2016 Anthology Workshop

It's been over two weeks since I got back from the Anthology Workshop. I meant to do a write-up about it before this, but I caught some kind of crud on the flight home (best as I can tell, looking at the likely incubation period) and I've only just gotten over the hacking and sniffling. I hate trying to sleep when my sinuses are clogged up; I think the sleep deprivation is worse than the actual hacking and sniffling. :P

Anyway. Great workshop as always. I only sold one story (an SF mystery to John Helfers for an anthology called No Humans Allowed,) but I had a great time anyway, and learned a lot. I had a chance to talk to a bunch of folks, get to know some new people and some people who've been around, but we just never had a chance to really sit down and chat before.

The whiteboard John built his TOC on. My story's on the right, in darker marker; it was a "Hold" at first, and he decided to add it at the end, when he was filling in stories to make his wordcount.

We wrote stories ahead of time, as always. About 45 attendees wrote about 250 stories, totalling 1.1 million words of fiction. The reading was like a tidal wave, seriously. We're supposed to be learning to read like editors -- who definitely do not read every word of every story that's submitted -- but it's hard when you're dealing with quality this high. If this were open-submission slush, most stories could be rejected after a paragraph or two. That's not the case here. This is a pro-level, invite-only workshop, and people who attend are ridiculously good at this stuff.

Six of the editors -- John Helfers, Kerrie Hughes, Kris Rusch, Mark Leslie (aka Mark the Kobo Guy), Kevin Anderson and Rebecca Moesta -- had established books they were reading for. We got guidelines for one book per week we were writing, and had a week (or a bit less) to write a story in accordance with the guidelines and get it in. Dean Smith was the odd guy out this year; he read all the stories and had to put together an anthology out of the ones the six other editors didn't choose, coming up with a set of stories that created some kind of theme as he went. He ended up with a bunch of stories on the theme of Hard Choices, and he had to fight a few of the other editors for some of those stories.

It was fun to watch. :) If the editor for whom a story was specifically written doesn't want it, any other editor who thinks it'd fit their book really well can steal it. All the editors with established books had dibs over poor Dean, who often found himself wanting a story, but standing in line behind two or even three other people. By the time he put his TOC together on the last day, he said the process had been a lot harder than he'd expected. I definitely wouldn't want to have to do it, although watching him do it was educational.

Most of the workshop was spent watching and listening as the editors went through the stories one by one, evaluating, disagreeing, arguing. There were a lot of WTF?? expressions scattered through the week as one or more editors loved a story that one or more other editors hated. Discussion got pretty heated once or twice. In the middle of all of this, Kris reminded us that this was because the stories were all very good. If this were a beginner workshop, where all or most of the attendees were still learning how to write, the editors would all agree. Obvious flaws would stick out to everyone. In this group, everyone can write, so the disagreements and arguments were all a matter of individual editors' taste. Even the common disagreements that sounded like craft issues -- like Kris and Dean insisting that a lot of stories had "no setting" (since they're both really aware of setting) while John and Kerrie often loved those stories and thought they had just the right amount of setting, or that the characters and plot were so interesting they hadn't noticed or didn't care that there wasn't much setting -- were really matters of taste. There are readers like Kris and Dean, and there are readers like John and Kerrie.

And that's the point. Just because one editor, or even five editors, rejects your story, that doesn't mean it sucks. It might just mean it wasn't to that editor's (or those editors') taste. Keep trying. Some of my stories that didn't sell would've sold to one of the other editors if they'd been editing that particular volume. Which is the point. Keep going. Too many writers get a rejection or three, decide the story sucks and stop sending it out. Don't do that!

As we've done before, we had sign-up lunches in small groups with most of the editors, and a few other subject matter experts, like Christy Fifield, who writes fun cozy mysteries, and is a hotel Controller in her day job; she's a great source of info for finance and accounting and such. We also had an audio expert, and someone who writes comics for major publishers, for folks who are interested in that. I went out with John, Dean and Christy, and had a great time with each of them, and the other writers who signed up to go with.

Other days we grabbed lunch with whoever was available, and there's plenty of talent in the room and lots of brains to pick. Dinner was also chaotic in a fun way, and I hung with a lot of different people at various times. Sometimes it's fun sticking with a few friends -- I usually do that at SF conventions, that sort of thing -- but at this kind of event, the more people you can hang out with and get to know, the better. The networking at these events is worth the workshop fee all by itself.

Allyson, the Publisher at WMG, announced that they're starting up a companion line of anthologies called Fiction River Presents. These will be reprints of stories that've already been in Fiction River, remixed in various ways. Fiction River is starting its fourth year now, and a lot of people only heard about it recently. Doing the reprint volumes is a good way of giving folks different mixes of stories, so if one theme from the past didn't appeal to you, maybe another will and you'll see some stories you'd have otherwise missed.

From the WMG site: "Appropriately, the first volume, Debut Writers' Showcase, commemorates first sales by up-and-coming authors. Future volumes will revolve around themes such as family, thrillers, offbeat stories, and Readers’ Choice."

My first professional sale was "Staying Afloat" in How to Save the World, and that story will be in the Showcase volume.

Othere random bits I noted down during the workshop:

Short fiction is an entryway to your work for people who've never read any of your other stuff.

Anthologies are an exception to BookBub's one-book-per-author-at-any-one-time rule. You can only have one novel up at a time, but you can have multiple multi-author anthologies, or a novel and an anthology, or whatever combination.

If you're looking to build up your sales ranking on sites like Amazon, advertise sales on multiple sites in succession rather than all at once. Start with BookBub and then go through others week by week. BookBub will raise your book up the ranks, and the smaller lists will keep it up there.

A workshop attendee who writes romances puts out a new short story each month. He makes it free on his blog for a week, with a buy button on the page. He sells a few during the free week, then when the story comes off of free, sales shoot up. He sells the e-books for $2.99 and paperbacks for $5.99, and he gets bookstore/warehouse sales; he sees batches of 10-15 of the paperbacks selling. He does this once a month, and now makes a third of his income off of short fiction this way.

"Free" is the most popular search term on Kobo, always, no matter what else is going on or what hot book's been released.

Writers are generally pretty awful at writing our author bios. I'll admit I hate doing it, and the standard one I use isn't great. An author bio should talk about your writing. It doesn't matter that you have five cats unless there are cats prominently in your work. It doesn't matter that you like to garden or knit unless your characters are gardening, or some detail about historical knitting is a plot point in your story. What do you write? What have you published? Have you won any awards? Or been nominated? Made any significant bestseller lists? When writing your author bio, remember -- not too long, not too short, not too modest. Most of us seem to have a problem with that last bit. :P

If your story is set during a big, horrific event, it's hard to get your readers to hang on to it. If you deal with it head-on, it's better to deal with a smaller part and make it representative of the larger events, with a close emotional grab. Trying to deal with the whole, sweeping thing will probably require a lot of tell-tell-tell narrative, which can get boring. Keep the reader down IN the events, focused on a representative character. Also, use little details, like in the middle of a huge event that's caused shootings or protests or whatever, there are going to be closed streets. Have your characters deal with that, to make the larger events have an impact on their lives in a given moment.

Make your manuscript readable. Small fonts are bad. Courier is iffy.

Make sure your name and the page number are in the header of every page, because some editors still print things out to read. If they drop a stack of pages, or they go for coffee and the printer spits the pages for a dozen stories all over the floor, the editor's not going to bother to play literary archaeologist to figure out which pages belong to your story and what order they go in.

Give your story a significant file name. Some markets call out file name formats, in which case follow that. But if a market doesn't specify, don't call it "Story.doc" or "Fantasy.doc" or whatever.

Story titles should be memorable. On the one hand, that means that calling something "Aftermath" or "The Game" or "Conflict" probably isn't a great idea because that kind of title doesn't call a particular story to mind. On the other hand, words and names in your title should be reasonably familiar and pronounceable. You want readers to be able to talk about your story to their friends, and editors to be able to remember your title when thinking about their up-coming book or issue, or when talking with their staff. They can't do that if they can't remember or pronounce your alien name, or your transliterated Arabic phrase. Put the linguistic fireworks in the story, not in the title.

First person can be very distancing because the reader is NOT the person doing whatever

There's a convention of a type of mystery fiction by people who don't know police procedure perfectly and that's fine. You're just aiming for a different audience of readers than the folks who are experts on procedure and make that a major focus of the narrative.

Put something in the body of the e-mail when you sub a story, or even just edits. Blank e-mails with just an attachment end up in the spam filter. Also, you're trying to foster a relationship with the editor, so say hi, looking forward to working with you, something. Not a Christmas letter, but a line or two.

If a published story gets picked up for a reprint, gets into a Year's Best, nominated for an award, whatever, let the original editor know. They might want to use it in their marketing, and even if they don't, it's a fuzzy to them too, just to hear about it.

If you're writing about one of a series of events, what's special about this occurrence, this character? Why are you writing about this particular one and not the previous one, or the next one, or the first one? Let the reader know why this person/thing/occurrence has a story written about it.

We were talking in the workshop about the layoffs at Random Penguin, which happened while we were there. Someone there who knows people at PRH said that Nora Roberts's editor was one of the people layed off, which... seriously? How could anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together for mutual warmth argue that that particular editor wasn't pulling in enough money for the business to justify their salary?? o_O So when word came out about a week later that Ms. Roberts had taken a hike up the road to St. Martins, I wasn't at all surprised. That was a ridiculously expensive round of layoffs for Random Penguin; I'm sure someone was called to explain WTF they were thinking, or will be when the company start to feel the lack of Ms. Roberts's sales in their bottom line.



We had a funny thing happen on the way home. I rode back to Portland with Lyn, who was driving, and Laura. We stopped at Laura's hotel to drop her off, and ran into Brenda in the parking lot. Brenda had dropped Michele off at the airport and decided, spur of the moment, to stay at that hotel herself. Lyn had planned to drive farther before stopping, but with two other writers from the workshop there, she decided what the heck, that she'd stay there too, so she ran in to get a room. I think she and Laura ended up sharing. I had a room at another hotel a couple miles away, and was having dinner there that night with a writer friend who lives in Portland. Under other circumstances, though, it would've been pretty awesome to have one more "workshop" night at the hotel. Or better yet, if they'd all been in mine -- it's the hotel I always stay at when I'm flying out of Portland, and my husband got a great deal on a suite. I had a for-real suite, with a main room and a separate bedroom, and my main room had a full size dining table and six chairs. We could've stayed up for hours gabbing. :) Maybe next year.

