Bluejo's Journal

12:28am: Thud: Turnover
Words: 2264
Total words: 5764
Files: 3
Tea: White Orchard
Music: Three Double Concertos, arguably the best music of all time ever.
RSI: Forgot that line, didn't I? Well, reminded of it now.
Reason for stopping: end of chapter.

I'm two chapters in, and these people are five courses through a twelve course lunch? Seriously? Oh well, we've also had a lot of backstory. It'll work out.

Anybody know anything about ballet that they didn't get from Noel Streatfeild and Rumer Godden? Any recommendations for ballet blogs?

12:18am: Lemonade (for fivemack and rezendi)
You need a 2 liter jug, a pyrex jug, a lemon squeezer, 2 big or 3 small lemons, 2 limes, 1 orange, a tray of ice, 2 oz of sugar, and lots of cold water. Takes 5-10 minutes.

Put the sugar in the pyrex jug. Boil the kettle. When the kettle boils, cover the sugar with boiling water, stir to dissolve. You don't need to make syrup or anything, but you want the sugar dissolved.

Meanwhile, put the tray of ice into the 2 liter jug. Squeeze the lemons, limes and orange in, getting out all the juice and pulp you can and avoiding adding the pips. Pour the dissolved sugar and water in. Top up with cold water. Shake or stir. Drink, with ice. It'll be cold enough. I used to refrigerate it for a while first, but then I had to make some in a hurry and it was just fine.

This is very refreshing and about as isotonic as you can get. I sometimes add mint or basil to the sugar in the boiling water when I have that growing outside. If it's too sweet, use less sugar next time. I figure this has about a teaspoon of sugar per glass.

The other thing you can do, right now while limes are nine for a dollar, is just squeeze half a lime into your glass of water and ice. Kids won't drink this, but it's good.

9:09pm: Thud: Turnover
Words: 3492, about 100 of them words from last time. I started again, much better. Now have good grip on voice.
Total words: 3492
Files: 2
Tea: Four O'Clock White Orchard. Also home made lemonade.
Music: Three Double Concertos.
Reason for stopping: Solid end of chapter.

Z fixed, or reasonably fixed, Protext on this computer, so I am trying it again. Much nicer using this keyboard!

Posted and deleted science query because I want an answer, not my competence to write SF brought into question. Thanks to people who gave useful answers anyway.

I think the short version of what this is about is "an art festival on a generation starship".

12:32am: Thud: Turnover
Words: 2088
Total words: 2088
Music: Three Double Concertos
Tea: Jon Singer's Green Pu Er, followed by London Tea Company's White Tea with Apricot and Elderflower.
Files: 3
Reason for stopping: bedtime

I've given up for the time being on getting Protext working properly in the emulator and gone back to the 386 laptop. I'm still planning to write the Talleyrand thing but I've been doing research on it forever and it still needs research, and I'm quite excited about this and I thought I'd sit down and write it and see where it wanted to go.

It's about the middle generation of a generation starship, and it's inspired by a panel at last year's farthingparty (Info on this year's here and here) and something Z said when we were in Florence.

7:07pm: Mythopoeic Award Nomination
I'm delighted to announce that Among Others is nominated for the Mythopoeic Award, along with an excellent list of other nominees:

Lisa Goldstein, The Uncertain Places (Tachyon)
Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus (Doubleday)
Richard Parks, The Heavenly Fox (PS Publishing)
Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless (Tor)
Jo Walton, Among Others (Tor)

complete list of all categories here.

I feel slightly overwhelmed with all the love my book's getting this week!

4:55pm: Chinese Calendar help
I can't find anything online that lists Chinese animal/element years into the future. What I actually want to know is what year it would be in 2212, and I'd also like to know the complete cycle of where it would be around then.

(It's really frustrating to click on something that says it's a ten thousand year calendar but which actually only goes up to 2019.)

4:01am: I won!
I won the Nebula! Wow. Very tired now.

(Wow. That was unexpected.)

