Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Marissa Lingen's LiveJournal:

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Friday, July 10th, 2009
7:55 pm	Two weeks and two days. I have just had an e-mail exchange with a friend wherein I mentioned my impending birthdayness, he said he/they would have to remember to get me something*, I said I didn't mean to be hinty, and he said he'd prefer that I hint than that he forget. People. You cannot forget my birthday. I don't mean you will remember. Noooo, I mean I will remind you.** Because I love my birthday. It is my favorite holiday ever except Christmas Eve and perhaps Lucia Day. I think everybody should get something nice on my birthday, ice cream or something. I have taken to responding to, "Happy birthday!" with, "Happy my birthday to you!" I am like the queen in this regard if few others. I am still trying to work out the details of my birthday party. I'm having one, but I'm afraid it's going to be a much smaller one this year. This means many of the people who have enlivened past birthday parties will not be invited to this one. It's not because I don't like you any more, dear hearts. It's that I am pretty drastically short of energy. Last year it was extremely important to me that I have a big birthday party in the face of the vertigo. I don't have that much energy for grand gestures of defiance this year. I just...don't. As I go backwards in my lj tagging past entries, I am struck by how much more mental and emotional energy I had for howling at the moon then. I thought 2008 was awful, but 2009 has taken the fight right out of me. I'm not giving up on the PT, and we're still seeing slow progress. I can do things I couldn't do this time last year. But also I admit that I am more resigned in some small areas. When I bruise myself, when I break things, when I can only enjoy part of something. I am frustrated when I have to say no to things that would be fun because I physically can't do them, and I'm particularly frustrated when I'm afraid that the friends I'm saying no to are getting the message that I don't want to instead of the message that I just plain can't. But the frustration is the small sigh, not the shower of tears. I don't think this means I'm doing better with it. I also don't think this means I'm doing dangerously badly, since I'm still doing the PT etc., all the concrete stuff that will continue to make things better in measurable, concrete ways, and since the lack of emotional energy is comparatively limited. I'm still finding the energy and the focus to write, or rather I'm finding those things again after the early days of PT. And there's been a lot going on in my family lately, some of it really good but all of it pretty intense. I'm just...not long on cope right now, and it feels like vertigo-related outbursts will harm more than they help. I thought about not mentioning the birthday party thing, but I've had so many years of "bring your neighbor's best friend's cousin if you like" sorts of birthday parties that I was afraid some of you would feel you'd personally offended me if there wasn't some kind of late-July/early-August invitation coming your way. And realio trulio you haven't, and I hope I haven't offended you, either, by bringing it up. I know it's not good manners to bring up parties people aren't invited to. But I am tired all the way through my bones, and I need to make my birthday party a little lower-key this year so as not to exacerbate that. I hope that's not hurtful to anyone. *He is wrong. Remembering to get me something is strictly optional. I am extravagantly pleased with presents but not the least bit perturbed by their absence. **July 26. Now you are reminded. (20 Comments |Comment on this)
1:56 pm	Minnesotan moments #1182 At the Josh Ritter concert last night: Josh: I want to try to play a new song for you. Enthusiastic Minnesotan man in the crowd: I'll bet it's pretty good! Oh, Minnesotans. Never, ever change. (It was pretty good, too. It had icy death potential, which improves most things.) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 9th, 2009
4:07 pm	News you can use. My calendar claims that it's National Ice Cream Day. If my calendar is wrong, I don't want to be right. I expect that gelato, sorbet, etc. counts for this festival as well, so I leave it in your capable hands. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
9:43 pm	Same thing I'm always full of. 1. I have been tagging lj entries a little at a time, in between typing revisions and writing new stuff and, y'know, the rest of my life. I find it a little daunting but gave myself full permission to be obscure when I need to. Which was a relief. 2. I have a theory now. I begin to think that many of the most useful conversations among working writers come when you can say, "How do you do such-and-such?" and you have a set of working writers who are clear that this question is not the same as, "How does one do such-and-such?" And then they can say, "Oh, I always X," or, "Usually I Y but this one time I Z and that was okay too." And then someone else says, "Really, Z? That almost never works for me, but what I like to think of is Q." 3. The revisions I am typing: they are pretty okay, I think. I am currently convinced that writing a book is like making lace: it's a whole thing when you're done, but you're almost certainly going to have a million holes in it, and you can only hope they're pretty. And work for them to be pretty. And not just pretty but in such a pattern that the reader can say, "Oh, of course, it's a shawl!" or, "How lovely, some gloves!" rather than, "It's...um...it's definitely...I like how you used a lot of thread here." 4. I have just finished watching S1 of Bones and boy howdy is that a Mary Sue. Fun Mary Sue. But uff da, the bit with her