I had a great conversation with Amelia, and a decent flight home the next morning. I came down with the creeping crud a couple of days later, but the trip itself went wonderfully well. I'm already signed up for next year, and there's still space. If you write short fiction, the Anthology Workshop is an awesome experience, and one I can't recommend strongly enough.

Thanks to Dean and Allyson for organizing the event, all the editors for helping make it happen, and all the attendees for making it rock. So long as they keep throwing these workshops, I'll keep going.

Angie

BayCon

The husband and I will be at BayCon this weekend, as we are every year. This is my only chance to see a lot of old friends from the Bay Area, so I'm feeling kind of boingy about it. :) Anyone else going? It'd be cool to have lunch or something. [wave]

Angie

BayCon Redux

I'm alive, barely. I came home with Con Crud from BayCon and have spent most of the last few days unconscious, which is the best way to spend a period of physical misery IMO. I'm feeling almost alive again, yay.

The convention was fun. I saw some friends I only (or almost only -- depends on the year) see at BayCon, and that's always cool. Even if the convention itself wasn't really that great, I'd still go to see old friends. Lois McMaster Bujold was the writer GOH, and I went to a couple of her panels, a reading and an interview.

For the reading, she read a couple of chunks of a novella in the Vorkosiverse, which she said might not ever be published because of structural issues, so those of us in the room might well be the only fans who ever get to experience even a piece of it. That'd be a shame -- it's from Ekaterin's POV (which was apparently one of the problems, but anyway) and was about how the guy who developed the butterbugs modified a strain of bugs to eat radioactive foliage and such, and concentrate the "hot" matter in their feces, which the bugs were trained to deposit in central collection areas. So basically, the idea was to release these bugs into Miles's glassy crater (which isn't so glassy anymore, but is still very radioactive) and let them do their thing. Clean up the glowy poop periodically and shoot it into the sun, or dump it down a particularly active subduction zone, whatever you want to do with it, and eventually the land will be habitable again. Of course there's a kink in the cable, and things get interesting, and that's about where she stopped reading. :) I hope she fixes the problems some day, because this was the beginning of a fun story.

I've heard Ms. Bujold speak before, and I've always enjoyed listening to her. She's a good reader, too -- I dragged my husband to one of her readings at a WorldCon back when, and that persuaded him to start reading the Vorkosigan books. If you have a chance to see her, take it.

The masquerade was small this year, but there were a lot of cool costumes. My favorite was Erin Mittman, who did "Dess from the Midnighters, by Scott Westerfeld." I've never read that book, so I have no idea how close she was to the original. But what I loved was her prop work -- young girl in a black costume, it was decent, whatever. But she had this long spear she carried, and the spear had a length of fishing line at the pointy end, attaching it to a big, black fly/spider-like monster made as a balloon animal. For her presentation, she "fought" the monster, and it looked awesome. :D The balloon creature was light and floaty, so at times it sort of hovered, and at times it darted around, depending on what she was doing with her spear. It was the best fighting-a-monster act I've ever seen at a masquerade, where the monster wasn't another person in a costume. Major kudos to Ms. Mittmann; I hope we see more of her at future cons.

Best Workmanship went to Shael Hawman, for "Knit Klingon." I think she was the woman who did the crocheted Wonder Woman costume last year, but I'm not sure. This was great, though, and I actually liked it more than the WW costume. The announcer said that everything above her boots was either knit or crocheted, and it looked awesome.

Best in Show was a black woman named J.B. (that's all that's in the newsletter, unfortunately, and I don't remember whether more of a name was announced during the competition) who was an "Intergalactic Amazon Warrior." The costume was decent, and I liked that it wasn't low cut or slit up to here or anything; it was a warrior costume, not a "sexy-whatever" costume playing for catcalls. What was really cool, though, was her presentation. She had a sword (looked kind of like a katana, although I didn't get a close look) and she had a dance/kata routine she did with it that looked really good. A lot of costumers can't move very well, and look awkward or self-conscious, but J.B. must have practiced this, and it looked very good. Another one I hope to see more of in the future.

Luckily my con crud didn't hit until I was on my way home, so I had a great time at the convention itself. Ironically, I actually did some writing at the convention (although not quite enough to make my quota for the week) but I haven't managed any at all since I got home. :/ I hope to fix that tonight and tomorrow, although I'll probably blow my quota again. That's okay; I'm way ahead for the year so far, and if I had a day job, I'd definitely have taken these days off, so I don't feel bad about taking them off writing too.

Still hacking and light-headed,

Angie

At BayCon

Jim and I are in Santa Clara at BayCon. They started giving the different iterations of the convention subtitles a while back, and this one is "Triskaidecaphobicon," which made me snicker.

Despite living almost a thousand miles away now, I consider BayCon my home convention in fandom. I was a gofer at the first one (in 1982), and was on staff until a few years after I got married in '96, when I finally admitted that it's tough to work ConOps, even as a grunt, when you can't attend meetings during the year. I gofered again a couple of times, but have settled into being an attendee. Hey, I get to see panels now! Whenever I want! :D

The best part is seeing people I've known for a long time, many of whom I never or hardly ever see anywhere else. That's really what it's all about -- keeping up with the people. Sometimes a person from Back When will vanish for years or decades, then pop up again, and that's always pretty awesome.

Lois McMaster Bujold is the writer GOH, which is pretty exciting. I've seen her at other conventions; she's a nice person, and gives great reading.

If anyone I know online is going to be here this weekend, drop a comment or an e-mail and we can get together. I love meeting internet people in realspace. :)

Angie

Busy with Business

Wow, two anthology posts in a row! I've never done that before. I've been kind of busy, doing some cool things.

Early in May I attended a workshop on how to do POD books -- covers, interiors, marketing and selling, with a lot of really shocking info on how the business has changed very recently. I spent the time between my April anthology post and the workshop itself fiddling with Photoshop Elements (which it turned out I didn't need for the class :P ) and InDesign, which is an awesome tool -- once you've learned even the basics of ID, it becomes clear why it's the industry standard. Once you have your art (for about fifteen dollars off a stock art site -- and yes, they have art art as well as photos) you can do the whole cover, beautifully, in InDesign.

Flowing the text in is easy. Front matter goes in first, then your story or novel text; ID will create as many pages as you need, and you use master pages to set the layout. The fiddly part here is making sure the formatting works at the line- and paragraph-level. Hunting for widows (the first line of a paragraph alone at the bottom of a page), orphans (the last line of a paragraph alone at the top of a page, and widowed orphans (the last line of a paragraph, totally alone at the top of a page, with no other text on the page) can make your interior look much better. Most of these can be fixed easily by using the tracking tool on a whole paragraph at once, tightening or loosening it enough to pull a lone word or two up onto the previous line (re-flowing everything up to close the space) or to push a word or two onto the next line (pushing everything down a line) while not changing the spacing so much that someone casually reading will even notice.

InDesign is an incredibly powerful tool, and there are usually multiple ways of doing just about anything, which means it can be overwhelming at first. Having personal classroom instruction, one-to-three instruction with Allyson in small groups, and people coming around to give us one-to-one help during lab periods, was worth the cost of the workshop, and then some. The workshop was taught by Dean Wesley Smith and Allyson Longueira (Allyson is the publisher at WMG), with help during labs by a couple of local writers who are old hands at this and came to help out. Lee Allred was particularly awesome in giving assistance to all of us newbie book designers.

And really, that's what it comes down to: the design. You can achieve the same results with other tools, but what's important is the design. Look at other books in your genre -- professionally published books, not just indie books -- and see what they look like. What elements are on the cover? How are they laid out? What's large or small? What elements are associated together, and placed near one another? Notice those little tags -- "Bestselling author of Popular Book," or "Book 3 of Author's Cool Series" -- that are too small to read in thumbnail? You still need them on your e-books. Even if they're unreadable in an online bookseller's catalog, they're design elements and readers are used to seeing them, even as a little line of unreadable text, on professionally designed covers. The cover will look naked and unfinished without them.

What's included in the front matter, and how is it laid out? What do new chapter pages look like in a novel, or new story pages in a collection or anthology? What does the spacing look like, between the headers and the text, the footers and the text, the text and the margins? If your presentation is amateurish, potential readers (buyers) will notice, even if they can't articulate what bugs them about a particular cover or interior. New York has conditioned us to expect certain things about a professional book, and if an indie book doesn't have all those things, or they're not laid out the way we're used to seeing, that'll ping our "amateur" alarm, even if we can't put our finger on why. Learning how to design the book, and the cover, is more important than learning to use kerning tools or feathered gradients in a particular software package. (Although you really should learn those things in whatever software you're using.)

So before the workshop, I was playing with the software and watching instructional videos online. Then I was in Oregon for a week and a half, and a lot busier than I thought I'd be. The day I flew to Portland, I met a writer friend [waves to PD Singer] at the airport, along with a friend of hers who lives in Portland, and we went and had lunch with a few other writers in our genre who are local to Portland. I love meeting internet people in realspace, so that was very cool. After lunch, Pam and I drove out to the coast, and we roomed together for the workshop itself. We sat next to each other in class, swapping help and opinions and angst. :)

After the workshop, we drove back to Portland and Pam dropped me off at my hotel. When I'm at these workshops, I like staying an extra night in Portland; not having to scramble to catch a plane that day means that I can flex my schedule to match that of whoever's driving me. One of the writers we had lunch with on the way out came to my hotel that evening. [waves to Amelia Gormley.] We chatted, had dinner together, and chatted some more.

The biggest bomb dropped on the workshop, though, was during the evening sessions, which were all business discussions. Remember Ella Distribution? I mentioned them a couple of months ago -- they were set up to distribute indie books by small publishers to bookstores. Well, Ella is gone. It was well organized, with an awesome web site, and had great people working on it, but within less than half a year, the industry changed. Now, not only is Ella no longer necessary, but it can't compete with the big kids on the playground.

Dean and Sheldon McArthur (Shelly's one of the best known booksellers in the country) talked to us about what'd changed recently with the distributors. Basically, 1) Baker and Taylor no longer marks books as POD published, and Ingram and the others followed suit; 2) B&T (and the others) now offer POD books at a good discount to booksellers, about 45%, and more if they keep on top of their bills; and 3) B&T (and the others) now allow returns on POD books.

