recipe for banishing ick

I don’t do stomach bugs. No, really. The last time I had one like this, I was five or so. Ergo, being laid out flat today by such a thing is both deeply unpleasant and highly annoying, since it means no karate for me.

But! Nothing like some good news to perk me up a bit.

Mike Allen, the excellent gentleman behind Clockwork Phoenix and my story therein, “A Mask of Flesh,” has just purchased another story for Clockwork Phoenix 2!

This is “Once a Goddess,” which long-time readers of this journal have heard me mention before. It is the current (and hopefully future) champion of the “longest stretch from idea to draft” contest, as I came up with the seed for it in the summer of 2001, and only shoved it through to completion because I was bound and determined to submit it to the anthology this fall. But now it also holds the title for “shortest stretch from draft to sale” — in fact, it is the first story I have ever sold right out of the gate. So it took its own sweet time coming out of my head, but the result was worth the wait.

The opening line, as cited before in that “first line of unfinished stories” meme:

For eleven years Hathirekhmet was a goddess, and then they sent her home.

This story goes out to all the real-world girls who have been Kumari, and then had to find their way in life as ordinary women.

the decorations of Christmas

Today kniedzw picked up at the farmers’ market something that could pass for Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. It’s perfect for our purposes, though; we’re flying to Dallas on Saturday, and weren’t organized enough to get a tree sooner, so it doesn’t make sense to drop lots of cash on anything big. And it’s cute.

Real trees are weird to me, though. My parents eventually figured out that maybe there was a reason their asthmatic son kept landing in the hospital around Christmas, so it’s been a fake tree for as long as I can remember. Which does have some advantages; I don’t want to know how much you’d have to pay for a real ten-foot tree that’s even half so bushy and full. But anyway, while fake trees are the order of business in my mind, I do not object to the real ones. Artificiality of greenery is not a requirement in my holiday.

What is apparently a requirement, judging by the smile with which I greeted it this year, is woven straw. It’s a very Scandinavian thing, I think, though it pops up in other cultures. My family recently retired one of our sadder mobiles in favor of something less worn-out, but I adopted the old one, so now I have some straw angels and hearts hanging in my entryway, and a little straw angel ornament on the tree. Like winter soup, this is something inherited from my mother. (My father’s influence will show up elsewhere.)

In general, though, our ornamentation — especially on the tree — is eclectic with a vengeance. We do not have a designer tree. We have keychains and necklace pendants from all around the world, souvenirs brought home to double as tree jewelry. We have Buddhist prayer ornaments.

We have a two-inch piece of split copper pipe inscribed with the date “December 25th, 1989.”

This one has a story. 1989, Dallas did one of its sporadic freezes, like it does. I think the high on Christmas Eve was maybe in the 20s. The day after Christmas, we were scheduled to get on a plane and fly to the British Virgin Islands for a sailing trip. Christmas Day . . . Christmas Day warmed up into the 40s or so. And some time after we opened presents, my mother wandered back into the master bath and felt the carpet go squish.

You know where this is going.

My grandparents were visiting that year, as I recall, so my father and grandfather went out back and started bashing away at the wall. They were lucky; the first brick they took out was directly over the broken bit of pipe. Then they noticed that, having taken a brick out, they were looking right at the pipe! . . . yeah, the layer cake of the wall went outside-bricks-pipes-insulation-inside. Brilliant construction, that. Anyway, they fixed the pipe — my memory insists that the “Hallelujah” chorus came on the CD shuffle when they came in to announce it was done — and the pipe piece wound up on the tree as an ornament. One year somebody stole it off and got it engraved, and it has occupied a position of pride ever since. This has become a family conversation piece to the point that this year, when my brother announced that he and his fiancee had bought a tree (a real one; here’s hoping his lungs don’t collapse) and were inviting people to bring ornaments, I went to Home Depot and bought him a piece of copper pipe.

(Actually, I bought a longer piece and hacked off a chunk for him, a chunk for me. My own copper pipe is currently serving as a tree topper, since we don’t have an angel or star.)

I love having a decorated house for Christmas. The density of decoration has gotten a little ridiculous at home — we’re pretty sure our ornaments sit up in the attic all year and breed — but I love the greenery, the red and silver and gold, the way the house puts on a different dress for a little while. The decorations are really the source of my conviction that the Christmas season begins the day after Thanksgiving: once my brother and I went away to college, we got in the habit of putting everything up while we were home for break. Christmas ends (of course) on Epiphany, not because I’m Catholic but because I need some kind of landmark to end on, and New Year’s is too soon. Anyway, these things — garlands, ornaments of woven straw, all that good stuff — are special because they only get brought out for a little while. As much as I love them, I wouldn’t want them around all the time, because then they would cease to be special.

auction redux

I’ve had three of the MNC gift packages go already at the Buy It Now price, so I’ve reposted the auction, this time accepting bids only, but with extra goodies promised if the bids go high enough. Details here.

heads up!

