Technical Difficulties

1. Not to be gross, but the snotbergs in my head are calving.

2. Milo <3 June

3. Since a couple people have asked, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves is a short story collection. It will be published by Prime in November, and will collect all the non-Booth stories I've published up until 2010. (I.e., "After the Dragon" will be in it; "The Devil in Gaylord's Creek" will not.)

4. There is no number four.

5. Bat-eared fox kits! They're going to grow up to look like this, so you can see that it takes a while after birth before the ears deploy. In honor of my love for critters who can use their ears for drag chutes, have some more pictures. (Plus a bonus fennec fox.)

I am sick, stressed, and full of snot (also, alliterative), but this video of red pandas in the snow makes me feel better about pretty much everything ever.

Around the interwebs:

• Via maryrobinette, there are some Icelandic horses in Zillah, Washington, in desperate need of rescue.
  
• John Scalzi has some rational things to say about last night's elections. I personally feel that if my county could secede from Wisconsin, we could elect Russ Feingold our Grand High Panjandrum, and that would be excellent.
  
• jimhines, awesome as always, is posting about sexual harassment at conventions.
  
• Today's moment of zen from jaylake was pretty much exactly what I needed. See above re: election.
  
• And, as another corrective to the general fucknuttedness of humanity these days, Apex Magazine's special Arab/Muslim issue is online.
  

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Short version of last night: the legs were fine, but the respiratory system was awful. Curse you, con crud.

Today I need to run--well, walk--errands, including paying the cat sitter and picking up a couple of prescriptions. This has the added advantage of providing at least some of the daily exercise I need. Since one of my goals, aside from staying off the narcotics, is to decrease the amount of Requip I'm taking (and hopefully escape its unpleasant side-effects--nothing like a little nausea just before bed), daily exercise is transitioning from a should to a must. Which, on the one hand, does provide motivation to stay fit, which is a plus. On the other, I hate being told what to do, even by my own body.

Still not able to drive, which is frustrating (cats need to go to various vets, I need to get back to riding, etc. etc. etc.), but I flinch just thinking about having to stomp on the brakes, so it's clearly not time yet.

On the career side, I can tell you that The Goblin Emperor is tentatively scheduled for Spring 2012, although obviously this is still mostly vaporware, and I'll have a short story collection coming out from Prime in November 2011, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves. (Don't worry, I'll be posting about that again--and probably again and again--closer to the publication date.)

Also, at WFC I got my contributor's copies of The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2010, edited by Paula Guran, which includes the Booth story, "White Charles." (I would offer you a link, but Prime's website is currently not cooperating.)

So, taken all and all and despite the con crud, I'm doing okay.

1. This is now quite possibly my favorite ad of all time.

2. John Scalzi has declared this International Grover Appreciation Day. Personally, my heart belongs to Mr. Snuffleupagus.

3. I'm finally starting to feel better. I still clearly have a cold, but I don't feel like I'm devolving into some horrible crawling mucus-monster anymore. We're gonna count that as a win.

4. It's snowing.

5. This is going to sound flip, but I swear it's a serious question. Do you ever have days where you get up and look at your current project and think, What the fuck IS this shit? Who in their right mind is ever going to take this seriously?

I'm sure this question applies to all fiction--and, in fact, all projects--but I mean it specifically in terms of the sfnal or fantastic element. Because the telepathic dire wolves got me that way this morning. And, obviously, there's already been one book published about the telepathic dire wolves and people have not fallen over themselves laughing at it, so this isn't like a rational or legitimate concern--which is why I'm asking: does this happen to anyone else?

The list I'm looking at is:

1. Elegy for a Demon Lover*
2. National Geographic on Assignment: Mermaids of the Old West
3. Sidhe Tigers
4. The Yellow Dressing Gown

That's a total of 9,055 words; to round it out, I'm adding:

5. Darkness, as a Bride

So you'll be getting 10,250 words of spoken fiction from me: two Booth stories, two Artist's Challenge pieces, and a fifth story about monsters and love.

When you'll get it is another question. At the moment, I have a cold; I'm hoarse and coughing, which is no state to do a podcast in. So, you know, I'll do it as soon as I can, but don't wait underwater.

Also, a question: would people prefer I do one podcast with all five pieces, or five individual podcasts?

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*33 votes--the clear winner

I have a head cold, which I am blaming for the following weirdness.

mirrorthaw put in Peter Gabriel's greatest hits album, Hit, this evening, and as I always do when I hear it, I thought, "Man, 'Solsbury Hill' so has a story in it." But this time, the other songs ganged up and gave me one.* It's a YA sf semi-dystopian thriller/romance/bildungsroman (reluctant psychics! teenage soldiers! true love!), and my question to you is:

[Poll #1476892]

Of course, I reserve the right to ignore the poll results completely, but I'm curious.

