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Dec. 1st, 2009 @ 11:45 pm
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work went and got crazy again, but it will just be through the end of this week. really. hopefully. i hope i can make it through ok, though. and i hope i don't get jury duty on thursday. that would put a big wrench in things. |
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@waltisfrozen: If Obama was keeping all of his campaign promises, some of the 30,000 additional troops sent to Afghanistan would be gay. |
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Dear writer friends,
In 2007 I attended Taos Toolbox, a two week writing workshop held high in the mountains of New Mexico. It was an intense, illuminating, brilliant experience. For two weeks, I did nothing but breathe, eat, and think about writing, guided by Walter Jon Williams, Connie Willis, and 12 wonderful fellow writers -- many of whom have become beloved friends.
This is not Clarion. It is not a beginner's workshop. It's a novel-focussed master class that will exponentially expand and fill your inspiration tank while giving you tools, tips, and tricks that you will draw on for years to come.
You must do this workshop. Walter alone has enough experience, insight, humor, and knowledge for years of classes, but next year's workshop will be co-led with Nancy Kress, who is, like Walter, nearly beyond praise. The workshop is now open for applications.
Beggar yourself, go into debt, risk hearth and home, but go to this workshop. |
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Dec. 1st, 2009 @ 09:08 pm
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also! i have a gristleism and you don't. |
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The customer hasn't renewed my contract for next year, so I'm a free agent again.
I'm looking for system administrator and application support work in the greater Los Angeles area.Current Mood:  blah |
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It's not quite as cool as the print edition, but I'm glad to pass on that Craft magazine's presence on the Web has returned with a vengeance. I know plenty of friends should be quite thrilled with this, and now it's time for me to contribute as well. (Anybody in the Dallas area have a first-generation iMac that they aren't using?) |
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( Can Stop the Signal: Finding Serenity, edited by Jane Espensen )
( Modern Veblenism: The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life, by Andrew Ross )
( The Philippine Queen: Delilah, by Marcus Goodrich )
( Miss Manners Rescues Civilization: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen, fucked with by Seth Grahame-Smith )
( Holden Caulfield Was a Pussy: Paper Towns, by John Green )
( Set Free by the Buddha: Seven Years in Tibet, by Heinrich Harrer )
( Illegitimati Non Carbonundrum Est: All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren )
( Stranglers on a Train: The Sleeping Car Murders, by Sebastian Japrisot )
( Deadly Earnestness: Man’s Fate, by Andre Malraux )
( Learned Enough to Know Better: The Masters, by C.P. Snow )
( Red Clay Wings: God’s Little Acre, by Erskine Caldwell )
( Well, *I* had to get up half an hour before time was invented...: Cosmicomics, by Italo Calvino )Current Music: I've Read Everything, Man |
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I can't make any promises that the new silicone polymer material Sugru will work as well in the greenhouse and garden as I suspect it may. I will say that I definitely want to find out. |
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Just in time for holiday shopping, I'd be horribly remiss if I didn't note that the second volume of the Grow Carnivorous Plants! DVD series from Sarracenia Northwest is now available for purchase. Considering what Volume 1 was like, I'm buying my copy of Volume 2 right now. |
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I just got a call from Dr. Braun a little while ago, and she got the results of my ultrasound from St. David's. She thinks that the lump is probably benign, but since the radiologist recommended another recheck in 6 months and this would be the 2nd recheck, she wants me to come in and be examined by her. As her nurse said, it's more of a precaution than anything else, and she doesn't think I'll need surgery or even a biopsy, but it's better to be more cautious now than a year from now someone say hmmm, this may actually be cancer.
So, I have an appointment to go in next Thursday morning for more medical manipulation of my booby. Yay.
