Kids from my old college just started this semester's game of HvZ (Humans versus Zombies). Apparently the Patient Zero has some training as a circus acrobat, and his attacks involve cartwheels and jumping into/out of trees. Sight-unseen, I think I love this kid.

I've got a shortened weekend this time around, but I'm getting a 3-day weekend plus systemcrasher next week, which is a more than fair trade. One of my cousins has a house out on Cape Cod and has kindly let us borrow it for the weekend, so we're going to go up there and play house and write and probably do a lot of cooking.

I'm also going to have at least a full week off in January (if I take it the first week of January, it'll be 11 days) and we're trying to figure out what we're doing & where we're staying. We originally wanted to go up to Montreal for at least part, but that might be too expensive, especially if my finances post-February are still undecided. (If I have a definite offer with a definite start date, I'd probably be willing to dip into my savings account a bit.)

Frankly, 11 days of hotel bills are going to be expensive no matter where we go. Best case scenario is that the Cape Cod house will be open for all or part of that week, and we like it enough to stay there again. (Or that another friend or family member randomly has an unoccupied apartment or house somewhere in eastern Massachusetts that they'll let us live in for a bit.)

On Facebook, a student from my alma mater wrote: "Well that's the main reason to become an academic, so you can eat kittens."

The following comments ensued:

"Eating Kittens is Gross!": The Exploration of the Sense of Pet Ownership in Modern American Society

"You Don't Even Know It's Cat If It's Fried": Ethical Arguments for the Consumption of the Abundant Food Source Known as Kittens.

Worldwide Hunger: A Solvable CATastrophe.

The Cat's Out of the Bag: A Study and Measure of Feline Intelligence by Means of Escaping from Enclosed Spaces

Kitty Food: A Personal Anthropological Case Study of Serving Kittens to Friends Before Telling Them What It Is.

Catch as Cat Can: Advanced Kitten Trapping as a Wilderness Survival Technique

"Essentializing Kittens: How To Eat Them By Ignoring Their Cute Aspects and Focusing on the Tastiness Inherent in Them as Subjects"

Cat's Got Your Tongue: A Full History of People Feeding Kittens to People Who Don't Suspect it in Medieval European Folklore

Nine Lives?: Impact of Digestion on Feline Reincarnation

Like a Kitten: Religious Symbolism of Kitten Eating in the Music of Madonna

Jean CLAWED Van Damme: An Exploration of the Portrayal of the Feline in Modern American Films

Schrodinger's Barbecue: a Collection of Quantum Physics Recipes

Cat's Got Your Tongue: Not If You Eat Its First

Mixed Blessing: Generational Effects of Interfaith Kitten Eating in American Households

Eliminating The Object-Subject Divide In Human-Kitten Relations, Or, Deconstructing Kittens through Mastication

CATch-22: An Exploration of How to Eat a Kitten, and Pet it too

A Clear and Feline Thought: Analysis of Descartes' Meditations on Kitten Eating

Aspects of Feline Acquisition in Modern American Society

"If You Want to Sing Out, Eat Cats": Cannibalism in the Music of Cat Stevens

Abra-cat-dabra: The Magic of Feline Disappearance in Culinary Technique

Language and Feline Consumption: An Exploration of the Pragmatics of Labeling Food with Terms of Endearment

Do or Do Not: Buddhist Perceptions of the Role of Free Will in Cat Consumption

Real Buddhism: Cats Have No Greater Worth Than Any Other Thing or Animal, So Eat Them (But Don't Kill Them)

Kittens Are Tasty: Speaking Truth to Power on Taboo Foodstuffs

CATatonic: A Revelation & Awakening of the Dormant Urge to Consume Kittens in Modern American Society

Production Confronts Cat-sumption: Pet Perception and Social Conflicts in the Ocatober Revolution

Feline Unity: A Study of the Reactionary Literature Against Kitten Consumption Produced by Women Who Hoard Cats.



No, I don't know either. But it made me almost as happy as "Swift & Lovett's Daycare & Pie Emporium", which my sister intends to open one day.

