Today has not started out terribly well. I'm currently awaiting a plumber. We woke up this morning ridiculously early as Shawn is off to Seattle for a conference. About an hour into her morning getting-ready routine Shawn came and sat on the bed with a look of deep concern. She said, "Bad news. Really, really bad news. We have a leak."

Of course my immediate thought was, "Oh my god, the fish tanks!"

So, strangely, I was relieved to discover that it was only the kitchen ceiling.

Oh, wait. The kitchen ceiling?? That's not good. But, we have a remodeling/handyman service that we love, called Platnium Remodeling. They did our downstairs bathroom (which I still haven't finished repainting), but we couldn't have been more pleased with their work. So I called them. They had to foist us off to their sub-contractor plumber guy, but at least someone is coming TODAY.

I spent the morning moving furnature out of the kitchen, because it seems pretty obvious from the advancing water stains that they're going to have to take down much of the ceiling to replace the pipes.

Yippee.

Although, really, it could be worse, as we like to say in Minnesota. We do have another working toliet (thanks to Platnium's previous work) and, with Shawn out of town, the stress-to-zen ratio will be in favor of the zen. I haven't, so far, gotten a lot of work done on the novel today, but, again, with Shawn out-of-town I will have potentially more time tonight - depending on how cooperative Mason is at bed time. Still, I don't always sleep well when she's out of town and I may take advantage of that for writing.

In other, completely unrelated news, I may join Twitter after all. The compelling reason to came from a reader of Tate's who posted on her/my blog yesterday. The reader knew, for instance, the pub date for my young-adult novel, because she gets Anne Soward's twitter feed. *I* didn't even know that. (If you're curious Penguin is saying August 2010).

Ack.

But one thing at a time, as they say. For now, I am "floating in space awaiting a rescue." (Anyone else a fan of Daniel Keys Moran?)

Oh, yeah. This is gonna end well.

Flesh-eating, potentially self-replicating, autonomous, steam-powered robots!

We'll call it "EATR!" WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

...I've seen this episode of Doctor Who.

Jupiter Jones here, activating the ghost-to-ghost network...

Item the first: cmpriest brings you a shinytastic new website, The Clockwork Century, for her shinytastic new steampunk project, beginning with Boneshaker, which is due out like any minute now, or this autumn, whichever comes first.


Item the second: Anticipation (the Worldcon) is having a writer's workshop this year, in which I am participating as an instructor or whatever they're calling it. Somehow, this has managed to not make it onto the website, and due to an outbreak of something-or-other (mass zombification in Montreal? Reports are sketchy) it will not be making it onto the website. However, if you are attending the Worldcon, and you want to come spend two hours having your beloved baby story picked over by cruel and heartless literary professionals who want nothing so much as to crush your spirit*, you can participate in this program by:

emailing Oz Whiston at "writers-workshop AT anticipationsf DOT ca" AFTER reading her blog post here detailing the submission process.


Item the third: there is no item the third.

---

So, yeah, apparently I am still plumb wore out and sleeping a lot, as I got up this morning two hours after I usually do (though not as late as yesterday) and so far have accomplished not a whole lot except playing with the dog, showering, making a pot of Russian caravan, and eating some raspberry bread and an apple.

This writing thing is exhausting, I tell you what. But that's okay, because I have delivered the book, and I'm allowed to crash for a week or two now.

Right. More animal protein and a nap, and maybe I will have the oomph to go climb something tonight.

---

*that would be me and/or my colleagues

We're home in Florida!

Been about a MONTH since we were here last. So much to do, yardwork/housework/utility bills to get caugh up on, etc.

Today also we're picking up a cat from the vet. "Tigrillo" we've been calling her - she's a feral cat that has lived in the alley behind our house for the past half year or so. A VERY emaciated (weighed in at 5 lbs for an adult cat!) silver tabby-like thing. We finally trapped her after a receiving a warning notification about a local rabid raccoon by our house. So about a month ago we took her in the trap to the vet to get spayed & vaccinated. Lo and behold (being a WILD feral cat) she bit a vet tech right BEFORE getting vaccinated and they had to keep her in Florida State Rabies Quarantine for the past few weeks. She's healthy though, and they've since spayed & de-wormed her, so now we're going to pick her up and take her home.

