FYI

If you can’t access my website for a little while, it’s because the host is having a downtime this evening.

Back on the horse.

Okay, so my previous attempt at book-blogging Queen’s Play failed miserably, helped along by the insanity that was 2008. But I’ve had the book on my desk for a few weeks now in an attempt to get started again, and a friend just tried to sic eclectician (aka “Stone Cold,” from his Assassin days) on me as motivation, so in the interests of not being murdered by a combat librarian, I’m officially announcing a new attempt.

For those of you with no idea what I’m talking about, here’s the original announcement, complete with link to my recommendation for the Lymond Chronicles. So far I’ve made it through the first book of the series; Queen’s Play is the second volume. (It’s also my least favorite, which is part of the reason for the stall. I have trouble remembering I liked it much better the second time I read it. If this were The Disorderly Knights, though, I would have blogged the whole thing a year ago, in record time.)

Anyway, if you or a friend of yours has read the whole series, drop me a line, and I’ll add you to the filter for the posts. Do NOT ask to be added if you haven’t read through the end of Checkmate; there are spoilers like whoa, both in my posts and in the comments, and I don’t want to ruin it for anybody. But otherwise, the more the merrier.

Good-bye, April Fools.

My LJ was remarkably quiet today, and featured a dearth of attempts at jokes. From this I conclude that most of you were hiding from the Internet, afraid of being suckered in.

(The only one that actually got me today? An announcement that Norm Coleman had conceded the Minnesota Senate election. I wish.)

Anyway, now that’s over, have a bunny! Or, to be more precise, a baby fennec hare. Dear moonandserpent: don’t click on that link until you’re seated in a comfortable chair, because it’s going to turn you to a puddle of cuteness-induced goo.

a followup on the karate criticism thing

Not so much “criticism I deal badly with” as a surfeit of riches: having three sensei and one senpai, in the span of three days, come up to offer me four different bits of advice on the same two kata moves.

To be fair, I brought it on myself. Having gotten that eye-opening pointer on Monday, I decided to practice it today — which meant I was repeating those moves when one of the sensei started watching me, so of course the pointer she offered had to do with them. Then I have two things to practice, which means I’m still working on those two moves when the senpai comes along, which means she gives me a pointer about them, and now I’m practicing three things when the other sensei decides to see how I’m doing . . .

So the bunkai is that it’s kind of a soto uke, and I need to open my hip out and then drop it forward for the double-punch, and make sure my zenkutsu dachi is wide enough, and think of my back when I chamber so the punch rebounds forward.

Or something like that.

Four different bits of advice, all of them good. But at this rate I’m going to spend the next month doing just those two movements, trying to assimilate all that good advice, and getting more piled on me every time somebody wanders by. <g>

Wiktory!

On my way to bed, my imagination suggested that perhaps the Plan involved cross-dressing half-orcs, and, well, the story’s done now.

4,149 words.

But still no title, dammit.

One day left . . .

. . . in which to finish my March story. Will I make it?

Hard to say. The last line of tonight’s writing was “We have a Plan” — which is very nice for my characters, but I wish I knew what that plan is.

Total length estimate has been revised downward; it might even be shorter than that. Funny things often should not overstay their welcome.

They should, however, have titles. And I have no idea what to call this one. It isn’t allowed to be “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” and “Dear Mom and Dad” (the current filename, because it’s the first line of the text) is not a whole lot better, but everything I’m coming up with sounds too much like “Letter Found in a Chest Belonging to the Marquis de Montseraille Following the Death of That Worthy Individual.” (In other words, most of my possibilities start with the phrase “Letters From.”) Possibly we will have to go with something in the vein of “The Adventures of” and then figure out what to put after “of.”

I hate being this close to ending a story, and still having no title for it.

Anyway. Enough D&D-style silliness for one night. Bedtime, and maybe when I wake up tomorrow I’ll know what the characters think they’re going to do about their problem.

The continuing adventures of the Littlest Yellow-And-A-Half Belt

Haven’t posted about karate in a while. (Still need a karate icon.) I belt-tested a while ago and got my yellow-belt-with-black-stripe, but they didn’t have any in my size, so I’m still running around in a yellow belt. (Am tempted to take a sharpie to it.) Two down, lots to go, but I’m enjoying the sense that I am progressing. I’ve got enough awareness of my own movements to be able to feel how I’m improving, and it’s kind of intriguing to observe.