10:55am: Off to the Nebulas
My stuff is packed (puts comb in pocket) and in an hour or so I'm taking the train southwards. I'm going to DC for the Nebulas. I'll see some of you there, or around DC -- in addition to the Nebulas I have plans for museums, a tea party, and a playreading. I'm looking forward to it.

12:16am: Doing laundry on the last day of the world
Even if we never wear these shirts,
lie on these sheets,
eat off these tablecloths,
they will still flap out blue
between the buildings,
an unexpected line of colour
like a grace note.
(And should we live to bring them in
they will smell like fresh sunshine.)

Happiness lies poised between
eternity
and the next moment.
This shirt reaching out its wet arms
to yesterday's wind and sun,
now dryly embraces my arms.
And every leek cut lengthways,
every garlic clove chopped,
every basil leaf
is both its own good
and the potential of a meal
if the world goes on so long.

Yes, we could die on any morning,
slipping between moments,
gone between words in a conversation,
our worlds could end at any time.
Yet here we are, doing laundry,
making dinner,
making poetry,
making the mindful choices,
living in every moment,
because it is this moment,
every action its own action,
every word a benison.

(So the injunction "Live as if it's the last day of the world" was countered by "If it was the last day of the world, I wouldn't bother doing laundry". I've thought about this a lot since. And though I would like to, I do not always live up to it.)

10:51pm: Locus Award Nomination!
Among Others is one of the five finalists for the Locus Award in the Fantasy Category, the whole list is here.

I don't think there's any question that A Dance With Dragons will win, but I'm seriously giving some consideration to going to Seattle to enjoy losing. I do think it's nice to be able to go to an award ceremony if at all possible. I loved Seattle when I was there in January, and I have friends I could stay with, and Amtrak is cheap and convenient. On the other hand I've already been away from home a lot this year, and maybe I should stay home and get some work done. Dithering about this now.

4:55pm: Home from Jo March's Europe
I am home, having spent the last week walking my feet off in Florence and Rome. What I said about Florence last time still very much holds. This time I wasn't alone with Thrud but joined by Z and A and nineweaving and we all had a delightful time. I have bought a tapestry, and Z says that the only thing better than owning a tapestry is being aware that he will one day inherit a tapestry. He says he doesn't care if he never sees another Annunciation, but he loves Florence.

At one point nineweaving and I were talking about Little Women and Jo March's desire to see Europe and I remembered something. When I was a child infuriated by Aunt March's perfidy in taking Amy instead I realised all at once that I was in Europe. I mean I wasn't in a bit of Europe where any C.19 Americans would have wanted to visit on their Grand Tour, I was in Aberdare, but all the same and even so. I was in Europe where Jo March so very much wanted to be. I could be in Europe for her.

On Friday we went to visit brotherguy at Alba Longa (or Castel Gandolfo as they call it these days) and we saw the observatory -- with a moon rock and a number of meteorites and a rosary made by tnh all in the same case. Then we walked through the papal gardens. There are olive trees and Roman pines and a formal Italian garden with fountains and hedges and statues, and there are the genuine Roman ruins of Domitian's summer palace among the telescopes of Jesuit astronomers. A was sketching a fountain and I thought that right then I was in the layered complex older civilization that Jo March longed for. That fountain, the ruined theatre behind it, that sunlight through those trees...

We carry ourselves forward, and we carry them with us. Some of them are dead and some of them are imaginary, and they can't see what we so badly want them to see and we can't even send them postcards letting them know we wished they were there. But we were there, for ourselves, for them, for you, for the past and the present and the future.

And furthermore, we need to make things and be excited about the things other people make and keep building the possibility that the future might be even more beautiful than the past and have spaceships in it.

7:56pm: Si
French is conditional,
Italian is affirmative.

7:18am: Number One Bestseller, FWIW
So, Locus compile their own bestseller list, based on sales in independent bookstores with good SF sections and SF specialist bookstores. And they've just relased their figures for January, a month I spent exclusively travelling around the US signing books in stores like that. So this is a very specialised and limited sales triumph, and one that doesn't really represent a huge number of literal sales. All the same, it's nice for once to beat The Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games...

