I have a problem. I’m fully willing to admit I have a problem. I will not even pretend that I can stop anytime I want. I’m addicted to buying books.
As a result of my addiction, my bookshelves tend to fill up pretty quickly, so I spent the past weekend assembling four new bookshelves. For comparison purposes, here are the old shelves, full to over-flowing.
…and get your very own genuine, bonafide, electrified velocipede! Electric Velocipede #19 is now available for sale. Thanks to Jeff for pointing this out to me!
If you still need convincing (say, for some reason, my string of random adjectives did not seal the deal), you can read reviews of the issue here and here.
Last night, happily ensconced against the last of the snowstorm, I finished reading Caitlin R. Kiernan’s The Red Tree. It’s been a long time since I’ve been so affected by a horror story. I started off being lukewarm on the book; by the end, I couldn’t put it down.
Well, Pennsylvania has effectively proved me. On top of Saturday’s storm, which lasted roughly twenty hours, today brings us twenty-one hours and counting. The wet snow that started around 7pm yesterday has been replaced by dry, light snow. There’s wind, and I saw a few downed tree branches this time around, but thus far we don’t appear to be in danger of losing power.
My place of work pretty much gave up any pretense and told us all yesterday, around 2pm, to take the day off today. The same appears to be true of most of my neighbors as many of them were decidedly not at work, but out shoveling their driveways earlier. Knowing in advance that I didn’t have to go anywhere was definitely a bonus this time around.
I have to hand it to Pennsylvania; the state has managed to produce two significant snowstorms this year, and a smattering of smaller snowfalls in-between. It’s almost like being back in Canada.
All week leading up to the storm, I was skeptical, but it ended up snowing for almost 20 hours straight. The result: everything is silent and beautiful, cars are buried, my event at work was canceled, and I haven’t changed out of my pajamas all day. I have no regrets.
Earlier, I used a rather unconventional method to measure the total snowfall - a very short dog.
The official accumulation stands somewhere between mid-ear and way over his head.
The vow of secrecy surrounding Nemonymous Nine: Cern Zoo has officially been lifted. The full TOC will be revealed in March, but in the meantime you can check out the authors who have revealed their stories here on the official Cern Zoo page. And in the spirit of telling all, let it henceforth be known that my contribution to the anthology was Mellie’s Zoo. There. Don’t say I never tell you anything.
Speaking of Cern Zoo, congratulations to Steve Duffy, whose story from the anthology The Lion’s Den, was selected for The Year’s Best Horror #2.
So far, 2010 is starting out right. I just learned that my short story The Poet’s Child will be included in the fifth Jabberwocky anthology, due out from Prime Books in July 2010. Suh-weet!
And, yes, I realize that the mome raths actually outgrabe, but they probably also practice feng shui, too. You can’t prove that they don’t!
Rich Horton posted his year-end summary of Electric Velocipede yesterday, and he picked A Mouse Ran Up the Clock as one of his favorites of 2009. Woohoo!
Yesterday, Michael Swanwick pointed readers of his blog to a collection of excerpts from his dream diary, which was published in the Readercon 13 program under the awesome title of Lord Vacant on the Boulevard of Naked Angels. As it turns out, the man is just as brilliant in his sleep as he is awake. He dreams in fascinating fragments of prose, filled with beautiful scraps and haunting imagery. I’m jealous. My dreams are nowhere near that coherent, or interesting. At the same time, I’m grateful that the world contains sleeping minds capable of dreaming like that. I’m also grateful that, thanks to Michael Swanwick, the world now contains this phrase: “Weasels wease. That’s all there is to it.” Truer words were never spoken.
I’m a writing process geek. I’m fascinated by the chance to peek behind the scenes and see how different authors do what they do. I can say - completely without irony - that I find discussions of fountain pens and moleskin notebooks absorbing. Yes, I’m weird. Given that, I’m naturally loving these posts by Jeff VanderMeer about his choices while writing Finch, one of my favorite reads of 2009. If you happen to share my highly specific brand of geekitude, you should definitely check it out.
Even though I love reading about other people’s processes, I rarely post about my own. Partly because it’s not interesting to me when I do it; partly because I don’t really have a process other than: type words onto a laptop and poke them until I don’t hate them anymore. In terms of my writing “career” I did everything more or less backwards. I jumped into the deep part of the lake, then five years later, I decided it might be a good idea to learn how to swim. So I don’t have a process right now, but I’m working on getting one. I’m learning how to learn.