parents. Also, I am pretty damned sick of shows putting their thumb on the scales regarding their rationalist atheist characters to either force the rationalist atheist to admit that there are More Things In Heaven And Wherever or else show them as irrational for not doing so. Booth was raised Catholic, and the show does not demand that he detail how Catholicism, as a worldview, is not comprehensively successful in addressing his life situations, even though it almost certainly does have spots of being suboptimal. Nor do I want it to--I just don't want it to focus that way on Bones, either. It is okay to have characters with differing worldviews and not go out of your way, as a show, to undermine any of them, particularly if they're all fairly amiable and willing to accept new data. 5. Bones has given us a Geeky Little Brother character again. Are there no Geeky Little Sisters? Really? Or is it just that that social dynamic isn't particularly stable with our social mores? (That is, a younger adult geek woman is still likely to be parsed as potentially romantically interesting.) I would kind of like to see the Geeky Little Sister. Also, I suspect part of why we have a Geeky Little Brother is that Bones is a large enough presence that just adding Angela in makes it feel to the writers as though they have A Whole Mess Of Womens already. I may be wrong about this; we'll see. But it sort of makes me want to Take Action. And then I remember that this thing I'm revising features an older woman mentoring a younger woman as a pretty substantial character relationship. So okay then. Action Begun, at least. (26 Comments |Comment on this)
9:05 pm	Back again for its first 2009 engagement! Books I quit reading. 1. If you want to write a memoir, write a memoir. If you want to write a book about something else with memoir bits in it, you have to make sure that the memoir bits are roughly on a par with as interesting as your topic, or else really really short. Or else I will run away and read some other book on your topic whose author is not convinced that their own life is the most fascinating thing ever. 2. I remember being a teenager. It was not a built-in excuse for being an asshole. So whining that your parents are mean because they're poor? No. Sometimes it's not enough that the narrative be aware that the character is an asshole--you're still sticking me with a big chunk of text all about this asshole, and if they're not an entertaining asshole, I'm going to read something else. 3. Hockey is not everything. I mean this in a philosophical sense, but also in a very literal sense: hockey is not the building of Hadrian's Wall. Hockey is not the Silk Road. Trying to argue that various historical events were the True Beginning Of Hockey is likely to make me roll my hockey-loving eyes and move on. 4. Unrelieved doom. Next. 5. I know and care about several people who stammer. They do not go, "Th-this s-sentence is s-stupid." That is not how it works. It's not cute, it's not funny, quit doing it. 6. If your entire plot/premise is predicated around someone learning not to worry their pretty little head about big hard questions, go directly to hell and take your book with you. 7. If you have convincingly portrayed a protagonist everybody hates, you may consider that there's a good reason for this. 8. If you're going to compare your parents to Hitler--as an adult writing nonfiction--you need to be aware of the scale differences. No, seriously. Unconscious hyperbole is not our friend. 9. You had no respect for yourself, your reader, or your characters. Next. 10. Women do not constantly think of ourselves as though we were describing ourselves for phone sex purposes. I promise. Even lesbians and bisexual women, who may quite rightly be assumed to be fonder of women's bodies than the average straight gal, do not get their Rice Krispies while thinking of the pertness of their own breasts. In fact, I am a bit skeptical that any woman ever has gone around thinking of her own breasts as pert. Or lush. Mostly I think of mine as...mine. Like my ear or my elbow. Because...follow me carefully here...when you've had breasts for decades, you sort of get used to them, almost like they're a body part a person might have. 11. If you're going to hit a dozen genre conventions on the first two pages, you need to do it in a way that tells me that the story will not simply be a string of conventions. Three pages later, you still hadn't left the stencil. Fail. (52 Comments |Comment on this)
12:36 pm	Libyrinth by Pearl North (Review copy provided by Tor Books.) This is one of those young adult novels that straddles the border of fantasy and science fiction. I think some of the ending is supposed to tip it over into definitely SF, but I'm not completely convinced and am much happier if I just think of it as an inhabitant of border provinces. It's also one of those young adult novels that is explicitly, completely, for people who love books passionately. While the overarching message seems to be that literacy is good and that sharing knowledge is good, it's very much a book for preaching to the choir--I can't imagine someone who isn't already fascinated with books attaching to this one with any enthusiasm. It's not a book for conversions. And the overarching message is very strongly present. There really isn't much book there without message. I also thought the two sides of the story were too carefully balanced for believability. I liked what North (which is a pseudonym for--well, her agent's page comes right out and says it's a pseudonym for the person who writes SF as Anne Harris, so I don't think I'm spilling any big secret, but if somebody knows otherwise, please stop by and say) did with the idea of the chosen one, though. People who like playing with fantasy tropes in that way might well