Steamy

[Poll #435024]

More on saunas

I don't like to share too much personal sexual information with people. There's a line in Dar Williams's "Iowa" that I just love: "But way back where I come from, we don't like to make a bother; We don't like to make our passions other people's concern. And we walk in the world of safe people, and at night we walk into our houses and burn." It's like that north of the border, too. It's not that we don't have burning passions. It's that we don't really think you should have to hear about them if you don't want to. Which is why an extreeeeemely small number of you have any idea what, specifically, gets me going, and why it's going to stay that way.

But. With that ominous beginning, I would just like to say: damn, people! Saunas! It's not just that sauna time is family time (although it is), it's -- saunas! If ever you are unfortunate enough to be consulted by someone who would like to seduce a Mrissa, please remember these words: NO SAUNAS! (Also, "Go away!" and "Shut up!" and "I don't know!" and "I don't want to talk about that with you!" may be useful words to remember. I know they would be for me if someone was consulting me about seducing the friendslist on average.)

rysmiel suggested that saunas are orthogonal to sex. This is a good data point to have from someone else's viewpoint. I asked those questions so I'd know how other people react, since I already know how I react. It's useful data. There's more than one sauna scene in Thermionic Night (and its sequels), but if you run across one where someone seems to be thinking unreasonably much about very, very unsexy topics in very, very unsexy ways, it is your collective fault. For my viewpoint, saunas are not orthogonal to sex; they are antithetical to sex. Saunas are either not warm enough to be any good or nearly too hot for me to stir myself to move out of. Much less to move around doing something active within the sauna. Saunas require at least 15 minutes of lying still somewhere cool afterwards, lying absolutely still lest the world disappear on you again, if you are a mrissa. (You know what? When I pass out, the world only sometimes goes black. Mostly it goes maroon or sometimes kind of a swirly purple. Also there is the gnat ballet. Anybody else get the gnat ballet? You never read about the world going maroon in books. Like the maroon of that one T-shirt you had, scottjames, you know the one.)

So. Saunas. All righty then. Useful information to have, but I'm really surprised at how overwhelmingly it depended on characters. I guess this is a bit of my own characterization instead of a law of nature.

Dude. Saunas.

(no subject)

Finallyfinallyfinally, I have one of my stories for elisem done. The earrings called "'Oh, yeah?' said the rock sprite." have deserved a story since September, and now they have one, although the story is now called "The Opposite of Pomegranates." It may be a bit...umm...scattery. I guess we'll find out on the readthrough. But it's drafted, and I don't hate it any more, and I'm still glad to be moving back to Thermionic Night in all its wretchedness.

If I'm going to insist that I'm not a short story writer, I should probably stop writing short stories. But somebody gave me my whale who is named "Warded," and so I have to write her my modern Saami whaling story, because why else would I deserve my whale and its corresponding worldlet? And that's on the queue after "Singing Them Back" and "The Calculus Plague"* and the short story component of Someone's birthday present. (Someone's birthday isn't in February or even March, but I'm beginning to think I should put the story on the priority list before then: novels, oof. Also, Someone is not the same as the whale-giving somebody, whose birthday is yet more distant.)***

Elizabeth Hand's Waking the Moon is suffering from two things: one, it's a college fantasy novel (which I love) and is not Tam Lin****; two, it's got two main characters, and one suffers in comparison to the other. I care much more about one than the other. Which makes me nervous, because TN has two main characters, too, and what if people feel like this about my book? Because I feel like this about other people's books often. Eeeeeek.

We can worry about that tomorrow.

*Because I am still a science fiction writer, dammit. Just because fantasy keeps grabbing me, doesn't mean I'm not also a science fiction writer still. Right?**

**I seem to be bigger on footnotes these days. Maybe I should read some Terry Pratchett and get it out of my system. Heh. I borrowed still more books from porphyrin and dd_b this week already, and I have stuff on my own unread stack. Important stuff. So: not very likely.

***I don't actually have anything to say here, but if I did, would it be more appropriate to use *** or to use ** and have the footnote-on-the-footnote indicated by ***? My thought here is that if you read footnotes at all, you're going to read them in order. But there could be a convention I'm forgetting.

****This after Hand's other book suffered in comparison with The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars. Scribblies. What can you do.