plot points: a fake blog

for those who served
in war and peace
who took the burden
whatever their reasons.


We Remember.

Well, we're still here. Old Unkillable had her 92nd birthday two days ago. We bought her a small air-conditioning unit and her flat is no longer an oven. This has probably extended her life at least another ten years past our original projection, which means she'll check out when I'm 92.

We still miss Miss Kitty Calgary, Queen of the Cats. Every now and then, I see her in one of her favourite places. It's a trick of the light combined with wishful thinking. Chris and I both miss having kitteh energy in the house but we are going to wait till September, when I come back from the Chicago worldcon. I won't be traveling after that.

I've written some stories, and some have appeared: "In Plain Sight" in The Future Is Japanese edted by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washinton from Haikasoru; a reprint of "She's Not There" in Obsession, edited by Paula Guran from Prime Books, and another original in Stephen Jones's Zombie Apocalypse! Fightback from Robinson, coming soon. And of course, Synners will reappear in August as a Science Fiction Masterworks title from Orion/Gollancz, also available electronically in any eBook format you like, courtesy of the SF Gateway program. All my other novels are available electronically, most from SF Gateway, Dervish Is Digital by way of Macmillan.

My thanks to every publisher I have ever had, for putting me in print in the first place and/or for bringing me back into print, on paper or in pixels.

As part of my ongoing effort to stay current, I've figured out Pinterest, which is fun, not too complicated, and fits my major requirement: i.e., I can use it with my iPad (which, as you'll know if you've seen me lately, is semi-permanently attached to me).

Time to go to work. I have a Bluetooth keyboard; works great but if I spill a tumbler of gin (or anything else) on it, it doesn't cost a fortune to get another one. Is this a great time to be alive or what?

As usual, I hope the sheer intensity of this update has not caused anyone to run screaming into the streets

Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

I’m somewhat more in the land of the living today. I still can’t breath through my nose, but at least I have a semi-operational brain. So of course one of the first things I’ve done is book my flights to another convention (Finncon in July). This, again, is on points, but these days “points” doesn’t excuse you from paying large sums of money in airport taxes. Here’s what I have been stung with for Lufthansa flights to Helsinki with plane changes in Germany.

UK – $60.10
Germany – $32.80
Finland – $15.10

Hmm.

By the way, with regard to Finncon, I’m delighted to be able to have my dear friend Irma Hirsjärvi announcing the winners of the Translation Awards both as a member of the jury and a Guest of Honor at the convention.

It’s my birthday, and I’m sitting on the lounge chair in my warm, sunny garden. The first roses are already out, along with big white, blue, and purple flowers whose names I don’t know. (As you can tell, I’m not the gardener in our family!) There are birds everywhere in the hedges all around, filling the air with chirping and trilling as I sit here and drink my morning latte. Maya keeps wandering over to investigate the sounds, but with a pretty casual air - bird-chasing might be fun for a dog, but even she’s too relaxed to get excited about it.

I can’t remember any other birthday I’ve had in the past ten years when I’ve been able to sit outside in a sunny garden - every other year, it’s either rained or we haven’t had a garden of our own to sit in, until now. I’m really appreciating it this time.

This morning I woke up to birthday messages and virtual gifts in my inbox, and fabulous presents from Patrick and MrD. This is the first birthday where MrD really picked out his presents for me himself, and I love them. I also love my haul of birthday books! They’re a perfect combination of already-favorites that I really love but didn’t own until now (like Caitlen Rubino Bradway’s Ordinary Magic, the one gift I’d told Patrick I REALLY REALLY wanted this year!) and new books that look fabulous (like Lizzie Foley’s Remarkable and an adult romance novel I’d been really wanting, Jill Shalvis’s Head Over Heels, the third in her Lucky Harbor series).

He even found me a secondhand copy of an old childhood favorite I’d been searching for for years, Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays. (I LOVED it as a kid but somehow confused it with the Noel Streatfeild books, so it was only when I went looking for it as an adult that I realized my mistake. Luckily, I adored the Streatfeild books when I discovered them that way! But it wasn’t until I read a great UK book blogger writing about The Saturdays that I finally figured out which book really had been the one that I loved back when I was eight.)