There are indie-pubbed books in bookstores right now. If you go through Createspace, and pay the extra $25 for extended distribution, your books are available to bookstores through their standard distributors, on terms that make stocking them attractive. The only barrier right now is your book's presentation -- mainly cover and summary blurb. (Again, does your cover look professional, or does it look amateur?)

The playing field between an indie-pubbed book and a midlist New York published book is now level when it comes to getting into bookstores.

Shelly talked about how he finds books to buy for his store, through the distributor, through publisher catalogs and promotional material, and through sites like Goodreads, where he'll go to see what books people might be talking about that he hadn't heard of. He's been buying indie books ever since the distributors changed their policies. He doesn't care where a book comes from so long as it's a good book, professionally presented, and neither do the readers.

Dean and Kristine Kathryn Rusch are talking about this all month on their blogs, in much more detail. As always, there's good stuff in the comments, too. I highly recommend you read their posts on the subject. (Actually, if you're a writer I highly recommend you read their blogs all the time. Lots of great stuff there.)

During all this, I had a deadline on the 15th to get a story turned in for an event running in June on Goodreads, and the story I was writing was getting longer and longer and longer.... [headdesk] When I wasn't futzing with InDesign during the workshop, I was writing, and after I came home I was still writing. I got it done, a 60K word novel that'll be available on Goodreads some time in June, and as an e-book on Goodreads and ARe some time after that, depending on where it is in the very long list of books the group's volunteers have to work on. I'll be doing a paperback version some time after that. (I did a cover for it at the workshop.)

And now I'm back to writing other things.

The business is changing while we sit here. If we stay on top of the changes, and take advantage of them, they'll work for us. This is a great time to be a writer, and a wonderful time to be indie publishing, or getting into it if you're not yet.

Angie

February Stuff

I've been on the Oregon coast for the last week and a half, doing two workshops back-to-back. It was a grueling experience, as the single workshop I did last year was. And it was awesome, and I'll definitely be doing it again. I got lots of writing done, and I SOLD A STORY!! Which got the all-caps treatment because it's my first professional sale, as in more than five cents per word, holy freaking yay!!! :D

I'm going to have a story in Fiction River's anthology How to Save the World, edited by John Helfers. (Scroll down a bit -- it's the second book.) Holy sheep, I'm gonna be in a book with David Gerrold!

I've been trying to break into mainstream SF/F for ages, so this is a huge deal for me. I'm still getting this really silly grin on my face whenever I think about it, so I beg pardon of anyone who sees me and thinks o_O about my state of mind. :)

I wrote almost 29K words in February, which is good -- I'm still well ahead of quota for making my 2013 goal. My wordcount meter says I'm at 27%, so I'm where I was hoping to be at about a week into April. That's great; I love having padding on my quota. I was hoping for more in February (January was over 35K) but there were several days when I was in the workshop and frantically reading rather than writing. I count those days well spent, though. I also killed my streak, but I was anticipating that, too. No prob; doing an Oregon workshop is one of the better reasons I can think of for having days with no actual writing.

The workshops I did were The Business and Craft of Short Fiction, and the Anthology Workshop. The Antho Workshop is a repeat for me; it's worth doing over and over, and many writers do. I took a ton of notes, especially at the first one, and learned a lot of stuff I didn't know before, which is the point. (Wow, a story that's in a continually extended option with Hollywood can make you a buttload of money, even if they never make the movie!) Great info; it's going to take a while to absorb it all.

Currently I'm sitting in a hotel room in Portland; I have a flight home at 2:30. I'll do some writing today, then fall into bed (ten hours last night, still not caught up) and my next Thing To Go To is a dentist's appointment on Thursday.

Oh, yeah, didn't blog about that before. :/ So on Wednesday two weeks ago, Jim and I were having dinner at this little cafe across the street. They have these really good ice cream sandwiches -- two chocolate chip cookies, made in-house, with in-house ice cream in the middle, then freeze the whole thing. So I was eating my ice cream sandwich when one of my crowns (upper incisor) snapped off at the gum line. :( Luckily I had a root canal before they put the crown on, so it didn't hurt; I was just damn startled, and then all ACK!! when I realized what'd happened. And that I was getting on a plane Saturday morning to go to the workshops. [headdesk]

I went to my dentist the next morning and they put in a very fragile, non-functional, temporary tooth-like object, cemented to the teeth to either side on the back. I was warned not to bite anything, and not even to brush. And when your dentist tells you not to brush, you know your fragile dental work is FRAGILE. I was very careful, but it was a bit wiggly within about 24 hours. I had some vague hope that it'd last at least until the second workshop, but no luck; it came out just a bit over three days after having been installed. So I've been going just over a week now with this huge gap in my front teeth, and talking a little funny.

I feel like I'm seven again. :P

Anyway, this is fixable, although it's going to be expensive. Civil Service has notoriously lousy dental insurance, and the Pacific Northwest has notoriously expensive dental care, for whatever reason. So the bill for an implant is going to be very large, and our insurance isn't picking up a dollar of it. This is our tentatively planned cruise for this year, going into my mouth.

I just hope my other crowns last longer. At least I know to stay away from the Market Cafe's ice cream sandwiches; that was the most expensive dessert I've ever eaten, by a couple of orders of magnitude.

Angie

Travelling -- No Anthologies This Month

Greetings from the South Pacific and all that. [wave]

For anyone looking for the Anthology Listing, I'm afraid I'm skipping this month. I'm on a cruise ship a couple of days out from Tahiti; internet is unreliable, and when it works it costs thirty-eight cents per minute. I usually do several hours of research online before I post the month's listing, and much as I love you all, I'm not willing to spend a hundred bucks or more to do it. :/ When I get home, I'll have one (1) day to wash every garment I own before getting back on a plane to go to my mom's for Thanksgiving, at which point I'll be doing family stuff. I think November's going to be a wash for the listing. Everyone keep writing, and I'll see you in December.

I've been having a great time, doing lots of reading and lots of writing, and am sitting here with a truly spectacular sunburn, courtesy of Bora Bora. :) We went on a 4WD tour around the island and up three mountains. It was truly awesome, but the truck had no roof (which was one of the awesome parts, actually) and I got sizzled like whoa. My face has been peeling off my skull in small, dried-up bits, and the peeling part is working its way onto my scalp. I expect to have what'll look like an absolutely terminal case of dandruff by tomorrow at the latest. [rueful smile]

Tahiti's awesome; see it if you can. Bora Bora was particularly beautiful, and had great weather, sunburn notwithstanding. Samoa is lovely and has incredibly nice people, but the missionaries did a number on them like whoa, to the point where it's rather horrifying. (Samoa is very Christian, to the point where you're required to go to church on Sundays, and when one of the people on our tour asked the guide on American Samoa about their religious beliefs before the missionaries, she smiled and said, "We had no beliefs." O_O Note that American Samoa was the less uptight of the two stops; Apia was more conservative on the surface, but nobody asked any of the locals there within my hearing about their traditional beliefs. Now I kind of wish I had, for comparison. I'd like to think this one guide is just particularly well brainwashed, and not representative.)

Hawaii is... well, it's the US, and there you go. It's worth visiting, definitely, but don't expect it to feel terribly different, if you're an American. The Polynesian Cultural Center that everyone raves about is very expensive and very plasticly Disneyfied. Oh, and no one grows sugar cane commercially on Hawaii anymore, something I didn't know. The last crop was harvested in December of... either 2008 or 2010, I forget now, but just a few years ago.

We have our share of idiots on board, including one gentleman who was on a tour with us who seems to think all brown people speak Spanish. [headdesk] I've been wishing I could confiscate people's citizenship for a while now, because nobody who goes out to foreign countries representing the USA should be allowed to be that obnoxiously ignorant. Every cruise seems to have at least a handful of them, and it's damned embarassing.

I meant to do a stop-by-stop commentary, but that probably won't happen at this point. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer. I'm having a great time (and losing lots of weight, yay! being one of the few people on the planet who loses weight on cruises) but am looking forward to being back in my own bed.

Oh, and the internet on this ship has some kind of nanny software installed. :( Early on I was bounced off of several of the sites in my RSS reader because of "adult" content, and I've been pretty much ignoring the whole thing since. I'm not sure how tight it's set, and trying to read something means it's marked as "read" in my feed reader; I already have to just remember (with my awful memory) that I need to back up on a few blogs and comics, and I'd just as soon not mess up any more feeds, so I have 1000+ posts piled up with more coming in all the time. I'll try to get through them all, at least eyeballing post titles to see what's interesting, but if I haven't commented on your blog in a few weeks, that's why. [sigh] It's going to be a busy holiday season.

I hope everyone's been doing well, and writing well, and that everyone's safe and unflooded and not blown over. {{{}}}

Oh, and Washington now has gay marriage! :D Washington's voters rock; I'm very proud of the state I live in. I wish the rest of the country would get with the 21st century.

Missing you all,

Angie

Free Story Plus Convention

Hey, all! [wave] I'm here at WorldCon in Chicago and having a great time. I just got back from a reading and Q&A session with John Scalzi, who's always entertaining, and who has a short story (I'm not even going to try to remember the title; it's long and funny) up for a Hugo this year. I'm also hoping to get into Laura Resnick's Bheerfest thing this evening, if one or two people ahead of me on the list don't show up, which would be pretty cool. (I don't drink beer, but I'd love to sit at a table with Laura Resnick and BS.)

I also have a free story called Birthdays Suck up at Cryselle's Bookshelf. It's set in the Sentinel verse and is about Paul's 17th birthday. It has no sex in it, so it's safe for folks who aren't into graphic sex in their fiction, but be aware that there's a major spoiler in this story, if you haven't read A Hidden Magic yet.

I'll put this up as a free read on my own site in two or three weeks, something like that, but for now it's only available at Cryselle's place; my thanks to her for hosting it. :)

Angie

Still Alive

There are a bunch of things I've wanted to blog about, starting with my trips last month, and in particular the Anthology Listings post that should've gone up a couple of days ago. We've had some medical issues around our place, though, most recently with my husband, who thought a cataract was getting worse and actually has a detached retina. :/ He'll be having surgery on that next week.

I'm still around, though, and I'll be getting the antho post up within a day or two.