Intriguing, and occasionally frustrating. Not because I’ve hit any kind of plateau, but because I’ve progressed far enough to run afoul of the one respect in which I take criticism badly: I hate being told I’m screwing something up when I already know that. Point out a flaw I wasn’t aware of, and I’m delighted, but bring up me one I’ve been kicking myself about for weeks? That’s the one thing I react badly to, in the sense that it just encourages me in my (occasionally counterproductive) habits of self-castigation. And now I’m aware enough of certain flaws in my work to hit that point.

On the other hand, the sensei tonight, after giving me a few eye-opening pointers on kihongata san, told me I did “beautiful kata.” Which, coming from a teacher you respect enormously, is enough to put you walking on air for a couple of minutes. At least if you’re me.

I need certain muscles back. Except that it probably isn’t even “back;” I can’t say for sure I ever really had much strength in my hip abductors, since dance almost never had me taking my leg out to the side in anything other than a rotated position (which shifts a lot of the work onto the glutes and the quads). So, okay, I need to get those muscles strong, because even if high side and roundhouse kicks aren’t anything you would use in a real fight, I’m asked to do them in class, and I ought to have good form. And the ab work we do for the belt tests is coming perilously close to making my quads give out (long before my abs do), so that’s something else to fix. And, y’know, the whole pushups thing. Stupid upper body strength. Or rather, lack thereof.

I am a looooooooong way from doing the one-armed pushup seen in that icon.

But I like feeling myself become familiar with a different style of movement. I can’t wait to get my orange belt, at which point I might be able to learn pinan nidan, the next kata; it’s very different from the ones I know already, and I expect I will learn a lot from it.

Dammit, I lost my bet.

I’ve been wagering since about 1998 that the Wheel of Time would end up being thirteen books long. Looks like I’m wrong.

Official Tor press release.

Brandon Sanderson, who’s finishing the series, on how he’s ended up doing four times as much work as he signed on for.

I never believed, from the moment Jordan announced the series would end at twelve, that it could wrap up that fast, and I was right about that. But my money was on thirteen, and even that turns out to have been optimistic. (There’s something hilarious about the line in the press release, that “somehow it seems fitting that what began as a trilogy will also end as one.” Trilogy, my foot.)

At some point, I will write a lengthy post or two about my history with this series. Suffice to say that I do intend to read the end, and in fact I will almost certainly re-read the series one final time on my way to that end. I have that much investment left in it, though not much more.

But man, I do NOT envy Sanderson, who almost certainly got paid a flat fee for finishing the series, and is now having to crank out three books instead of one, all of them longer than the original estimate. While also keeping up with his own books. The man is insane.

FINALLY!

I’ve been in California for seven months, and I finally felt my first earthquake.

What’s funny is that it didn’t feel like what people told me it would. In fact, it happened twenty minutes ago, but I wasn’t sure it was an earthquake until just now, when the USGS map updated. More than anything, it felt like a reeeeeeeally big gust of wind came along and knocked my building a bit sideways, like when you’re in a car and a semi goes whooshing past — but I seriously doubt any gust of wind is big enough to make this entire row of townhouses rock like that. Sure enough: earthquake. 4.3, ESE of San Jose.

I know I’ve experienced a billion and one earthquakes since coming here, but none of them big enough that I noticed them. Now I have. I can mark that off my checklist.

Two social things I have come to appreciate about ICFA

1) Don Morse makes a point every year of not just thanking the wait-staff who herd us through the luncheons and banquet, but thanking them by name. Which pleases me more than I can say, because I believe very strongly in greeting and smiling at and making eye contact with maids and doormen and other service personnel. They’re people, and they aren’t invisible. They should be treated accordingly. (In fact, I almost wish our room ninja steward on the cruise had been less ninja-like, because I almost never saw him to thank him. But it took only one day on board the ship before I grokked why cruises include substantial recommended tips for the staff. Those people earn them.) And it’s triply important when you keep coming back to the same place year after year.

2) On the whole, the poolside contingent is very good about doing introductions. If I pull up a chair next to someone I know who’s sitting with someone I don’t know, our common denominator will often take a moment to acquaint the strangers with one another before the conversation proceeds. I’m not as good about doing that myself as I should be, actually — I blame a pervasive self-doubt as to whether I have people’s names right, even though I know that self-doubt is groundless 99% of the time. But I appreciate other people doing it, since it helps smooth over the uncertainty of joining a group composed largely of people you don’t know.

