Technical Difficulties

ROUND 1
1st BIPED¹: What the fuck?
UNDERFOOT CAT: Is new toy!
1st BIPED: ... that's a mouse.
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA*: Kill it! Kill it!
UNDERFOOT CAT: Is toy! See! [bats at mouse softly, no claws]
1st BIPED: Seriously?
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA: Kill it! Kill it!
UNDERFOOT CAT: Is awesome toy!
MOUSE: [escapes]
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA: D'oh!
1st BIPED: Where the fuck did it go?
UNDERFOOT CAT: I will find!
1st BIPED: I wish you wouldn't.
2nd BIPED³: [emerging belatedly from the study] Mouse?
1st BIPED: [brightly] Adventures with nature!

INTERLUDE, in which there is much peering under furniture by UNDERFOOT CAT and both 1st & 2nd BIPEDS

ROUND 2
2nd BIPED: [from under the piano] JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
1st BIPED: [dryly] Did you find it?
2nd BIPED: It's on top of the radiator. I thought the cat was just on crack.
UNDERFOOT CAT: Toy! I has finded you!
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA: Kill it! Kill it!
1st BIPED: [advances with makeshift mouse-capturing device] Cat, you are as much use as a trapdoor in a canoe.
UNDERFOOT CAT: [being dragged away] But! Is toy!
1st BIPED: [captures mouse]
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA: Biped! No interfering!
2nd BIPED: [gets door]
1st BIPED: [advances to suitable mouse-release point and lifts makeshift lid of makeshift mouse-capturing device] Fuck, I don't have it.
2nd BIPED: [facepalm]

INTERLUDE, in which CATZILLA scoots anxiously through the living room & completely and utterly fails to notice the mouse

ROUND 3
UNDERFOOT CAT: Toy is in radiator! Make it come out!
2nd BIPED: [attempting to pry mouse away from the radiator with a dowel] You're a strong little bastard, I'll give you that much.
MOUSE: [escapes]
2nd BIPED: FUCK.
1st BIPED: It's over here! Gimme the--
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA: Kill it! Kill it!
UNDERFOOT CAT: Where is toy?
1st BIPED: HA! [captures mouse in makeshift mouse-capturing device]
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, EMMA, & MIRANDA: INTERFERENCE!
UNDERFOOT CAT: To-ooy! Where has you gone?
2nd BIPED: [gets door]
1st BIPED: [releases mouse at suitable mouse-release point]
2nd BIPED: This is not how I wanted to spend my Sunday morning.
1st BIPED: At least you're not the mouse.

CODA
UNDERFOOT CAT: [peering under bookcase] Toy? Is you under here?
2nd BIPED: Really, cat?
GHOSTS OF RICHIE, BEN, & MIRANDA: This is very embarrassing.
GHOST OF EMMA: Oh my god I can't even.
1st BIPED: I no longer wonder why he was found up a tree.
CATZILLA: ... Is something going on?


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¹Played by my lovely husband, mirrorthaw
²a.k.a. the Orange Creamsicle Dream Cat, the Elder Saucepan, and the First and Second Ninjas
³This would be me.

Today I have revised "To Die for Moonlight," adding 1,400 words and a plot complication. 7,700 words total now and back it goes to mirrorthaw to see if the improvements have improved things.

(My Samsung printer totally just made a noise like a jet engine powering down. Dude. I knew it was mighty, but not that mighty.)

I have also paid bills and dealt with some house stuff, plus feeding the cats, medicating the Elder Saucepan, and putting food and water out for the feralistas. (If you run the water hot and put it out in a plastic bowl instead of metal, they have a fighting chance of getting a drink before it freezes solid.) Oh, and feeding and medicating me.

