Technical Difficulties

1. There's a new Submachine game: Submachine 7: The Core.

2. This is a lovely video of Zenyatta enjoying her retirement.

3. While I'm offering videos, the big cats at Big Cat Rescue really enjoy their Christmas presents.

4. There's a new octopus for the Octocam. Ursula is smaller than Deriq was, but she is every bit as fabulous.

5. I am not going to link to the story on the Republican state legislator here in Wisconsin who's trying to repeal the (new) state law aimed at abolishing "Indian mascots and other race-based team names and logos in Wisconsin public schools," nor to the story on the man in Toronto who pressured a twelve-year-old girl off his son's co-ed PeeWee hockey team, because impotent anger is bad for my blood pressure.* Instead, have some pictures of the lunar eclipse: here (wikipedia), here (National Geographic), and, oddly enough, here (DC Clubbing).

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*This would be the rhetorical trick called praeteritio. The internet makes it particularly transparent.

1. Yesterday, the CEM of The Tempering of Men started its journey back to New York. If it doesn't get there by Tuesday, it's because of UPS, not me and the $74 I shelled out.

2. Yesterday, also, I had my first full-length dressage lesson since July 31st. (I'd had a couple of lessons previously, but they'd been much shorter, as my dressage instructor has been very careful and cautious about overtaxing my ankle.) This morning, my thighs are telling me ALL ABOUT IT. I have never been so happy about sore muscles in my life.

3. The orthopedic appointment on Friday went very well. My orthopedist was amazed at the range of motion my ankle has achieved; it was much more than he'd expected. (The word "awesome" may have been used. *g*) I have the green light to start weaning myself from the lace-up brace, and I don't have to go back to the orthopedic clinic until June.

4. These three things need listing because, otherwise, I've had a crappy week--due mostly, it seems, to PMS (depressed, clumsy, exhausted, retaining water like a camel, plus the random menstrual cramps like being stabbed in the kidney.) The Mirena has certainly reduced menstrual flow (which was not something I was ever actually particularly concerned about), but other than that, all it seems to accomplish is making everything as irregular as fuck. Gynecologist appointment in January, and we will most certainly be discussing the matter.

5. I haven't done this for a while, so: if you are a reader of this blog, and you would like to introduce yourself, please feel free to do so in the comments to this post. This offer is 100% obligation free; there is no pressure here of any kind.

1. As today is my birthday, I observe that the true and valuable purpose of Facebook is birthday greetings. I'm not being sarcastic. I'm very grateful and very touched at how many people are wishing me a happy birthday, and I'm very grateful that Facebook makes it so easy for them.

2. Amazing photographs (1): Astronaut Douglas H. Wheelock's pictures from the ISS. My particular favorite is No. 17. (Link via papersky.)

3. Amazing photographs (2): This picture of an ornithopter is going to turn into a story someday. The rest of the ornithopter pictures (just keep scrolling down until you run out of ornithopters) are also fantastic. (Link via jaylake.)

4. mirrorthaw is playing weird covers for me again. Ska "Crazy Train," bossanova "November Rain," the weirdest-assed weird-ass cover of "King of the Road" I have EVER heard.

5. Tobias Buckell has a smart post about the American Thanksgiving, and how its origins and cultural mythology are kind of problematic and off-putting, but the idea, of taking a day to think about the things you're grateful for, is a good one. And, yeah. What he said.

This is probably a good place to mention, btw, that Pat Rothfuss is doing his Worldbuilders fundraiser for Heifer International again this year. I don't even know what awesome stuff Pat has in his hat this year. But Thanksgiving seems like a good day to think about giving to others.

Our plans for today involve staying in and not doing much, except for the food. (Love is the plan, the plan is food.) Given how exciting/hellish things have been for us recently, this feels like the right thing to do. I'm grateful we can do this, and I'm grateful my life has put me here to do it.

I hope all of you Americans have a very happy Thanksgiving with people you love. And I hope all you non-Americans have a very good November 25th. Which, you know, is a perfectly cromulent day to have a good one of.

Jim Hines has two great posts:

1. contact information for reporting sexual harassment in SF/F

2. This Is What Asperger's Looks Like.

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3. (via buymeaclue) an important PSA for riders: WEAR YOUR DAMN HELMET.

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4. yuki_onna has cover art for Fairyland.

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5. jaylake has been posting pictures of a train recently. This one is my favorite (possibly because I'm thinking my blind automaton meets clockwork dragon* story needs a talking locomotive called The Bullroarer, and although the period is all wrong, the picture really helps).