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I blame the cold weather. I love this weather: it's cold, gray and wet. Which puts me into the mood for snugglies. I've made my home as snuggly-friendly as I can: I put the flannel sheets on the bed, it's even cold enough for a blanket. The cats love both. Last night I used my fireplace for the first time this season, and if I forgot to open the flue, well, it's been a long time since I used the fireplace. Imagine standing in the kitchen nuking some leftovers in the microwave, wondering where the smell of smoke is coming from (and it's not coming from the microwave). Luckily I remembered in short order to open the flue, and the fire was happy after that, and I did not set off my smoke detectors.
This weather, unfortunately, also puts me into another kind of snuggly mood, and it makes me long for snuggles with, well, someone inappropriate. I am of course referring to the Irish Bastard, who for all his issues, all our issues, is very snuggly. I wish I could say I don't miss him at all, but that would be a lie. There are many things about him I do miss. There are many more things I don't miss, and those are the more egregious things, so I try to keep reminding myself of those things as needed, because some things I will not forgive at this time. But he's been in my thoughts lately, and it's distracting, because I've got work to do. As in work work.
It's deadline week - Friday is the deadline for anyone graduating this semester to turn in their theses/reports/dissertations, and this means they have to be in the door by 5PM Friday or they graduate in the spring. The traffic has been steady since last Wednesday, although surprisingly slow today. Too slow. This means end of the week will be shitty with traffic. And anyone who makes it in the door by 5pm, we have to stay and see. Which I don't care about, but it does mean I'm not sure when I'll be able to make it to SMOFcon on Friday evening. I should be done here by dinner time, so if anyone is in town for SMOFcon and wants to have dinner with me, I'm up for that. I'm trying to figure out details: do I drive in and try to find some free parking somewhere around campus? Do I drive in and suck it up and pay for parking in a garage and then drive downtown (only to face the possibility of having to pay again for parking?)? I'm kind of hoping that I can find street parking down there. Shoot, I'm not even sure what hotel SMOFcon is in (I just bought my membership yesterday, so I'm a little behind the curve), I suppose I ought to look that up. See, I have too damned many distractions and I need to be a little more practical right now.
Meanwhile, we're looking at some cold nights ahead, which I love. Now if I could get the distractions out of my mind, that would be super swell. Well, maybe not get the distractions out of my mind, but rather have different distractions. The idea of snuggles is a perfectly fine one, a worthy pursuit. For now I have to be satisfied with Ginger and Charlie, who for such small beings actually generate a lot of heat, so they do have some extrinsic value (in addition to their intrinsic value).
And then I can start my countdown to vacation (which for me starts in 16 days).
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Okay, so American Thanksgiving Weekend is the time where I traditionally put all of my temperate carnivores into winter dormancy (and not let them out until St. Patrick's Day), clean up the greenhouse, and move all of the tropical plants either indoors or into more sheltered spaces in the newly cleaned greenhouse. I'm quite surprised at how many supposedly obligate tropical plants can handle temperatures nearly at freezing...so long as they're protected from the wind. Oh, and the Dallas north wind is something that will rip right through your bones if you're not prepared.
Likewise, this last weekend in southern Michigan was odd for a different reason. For a good portion of my childhood, at least one day in Thanksgiving weekend was spent with my maternal grandparents, and I remember the weather all too well. For those from more friendly latitudes, the last weekend of November is traditionally when Yahweh, Odin, and Nyarlathotep get together and play games of "Yeah? Well, watch this" with the weather around the Great Lakes. The first time I ever had a Thanksgiving weekend without snow was literally my last weekend in Chicago, thirty years ago. And when I describe this snow, I'm describing the perfect snowball and snowman snow, which rapidly turns into a grey-black mush on sidewalks and roads before freezing to black ice, guaranteeing the first of about eighteen weekends of broken hips, crunched fenders, and a general attitude of "You know, let's forget checking on whether our neighbors have frozen to death and see what's on television tonight. It's nasty out there."