Angie

PS -- don't sail with Celebrity. :P Our cabin bathroom smelled of sewage the whole trip, despite broken promises to fix it. I got a case of e. coli and spent a chunk of the cruise on in-cabin isolation, the kind where if you leave before you're okayed, they toss your butt off at the next port. Wow, fun. At least they picked up the medical tab.

November Stuff

Writing: 60,826 = 29 pts.
Submissions: 1 = 1 pt.
TOTAL = 30 pts WOOT!



NaNo went wonderfully, as you can probably tell from the above. :) I wrote just over 50K on my NaNo project, which was the third book of my Sentinels series, and another 10K and a bit on book two of the same series. Sentinels 2 (the book that comes right after A Hidden Magic) is almost 85K words and I think I'm about two or three more chapters from finishing.

Doing both at once actually worked out well. The two stories take place at the same time, with most of the team up in Seattle in Book 2, and the guy left home to hold the fort having an adventure of his own back in San Jose in Book 3. I had to go back and do a couple of tweaks on chunks of Book 2 I'd already written to make the timeline work with Book 3, which I wouldn't have been able to do if I'd finished 2 and turned it in (especially if it'd already been published before I got significantly into 3), so I'm glad I decided to start 3 even though 2 wasn't done.

The current plan is to finish Book 2 in December and get it submitted and in the pipeline, then finish Book 3 (maybe before spring?) and submit that. If I can have two novels published in 2012, I will be absolutely delighted.

Jim and I went to Reno to spend Thanksgiving with my mom and brother, and we had a wonderful dinner (on Wednesday, because my brother is a retail manager and worked both Thanksgiving and the day after) at a very nice steakhouse at the Atlantis, the same hotel WorldCon was at this last August. I had American Kobe beef for the first time, and I now understand what all the fuss is about. It's sublimely beefy, tender and flavorful and rich. I could have eaten three of them, except then I wouldn't have had room for the excellent beef-vegetable soup or the great cheesy-buns that came in the bread basket or the very good creamed spinach or the creme brulee (yum!) I had for dessert. The service was great, not at all snooty, and the little extras -- like the coffee service, which came with rock sugar on sticks, cinnamon sticks, white lump sugar, brown lump sugar, chocolate shavings, whipped cream, and I don't remember what-all else to put in your coffee -- made the whole dinner a wonderful experience. It was expensive but very much worth the price. If you're ever at the Atlantis and have a week's food budget to blow [cough] I highly recommend the steak house.

The Friday before Thanksgiving, Jim slipped on an oily metal grate or something on his way home from work, and banged up his knee pretty bad -- all scabby and sore -- so he kept it bandaged and went on with life. A couple of days after we flew to Reno, his leg from the knee down was incredibly swollen and red, and a bit warm to the touch. Mom and I persuaded him to go see a doctor; the local urgent care clinic was on our insurance, so Sean dropped us off on his way to work. The doctor took one look at it and said it looked to her like he had a blood clot, and she wanted him to go to a hospital for an ultrasound immediately. She said that if they found a clot, they'd keep him at least over night, because you don't mess around with those things. We took a cab to the medical center and after some really ridiculous run-around about where we were supposed to be and who we were supposed to see -- the urgent care doctor called and talked to an ultrasound tech and made an appointment for us, but no one else seemed to have ever heard of Jim or of the tech -- we finally got in and he got his ultrasound. She didn't find a clot, which is good but kind of weird; she said that just looking at the leg, she'd have assumed there was a clot too, but no. Apparently it's just an odd case of cellulitis, or however you spell it, and so he's on antibiotics. If it's not back to normal by the time he's out of pills, he promises he'll go see our regular doctor.

That was scary for a while, but it looks like he'll be okay. :/

I did my usual travel-sick thing, which continued after I flew home, yay. I missed going to the movies with the rest of the family, but they saw The Immortals and from all accounts I didn't miss anything. I'm used to the whole post-flight sickness now, though; I'm just glad I have my pills.

I hope everyone else had a great Thanksgiving, or if you're not in the US, had a great November anyway. :)

Angie

New Orleans

Wow, I haven't blogged about GayRomLit yet -- I should probably do that before I forget what-all happened. :)

The conference was a lot of fun, more than I expected, actually. I've always loved meeting internet friends in realspace, and I got to meet one of my very best online friends, plus a bunch of other people I knew, people I sort of knew, people whose names I'd seen around, and people I ran into for the first time while I was there. One thing a lot of people have commented about is how awesome it was to hang out with a bunch of people who are all into m/m romance. I've never been to one of the big romance conventions, but people who have talk about been sneered at, snubbed and otherwise marginalized, on a ratio of four or five to one versus people who say everyone was great and they had no problems. Gay romance is the redheaded (bastard, drug addict) stepchild of romance, and it seems to be very stressful, to say the least, to be an m/m romance reader or writer at a general romance convention. This one was for us, everyone was in the same group, and no one was asked, "But why do you read/write that stuff?" with even curiosity, much less hostility or distaste. Good stuff.

I got majorly fangirled a couple of times, which was pretty darned cool. [beam] I even had about half a dozen people ask for my autograph, which was ??? because I don't have any paper books out and wasn't expecting it at all. The first four or five I was trying to actually SIGN a name I'd never signed before, and I'm sure no two were alike, LOL! My usual mode of writing is a rather weird printing style I've developed since I was like eleven, though, so for the last couple I ditched the whole cursive-signature thing and just printed my name. It's still very curvy and doesn't look like anyone else's printing, so that should work fine. Also, it's readable, which my cursive most definitely isn't. [cough] Also-also, this matters less with a pseudonym, but in general you don't want your "autograph" to be the same signature you use on checks and credit card slips, so that's another good thing, just on general principles.

It wasn't all wonderful, of course. I had some tote bags made up with the title and author name (same fonts and all) from A Hidden Magic to give away, and had my vendor send the box directly to the hotel. They lost it. [headdesk] They found it eventually, but it took about a day and a half, and the first couple of people I talked to (two separate occasions) seemed pretty convinced it'd never arrived, despite UPS's web site showing that it had been delivered to the front desk. The third time there were three people hunting for a while, and the bell captain finally found it and brought it to my room, yay! I gave him a nice tip and was very happy to have my stuff.

The day after I arrived, I went out with three friends to Cafe du Monde, where the coffee's great and you have to excavate through the mountain of powdered sugar to find your beignets. That part was good, but there was an older guy right outside the fence, like twelve feet away from us, who was alternating between trumpet music and very loud singing the whole time we were there, such that we had to shout at each other to have a conversation. [sigh] I know the street performers have to make a living too, but the whole captive-audience thing sucks. It's one thing to do your performance on a street corner, or around the perimeter of Jackson Square where a bunch of performers and artists and fortune tellers hang out, so that people passing by can stop and watch/listen if they want. But when we're in a cafe having coffee and beignets and want to talk, it's very unpleasant having music blaring in our ear the whole time. And courtesy dictates that you stop what you're doing to applaud whenever a song finishes, whether you enjoyed it or not, and that got old as well. The guy was all "Thank you for your thunderous applause" whenever there wasn't much, going passive-agressive on people who hadn't chosen to hang out and listen to him in the first place -- so that kind of sucked. He's the one who chose to foist his very loud music on people who just wanted to sit down with coffee and beignets and conversation; if his audience wasn't universally delighted with his offering, that was his doing and nobody else's. If I ever go back, I'll definitely look for a table inside, or way in the back of the patio.

After that, we took a carriage ride around the French Quarter, which was fun. Our driver knew a lot about the history of the area (I'm assuming they all do, but still) and it was nice to see things while sitting down. The carriages are pulled by mules these days. The driver said it was because mules are stronger and can take the heat better than horses. They used to use horses, but there was trouble with the horses being overworked and generally in bad shape, so the city passed a law saying that the carriages had to use mules, which is good. They all seemed to be healthy so far as I could tell -- no hip bones sticking out, no limps, nothing I recognized as abused animals, which isn't always the case with animals who work this way, so that was cool.

I had some "lightly" blackened red snapper later on which was way too spicy for me (I have pretty much zero appreciation for capsaicin type heat in food) so I only ate half of it, although the rice and veggies were good. And on the last evening before I left I had a fried oyster poboy with sweet potato fries, both of which were very yummy. And I had breakfast a couple of times at the hotel restaurant, including my first try at grits. I expected to like them -- I'm Italian and grew up eating polenta -- and I did. Grits have a lighter taste, less corny, if that makes sense. I imagine it's something to do with the chemical processing that turns them white. They're still good to eat with butter, just like polenta, and I'd definitely have them again.

I didn't do any of the walking tours the con had set up -- they did cemetary walks and vampire tours -- and from what I heard I was glad I didn't. It sounded like they were too long and with too much standing around for someone with my mobility issues. I have to be careful what I commit to, and I had a feeling these wouldn't work out for me.

A lot of the planned events of the conference were based on alcohol -- hurricane party, wine and cheese party, pub crawl, that kind of thing -- and I didn't sign up for them because I don't drink. Various authors and/or publishers were sponsoring all these events, and they had to pay so much per head based on how many people signed up. I could've gone just to be sociable, but I didn't think it was right to make someone pay for booze for me that I wasn't going to drink.

I haven't mentioned any panels because... well, I can't quite say there weren't any, but there weren't supposed to be. The organizing committee decided not to hold panels because they, as individuals, don't care for panels at conferences. All right, it's their show, they can do what they want. But there were panels anyway -- two that I ran into, and I didn't try to get to everything -- so it seems at least some of the attendees and sponsors want them enough to go impromptu if none are organized. This would be fine, except that the rooms weren't set up for panels. The idea with the smaller events was that authors or publishers or whoever was hosting a social or signing or whatever would be sitting behind tables around the perimeter of the room, and people would walk in, chat a bit, pick up swag and/or autographs, and leave. The first panel I encountered was in a small room intended for a meet-the-authors social sort of event. A friend was in there and I wanted to go say hi and see how things were going with her, but I found a panel going -- people were asking questions, writers behind the tables were answering them, and everyone was listening to the answers. That's a panel. The room had about six chairs in it, aside from the chairs behind the tables for the authors, and they were all full. There were people standing along the walls, packed into the corners, standing here and there in the middle of the room, and packed very tightly in the doorway and in the hallway right outside the door. I couldn't even get close enough to the door to peer in and see my friend, and I could only hear every fourth or fifth word. I stood around for a few minutes, but then my knees and back started griping so I left.