Because I have a wonderful husband, I’ve even finally got the DVD of the new version of Jane Eyre (which I’d never managed to see in the cinema) with a promise that yes, he really will watch it with me, since it was a birthday gift. The power of birthdays! :)

This afternoon, we’re planning a birthday picnic with MrD, and then birthday brownie-cake. Thank goodness, after working like a maniac all weekend, I finished my copyedits early, so I get to take today off from doing any real work (although I’ve still got just a few pages I want to go back over one last time tomorrow morning before I send those copyedits off). When I first finished my copyedits, I thought, OK, great, I’ll use the child-free time on Monday to work on my WIP, then! But then...

Well, then I read an email from a really smart friend asking me: When are you taking any time off??? And when I looked back on the last few weeks of ER trips, parenting worry and high stress…well. Let’s just say I couldn’t think of any days off in the recent past, including weekends.

So today, here I am. I’m 35, and just this once, sitting in a sunny garden, drinking my latte and simply luxuriating in my hoard of presents feels like just the way to spend the morning.

A Momentary Taste of WisCon #4 is now online, with news of Andrea Hairston's and Debbie Notkin's guest of honor speeches, the Tiptree Award ceremony, WisCon 37 guests of honor, shipping services for the trip home, and more.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/27/the-class-of-12-flings-their-caps-into-the-air/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18712

Because, you know, high school. Done with. Somewhere in there is my niece. It was a good day for her and for the family.

Over at the Kirby Museum, Robert Steibel has something to say about a post I wrote a year back which explained how, when I was working for Marvel in the ’70s, I disliked the work Jack Kirby was doing upon his return there, and how I dislike that work still. By work, I don’t mean the energetic as always images Kirby was drawing, but the text he supplied once he was responsible for both words and pictures, without Stan Lee to complement him. As I wrote in that post, “The art could still be the stuff of dreams at times, but the words that came out of his characters’ mouths seemed more like a nightmare.”

When it comes to the Stan vs. Jack wars, I am a partisan of neither. Once the duo disbanded, I don’t think either of them ever worked separately at the level they did when together. They needed each other. So I wasn’t slamming Kirby to elevate Lee, merely making an observation that when the King tried to do it all, it was far from satisfactory.

But let’s leave for another time the debate as to who’s right about the quality of Kirby’s prose. (Though it looks like that time won’t be too far off, as Steibel’s post, after all, was the first of two, and his second will deal with exactly that issue.) What I’d like to address here, and what it seems as if Steibel is most interested in having me address, is my behavior when I was on staff at Marvel in the ’70s, whether there was a conspiracy of some kind to cause Kirby to be fired, and if we were trying to get the scripting duties of his books for ourselves.

Steibel wrote:

Clearly they were all ambitious kids who wanted to take Jack’s place. They wanted to write comics and pointing out what they considered flaws in Jack’s work was a step in that direction. Push Jack aside and move in.

No, no, a million times no.

But to be more specific …

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Originally published at Scott Edelman. You can comment here or there.

http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/2012/05/specifics-of-general.html

Go ye and read this if you're wondering what the fuck this is.

I don't know if it's because I picture General Buggerman as something of a handlebar-moustached General Melchett from Blackadder Goes Forth, but I can only imagine him singing in the terribly posh, perfectly enunciated tones you'd expect in a Noel Coward song, or from some Gilbert & Sullivan major-general, modern or otherwise.


*

http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/2012/05/fond-adieu.html

You're not going to have chanced on this entry without knowing the backstory, are you? Me rewriting The Farce of Sodom as a musical? If you're like "Whuh?!" go here. Otherwise...

With this number, I'm not sure it isn't just a continuation of "A Helping Hand," but it feels like there should be a break between them. I'm tempted to move this to after the next song coming up, indeed, stage it with

http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/2012/05/helping-hand.html

Going by the order in the original Restoration play I'm adapting to a pornotropic Spectacular Spectacular, the previous Prickett and Swivia scene should actually come directly before this, but I rather think it might be better to introduce them earlier, with "A Most Obliging Friend" coming after "The Two-Timer's Waltz" and before "Comfort My Cock." This, then, would stand as a jaunty wee opener