These are the events it looks like I'll be attending in 2010:

• a library event in DeKalb, IL, on March 3 (rarelylynne, is there a more descriptive way to put it?)
  
• The Second Annual Tucson Festival of Books, March 13-14
  
• 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

And I'll insert my usual disclaimer: I am very shy and very near-sighted, but that doesn't mean I don't want to talk to you! And I am always happy to sign things--as long as I'm not about to be late for a panel.

larksdream , you are a crazy person.  Attempted FavsG tonight and it is ridiculous.  Also: awesome.

This is a 5.9 that starts into the arch, so you go up a little, then horizontal to the ground, then up again.  At least in theory.  I wouldn't know about the "up again" bit.  By the end of the night, I was reliably achieving and sustaining the horizontal-to-the-ground bit, and then I'd go to bring a foot higher and grab the handhold that would let me start to go vertical again and then suddenly I'd be dangling with no idea how it happened--vertical, yes, and hands on, but feet nowhere near the wall.

But!  That horizontal bit!  Amazed me that I could get there at all, let alone sustain it for a more than a second or two.  It was very butch, insofar as anything can be very butch that's done while giggling madly, with one's ankle done up in hot pink Vetrap.  I loffed it.

re: the ubiquitous Tipsy Turvy, I fell again at the same place and tried a right foot match instead: left foot joining the right on the bigger foothold, right foot onto the tiny one, step out to the left.  Much better.  I surrender to the inevitable and will try that first on the next attempt.  (But I am not giving up on the hop.)

Also tackled bunch of other stuff, with varying but always interesting and/or amusing results, but I can't remember any of the details other than Crypt Ticket (got lost and made a hash of it, but no falling--just inelegant) and a first assault on Searchin' For Knubbin' (think I'll put that one in the rotation--good fun and hits the challenging-but-attainable sweet spot).

Probably done for the week, now, what with horse and emergency back-up horse tomorrow and Thursday and then we're into the weekend, but maybe will wander up for some bouldering at some point over the weekend.  Clearly I need more oomph for FavsG and pull-ups are boring, so.

(Whee!)

Can you find the cat in this picture?



Apparently, the Presumptuous Cat approves of the new addition to our nest. In other news, the Fearless Kitten met his first snow:



and the depredations of the smouse continue:



Now that's hubris. He also made a raid on my walnuts, the little bastard. Our cats are lazy layabout goldbricks.

I, on the other paw, am made of virtue. Today I went to the gym and the bakery, adhered to The Discipline, spent the entire remainder of the day working on a critique for stillsostrange (Why yes, I do have the draft of The Bone Palace, and why yes, it is made of awesome.), and then took the garbage out and came upstairs and made my bed and cleaned my bedroom. With my girly new pink-and-purple wool blanket.

The downstairs is a pile, the office is a pit, the Christmas tree needs to come down, the bathroom is all but invisible under the mildew, and the kitchen is an indistinguishable heap of winter coats and surface clutter... but my bedroom is clean!

And now I am going to finish reading Amanda's manuscript. I was going to watch Mythbusters and Hustle tonight, but this is better.

I have neglected thoroughly to blog the movies I've been watching, so to get back into that habit I will start with the oldest of the batch: Z, the political "thriller" (more like a tearfully angry love-letter) directed by Costa Gavras in 1969. Although it takes place in French (and was filmed, it turns out, in Algiers), it's based on true events of the early-mid 60s in Greece. Which is important, as I do not think the letter Z means anything in French except a letter in the alphabet, but in Greek, it's code for he lives.

He being a doctor and political activist struck down in the middle of a protest, his murder tidily whisked away by city and military officials despite the obviousness of the low-grade conspiracy behind it. The action of the movie is the slow movement of the investigatory magistrate, a strait-laced fellow in nerdy square glasses. As the film goes on you realize that he doesn't have a horse in any particular political race; he's just one of those stubborn, factual types who look harder the more you tell them there's nothing to look for. And, I mean, the conspiracy he has to unravel is laughably porous, sustained more by status quo than any particular anti-communist ardor.

It's funny, watching this movie 40 years later. The radicals all wear prim suits (they're all men), and their position against nuclear weapons being parked in their back yard doesn't exactly sound radical. They're earnest, serious, ardently legal, constantly negotiating with the authorities they know despise them. You do see some long-haired student hippie types in the crowd shots, but they're marginal. The witnesses who come forward are a garrulous coffin-maker, an ambitious reporter, ordinary people from the working-class neighborhood who saw and heard the conspirators blabbing to everybody on the planet what they were going to do. The machine has always been there, and always been tolerated, but murder turns out to be beyond the pale.

