Non-Traditional Songs Among the Elk People

I have sent Thermionic Night off to beta readers. (HA! Take that, book!) There are still a few points on which I'm uncertain. Sometimes I am too understated and it becomes unstated, which is not the goal. Other times when I try to fix this, I have wielded the clue bat a little hard, and the reader comes out dazed and bruised. But this is what betas are for: to go, "Huh?" or "Ow!" or whatever else where appropriate.

I am wearing "Traditional Songs Among the Elk People," elisem earrings, in honor of this. They are elk earrings. Making them Not The Moose Earrings! This makes me happy. (For those of you who haven't been reading along the whole way, Thermionic Night is the first volume of a trilogy I used to call the Not The Moose Book when I was laboring under the happy delusion that it could be just one single book.)

I have started packing but not finished.

I have the (banana) bread and (gourmet peanut) butter and (Roo's) cuppie in the car already, so I will not forget them to give to porphyrin and matociquala. Fish and Bears, Bears and fish! (Not that porphyrin is a fish. Just that I get fish.)

I am fairly un-hyper, considering what day it is.

Forgot to say

There was a line of Spin that made me think, "Yes, I want to read that book instead of this one." That line was, "It was the Tribulation reconfigured as Elizabethan drama." So, y'know, anyone who wants to handle that....

This is one of the things about Robert Charles Wilson books: he often mentions that people elsewhere are handling things interestingly, but then he doesn't go there and show us. I want the red roses on the rival's corpses and the extremely high-tech dueling pistols. I want characters who are doing a hell of a job at whatever they're doing instead of wandering around behind this guy they knew when they were 10.

I have a Dorothy Dunnett book in my backpack for next, so that's okay then.

Also: the problem with the Indigo Girls' "Jesus Christ Superstar" is not at all having a girl Jesus. The girl Jesus is one of the best things in it (the girl Simon Zealotes is actually my favorite). The problem is that half the cast appears to have shown up to read the thing for the first time when they were supposed to be recording. And smoked a good deal too much weed in the process. So you end up with lines that are supposed to sound irate or dismayed and instead sound confused-stoned. Girl-Jesus is fine, though. Half of the Indigo Girls makes a better Jesus than the other half makes a Mary Magdalen, I think.

This is probably because I am a hippie menace, but I'm okay with that.