Even better than Friday, it's a payday Friday. Which means I get to pay my student loan and have an Evening Out. Hartford Community Dance is holding a swing dance night in West Hartford, so I'm going to that this evening. Before that, I'm probably going to go to Barnes & Noble and just lie on the floor and inhale the scent of books. And before that, of course, is work.

( Meme, from <lj user= )

If you want to do this meme, feel free to comment! But between my Evening Out and going down to New Jersey to see my grandmother tomorrow, I'm not going to have reliable computer access until mid-Monday. So you may have to wait a couple of days.

Dear LiveJournal, a question for you all.

So, in the world, there exist:
1) potato pancakes, or latkes
2) pancakes
3) waffles
4) sweet potato waffles (entirely like the aforementioned waffles, except they're orangeish in color & slightly sweet, even before the addition of maple syrup)


Now, you are confronted with a box that says "sweet potato pancake mix". Is this:
a) latke mix, using sweet potatoes instead of regular potatoes
b) traditional breakfast pancakes, the way the sweet potato waffles are more or less traditional waffles


(For the purposes of this exercise, you've been living in a reform Jewish household for at least 15 of the past 25 years. You are perfectly familiar with the existence of both latkes & sweet potato waffles.)

The street where I grew up was not a good spot for trick-or-treating -- it's a steep curvy road up a hill, with a major throughway at the bottom and no streetlights or sidewalks. (On summer nights, we used to sit out on the lawn and listen to cars screeching up the hill, then crashing on the hairpin curve just below our driveway.) All the houses are set far back from the road. My parents bought Halloween candy "for the trick-or-treaters", but it was generally understood that no one had ever come, or would ever come.

Instead, my sister & I went trick-or-treating in our friends' neighborhoods, which were generally much more kid-friendly. And when we got home, we'd dump all our candy out and then trade anything we didn't like with our parents, who would give us some of the house candy in return.

It was a very good system.

God, I'm loving only working 40 hours a week. I kind of wonder now why I was so frothingly excited about 60 hour weeks. I got to sleep in till 8 this morning, and write, and go for a walk, and catch up on all the log notes for work, and do laundry, and I will probably still have time to watch Alias. And tomorrow I get to do it again. You have no idea how exciting this is.

Also, I read Death is A Lonely Business at work last week, and was bowled over at how beautifully Ray Bradbury writes. His prose is really forceful, not flowery at all, (but still beautiful) and I think I only remembered the force and not the elegance that slides along with it.

Am kind of still in the "violently antithetical to talking about/showing my own writing" phase, but I miss writers, miss connection. So: what are YOU working on, writers-reading-this?

(That reminds me, I need to read & critique Mary's story that she sent, uh, three weeks ago. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow.)

Yesterday at the movie theatre, I saw a small boy in a surcoat gravely inform one of the ushers that he had just come from a ren faire, where he was knighted by the King. It was an excellent moment in an otherwise negligible day.


But today is shaping up pretty well: rain outside, so I spent the morning curled up in my armchair listening to Einaudi and reading The Great Arab Conquest. I'm hoping to get around to some cranberry muffins & watching Alias "with" systemcrasher later.

"It wasn't cold there, but it made me shiver. There was light, but pale thin light, like the kind you get early in the morning or on overcast days. It came from everywhere and nowhere -- no sun, or stars, or moon. In fact I can't even tell you what the sky looked like, even though I know I looked up at it twice -- once to see the hole I'd fallen through, and again because I couldn't believe my own eyes. But what I saw there, I don't know anymore. That memory was one of the things I left in Xibalba."

Argh. I'm really sick of people hating on "write what you know."

Just for the record:

"Write what you know" does not mean "do not write about alternate time periods, fantastical elements, other cultures or characters who live different lives than you." It does not mean "only write about things you've personally experienced."

"Write what you know" means two things:
1. Your life is material. Use it.

2. If you're writing about something you haven't personally experienced, for God's sake, put some research and thought into it.

On Saturday, I worked a bit at one of the group homes. The other staff that night used to work a lot in one of the other group homes, and she told me this story:

One of the guys at the group home is a very irritable older guy who doesn't like loud noises, or surprises, or changes in his routine. But they had to run a fire drill every month, and one month it fell on his birthday.

So the staff waited until this guy wasn't in the middle of doing anything, and then they pulled the alarm. And to their surprise, this guy just goes right out without arguing or getting angry.

