The Daily Report

I'm trying to keep up my blogging here, even if I don't have a ton of stuff to say, because any disruption to that routine that lasts four or five days is going to be enough for it to not be routine any more. Obviously things were more complicated last year than they're likely to get this year, but even if nothing in particular goes wrong it doesn't take much for me to fall into radio silence, and when I'm not blogging the structure that keeps me on task on a daily basis falls apart.

Yesterday was a day of unusual social boldness for me in the morning, with pleasant results. It was a pretty good day, all in all. We had some difficulty with dinner... there was some kind of race happening around the capitol square area, and it was Saturday night, so most places that were near to the hotel were pretty packed. I think next year we'll probably plan on eating in Saturday night.

Last night was my first night at Wiscon where I've acknowledged to myself that I'm not a party person. Every other night of this and my previous two cons I've seen things on the schedule and gone, "Oh, well, I like [this subject] or [these people involved in this party]. Maybe that will be cool." Then I go up to the 6th floor and go in, and it's just a room full of people and I don't know what to do with that. My usual response to crowded rooms is to sit down in a corner and be very quiet, which I'm actually okay with doing... it's not like I'm bored or distressed or anything. But it seems to me to be missing the point of a party. I did enjoy Cat's ...Fairyland... launch party here last year, but it was also a concert.

Anyway, with the decision to stop making time each night to wander around the sixth floor trying to catch the vibe, it becomes a lot easier to be awake during the day to partake of the content.

The Daily Report

I'm not quite getting a full night's sleep any night here, but I am sleeping well. Still no signs of the creeping con crud.

Plans For Today

Nothing too strenuous.

This entry automatically cross-posted from http://alexandraerin.dreamwidth.org/389818.html. Comment hither or thither. Void where yon.

Thank you to everyone who weighed in on the name change question. I'm afraid some of you will be disappointed, though. I can't let Varis and Vargas appear multiple times on the same page (much as I couldn't handle Kieran and Kiril), but there will not be any cute in-text reasons for this. (Okay, I say that now, but I may think of one later.) I just have to change it. The first reader who actually notices will get a cookie.

The true lesson to be learned from this is: there's no such thing as a throwaway name. At least if one is writing a series, anyway. One never knows when Random Character Bob will show up again, and when he does, you may regret naming him Bob.

In other news, Agent F just passed out while watching Animal Planet an hour before her bedtime. This is an unlooked for windfall of writing time, if I can manage not to pass out.

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?

The Daily Report

It's been a pretty wonderful con so far. The panels yesterday were pretty great. One about fairy tales (A Princess With A Sword Is Still A Princess) featured a favorite panelist of Jack and myself, Lisa Blauersouth, as well as the ever impressive and ever entertaining Na'amen Gobert Tilahun. It was a great panel, and the discussion of fairy tales was helpful to me in my thinking on By Half Measures.

I'm not good with faces but twice so far during the con I have recognized someone I couldn't see by their voice... first shadesong and then mmohanraj, who I heard on the other side of a display in the art gallery. Coincidentally I had just spotted one of her photographs on display, though I hadn't read the card yet so I didn't know I was looking at her work. Shira (shadesong) is I believe the person here that I've known the longest (if only by a day or so), as so many of my older friends weren't able to be here this year, and Mary Anne Mohanraj... well, I got to WisCon my first year ahead of the rest of my group, who had been here before when I hadn't so I felt pretty lost. brainwane, who among her many other fine qualities is also basically a walking human icebreaker, rescued me at the Gathering, but Mary Anne was the guest of honor at WisCon 34 gave me a huge pick-me-up at the guest of honor reading when I went through the receiving line and she had some very nice things to say about me and my work.

Other luminous and wonderful people we have been able to connect with so far include but are not limited to ktempest and piglet, who was kind enough to come up and say hello to us at dinner. I was kind of tongue-tied at the moment, but I'm reasonably sure I manged to say hello back.

The panels we've seen so far have been pretty uniformly awesome. Aside from the aforementioned fairytale one, there was one about asexuality in sf/f (and to an extent in popular fiction in general) overseen by Tempest, and a mammoth panel with a huge number of contributors from the essay collection Chicks Dig Comics that unexpectedly included someone I've gotten to know on Tumblr recently, Spastamagoria.

I popped up to the party floor between the last two panels of the night, but didn't have the wherewithal for much socializing so I just stopped off at the Circlet Press party to say hi to Cecilia Tan.

Jack and I finished the night off in the con suite, in a game of Apples to Apples with two people whose names I regrettably did not catch. So far, the con has pretty much been the experience that I had hoped to be able to share with Jack and Sarah last year.

Jack hopes that we can manage to meet more people in the next couples days... we're a party of relatively withdrawing people in real life, and we're missing our extroverts.

