Technical Difficulties

My spies, a.k.a. mirrorthaw, tell me that "Coyote Gets His Own Back" came in second in Apex Magazine's 2012 Story of the Year Readers Poll, behind tied-for-first-place Alethea Kontis and Katharine Duckett.

This has reminded me that I should make a post about the things I published in 2012. So here you go:

• "Blue Lace Agate" (Lightspeed Magazine 20)
  
• "Coyote Gets His Own Back" (Apex Magazine 38)
  
• "Extract from 'Horror in Pierre Lucerne: Suburbia, Alienation, and the Rejection of Community" (The Magazine of Speculative Poetry 9.2)
  
• "Hope Is Stronger Than Love" (Shadow Unit 4.03)
  
• "A Road That Has No Ending: Revenge in Sandman" (Chicks Dig Comics)
  
• "The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward" Part 1 & Part 2 (Drabblecast 254-55)

::emerges, blinking, from hole::

So things have been pretty hectic for me in the past couple of months. I've started a new job as a database thrall, and The Goblin Emperor should have been turned in September 1st but persists, hydra-like, in producing two new heads for every one I chop off.

There are all kinds of things that aren't getting the attention they deserve because of this (just ask Catzilla and the Plushie Ninja if you doubt me), but one thing I've failed ignominiously to do is to provide pointers to some things people who like my writing may be interested in.

(Marketing genius, ladies and gentlemen! as Peter Mulvey says.)

1. The compiled list of recommendations from #buyabiggaynovelforscottcardday is here.

2. Whedonistas, in which I along with a fuckton of awesome women have an essay, is available for the Kindle.

3. Back in the pre-The Tempering of Men-launch week, matociquala posted the first chapter. So, you know, if you haven't bought it yet or haven't heard that there's a sequel to A Companion to Wolves or something . . . it's still there.

(I am so bad at self-promotion, it is embarrassing.)

4. The ebooks of Shadow Unit Seasons 1-3 are available at Barnes & Noble (for the Nook) and Amazon (for the Kindle).

5. Just a note, because I should have said it here: "Absent from Felicity" will be included in Somewhere Beneath Those Waves, which I should also mention is, if you follow the link, available for pre-order.

Also, bonus item: the fabulous cover design for the new edition of The Bone Key. (Seriously. This is the best cover I have ever had. I am in love with it and want to give it chocolate.)

There. I think that does it.

::retreats back into hole::

Look! Look at the shiny-to-be!

1. matociquala has started a memorial thread for Ben on the Shadow Unit boards. Ben, as it happens, provided some verisimilitude for me when I was antiquing the script pages of "The Frogs" for one of our early DVD extras. Judge Crater, the British Shorthair of Robert X. Aguilera, the actor who plays Chaz Villette in the alternate reality where Shadow Unit can be found on television (did you follow that?), chewed on Beto's script, as Ben chewed on countless manuscripts of mine, plus magazines, bills, junk mail, newspapers, and paperback books.

I remember, the afternoon I was creating Beto's script, I went out into the dining room, where Ben was hanging out under the table. I offered him the script page. He rubbed his face on it once, twice, and then took that perfect chomp. (Much like the owl in the old Tootsie-Pop commercial.) Here, people, was a cat who hit his marks and knew his lines.

2. Smoothly, I segue: there is going to be a Ben Jonson Memorial Sale. I'll make a post probably later today to tell you when and what, but I'll say right now that all proceeds are going to go to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital's Companion Animal Fund, and I will have an option where you can donate even if you don't want or can't afford to buy anything. I will ask that, if you want to donate, you hold off until the sale: I'd like to present a whopping big donation in Ben's name.

3. Moving on to other animals (and thanks to @victoriajanssen for the link): Zooborns has an entry on Egyptian tortoises, which includes this charming video:


4. One more reason I loathe Wisconsin's new governor. (No, no segue. He doesn't deserve one.)

5. Finally, thank you to everyone who has offered sympathy and condolences. Losing Ben was and is really hard for me and mirrorthaw, and we appreciate your kindnesses more that I can find the words to say.

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.

Megan Arkenberg and cheloya, things for you are In The Mail.

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The con_or_bust auctions close Saturday, March 13, 2010 (11:59 p.m. Eastern). This includes (among a lot of other cool stuff) the auction for a signed hardback of The Virtu, in which the bidding has reached $65.

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Corambis will be out in paperback (according to Amazon) at the end of this month.

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Tomorrow, I'm doing a Friends of the NIU Libraries/Friends of DeKalb Public Library event. Info here. Also, yes, I will sign things after the discussion, and yes, I will sign things other than The Bone Key.

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Sunday, I'm leaving for a week in Arizona with matociquala, cristalia, stillsostrange, coffeeem, and willshetterly, which culminates in a Shadow Unit panel at the Tucson Festival of Books. I believe we're also doing a signing at the Mysterious Galaxy booth.

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Other planned appearances for 2010 include:

• Odyssey Con X, April 16-18
  
• Penguicon (unnumbered), April 30-May 2
  
• WisCon 34, May 27-31
  
• Fourth Street Fantasy Convention (also unnumbered), June 25-27
  
• World Fantasy Convention 36, October 28-31

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There's probably something else, but I forget what it is.