enjoy what happens with that at the end. In fact, I thought the last third of the book was much stronger than the rest--I preferred Haly's insistence that she was a clerk, not a full libyrarian, to her somewhat formulaic interaction with the libyrinth bullies. The title word bugged me some. It's clearly Library + Labyrinth, with a hint of Liberation as well, but like most portmanteau words--see Anathem over and over again for other examples--it struck me as not really as clever as its author had hoped, and having the libyrarians of the libyrinth made me feel like I was dealing with a 4-year-old who can't say "librarian" properly--the lie-buh-rarians work at the lie-berry in my head. Meh. I am also frustrated that the ad copy seems to be focusing on only one of the plot threads, when I liked the other character better. But my favorite bit with her is a spoiler, so...yah. I have a favorite bit completely not hinted at in the ad copy, is what, down to which character it happens to. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
11:55 am	Sing hey the thoughtful livejournal readers that you are. I said this over on Facebook, but I will repeat myself here: markgritter and I are going to the Gilbert & Sullivan Very Light Opera Company's performance of H.M.S. Pinafore on Saturday at the Lake Harriet Bandshell. We'll be bringing picnic for ourselves, which will probably include enough bars and/or cookies to share with a few people if people turn up. The performance starts at 7:30. We will be picnicking somewhat in advance of that. If you're around and going to be there, look for us. We're likely to be on lawn chairs on the little rise behind the benches. GSVLOC generally puts priority on music first, costume second, and dance third. That's for their stage productions. At the bandshell it's not a fully enacted performance, it's mostly just the music, possibly some funny hats. (For those of you who like dance a great deal, this may actually be a good thing: no need to worry that anyone will butcher the choreography.) They really want to get you out of there by dark, too, so the intermission is short and the pacing moves along at a really good clip. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
8:55 am	finally. I finally had a dream with Grandpa in it last night. I'm not saying what, because some parts of my life and heart are not for public consumption, but it was a good dream. And I am so very glad. I miss him so much.
Monday, July 6th, 2009
10:33 pm	built on the ruins of a cardboard box one Today lydy came over to help me clean the basement. She did the stuff I couldn't do with the vertigo, and she did a fair amount of the stuff I could do but would have taken immensely longer to do, or else could do but would find my head spinning for days after. And the bits that I probably shouldn't have pushed were certainly all my fault and not Lydy's. Still! Basement is clean! My head is weird and I feel very funny about the whole thing, but the basement is no longer a source of mental grimness. I hadn't been down there since the vertigo got bad, more or less, so it had sort of grown in my head until it was something like the underground bits of Paris, except instead of Renaissance skulls it would have things of immense personal significance, jumbled together in water-damaged boxes with dead bugs and all manner of unpleasantness. In reality it was a great deal more straightforward, and while we have a big trip to the charity people ahead of us (or a big visit from them, not sure which), and while there are more boxes to break down for the recycling than you would believe (oh seriously, the boxes), it is now a basement and not a pit of woe. And in fact it is a basement the furnace people can work in on Thursday without me fearing they're going to accidentally set the new furnace down on my grandfather's compass set or my glass Aslan or my old copy of Peter Duck. Or even a saxophone catalog from 1997 or a Gene Autry songbook. One of the purposes of sitting in the library with the dog and a book nearly every morning is that it is good fun and the dog likes it. (This is the opposite of "a waste of your time and annoys the pig.") But another is that we are periodically reading books and adding the new ones we've just read to the shelves, and I like just sitting there getting the feel of my books around me, so that I know how the whole of it goes. And I feel like it's going to be impossible to do anything like that with the basement for awhile, because there are so many steps to go before it's done: the plumbing and the electrical and the, y'know, walls and stuff. But once we get there I think it will be immensely satisfying to have gotten there. My friends have learned not to believe me when I say my house is a mess, and in turn I have learned not to apologize for the mess that is my house because it really isn't very messy, all things considered, and they will become intimidated and refuse to invite me over. But trust me when I say that this basement was orders and orders of magnitude messier than I am comfortable with in the rest of the house, and I am so happy that it has been brought back into the fold. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 5th, 2009