I know I'm finally coming out of the ankle-related slump, because my to do lists for the word mines are getting too complicated to keep in my head again. The current one looks more or less like this:

1. Query Apex re: "Learning to See Dragons."
2. Revise "To Die for Moonlight."
2a. Read-aloud pass through "TDfM."
3. One more pass through "Hollywood and Vine," mostly for clean up.
3a. Read-aloud pass through "H&V."
4. Editing pass through "The Devil in Gaylord's Creek."
4a. Read-aloud pass through "TDiGC."
5. Submit "TDfM," "H&V," and "TDiGC."
6. Implement fix for the broken bit of "The Witch of Arvien" and inflict on mirrorthaw and matociquala to see if the story runs now.
7. Revise the nameless story about the knight, the wizard, and the giant mutant telepathic bear. (Also, find a title!)
8. Finish "Hope is Stronger than Love" for Shadow Unit.
9. Finish Thirdhop Scarp, kicking and screaming all the way.
10. Write the missing scenes for The Goblin Emperor and hope for edit letter soon.
11. Essay for Projekt that I think is still Sekrit.
12. Next EQ essay for tor-dot-com.
13. Read and review Brave New Worlds ditto.
14. New werewolf story? (First line: The werewolf had hooked his iPod up to the stereo and put it on shuffle.)

And from there, the To Do list merges indistinguishably into the first lines meme.

1. Thank you, everyone, for the birthday wishes on Wednesday. So far, thirty-five is going pretty well.

2. One of my birthday presents was a ring made by Sara Jayne Cole. I think I've linked to her work before, but I gotta say, it's worth linking to again. (Disclaimer: she is a friend of my mother's.)

3. My birthday present to myself--and mirrorthaw--was buying a new bed with the advance from the goblin book. Since the bed we were sleeping on was the one I bought when I moved to Madison in 1996, you may rightfully say that this birthday present is neither self-indulgent nor, indeed, a moment too soon. Also, for the first time in our adult lives, we have an honest-to-god bed frame.

4. The bed frame has taught me that I do actually have a (rather dim and rudimentary) sense of spatial relations. I walked into it in the dark yesterday because I knew exactly where the bed was. Or, you know, used to be. I'm developing a lovely bruise on my thigh.

5. I have reached 65,000 words in the goblin book. 45,000 to go. Which will be easier once I figure out what the captain of the palace guard wants to talk to the emperor about.

Things learned while gardening today:

1. I'm a much better gardener if you give me a task. "Go out and garden" does nothing for me. "Go out and slaughter all the grape vines you can reach" does.

2. If you have an Anthropophagous Rosebush, you let the grape vines co-habitate with it at your peril.

3. ZOMG! We have BERRIES! Blackberries, I think, but my woodsy lore is so stunted and vestigial that they might as easily be the rare and deadly cyanideberry for all I know. (No, we will not be eating them unless we get a positive ID.) They are also co-habitating with the Anthropophagous Rosebush, which explains why I have lived in this house for five years without knowing they're there. One leafy aggressive thing with thorns is much like another to me, unless one of them is actually, you know, fruiting.

4. I need better gardening gloves. Or possibly gauntlets.

5. The only thing that can be said in praise of Virginia creeper is that it is not as macho as the grape vines.

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Update on the Cerise Bouquet climbers, for any rosaphiles who care: both bushes seem to have survived the trauma of being planted. One of them died back quite a bit, but it has surviving branches (is branch the right word?), the largest of which happens to be the branch which has found the trellis. The other bush seems to be doing fine. So a round of applause for my rose bushes, please. They're making the best of a bad lot.

ETA: I am charmed to discover, by following links from the HelpMeFind.com page, that the nursery founded (in 1906) by the man who created the Cerise Bouquet is (a.) in Schleswig-Holstein, (b.) still in operation, and (c.) on the web (German-language only, despite the splash page being in English, but the pictures are lovely).

::is great big sparkly geek::

"Waa-aaaaah! Fuck!"

So, Wednesday night our furnace died.

Our oil-burning, asbestos-swaddled furnace.

Thursday (starting at a quarter after midnight) and Friday, when not gallivanting about with heresluck, were spent largely on the phone, calling people to come look at the furnace, to come look at the asbestos, to deal with the asbestos, to install a new furnace, etc. etc. etc. I'm in fact still trying to find someone to come pump out the fuel tank. On the other hand, the new gas furnace should be arriving with its entourage in about half an hour, and that's good, because we have space heaters and the house holds its heat remarkably well, all things considered, but the thermostat says 54 this morning, and I'm cold.