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*For the record, the playlist is:

"Jeux sans frontiers"
"Shock the Monkey"
"More than This"
"Solsbury Hill"
"Burn You Up, Burn You Down"
"Digging in the Dirt"
"Growing Up"
"Don't Give Up"
"Sledgehammer"
"More than This" (reprise)

This may become a Continuing Series, as I am, in fact, still sick. However.

Yoe, Craig. Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2009.

( cut tag behind which there is a slight rant )

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And now, just to give you whiplash:

Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England. 1944. Revised and expanded. New York: Harper Torchbooks-Harper & Row, 1966.

This is a low-key book, sympathetic to its subject matter as many books about the Puritans are not. I found it useful for explanations of a number of things about the Puritans' conception of the family which I had not known (matociquala tells me this is because I didn't grow up in New England); it dovetailed nicely with Entertaining Satan in clarifying certain aspects of Puritan communities.

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Starkey, Marion L. The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials. 1949. New York: Anchor Books-Doubleday, 1989.

Although I don't agree with Starkey on many points, The Devil in Massachusetts makes a good point at which to begin one's reading about Salem. It is interested in forming a narrative of the witch trials, which means that it is clear and easy to read and compelling in ways that, for instance, Salem Possessed is not.

That said, I do disagree with Starkey, and if you begin with The Devil in Massachusetts, you would be ill-advised to end there. Starkey forthrightly blames the afflicted girls, and she does so with a misogyny that I find distinctly repellent. Moreover, making a narrative out of history inevitably warps the history around the narrative and encourages the selection/creation of heroes and villains.

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Allert, Tillman. The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture. 2005. Transl. Jefferson Chase. New York: Picador-Henry Holt & Co., 2008.

This was one of those frustrating books that I agreed with but was not convinced by. Which is to say, I completely agree with Allert's thesis that the Hitler salute both reveals several very important things about Nazi culture and was (a very small) part of the formation of the culture of indifference in Germany which (again in part) allowed the Holocaust to happen, but Allert never showed me the links between his evidence and his ideas in such a way that I really believed him.

His evidence is fascinating. It includes Hitler figurines with movable right arms; illustrations for Sleeping Beauty in which the prince salutes Beauty as he wakes her; pictures of vacationers saluting a sand-portrait of Hitler, of a vaudeville performer teaching his chimpanzee the salute, of Richard Strauss caught in a moment of miserable ambivalence. He has wonderful anecdotal evidence of how the salute permeated German life. And I think he could have done a good deal more with why the Nazis imposed their salute on Germany (I found myself thinking about that more than once while reading The Psychopathic God [see below]). But he never manages to persuade me that his evidence connects to his abstract and abstruse sociological theories about the meaning of greetings.

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Vinogradov, V. K., Pogonyi, J. F., and N. V. Teptzov. Hitler's Death: Russia's Last Great Secret from the Files of the KGB. London: Chaucer Press, 2005.

This is a collection of primary source material from the Russian investigation into Hitler's death, including the reports from the soldiers who found the bodies and reports of the interrogations of various witnesses. I found it almost more interesting for the insights into the Red Army's bureaucracy than for its ostensible subject matter.

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Waite, Robert G. L. The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. 1977. New York: Da Capo Press, 1993.

This book has the defects of its virtues and vice versa. It is also very definitely a product of its times, as Waite's careful, literal, by-the-book Freudian psychoanalysis shows. I don't think anything he says about Hitler's childhood can be trusted (except that, yeah, the household of Alois Hitler was seriously weird), whether it's his speculations about the "primal scene" he thinks Hitler witnessed or his speculations about Hitler's monorchism or his putatively Jewish grandfather or any of the rest of it (including the coprophilia). Freud is least useful when you take him literally. But Waite's analysis of the adult Hitler I found very enlightening, in particular his [Waite's] patient refutation of Hitler's lies about his years in Vienna and the connections he makes between Hitler's private neuroses and his public performances.

DO NOT WANT.

The same applies to the house centipede lurking along the ceiling in the bedroom. Also to the doctor's appointment I have this afternoon. (Which is unrelated to the con crud. Checkup, Annual: see above re: Boring Health Problems.)

Therefore, if you have something good or interesting or fun you want to tell me about (this includes general burbling about Fourth Street, if a person felt like it), the comments to this post would be a superlatively appropriate place.



And I found something interesting on my own even! A nifty article about the intelligence of octopuses, via jaylake.

Also, dd_b's snapshots of Fourth Street.