1:28 pm	Meeting my boring quota My goal for the weekend, after about 8:00 Friday evening, was to be externally boring, and I think I can honestly say we're doing a good job. There has been writing, reading, working out, doing PT, cooking, and various and sundry other useful and/or pleasant things. And, I mean, I could chatter away to people about The Dark Knight and Bones S1 and the books I'm reading, but I'll probably do some of that later. Some of the people we want to do stuff with are out of town, and some are busy, and also some of us are unpredictable regarding sleep (just the usual some, there), and we're all sort of tired and peopled out. I was very pleased with having two weeks of 4th St. related stuff, but when push came to shove it had gotten to be time to curl up and not do or say much. And so yesterday I invoked the 5:00 Rule*, and markgritter made guacamole today, and I think I win at holiday decadence, but just in case that's not enough, there will be grilled sockeye salmon, and I will finish this book I'm reading, and I will play with the doglet's ears, and that's what, really. It's good timing for a lazy, lazy holiday: the doglet hates the 4th due to feeling under attack, so having quiet, soothing monkeys around is just as well for her. Also the rest of July is looking...a bit like we have a thing or two to do, let's say. But more on that later. For now I am catching up on correspondence and renewing my zoo membership and other stuff that is quite satisfying from the inside and not the least bit of interest externally. So yay. *The 5:00 Rule, for those of you who need a refresher course: if you are a morning shower person, and you manage, with this and that, to put off your shower until after 5:00 p.m. and don't have other stuff to do, you win! You are not required to put actual clothes on but can instead put clean pajamas on after your shower and luxuriate in your decadence. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
4:39 pm	books read, late June W. H. Auden, Complete Works: Prose Vol. 1, 1926-1938. Some good stuff, some silly stuff, some good silly stuff, and some stuff that wasn't either. But very little of the last category. That's Auden for you. He went to Spain and China in the '30s, and also to Iceland, which was of more personal interest to me but less historical interest. Regarding Iceland and also Framley Parsonage, I think it's a very good thing that I had already run into the idea that authors I like don't always like the same things I do. (Madeleine L'Engle introduced me to this. The summer I turned 19, I took a volume of Chekhov plays with me on the retreat to the shore with my summer research group. I had been reading Madeleine L'Engle for over half my life at that point, going on about how wonderful Chekhov plays were, and this volume had the ones I'd been looking forward to most, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard. I, it turns out, am not a Chekhov fan. Not in the least in fact. And so when Auden and Isherwood had Framley Parsonage in China and didn't like it much because they were bored by the bits that made me want to hide under the desk, I was simultaneously amused and greatly sympathetic, because I know what a horrible thing it is to be traveling equipped only with a book you find you really don't much care for.) You know how people sometimes refer to Walt Whitman as Uncle Walt? He's not my uncle Walt. But W.H. Auden can be my Uncle Wystan. Of course Uncle Wystan is stupid sometimes, but this happens with real uncles, too, I've noticed. Anyway I had been wondering whether I would want the rest of his Complete Works, and now I know I do. Also I am furious with Bill Holm for being dead so I can't write and ask him if he didn't go to China just because he secretly wanted to be W.H. Auden and had already been to Iceland. Anyway that's my theory. Dammit. Matthew Baigell, The Western Art of Frederic Remington. Grandpa's. I didn't think Remington was my thing, and in fact he isn't, but this is a pretty good book of his stuff, lots of good prints and no attempts to gloss over the less admirable aspects of Mr. Remington's character. And he was clearly extremely influential--you can look at the prints and see how they influenced cowboy movies, and then you get more or less the rest of movies influenced from there. Ed Cray, Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie. Interesting stuff, very much recommended if you have an interest in that generation of folkies. (And I think they're interesting.) Startling juxtaposition with our bio of Leadbelly, though, because Leadbelly's biographer (quite rightly) did not think of him as particularly stable and steady, and yet compared to Woody, well. I have sort of a different take than Mr. Cray on legacy, but that was a minor point, very small section of the book. The main difficulty of this book was that it took me most of a week to dislodge the songs from my head. Georgette Heyer, The Reluctant Widow. Very silly. Tony Hillerman, Hunting Badger. Not really as silly as Georgette Heyer. Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. Grandpa's. I read this very shortly after the Woody Guthrie bio, and wow, contrast. I'm not sure how I feel about this one. It was interesting, but it seemed to presume a level of awe/intimidation that the reader would feel towards the Founding Fathers and I just...don't. Also I am skeptical of people who quote David Brooks very much. At least if there isn't pointing and derisive laughter. Not that there was a lot of David Brooks in this; but it turns out I feel that David Brooks is for some reason not essential to a biography of Ben Franklin. Any David Brooks at all, really. But it was comprehensive and paid attention to other interesting people but not to the exclusion of Franklin, and the structure made it pretty easy to keep various bits of time straight in important ways. Luo Guanzhong, Three Kingdoms: Volume II. I finally have grown back enough brain to keep track of the cast of several, including people who show up to die on the next page. I'm halfway through the four-volume set and looking forward to the rest. Helen Morgan, Blue Mauritius: The Hunt for the World's Most Valuable Stamp. Grandpa's. This was much less obnoxious than the other stamp book of Grandpa's I've read so far, largely because Helen Morgan has no illusion that we are panting to know more about Helen Morgan when we buy a book about stamps. If you're looking for a present for a philatelist in your life, I'd definitely recommend this one. It goes along at a good clip, and just about the time you think you've heard as much as you can hear about the Blue Mauritius stamp, it turns out you have and you're done. James Patterson, 3rd Degree. Grandpa's. The title had something to do with the book this time, hurrah. This...continues to be not a very good series. At all. But the unintentional hilarity was there, at least. Notice that there wasn't any speculative fiction in this bunch? Yah. So did I. We'll be remedying that lack immediately. I read in a bunch of genres, but not all of them are mine. Too long without fantasy or SF--much less without both--and I start to get antsy. (17 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