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Today started for me with a really awesome piece of bad news, which I will share with you all as soon as it's official. (I know, I know, the cognitive dissonance will drive you mad, but I'm not being sarcastic. It really is both.)

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*I realized last night that actually my statement in this post could have been even better and more descriptive of my work as a whole, because it really goes like this: I write literary fiction about two women meeting in a train station and exchanging their life stories, except one of the women is a blind automaton and the other is a giant clockwork dragon.

1. mrissa says something important.

2. Despite exercise and medication, the RLS was awful last night. It kicked me out of bed twice (once around midnight and once around 3 a.m.). I have called the acupuncture clinic because this is Just. Not. On.

3. A faithful reader has asked where the Booth stories since The Bone Key can be found.

Two are online: "The Replacement" (which appeared originally in The Willows 2.3 (September/October 2008), pp. 48-54) and "White Charles" (link takes you to its original publication in Clarkesworld 36 (September 2009); it has also been reprinted in The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2010, edited by Paula Guran (Prime Books, 2010), pp. 388-405.

"The Yellow Dressing Gown" was published in Weird Tales 63.2 (March-April 2008), pp. 63-69.

"The World Without Sleep" was published in Postscripts 14 (Spring 2008), pp. 40-64, and my current hopeful plan is to reprint it in Somewhere Beneath Those Waves.

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My 5 things are only making it to 3 today. It'll have to do.

Four of them are the novels I have successfully read in the last week:

1.) matociquala, Range of Ghosts (in draft): Rocked my socks.

2.) maryrobinette, Shades of Milk and Honey: you probably need to like Jane Austen, or Austenesque novels, to fully appreciate this one, but the magic system is just awesomely clever. It dovetails seamlessly into the social history in a way that reminds me of papersky's Tooth and Claw (no, there are no dragons).

3.) cmpriest, Boneshaker and (4.) cmpriest, Dreadnought: I love her crazy alternate America with zombies and dirigibles and all the rest of it. And three cheers for competent women as protagonists!

5.) This week I have also given to someone else to read complete drafts of (a.) the windship story that still doesn't have a title, (b.) "The Devil in Gaylord's Creek," and (c.) "Hollywood and Vine," along with sending out "Impostors" (Embarrassingly, with the title misspelled because I've only just now figured out it's -or rather than -er. Damn you, English language!), "Hôtel Image", and "Coyote Gets His Own back." Next up would seem to be "(Un)fallen." I have no idea how to fix it, but maybe rereading it will help.

It's a theory.

I feel like crap today. Just had to say no to the Red Cross about a blood drive Friday because, honestly, I am in no shape to sustain another insult to my system. I hate that.

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My friend jaylake is undergoing liver surgery today as part of his horrible ongoing battle with cancer. On the one hand, this puts my measly discomfort in perspective; on the other hand, I hate that Jay has to go through this and has to suffer like this; and on the third hand, perspective does not fucking help. Not at the moment.

ETA: There is potentially good news about Jay's liver.

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Elsewhere on the internet, there is, of course, controversy. (That's what the internet is for, besides cat pictures and porn.) Intolerance is the wrong answer to 9/11, as it is pretty much always the wrong answer, and that's all I'm going to try to say about it today, when I know I'm not firing on all six.

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I know I should eat something, but I can't face it.

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Ace is still dragging its feet about the rights to The Virtu, and I still don't have an edit letter for The Goblin Emperor. I know this is the natural state of publishing (the wonderfulness of casacorona notwithstanding), but that doesn't mean I like it.

1. Went to the vet's office this morning to buy cat food and got to see a Newfoundland heading into one of the exam rooms for his or her check up. I love Newfies; they look so exactly like small bears, and those that I have seen have clearly been deep in love with the whole wide world.

2. My dreams last night starred Avery Brooks and Hulk Hogan. I'm still decidedly nonplussed about that.

3. I now know of two cats named Mildmay (thank you, hominysnark and topknot, both for choosing that name and for telling me about it). Of all the things I imagined before I became a writer about what a writing career would be like, I never thought people would be naming their cats after my characters. I have to say, it's kind of awesome.

4. No, neither Felix nor Mehitabel is named after the famous cats of those names--although Mehitabel is more or less named after a cat, as my first exposure to the name was a neighbor's cat when I was a kid (and that cat may have been named after Don Marquis' mehitabel, although I don't know for sure either way). That wasn't in my head when I was naming her though; all I was after was to replace her original name, which was Hephzibah.

5. Today, in pursuit of my job, I found both an Old Norse dictionary (ON to English and English to ON) and some Old English resources. The word for "poison" in Old Norse is eitr, and the word for "poisonous" in Old English is aettryne. (The word "poison" is from Latin, potio, -onis by way of Old French and Middle English pocion.)