As always, if you want to come up and say hello, feel free. If you're on the lookout for me or you're not sure if you're looking for me, I have a light-up Tinkerbell hanging off my collar for recognizability... as someone who experiences a lot of uncertainty about identifying other people, I like to leave as little room for doubt as possible.

The State of the Me

Still doing great! Yesterday I kind of wore out my legs, but no sniffliness or other signs of impending respiratory complaint or anything.

Plans For Today

We're about to start our panels for the day with "How Society Maintains Poverty" and then we'll see where we go from there. I will probably check in at the Chicks Dig Comics party tonight.

This entry automatically cross-posted from http://alexandraerin.dreamwidth.org/389611.html. Comment hither or thither. Void where yon.

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.

I named a character once in The Bone Palace, an offhand reference that didn't warrant an entry in the dramatis personae but is still in print. Now I find myself needing to write more about that character and a) not liking his name much anymore, and b) finding it a bit too similar to someone else who shows up quite often. How many of you would be wildly irritated if I changed someone's name between books? (I doubt most people even remember that he was ever mentioned, but somewhere out there is the reader who will.)

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".

Work let me out early this Memorial Day weekend, so I ran some errands and got sucked into a bookstore. As one does. So instead of going to the grocery store and hauling home lots of food, I hauled 6 books and a lesser amount of food, including a whole chicken, and I'm pretty sure it's the books that wore a groove in my shoulder.

(At the bookstore, I had one of those moments where I found a book (new) for sale that I'd already read out of the library, and remembered that I'd liked it a great deal, and remembered that I had never written it up (pretty sure I didn't anyway), and felt that I should buy it just to be able to write it up, and to signal to the publisher that one cheapskate, at least, liked the book enough to buy it at list price. Anyway, the book is Slavery in Indian Country by Christina Snyder, and now you know what my homework for the weekend is.)

I go through cycles. I feel like I haven't read a book since I moved into the house (this is not literally true, but close) and now I have a new pile to start on. Similarly, I moved and held onto the same Netflix movie unwatched for 4 months, then started back in on the queue.

This does not mean the house-maintenance tasks are stopping, oh no! One of the two high-quality hardware stores at my disposal did have replacement glass doorknob sets, but with brass not steel, and anyway I do have a perfectly cromulent doorknob, just one missing a couple of parts and badly painted-over (latex, easily stripped) and maybe the pin threads are a little bit worn out, but you can't really tell until you've got the right screws, can you? And the upshot was, the right screws for the doorknob might no longer be standard screws. A very helpful fellow tried out my sample headless screw on several bolts and declared that I needed a 1/4 inch, 28-thread screw, which they do sell (though 24- or 32-thread are much more common), but it wouldn't go well into the knob. My sample screw was a little bit loose when tried on a putatively-matching nut; it rattled when I shook it. Although I cannot swear that the knob is 150 years old, I can swear that it's old, and that the door itself is over 100 (because it's a particular solid, vertical style; my front door is a later, 1930s style), and that the grooves worn into the door from the knob plate are longstanding. So, what I should probably do is inventory all the glass doorknobs in the place, put all the best parts together into the 2-3 doors that will keep their ancient knobs, and buy a replacement set for the odd door out.

(But not glass-and-brass; it looks strange and newfangled.)

Did I mention that of the five interior doors in the unit, two have gigantic gaps (one above, one below) and a third has a very old crack, very badly repaired with tape and latex? I think I can Bondo the cracked door, and tack on 1-inch strips of wood onto the gappy doors, but those are projects that have not yet come to fruition.

I have moved mostly over to Dreamwidth. Please comment there if you can.

Also, splat. For the best reasons! tithenai came over (squeeee!) and yuki_onna and Dmitri came over for a wee while tooooo! :)
AlsoIfailedtotakemedsontimebutwho'scounting

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Originally posted by mitchell_hart at Through the Gate: Submissions Wanted!

uawildcatgirl asked me "What is your favorite thing to do in your spare time?"

That's a really easy one: I read.

I read books, my Kindle, LJ's, blogs, fan fiction, and magazines both physical and online. I read packages, instruction manuals, encyclopedias, dictionaries, web comics, newspapers, and online forums and discussion groups. I read anything I can get my hands on. I've been known, when there was nothing else around, to read cereal boxes.

I usually have one book going on my Kindle and a couple of dozen tabs open on my computer, each with a different site on it.

A close second would be making things. I knit, embroider, use both a lucet and a kumihimo to make cord, collage, cook, bake, and make my own liqueurs. I'm learning to tablet weave, finger-loop braid, garden, and make my own household and personal cleaning supplies. I have the bad habit of making something because I think it would be cool to try out, but then either getting bored and leaving it 90% finished or finishing it but not having anything to do with it once I'm done. Or I buy lots of tools and supplies but never do it enough to justify them.

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I'm trying to post more often, and am looking for writing prompts. You can help by asking me a question or giving me a topic. Anything you want as long as it's safe for work. No promises I'll actually be inspired by your idea, but I'll do my best.