We're going to try to acclimate her for indoor living (as this area is NOT safe for outdoor cats - too many other wild animals, alligators, etc.) and try to tame her as an indoor cat. Our current cat (Mama Wolf) was also a feral rescue, as was our little Quan-Yin of years past. So we're used to little wildcats. Hopefully she won't be tooooo much more trouble (she's already racked up $1000s in vet bills and I've never even touched her or petted her once, lol), and maybe someday she'll be a sweetie like Quan-Yin was or Mama Wolf is today.

I'll keep you all updated!

When done right, comics are a cognitive whetstone, providing two or three or more different but entangled streams of information in a single panel. Processing what you’re being shown, along with what’s being said, along with what you’re being told, in conjunction with the shifting multiple velocities of imaginary time, and the action of the space between panels that Scott McCloud defines as closure...

--Warren Ellis

Word.

I have actually tried to do this in prose: Blood & Iron is the result, and as many can testify, using only one input stream for all those entangled information threads results in almost headsplitting density and limited success. (In your average comic panel, the streams may be visual/art/action/scene setting, narration, internalization, dialogue/thought, and white space. Yeah, think about that for a moment, and consider that maybe I missed one. Or two. And that they can contradict or ironicize each other.)

Comics are cool. They are an interstitial art form all in their lonesome.

Blog Update - http://www.brigidashwood.com/blog/

If I do not finish the book today, I will simply have to finish it tomorrow.

Page 357. Two chapters remaining.

Protein helped with the exhaustion. Memo to me: you do really feel better when you eat the red meat, even if you'd happily go vegetarian on most other grounds.

Ellen Million Graphics

Stack of orders to take to the PO today, and I'm thiiiiis close to being done with the first calendar, with good strides on the second. Then, it's on to the anthology!

Torn World post today will be on... hmm... more on the snow unicorn riders, I think - education and literacy, particularly.

Art and Authoring

Still no scanning, and I spent last night (after calendar-grinding) beating Jake at scrabble. I used all my letters on my second word! I'm not sure I've ever been able to play all my tiles. "Election" was the big score - but for all of that, I only barely beat him, by about 15 points. I did most handily stomp him at Lost Cities.

So, instead of something completely new, I'll link you to an ElfQuest fanfiction of mine that you may not have seen: Perfect.

Home and Health

Oh GOD, the smoke is back. It's frightfully thick, and muggy and WAY TOO HOT, but mostly horribly, horribly smokey. The radio said we're nearly to the 1 million acres mark. There should be thunderstorms this evening and tomorrow looks rainy. THANK GOD. My cough, which had been completely and utterly gone, is back, and my eyes are watering. Bad day to wear contacts.

Planning

Work until 4. Trip to the post office. Upload calendar. Work on second calendar. Maybe Kung Fu Panda? (We've got the disc from Netflix. :))

If you've never checked out "There, I Fixed It", you kinda should. Shawn turned me on to this site, and it's an awesome time waster. I will admit that sometimes I look at the "fixes" and think, "what's wrong with that?" Anyone whose been to my house has seen at least one of these in operation. (I won't say which. It's not on the first page, though.)

In other news it's sort-of-kind-of half-a$$ed raining right now. We really need the sky to open up and flippin' pour, but that doesn't seem to be forthcoming. I may need to complain to the management. Anyone got a direct line?

Meanwhile, my talking cat may have morphed into a psyhic ferret, but I haven't sat down to do any real writing yet today, so that's still undetermined. Shawn and I spent a long time talking about my vision for the world of the young-adult novel last night, and those kinds of discussions are always good for my brain (and hopefully the story.) I wonder how people deal with having non-writing-supportive partners/spouses. If I couldn't bounce ideas off Shawn at nine o'clock at night, I'd have to have some kind of life line to call. Probably I'd call the other Sean in my life, but I suspect he'd get pretty sick of me. I tend to need a lot of hand-holding/encouragement/just-shut-up-and-let-me-talk at the beginning of a big project like this. Shawn has learned when to let me ramble, when to say "there, there" (and not much else, and when to go into a full blown brainstorm session. Because I don't always need the latter. Sometimes I just like to sing a complaining song, as Pooh would say, and sometimes I just need to hear how something sounds out loud, you know?

