TIME: 30 min.
DISTANCE: 3.5 mi.
TOTAL: 9.5 mi.
SHIRE-RECKONING: Hobbiton is out of sight.

---

On the other hand, the lecture on Wells was quite nifty. Possibly this is because the audience/lecturer knowledge ratio was better, or possibly because Wells lends himself very graciously to litcrit analysis, what with the Important Social Themes lurking beneath the surface of his work. But anyway, I didn't yell at the DVD player at all this morning, and I am now considering how and why The Island of Dr. Moreau has cross-pollinated with Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies in my head.

• Brutal Women: Terrified Waitresses & Chicks Who Kick Ass
  Kameron Hurley mediates on Sarah Conner. Very interesting thoughts. Go read them, or you’ll be terminated.
  (tags: kameronhurley SF terminator film)
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• A Sample Blogging Workflow | chrisbrogan.com
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Originally published at JeremiahTolbert.com. You can comment here or there.

Okay, raspberries plus cherries plus two big tablespoon glops of apple butter plus some milk makes one kickass smoothie. I am naming this recipe the Red Right Hand.

Also, as we all know yuppie kitchen appliances beget other yuppie kitchen appliances, I now need a cherry pitter.

Here are some show-offy videos.
She will be 13 months on Wednesday.

( click click )

How horrible about the thefts from Clarion West workshop, outrageous, really. I won't post the details, as they're everywhere, but just wanted to say.

Also, I was going to send a donation via PayPal and then realized--with my connection it may not be wise. I'll send a check instead. Info for that is:

Clarion West
340 Fifteenth Ave East Ste 350
Seattle WA 98112

Anyway, I want to ask about my connection and see what you think.

I'm connected by a phone's modem. I'm not at all slow, though, and in fact, don't see any difference that when I was on cable--I think the high-speed is called DSL? I'm not on high-speed, though, apparently, though it seems as fast to me.

Anyway, it's an Alltel Samsung phone, and it hooks to my laptop with a cable. It's called Axcess MobilLink, which gets me there, and then I use Firefox. I thought I'd try this with the phone because it's all so portable; I can go anywhere and I'm on the internet, and it's a great phone...anyway, I'm not sure about security. I have a lot of security on my laptop itself, and I know the sites are secure, but the doubt is centered on the phone itself.

Even banking, I go to the bank and use a computer there to do my Bill Pay. Which, that's all right, but I'm pretty much working off of what random people have said. At the phone store, they said I would be secure, but the attitude is, well, they would, wouldn't they? to sell a phone.

What do you think?

Looking for a map of the world after a rather drastic sea-rise. I was surprised that there were many maps around already, but also that most of them stopped at a sea-rise of 14 m :)

Due to an embarrassment of riches caused by seriously underestimating the size of the internet, we're stepping up the release schedule for the over-hiatus Shadow Unit content. Rather than twice a month, we will be posting new content twice a week, because it seemed like making everybody (including us) wait through December for the last of the content was silly and mean (in both senses of the word).

So from tonight through the middle of August, we'll be posting new content twice a week: a new scene every Thursday night and Sunday night.

As Emma says, Are we crazy? Crazy like a platypus, baby.

I'm one of the featured authors this month at Anthology Builder, courtesy of nancyfulda. Anthology Builder is a do-it-yourself anthology service, where you pick the stories you like and make your own custom anthology.

What this means is that if you buy an anthology that has one of my stories in it, you'll get a 1$ rebate.
If you don't feel like buying one of my stories, you can also buy a story by one of the other other featured authors, which include ericjamesstone, j_cheney, James Maxey and Joy Marchand.

In other news, issue 9 of IGMS is up. It has two standout stories for me:
-kenscholes's "The God-Voices of Settler's Rest": on Settler's Rest, every once in a while, the voices come. They start by cajoling you, by promising you that there is a place somewhere where you will feel at home, when you no longer will be alone. But then the voices turn, become darker and more insinuating--and in their wake civilisation collapses. Mother Holton was a young girl when the last change came, but she remembers it well enough--and now the world has come full cycle, and the voices have come again.
This is strongly reminiscient of some SF classics such as "Nightfall" and "A Canticle for Leibowitz", but Ken excels at drawing characters you will care about, and Mother Holton herself, remembering what the voices cost her last time, is a very strong and moving personality.
-The other is the cover story, "The Tale of Junko and Sayuri" by Peter Beagle. Junko is a huntsman, a commoner favoured enough to live at the court of the daimyo Kuroda in an age when the separation between noblemen and commoners has never been stronger. And so things would have remained, if Junko had not saved an otter's life: the otter is the shapeshifter Sayuri, who loves Junko, and takes it upon herself to better his fortunes.
This started out like a classic fairytale, and it almost turned me off because I feared it would be too predictable. I underestimated Beagle: for the story of love, greed and self-sacrifice that unfolds from this is a very sweet and a very moving one--and ultimately teaches us a great lesson about human nature and the darker places of the soul.

If I were to switch from french press to a drip coffee I think I'd have to get a Hello Kitty coffee maker.

I stumbled on that abomination because it's reviewed on a blog that talks about an on old book of mine. One of the auto-google functions shot me the heads-up. Once, a long time ago, I bought a Hello Kitty vibrator as a gift. I would like a Hello Kitty coffee maker.

My night in Seattle was a blast. A bunch of us played drunken scrabble and drunkener Rock Band.


Even with a hangover I loved the Sci-Fi museum. I was bugged at all the 'fan built' stuff. Seems like they coulda/shoulda gotten original Storm Trooper/R2D2 outfits.