11:42 am	Dakota County Library: not just for microfiche any more. Our library paid somebody to come up with a slogan, and now they're putting it all over everything: "Dakota County Library: Come to Know." As far as I'm concerned, the only slogan they needed was, "Dakota Country Library: we're the library that's in Dakota County," or possibly if they wanted to get fancy, "Dakota County Library: books you already paid for." I am already skeptical that there's any value in most kinds of marketing/branding people seem to take for granted. I don't believe it's automatically worthless or automatically morally suspect--the best of advertising brings people to realize that there is something they actually do want or need, possibly at a better price than they had hoped to pay. But really, how will the library benefit from having the slogan, "Come to know"? It's not like it sparks a million ideas about programs and groups they could host at the library. Mostly at my house it prompts snarky remarks about coming to no good. Do they hope that this will make people think, "Oh yes, we must continue to fund the libraries at previous levels or higher, they're where we come to know things!" Or alternately, "Oh yes, we must continue to fund the libraries at previous levels or higher, they have such a nice slogan!" Can anybody tell me why this is not a stupid waste of time and money? (50 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 28th, 2009
4:02 pm	Oh villainy. Oh alack. Etc. Dear fellow writers, but especially thriller and fantasy writers, I am able to accept someone as The Bad Guy without knowing the least little thing about their sex life. Do you know why this is? It's because a) the world is full of evil that can be done without having the least thing to do directly with sex, and b) I am aware that many really good people are into things I am not into, sexually as well as nonsexually, and that is--within reasonable parameters including but not limited to consent--quite all right with me. Sure, some villains Really Must have their villainy interwoven with their sexuality. It does not have to be the default. I promise it does not. And frankly it gets boring. "I'm not really sure this is my business," may be the Minnesotan polite translation of, "I don't care what happens to these people!" It still serves the same purpose: not reading your book any more, okay, buh-bye. See also: cruelty to animals. It is not strictly obligatory in a villain. What ever happened to the cat-stroking villains of yore? These days they would be forced to kick the cat just to demonstrate that's the kind of person they are. Memo: humans are animals. Being nasty to humans counts. I'm going to go read W. H. Auden. W. H. Auden never does this to me. Exasperated, mrissa (37 Comments |Comment on this)
10:33 am	theories from cons, applied to life You know how we decided that exposition is what keeps everything from happening all at once? Apparently I need more exposition. (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 26th, 2009
4:08 pm	Pleasant things to eat I have tried two new-to-me restaurants this week, both of which went well. Bibo on Diffley here in Eagan is an Italian place in the location of a previous Italian place. The previous place was not very interesting, fairly expensive for what you were getting, and featured staff who would cast disdainful looks upon people who showed up without reservations--even if the restaurant was fairly empty and stayed empty all evening. This apparently convinced people that it was gauche to drop in on them without warning, so no one did, and they're gone. Bibo is much better: more interesting, cheaper, less snooty. They have things like a very fine chicken parmesan, but also a lovely pork tenderloin with an interesting pear moutarde sauce and some of the best polenta I've had. (The best polenta I've had, actually, if you rule out the polenta at Bistro E. Europe, which 1. no longer exists and 2. was in San Francisco anyway so was not serving me polenta on a regular basis.) markgritter and I went with my parents, and all of us were pleased with our entrees and sides. The only thing I would say by way of detraction from Bibo is that their desserts were boring, boring, boring. Well-executed. But boring. I don't see any reason I would have dessert there again: it's so close to my house and my parents' house, both of which tend to be stocked with tasty dessert items, many of which are more interesting than the ones at Bibo. Also of interest to locals: they only do dinner, no lunch. timprov and I took seabream to try La Chaya Bistro up on 46th and Nicollet for lunch, which cloudscudding had scouted just after I spotted it. It looked to me like their lunch menu was almost completely different from their dinner menu, but not in a bad way. We had tasty queso frito (which came in four blocks, not at all what I was expecting), and I had a cool creamy avocado-crab soup and a beet-green bean salad (with spinach and avocado) that magically