Lilith Saintcrow

Well hello, dear Reader. I had a busy weekend–between working, a haircut, grocery shopping, some body mod, my sister’s stalker (in a minute, hang on), getting some decent bread pans (joy!) and Being Judged.

I had a lovely long leisurely lunch/dinner on Saturday after I left work, got haircut and modded, and wended my weary way home. Waited until it was dark and watched The Blair Witch Project, which was creepifying in some places but obeyed horror tropes with a fine well-trained obedience so far that the shiny new way of obeying said tropes didn’t have the punch, for me, that I’ve heard the movie had for other people. I have to say, the more interesting thing about this film is knowing how it was made, and the psychological terrorizing (lack of sleep, pursuit, strictly controlled food) of the cast that made for such a ring of verisimilitude.

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First, the new Watcher book–Mindhealer–is available for preorder at ImaJinn. (It’s also available as an ebook.) If you prefer to wait for Amazon etc., I’ll let you know when that goes live.

I’ve also done my weekly post on writing. It’s at Fangs, Fur, & Fey or The Midnight Hour, depending on which you prefer. This week I’m thinking about sensitivity–both its benefits and its drawbacks.

This week was a busy one. I’m averaging a lot of work per day on the YA, which is good–but it’s not as fast as I want to be going. Life keeps interfering.

Anyway, I’m ready for the weekend. On that note, here are two bits of hilarity from Cracked.com–the Ten Most Insane Crash Diets in History, and the Ten Weirdest Historical Contraceptives. I don’t think they’re particularly safe for work, as I almost fell out of my papasan with hysterical laughter while reading either. *giggle* Enjoy!

The trouble with sensitivity is that it is as much curse as cure or help. Any kind of sensitivity has trouble as its obverse.

Today has been a day of Things Going Wrong, or at least Worse Than They Could. Not for me, though, for everyone around me. I like to joke that I’m the den mother, and some days the title is incredibly apropos. Fortunately I will soon turn everything off but the writing I need to get done today, and a quick trip to the store for celery and cream (for different dishes, natch.) That will be my signal to the Universe not to drop any more problems in my lap.

Yeah. Like the Universe will listen.

I had really odd dreams last night, about someone teaching me to “blink” in and out of reality. I didn’t know how I was doing it, and someone was trying to teach me how. It always came through in a pinch (I suppose I should mention I was at kind of a Hogwarts) but I needed control. And then my parents showed up, or younger versions of them, and I started hyperventilating in my dream and hiding. From there it was straight to nightmare.

Hm. Someone will analyze that and find, no doubt, something dark and deep, especially in the figure of the faceless boy who was telling me where to hide and how to control the “blinking”. Now isn’t THAT strange. And I’ve been feeling kind of like I’m standing right next to myself all day. The local crows are making that ratcheting-throat-sound that means they’ve seen something weird/strange coming, it’s kind of their sentry call. This is interspersed with eerie quiet from all the fauna except the Little Prince, which surprises me not a bit.

Hm. A good day to you all, dear Readers. Be careful out there.

G’morning, all. I’m barely conscious but have managed to make it into work–driving without coffee is an adventure. And turning on the espresso machine once one walks in the door and waiting twenty minutes for the damn thing to wake up was even MORE of an adventure. But I’m not complaining.

I didn’t make the Seattle author-a-thon last night; there was an accident on the I5 bridge that held up the Muffin getting home. It was very sad–I couldn’t just throw the kids in the car and go, since they were going to kendo. I REALLY REALLY WANTED to get my ms. copy of Happy Hour of the Damned signed, and to buy a copy too, since it was one of the funniest books I’d read in a long time. *sad face* I ALSO wanted to kibbitz with Richelle about some Fabulous News. Instead, I got the kids and the Muffin out the door and collapsed on my bed to read some of Kipling’s Kim, which is a slow start but starts rollicking at around Chapter Six. After a while there was a plot bunny, and I wandered back to the YA and wrote down one of my high-school fantasies, which involved me having the power to telekinetically choke people without touching them.

Hey, you can’t say you didn’t feel the same way at least ONCE in high school.

I’m knocking off between 3 and 4K a day on the YA, which is good but a little unsatisfying; I can’t type fast enough and I’m in that stage of creative endeavor where any interruption, no matter how minor, is galling. But I’d rather have THAT problem than a dry well.