9:45am: So happy
I'm very bad at keeping secrets, and it has been really hard not telling everyone for the last few weeks, but I am delighted to tell you now that Among Others has been nominated for a Hugo.

I am so happy I feel I ought to drop an emerald in the ocean, and I feel as if my entire life has been vindicated by this. Sure I have won a World Fantasy Award and been nominated for Nebulas, and that was very nice. But this is a Hugo nomination! A Hugo nomination! Me! Wow. I've been waking up happy every morning for weeks and it shows no sign of wearing off.

8:16am: If this is Wednesday it must be...
I'm in Cardiff, with Z and A, in my aunt's house. Z and I will be arriving in Eastercon on Friday afternoon, so this year for the first time for ages I won't be posting on Friday to say I'm not in Eastercon or Minicon with my oh-so-subtle T.S. Eliot joke subject line of "And then again, in spite of that".

The keyboard on this netbook is very small. Wales is chilly and rainy but full of delicious chocolate eggs.

12:26pm: Elise has a whole pile of amazing new necklaces on sale
The elements were sulphur, red orichalc, dragonscale, and light.
Gravity shaped them, lightning fused them,
Attention poured through them
So the wind
Wound them together.

(lots of different links)

12:35pm: This makes me happy
My favourite ego-google hit at the moment is a variant of "Reading Among Others made me want to read some classic SF and so..." To my certain knowledge, people having this reaction have read The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, Babel 17 and Triton. And they like them too, even people who describe themselves as not usually reading SF.

I was pleased enough when people who read Tooth and Claw read Trollope, but this feels like fulfilling a victory condition.

Oh, and after considering all the options very carefully, I have bought a Kindle, which should be delivered tomorrow. I like the page-turning better than on all the other things available to Canadians, and there is also a big plus in having the same thing as Z when it comes to tech support.

2:38pm: Next Stop Albany!
Don't forget I'm going to be reading and signing tomorrow afternoon in Flights of Fantasy in Albany, New York. If you live anywhere near Albany... consider renaming your region something nicer than "Upstate", because it's actually a really attractive area. Also, come to my reading tomorrow! With a special appearance by cyberneticnomad who wrote the two most important words of Among Others -- the title.

(I've done really well on this tour in terms of not doing it on my own. First I dragged Z on my circumnavigation of the US, then I took rysmiel to Toronto, and now Rene is coming with me to Albany.)

5:10pm: If your brain plays tricks, you can use that
I was looking at the address of a Czech restaurant we're planning to go to, which appears to be located in early May. Why is it when looking at a place in another part of town in Google Streetview my immediate reaction is not "this picture was obviously taken at a different time of year," but "Hey! It's snowing down here, but up there they have leaves on the trees already?"

I never react that way to photographs, but I always do to streetview. I think it may be because Google itself is so immediate, so current.

I used this in my story "The Panda Coin", inspired by a concept by Marguerite Yourcenar and published in Eclipse 4. There's a space station divided into twelve sectors named for the months -- and with artificial weather to match. Everyone wants to live in May and September, and February is a low rent area.

And of course, it's better that Google doesn't have cameras on every street corner showing places in realtime. In my story "What a Piece of Work", published in Subterranean, Google becomes sentient and starts to set its own priorities...

Writing what I know and anthropomorphising software since 1986.

11:15pm: Thinking about buying a Kindle
So, I just read a whole novel on Z's Kindle, to see whether I was OK with it. I was OK with it. I certainly prefer reading an actual book, but it's just fine.

If I had one, I'd use it for three things.

1) Wise Man's Fear. The paperback I'd been waiting for came out -- and it's a huge trade paperback that weighs 1.2 kilos. I'm going to Britain and Florence next month, and I need to write about 5 chapters of WMF a week. Just by buying this I could reduce my luggage weight by more than a kilo. Which brings me to:

2) Travel.