So it's sort of a naive story: did that military-political machine never murder anyone before? Really? The intimidation tactics are that believable mixture of terrifying and buffoonish, but the terror seems always to inflame, never to silence. The film takes righteous pleasure in the pressing of charges, working its way up the military hierarchy in repetitive one-on-one scenes in the magistrate's office, as the soldiers' protestations of honor become more indignant and more flamboyant and more obviously untrue. But even as I watched I was like, Really? You think anything's going to come out of that?

And indeed, nothing came of it. The film is much more brutal in its final five minutes, as it details the deaths of witnesses and the dearth of justice and finally the coup of 1967 that ushered in 7 years of military junta and hysterical authoritarianism. The movie didn't quite have the nerve or the desire to show how authority flexes its muscle directly, and didn't spend any time at all on the ease with which people conform unthinkingly to authority's barked orders. It's not that kind of film, I guess. It's an accusatory finger of a movie.

Which is to say, it's also very exciting, fast-paced (for a movie from 1969), filmed with verve. It reminded me a bit of the original Manchurian Candidate, that active, firm camera and deep focus. It's a movie you could not make today: too many conspiracy theories have been proved true, and anyway the conspiracies have gotten much more professional. But in its own time, I bet Z was refreshing and frightening and like hearing something important said out loud for the first time.

In the interests of learning something new, I'm taking the IAP mini-class on Perl programming. My first impression matches the old classic, "You shoot yourself in the foot, but nobody can understand how you did it. Six months later, neither can you." Even so, I think this will be fun (despite how serious people are about this language).

Also, I'm surprised by how few of the 20 or so attendees have ever written shell scripts. Kids these days...

--continues to fall. It's been falling nonstop, at varying rates, for at least a week around here (so long I can't remember quite when it started). I think it began to get steady a few days after Christmas. Anyhoo, there it is and according to the weather, it won't really stop--I mean _really_ stop--for at least 5-8 more days.

We're been accumulating 2-4 inches a day. It's over 14" now, but it's very fluffy (Temps in the teens or lower) and packing itself down as it falls; our accumulation is low compared to areas east and west of Rochester; a town called Marion weighed in with nearly 3 ft, according to this morning's newspaper. The streets are fair to middling; main streets are generally fine.

I know. We are pikers compared to back in Mass. My sympathies. But I really do wish it would actually stop for a little while.

Work--well, not as much as I'd like to have done, but I have got the stacks sorted out and a priority list updated. I owe a bunch of reviews; story of my life. Still haven't locked in that hour for fiction. MUST do this. Have an article to proof, another to finish the research on and write, and pitches to get out. I sorted out a batch of ticklers for that last weekend, so those are also started.

And I promised urchin that we would make some more pita bread. But now it's time to grab my boots and get outside to meet the bus.

Excelsior!

yuki_onna has a good, chewy post about Realms of Fantasy's plan for an All Women-Authors Issue. What she says about it, of course, goes for any minority group: women*, African-Americans, GLBT writers, writers with disabilities, etc. etc. etc. I think there's a point in the process of opening a genre where the Very Special Episode Issue is a good thing, when what you're saying with it is, HEY! There are enough [women/African-Americans/GLBT writers/writers with disabilities/etc.] doing excellent work in our field to fill A WHOLE ISSUE! Maybe we should all be PAYING ATTENTION!

But, returning to the specific circumstances, that's really not where women SF writers are anymore, and hasn't been for, jeez, thirty years. Because, seriously, a whole issue of Realms of Fantasy (or any other magazine) is, what? Six stories? Seven stories? Ten if they're small? I guarantee you there are more than ten women writers doing excellent work in sffh. As Cat says, a Very Special Issue is tokenism. (It also suggests, subliminally, that women writers are fragile flowers and can't compete with men head-to-head, that our stories wouldn't be good enough to fill a whole issue without this special enclave, like we're a rare species of owl or something.) It neither causes nor promises fundamental change in the way a magazine is run or the way an editor makes decisions.

I should say here that I don't know what the motivations are at RoF. For all I know, this is a sincere attempt to cut through the male-dominated bullshit and champion the cause of feminism and women writers. And it's a very attention-getting way of doing it. I'm just not sure it's the best way.

[ETA: as jimhines kindly points out, Douglas Cohen explains some of the editorial thinking in the second comment to the announcement.]

---
*Not, of course, that women are a numerical minority. Tra la.