It isn’t just the sunshine and the poolside and the random fascinating conversational topics. Those first two would be lonely, and that last one wouldn’t happen, if people weren’t conscientiously friendly to their fellow attendees.

gathering data

I was going to post this myself, but Mindy Klasky has done a good job translating the survey into an LJ poll, and it’s easier to have all the data in one place anyway. Therefore, I encourage everybody to head over to her journal and answer a few questions about your preferences in cover art.

The survey in question was started by Elizabeth Moon, and is part of an attempt by some SF/F authors to suss out the decisions made by publishers’ art departments, and how those fit/do not fit with reader preferences.

Speaking of short stories

The Story That Is Not Allowed to Call Itself “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” No Matter What It Thinks:

The Zokutou site is down. Sadness.

Anyway, this is not the story I thought I’d be writing this month. It was going to be the ghost-prince story. But that one has grown Significance that I’m not quite sure what to do with, so it’s composting a while longer, and in the meantime I’m writing something I forgot to include on the previous list: a piece that I think is my first attempt at a genuinely humorous story.

(Short form is, it’s a silly take on D&D-style fantasy. It has nothing to do with summer camp, but like “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” it belongs to the micro-genre of Distressing Letters From Your Wayward Offspring.)

(Oddly enough, the quickest way to make D&D-style fantasy funny is to take it seriously.)

I’m very much making this one up as it goes along. Though I should figure out soon what was up with the temple roof thing, and also where the rest of it is trying to go.

I have a week to figure it out.

A day late

I meant to post this after getting home from ICFA last night, but got distracted. Eighty days seventy-nine days to the publication of In Ashes Lie, and today’s bit of added content . . . comes from Midnight Never Come, actually.

Long-time readers of this journal may recall that back when I drafted that book, I had to re-write a substantial chunk of Act One — basically Deven’s chunk of it, almost in its entirety. Therefore, in the spirit of the “deleted scenes” they put on some DVDs, you can read the original draft, complete with some notes about why it got replaced (and what I wish I could have kept).

There’s mild spoilers for MNC in the discussion of those scenes, so if you want to say and/or ask anything about them, I direct you to the spoiler thread for the novel; comment there instead of here.

Why do I go to ICFA every year?

Because it’s the only place I’ve ever been where I can spend a weekend talking about makeup in SF/F fandom, adulthood in modern America, Albanian sworn virgins, a myriad of foreign languages, my honeymoon, copyright law, medieval cathedrals, oral-formulaic theory, the Oxford English Dictionary, the perils of caretaking for capuchin monkeys, and Scurrilous Industry Gossip, and do most of it while lounging around a poolside in the sunshine.

There’s really no downside to this.

Except that I’m now five days behind on what the Internet’s been doing in my absence, and there’s no way I’ll be catching up. So if you did something interesting on the Internet since Wednesday morning and you want me to know about it, please link it in comments; otherwise, I’m just declaring Livejournal bankruptcy, and moving forward from here. (E-mail, I will be catching up with.)

Tonight’s packing-induced revelation

I am somehow taken by surprise every time I notice something is wearing out.

What, you mean I can’t wear a pair of pants, or a shirt, or shoes, for eight or ten years and have them still be in good condition? You mean these things are less durable than, say, the Pyramids of Giza?

Somehow this both startles and offends me, as if it is not the natural order of things.

Well, at least I get my money’s worth out of what I own. But it’s very annoying to me when something falls apart after less than a decade of constant wear. I mean, really.

File Under “Sad But True”

Conventions have become my major reason for cutting my hair.

For those of you who don’t know: it’s down to somewhere in my waist-to-butt range, depending on when I last got it cut. It got that long because in high school I fell into a pattern where I’d forget to get it cut for, oh, a year at a time? I’m better now, but I still regularly go six months or more without thinking about it. And when I do think of it . . . yeah, it’s often because I’m about to go to a con and decide I should clean up the ends a bit.

Which is a wordy way of saying I got three inches whacked off today, and ICFA was the occasion. I head out on Wednesday, and am looking forward to poolside conviviality that legitimately doubles as work.

Between now and then, though — time for some work-work.

Today on Flycon

3 p.m. Pacific time — Gaming and Fiction

7 p.m. Pacific time — Reactionary Fantasy

All panels are message threads, so check that page for the appropriate posts shortly before the panel starts. You don’t need to register to participate.

ETA: Er, I’m going to stop pretending I know how the panels are being sorted out; it appears the gaming one is actually over on SFF Net, while the later one is over here.