The second one was a publisher's reception. They were supposed to be hosting a hurricane party on the patio around the pool, but the hotel was going through some rennovation and fumes from the paint had drifted out the windows and made the pool patio uninhabitable most of the afternoon, so events that were supposed to be near there were hurriedly moved. I hadn't signed up for the hurricane party, but I wandered past their relocation room (which was way too small for a party, but they were moved back to the pool patio a bit later, after the painters had gone home and the fumes dissipated) and saw that the publisher was holding a panel. The room was packed again -- there were eight or so chairs that were full, people lining the walls and packing the corners and standing in all the free space, plus people sitting on tables and assorted other things that weren't meant to be sat on. The publisher had been invitation-only up until recently, and one of the bigwigs (I didn't catch her name so I don't know exactly who) was speaking about their preferences in submissions, what they're looking for, how they deal with covers and promo, and generally the sort of thing an author who might consider writing for a publishing house would want to know. I'm happy where I am, but I wanted to hear what the publisher had to say anyway and there was a spot on a table near the door, so I perched for a while, along with a number of other people. Seriously, though, if this sort of thing continues, one of these times someone or a group of someones is going to sit on something that isn't meant to be sat on and break it, and the hotel is going to bill the conference. I get that the organizers don't care for panels, but if they're going to happen anyway, they'd best be organized and scheduled and put into rooms that are set for panels, with plenty of chairs. Otherwise the committee should start setting aside money for a surprise on the hotel bill, because it's going to happen.

I got to meet my own publishers in person for the first time, which was pretty cool. Shawn and Lorna of Torquere Press had a table at the big signing event -- which was on a riverboat -- and invited me to sit with them for a while. That's where I got asked for most of the autographs. :) A lot of writers in this genre don't have paper books, so readers were going around with notebooks and such, using them as autograph albums. One lady was having people sign her e-reader cover, and one of the mods of the M/M Romance group on Goodreads was having people sign her Don't Read In The Closet knapsack, which was pretty cool. That'll be an awesome souvenir.

Later some of us Torquere people gathered in the hotel bar -- which was around a corner and down a long hall and pretty dead unless there was a conference event in it, which sort of surprised me -- with Torquere hosting. Shawn ran a tab, which I've never seen anyone do in real life, and which amused me beyond reason. Okay, I don't go to bars, I'm sure everyone else is eyerolling right now, but it was pretty cool from my point of view. :) I had a couple of sodas and we talked about stuff. One thing that sticks out was confirmation that when the second Hidden Magic novel comes out, they'll bring both it and the first out in paperback, yay! Seriously, that was awesome to hear; I'd suspected they might, just because it makes no sense to bring out Book 2 of a series in paperback but not Book 1, but it's great to hear it officially. I know paperbacks don't sell terribly well in this genre, but I've been wanting a paperback book with my name on it that I could autograph and give my mother for ages, and now I know I'm going to get one. Even if sales are lousy -- which I hope they aren't! :D -- just being able to give her that will be worth it.

Oh, one of the street performers I saw while walking around the Quarter was excellent!! I was on the way to a nearby drugstore and was passing by Jackson Square, and there was a guy who was a police car transformer, and it actually worked!! :D He walked around with pieces of police car hanging off him like armor -- I think a lot of it was sturdy cardboard or light wood, it certainly wasn't plastic or metal, but still -- and then he'd sort of squat and fall forward and the car assembled itself around him with the four tires on the ground and his feet tucked up out of the way. He must've had an electric motor in there somewhere because he could drive around!! Then he'd stop, then put his feet down and stand up, and the car disassembled back into an armor-y thing again! I definitely dropped some money in his bucket, 'cause that was freaking awesome. [beam]

On the whole I had a great time, and I'm looking forward to going to next year's conference, which will be in Albuquerque. Hot and dry instead of hot and humid, so a bit better to this California native who's not at all used to humidity. It's the people who make it a great time, though, and I expect that to be just the same, only maybe a little bigger with any luck. I can hardly wait! :)

Angie

WorldCon Part 4

Okay, I'm going to wrap up this time, promise. :) No more panels I want to talk about, so this'll be more random stuff I remember that seemed cool or interesting.

For Game of Thrones fans, they had the actual TV series iron throne, which is made out of swords and looks very uncomfortable, in the display area. It was right out in the open and anyone who wanted to sit in it could do so. Every day I saw lots of people taking pictures of the throne, of their friends in the throne, of their friends standing next to George R. R. Martin in the throne, and having other people take their picture in the throne or their picture next to George R. R. Martin in the throne. Once he's done with the series I'll read the books -- a lot of people seem to think they're pretty awesome. :)

The dealer's room (which was actually a cordoned off section of the trade-show-sized hall it shared with the art show and the display area and the small stage and a bunch of other stuff) was kind of smallish for a WorldCon, or maybe I've just been spoiled. Lots of book dealers, although I was able to restrain myself. :) I found a few books I'd had on my wish list on one table for half off, which was pretty awesome. One was Arab Folktales by Inea Bushnaq (you find all sorts of cool stuff at SF cons) which I recommend highly. It's not only a great collection of stories, if you're into folk/fairy tales, but also there's an introduction to the book as a whole and to each section talking about characters and culture and custom and such, so I learned at least as much about traditional Arab culture from reading this as I have from any of the Early Arab History type books I've read. And it was a lot more fun; I read the whole thing over three or four days and thoroughly enjoyed it.

You know, I think the rise in online shopping, and particularly places like Amazon, has made it easier to restrain myself in a convention dealer's room. Even small press books are easily available online; it used to be it was hard to even know what was around, much less actually buy it, unless you were at a convention with a lot of dealers and publishers gathered in one place.

I also caught up on the bound editions of Schlock Mercenary (which was up for a Hugo for Best Graphic Story but didn't win :( ). If you buy the books at a convention, Howard Taylor, the writer/artist, will use a blank page in the back (included for this purpose) to draw you the character of your choice. He was very nice, especially considering I'm awful with names and asked for "Dr. Bunny" (actually her name -- she's one of the regulars so I remember what she's called), "the ex-special forces spy chick in her baggy stolen combat suit" and "the AI girl doing her Bambi-eyes thing 'cause she rocks at that." [hides under keyboard] Howard was completely cool about my verbal mangling of his characters, and I am grateful. :)

I also got a pair of T-shirts (one for me and one for spousal unit) that say "Harrington Treecats" with graphics to make it look like a baseball team fan shirt. This is awesome if you're a fan of David Weber's Honor Harrington series. If you're not, you're probably going "Huh?" which was the reaction of two of my friends to whom I displayed a shirt shortly after buying them. [heavy, theatrical sigh] I have to start giving my friends books for Christmas.

Other than that, I didn't spend any money in the dealer's room. I exercised quite a bit of restraint, although actually, it's easier than it used to be. There are fewer cool-thingy dealers at cons these days; you used to be able to find multiple dealers selling 8x10 photos, replica weapons (both replicas of TV/movie stuff and replicas of historical blades, plus some very cool battery powered light/laser guns from no particular source), buttons with great sayings on them (I used to spend like $20 on buttons at every con -- I had a couple of shoeboxes full by the time I stopped), fanzines, replica patches and insignia and trim and other stuff you needed to make your own Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica or whichever uniform, etc. Cons nowadays have little or none of this stuff, and it's depressing. I'm thinking the economy probably drove most of the more marginal dealers out of business, but whatever the reason, it sucks. [sigh]

I went through the art show with a couple of friends in about an hour or so. It was very small for a WorldCon, or it seemed like it. There were some Ken Macklin originals, which were cool to see; I haven't seen anything by him in an art show in at least a decade or so. A friend of mine, Stuart Shepherd, sold some pieces, which is very cool. Stu does fantasy art and also aviation/military art. It's funny, he and I went to high school together, and I saw him at a BayCon like ten or fifteen years later. He wasn't really an SF con sort of person, but he'd dropped by to look around. He told me he was an artist now and I said, "Hey, we've got a couple of spaces left in the art show! If you have any SFish stuff you could go get, maybe you'll sell something." It was only like $5 a panel back then, so it made a great impulse buy, especially if you happened to be an artist. :) Turned out Stu had some framed paintings in his trunk, so he signed up, went out to get them and hung them up there and then. I don't remember whether anything sold that year, but he's been a regular at the BayCon art show since, and has done more fantasy art. At the time he'd mostly been doing box art for aviation model kits -- gorgeous stuff, and I'm not even into planes. He's also combined the genres; one new piece has a dragon fighting a tank and a military helicopter, and another has some SFish looking fighter planes (from Atlantis, according to the title) buzzing around a modern aircraft carrier.

One of the days, I forget whether it was Thursday or Friday, there was an art demo in the big room near the displays. A young woman in a bikini-ish sort of outfit posed for a number of artists, including the Artist Guest of Honor, Boris Vallejo. Boris was one of the first artists whose work I learned to recognize by style when I was a teenager. I got Boris calendars as part of my Christmas loot every year for like fifteen or twenty years, plus I have a book of prints floating around somewhere. I was on my way somewhere else and didn't get a chance to watch him (or the others) work, but it must've been pretty cool for the baby artists in the crowd to get to watch such a well known pro.

The masquerade is always one of my favorite events; I've seen the masquerade at all but a couple of conventions I've attended, and usually if I've missed it, it was because I was working the con and was stuck behind a desk or something during that time. Phil and Kaja Foglio MCed (properly dressed for the occasion) and did a wonderful job. They're both obviously comfortable in front of a huge crowd (either that or they fake it really well) and managed just the right mix of jokes and getting on with business. There were only twenty-eight entries this year (another effect of the economy, I'm pretty sure; costuming is an expensive hobby if you're going all out) but there were some great ones.

My friend Karen McWilliams (who went to high school with me and Stu) went as the Undine, based on Anderson's mermaid, who died after being betrayed by her prince. Karen is a master costumer, and she won Best Use of Dyes (a workmanship award), for obvious reasons, but she also got a presentation award. She's been studying movement for over thirty years, and can move and dance in a costume on stage in a way many other costumers can't. I linked to a series of photos, but you really had to be there to get the full effect. That's true of a lot of costumes, especially the funny ones; they look kind of okay-whatever if you can't see the presentation.

