Bluejo's Journal

6:38am: 45 Today
I'm awake ridiculously early because I'm excited because it's my birthday. I thought I was supposed to grow out of that, and I suppose I may, but not yet.

AM is here, and we're going to meet Z for breakfast in Byblos and then come back here to open presents. Then we're meeting rysmiel and Z's girlfriend A after work and going to have dinner in L'Unique, all of which sounds like a lovely plan. I'm looking forward to it.

( and my publications while I was forty-four )

1:56pm: Snowing
It's the first real snow of the year, and I don't suppose it'll stick as we have rain forecast, but nice anyway.

My aunt is here, which is also nice. We had breakfast out and went to Jean Talon market and then Z's apartment Saturday, and then to the botanical gardens and Chateau Dufresne yesterday. Today she's shopping with Z and I'm trying to get a bit ahead on Tor.com posts.

Which reminds me, Athyra, Robert Holdstock, 1948-2009 The Phoenix Guards, Phoenix.

I found out last week that "Down to Earth" also known as "the Dortmunder in space story" and "the squirrel story" was published in SF Chronicle in 2006 -- I now have copies of it and have been paid for it. As I don't expect many people saw it, I may put a copy online (probably here) at some point when I find a copy -- it's backed up somewhere, and if the worst comes to the worst it's on my 286, which I'm seriously thinking of setting up again for everyday use. I wrote "Down to Earth" in 2001.

In other good short story news, "Three Twilight Tales" which was published this year in Firebirds Soaring is going to appear in two Year's Best anthologies, which is especially nice because I almost never write short stories. Poetry, yes, and also novels, but I seldom have short story size ideas.

9:25am: Another moon poem
nineweaving had spam this morning containing the phrase "submersible moonphase" and asks for poetry or flash fiction.

To the Aegean she tosses the moonpath,
rippling highway of silken silver
if you could walk it, if you could
take that first step, if you could
keep your balance as she rises
you could dance with Artemis
beside Apollo Eleven.

Our oceans are her cloak
tossed over her arm,
dragging behind her
glinting, glimmering,
shot through with silver
waxing, waning
tugged by her tides.

Still she stands poised
rising full over the mountain's rim
a great silver coin
as if a push would roll her
splashing coldly down at Kythera
impossible, underwater
submersible moonphase.

7:12am: Raspberry muffins, very easy
Pre-heat oven to 180 C.

Put paper cases in muffin tins.

Melt 2 oz (50 g) butter or marge.

Put 6 oz sugar in a mixing bowl.

Whisk in the melted butter, then add 2 eggs, a slosh of vanilla (teaspoon) and half a pint of milk, while continuing to whisk well.

Fold in 6 oz SR flour.

Pour a little batter into each of the 12 cases. Then put four (fresh or frozen, I used frozen because it is November) raspberries on top of the batter in the cases. Then put a spoonful of batter on top of the raspberries.

Melt 2 ounces of butter or marge. Add a handful of oats, a handful of ground hazelnuts and all the brown sugar that's left... probably a tablespoon or so of brown sugar. Stir with a wooden spoon until it's like crumble. Distribute this over the tops of the muffins. (It's this faffing about with a topping that makes things muffins instead of cakelings as far as I can see. Well, also the milk.) If you were organized you could make it first and have it ready to put on.

Bake in the top of the oven for just over 20 minutes until done.

Having so little fat, these won't keep long. Make them on occasions when they don't need to. I made 12 and there's one left, which is going in rysmiel's lunch. I'd have predicted four or five left.

This started off with a couple of online recipes, and then wandered far away when I realised the first one hadn't done their conversions properly and that I hadn't enough milk for the second one and just thought "OK, I have six ounces of sugar in a bowl and 2 ounces of melted butter, the oven is on, let's just improvise." The bit with putting the raspberries in the middle of the batter was from the second one, and definitely worth it, if fiddly -- you end up with the raspberries totally surrounded by cake in a layer, not at the bottom, but the muffins well risen. The topping was from a banana muffin recipe I found online ages ago, well sort of, as I vaguely remembered it, except for the hazelnuts, which I just thought of yesterday. The results were so deeply appreciated that I can see that these are something Z is going to want again, which is why I'm writing it down, because otherwise there's no way I'll remember.