Mason, mysteriously, has gotten some kind of starring role in the Kindergarten Celebration (graduation ceremony?) at Crossroads. When I asked him about it (one of the other parents said she heard he had a "solo"), he did his classic blank stare. "I don't remember," is what I usually get next. Will you be singing? "I don't remember." Reciting poetry? "I don't remember. I get time at the microphone." Doing what? "I don't remember."

What I think this really means is: "I'm too overloaded right now to think of what you mean. The whole day has become a blur to me. Tilt!" This, to me, is the biggest crime of full-day kindergarten. Mason comes home completely wiped out. I bring along a book so he can go nose-down into it, and he seems to recover quickly if he has that kind of retreat from the sensory overload of his day. But sometimes critical information gets lost. Like this celebration. So I asked his teacher about it this morning, but she told me she wants to keep it "a surprise." Fun, but frustrating. If I thought Mason's *intention* was to keep it a secret, that'd be one thing. But he too shell-shocked at the end of the day to remember...

I at least got the day out of her: Tuesday, July 28. Now we just have to figure out when and we can plan to be there. I'll be curious to find out what this "time at the microphone" is. I'm sure he'll be awesome. Despite this curious pheonmenon of the end of the day blank slate brain, Mason actually has a phenomenal memory. He can recite poetry he's read only once or twice fairly perfectly, and easily remembers song lyrics and tunes. So whatever it is, I'm sure he'll rock at it.

The other big excitement for us is that Mason's 6th birthday is fast approaching. He's decided he wants a Halloween themed party (in July) completely with costumes. We usually have his party outdoors (saves on the cleaning, and kids can usually amuse themselves easily with a kiddie pool, spray bottles and water ballons). So we're trying to come up with a way to have Halloween at the kiddie pool combinations. I think we've got it, but trust Mason to come up with something completely off the wall.

My poor meat is so dischuffed with me. I just managed to pry myself out of bed and I'm still exhausted and in the throes of the allergy attack that woke me up at three AM and would not let me go back to sleep until I fed myself benadryl and washed out my eyes. Really, my major life goal currently would be to lie down for a nap, but there is this deadline, see, and the deadline must be obeyed. Prodigious work lies before me today--revising at least fifty pages and/or three chapters of Chill, since today is a day without other scheduled duties. And I so badly want to crash. Alas, the meat must wait a few days still to collapse.

We went climbing at Pinnacle last night, and I managed both routes we set. One was easy--First Crack, which was the first route I ever sent outdoors, last year, and which I managed this time as a clean ascent--and the other was a more challenging, very edgy route on the slab, which may not even have a name. Basically it consisted of a fifteen-foot 5.7 slab ascent, a fifteen-foot 5.5 or so crack system, and another fifteen-foot slab at the top that was very sparse and crimpy and required a couple of fairly technical smears and matches. I got through it without any falls, and with only one bad moment--my shoe popped off the slab on a smear, but I held on and got myself back on without losing my hands.

I also got through both climbs without panic attacks, which was nice and may be a sign of progress. I do better at this whole outdoor climbing thing when I'm not throwing myself fruitlessly at routes that are way too hard for me. I wonder if my climbing buddies can be convinced of that? Because they tend towards the stupidly macho end of the scale when it comes to repeated failures being good for you....

I was going to take the dog for a run this morning, but it's just not going to happen. The flesh is weak. Poor young dog, saddled with a frail and aging monkey.

Arcana: Minor Arcana
Card: Ace - Water
Represents: New Love, Infatuation, Desire, Intimacy, Strengthening Emotions, Attraction, New Awareness
Size: 12"x17"


- Expression of Feelings
- Developing a new love or new awareness
- Getting in touch with your feelings
- Being infatuated with something or someone

Greetings amici!

