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Five Januaryish things
Jan. 8th, 2011 02:19 pm1. I have seen the Table of Contents announced, so I feel comfortable that I'm not stepping on anything if I say that my good short story news squeaking at the very end of last year was selling "Tusk and Skin" to Ekaterina Sedia for her Bewere the Night anthology. The spelling on that is correct: it's a shapeshifter-themed anthology. Very very pleased.
2. Many of you have probably seen this from other friends of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
elisem, but just in case: signs of a stroke. Learn them, know them, cherish them in your heart. If tnh hadn't known them and acted quickly, we don't like to think what. Instead we get our elisem some more. So: make sure you know how this stuff goes, just in case.
3. I have been in tidying mode around the kitchen. This does not mean putting things away in the cupboard or Narnia or the recycling bin as one might expect. It means that when in doubt as to what to eat--and I am often in doubt as to what to eat these days--I am Using Things Up. I am a holy terror at Using Things Up, which is good, because the tea/tisane section of Narnia is rather overflowing after Christmas. So I got major points yesterday for using up an entire kind of tisane, even though it's a good kind and I should probably get more next time I go to Tea Source. But! The Tea Source run is not imminent, and in the meantime I have so-virtuously cleared out space.
Why, this makes me want to have a cup of tisane right now. Just to continue with the virtue of tidiness.
(Yes, my shorthand for our pantry is Narnia. If you'd seen how it opens up in layers, you might well believe there was a magical land behind the cereal also.)
4.timprov was not up for an hour and a half of subtitled French, so we didn't watch the movie we've got on our pile for "family movie night" next time (Micmacs, for the curious, but I can't tell you anything about it). Instead markgritter and I watched the beginning of the butchery they made of The Dark Is Rising to see if it was as bad as we feared. Friends, it was worse. They were clearly trying to make it more "action-y" and "relatable," but half the changes were counterproductive for the other half's goals, and it just ended up a wandery mess with no bearing on the original. It was the sort of thing that made me wonder why they even bothered using the name and paying Susan Cooper, because there was that little relationship between the book and the movie--they could have just made an action fantasy about an American (!!??!!) boy in England and not tried to pretend it was The Dark Is Rising.
There was an ad for the movie of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader before it. "If you like butchering children's fantasy classics, you might try...."
5. Relevant to #1: I am terrible at writing author bios. Terrible, terrible, terrible. I have my standard one, but I get tired of it, and then the process invokes my inner sullen teenager: "I dunno. Nothin'." Which is ungracious and unpleasant. I also tend to roll my eyes at the people who give into their impulses and have bios like, "Ever since she was horribly scarred, Marissa Lingen has been living under the Paris Opera House and coaching promising young singers in secret, hoping that one of them might love her." Nor, in fact, was I born in the wagon of a travelin' show. And, "Marissa Lingen wishes she was writing any other novel than the one she's writing," probably won't be true by the time the book comes out. It is a conundrum.
2. Many of you have probably seen this from other friends of
elisem, but just in case: signs of a stroke. Learn them, know them, cherish them in your heart. If tnh hadn't known them and acted quickly, we don't like to think what. Instead we get our elisem some more. So: make sure you know how this stuff goes, just in case.3. I have been in tidying mode around the kitchen. This does not mean putting things away in the cupboard or Narnia or the recycling bin as one might expect. It means that when in doubt as to what to eat--and I am often in doubt as to what to eat these days--I am Using Things Up. I am a holy terror at Using Things Up, which is good, because the tea/tisane section of Narnia is rather overflowing after Christmas. So I got major points yesterday for using up an entire kind of tisane, even though it's a good kind and I should probably get more next time I go to Tea Source. But! The Tea Source run is not imminent, and in the meantime I have so-virtuously cleared out space.
Why, this makes me want to have a cup of tisane right now. Just to continue with the virtue of tidiness.
(Yes, my shorthand for our pantry is Narnia. If you'd seen how it opens up in layers, you might well believe there was a magical land behind the cereal also.)
4.
timprov was not up for an hour and a half of subtitled French, so we didn't watch the movie we've got on our pile for "family movie night" next time (Micmacs, for the curious, but I can't tell you anything about it). Instead markgritter and I watched the beginning of the butchery they made of The Dark Is Rising to see if it was as bad as we feared. Friends, it was worse. They were clearly trying to make it more "action-y" and "relatable," but half the changes were counterproductive for the other half's goals, and it just ended up a wandery mess with no bearing on the original. It was the sort of thing that made me wonder why they even bothered using the name and paying Susan Cooper, because there was that little relationship between the book and the movie--they could have just made an action fantasy about an American (!!??!!) boy in England and not tried to pretend it was The Dark Is Rising.There was an ad for the movie of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader before it. "If you like butchering children's fantasy classics, you might try...."
5. Relevant to #1: I am terrible at writing author bios. Terrible, terrible, terrible. I have my standard one, but I get tired of it, and then the process invokes my inner sullen teenager: "I dunno. Nothin'." Which is ungracious and unpleasant. I also tend to roll my eyes at the people who give into their impulses and have bios like, "Ever since she was horribly scarred, Marissa Lingen has been living under the Paris Opera House and coaching promising young singers in secret, hoping that one of them might love her." Nor, in fact, was I born in the wagon of a travelin' show. And, "Marissa Lingen wishes she was writing any other novel than the one she's writing," probably won't be true by the time the book comes out. It is a conundrum.
