Technical Difficulties

1. My Storytellers Unplugged post for January, "Taking Another Tilt at the Windmill," is up. It's about fantasy, science fiction, and genre theory.

2. I was woken up this morning by a call from the sleep clinic. While the irony is bright and shiny and very pointed, I am glad to know my GP went ahead and made the referral, because I was going to have to call him today to tell him to do so. RLS is evil.

3. Gynecologist appointment also today, in which we agreed to try taking the Mirena out, and see what happens. (Taking it out was about 5 MILLION TIMES less painful than putting it in, so that was good.) The Mirena lessened my menstrual flow, but it made my periods MUCH too frequent, and it also randomized my menstrual cramps so that they became like drive-by stabbings. Double-plus ungood, thank you.

This is a new-to-me gynecologist, and I like her. She asked if I wanted to keep the Mirena. (I did.)

4. RT @pnh Elise, about to be Discharged, manifests as a Figure of Allegory and asserts Control over Time. http://yfrog.com/h7eieaj

5. It is snowing. Nevertheless, I plan to go to the pool in another hour or so.

6. ursulav is right on the money.

1. Happy birthday (yesterday) to coffeeem and to matociquala's Giant Ridiculous Dog!

2. My second Ellery Queen post is up at tor-dot-com, here.

3. Yesterday, heresluck and I braved the winterness of Wisconsin to go bookstore trolling. I picked up cmpriest's Boneshaker and Dreadnought to give as xmas gifts (having given h.l. our extra copy of Boneshaker--I am flinging the steampunk zombies far and wide this holiday season), and had excellent book-fu on my own account:

• Cohen, Patricia Cline. The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (I'm hoping this will be more the book I wanted The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers to be).
  
• Godbeer, Richard. The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England.
  
• Kater, Michael H. Hitler Youth.
  
• Sigmund, Anna Maria. Women of the Third Reich (not quite as exciting as if I'd found Jill Stephenson's Women in Nazi Germany, but still).

4. There's even more winter over in Minnesota.

5. When I was buying Boneshaker and Dreadnought, the owner of A Room of One's Own did a double-take at my check and said, "Are you Sarah Monette the science fiction writer?" And when I agreed that I was, she said, "Are they going to put your books out again? Because I get a lot of people asking about them." And I told her about the rights and my plan to find a small press, and she mentioned the TOTALLY INSANE prices The Virtu is going for on eBay, and so on.

I've had conversations like that with booksellers before, but they've always been in-genre (Dreamhaven, Larry Smith, etc.). So having the conversation again with someone who sells all kinds of books feels like, in the middle of a lot of discouragement about my career, a kind of encouraging milestone.

I have started blogging for Tor.com; I'll be doing book reviews, and also analyses of various things, like I've done over here in the past for Dorothy Sayers and Due South and the like. I'm starting with Ellery Queen (yes, building on some of the posts I've made here), and the first post is live over there.

Storytellers Unplugged for Augsut, "Verisimilitude. Plus a sestina," is live. And, yes, this is the sestina I wrote stoned on Tylenol 3. It may not be very good, but it's the best blank verse I've ever written.

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I'm sorry to have been confusing. There are, in fact, nine screws in my ankle. The one they didn't have to put in was the one that would have held the two bones of my ankle to each other. It's also the only one they would have had to go in and take out again, so it is a very good thing it wasn't necessary. But it's not the same as not having screws in at all.

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mirrorthaw, who is a Hero of the Revolution, helped me wash my hair this afternoon. I feel much more human, but also exhausted.

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The worst thing, bar none, about the broken ankle, is the involuntary twitching. Especially when I'm asleep, as it causes me to dream that I've missed a step on the stairs or fallen forward or something like that, so I wake up with both a bolt of agony and a burst of adrenaline. If I take my maximum dose of painkillers just before bed, I can knock myself far enough out that it doesn't happen (and, I should add, this was the doctor's suggestion, not something I made up for myself). I don't enjoy the Oxycodone hangover--and hopefully will be able to ease off over time--but it's worth it for being able to sleep.

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The ninjas are terrified of my crutches.

"Finding the Story in the Story" is up at Storytellers Unplugged.

"Fiction, History, and Tombstone" is up at Storytellers Unplugged.

85,000 words. 25,000 to go.

Outdoors, it is all snowpocalypse now.

My Storytellers Unplugged column for January, "Everyperson Blues," is here.

It's a Q&A post, and it's up.

1. My (rather pathetic) Storytellers Unplugged column for August is here.

2. WATERLOG (yesterday)
TIME: 41 min.
DISTANCE: 5 mi.
TOTAL DISTANCE: 258.1 mi.
DISTRACTION: The Dead Zone, "Enemy Mind"
SHIRE RECKONING: In thickets

3. This Dead Zone episode gets points for giving the girl agency. She has hard-earned knowledge that Johnny doesn't; she is an active participant in saving herself. My worst problem with the episode, which is purely my problem, is that the cougar is so beautiful I keep forgetting it's symbolically the bad guy.

4. Shift, Shift 2, Shift 3, and Shift 4 are flash games that make brilliant, and frequently fiendish, use of their medium.

5. I will have more to say about Anna Katharine Green when I've finished reading The Leavenworth Case, but if you're going to be near Milwaukee anytime before the twenty-third, I highly recommend the Milwaukee Art Museum's current exhibition, "American Originals," on Charles Rohlfs' furniture and the paintings of the Eight (Arthur B. Davies, William Glackens, Robert Henri, Ernest Lawson, George Luks, Maurice B. Prendergast, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan).

(Anna Katharine Green, whom I had heard of as the first American woman mystery writer, was Charles Rohlfs' wife; the exhibition and the accompanying book, The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs by Joseph Cunningham, are concerned to emphasize her collaboration with her husband, and the exhibition store made me very happy by having copies of one of Green's books: The Leavenworth Case, as mentioned above.)