I’m sure you all have your Christmas shopping done already, right? But in case you’re looking for a gift for that one last special person, head on over to the auctions. Not only are there many wonderful goodies for sale there, you can also buy a Midnight Never Come gift package, with a signed hardcover copy of the book and many other fun bits to go along. The auction ends at noon (Pacific time) on Thursday.

Winter Soup

As requested by many, the recipe:

2 lbs ground chuck
2 med. onions, chopped
1 can tomatoes, cut up
1 can stewed tomatoes, cut up
1 can tomato soup and 1 can water
1 can beef consomme and 1 can water
1 beef bouillon cube (or 1 tsp granulated)
1 green pepper, chopped
1 cup celery, chopped
1 can Vegall (mixed vegetables)
1 small can kernel corn
3 Tb brown sugar
1 Tb mustard
salt and pepper to taste

Brown and salt beef, drain off fat. Add rest and cook for several hours in a large pot.

***

I’m not fast at chopping things, so prep time for me tends to be half an hour, maybe a bit more. By “large pot” I mean a stock pot; by “cook for several hours” I mean simmer at a relatively low setting for three hours or so. My recipe card doesn’t specify that the pot should be covered, but I’m pretty sure that’s just an oversight; I do put a lid on. Vegall brand mixed vegetables are not required, but someday that company will go under and then as far as I’m concerned winter soup will never taste right again.

This serves six people moderately well, or two people with a lot of leftovers. It can be frozen and then thawed again later, though it tends to get thicker when you do so.

The Littlest White Belt is now the Littlest Yellow Belt

Meant to post this last night, but: Friday I had my first belt test, and yesterday I was presented with my new yellow belt. (Which really needs to go through the washing machine to be softened up; I could barely get it to hold its knot.)

I’m pleased, but it isn’t a huge achievement; people very rarely fail their tests for yellow, or so I am told. Since I did not fall over or accidentally punch one of the judges, I passed. It’s a nice mile-marker, though, and leaves me feeling energized for more. If I attend class regularly, I think I could be testing for orange at the beginning of February. Then blue, and then I think we start moving into the finer gradations of rank; I believe I have to go through blue-with-black-stripe before green (and green-with-white-stripe may intervene between those two). And you have to attend more classes between tests the higher you go, of course, so the rapid initial progress slows down eventually. But that rapid initial progress is nicely satisfying, and helps you feel like you’re getting somewhere.

Most importantly for me, this means I can practice kihon gata san without feeling presumptuous. Kihon gata ichi is the kata for the yellow belt test, and kihon gata ni for orange, but the two are all but identical, and doing them over and over again gets tedious. I’ll still work on both ichi and ni, of course, but at this point I’ll learn more about improving my form by doing things other than that same set of moves. I need to become more comfortable with the shorin-ryu style of movement in general, rather than just one limited example of it.

Now off to the library I go.

my brain = sieve!

I meant to post this on Thursday. That tells you something of the state of my brain. (Hey, at least it didn’t fall by the wayside straight into 2009 . . . which some other things in my inbox are in danger of doing.)

If you have not much time for reading, but you do have time for podcasts, check out Beneath Ceaseless Skies‘ audio department. You can download individual stories — including, oh, say, “Kingspeaker,” which went up on (you guessed it) Thursday — or subscribe to the RSS feed, or get updates via iTunes. Instructions for those methods are behind that first link.

Now I’m going to go put on some music. Because while it amuses me that my mental stereo put on the Hallelujah Chorus when my editor told me she liked the revisions I did on Ashes, I’d like something different now.

research query, especially for the Brits here

I know that properly doing this would require reading more than one book, but I’m trying not to fall down the research well, here.

If I were to read only one book to get a sense of the life a pretty and popular young woman (age circa 18-21) would have lived in late 1940s post-war London, what book should that be?

For my purposes, fiction would likely suffice as well as nonfiction. I’m looking for a sense of culture and society here, rather than specific facts.

’tis the season for charity

The news is filled with one bleak story after another, but sometimes it hits closer to home.

Vera Nazarian, the woman behind Norilana Books (which publishes, among other things, Clockwork Phoenix), is on the verge of losing her house. The story behind this crisis makes it abundantly clear that she has not ended up in this situation through foolishness or mismanagement, but rather from a streak of appalling luck, any one component of which would be bad enough on its own. Taken all together, they’re devastating.

Fortunately, sf/f fandom turns out to be really really good at mobilizing its social networks for a good cause. The community is taking donations, and also organizing an auction along the lines of . If you can’t spare the money for straight charity, look through the auctions and see if there’s something that can double as a holiday gift for someone else, or offer some item or service of your own for auction.

Vera needs a little over $11K by the 20th to keep her home; as of last night, the comm has already raised nearly $3800. The goal is too much for one person, but for fandom as a whole, it’s very much within reach. Every little bit helps.