So...I spent the weekend noting the lack of snow in southern Michigan. I don't mean a lack because it melted off during a freak warming period. I'm talking about none at all, where the grass is still green in places and the front courtyard at the hotel at which we stayed was still full of live weeds. If not for convenience stores and gas stations full of Vernors ginger ale and Faygo Red Pop, I'd have asked if someone had been messing with me and just dropped me off in east Texas somewhere. The rest of the situation last weekend was bad enough, but I was legitimately and honestly glad that I wouldn't have to explain to the Czarina why frozen water was falling out of the sky and dropping road visibility to nearly nothing. She freaks out when she catches a blast from an open refrigerator, and Elvis help us all when the air temperature outside gets colder than that.
Well, it all comes to a head tonight. Naturally, it's on a week when I'm already slammed with projects that I have to strip out the greenhouse in the dark. Naturally, it's on a week where we might actually see snow on the ground in Dallas in early December for the first time since I moved back from Oregon 12 years ago. Naturally, it's a time when the Czarina will actually pray for the Big Yellow Hurty Thing In The Sky to come back, because it makes the evil frozen water goblins melt and return to Hell.
You know how I've been threatening for years that I'm going to find a big hole on Halloween and hibernate in it until the beginning of March? Oh, yes, I'm going to do that next year. I'd even be doing it if I lived in Australia. |
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The new year draws near, and there are several things I'd like to do to finish on a good note.
First, continue with the exercise and diet. So far, I'm pleased by the results. I broke out a new notebook today for my food journal; I filled the last pages on the initial one over Thanksgiving break. Ideally, I hope to see some more losses. Even though I didn't get a chance to exercise with the Jillian Michaels Wii program during vacation, I still recorded a pound or two lost. If I follow the routine without a skipped day I can count on 23 workouts. The diet is becoming easier, so I think weight loss will require more and stronger workouts.
Second, December is a long month and, holidays notwithstanding, that means 31 days to write. So, I want to come close to breaking 100 pages. I've got a week off mid-month, so I hope to rack up good numbers then. Best-case scenario, that will compensate for any writing time I lose to the holidays when merriment matters more than work. :-)
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Bingo!
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Dec. 1st, 2009 @ 11:21 am
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A few quick things:
*My story The True Meaning Of K-Day was in last week's episode of the Diet Soap podcast.
*My story Three Perspectives On The Role Of The Anarchists In The Zombie Apocalypse was mentioned in a list of stories with sympathetic anarchist characters in a new book out from AK Press, Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers On Fiction. (Thanks to nihilistic-kid for the pointer.)
*It looks like the date for my dissertation defense is semi-settled....it should be either March 8th or March 22nd. |
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Every once in awhile I end up reading a bunch of "literary fiction" books in a row, whether to see what's going on outside of genre or by some fluke of omnivorous shelf-grazing. Almost always, it causes a rash of contemplation about literary fiction as a genre--because boy howdy is it a genre. And this time is no different. Due to what was staring me in the face in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) zoethe and theferrett 's guest room, what was on offer in the Frankfurt airport bookstore, and what I happened to pick up when I got home, I read, in quick succession: A Brief History of the Dead, The Lovely Bones, Kafka on the Shore, and A Trip to the Stars. Add to that the not really literary fiction but certainly mainstream YA Feed and out of my own perversity a re-read of The Secret History and it's a feast of angst and high sales and quotes from the LA Times.
To be fair, I didn't even finish Kafka on the Shore. I love Murakami, but this was so boring and uninteresting and meandering that I just had to give up, less than a hundred pages from the end, which I never do, because the tedium of it made me want to die. I seriously cannot believe this won the World Fantasy Award. Also, authors should deeply reconsider whether annoying 15 year olds (who talk like 30 year olds) and their bizarre sexual habits are fascinating enough on their face to justify hundreds of pages of examination. It sounds trite to say nothing happened in this whole book, but it's a buddy flick where the buddies don't meet and their endgame is some murky WWII event (it is Murakami after all) of which only one (who is mentally disabled) is aware and then all of the sudden there are crystals and bizarrely helpful truck drivers and some kid is having sex with his mother and thinks it's awesome. But it's all so banal and flatly written that I don't even care--even less than I care about some of these other books, and that's saying a lot, so let's just leave it with a "not living up to his potential" comment on Murakami's report card. Guh.