My inter-season episode, "On Faith," is live at Shadow Unit. It's a standalone story, so if you've been wanting to check out Shadow Unit, it might be a good place to start. And if you're already reading Shadow Unit, well, I hope you like it.

So between the insomnia and the anxiety dreams (all clothing related, for some bizarre reason I wot not of), I think we can conclude that I'm stressed about something. No, don't ask me what. I DON'T KNOW. But it means that my thought processes have gotten simultaneously weirder and slower, so I can sort of watch my brain work. Like the Glass Cat's.

So, as I have been for several years now, I am thinking about getting a tattoo. I almost got one at Fourth Street, but bailed on account of the tattoo artist not seeming to understand what I wanted. But I have a birthday coming up (my thirty-fifth, which seems sort of pseudo-significant), and I'm thinking about it again. (Parenthetically, if anyone in the Madison area has recommendations about tattoo artists, please please please comment or email or something.) One of the designs I have been considering, on and off, is Dyson Cieslewisc's rabbit (the left-hand rabbit), from "Dexterity," my episode of Shadow Unit. Different reasons than Dice, but, well. And the thought crossed my mind again this morning, for reasons I can no longer reconstruct. Which is where we join the stream of consciousness in progress:

Int.
GUILDENSTERN: It is a very cool rabbit.
ROSENCRANTZ: But it's wrong. Year of the Tiger, not Year of the Rabbit.
GUILDENSTERN: Tigers are cool, too. A tiger tattoo could be pretty awesome.
ROSENCRANTZ: Wait a second. That's the Chinese Zodiac. That's cultural appropriation.
GUILDENSTERN: Shit, that's right. We'll have to--
[crackle of static]
THE RADIO: "It's the eye of the tiger / It's the thrill of the fight"
ROSENCRANTZ: [moans] Oh no, no, no, no, no.
THE RADIO: "Standing up to the challenge of our rivals"

Ext.
[Truepenny comes into the study from the kitchen]
[Mirrorthaw takes off his headphones]
TRUEPENNY: My brain is cursed.
MIRRORTHAW: Cursed?
TRUEPENNY: I have the acoustic cover of "Eye of the Tiger"* stuck in my head, and if that isn't a curse, I don't know what is.
MIRRORTHAW: Can I change the station?
TRUEPENNY: I don't know how!
[Truepenny exits back to kitchen, singing "It's the eye of the tiger / it's the thrill of the fight"]
[Mirrorthaw resumes his headphones]

Int.
GUILDENSTERN: Turn it off!
ROSENCRANTZ: Where's the off-switch?
GUILDENSTERN: There is no fucking off-switch!
ROSENCRANTZ: [shouting at ceiling] STOP IT THIS INSTANT! STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT!
THE RADIO: [triumphantly] "EYEEEEEEEEEE ... of the tiger"
[pause]
[Rosencrantz & Guildenstern look around warily]
THE RADIO: "Won't you ease on down, ease on down the road?"
ROSENCRANTZ & GUILDENSTERN: [simultaneous facepalms]

Ext.
[enter Truepenny to the study again]
[Mirrorthaw takes off his headphones and waits]
TRUEPENNY: I have proof that I was IRRETRIEVABLY WARPED by junior high school chorus.
MIRRORTHAW: [looks alarmed]
TRUEPENNY: In my head, "Eye of the Tiger" segues immutably into "Ease On Down the Road." Because we did medleys. "Eye of the Tiger," "Ease On Down the Road."
MIRRORTHAW: Are you sure I can't change the channel? Where's the remote? Everything comes with a remote these days.
TRUEPENNY: Ah, but I was made before 1980.
MIRRORTHAW: Oh god that's right. There is no remote.
TRUEPENNY: Not even one with a cord.
MIRRORTHAW: Just push-buttons.
TRUEPENNY: Maybe some dials.
MIRRORTHAW: And I don't know where they are!

Int.
ROSENCRANTZ: [timidly] The rabbit's from a netsuke. Does that mean it's no good, either?
GUILDENSTERN: Dunno. There's always the labyrinth idea. Or the octopus. Or get somebody to design a sort of catfish-dragon thing.
ROSENCRANTZ: [ponders]
GUILDENSTERN: [ponders]
THE RADIO: "It's the eye of the tiger ..."


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*Mirrothaw found it somewhere, because The Internet Is Full Of Things.

standuponit is doing Down the Rabbit Hole Day so I don't have to. (Yes, that post is only the beginning.)

1. A follow-up from Phi Beta Kappa, concerned (they say) that they have not received a reply to their invitation to join the Anniversary Society.* I notice that it is not possible to reply (via the R.S.V.P. card they have so thoughtfully included) without agreeing to give them money. You may either say Yes, in which case you are ponying up at least $233 (233 years being the age of Phi Beta Kappa, which, hello to the twee), or you may say No, in which case you are still agreeing to contribute. (The lowest tier of supporting membership is $39.) There is nowhere to say, yes, I received your missive, however, I must regretfully decline your generous invitation to give you money. Which would be, dear Phi Beta Kappa, the reason I did not reply in the first place.

2. This month's Locus, including a positive review of Shadow Unit Season 1.

3. My contributor's copies of The Lone Star Stories Reader.

#2 & #3 balance out my irritation at #1. But honestly, I become less proud of my Phi Beta Kappa membership every damn time I hear from them.

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*The astute reader will deduce from this that they still think I'm my mom.