Summer colds

Summer colds seem entirely unfair. In the winter you drink hot beverages, lemon chamomile tea for me, or cider or cocoa or other herbal teas, or you switch them around and get a different one each time. In the winter you curl up under the afghan. In the winter you drink hot soup.

In the summer none of that seems right. Even if you're cold enough for the afghan, who wants to wrap in an afghan in July? Even if the tea feels good on your throat, July is lemonade time. The body gets confused.

Not that I have a cold, mind you. markgritter has a cold. I merely have almost no energy, swollen lymph nodes, and a persistent need to clear my throat. This last is almost certainly to make sure that my empty office (kitchen, etc.) is paying full attention to the things I'm not saying and has nothing to do with being sickish at all. I would not dream of having a cold. Nuh-uh.

Excuses, Excuses

I got an e-mail note this afternoon from the historian who wrote one of the books I read earlier this month. She was googling on her book and found my mention of it on my journal, and she wrote to express her surprise and very politely inquire, "What does a young writer of sci fi find in a work of history?"

And I thought, heh, ohhhhh, lady, do you not know anything about this job.

I mean, seriously: for what other profession in the world could reading anything, anything at all, be considered professional development? And yet I am hard pressed to come up with a book that absolutely positively could not relate to my work either now or someday in the future. Whenever I need an excuse, I have one readily available at all times now.

And an Inquisition microhistory is not at all the most obscure volume of history ever read by a young SF writer. Not even by this young SF writer. Possibly not even this month. Why? Because we're geeks, the lot of us, geeks and intellectual magpies.

And it's so much fun.