4:06pm: Recent posts of mine at Tor.com
Yendi, Brokedown Palace, Barbara Hambly sequel stories to download, Teckla, Taltos. More Dragaera posts coming soon.

6:32pm: Poll #1489041 How old are you, or is fandom really greying?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 428

How old are you?

Do you go to Worldcon?

Do you go to other cons?

In my opinion, reading this LJ makes you a part of fandom. Do you consider yourself a fan?

And furthermore...

4:57pm: Ur-story
I went last night with Z and A to the Montreal launch of Claude Lalumiere's collection Objects of Worship at Paragraphe. During the question period afterwards, Claude mentioned that he believed that all writers are trying to tell part of the ur-story, and sometimes they get closer than others. Afterwards, walking back to the metro Z disagreed with this idea at length -- and I have to say it isn't what I feel as if I'm doing either. "Anyway," Z concluded. "If there is an Ur story, it has to be Gilgamesh."

11:23am: Recent Tor.com posts
Noodles, self-help groups and airplane parts: things to avoid in making up fantasy names, Jhereg, Re-reading Dragaera, What is it with coffee?, Fred Pohl's The Way the Future Was.

More Dragaera posts will be going up soon.

In other interesting reading this week, Anne de Courcy's biography Snowdon about Tony Armstrong Jones is brilliant, as I'd expected. She is definitely my favourite biographer, she always gets the balance just right.

6:33pm: New coat! Well, also old coat.
One day in the autumn of 1996, I bought a five pound bus pass that, in those days, enabled one to take buses all over the north-west. Since Kendal had a shoe factory, it was cheaper to take the bus to Kendal to buy shoes than to buy shoes in Lancaster -- about half the price in fact. I did this -- I went to Kendal and bought a pair of sandals. Then I got on another bus and went to Keswick. Feeling a little chilly, I went into an army surplus store and bought a dark gray Swiss army surplus greatcoat for ten pounds. I hadn't been planning an expedition to buy a coat, but I felt smug that I had bought sandals, a coat, and had a walk around Derwent Water all for less than the cost of buying sandals in Lancaster.

The sandals have long since disintegrated, but I've worn that coat every winter for the last twelve years. All the buttons have fallen off at different times and had to be reattached. The cuffs have torn. It's horribly shabby, the way things are when you wear them in all weathers and every day for years. But it's also long and wonderfully warm, and in its own odd way stylish -- it has been described as Stalinish chic, but there you go.

The last two winters I've been thinking I ought to replace it. On occasions where I've wanted to look less scruffy I've worn my gorgeous microfibre leaf pattern coat that james_nicoll gave me. That's warm, but it's also short -- my greatcoat comes down to my shins, and also buttons up to my chin. But every time I've thought about replacing the greatcoat, I've failed to find anything that's as nice. Everything I have looked at fails to match it. So I've kept on wearing it as it's got older and shabbier, because even with ragged cuffs and non-matching buttons (some usually hanging by a thread) it was just better than anything else.

Today, when I came back from going to the bank and shopping, my downstairs neighbours had decided to use loud machinery outside my study window to tear out the parking spot. I'm generally in favour of it being returned to grass, but I would have liked some warning. I put the shopping away and went straight out again, as it was too loud in here to hear myself think, never mind think about Brokedown Palace. I didn't actually have anything sensible to do, but I went round in a loop to CocoRico to buy some Portugese barbecue for dinner.

On the way, I passed the army surplus shop on St Laurent. I went in. Now I do try not to replace everything with an identical thing, because left to my natural inclination this is what I would always do, and it's easy to get obsessive about it and it isn't healthy. I'm bad enough with DOS computers and denim bag. I hate buying clothes, and I always tend to buy the same kind of thing, while trying to vary it a bit. Z's girlfriend A, when shopping with me, despaired that I wanted something different but I wouldn't buy anything that wasn't the same because I didn't like it. Yeah. Problem. I know some people love buying clothes, and buying clothes that are different from their other clothes, but not me.