Seeing the original Star Trek uniforms gave me a thrill. As did seeing one of Neil Stephenson's hand written books which was inexplicably placed in front of E.T. You aren't supposed to take pictures inside the museum hence my blurry sneaky from-the-waist snapshot. The gift shop was on par with a dealer table at a third rate sci-fi show. I'm their target audience and I didn't want to buy anything. I thought they'd at least have a good selection of post cards. They had nothing. I should have snuck more pictures of my own.


I liked the sculpture garden.

Seattle feels more metropolitan than Portland though I'm told that Portland has taken the lead in hipness.


I did go to a great party in Portland on the 4th where we set off illegal fireworks and participated in underage drinking.

I need to get on more PR for my book. It's starting to hit stores.

San Diego Comic Con is coming up soon. In addition to books I'm going to try selling a lot of original art.

It's a two-hander with the Sparkly Paddle of Birthday Wonderfulness today--

one for eleanor and one for christinaalley!

Happy
Happy
Birthday!
Birthday!

Hope your respective days are full of awesome and the coming year will be even more so!


And--you know it--don't forget to live forever!

Wrapping up things manga at AX, here's what CMX announced. Almost everything they mentioned had been announced before, but they had one new title:

Hana no Namae. 4 volumes, shoujo from Hakusensha's LaLa DX.

For anyone attending the World Fantasy Convention in Calgary this October, be aware the Election Day is November 4th and you may not be home to vote in time....so remember to apply for an absentee ballot. I don't know about other states or cities, but in NYC you can apply for an absentee ballot by printing out a pdf file from here:

absentee ballot NYC

I see that everyone from Cherie Priest to Cory Doctorow to William Gibson has already blogged this, so I'm not sure how much more my spreading the word can help, but albionidaho reports that four Clarion West students had their laptops and some other things stolen. But really, they're writers at a workshop, so it's about the laptops. They have loaners for now, and Clarion West is taking donations to help defray the cost of replacement.

I forgot to mention that I saw The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice, produced as a musical last week at the Minetta Lane Theater--a small venue in Greenwich Village. I'd never read or seen the play before and knew very little about it but that a friend of mine who had seen it a few months ago hated it. But because it won some awards and it was cheap (through TDF) I decided to take a chance. I enjoyed it. It's dated, but as a snapshot of boring, numbing, bookkeeping work in the 20s it was interesting, and I liked the production. Middle aged guy with horrible screeching, complaining wife goes to work daily and does numbers with a woman helper who obviously is interested in him. Boss fires him, guy murders boss and ends up on death row. Dies and instead of the Hell he expects he ends up in what seems like Heaven, a place he can do whatever he wants. Freedom. Plus, the co-worker (who he was interested in) kills herself because with him gone she has nothing to live for--and she ends up where he is. They CAN live happily ever after, but he freaks out and would rather go back to being a cog in the machine...

Today I went to a matinée performance of Clifford Odets' The Country Girl, with Morgan Freeman, Frances McDormand, and Peter Gallagher. Directed by Mike Nichols. I thought I remembered the play getting mixed reviews --I'll have to check--but it was brilliant. Great performances (some of you might have seen it as a movie with Grace Kelly --who I'd think would have been totally miscast--, William Holden, and Bing Crosby. I've never seen the movie). Once good actor who has been a lush for at least ten years is given a chance by a producer to star in a new play. The actor's wife, the "country girl" of the title, is either a support or hindrance, depending on who you believe.

The last two episodes of the first season of Deadwood--and yes, it keeps getting better and better; I Can't Sleep, a thought-provoking French film by Claire Denis about several "outsiders" in Paris whose lives connect interestingly--told against the background of a series of murders of old ladies based on real murders in the early 1990s.

And Swimming With Sharks, with a vicious Kevin Spacey as a movie executive, Frank Whalley, as his green put upon assistant, and Michelle Forbes (who I'd never seen before but has apparently been on a lot of tv series including "Lost" and "In Treatment") as a producer who is trying to get a deal for her script. Nasty nasty film.

raecarson and my oldest told me this story (which is a direct result of this post a couple days ago) makes little or no sense. I won't say which one was little and which one was no. Like the Monkeycon stories I wrote a few years ago, I suspect it is full of references that only amuse me. Nevertheless, I give you:

( The Cross-time Accountants Fail to Kill Hitler Because Chuck Berry Does The Twist )

Series: Darkest Powers
Publisher: Doubleday, 2008
Genre: Horror
Sub-genre: YA, Paranormal



Cross-posted from genrereviews.

I have two initial reactions to this cover. The first is me dancing with joy that there's no underage cleavage being shown off. The second is me being very sad that I'm so easily pleased when it comes to the cover of a supernatural YA novel.

Actually, I have no complaints about this cover. It's tastefully shot, the necklace is significant to the story, and I like the monochromatic tones with the occasional splash of colour. The black lace pattern on the back cover is gorgeous, too, and the whole thing sets the mood perfectly. On the whole, the cover is eye-catching, and exactly the sort of thing I'd pick up off the shelf to take a closer look at. Then again, having been written by Kelley Armstrong, whose Women of the Otherworld series I have a serious fondness for, I'm not someone who's going to randomly come across this book in the store, but that's another story altogether.

( 'I see dead people...' )

http://www.snopes.com/sports/soccer/barbados.asp

How a soccer team advanced in a cup match by deliberately scoring against itself.

I totally missed this last week. But we moved to NYC on June 28 last year.

It’s been an interesting year.  I’ve been so busy that I can barely breathe, but Rob spent then entire year looking for work.  And that’s almost literal.  He sold his first article a bare two days before our one year NYC anniversary.  He’s got a couple of other jobs coming up, so I’m really hoping the dry spell has broken.

It will be interesting to see what the next year holds.

Comments? -- Link