Going to get my crazy pills adjusted today. I've actually tried to stop using the word "crazy" on Twitter because I know there are people on my tweetstream who feel it is an "ableist" word and are hurt by it. I may or may not agree -- I consider myself fairly crazy at this point, and the word doesn't particularly hurt or offend me; nor does the word "lame," though it undeniably applies to me. Twitter, though, is more or less a conversation or series of conversations. In conversation, I think it is reasonable to avoid language that you know hurts people. So what if I'm not hurt by "crazy" or "lame"? That doesn't negate Jane Deaux's pain, and I'm tired of seeing people blow off genuine pain as "insistence on political correctness." I retweeted a good quote once, and I can't remember it exactly, but the gist was Why should I have to explain precisely how the knife you stuck in my back is hurting me before I can convince you to take it out?

There's no need to hurt people if you can easily avoid it. So many people online seem to ignore or gleefully defy that. But this journal is my place, my online living room if you will, and here I'll call myself crazy and lame if I like.

http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-bsc-review-column-scourge-of-sci-fi.html

In the uptown district of Literature and the midtown district of Mainstream, so the story goes, the high-brow and the mid-brow all turn their noses up when they glance downtown, in the direction of Genre. Fairy tales for children, they sneer. On the door of the Bistro de Critique there was for a good many years a sign that read, “No Genre allowed.” The nearest they ever got to a genre label is

Cally._) THAIS. Nay, no more! PHAED. No more?--O Thais, Thais, would to
Heaven Our loves were parallel, that things like these Might torture
you, as this has tortur'd me: Or that your actions were indifferent to
me! THAIS. Grieve not, I beg, my love, my Phaedria! Not that I lov'd
another more, I did this. But I by circumstance was forc'd to do it.
PAR. So then, it seems, for very love, poor soul, You shut the door in
's teeth. THAIS. Ah Parmeno! Is't thus you deal with me? Go to!--But
hear Why I did call you hither? PHAED. Be it so. THAIS. But tell me
first, can yon slave hold his peace? PAM. I? oh most faithfully: But
hark ye, madam! On this condition do I bind my faith: The truths I hear,
I will conceal; whate'er Is false, or vain, or feign'd, I'll publish it.
I'm full of chinks, and run through here and there: So if you claim my
secrecy, speak truth. THAIS. My mother was a Samian, liv'd at Rhodes.
PAR. This sleeps in silence. (_Archly._) THAIS. There a certain merchant
Made her a present of a little girl, Stol'n hence from Attica. PHAED. A
citizen? THAIS. I think so, but we can not tell for certain. Her
father's and her mother's name she told Herself; her country and the
other marks Of her original, she [DO NOT CLICK. JUST ENTER url IN YOUR BROWSER]

Am I the only one left that hasn't seen Avatar yet? The film just crossed the point of grossing $2 billion. That's a lot of dollars. I mean, I already saw this flick back in the day:


Does that count?

Actually, despite all the GO SEE IT reviews and recommendations towards Avatar, I'm still not interested in it. Especially not in 3D. 3D is the devil's juice. Whenever I see a trailer for Avatar, bad flashes of furry comics burn behind my eyes, and the characters seem so cardboard cutout. And this is just from the trailer alone. I suspect the military commando is a tough guy that talks in a tough voice and prepares the troop for the worst missing of their lives. I bet Sig Weaver's character speaks some doctor-like mumbo jumbo that if actually thought about would be problematic for the plot. I bet the blue furry people are foreign things, but lovable once our main hidden hero gets to know them. Yes, I'm judging the movie before ever seeing it, but unfortunately it's pretty easy to figure out.

And I'm a big fan of the 1980s films. Weird Science, Blade Runner, Back to the Future, and all that. CGI and special effects really do nothing for me. They can be nice and worthy of an oooh or ahhh, but it's just dressing for a salad. As of late, Children of Men knew how to use it effectively and sparingly, keeping it mostly to the background. Here, it seems to be what Avatar is all about. Well, story is much more important, and from what I can tell, the quest for unobtainium (sigh) does not sound like the deepest grave ever dug.

I don't know. I already saw FernGully: The Last Rainforest and Dances With Wolves. I'm not interested in revisiting them any time soon, I guess.

Dearest readers, I hope the new year has been treating you well! Myself, I've been taken up in a whirlwind of activity, because that is my new years resolution: to consort with the elements.

THEREFORE: I am ready to take blacksmithing commissions!

If you know anyone who wants a forged gate, railing, fence, table, chair, lamp, wall sconce, or stand-alone sculpture or anything else wacky, please connect them to me. We can chat over the phone or in person. I can draw a picture. You can give me a budget, and I can tell you if it's realistic or not.