This past weekend, my amazing agent and idea goddess, Jamie, and I sat down to plan next year. I can't begin to tell you how cool it is to plan out next year. Where I am gonna be? What am I gonna do? Those are not easy questions to answer a year in advance, but they SO necessary if you really want to do more than just stumble around blindly.
( Read more... )

---

Originally published at Marc Gunn .com. Read. Interact. Breathe. It's easy; it's free.</div></div>

(This is jenett posting in Elise's account, as Elise's net is still fried.)

Elise will be at the hospital around 8am tomorrow, and her surgery is scheduled to begin around 10am. We expect it will take about 4 hours, give or take. (Note: the surgery time has changed about 5 times in the last week, but we're pretty sure this is the final change.)

As Elise mentioned, we've set up a way to post updates and news and all sorts of other such things to, to make it easy for a wide variety of people to track things. The community name is hip_hooray, a name Elise very much wanted. However, as that name's not available at LJ, and because of some other considerations, we've created the update community on the Dreamwidth service. Don't worry! There are lots of easy ways for you to keep up with what's going on without adding a new online account to your life.

Where's the community: http://hip_hooray.dreamwidth.org
We've also set up an RSS feed to LiveJournal: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/hip_hooray_rss/
(there's a couple of other options for following the community: see the Technical FAQ below for more info.)

A general FAQ with information about the surgery, and about things that would be helpful or enjoyable for Elise if you're so inclined (since people keep asking, yay!) is at http://hip-hooray.dreamwidth.org/624.html

Technical FAQ (which explains various options for reading, following, and commenting on the community so you can pick whichever ones work best for you) is here: http://hip-hooray.dreamwidth.org/292.html

Questions? You can reach me and various other people helping with Elise's post-surgery support at helping.the.lioness@gmail.com . It's most useful to direct questions about visiting, sending things, etc. etc. there, because it'll stay separate from our other email and can be more easily tracked. I'll also be keeping an eye on the comments here, in case there's anything I can clarify.

I just read shweta_narayan's March story at Strange Horizons, "Nira and I."

It's very, very evocative, and it makes me think about the importance of bearing witness, and the recent and ongoing struggles in Iran.

This was really cool.

The Fire Circle tested your endurance -- you worked a rangoli and alchemical fire from midnight to sunrise two/three nights in a row. It really did put you in a diffferent place.

Some folks were there to work hard. And they did. Lots of spiritual breakthroughs and emotional catharses. Some working was more subtle -- that was where I was. The weather was lovely, though cold at night.

Essentially, it was a heavily tylored rangoli where people danced, tranced, walked, ran skipped, screamed, wailed sang; outside the tyloring circle were places to meditate, get a massage, eat, drink, sack out. The point was to help, in some way, keep the motion around the fire going and to keep it contained so energy came to a boil, and allowed people to slough off their baggage and dross.

Beautiful moments. Some inside the circle, some out. I'm going to encourage folks to give this a try next year.

Part of the coolness of the weekend was that food was provided by 5-star chefs that also happened to be Pagan and joined us in the circle in the evening. Nom. Nomnomnomnomnom. And they were adorable, too -- had fun flirting back and forth with Dave and Roger. (Hush, all of you, they're spoken for, and it was just fun.) But I think that was a good part of my work this weekend -- remembering that I'm attractive and worthy, and not just a damn brain in a jar that everyone wants to pick at. It was good to be reminded I was a physical and sensual being, too, by someone else's perspective.

Met some cool new people -- some in the Cities we're working to get  to Cauldron. A contingent came up from Milwaukee. We're trying to help them escape to Paganistan somehow.

Off to potluck/Reiki circle tonight...

Ellen Million Graphics

Two 2010 calendars are up for pre-order!

New pieces are up!

http://ellenmilliongraphics.com/fantasyart/

Torn World post today on snow unicorns. (Contributors-only) Stay tuned for the official opening of the first Torn World contest on Wednesday.

I'm caught up on orders, pretty much.

Art and Authoring

I've done a number of sketches this weekend, which I'll share when I have some quality scanner time. In the meantime, here's a Portrait Adoption piece that is available for general adoption now!