made beets mellow. Texturally I could have wished for something like pine nuts in the salad. But still, mellowest beets ever. Very good stuff. And timprov approved of his fish tacos, which I'm not sure he's done since we left California. I will definitely want to drag a variety of people back there for dinner--possibly quickly, since the place was pretty empty for lunch. (Perhaps this is because they've just started serving lunch and people don't know it yet. We can hope so. Still, this may be a "get the good food while it's there" experience.) Timprov had pluot sorbet and mango crisp, both of which were lovely (though I wouldn't have combined them--and in fact that was T's choice, not the restaurant's), and my chocolate creme brulee was extremely pleasant and garnished with unexpected blueberries, which I thought were just right. Also, Barb at Pumphouse was making a vanilla ice cream swirled with a mango-passion fruit sorbet, which struck me as the grown-up version of a Creamsicle/Dreamsicle. Don't know how long that flavor will last. Get it while it's cold. I have been pretty low-energy and fuzzy-headed after the convention. Feeling very scattered, like I have to gather six or seven mental things to do the simplest of tasks. Mostly I am just trying to roll with this, although there's a story that's not getting any fresher. Among other things, we've verified once again that the longer workouts are needed for me to be able to eat and sleep reasonably: I went two days with no workouts at all (Saturday and Sunday) and could not sleep for more than three and a half hours of Sunday night, despite being really exhausted. Formerly regular-length (45 minute) workouts are not really cutting it, so I'm continuing with the hour and a half ones in hopes that food and sleep will continue to be possible, since, y'know, people need those. We also did a recent experiment with unassisted walking with my friend V's help and discovered that we are Not Really There Yet. (Which was not a surprise, but the level of sick it made me the day after was greater than I expected.) I had been hoping to try driving in a parking lot in June, but this is not to be; perhaps July. Or not. We'll see how it goes. Of course I want to be done with the stupid vertigo all nownownow. But progress, even slow progress, is better than nothing. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
2:08 pm	Five Things, most of them Fourth Street 1. Before I wandered off to the con, I read a link from somebody else's journal to this Powell's blog entry called "No One In Romance Novels Is Ever Fat." It reminded me of something that worries me when I run into it: every once in awhile I hear writer friends who are more visual than I am talking about casting their current story or book projects with Hollywood actors. And I think, don't we hand over enough of our visual imagination to Hollywood already, without handing them a piece of control over what is not a visual medium, or at least not in the same way? Of course one obvious (or at least obvious in my social circles) concern is a dearth of actors from ethnic minorities. It's bad enough that there aren't more Asian characters on Eureka. But prose writers can't let that lack keep going into their stories, where you can't have more than a token Asian character because you can only name two Asian actors who could play them. It's not just obvious ethnic minorities, either. I was pleased by Season 2 of The Wire but also completely knocked over, because they got so many of the different visual types of Polish-American you run into if you live in a heavily Polish-American area. Not just the Sobotka family members (all of them, oh perfect casting), but also Horseface and Maui and random guys in the background on the docks and at the bars: none of them looked alike. They all looked right. And Horse, in particular, is a guy I saw four or five of just at my mom's cousin's family events when I was a kid (the said cousin married a Polish-American fella)--none of the faces exactly alike, all interesting--and never, ever see on TV or in movies. And no, you don't want every character to look like Horseface Pakusa from The Wire. Obviously. But there is a certain sameness, a certain smoothing out of variation, among Hollywood actors, and I don't see why we should settle for that in our inspiration to prose. If you're one of those writers who wants visual cues for character description, please please consider looking at photo websites like The Big Picture, where even their recent dance entry has professionals and non-professionals in a dozen styles of dance from all over the world. The focus of these photos is to be interesting rather than to conform to a particular look of person. In other entries are people dealing with war, natural disaster, and political strife--interesting faces in interesting times. Which is what we want in fiction, isn't it? 2. I had a really good weekend at Fourth Street. I have notes in my journal and notes on PostIts and other stuff just floating around my head, and my library list and my Amazon list each grew by several items. I have come to consider, as a philosophical position, that it's a good thing about a con when I don't get to talk to everybody I want to talk to, or when I don't get to talk as much to everybody I do talk to as I'd liked; but in practical usage this does not actually translate to, "Oh, I'm so glad I didn't get more time talking to that particular friend or cordial acquaintance or new person." Funny thing, that. There'll be a few more opportunities this week, but still. 