Girl Meets Books.

This is an old old story. Boy meets girl in Science Fiction lit class. Boy mentions his love of Iain M. Banks; girl catches a ride with a friend to a different city to buy one and talk about it. Boy shoves stack of additional Banks novels at girl with shy hope. They start dating.

In the first few months they’re dating, they trade a great many books, like boys and girls and non-binary-gendered young persons do when they are nerds in love. What he lends her, in great bulk, is: Charles Sheffield, Iain M. Banks, Frederik Pohl, C.J. Cherryh. (Her list is a bit younger.) And since you know this story in one form or another, you won’t be surprised that it was Mark, or in other words, reader, I married him. I just…keep thinking about that list. Gee, for some reason.

I’m going to go reread Gateway now, but if any of you know C.J. Cherryh personally, can you, like, send her a fruit basket and invite her on a nice walk or something? Remind her to stretch while she’s writing and look both ways when she crosses streets. It would be creepy coming from me, but I’d just like to take a precaution. I’m a champion worrier, and I’m starting to feel a bit worried.

Originally published at Novel Gazing Redux

Where I’ll be (rest of 2013)

Mostly I will be at home, but not everyone has heard the rest of my plans, and it might be relevant to some of you, so:

I am going to Farthing Party at the end of this month in Montreal. I will show up the Wednesday before and depart the Wednesday after the Farthing Party weekend itself. J’aime Montreal. So many lovely places to return to, so many lovely places I haven’t been yet. And Farthing Party itself! Which is full of excellent monkeys but not in such bulk as to be unmanageable! Hurrah. Am excited. I already have one dinner plan. Poke me if you’re going to be there too and want something else definitive in that time.

I am also going to a family wedding in the Hudson River Valley in mid-October. I will not be going through New York City this time, just in and out of a little local airport a bit further north than NYC. Last time we were going to the Hudson River Valley, we wanted to stop off and visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Which I loved, and which I bet I still love. But NYC traffic I do not love, and this trip is all about the family wedding, and since it’s a fairly short-notice wedding, we are not planning any kind of tours or visiting of NYC friends around it. Sorry to be so close and yet so far for some of you.

I will not be going to the Minn-StF fallcon this year, and this is no fault whatsoever of the concom. Fallcon is fun. You should go if you like fun. But following one round of very active con-like participation at Farthing Party and one set of family stuff, this year’s fallcon comes just too soon for me to plan to spend the energy. There is really nothing additionally fun the concom could have done to make this interesting to me; I was already interested. I just have not been overflowing with energy of late, and that’s already kind of a lot.

I will also not be going to World Fantasy Con or Sirens, although neither is off the table for future years when I have different time/energy commitments.

I have no idea where we will be for Boxing Day and beyond, but the odds are fairly good it will be somewhere in the upper Midwest that is not here. I am not in sole charge of that decision, and it’s unlikely to result in visits for any friends, given the other parameters and priorities–that’s Christmas with Mark’s side of the family, which means maximizing niece-time.

And now you know.

Originally published at Novel Gazing Redux