And a link to a picture I did for Heidi of her character Willow.

Home and Health

Siding still in limbo. Car still WONDERFUL. Health remains good - we're going to the health club tonight to get back in the swing of working out.

Planning

Calendar work and club tonight. Plus, delicious edibles for dinner.

Gray and I have been having a wonderful visit with his folks. The weather has been downright pleasant the entire time they've been here. Gray's train layout has grown by leaps and bounds and I've finished another tea cozy, this one from the book Gray's mom gave me when they arrived. The dogs are all getting along now too! Saturday they joined us for a Welcome-To-Minneapolis-and-we-hope-you-enjoy-your-hour-long-stay picnic at Minnehaha Falls Park with Steve Mac, Chas, Peggy, Nate and Louie. It was good to see Steve and give and get some much needed hugs. Yesterday we introduced the folks to "Slings and Arrows". It seems they might now be hooked, mwa hah hah. Tonight we're going out for dinner and then tomorrow they drive home. We've really enjoyed their visit and will miss them when they drive off.

The Driftless Organics people just sent along a list of most-likely candidates for our next CSA box:

Basil - will be separate from the box and will be at your site in a big box: take what you like (within reason) for making pesto or whatever... YUM!
Broccoli
Cauliflower
Cippolini Onion
Cucumbers
Collard Greens (they're good, trust me)
Fresh Dill
Fresh Garlic
GreenTop Mixed Beets
Green Beans (lots!)
Pickling cucumbers
Red Cabbage
Red Romaine Lettuce
Yellow Summer Squash

Okay, only one thing I don't know what it is... cippolini onion. Still, it's an onion, how hard can it be to use? And, what the hey! There's a lot more comin' this time. I'm going to have really chow down this next two weeks.

This week we were a little less dilligent with all the produce. I ended up having to compost some cilantro (well, my family and I actually loath it. It tastes like soap to me.) The chard and broad-leaf parsley wilted before I found a use for them, and the last bits of the remaining brocolli head is kind of turning yellow at the tips. There is still a bit of yellow squash in the fridge too, which will probably not get used before more arrives. However, the strawberries lasted less than an hour, and I actually had to buy more romaine lettuce from the store (not as crispy, alas.) There are still a few garlic scapes in their glass, but they still see quite fresh and usable. So not too bad, all and all.

Also, I did finally eat the fennel blub and all as part of dinner last night (Shawn tried it too! Mason, not so much.) "Cooking Light" had a good, easy recipie that included sausage, fennel and onions which I adapted for what I had on hand (no "ziti" in the house, so we just had it over egg noodles.)

Boy, am I glad we're not getting a full share. I'd be looking into canning right about now, otherwise, I think.

Also, just read about this. I didn't know Charles N. Brown very well at all, outside of his editorials which I always read diligently. We passed each other numerous times at WorldCons and the like, hardly saying more than, "hi." I'm still very surprised and shocked at the news of his passing. I'm sure he'll be missed. LOCUS Magazine has been pivotal to my life (and success, I think,) as a professional writer, and I always recommend subcription to my students. I'm glad to hear that LOCUS will continue without him. His friends and family will be in my thoughts.

(I'd say "gucci, gucci" but I don't want to offend anyone.)

Now I'm headed back to "work" after a great weekend up at our friends' cabin (sans friends, strangely enough.) Mason and I spent much time floating in innertubes in the lake, and on Sunday morning in the light rain, we had an awesome kiyak trip around the entire shore of Crooked Lake (yes, my arms are sore, why do you ask?) Mason, I think, would really love a canoe trip sometime. He just lay back on my lap and closed his eyes, listening to the sound of the paddle in the water and feeling the boat glide along the surface. We were eyed by a great blue heron, several nervous duck, a seagull, sandpipers chipping and dashing along the shoreline, and a noisy flock of Canada geese.

It was lovely. It's hard to be back. And I'm belatedly dealing with a very intense critique session from the Wyrdsmiths on my newest young-adult project. Now, suddenly, there's a talking cat. I haven't decided if that's a good thing or not.