Outside, he walks over to my co-worker. "Montana," he says (her nickname at this house is Hannah Montana, because she is blonde and sings Disney songs enthusiastically without much regard for being in tune), "That was not very nice. But. It's my birthday. I am not getting angry on my birthday."

Ok, cool. So everyone's going out to an activity, and they all get in the van. As they're driving there, the guy's housemates get louder and louder. And he's sitting in the middle, scowling and clenching his fists, and saying over and over, "It's my birthday, Montana. I am not getting angry on my birthday." Clearly, he's getting angry, but he is so determined not to let it get the better of him, not on his birthday, and it doesn't despite the universe pushing his buttons.

"And after that," my coworker added, "I wanted to work on his birthday EVERY year."

---

It is, more often than not, not my birthday. But recently I've become painfully (obsessively) aware of my own mortality. And some days -- like today -- I just feel like walking up to God and going, "That was not very nice, Montana. But this is my day, one of the few days I get, and I am NOT getting angry."

I am trying to read a (terribly structured, rambling) book on Chaucer, and there's something very beautiful in the syntax of Chaucer's English:

"We han wel known how many grete heroes and destructions were idoon by the Emperor Nero. He leet brennen the cite of Rome, and made sleen the senatours; and he cruel whilom sloughe his mother, and he was maked moist with the blood of his moder (that is to seyn, he leet sleen and slitte the body of his moder to seen where he was conceyved, and he looked on every halve upon her cold deede body, he no teer wette his face but he was so hardhearted that he might been domesman or judge of hir deade beaute."

It reminds me a little bit of modern Caribbean dialects, but damned if I know why.


(And then, looking on Chaucer's wiki page, I found this gem:
"In Rudyard Kipling's story 'Dayspring Mishandled', a writer plans an elaborate revenge on a former friend, a Chaucer expert, who has insulted the woman he loves, by fabricating a 'mediaeval' manuscript sheet containing an alleged fragment of a lost Canterbury Tale (actually his own composition)." Hee hee hee!)

Various groups of friends have mentioned delicious baking projects today, making me both hungry and envious. But I've also tapered off my sugar intake a lot in the past few weeks, so large quantities of sugar make me sick now. (I think the cranberry nut bread will still pass muster, since it's mostly tart. Chocolate chip cookies are right out, though.)

So am trying to find baking projects with less sugar:
Jule Kaga
Swedish Limpa Bread
Edit: And these! But Grá doesn't like cinnamon, so if these are good I'll also need to figure out a sans-cinnamon variation.

And some simple & sugary recipes:
May's Applecake
Swedish Applecake
Professorns Chokladkaka (because the Swedish name is so much fun to say.)


No, I cannot tell you why these recipes are all Swedish.


I also need to get the family teiglach recipe and my sister's apricot-chocolate improvised cake recipes next time I go up to Amherst. And the chocolate pudding volcano cake. God, that one is the best.

Edited, again:
fairfeatherlinked me to these cranberry honey spice pinwheel cookies which look like a headache and a half but then SO MUCH DELICIOUSNESS.
And then I found these spiced apple butter bran muffins and this cranberry apple coffee cake.

(And I think if I make the pinwheels successfully, I will let myself try this, which is the kind of elaborate yumminess that looks like it should only be attempted by trained professionals.)

The Science of Sherlock Holmes is a super-quick non-fiction read (took me about 3 and a half hours to read it, with some interruptions.)

It does not actually have a lot to do with Sherlock Holmes, which was vaguely disappointing. The author felt obligated to justify the title by dragging in Sherlock Holmes quotes or references every few pages that were only minimally relevant to what she was actually discussing.

This book is actually a basic overview of Victorian forensic science, and as a basic overview it does very well. The topics in each chapter vary widely (jumping from forensic autopsies/dissection of the dead to bertillonage to the effect of superstition on criminal investigation to handwriting experts), so one has a broad idea of how things happened, but very little in-depth knowledge. (Happily, the author regularly references many many primary sources, which I will be tracking down in the near future.)

If you're curious about the subject matter, or doing research and need a good place to start, this is worth picking up. But it's not such a stunning non-fiction read that I'd recommend it regardless of your tastes.