Feed, on the other hand, was really and truly decent--though it thrives on the reader being young and thus never having read Stand on Zanzibar or any of the other SF novels that feature a constant stream of advertisement as a literary technique. Again, though, I have a problem with the bored, passive protagonist and his sexual fantasies being more or less all I'm given to hang on to as a persona. And the dying wrong side of the tracks girlfriend having actual serious thoughts about anything while the privileged boy goes on to...not have any. It's just kind of a tired trope. And the lesions were never explained, no matter how awesome the truffle line is. In general, I think that The Great Gatsby is great despite its excerable protagonists, not because of them, and I don't actually want to spend any time with mini-Nick or mini-Daisy, even on the moon. But back to this one in a second. Those would be the outliers, the best and worst of the lot.
I found none of the others to be bad books per se. Obviously, they're bestsellers of varying degrees and somebody loves them, they speak to someone. But I feel like, with every one, they were doing it wrong. Clearly doing it right for someone, but doing it wrong for me, personally, as a reader. And with every one I felt like I got a clearer idea of the actual difference between "literary fiction" and "genre."
The difference, I think, is rules.
I've commented before on litfic's obsession with suburbia, which Alice Sebold hilariously claims in the interview in the back pages of The Lovely Bones is somehow a neglected corner of Americana where all the real stories are and she had to learn as a writer to recognize it as a legitimate source of stories. To which, with all the class I can muster, I wave my brandy snifter and say: LOLWHUT. Look, I get that urban stories are legion--as long as that urban means New York and the protagonists are privileged white people, but suburbia is where it's at for literary fiction. The story of the repressed housewife being dissatisfied while her husband works miserably and her kids act out is getting to be nigh-on universal, no matter whether it's the 50s or the 00s. Hell, it's the plot of Mad Men, Desperate Housewives, Little Children, American Beauty...I could go on, but it's pointless. The siren call of the easy symoblism of an outwardly perfect row of houses and inwardly borked lives is resisted by precisely no one. The Lovely Bones is merely another entry in that restrictive genre of storytelling, and other than its otherworldly protagonist, alters the traditional narrative not even a little. But besides having to sit through yet another reel of how much being a wealthy white family in the suburbs sucks, what I really notices was a total lack of worldbuilding or rules of the game. And more, a total lack of interest in the same.
To be honest, Sebold seems to have no real interest in the afterlife she sets up at all. It's just a vantage point for the family drama, and half-baked serial killer thing (worst serial killer ever, by the way. There is no WAY this guy doesn't get caught in five seconds in the real world). And yet, what few rules she sets up (the dead can't affect anything, mainly) she breaks without any stated reason or justification. Those of you who have read the book will probably know the big Rule Breaking Moment I mean, when not only does our little Susie body-swap for no reason, without intent to do so or any possible sense of why she could, but she takes her last living moment not to talk to her tortured family about who killed her, but to bang a dude she liked in middle school, despite her only other sexual experience being brutal rape. Yay! Love is awesome!
But I just kept saying: why? Why can this happen? And what happened to the other girl's soul?
But Sebold isn't after that fish. She cares about a. the broken suburban family story and b. writing a scene she wanted to write without caring whether it fits with the universe of the book. Because she's not a genre writer, despite the genre window dressing, she doesn't recognize that the book has a universe, or care about rules, or worldbuilding--because it's ostensibly our world and doesn't have to be built. But for me as a reader this is just insane, because it's ghost time in the house, and the book just throws up its hands and says: weird things happen! We don't have to DWELL ON IT! Let's get back to a suburban dad smashing things.