So today it’s a half-day of work, heading home (where my sisters will be down for the day to coddle and cuddle the Little Prince, who will of course bask in the attention) and a trip out to cat-sit this evening; in between that, I want to get another few thousand words out of the way and set up a love triangle.

Hey, BTW, does anyone on my f-list know someone who knows Bulgarian? Just checking…

Tonight I’m hoping to make the Seattle Urban Fantasy Author-A-Thon, 7pm-9pm at the Beaverton Powells. Mark Henry and Mario Acevedo will be there, and the audience will hold such luminaries as Richelle Mead and (I think) Caitlin Kittredge. I am certain there will be heckling and much fun. My own attendance is based upon the car not making that knocking noise and the Muffin getting home from work before 6:30. Wish me luck.

Yesterday I (are you ready for this?): knocked off 4K on the young adult book, made bagels from scratch, made homemade pizza, started Mixed-Starter Bread, and cleaned. Of all those things, it was the work on the YA that made my brain feel like it was ironed out flat and squeezed dry.

I’ve been thinking lately of books I feel are sorely neglected, so I decided to list five of them. Your mileage may vary, but I love these little books I’m about to list–and should you try them, I hope you like them too.

* A New England Girlhood, Nancy Hale. I read this when I was about nine, and I loved it. It’s a slice-of-life, a woman who grew up as a New England debutante thinking about her childhood and telling what it was like to live in that world. Some childhood experiences are universal–like losing something precious, or being cruel to a tag-along and only realizing later how bad that is, or wanting to go with your parents so badly you throw a tantrum. Interspersed with this are little stories about living as an adult, and how childhood memories can be misleading or illuminating, sometimes on the same day.

* Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum, Various. This is an anthology I bought once at a library sale that has some of the finest short stories I’ve ever read in it, like The Desrick on Yandro by Manly Wade Wellman, Homecoming by Ray Bradbury, Stephen Vincent Benet’s King of the Cats, and more–like Henry Martindale, Great Dane, or The Man Who Sold Rope To The Gnoles. It’s just one of the finest compilations I’ve ever read, and I’ve read three copies of it to pieces now.

* Jacob Have I Loved, Katherine Paterson. I read this, again, when I was about nine. (That was a good year for formative books.) Sara Louise is born first, and her twin Caroline almost dies at birth. Everyone cossets and pets Caroline, who is a musical prodigy, and Sara is left feeling ignored and unloved (at one point, her bitch of a grandmama quotes the Old Testament to her, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated). So Sara turns to making her own way. The great thing about this book is the setting, an island in Chesapeake Bay fast losing land every time there’s a storm, crab pots, the stultifying suffocation of small-town life when everyone has already decided what you are. The ending leaves a little to be desired–even when I was nine I thought that Sara Louise deserved much more than nursing and marriage–but it has the virtue of being the ending Sara chose for herself and worked toward, so it made sense.

* Psion and Catspaw , Joan Vinge. Every once in a while I get the great urge to reread these two books; nothing else will do. Xenophobia, telepathy, poverty, outsiders, the longing to belong–it’s all in here, and Cat is a hero the way Sam Spade is a hero. He’s trying to do the best he can, measuring himself by a fierce internal standard, at the mercy of forces and people he can’t control, taken advantage of, and just generally mistreated. I think Cat was the first hero I ever really wanted to marry and “take away from all this.” Ironic, no?

* Passion Play, Sean Stewart. I think Stewart’s work doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. In particular, Passion Play, which was one of the major influences for Dante Valentine’s world, is a dystopian work that kind of mixes a less-repressive Handmaid’s Tale with Psion, structured like a medieval morality/passion play, and with a tough female protagonist that could probably arm-wrestle most male protags under the table without breaking a sweat. I like a lot of Stewart’s other work, but Passion Play is a book I wish I’d written. And that, for me, is the sincerest form of flattery. The codification and government use of psionic talents in Dante’s world gets a lot from the structure Stewart built in this one slim little volume.

There you go, five books I’ve enjoyed thoroughly over the years and hope other people will discover.

And now I’m off to knock off more of the YA. I am SO SO hoping I get out to Beaverton tonight! If only to squee with Richelle about some neat stuff that I can’t share with everyone just yet, and to possibly see Scockercrew. *wink*

*crosses fingers*