Princess Pacman was one of those -- it's kind of okay-whatever if you just look at the costume itself, but the presentation was hilarious, all about how Princess Peach (from the Super Mario games) discovered that her love, Mario, was leaving her for some other floozy, and how she set out to find her true love, someone who'd love her and appreciate her. She ended up with Pacman. Trust me, it worked. :D She won a presentation award, Most Humorous.

Lance Ikegawa came as a Blue Meanie from the Yellow Submarine movie, and it's awesome. :D He got a workmanship award too, if I recall correctly; the blue fur is some ridiculous number of blue clown wigs, cut up and sewn into the body part of the costume. Definitely click through and take a look, especially if you remember the movie. :)

Another nostalgic kind of costume was the One-Eyed, One-Horned, Flying Purple People Eater, by Susan Scheufele. This one was in exhibition only; usually that means the costume has won an award at a convention the same size or larger than the current one. At WorldCon, that probably means either another WorldCon or a CostumeCon.

One of my favorite costumes was a large group who came out as Semi-Precious, each one representing a semi-precious stone. Costumers have been doing this sort of thing for years -- putting together group costumes based on the seasons or the zodiac or the continents or the elements or whatever they think they can do cool wearable representations of. So okay, someone thought the semi-precious stones would work, and the costumes weren't bad, in all the different colors. Each one carried a banner with the name of the stone they were portraying, so you could tell which was what. Okay, that was cool -- they're all spread across the stage with their serious processional-type music playing, when suddenly the music stopped, and started up again, and everyone flipped their banners. The person with the first banner dashed over to stand just before the second, then the third, then the fourth, etc., keeping the lyrics going. It was great -- everyone was laughing and clapping and groaning. :D They won a presentation award, "Worst Internet Meme."

Another one of my favorites was Night at the Sci-Fi Museum. They did sort of a parody of the Night at the Museum movies; when the lights came up, the bug-alien and the space-lady were up on boxes, frozen like exhibits. The night watchman guy came wandering on stage and they played with him for a bit, only moving when he wasn't watching, with him between them. The space-lady got his keys and she and the bug were able to escape. It was done all tongue-in-cheek and it was very funny, and the costumes themselves were great too. They won Best In Show for Original Presentation.

There were a bunch more, including some more really good ones, but you can see for yourself -- here's the "masquerade worldcon reno" Flickr collection, and the "worldcon 2011 masquerade" Flickr collection. Currently it's three people's worth of photos between the two of them; hopefully more will be added over time.

The Hugos was your basic award show. Jim and I always go when we're at WorldCon, and it's fun to watch the results and see how many I voted for actually won. (Usually not many. [duck]) My second favorite part of the evening was when Chris Garcia and James Bacon won the Best Fanzine award for their zine Drink Tank. Chris pretty much melted down on stage. :) It was great -- he ended up sitting on the stage cuddling his statue while James was taking his turn to thank everybody at the microphone, hee!

My favorite part was when Robert Silverberg got up to award the Best Novella Hugo. He and Connie Willis have been taking humorous shots back and forth at each other at the Hugos for however many years, often with a theme of stretching out their speech or presentation intro or whatever while the other is sitting somewhere waiting to find out whether he/she has won something. Because no one is in a hurry at moments like that, right? Silverberg is a brilliant presenter, a wonderful speaker, and has a talent for being dryly hilarious. He managed to stretch his introduction out for several minutes, and whenever it seemed like he was going to get on with it and read the nominees, he'd start up again and keep going with the rambling. It was awesome, and a privilege to watch a master at work. :D

Unfortunately my least favorite part of the Hugos contrasted strongly with Silverberg's presentation. The two guys MCing the ceremony spent a lot of time stretching things out in various places (I'm not sure why), and tried very hard to be funny, but usually failed. I don't know, I'm sure there were other people who thought they were wonderful from beginning to end, but before very long I was whispering "Why don't they get ON with it!" to myself and/or my husband every few minutes. They tried hard, and neither one is a professional performer or anything, so I'm sure they did their best. I wish we could just have Robert Silverberg MC the Hugos, all of them, forever. That'd be very cool.

Oh, my other favorite part -- Phil and Kaja Foglio won the Best Graphic Story Hugo for their excellent steampunk web comic Girl Genius. Best Graphic Story is a new category, and the award has only been given three times, including this year. Girl Genius has won all three times. After accepting the award, Phil announced that he was removing Girl Genius from consideration for the award in the future. I thought this was incredibly cool, a very gracious move by someone who already has a nice collection of Hugos. You see, before Phil was a professional artist, he was a fan artist, and back in the late '70s he won the Hugo for that twice in a row before removing himself from consideration. I remember hearing people snark and sneer at him for that, trying to frame it as a demonstration of huge ego. I think someone with a huge ego would be more likely to want to win as many awards as possible, and I admire him for doing it, both times. Especially this time; since the Graphic Story category is still so new, it's not really cemented into the roster. Fans could still decide that it's not needed, or that it's silly, or that it's just a vehicle for giving one guy (or rather, one group of people -- Kaja Foglio and their colorist Cheyenne Wright are part of the comic team and also got statues) a Hugo every year, and vote to eliminate the category. Pulling Girl Genius out gives the category a chance to grow and show its viability by demonstrating that there are enough really good graphic stories every year for a Hugo category to be worthwhile. Props to Phil for doing it, and to Kaja and Cheyenne for agreeing.

Let's see, what else? I put a twenty into a slot machine (a Wizard of Oz machine -- three are ganged together and the special minigame affects all three, whoever triggered it; it's lots of fun) and got almost ninety dollars out, so that was An Excellent Thing.

My mom and brother (who live in Reno) came to the hotel to eat with us a couple of times, and it was great seeing them. My brother's in retail management, and he just moved to a new store; he looks much less stressed, and I'm very happy for him. {{}}

One of the restaurants at the Atlantis (I forget the name -- it's the gelato place next to the buffet) has awesome pizza. I had to watch Jim eating it for days while I had pasta or something similarly soft; I had my temporary crowns in and I couldn't bite anything hard or chewy or thick for fear they'd break while I was a thousand miles away from my dentist. :( I finally said "Frack it!" and got a pizza anyway, which I ate with a knife and fork. I don't care if I looked like a doofus, it was wonderful -- bacon and spinach with white sauce -- and all the moreso because I'd been eating pasta and omelets (and mashed potatoes and apple sauce at home) for days and days. Pizza, yum!

Oh, another friend of mine drove out from Sacramento just for Thursday with her son. He's a major George R. R. Martin fan and he wanted to get his Kindle signed. :D I only see Laurie once or twice a year, so this was great; we spent the day together being fannish, which is appropriate because we met at an SF con when we were both teenagers.

I think that about wraps it. Definitely click through on the masquerade photo collections -- they're very cool, especially if you've never seen an SF convention masquerade before. [wave]

Angie

WorldCon Part 2

Another panel I made it to was John Scalzi's "A Trip to the Creation Museum." I'd previously read Scalzi's blog post about the visit and had a great time reading it. I knew it'd be even more fun in a room full of like-minded folk, so I made sure to get there to hear it live -- I even managed to get a seat. :)

Scalzi explained in the panel how this came about. The Creation Museum (which is exactly what you think it is) was built within a reasonable distance of Scalzi's home, and someone asked if he was going to go. He explained exactly how unlikely it would ever be that he'd visit such a place, even under considerable duress. A bunch of people thought it'd be hilarious for him to go, though, so he finally made a deal -- he'd go if the people who thought it'd be hilarious raised $250, which he would donate to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. He says on his blog:

As of 11:59 and 59 seconds (Pacific Time) last night, the "Drag Scalzi's Ass to the Creation Museum" donation drive raised $5,118.36. That's 256 times the admission price to Creation Museum, a multiple I find both amusing (from a dork point of view) and gratifying, since it means what tiny bit of income the creationists running the museum gain by having me pass through the door will be utterly swamped by the amount I'm going to send to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Would that it worked that way for every admission to that place.

For those of you who were wondering, some statistics: The first milestone for this fundraiser, the $250 to get me to go at all, got passed within the first hour of posting the challenge. The $1000 mark got passed about 12 hours later. The $5,000 marker got passed last night sometime between 6 and 11pm, while I was out on a date with my wife, celebrating our anniversary. I'm particularly pleased about hitting the $5k mark. The least amount donated was $1; the most was $300. More than one person donated more than $250, usually with the notation "Ha! Now you HAVE to go!" Multiples and variations of $6.66 were amusingly common, although the $5 suggested amount was the amount most received.

The people at Americans United were reportedly delighted by the donation, if a bit bemused by the curiously specific amount. :)

The panel was indeed humorously awesome and I'm very glad I went. The visit report is funny too, scaled down a bit to take the solo experience into consideration. Highly recommended.

I went to another panel that I'm not going to name specifically, since I want to do a bit of constructive analysis, although I suppose anyone who gets ahold of the program book could figure out which one it was, since I have to give some detail to get my point across. :/

All right, fine, it was on world creation for writers, how to create a realistic world for your science fiction story. I've been to such panels before, and they've all gone pretty much the same way, which isn't a compliment. What tends to happen is that there are several scientist types on the panel, one or two who are into the astronomy and planet creation end of things, and one or two who are into the smaller scale geology and biology end. The logical thing to do is to start out with the creation of the star system and the planets, talking about dust clouds and star spectra and magnetic fields and galactic arms and gravity and such. You have to have all that before you can have any small scale geology, much less anything biological, so starting with the bigger picture makes sense.

The problem is that the panelists get used to the idea that the stars-and-planets people are doing all the talking at the beginning, and... they usually just keep on doing all the talking. One person in particular has been on every similar panel I've ever attended; this individual really likes to talk, to jump in, and even to interrupt. To give the person credit, they're a good speaker and know a lot about the subject and are very eager to share that knowledge, which is cool. But, as has often happened before, this person plus the other stars-and-planets person ended up doing about 85% of the talking. The biologist did about another 10-12%, and the geologist squeezed in whatever shards of speakage were left.

This isn't an ideal way to run a panel, and the moderator did nothing to get things under control.

Again, there was a lot of great info presented here, but it was frustrating to watch all the same. And judging by the look on the geologist's face through the last third or so of the panel, that person might well be thinking twice next time an invitation shows up to be on panels. Or maybe their lunch didn't agree with them. At any rate, they didn't seem to be having a great time.