Two final and beside the point points: one, the death of the serial killer was bullshit and I call shenanigans. There is an implication that Susie made it happen but it's fairly clear she didn't, at least to me, since it's all from her POV and she doesn't say she did it. But the refusal to decide whether the dead can or cannot affect things reaches its most ridiculous toward the end. This is not satisfying, for crying out loud. And by the way, a heaven where no matter what happens you cannot grow or heal or change, where you cannot grow up, ever, where you can meet other people but cannot be an adult, or sexual, or progress beyond the age and mentality of your death is not heaven. That's hell.
Ahem.
Same thing with A Brief History of the Dead. I got the gist of everything in literally the first 30 pages, which are easily the most interesting. I walked out and asked theferrett : "Is anything going to happen in this book besides everyone else figuring out that someone has to remember you on earth for you to live in the purgatory city and that one chick is the last one on earth so everyone she doesn't remember is gone? Because I got that, and there's a lot of book left."
And he wouldn't meet my eye.
What I wanted, with these afterlife porn books--the genre element of choice in American fiction--was some exploration of the world put forward, of what it means to be dead, of why people keep their general economic status, still working in restaurants, etc. Why do dead people need to eat? Does anyone, ever, do anything but stare into the distance and act depressed? But the authors didn't want to write those books. They wanted to write about Antarctica or the standard "the connections that bind us all" or, you know, "emotions."
As a genre writer, it's funny how I put emotions in quotes. We don't like emotions or characters, right? It's all about the world. And the worst genre fiction does get mired in that, the fetishizing of rules and worldbuilding. But, you know, some attention to the fact that you've invented this fascinating premise and are going literally nowhere with it and exploring nothing in it would be nice. And I use quotes because the emotional arcs presented by these books are just not intense or interesting enough to justify flying in the face of logic so often. I can't listen to parents mourning their kid because she hasn't died yet because they're EATING in a DINER and people are WORKING SHIFTS there and they're all dead and WHY? But it's the emotional content of the scene the author cares about, not making it work in an invented world. (Don't even get me started about the fuzzy fade to white handwaving ending of that book, either.) Really? Parents miss their kids? Stop the presses. We have got to get someone on this.
A Trip to the Stars...probably the best written of any of them, but the best example of why genre fiction can't have nice things. Every five pages the author picks up a genre trope, shakes it in confusion, and then throws it away. There's vampires, but they're gone within a few pages and no one cares. The whole thing is an embarrassing Mary Sue (Gary Stu, really) adopted kid's fantasy about how the protag's REAL family is RICH and AWESOME and will take him away to a palace in the desert where he'll get a perfect education from genius tutors and speak Greek and Latin and be awesome at drawing and get all the toys he wants and ALSO be awesome at sports and anyone who doesn't like him is inherently evil and despite all this he has tons of free time to wander in the desert where a spider will give him superpowers (that won't matter and will be forgotten) and his tutor will give him a BABY WOLF and also they're all TRUE DESCENDANTS OF ATLANTIS WTF. (Actually, the Atlantis thing is especially awesome, because supposedly it's their sooper special "double O positive" blood type that makes them Atlanteans. I thought that sounded weird, so I looked it up. Turns out that "double O" just means O, as it's a recessive gene. That means, fare from being the "rarest blood type on earth" it is in fact the single most common blood type on earth and it just so happens to be mine. So now, when justbeast asks me to do things I yell: NO, FOR I AM A TRUE DESCEDANT OF ATLANTIS AND I DO NOT DO DISHES.)