You will not be surprised to learn that we had four-cat bed-and-heater detente most of yesterday afternoon.

---

Short review of The Virtu, and ditto of Mélusine.

Review of The Virtu at myshelf.com.

A thoughtful review of Mélusine.

oldcharliebrown quotes the IROSF review of Clarkesworld Magazine 1.

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The Bone Key is available for preorder from Clarkesworld.

The Mirador, Chapter 16: 6,480 words

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We now reach the point in our programme where I have to rejigger the plot on account of having lost my head in the first draft and never gotten it back. (This is the most complicatedly plotty thing I have ever written. Note to self: Don't do that again.)

Fortunately for me, I have matociquala, who's not only willing to say, "Yanno, this doesn't make any sense," but also to listen while I wail and thrash, and to help me get it right. So I know, more or less, what needs to happen. Now I just have to write it.

Watch that first step. It's a doozy.

On the other hand, this is the climax, and it's this and the denoument, and then the draft is done. And I have my little list of things to correct (with more doubtless to come as mirrorthaw progresses through the draft), but I'm very close to the point where, if my editor called me tomorrow and said, "I need the ms. Right. Now." I could give it to her and not have a cataclysmic hissy fit about it, either. We're not there yet, but I can see it from where I stand.

(In other news: wax. Definitely wax. 100 year old wax, even. Tra la.)

The Mirador, Chapter 14: 4,016 words

Two artificial and unnecessary subplots axed, making this another very small chapter.

I think, if I'm doing the math right, that I've managed to cut the draft back down so that my word limit is no longer in dire peril. Which is good, and indicates that, yes, Part Two had a lot of deadwood.

---

matociquala and I have diametrically opposed reactions to the end stages of a book. She becomes a juggernaut; I become a squirrel in a cage, constantly looking for a way out and desperate for distractions.

So, yesterday, I started stripping the ugly slate-blue paint off our backstairs, something that I've only been wanting to do since we moved in two years ago.

Of course, under the first coat of ugly paint was another coat of ugly paint, and then another coat of ugly paint, and then some ugly munge-brown stuff that we think is probably primer. And then wood. Which seems to be a very pleasant reddish color. (I associate the color with cherrywood but I know absolutely fuck-all about house design of the early 20th century and even less about tress.) I spent a lot of yesterday afternoon ferociously menacing the top stair with a plastic paint scraper, and that's probably how I'm going to spend today as well. That ugly munge-brown stuff is a bitch to get off.

But I also spent a fair amount of time waiting for applications of paint stripper to dry, and while I was doing that, I finished Blood & Iron (which I can't quite count as a UBC, because of course I have read it, in several different drafts).

Entirely apart from my friendship with Bear, and even apart from my previous familiarity with Blood & Iron, I enjoyed this book tremendously. Because it's thoughtful and careful and uncompromisingly honest; because it says that war is stupid, even when it's necessary; because I love the way Bear imagines Faerie and its Queens and its complicated relationship to mythology and folklore and ballad and superstition--and Heaven and Hell. I admire it intensely for refusing to have Good Guys and Bad Guys, and for pointing out, patiently, that humans aren't on the top of the heap because we are noble and virtuous and pure of heart. Or because we somehow deserve it.

Americans have a very uneasy relationship with predators. Partly because we are predators; partly because we think we shouldn't be predators any longer; partly because our predatory nature is becoming increasingly removed from the actual business of hunting and killing animals weaker than ourselves. Oh, we still do it all the time, but we do it by proxy. In our day to day lives, we're predating metaphorically on each other, in the endless stupid competitions and games of oneupmanship that characterize politics and business and every other branch of human existence.

And partly because our romantic streak loves them, and our Puritan streak wants them exterminated.

One of the things fantasy can do is give the wilderness a voice. And one of the things Blood & Iron does is remind us that the standards we persist in applying to the wilderness are artificial and wrong and even more dangerous than the wilderness itself.