Anyway, I have looked in plenty of army surplus shops between 1996 and now, without seeing my greatcoat including the one by St Laurent metro -- last winter they had some but only in very small sizes. But today they had one in my size -- slightly different lining, and the buttons look more securely fixed, otherwise identical. I bought it. I didn't hesitate. My coat. My coat, new, renewed, reborn, risen again hosannah.

The usual trouble with buying something excellent and long-lasting is that when it does eventually need replacing the company who made it have gone out of business because they couldn't keep going all that time without my support. I've been seeing this recently with kitchen things -- a lot of my better kitchen things I bought in 1987 when I bought my house in Lancaster, and they're wearing out. But the Swiss Army, having designed what's close to being the platonically ideal greatcoat, haven't changed it, and are still selling off their surplus. It cost $65, which is more then ten pounds but still incredibly cheap for a new Montreal-winter-quality coat.

In another ten years or so I'll buy another, unless we've invented nanotech clothes by then, in which case I'll buy Ellen Mae's Swiss army coat from The Cassini Division, the one that changes into a spacesuit or a balldress. But when I go out in winter, this is what I'll have it set for.

2:17pm: The Grief of Orpheus
I just realized this wasn't actually online anywhere. I wrote it in January 2001.

They may not call this music.
This is the air of anger.
This is refusal made palpable,
cast in chords as bells are cast in bronze.
Each step down is inexorable.
This is the necessity of the lyre.

Earth opens by the logic of these notes.
I insist there is a way down;
a long, tiled, sloping passage
towards the ferry, the waiting dog,
the marble halls, the king, the queen,
the seven hard rivers of hell.

This theme everyone knows.
Nobody has gone down alive;
nobody has come back before.
This time my will
bending possibility
demands there is a way back up.

I have not come to plead.
I have not thought of grief.
(Since she fell, I have not stopped singing.
This is neither grief nor music.)
I have alloyed anger and art together
to make the world the way I will have it.

While I am singing,
she is dancing through long grass,
crowned with poppies and cornflowers.
Our eyes meet and joy touches her
she is light on bare feet,
turning towards me.

While I am singing,
she is looking with love, and dancing,
there is no next moment
no snake in the grass,
no fear, no falling,
no fluster of folk and useless fuss.

While I am singing,
I am walking the long way down
to Death's dark kingdom.
When I come singing up
through hell's seven rivers,
she will be behind me.

I need not look back,
since I am singing.
By sheer necessity,
that wrings each word and note to follow
the word and note that came before it
she follows behind me.

We pass the dark thrones,
and the path turns upwards.
Towards the growing lands,
towards the earth, the sea, the sky,
towards the meadow where she is dancing,
towards the waiting wedding breakfast.

By the power of my lyre
by the power of art to bend hearts,
by the power that makes and unmakes,
by the undeniable power of love,
she is bound to be behind me
while I am singing.

We make our way up,
one measured step at a time.
I lead the way upwards,
out of this hell, in which she is dead,
in which I may not stop singing,
towards the memory of light.

4:37pm: Water on the moon
The moon answers me back, saying:
No, you imagined that lonely goddess
shining huntress of chilly night
solitary sister to owls.
I circle you all the time,
night doesn't fall in my orbit,
I dance with gravity.
And as for water, well,
haven't you noticed the tides?

9:49am: How to sharpen and shape.
Read this which is Jennifer Crusie first draft of a scene, and then read this which is her analysis of how she's going to fix it.

This is a kind of writing about process that people don't do enough, and which people learning to write could really do with. I said in comments there that this isn't the way I work, but in a way it is. I don't formally ask those questions, but this kind of shaping is what I do when I go back through what I just wrote. It's how I stop things being flabby and heading off in the wrong direction. In a way I'm constantly doing this -- that's why I have the whole file open when I'm writing, so I can go and put in the tightening or the set-up where I need it when I figure that out.