My connection, of course, is through Clockwork Phoenix; Mike Allen, the editor, has posted about Vera here, speaking in praise of her as a wonderfully professional publisher. It’s worth keeping people like that on their feet. If you can spare even a little, head on over to the community and pitch in.

the food of Christmas

Tonight I’m going to make winter soup.

There’s nothing particularly special about it; to the unfamiliar eye, it’s just your standard beef-and-vegetables deal. But it’s not a beef-and-vegetable soup; it’s winter soup. It’s something my mother has made for as long as I can remember, and it is one of the infallible markers of the season in my mind, along with things made with wild rice. (Which is in the other soup.)

I’m going to try to make a series of posts this month about my personal Christmas traditions and where they come from. Christmas dinner itself will get its own post, I imagine, but since tonight there will be winter soup, it seemed a good way to start.

Funny story: the first time I made the soup for myself, I assembled the requisite ingredients, chopped the things that needed to be chopped, browned the things that needed to be browned, chucked it all in a pot, and thought, it just doesn’t look right. Because that happens, you know; it’s never the same when you do it yourself, never quite like how Mom made it. But I went ahead and put it on to simmer and wandered off, and an hour later I came back and there was winter soup in the pot.

Soups are like alchemy, as far as I’m concerned. They magically stop being their ingredients and become something else while you’re not looking.

Just as soon as I finish tidying this place up, we’ll get started on the alchemy.

another open letter

Dear Brain,

When I said I was going to work on short stories, I meant I was going to try and reduce the backlog of half-started ideas. That was not an open invitation to half-start something new.

Especially something that of all things in the world kind of resembles “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh.”

Especially when that means I’ll go to bed with that song stuck in my head.

Cut it out, and go back to developing the sacrilicious idea. Even better, stop being so finicky about working on “Chrysalis.” STOP ADDING TO THE LIST.

Love and kisses,
Swan

Catching up with a few more book recommendations:

To Say Nothing of the Dog, with which I have begun to mend my ignorance of Connie Willis’ novels, and

Uglies, in which Scott Westerfeld has fun with semi-dystopic near future SF YA.

If you have read either book, feel free to discuss in the comments.

Dell Award

I have no idea how many current or recent undergraduates read this journal, but if you were enrolled full-time in college for any semester since fall 2007, check out the Dell Magazines Award, a short story competition aimed specifically at undergrads. I won in 2003 (back when it was the Isaac Asimov Award), so I’m speaking from first-hand experience when I say they’re a great group of people, and the conference is especially fabulous to attend if you live in a place that’s cold and dreary come March.

I should have saved the egotism link for a little while longer, so I could pair it with this news: Rick Horton, editor of a Year’s Best antho series, is doing his year-end roundup of magazines, and in the post for IGMS he singles out “A Heretic by Degrees” as one of two stand-out short stories they published this year. Woot! Go, Driftwood, go!

linky

Three totally unrelated links make a post, right?

THE SELF-CENTERED LINK: a mini-essay about my story “A Heretic by Degrees.” Me musing about Driftwood and how I created it.

THE INTERNETS ARE FULL OF WEIRD LINK: since this is only photos, not video, it might be rigged, but the “action shots” make it look pretty real. Paintings created by an elephant. And here I thought creating art was the last bastion of “things humans do that other animals don’t” . . . .

THE ARMING FOR INTERNET SLAPFIGHTS LINK: might be of particular interest to jaylake. Pursuant to a discussion elsewhere, regarding whether the Mumbai attacks would have been stopped faster if India had an armed civilian populace, the abstract for an article on American gun ownership. Money quote: “For every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.” That’s twenty-two injuries or deaths for every one incident of defense. Mind you, that doesn’t factor in possible cases where the gun acted as a successful deterrent without anyone being hurt, but I rather doubt there are twenty instances of that for every one of the other. I wouldn’t say I want to see guns completely outlawed in the U.S., but these numbers make a good counter-argument to the “but I need to defend my home from burglars!” justification, as well as the “an armed society is a civil society” idiocy you get from some corners.

pronoun update

Tied for first in the poll are “they” and “yehuatl,” which I find interesting. “Sie” is in second place. But I think the winner will be a candidate not in the original poll: aliettedb‘s fabulous suggestion of “ome,” which is the Nahuatl word for “two.” This is both short and easily pronounceable; also, it carries a benefit for my hindbrain, which is that it evokes Ometeotl, the (mostly abstract) Aztec deity of duality. Since I already had it in mind to port Ometeotl into the setting as the patron deity of the xera — particularly those xera in this character’s condition — that looks like a win all around.

And I think I even have a name. Cenquiztli may not be the world’s most user-friendly set of phonemes, but phonetic friendliness has never been a real priority in this setting. (One of the reasons I doubt I will ever write a novel there. I rarely even bother telling anybody the setting is called Xochitlicacan.)

So my thanks to Aliette, and to all of you who pitched in on the problem. Now I go back to renaming Matzoloa, and trying to figure out where I got vay zodtz from in the first place.