I'm very excited to take work. I have access to a shop in Amherst.

jlefton at gmail is the best e-mail.

This cold weather is killing me.

Okay, okay. Not so much killing me as it is making my bones hurt.

(Bonus points to you if you can tell me where the saying in my subject line came from. And no cheating!)

Your Tuesday moment of zen.



Me as Santa Claus, circa 1988. Photographer unknown.

Best Fantasy Story of 2009 Poll and Contest — Fantasy magazine with a poll. I note immodestly that I have a story in this poll, "People of Leaf and Branch".

What Could Have Been Entering the Public Domain on January 1, 2010? — (Scott Edelman via scarlettina.)

calendula_witch with some more photos of my scars (and tattoo) — Slightly NSFW.

Smile! You've got cancer — Barbara Ehernreich on cancer and the tyranny of positive thinking. (Thanks to danjite.) Per my brother, see also this related piece in The Economist.

Looking Into the Past — A cool site restaging photos. (Thanks to willyumtx.)

The Future of Human Spaceflight — Are astronauts close to extinction?.

The Year of the Assassin — A leftie semirant which I found pretty interesting. Lots of comments on the American attitude toward war, including this gem: if we are no nation of warriors, from the point of view of the rest of the world we are certainly the planet’s foremost war-makers.

American Evangelicals and the Ugandan anti-gay hate law — You really are responsible for the consequences of your beliefs, people.

?otD: Are you a rocketman?

---

1/5/2009
Body movement: 30 minute ride on stationary bike
Hours slept: 5.5
This morning's weigh-in: 229.2 (!)
Currently reading: (between books)

Happy Birthday to my sweetie, even tho' he doesn't read my LJ.

My cold has lingered for THREE weeks, and I've been dragging myself around, trying to meet all my responsibilities, so I've not had a lot of time or energy to update here.

But ceciliatan just pointed out a neat new award accepting nominations here on LJ that I wanted to share:

Crowdfunded Creativity: Connecting Creators and Patrons of the Arts
http://community.livejournal.com/crowdfunding/151736.html

I nominated Cecilia's project Daron's Guitar Chronicles and Digger by Ursula Vernon.

Maybe there's something out there that you'd like to nominate? Or perhaps you'd rather watch for an opportunity to vote? Or check out the links. Some really good stuff there.

Dear Better Off Ted:

I just want to start off by saying that you mean a lot to me, and I really value the time I spend with you, which is why I feel like it's important to be honest with you. I know it seems like we just got engaged yesterday, and I don't want to sound defensive, but I hope you didn't think this was an exclusive relationship--it doesn't mean I love you any less, unless a writer get fired or Psych comes back on air. You know I need to see other shows sometimes, and well, I've started seeing someone new.

I met White Collar at my mom's house, over Xmas and I didn't really think anything would come of it. It was just in passing, during the commercial breaks for an SVU marathon, but I looked him up when i got back here, and we hung out tonight, and well, we just really clicked. I know it's sudden, and I don't know what the future holds for us--hell, I don't even know if he'll get a second season.

I'm not trying to end our relationship, but for now, I'd just like the opportunity to spend a little time getting to know hime. I know it sounds shallow, but I'm just a sucker for a cute star, some clever dialog, and a caper plot. If I had more time to spend with him--say, 6 episodes, before his season starts up again--it would give me the chance to see how this thing could work out between us. You know my love for you is eternal and untainted by commercialism, but if I miss my chance with him, the way i missed my chance with the Middleman, well I'll just never forgive myself.

I hope I'll see you at our usual place this week, but I'll understand if you need to take some time to come to terms with this, so I won't take your silence personally.

Love, Me

Award season is upon us again!

Nominations are open for the Stokers (until January 15), the Aurora Awards, the Hugos, the Nebula Awards, and the Rhysling Awards. We at Ideomancer are hoping you'll consider pieces published in our 2009 issues for any or all of these, but more importantly, we're hoping you're getting out to nominate, discuss, and vote for these awards. Aside from a chance to give each other shiny prizes, the award circuit's a great chance for readers, writers, and fans of the genre to really just wave the flag for the poems and stories they loved in the past year, and that's always a worthwhile endeavour.

Thanks, and happy nominating!

I don't know if you know this or not... but people in Hawaii know how to blow shit up. Big time. New Years eve was one long stuttering explosion of legal (and illegal) explosive devices.

This is me celebrating the end of the "naughts." Goodbye -- but never forget those 10 terrible years.

Kilo side... a few days back.