon as I come back
from WorldCon or very shortly thereafter.
Now, if I just manage to get an agent in the next two months, I'll begin to
wonder if I'm not really, secretly Stephanie Burgis on the inside.
But, no, really. I'd also have to be in graduate school and have a dog, so I'm
actually probably still me.
Plus, it's not like I have a book manuscript in any sort of shape to show to
agents.
My WorldCon roomie and I are trading hesitantly geeky emails (I, at least, wonder if I'm about to cross the line with my w00ting and the like) and getting generally pumped for the trip.
I'm having a hard time staring down the suitcase, though.
*
In other news, I passed the 100th submission mark today in my glorious two-year writing career. I subbed 4 items today: two reprints ("Huntswoman" and "Heretic's Day Out"; the former I have great hopes for and the latter I was just waiting for the right market), and two originals ("The Lonesome Dark," now with industrial-strength continuity action! and "The Library Seed" which I finally finished rewriting after my wonderful critiques on the OWW, including the Editor's Choice crit from Kelly Link. In honor of that, in fact, I sent it to the magazine Ms. Link slushes for...)
Sad to say, Write Club was Farewell Club. We bid adieu to Lou, who's off to Library School in Maryland.
Write Club will henceforth be much quieter, less exciting and waaaay less slashy.
It was with some shock that I realized that I'd not actually written anything for a month.
I thought it had been two weeks. But no. Three. Four. A month. Nothing.
Ouch.
The dam broke yesterday, and it was a huge relief. Nothing finished, of course, but you know, you can't finish what you don't start. Or, as Mary Poppins would say, "Well begun is half done."
Well, maybe not so much for writers.
The Sword and the Mind translated by Hiroaki Sato (34) [non-fiction]
The front cover says: "The Classic Japanese Treatise on Swordsmanship and Tactics."
I picked it up because I was writing a short story with a sword duel in it, and I thought, "It sure can't hurt." And it's wonderful. I wasn't hoping to learn how to sword fight myself, but I was looking for a way to write about it, and I think, if anything, this book has managed to provide an excellent example. There are detailed descriptions of attacks, defenses, and pictures from the original manuscript with stances.
This is mainly a translation (I don't know any Japanese at all, but there are many hallmarks of what I consider a good translation in the text--lots of footnotes--which is the best way to translate anything older, in my opinion; in a modern fiction book, you would not wish to disrupt the lyrical flow of a text with footnotes, but I think anything non-fiction, technical or prone to be analyzed, you do want the deeper explanations. Or at least, I do.) of the Heiho Kaden Sho. It is also, interestingly, one of those Barnes & Nobles specials--something B&N published.
The last two-thirds grew increasingly Zen and less practical for writing the kind of swordplay I'll be writing, but at the same time got more interesting for me personally. I read approximately 2 pages a day for the last several months, so dense were the concepts.
I intend to keep this book on my desk, next to my medieval herbals and my atlases of world history, as an essential fantasy writer's tool.
Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl (33) [non-fiction]
What started out as a fun book about being a food critic turned into something deeper about identity and power. The best part of the turning deeper is that the author didn't necessarily go for the pat answers on the matter of identity and power, though the end game did seem rather abrupt: life was immediately better once she stopped being the restaurant critic for the New York Times.
Well, who knows. Maybe it did.
I really liked the fun parts, and the deeper parts weren't bad. I found myself getting a bit bored and frustrated when the author started describing a time in her life that was boring and frustrating, but beyond that, it was clearly written and, at times, wildly entertaining. Perfect light non-fiction.
Ok, excuses are off. I have nothing due, nothing to do, between now and WorldCon. Plus, I'm almost over my latest dreadful cold. So, between now and August 1, I shall do nothing but read and write.
This I vow.
Yep.
Don't ask me how it became Friday already. I'd have no good answer for you, other than another damn cold has tried to wrest control of my head from my brain. So far, I'm not laying bets on who's winning.
I'm almost done with a handful of books, so I should be able to report on them soon. But even if I go on an intercontinental book reading spree (and I do have one slated in August), I probably won't reach my goal of a hundred books this year. I used to be able to do so. It was all so effortless and easy, to read in all my spare time. Before writing.
And the internet.
And TiVo.
Dammit..
LM by E.S. (32) [fantasy]
I can't talk about this book much since it's someone's unpublished work in progress, but I like to think that I learn something from each book I read... whether or not I share that something here is another matter... Anyway, in this book, I learned something important about finding your strengths and making sure that you have an example of your more broad-based strengths on every page. (In this case, E. excels at descriptive detail without being boring.)
Just a thought.
I spent an extended weekend in Southern California, marveling that a place further south than Michigan is not unbearably hot in summer. After all, I was raised in a place further south than Michigan (North Carolina), and it was unbearably hot in summer. How, then, does California rate beautiful, no-humidity 72 degree days in July?