On Twitter today I characterized most of my non-fiction reading as "true crime in Edwardian times", which is sadly true. I think this is partly because DNA testing renders modern mystery novels a moot point, and I long for days when there were less straightforward clues. (Even Agatha Christie novels, I note, make a point of never having usable fingerprints at the crime scene.)

So, I mentioned like two months ago that my Clarionmates have sold a ridiculous shit ton of stories, and I wanted to make a list.


Here's Draft 1 of the list. It's actually got a fair amount of gaps in it, mostly when it comes to pre-Clarion sales. Some of the stuff is online and I haven't linked to it; some is forthcoming and isn't marked as such. I'll fix and update the list as things come to my attention.

Stories that are bolded were sold post-Clarion. Stories with an asterisk* after them are Clarion stories.



Grá Linnaea:
"And Then Some Day I'll All Change And Stuff", BURST
"Namaste Prime", MOTA 9 Anthology
"Bakerloo to Hollow Hills", Escape Clause Anthology
"Life in Steam", Writers of the Future 25

Ferrett Steinmetz:
"Camera Obscured", Asimov's September 09*
"The Sound of Gears", Edge of Propinquity
"Suicide Notes, Written By An Alien Mind", Pseudopod
"In the Garden of Rust and Salt", GUD
"At the Unicorn Factory", Bards & Sages Quarterly*

Eugene "E.J." Fischer:
"Husbandry", Strange Horizons
"Adrift", Asimov's (forthcoming)*

Stefani Nellen:
"Spinnetje", Apex Digest #11
"Done!" Cosmos # 22
"The Second America", Inkwell, Spring 2008
"Tentacle Mind Report", Conjunctions*

Keffy R.M. Kehrli:
"Machine Washable", Sybil's Garage 6*
"Bone Dice", Talebones 39
"Advertising at the End of the World", Apex Magazine*
"Shoes Worn Once", Electric Velocipede (forthcoming)*

Sarah Miller:
"The Music at Bash Bish Falls", Everyday Weirdness

Paul Berger:
"The Watching People", Ideomancer, December 2004; recorded in Escape Pod 103
"Winter in Aso", Polyphony 6
"The Muse of Empires Lost", Twenty Epics
"Voice of the Hurricane", All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories
"Year of the Ninja Spiders" (non-fiction), Weird Tales 2007
"Home Again", Interzone #221
"Stereogram of the Gray Fort in the Days of Her Glory", Fantasy Magazine (forthcoming)
"Small Burdens", Strange Horizons (forthcoming March 2010)*

Kathleen Howard:
"A Life In Fictions", Stories anthology (ed. Neil Gaiman & Al Sarrantonio) (forthcoming)

Damien Walter:
"Momentum", originally published in Electric Velocipede #13, reprinted in Art & Things Magazine, recorded for StarShip Sofa (forthcoming)
"Cthul-you" , The Drabblecast
"My Love Sick Zombie Boy Band", Electric Velocipede (forthcoming)

Monica Byrne:
"Redress", Gargoyles (forthcoming)
"The Comedy at Kualoa", Electric Velocipede (forthcoming)*
"Letters From New Laverne", Shimmer (forthcoming)



FEAR US FOR WE ARE MIGHTY.

Beautiful paper and wire art, by Polly Verity.

Divenire, by Ludovico Einaudi.


I was too wiped out today to get very much of anything useful done. But I'm down to 40 hours this week, and I think that'll help. As will the paycheck on Friday.

I'm not even burned out. I just don't know how to balance things. I don't know when to stop.

From When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World, regarding the grammarian and critic Ibn Durayd:

"Always generous and improvident, he was frequently penniless and was well known for his love of wine. ... He was once reproached for giving wine as alms to a beggar and was quite unrepentant, saying that he had nothing else to give. His lifestyle was not without its perils: when he was working in Fars, he fell off the roof of his house one night and broke his collarbone, probably, though he does not say it, because he was drunk. ... As he lay in pain trying to sleep, he had a classic literary critic's nightmare in which he recited two of his verses in praise of wine. When he had done, Satan appeared and asked him whether he was trying to do better than the great Abu Nuwas. When Ibn Durayd admitted he was, Satan told him that his verses were not too bad but he had made one solecism, saying that the wine was narcissus yellow and then anemone red all at the same time; the poet woke up abruptly, mortified by this supernatural criticism."