3. You know what I want to talk about on panels next year? Lots of stuff, in fact, but particularly Work In Fantasy, books that handle work particularly well, not just, "look, our main character is a writer/artist/musician/vaguely creative type, again, and it does not appear to be any kind of work for them." And sort of conversely, I'd like to do a Fun Bits of Writing or a Writing as Play or Recovering the Fun Parts panel sometime. And also maybe Geezers In Fantasy, because old people who are actual characters rather than types are striking me as frustratingly rare. And stuff. 4. I think the weather is trying to convince sheyrena and papersky that they should be pleased to leave Minneapolis. Sigh. This is not June in the Twin Cities! June in the Twin Cities is nice, and by nice I do not mean 80 F by 9:00 a.m. and rising! This is more like August, and nobody wants extra August! (Note: if you want extra August, please apply in the comments section to take mine. Thank you.) 5. I am at that stage of having too much to do where I'm sort of flailing out randomly and doing things that need doing when I smack into them. This is not perhaps optimal, but it also might be inevitable to the level of tired my brain is and the length of my to-do list. (28 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 20th, 2009
8:28 am	Clearing up some of this weekend's misconceptions about me 1. I was not making cookies for breakfast, I was making cookies at breakfast time. That people were allowed to eat then. Still. 2. I do too look like Anthony Stewart Head. It's amazing nobody has mistaken me for him already this weekend, we look so much alike. See icon: is it me? Is it him? How could you tell? Don't listen to Certain People on the subject of me and tweed, because they are biased and wrong. 3. I can, apparently, sleep past 6:30. Sort of. 4. I can also carry on conversation after I've been given lemon-ginger dark chocolate. Really I can! I just have to sort of pause and let the brain reset from the complete focus on the chocolate. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
11:05 am	made to be broken markgritter has labeled me Chaotic Good, which is a little strange considering that I am the force of organization in this house. (Anybody agree/disagree with him there?) Here's how it came up, and I think this is important: yesterday I encountered someone who was not sure she was "family enough" to count in the "family only for ICU visits" rule for someone close to her. She definitely is, but I was boggled that this even came up, and frankly it was pretty upsetting. Important life lesson, people: you do not have to follow rules simply because someone else has gone to the trouble of making them. If someone you love is in an ICU where they have a "family only" rule, and you know they want to see you, and you can be quiet and respectful of the other patients, congratulations! You are now their Cousin Cynthia. Or their Uncle Frank. Or whatever the hell else you want to be. Because the family only rule is not there because ICU patients benefit only from seeing people with specific blood or legal ties to them. It's there to keep the number of visitors down so the staff can work and the other patients aren't being disturbed by wild ICU parties. The first night my grandpa was in the ICU, my aunt Kathy came up to stay with him and my mom, and when I say "aunt," I mean "person who has no legal or blood relationship with me whatsoever." And my mom, without turning a hair, said to the night nurse, "This is my sister-in-law." Here's what this semi-fib did: it gave the night nurse a leg to stand on if anybody administrative challenged her on who was in Mr. Adams's room and/or the family lounge, and it expressed the closeness of my aunt Kathy to Mom and Grandpa without giving the night nurse the impression that she was someone who should be consulted with my mother equally on Grandpa's care. And on Grandpa's last Saturday with us, it was Grandma's "niece" Vicki (again, no relation) who stayed with her while we drove into the wee hours of the morning to get there. Was that rule there so that a person whose husband was dying would have to sit alone and wait? No. Hell no. And if it was, I don't care; that is not my problem. I had a dozen or more really major problems that night, and strict adherence to hospital guidelines was not anywhere on the list. You know what else? Grandpa had c. diff., and I took off the gloves to hold his hand on the day he was dying and the day before that. You bet your ass I did. I didn't touch anything else while I had the gloves off, and I washed up like crazy after, but did I make my grandpa's last contact with me come through latex or nitrile? No. No. A thousand times no, a million times no. I am not high-risk for infection, I followed the anti-infection procedures better than some members of the hospital staff in that regard, and I am a competent adult human being with my own judgment. They can make their rules. I make mine. I know some of you are facing medical issues. Do not let them intimidate you pointlessly. Things are bad enough when you're dealing with a crisis without deciding that a spirit of legalism must inform your doings. Your first obligations are moral and interpersonal, not regulatory. (50 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
9:59 pm	Bleh. Today is the most physically miserable I've been in quite awhile, and while the vertigo has been generally improving, it has not been monotonically improving. Today eating is hard (although that's not all vertigo, I don't think), and moving around the house safely is hard, and being comfortable sitting still is hard, and it's all just hard. And I'm hoping that it is the designated hard day this week, because I will do 4th St. either way, but it's going to be much more fun if it's more like yesterday than like today. Also I have not been posting Grandpa stories very much, but oh, I miss my grandpa. I am still running into such difficult things. And sometimes it's not even related to a trigger at all. Sometimes I just want my grandpa, dammit. We got markgritter back this morning, finally. That doesn't make everything better. But it doesn't make anything worse, and several things--notably the lack of markgritter--it does improve substantially. (His 5-day business trip was unexpectedly extended to 8 days. Not A Fan, but sometimes these things are necessarily.) I think I can still manage the stuff what needs doing before the times when it needs to be done. But it feels--both literally and figuratively--like ground is slipping away beneath my feet. I really hope sleep is a reset button. (15 Comments |Comment on this)