When I pondered this, Dann's friend Siobhan said, "We don't have weather, we have climate."
And I realized that it may be the first time I've been somewhere that the joke "if you don't like the weather, just wait five minutes" doesn't make sense. (Well, I'm sure not the first time... it was my fifth trip to California and I've been to other climate-not-weather places, I'm sure, but it was the first time I realized it.)
Just when I think I've gotten world building down, I hit another stumbling block. "Does your world have weather or climate?"
My Life So Far by Jane Fonda (31) [biography]
I read this with a prurient intention. Ok, not prurient. One step down from prurient. I've been intrigued by Jane Fonda since watching Barbarella one Sunday afternoon when I was about 14: "What on earth is this crap?" being my main emotion. I never have learned to see it as satire. But I thought it was cool that Duran Duran got their name from this movie.
Later (about age 17), an acquaintance told me an interesting story about running into Jane Fonda and Ted Turner at a Broadway show, and how Ted Turner sort of yelled at said acquaintance, while Jane stayed gracious and smiling throughout.
And then I took a class on Westerns and became a huge Henry Fonda fan.
And it was only after all this that I became culturally aware of "Hanoi Jane." Since that all happened before I was born.
So, when the autobiography came out, I have to say I was truly intrigued, and consumed it with the aforementioned one-step-below-prurient intent.
My curiosities about Henry Fonda and Barbarella and Ted Turner were all pretty well satisfied. There were some boggy parts, and the extended metaphor about the "acts" of Fonda's life sort of irked me, but I think, overall, it was well worth the read. If anything, I think I'd like to read some more biographies of the same space/time/group; Fonda quoted at times from the bios of her father, her ex-husbands and so forth, and some of them might prove to be very readable. But I'd also really like to see On Golden Pond, which I wasn't allowed to watch as a child because of the swearing.
Anyway.
Heading off to L.A. and Santa Barbara tomorrow. Have been packing. Have not, thusly, done any writing, but I did pick out a market for one story.
Having one of those self-disillusionment moments (read: days). It's not that I don't want to write. It's that I don't want to schill.
I remember being blithe about the whole thing, once upon a time. "I shall send out the stories and not worry about it," I would tell myself. "What's $.83 going and $.37 coming?" Rejection, sure, that sucked, and that's when I was most prone to depression. Now I get depressed trying to send things out. "There I go, wasting another $.83 going and $.37 coming."
(le deep sigh)
What kind of business is this, where you can look at what you've done, at how far you've come, and somehow see it as less progress than the last time you looked back?
Got a "sorry, but send us more" on one story (accompanied by something indecipherably written, but I'm going to pretend it was a compliment), and then a "sorry, but send me more" on another (accompanied by Ellen Datlow's signature, so that's nice), two days in a row. Which means--tonight: market research. In between packing, laundry, cleaning, weeding, writing and feeeling totally overwhelmed by everything.
I'm this close to bailing on WorldCon in lieu of having a mental breakdown.
Something has to get easier Real Soon Now. Other than slushing, which is on hiatus until after WorldCon, in part due to a magazinal hiatus, and a personal one after that (can't really read slush in a foreign country. Not reliably).
Much voluntary up-and-downing and not a little acrossing of the state this weekend. (Some people might just say "criss-crossing," but those people don't know the value of complicating things unnecessarily.)
Saw my mom. Saw my aunt. Saw my in-laws. Saw good fireworks. Saw some cousins.
Saw a state trooper in my rearview mirror, and I have a souvenir of *that*.
I'd say it was the *one* and only time I was truly speeding this weekend. "Truly" in the sense of "In Michigan, everyone gets 10 over." Ah, well. He reduced the ticket from 15 over to 10 over. It helps, a very little.
All the same--crap.
Planet Simpson by Chris Turner (30) [non-fiction, pop culture]
While I didn't need to be told that The Simpsons is a deep, deep social satire, it was fun to listen to many of the punchlines from the show for a few hours. The analysis was at times deeper than necessary and at times relentlessly pointless. The long introduction about bar night Simpsons-watching in a Canadian college town made me want to tear my hair out, but before I went bald, the book became more substantive. I enjoyed the tracing of the origins of the show, especially the transition from the Ullman shorts to the first episodes.
I'm off for a command family performance this weekend (well, that's mostly accurate). Fourth of July... never used to be anyhting other than fireworks and wearing red, white and blue for me, but it seems like it, as with all other holidays, grows more complicated every year.
I was supposed to have gotten on the road two hours ago, but my brain refused to comply with this notion, and we both slept. Until it started giving me one of my old recurring dreams about wandering around a parking structure. It's weird, but, in these dreams, I'm never looking for a car. Just... wandering around the parking structure, like we're 80s teens at a mall. Creepy.