I think (if anyone cares what I think) that in future it'd be better to split this panel into two. Let the stars-and-planets people have a panel all to themselves. They'll do a great job with it, and it'll end up being essentially the same panel they've given for however many years, without the bother of having to talk over and interrupt those other folks. Give the smaller-scale geologists and the biologists -- maybe add a botanist and an oceanographer to round things out -- their own panel, talking about smaller scale landforms, climates, biomes, and what sorts of life might develop under different conditions. That'd be at least as useful to SF writers as the stars-and-planets panel, and separating them out seems to be the only way to give the smaller scale planetbuilding speakers a chance to get more than five sentences in edgeways. Everyone wins.

Angie

May Stuff

Zoned on this earlier in the month. [duck]

6 Submissions = 6pts
7820 words written = 2pts (Arrgh!)
TOTAL = 8 points



Bother, I missed Approved for the first time this year, and by 180 freaking words! At least the amount I missed another point by was in the triple digits this month. :P

Still not happy with my writing totals, but I have a couple of stories I'm fairly close to finishing, around attempts to flog Paul and Rory back to work.

Jim and I only travel a few times a year, but two of them were in May this year -- the cruise early in the month, and BayCon at the end. I spent a few hours very early Memorial Day morning in an ER in San Jose (or maybe Santa Clara, I honestly wasn't paying that much attention), having gotten sick again about 2.5 days after the flight down there. This has been happening pretty much every time we fly somewhere for almost a year now, and I've been coming up with all sorts of theories about what might be going on, none of which have suggested solutions. The ER doctor watched me staying rock-still while he talked to me and examined me, holding on to the bed rails and keeping my head perfectly still. I'd been sick since about 3am and moving makes nausea worse, even just turning my head. I told him about the travel thing, and he thinks it's the pressure changes in flying, that something is going squirrely in my inner ear during descent, and 2-3 days later it goes sproing! and I get a nasty case of positional vertigo, with massive nausea. I got some good drugs in my IV and was fine in the cab on the way back to the hotel. He gave me a prescription for what turned out to be generic bonine.

This is pretty awesome. If he's right about what the problem is, and if the bonine works, then I'm basically cured. We're going to WorldCon in Reno in August, and I'll take the bonine for five days or so after the flight out. If I don't get sick, then I'll be celebrating; bonine is cheap and OTC, so if that works then the problem is fixed, yay. Keeping a set of virtual fingers crossed for that one.

I can't believe it's June! It's still cold up in Seattle! :(

Angie, still in sweatpants

Cruising

Hello from the Pacific coast, somewhere between San Francisco and Astoria, Oregon. It's a sea day, so we're just sort of cruising along here without much to do. It's actually my favorite kind of day at sea; I like being on the ship, moreso than going ashore most of the time.

We've had some weather so far; it's a good thing Jim and I are both good sailors. Note that when a British captain comes over the loudspeaker to say that you're heading into "a bit of a breeze," it's time to tie yourself to your bunk. :) That was the night we were approaching San Francisco. It was rough last night too, although not quite so much.

Our first stop was Santa Barbara. Jim got off there and just walked around for a while, but there's not much to see near the dock. All the places interesting to tourists are some ways away, a bus or cab ride, and he didn't feel like doing either. I stayed aboard and read a book and was happy just hanging out.

We got off in San Francisco and went to Yank Sing for dim sum for lunch. Awesome place, over in the old Post Office building. It's not cheap, but the food is excellent. We tried some new things this time, including an ocean bass in a light honey sauce that was very yummy, and some small patties made with chicken and lotus root. I'd never had lotus root before; it doesn't have much flavor but it added a slightly crunchy (vegetable-type crunchy) texture to the patty. And we had the ltitle dumplings filled with soup; that's my favorite thing to get there, as much for the coolness of soup-filled dumplings as for the fact that they taste good. :)

After that, we wanted to go to the Cartoon Art Museum, up on Mission. We'd passed it on the way to the Museum of the African Diaspora back in September, and meant to get back there but never did, so yesterday seemed like a good day for it. So we walked and walked and commented on how it was farther than we'd remembered and walked some more, only to get there and find out it's closed on Mondays. :/ Massive bummer.

One good thing about this ship -- the Sapphire Princess -- is that it's new enough that they have wireless internet in the cabins. It's great not to have to pack everything up and trek out to one of the public areas to find an internet signal. It's not an incredibly fast connection, since satellite connections aren't and the ship's official traffic has priority, but it's still cool to be able to sit here in my room and get online. Not that I've been doing it much, because it's still expensive, and in fact I'm typing this offline; I'll do a copy/paste to post it in a bit.

One bad thing is that my back loathes these mattresses. [sigh] I have a very fussy back, and I have this problem a lot, although that doesn't make it any easier to deal with. I can sleep for a few hours, maybe three or four, then I wake up hurting, and it's turn-doze-turn-doze-turn-doze, never comfortable again but trying to collect enough dozing periods to add up to a non-zombie state when I finally give up and get out of bed. Repeat about half a day later when I run out of gas. I'm probably going to collapse and sleep round the clock when we get home to our own bed.

Jim's going to see a fort in Astoria tomorrow, and I'm staying on the ship again. The next stop after that is Seattle, which I can see whenever I want. :) Jim's planning to go on a tour of the Boeing factory, which is cool for him 'cause he's massively into planes. Then we'll be in Victoria, where we're going to the Butchart Gardens, to look around and then have tea. We did the same exact tour a few years ago when we did our Alaska cruise, although that was in September. The garden (which was gorgeous enough that late in the season) should be pretty spectacular in May, so I'm really looking forward to seeing it. And the tea was very good last time too, once we found the right building. :)

After that is Vancouver on Saturday and we get off the ship; we'll be taking a bus home.

I'm way behind on blogs and such, and probably will be until we get home. The combination of the cost and the slow connection makes it frustrating to do much on my blog list, so I'll be back visiting folks next week. [wave]

Angie

Boosting the Signal

Rachel D., who is disabled after a back injury, had an absolutely hideous experience flying on United recently. This wasn't just one person being careless, or even an encounter with one jerk. This is multiple bad experiences, over and over, on a single flight, involving employees from two airports as well as flight crew; it looks like evidence of a company-wide issue to me. This is inexcusable, especially the attitude of the customer service supervisor toward the end, who said right out that she wouldn't apologize for anything and didn't feel at all sorry for what'd happened to Rachel. Wow, I'll bet she aced Customer Service 101. :P

Angie

Seattle Ho!

I've been mostly away from the internets for a while, so I thought I'd post an update. The spousal unit and I are up in Seattle, house-hunting. He's changing jobs and due to report for work up here in mid-January, so we're trying to figure out where we're going to live. It's been up and down so far.

First, it's been freaking cold up here all week. :/ They've been having record lows for the last few days, imported from the Arctic especially for us, I'm sure. I still need to buy a coat one of these days. Actually, there are times when I'd like to pile about half the hotel room furniture in the middle of the floor and start a bonfire, but that's probably not practical. [cough] But it's heating back up! It's actually supposed to be above freezing here at some point today -- might actually be above freezing now, I'm not sure. But wow, thirty-four degrees -- heat wave! [eyeroll/shiver]

On the house hunting front, we've actually had some good luck today. One older house with a very nice recent remodel is looking promising. It's also on a relatively huge lot, with a bit of a flat side yard which has been done up in some skinny raised beds all ready for annuals in the spring, plus a huge back end on a slope with some trees and berry canes and ivy. I could see putting some more fruit trees up there. And it's on this hill with a wonderful view of the valley and the mountains beyond, and there's a golf course across the road so it won't be built up. Jim and I both like it a lot. There are a few questions to ask, but it's looking like a distinct possibility.

We also saw two very nice newer houses, just a year or two old each, a bit bigger than the older one but the locations don't work in either case. One was up a VERY steep hill, which we'd have to hike up/down to get anywhere unless we took a taxi. (Neither Jim nor I drive, and I have an arthritic knee. I get around fine in general, but slopes are hard.) The other one had just a bit of a hill about a block or so long from the main drag, not too bad at all, but then a hike from there to the actual house which looked like it might be too long, even flat; the place is back in kind of a semi-rural looking neighborhood with a lot of mixed older houses (many not terribly well maintained) on larger lots, with little clusters of newer, smaller places crammed onto smaller spaces. We were looking at a newer house in a row of three with no front yard and a small back yard, but it'd be enough for us. Basically I want enough backyard space for a dog; anything else is gravy. But that long hike, especially for Jim twice a day to get to the bus to and from work, is making it really iffy.

We did like the first one, though, so we're hopeful. We saw a three other houses yesterday, all older, and we were both rather dismayed. :/ Lots of yuck, and at the end of the day it was like, "Okay, which one sucks the least?" which really isn't what you want to be considering when you're in the process of moving a thousand miles and spending 99% of your assets, you know? So today made us feel a lot better, just seeing that yeah, there are some good options out there.

In general, Seattle is a lot hillier than we'd realized. I haven't visited since I was a kid, and Jim almost the same; neither of us remembered the topography. We knew in advance that location -- being reasonably near a grocery store, and close to public transit such that Jim can get to work in less than an hour and without too many transfers -- would be an issue. We didn't realize ahead of time that we'd be crossing houses off the list for reasons of steepness, though. It's one more limitation, but our real estate guy is really good and he's starting to get the full ramifications of the "no car" thing a lot better than many folks who drive. More tomorrow.

Our hotel is downtown, four or five blocks from the Pike Place market. We wandered down there on Sunday, and it's pretty awesome. :) Aside from all the quirky little shops (and we've still seen less than half of it) it's sort of like a farmer's (and fisherman's) market, with great produce, seafood, mushrooms, cheeses, honey and preserves -- all kinds of fresh stuff. I'd love to have something like that within walking distance on a regular basis and be able to head down there just whenever to pick up fresh things for dinner. It's the kind of produce etc. they use on the cooking shows, you know? Also, there's this tiny hole-in-the-wall bakery that makes awesome espresso brownies; we got a couple of those when we were there. Massive yum. :)

There's an art museum about halfway between the market and the hotel, which has a Michaelangelo exhibit we want to get to while we're here. I don't think it's huge, mainly a collection of lesser-known sketches and such, but still that'd be cool, and I'm sure they have other things worth seeing. In general, though, we're not major nightlife people and haven't been going out doing a lot of touristy things. We'll probably be staying somewhere downtown for a couple of months after we move up here in January -- we get that much temporary housing paid for -- so unless we fall in love with a house this week and make an offer and it all goes through immediately, we'll probably be back here for a month or two and we can do more touristy things on weekends then. And hopefully it won't be so freaking cold.