3) Reading e-copies of not yet published books that friends give me. That's what I just did with it, and it worked really well, massively better than reading a book on the computer.

4) Buying e-books instead of hardcovers, and then buying the paperback when it comes out. At the moment, what happens is that I buy a hardcover for $35 because I cannot wait. Then, a year later, I buy a paperback for $10 to replace my hardcover, at a total cost of $45. This way, I could buy an e-book for $10 and then a paperback for another $10, thus saving $25 per book without the author having any less money. By this argument, it would pay for itself in four hardbacks.

Also, this would eliminate my first worry about it -- that any book I buy for it won't be there when I need it in the future. I'd have the long lasting re-readable solid paperback, my preferred format. The e-copy would be an instantly readable copy, and a travel-re-readable copy, and if it didn't hold up, well, there's the paperback. (I've recently noticed people saying MMPBs don't last, as if this was an established fact. It's complete twaddle. I have MMPBs I bought second hand and have read zillions of times and which are just fine. True, I had to replace a copy of Shogun after a mere dozen readings over twenty years, but it's an exceptionally long book. And it was still in print.)

My other worry about it is that I'd be shifting my book dollars to Amazon, and Amazon is a giant with dubious ethics trying to get a monopoly. But it's not as if many of my book dollars go to awesome independent bookstores now -- we don't have any locally. I mostly buy from Chapters/Indigo, which are the Canadian equivalent of B&N. I could buy their e-reader, which is called a Kobo, except that it's heavier, doesn't have such a good screen, and it's even less likely to keep being supported in the long term.

Looking up comparable weights to check my intuition that the Kobo's heavier -- it is -- I discovered the astonishing statistic that the Kindle's battery will last for a month if you only read for half an hour a day. I suddenly feel repelled and as if I am not their target market. I'm sure there are many lovely people who only read for half an hour a day, but I am not them. Also, wouldn't it make more sense to say the same thing as "Battery lasts for 15 hours of reading time"? I mean I don't mind charging it, that's not the issue, it's the shifty marketing that makes me wonder where else they're shading the truth.

I'd almost talked myself into it, but now I've changed my mind again.

2:24am: I can't believe I'm even thinking about this again
I'm really reluctant to post this, because I know a lot of you will say "write it, write it, write it" and a lot of you will say "I'll read whatever you write" and none of that is the slightest use.

( spoilers for Among Others and 1493, weird landscape stuff, angsty irresolute whining )

12:26pm: Drabblecast of "Unreliable Witness"
My short story "Unreliable Witness" originally published on Strange Horizons in 2001 has just been released as a podcast by Drabblecast and is available for listening here.

It's about an old lady with dementia who meets an alien.

I remember writing it -- it's one of my very few actual short stories, rather than being a joke or the first chapter of an unwritten novel or a poem with the line breaks taken out. I had the idea and the voice while out for a walk when I lived in Swansea, and I rushed home and threw my coat on the floor and sat down and the computer and wrote it, only later realising that I'd left the front door swinging in the wind.

3:29pm: Another tour event: Flights of Fantasy in Albany on Sunday 18th March
So, one more reading and signing at Flights of Fantasy in Albany NY on Sunday 18th March at 2pm.

1:12pm: Bibliography in Covers
OK, this is awesome. Some amazing person has done a pinterest thingy of the covers of all the books mentioned in Among Others. Here's the link, I love it.

The best thing about it is that they're all old covers. So some of them I look at and that's the "right" cover, i.e. the one I have. Others are old US covers I've never seen before, and which are really interesting -- look at that I Capture the Castle cover! I really want that edition of Citizen of the Galaxy!

I'm really delighted by this.

2:51am: Thud: Flood
Words: 2167
Total words: 2167
Tea: Pu Erh
Music: No music
Reason for stopping: Bedtime. Been puttering with this on and off all day.

How dystopic does a world have to be before it's deserves drowning? For some reason it's at a 1950s tech level.