1:14 pm	Books read, early June Steven Brust, Five Hundred Years After. Reread. I got lured. Well--in all fairness it might be described as mutual luring. In any case, those of you who are going to 4th St. should perhaps be a bit conversationally careful lest alecaustin and I start talking like a pair of Paarfi novels. (It is with surprising ease that I can come up with a fictional pair of Paarfi titles that the two of us might be. More than one pair, even. Uff da.) I love these. markgritter said there were lots more Teckla Republic references in this one than he'd remembered, and it was more than I'd remembered as well. I like the Teckla Republic. Jim Butcher, Turn Coat. I could wish for the overarching plot (as opposed to the single-volume plot, which was fine) to be moving forward a bit faster than it was. Also, the traitor at the end of the book was not even remotely satisfying to me. Otherwise it was another one of those, and it did the things those do. Not enough Mouse and Murphy. This is my usual complaint. Samantha Henderson, Heaven's Bones. This is not my kind of book: too much on the border of dark fantasy and horror. I knew this going in--the cover was obvious. (It was a gift; apparently a good one, because I wouldn't have read it on my own and did read and enjoy it.) Also it's not a very creative book: ominous mists and fogs, sketchily done Roma, bereft doctor/husband carving up other women after his wife etc. etc. etc. All kind of been done before. I started reading it with the understanding that I was under no obligation to finish it. Yet I did finish it. What this says to me is that Samantha Henderson knows how to construct a book. The prose never really shone or called attention to itself, but it did pull me along and keep me from bolting, when I was prepared to bolt at the slightest provocation. So that was sort of interesting in itself. Georgette Heyer, Faro's Daughter and The Quiet Gentleman. I like the ones where the sensible people get together and laugh affectionately at the silly people. Gwyneth Jones, Spirit. I think one SFnal retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo was perhaps enough for me. Anyway, this was fine but not my favorite Gwyneth Jones by quite a bit. Louis L'Amour, Off the Mangrove Coast. Grandpa's. This is where "genre" and "generic" intersect: these stories all did what you knew they were going to do--with surplus exclamation marks, I'm afraid--because they were the kinds of stories they were. And they were more invested in being kinds of stories than in being actual stories. James Patterson "with" Andrew Gross, 2nd Chance. Grandpa's. Oh dear, was this a bad book. I was wondering whether a co-author would help. No. There were little things and big things wrong with this book. I was completely creeped out by the main character's long-lost father's fixation on her looks. He told her she was gorgeous/beautiful/etc. thirty bazillion times. And the phrasing is not that member of the family, "Oh honey, you grew up so pretty, you look just like your mother/aunt/cousin's best friend's roommate." It was not well done. Also the bits even slightly related to motherhood and work were implausible and offensive. He really just should not attempt to write female POV. Also: do not try to have people "talking black" if you don't know what it sounds like. A black professional woman talking to three white professional women who are her close friends does not sound like someone with a tin ear trying to reproduce what he heard when he turned on Oprah for half an hour once. And--oh, well, anyway: not a good book. Since Grandpa had several of the others in the series and some of them were "co-written" by women, I will be interested to see whether that improves them at all. (I put "co-written" in quotes because the amount of writing each author actually does varies so widely that I have no idea whether the later books in the series are essentially completely written by co-author and given a light editing pass by James Patterson or whether he does a seriously equal job in that context. Collaboration varies so much, but he is clearly the "name" in this case.) James Patterson, The Midnight Club. Grandpa's. The hook on this thriller is that the action-hero main character is in a wheelchair. I will not be spoiling anything if I tell you that he walks in the end, with many italics and adjectives and ellipses and exclamation marks, because you know he will; it's that kind of book. Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories. Grandpa's. Poor Mr. Twain. Most of the stories in this collection were written when he was old and was losing everybody he loved, and many of them had that "depressed cynic" feel, where if you enjoy eating a strawberry or looking at an interesting tree, you are DELUDING YOURSELF BECAUSE LIFE IS ALL PAIN AND MISERY AND WOOOOOE AND ANYBODY WHO SAYS DIFFERENT IS A FOOL AND THIS IS THE ONLY REALITY. And then you want to make him take deep breaths and possibly drink a cup of tea. Twain and Kurt Vonnegut: I want to bake them cookies and make them go weed my garden before they come in for their cookies. It just seems like the combination would be good for them. (18 Comments |Comment on this)