5:48pm: And related subjects, recent Tor.com posts
Like swords, but awesomer: made up words in science fiction and fantasy, The Magus, Lord of Light.

12:04pm: Remembrance day
And what shall we remember?
That war is horrible?
People, young men traditionally,
get marched off to die,
in ugly futility
or destined glory
Rupert Brooke
on a naval expedition to Constantinople
or Wilfrid Owen
slogging across years of broken bodies.
Parade them out sadly,
the ghosts of the Great War
who have not grown old
and would be dead anyway.

Shall we remember the real forgotten
who left us no poetry
who fell in the morass they did not make
so very young, saluting,
going one more time over the top
to face the carnage, the guns, the bombs,
far from their homes,
their email, their iPods,
in far Iraq, Afghanistan,
the ghastly crop of this year's dead?

12:03pm: My recent Tor.com posts
Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, Stevermer's When the King Comes Home, Brust's Agyar, Chiang's Stories of Your Life.

In other news, doing research for ILE2, starting a roleplaying game, cooking a lot of gnocchi.

8:51am: My Elf Policy
You may not steal my children
nor yet my neighbour's children
not even when my neighbour's children jump at six AM.
You may have unearthly beauty,
but you may not steal hearts, souls, or nursemaids,
nor sacrifice my friends to hell.
You may sing as much as you like,
even tirra lirra,
folk, rock, metal or opera,
except after ten at night.
You may tell me of your life in other lands
but you must not whine:
a little nostalgia is fine.
Whatever stories you tell me,
you mustn't complain if I write them down.
You may not rev motorbikes before or after eight.
You must never cast enchantments indoors
without express permission.
Since you walk on top of the snow
it's your turn to fetch bread in winter.
Smoking is only permitted on the apartment balconies,
yes, even in January.
You must not transform without warning
when I am holding fragile objects.
Time is negotiable
under no circumstances whatever.
Since you will try to trick me
and creep between cracks of intention
this policy remains open and subject
to constant addition and amendment
(by me and me only)
for seven years,
seven hundred years,
in this world or any other.

(daegaer was sent some spam that she misread as selling elf policies.) And Happy Birthday janni!

ETA Do read the comments, there's a terrific poem on the same subject by stakebait.

1:31pm: Tor.com posts
Kay's Sarantine Mosaic, Brust's The Sun the Moon and the Stars, Tenn's Of Men and Monsters

My general preference is that if you have something personal to me to say about the posts, say it here, but if it's relevant to the post please say it there. I'm linking here to make it easier to have the discussion there, not to have it here. It's easy to post on Tor.com, it takes two seconds to make an account and then you don't have to do the stupid verification, or if you like doing the verification, you don't have to bother making an account.

5:24pm: Proofs, and reading faster than light
I am doing -- in fact I have nearly finished -- the proofs for Among Others. The typesetting is very nice, with attractive fonts and leading, and gorgeous little squiggles. I don't know the technical term for them -- there's one on the title page, and every time there's a date, which is often, because this is a journal, there's a little row of them to the left with the actual date to the right. This looks great, I'm very pleased with it. And actually having to read every word of the book again to find mistakes is good for the sequel, and not so horrible as it is with some books I have written.

And I have even found some mistakes, despite being hopeless at seeing that kind of thing because I read what I expect to see. I can't slow down my reading -- I've tried, and other than tricks like reading backwards I can't do it. I don't read by looking at the letters, I read by mystically inhaling the words from the page. The unit of reading is not a letter, it's a sentence. I'm not sure reading is a physical process at all -- it's much too fast. Indeed, when I was musing on the telepathy in Time For the Stars which works faster than light, I wondered whether if thought (because, if telepathy, therefore thought) worked faster than light, then reading might work faster than light as well. Then I realised it couldn't, because if it did, it would be possible to read in the dark.