Angie, trying to stay warm

San Francisco

San Francisco was awesome, as always, but it's good to be home. If nothing else, I heart my main computer, and particularly its full-size keyboard. :)

We had a great time, though, and I'm going to babble about some of it.

This first part is for Travis. :D SF is a great place for food, particularly if you're into meat. We were staying at the Hyatt on the Embarcadero, right across from the Ferry Terminal. I've never gone over there before for whatever reason, but a few days before we left to fly up, Jim and I were watching an episode of a Food Network show called The Best Thing I Ever Ate. A bunch of the Food Network people talk about great food they've had in various places, and this was a bacon themed episode, yum! One of the guys talked about a great little butcher shop in the Ferry Terminal called Boccalone; their slogan is "Tasty Salted Pig Parts." Can't beat that, right? They cure their meat right on the premises; there's a glass-doored cabinet off to one side with slabs of bacon and legs of prosciutto and whatever all else hanging there. The "best thing" here was a salumi cone for like $3.50. Salumi seems to be like a superset of salami; it's a variety of cured pork bits, sliced thin and curled up in a paper cone, sort of like a snowcone only with meat instead of ice. We got that a couple of times -- good stuff. It's salty and porky and just fatty enough.

[Note that the Terminal is a great place just to walk around and eat. There were three artisanal butcher shops there that I counted, plus a fish monger, a couple of cheese shops, an artisanal bakery, three or four places selling local produce, a mushroom shop, a place specializing in olive oil, and a gelato shop. These are all local shops; the only chain was a coffee place, Peet's, which is a local chain. There weren't any McDonald's or Starbuck's or Cinnabon or anything like that. Highly recommended for wandering around to get lunch. After having my salty pig parts, I got some bread and some grapes and a pear to sort of balance things out.]

Also off that same show, Jim went to this little shop called Dynamo Donuts one morning while I was asleep and got us bacon donuts. No kidding, these things are great! They cut slab bacon into chunks and cook it, then knead the bacon pieces (I'm not calling them "bacon bits" 'cause that gives absolutely the wrong image) right into the donut dough. They fry the bacon-studded donuts, then glaze the tops with maple icing and sprinkle on more bacon. Mmmm! It kind of reminds me of when you're having breakfast and your bacon gets into the syrup from your pancakes, you know? Good stuff.

We also went to The Stinking Rose. If you like garlic at all, you can't hit SF without going to this place -- their slogan is that they flavor their garlic with food. :) We started out with a bagna calda, which is a dish of roasted garlic cloves in olive oil and butter. They put it over a candle to keep it warm, and serve it with bread. The garlic is soft so you just spread it on, and drizzle some of the oil. Much more dangerous than just basic bread and butter. Then both of us had the prime rib. Wow. Note that they have three sizes: regular, large and the slab. With both got regular cuts and I couldn't finish mine. I was pushing the last few bits over onto Jim's plate because this thing was just huge. I can only speculate what the larger cuts are like, but I suspect you could probably feed like six people if you got the "slab" size. After the regular cuts, couldn't even think about dessert, which for us is very unusual. [duck]

Oh, and the sides rocked too. It came with garlic mashed potatoes and creamed swiss chard. Now I'm not a major swiss chard fan -- it has a bit too strong of a flavor for my taste. I don't hate it, though, so I tasted it, and I'm glad I did. Jim's almost as anti-vegetable as Travis and even he liked it; I don't know what they did to it, but the flavor was mellower and more spinach-like, and of course with the cream and the garlic, it was just perfect. I could've done with about half as much prime rib but three or four times as much chard. :)

We ate at the hotel a few times and in their lobby cafe-bar, and that was good if a bit expensive. You can actually get a rare burger there, which is more and more difficult to do these days, and the garlic-parmesan fries are really good. The clam chowder is excellent, and the quatro leches cake.

Jim had enough upgrade points to get us a small suite at the hotel. It was actually a single large room rather than a bona fide suite, but it was an excellent room, long enough that I could be on the laptop on one end without disturbing a sleeping spousal unit at the other end. It also had an awesome view of the Bay Bridge. The only problem was a certain busker down on the sidewalk. This dude played the saxophone. Every day. For about twelve hours a day, with periodic breaks but essentially from around nine to nine. Every day. Did I mention every day? This dude wasn't a horrible horn player, but he wasn't awesome either and I'm not really all that into unaccompanied sax at the best of times, so a little goes a long way with me. Oh, and he only knew about fifteen songs. O_O And he played every one of them a little slow. I don't know whether he wasn't capable of playing on-tempo or whether he thought he was being artsy or whatever, but... yeah. After a day or two I was ready to offer to drop a twenty out the window if he'd go four or five blocks in, well, any direction actually. [headdesk]

We went to the movies, down at the Sundance Kabuki theater in Japan Town to see Public Enemy and Ice Age 3. The theater is upscale for a movie theater, with assigned seating like at a play, so you can buy your tickets in advance and choose your seats. They sell alcohol up on the balcony so there aren't any kids allowed up there, which is nice if you're not into kids and don't mind sitting in the balcony. Looking at the architecture and decor, I have to wonder whether it used to be an actual kabuki theater. If not, they did a great remodel on it, because it looks like a place where there used to be live performances.

Public Enemy was great; Johnny Depp rocked the part and made it feel natural to be rooting for a bank robber. Christian Bale's a great actor too, but playing Melvin Purvis didn't really give him a whole lot to work with. I didn't get the impression that the role was badly written or anything, but rather that it's a supporting role and they didn't develop it all that much. Ice Age was fun, with Scrat getting all the good bits as usual, but I discovered that my eyes don't agree with 3D. :/ In addition to being nearsighted, I also have a hard time focusing on objects at a distance; I see double without my glasses, which have prisms on the edges to help me see straight. Add the 3D glasses and it was intermittently blurry and just generally unpleasant. Luckily I'm not all that into 3D anyway, so I'll just let Jim go by himself to 3D showings he wants to see in the future.

The trip to the theater was like the second day we were there and I was still feeling lively enough to be kind of stupid. [cough] I suggested we walk back to the hotel, or at least start walking; I figured if my knee or feet or whatever gave out, we could grab a bus at the next stop. So we start walking and there's this humongous hill right off the bat, but once we're past that it's all flat, downhill, flat, downhill, flat, downhill from there on. So we're walking and walking and walking, and by the time I'm starting to get uncomfortable I can see a clocktower in the distance which I recognized as being near the hotel, so I grit my teeth and keep going. It's around dinner time so we decide to go past the hotel to the Ferry building and grab some food, but when we got over there everything but the coffee shop was closed, so back to the hotel. Jim went out and grabbed some sandwiches for dinner, one of the few situations where we'll eat basic chain-shop food on a vacation. Everything from about the hips down was really griping at me, though, and looking at a map we probably walked about three and a half miles. [sigh] Really stupid, but when I get going I get stubborn. You'd think I'd know better by now.

A couple of days later we took the cable car up to Chinatown and walked around there for a while, up one street to the border of North Beach, then a block over and walked back. We didn't buy anything, but just enjoyed looking around, seeing the carvings and jewelry and clothes and things in the shop windows, and the things in the food shops, which all tend to have huge displays right out to the sidewalk. The produce smelled wonderful, green and sweet, interspersed with shops selling dried everything -- spices and mushrooms and fish and squid, earthy and rich and salty and fishy.

Oh, on another day we got dim sum at a little place that's only open a few hours through lunchtime, but they're incredibly busy and have wonderful food. This wasn't in Chinatown, but was a couple of blocks from the hotel. They had some things I've never tasted before, including these little dumplings full of soup. :D It's like a little balloon full of broth, about an inch and a half across. You take it onto your ceramic spoon, then pierce one side with a chopstick to let the soup out. Then there was a little bowl of vinegar and shaved ginger; you put a bit of that on if you want to, then eat the whole thing, one spoonful at a time. Wonderful stuff; I could've made a lunch of just a few more servings of those.

One thing Jim really wanted to do was go on a duck tour. They have these amphibious vehicles called ducks, which were built to land troops during WWII. We took a similar tour up in Toronto a few years ago, but those vehicles were purpose-modified for the tourist trade, and they had to stop and do a bit of conversion between land and water. These are refurbished but otherwise work just like they did during the war, going right from the land into the water and back again without having to stop and fiddle with anything. The soldiers didn't like them because they could only do about five knots in the water and that made them... sitting ducks. :P They're great fun for touring around the city and then into the bay, though.

The tour went past the new ballpark three times, twice on land and once on the water. I don't know, I used to go to Candlestick when I was a kid, so I view the new park with a jaundiced eye. It's nice, and there are statues of famous Giants players around the plaza on the land side. There's plenty of parking (which is kind of amazing for something right there on one end of the city like that, well up the penninsula) and there were a bunch of people having a huge tailgate party, even though the game didn't start for a few more hours, so obviously people like the place and have fun there. I think that to me, though, the "real" home of the San Francisco Giants will always be Candlestick Park, despite the wind and the cold and the slightly grubby structure. :)

And of course, there's no way I can tourist around San Francisco for a week without going to A Different Light. It's a great gay bookstore up in the Castro. A trolley went from right outside our hotel to within a block or two of the store, very convenient. I came out with a bunch of books and could easily have bought a lot more. I restrained myself, however, and what I got will keep me for a few more days:

Alex Beecroft's False Colors
James Buchanan's The Good Thief (hardcopy to replace my e-book -- I prefer paper copies of my favorites if I can get them)
Erastes's Frost Fair
Scott and Scott's E-male
NL Gassert's The Protector

Jim did a lot more running around than I did; my joints just aren't up to hard touristing every day. I had a great time, though, and just being in the city, hearing the cable cars go by and enjoying the wonderfully cool temperatures -- San Francisco is absolutely the place to be in July. :) It's one of the few really urban areas I wouldn't mind living in, if only the cost of housing wasn't so ridiculously high. Maybe some day.

Angie