The point is that Nicholas Christopher doesn't give a shit about making all this magical stuff jive with the plot, nor, clearly, does he even recognize the painful Gary Stuness of his story. He cares about the relationship between his two main characters (sort of) and the rest exists so that the back cover copy girl can list a bunch of cool things separated by commas that make the book sound epic. Don't you want to read about vampires in the Old West, alien spiders, Captain Cook, Basque separatists, astronauts, Atlantis, and BABY WOLVES? I know I do! But none of those things matter to the book at all, and the minute one starts to matter, the author crushes them brutally and glares around daring you to remember that there were real fucking vampires like five pages ago and everything that's happening are coincidences that beggar the end of Jane Eyre. It's the real world, right? Shit just happens, and you don't have to explain it.
The Secret History is really a bit of a cheat on this list, because the doin it rong is completely different--though related. Once again I question why I want to hang out with the cast that got rejected from The Great Gatsby for being too assholish. These guys, all of them, are literally the worst people ever. And there's no reason that the worst one, Bunny, who gets killed on the first page, should have been let into the sooper special circle of classics students that the protagonist has to shit angel feathers to get into, where you have to be charming and smart and attractive and be approved by the perfect amazing teacher, given that Bunny is a colossal shit. Who can't do Latin or Greek. What the hell.
But my main issue is that only one thing of any interest occurs in this entire book. It happens to be the only genre element--the kids do a ritual to summon Dionysus and homes shows up. That is awesome, my friends. It's tossed off in three pages of dialogue. I suspect if you asked Tartt, she'd say it's a nod to Greek plays where all the action happens offscreen and is reported by a messenger. Yeah, whatever. It's the only interesting part of the book and it's what the book should have been about. We should have seen all those aborted attempts, and the group growing close and then fracturing over failures, not just be told about it by a bored 21 year old who talks like he's 90. Good grief.
But then, that would have been a genre book, right? If you center stage the weird shit, rather than using it as a fetching window treatment, then it's not Serious Literature. But what we're left with is a bunch of Literature that makes no sense because the authors are essentially operating a forklift they're not rated to handle. It's awesome! It goes up and down! It crushes things! Wheee! But if you don't read the manual, you end up with a messy factory, and everything is out of order and nothing makes sense. A novel should have its own internal system, its own logic, that coheres, that connects with itself. It should not be full of random incidents of magic that connect with nothing just because watching people grieve for three hundred pages is much harder to make interesting without ghosts or vampires. It feels lazy to me, intellectually lazy, to throw out scenes and leave them hanging, breaking all the rules of the world, with no explanation. And yet I see it again and again in these books.
I'm reminded of a speech from Six Feet Under, a show that for awhile managed to pull all off this afterlife/family drama stuff pretty well:
It may seem weird to you but there is a reason behing everything that we do here...Current Mood:  geeky |
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Readers hoping for a new story at Futurismic this month will be disappointed to find that, instead, there is merely a blog post from me explaining that we are taking the month off. The simple upshot is, we just couldn’t find a story in time for our December deadline. I’m going to really hit the books this month, though, in the hopes that we can stock up for a good start in 2010.
On the plus side, it’s the first blog post I’ve made to Futurismic in, well, years actually, and I’ve kind of resolved to contribute more this year, on the theory that my being completely invisible is kind of bad marketing. (That’s just a theory; maybe after I start posting it will reveal itself to be good marketing…) Anyway, if any of my loyal readers here spots near-futurey SF news or other tidbits that might be of interest to Futurismic, feel free to shoot me links. As you know, blogging doesn’t exactly come naturally to me…I need all the help I can get!
Originally published at Christopher East. You can comment here or there.
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Yes, definitely a better hotel than the Mariott. They know how to work with odd people. If I didn't know better, I might even assume there was a certain wheelchair-bound man named De la Valliere somewhere in the upper management.