1:32pm: All the tea in China
I had a card from the postman to say there was a parcel for me, so I went to collect it expecting a book. (I'm waiting for some books.) However, the parcel was square and covered in mysterious Chinese writing -- honestly, the only parts I could read were my name and address. It was also completely sealed in clear tape, and therefore couldn't be opened without a knife. I do have a friend in China, but since she's an ex-co-worker of rysmiel's, it seemed really unlikely she'd send something to me and not to both of us. I eventually got it home and cut it open, to find a packet of Yong Xi tea, straight from China, and a card saying it had been bought for me by marykaykare, when she'd noticed me saying here that I was out of it. Thank you, Mary Kay! Wow. This tea is unfairly delicious -- I could drink it all day if it wasn't for the caffeine. It's subtle and complex and not bitter at all. I make it in my engineer's teapot that hobbitbabe gave me, and drink it out of the bowl jonsinger made me, and feel happy and appreciated.

Tor.com posts recently: Time For the Stars, Elizabeth Moon's Serrano series, Nevil Shute's In the Wet (with bonus conversation about some of his other books in comments)

3:52pm: My recent Tor.com posts
Constantine Fitzgibbon's When the Kissing Had To Stop, Who reads cosy catastrophes?, The Kraken Wakes, Kij Johnson's Fudoki.

11:44am: Happy Birthday, sovay
The context for this is in a locked post, or I'd link to it so it would make sense, really I would. This is my sonnet on sovay's alternate Hamlet.

The cliffs of Elsinore, at dawn. The clouds
Lour low about the castle's jagged walls.
The play is over, all the dead who choked
In weltered blood no longer clog the halls.
The final battle's done, young Fortinbras
Old Claudius together met, and died.
Laertes will be crowned this afternoon
As oft his rue-crowned sister prophesied.
But not all folk rejoice in this cold dawn.
Horatio comes forth to greet the skies
Whose tears shed doubts upon philosophy
Nor ghosts nor friends may longer walk nor warn
Looks south, to England, where drowned Hamlet lies
And casts cold violets to the gull-swirled sea.

10:50am: Saturday, update, etc.
Yesterday morning my LJ Reading List seemed to be composed of equal parts "Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize, WTF?" and "James Bacon ends Octocon feud, yay!", leaving me with a general impression that it would be totally justified and everyone would be utterly delighted if James Bacon were to win next year.

I've been generally not too good this week, with all the ills that flesh is heir to, my flesh anyway, leg, back, insomnia, blood pressure. However, it occurred to me that I never mentioned here that I am generally better. I posted about having that weird blood pressure chest thing and being exhausted all the time. I had that all summer, but it went away around the time of Worldcon. I felt as if I'd finally had the right cup of tea and sit down. I still sometimes get the chest thing, and have had it this week, but not all the time. I should probably go to the doctor again, and Z is nagging me to, but I'm in my typical state of either being OK, in which case, no point, or being too ill to be able to face the doctor. I know: I should go.

Tuesday, the day wasn't raining, I went on a series of long bus rides to the West Island location scouting for the book. The trees are amazing colours. I had some good location thoughts, but the best bit came when I was changing buses and found a magic corner and knew exactly what, in terms of the mythology of the ILE universe, would be there. I now need a 1983 Montreal bus map. It's possible I can get one, I have two different leads on one. If anyone has one -- or any bus map from the early eighties -- let me know. But whether or not, I might have looked as if I was just sitting on buses, but in fact it was extremely productive.

Yesterday I had dinner with Z in Le Unique, a restaurant on Beaubien near Beaubien metro. This is on Z's way home from work. Unique is a genuinely unusual Italian restaurant. They make their own pasta, and they make awesome unusual kinds of pasta in delicious weird sauces. (Giant ravioli isn't that unusual, but giant sachetti, the shape of a Werther's Original but the size of a Mars bar?) I had what might have been the most purely delicious meal I've ever had. I started with three perfect oysters, served with parsley, lemon wedges, and salt (and with optional hot flakes and parmesan which I didn't use). Z had a delicious charcouterie plate, of which he was kind enough to share bites of prosciutto and rosemary pork loin. Then he had canneloni and I had giant ravioli stuffed with confit de canard, pine nuts, and mushrooms, in a marsala sauce, served with roasted peach slices. For dessert we split a creme brulee. We also split half a litre of lovely Italian house red wine. All of this, with tax but before tip, was $67. Service was excellent and friendly, they remembered us from last time and spoke English right away, though the menu is bilingually Italian and French. Le Unique is a great addition to the list of awesome places you can have a great meal for $30/person. I'm only sorry I found it too late to put it in the Anticipation restaurant guide -- even though it's absolutely nowhere near the Palais. (It's three metro stops north of the Farthing Party hotel, and it's one block from the metro.)