Best job in the world.

1. cmpriest has a pair of wonderful posts about the oil spill and what you can do to help.

2. The Planckendael Zoo in Belgium has a snow leopard cub (I particularly recommend the second video, in which Laila demonstrates her ferocity upon a hapless rubber glove.)

3. So in January, the local high school's Future Farmers of America chapter has a seed sale. Everything they don't sell, they donate to a local small animal welfare group, who then has a plant sale, which I went to this afternoon. I came away with two flats of marigolds, two Wisconsin 55 tomato plants, two Long Thin Cayenne Peppers, and three (or hopefully four) Chocolate Beauty Peppers. I spent the afternoon digging a small vegetable garden in the side yard.

I've never tried to grow vegetables before. We'll see what happens.

4. Also! The Anthropophagous Rosebush, the Grandfathered Rosebush, and one of the Cerise Bouquet climbing roses are blooming! So is one of the hydrangeas (and the other is looking happily leafy)! I'm restraining myself from grabbing passersby and dragging them into my yard to admire things. Especially with the Grandfathered Rosebush, which is all but invisible unless you're standing right in front of it, and which is blooming in this FABULOUS deep purplish-red color, the restraint required is greater than you might think.

5. This is amazing, and if I ever get to Australia, I want to see it.

1. The new bread pans work very nicely. They're a little shorter (length-wise rather than depth-wise) than my old ones, so I get these very tall majestic loaves. They do, however, definitely need greasing, at least around the top.

2. Also, the new bread pans are deep red. My bread mixing bowl is golden-yellow. Our counters are bright blue (so not our choice). As I said to matociquala yesterday, I feel like I've wandered into some trendy yupster magazine article on baking your own bread.

3. Stuff I'm working on right now, at least hypothetically: (1) A Reckoning of Men: matociquala lobbed the ball back and it's awesomely cool, but I have to figure out how to play it. (2) Shadow Unit: "Hope Is Stronger Than Love," which gave me something this morning which should be OMG TEH CREEPY if I can make it work. (3) "Doc Holliday Makes A Deal": I hope this will consent to be a short story, but otherwise it's the first chapter of Doc Holliday, Demon Hunter.

4. Saturday night of Penguicon, mirrorthaw and I were flipping channels (we don't have cable, so this is a sort of weird special occasion thing when we stay in hotels) and we found a college women's fast-pitch softball game, Tennessee vs. Alabama, and Tennessee was getting shellacked. mirrorthaw can confirm that I turned into the most geeked out, fangirliest fangirl EVAR, because OMG there are women playing sports on my TV. I'm totally the same way about women's basketball, even though basketball is not a sport that does much for me, so IMAGINE MY GEEKITUDE. And not only was it women playing baseball (under the generous definition of baseball, yes), but, unlike with women's basketball, these were not women built like supermodels. This is totally not a slam against the women who play basketball, but their sport selects for women who are tall and willowy and thus fit right in with the cultural image of what sort of women you see on your TV. Fast-pitch softball does not select for tall and willowy; from the evidence of the Tennessee and Alabama teams, it selects for women who are short and stocky and strong. Women who are built like me. I can't even explain how awesome it was. I also loved the breakdown of the dichotomized performance of female gender roles: these are athletes, visibly powerful women (Alabama hit several home runs while we were watching), wearing softball uniforms (and Tennessee with that terrible orange, too), and they've got the black bars under their eyes to cut the glare, and yet the Tennessee pitchers have all done their hair the same way, with the French braid along one side and the pale blue bow at the back, and I love the way that they're doing both, that they can be serious athletes and yet still make choices about their gender performance--they can code themselves along a spectrum of femininities*--and they can by god play their sport and mean it.

5. I want to say thank you publicly to Penguicon's concom and staff, who did a wonderful job this weekend--especially but not at all exclusively Yanni Kuznia, who was running the literature track. Thank you all very much!

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*pitselly objected to my using the butch/femme dichotomy/continuum to talk about this, but the suggested replacement of masculine/feminine is wrong, because it implies that there's only one way to perform femininity, and that is NOT AT ALL what I mean. It also implies that the women who didn't go for the braids and pale blue bows were being, or trying to be, like male athletes, and that is equally not what I mean. They're all women athletes, and what I love is the fact that they have a variety of gender performances without being stigmatized as quote-unquote masculine (those girls are just trying to pretend they're men) or stigmatized the opposite way as quote-unquote feminine (those girls, they can't cope with a real man's game). And there isn't a lot of vocabulary to talk about that.