Hee hee hee. I love this so much I cannot even tell you.



ETA: Though now I'm trying to figure out what solecism would create the semantic error that Satan describes -- using the same case ending for both adjectives, maybe?

Writer's block is probably the most useful tool I have.

This is because writer's block -- not beginning block, when you don't have an idea, but middle-block, when the story just stops dead and refuses to go any further -- is, for me, a big honking red DANGER DANGER DANGER sign.

When I get to a point where I can't make the words come out, this means that somewhere in the last three or four pages, I fucked up. I wrote the wrong scene, I wrote something out of order, I tried to introduce a subplot that doesn't work, I skipped something, I spent too much time lovingly describing my character's toenail clippings ... whatever. The point is, I fucked it up, and I need to go back and fix it before I can write anything else.

"Oh, but Sarah!" the collective wisdom of the internet protests. "You're not supposed to revise on the first draft! That's how you get sucked into the endless loop of comma perfection! Just keep going!"

I used to keep going, and tell myself I'd fix it later. I wrote three novels that way -- and they are all of them utter crap, crap so utter that I cannot even begin to revise them, crap so utter that it has always been easier and more efficient to just start a new novel rather than try and salvage the old one.

The DANGER sign is there for a reason; go past it, you fall off a cliff. Trying to continue writing after that is akin to tying some sticks to your mangled corpse of a manuscript and forcibly walking it around town. It'll get where it needs to go, but under your power, not its own. And it's not going to be pretty.

For the writers on my flist (just cause I'm curious):

-- How many of you regularly solicit/receive feedback on your work? (writing group, writing partner, online critique service, focus groups, whatever)
-- How many of you write in what's essentially a vacuum?
-- Which do you prefer? Are you in your ideal situation right now?

Have you seen The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello yet? If not, you should watch it. It's a shortish film with overtones of steampunk, Edward Gorey, and Dave McKean. (The story itself is nothing exciting, but I love the animation and art SO much. It is exactly what a steampunk animation ought to look like.)



In real-life/personal news:
Heh. Did I say I was only working 52 hours this week? I meant 66. (And a half.) And when I say "66.5" I actually mean 90.5, because the 24 hours I worked on Saturday & Sunday went onto my previous paycheck. So I worked 90(.5) hours in 7 days straight.

I'm glad to have a day off. I'm not super-tired, though I'm definitely lagging on the Getting Stuff Done front this week. I could probably do it again. I don't think I would unless there were some Dire Conditions happening, like a staff member dying or a sudden need to post bail for hobbit_em.

Also, my credit card has gone missing. I called all the work sites I was at on Friday; no one's handed it in. But no vacations to Hawai'i are showing up on my online statement, either, which means it's been taken by the elves or is safely (but inaccessibly) locked up in the van at work. I will find out Tuesday which it is and take steps from there.

It's not actually a big deal, since I have all kinds of methods for getting around lack-of-plastic-funds and don't actually NEED to spend money most days. But now that I no longer have the easy option, I keep having ridiculous consumerist urges. I want takeout Chinese food, and new clothes, and Really Nice Fruit. And new books. Oh my god. I haven't bought a new book since July. Before that, February.

(Though, to put things in perspective, the last time I bought new clothes was in February, and before that, it was probably four or five years ago ... new clothes may actually be a sensible consumerist urge.)


Right. Off to the rest of my day. It is very quiet being at home all of a sudden, and I thoroughly encourage people to IM me (or send me things to crit/read.)

"The court poet Ibrahim al-Mosuli had a sirdaab with a pool of water that was fed by a running stream and which discharged into a garden. He liked to spend the hot part of the day sleeping there, and it is likely that the caliphs used theirs in the same way. When the poet slept in his, he was taught a beautiful new song by two cats, one white and one black, which lived under the steps. They warned him that anyone he passed it on to would be turned into a jinn. And that is exactly what happened: he taught it to a singing girl of his and she was turned into a jinn."
--When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: The Rise and Fall of Islam's Greatest Dynasty