Tor.com posts: Zenna Henderson's People stories, The Pride of Chanur, Chanur trilogy, Chanur's Legacy, Delany's short fiction, Walter Jon Williams This is Not a Game, A Gift From Earth.

And in other vaguely interesting news, I've signed contracts for the Spanish (Factory of Ideas) edition of Ha'Penny.

4:11pm: Thud: ILE2
Words: 1143
Total words: 4192
Files: 4
Tea: Pu Erh Yongming 2007
Music: Three Double Concertos
RSI: Fine.
Reason for stopping: Need to look things up

This needs rather a lot of looking things up and asking people things, but it's going OK.

Oh, and Happy Birthday to embryomystic, 2muchexposition and especially zorinth!

10:48am: Spiced Peach Tarts (from a concept by Lois McMaster Bujold)
To make 12.

Mix up some shortbread and leave it to chill. That's 9 ounces of all purpose (plain, tout usage) flour, or (8 ounces of flour and 1 ounce of semolina) plus 6 ounces of butter of cooking marge, and a pinch of salt, mixed with a pastry fork. When mixed to breadcrumb consistency, add 3 ounces of vanilla sugar. (You make vanilla sugar by putting some white sugar in a glass jar with a vanilla pod and leaving it for a few days.) Then mix to a dough with just enough water.

While shortbread is chilling, take a large peach or nectarine, cut it into quarters, cut three of the quarters into quarters (twelve slices), and halve those (twenty four). Eat the extra quarter. Wash the mixing bowl. This won't take you an hour, so have a cup of tea and check LJ.

When shortbread is chilled (an hour) cut it in half. Put the other half back in the fridge for another day, or freezer if you're not going to need it soon. You only need half that much, but for quantum reasons it isn't possible to make a half quantity. The pastry fork really needs all that flour etc to be there to work right, and getting fiddly half ounces is difficult, and shortbread never works unless you start with this much.

Roll out the half shortbread on floured greaseproof paper. This not only makes it easier, it saves a lot of cleaning flour off the work surface. When rolled out, cut 12 circles the size of standard patty tins. Put the pastry circles on the patty tins. Put the oven to pre-heat to 180 C.

Put two pices of nectarine in each pastry circle.

Melt 2 ounces of butter or marge.

Measure 2 ounces of vanilla sugar into the mixing bowl. (You didn't forget to wash it, did you? Well, if you did you have time now while the butter melts if you're quick.)

Pour the melted butter/marge into the sugar, beat enthusiastically with a balloon whisk until mixed. Add an egg. Beat enthusiastically until mixed.

Measure 2 ounces of SR (self raising, patisserie) flour (if you don't have any, make in proper SR flour proportions with baking powder and salt), and sift it on top of the mixture. Sift in half a teaspoon of cinnamon and a quarter teaspoon of nutmeg. Fold in the flour and the spices with a metal spoon, using the "folding under" method so as not to get rid of the oxygen you added with the balloon whisk.

Using the metal spoon, put a spoonful of mixture on top of the nectarine on top of the shortbread in the patty tins.

Bake at the top of the oven for 15-20 minutes. The cake layer will be darker than usual because of the cinnamon, so go by smell.

Fiddly, but surprisingly delicious hot or cold.

9:31pm: Books!
For Mavis and everyone else who would like something cheerful, I present Booklovers never go to bed alone a collection of pictures of people's bookshelves. I know some people don't care for books as physical objects, but if you do at all you're bound to find something to make you smile here.