Probably my number one priority at OryCon music programming has been to avoid scheduling multiple music events opposite one another. The price of that is, the days get pretty gorram full. Almost every moment of the Con, I was either at an event, or out running an errand, quickly cramming some food into my mouth, or wrangling Twofoot. Which left very little time for actually being social with the tribe/extended family of people I really like and only see two or three times a year. Heartfelt apologies to all of you that I didn't really get to talk to this time. Please come to The Uncommons for our gathering in May, and I'll make it up to you.
slantiness performed a mostly solo concert for the first time I'd seen. It was sad not to have missjely around to share it this time, but slantiness more than held her own. She gets better every time I see her, and she has a contagious amount of fun on stage. So does hsifyppah, who managed to crack me up multiple times yet again. And jhitchin proved once again that he is the master of the short-short.
More heartfelt apologies to people who found Rhianon's set to be too loud. I was on Twofoot-wrangling duty during their setup and did not know that a performer who had previously concentrated on movie torch songs with an acoustic guitarist was planning to surprise us with a full rock band and amps that went to eleven. To me, it sounded pretty good from down the hall. More good concerts from Bigfoot Dave and Anne Prather, which sort of flashed by me because of my adrenaline rush preceding my first ever attempt to play the guitar in public.
My setlist won't mean much to you unless you were there or live with me, since all songs but one were written this year and none had been performed outside my home until OryCon. What I did was:
1. The FaceBook Chanty
2. Paper Towns
3. The Wreck of the Crash of Virgil Beauregard Timson
4. My Uncle, the Fighter (with guitar)
5. Monsters On the Right (with guitar)
6. Enditol (the Death Panel Song) (with The Redhead)
7. The Lion's Cross (with The Redhead and guitar)
8. I've Read Everything (with guitar).
The first, third, and the last two were the best, and only the third was more than a month old. My goal was to Not Suck, and from the reaction of the experienced musicians that I've respected and admired for years, I succeeded in Not Sucking. In fact, I felt so grateful and proud that I kinda puddled up into a fuzzy glowing blob of Happy for the rest of the Con. This was especially easy to do because vixyish and tfabris did their set immediately after mine. There are urban faerie stories in which fae musicians evoke intense emotional energy from their audiences and weave spells and glamour from it. Some of Heather Alexander's best concerts were like that, and now Vixy & Tony create that effect too.
Thankfully, Alexander J. Adams is also starting to display some of the old magic that Heather used to make look easy. I hadn't realized how much I had missed it until I saw and recognized it again.
The rest of the Con was mostly a blur of packing, hugs, and a hurried visit to the dealer room to find a CD. More small panels, and a somewhat awkward moment in which I found myself the only participant in the last panel of the weekend, which ended up devolving into Admiral Concert #2 (I was groggy, my voice was gone, and yet they stayed there waiting for more), followed by a few more rounds of open filk, a dinner at the Old Wives Tale, and the long and not at all winding road back home.
Twofoot: At childcare most of the time. Put her on the floor, and she heads straight into the ball of kids, as if I had already teleported out of the room. Put her in Kinderfilk, and she is instantly enthralled and eager to hop up on stage and join the festivities. Sing Re: Your Brains to her, and watch her clap and giggle. Stop watching her in the hotel room for a moment, and look up again and she's not there, Sunday morning at nine o'clock as the day begins, Twofoot's gone out the hotel room door, silently crossing the carpeted floor...
Molly Alley: OMG, is it really possible that she's been at previous OryCons, singing even, and somehow I managed not to notice her? It's hard to see how that could happen. That woman fills the whole room when she sings and has a concert slot waiting for her at OryCon 32 if she'll accept it. So does bellyhousefrau, who has one of the sweetest sounding voices I've heard lately, except that I know she wouldn't accept it except if partnered with someone like Steve Dixon.
Congratulations and thank you to everyone who was there. Especially jenrose1 and dan_ad_nauseam. We helped put on a good one once again. :-)Current Music: Circle of Friends |
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I'm still not quite ready to talk about the weekend, but my grandfather's obituary is finally online. It doesn't exaggerate how much he loved golfing, and many of his cohorts at the wake after the funeral were commenting that they'd been longtime friends and friendly adversaries at his golf club. I'll share more about him later. |
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