writing

Under the weather

Still not feeling so great, and there were times throughout the day when I wondered if I’d made a mistake going in to work at all. I’m still not entirely sure if this is a cold or just a severe allergy attack I’m nursing; none of the symptoms that are supposed to differentiate the two are definitive in my case; and in fact, I think I’d feel better if I was running a fever because at least then I’d know it was probably a cold, and therefore likely to end sooner rather than later. I’m leaning towards cold, if only for that wishful thinking — who knows when allergies would start to lessen, given the changing weather we’ve been having — and because I’m pretty sure I felt this coming on as far back as Monday or Tuesday. Then again, I’ve heard that yesterday, when I definitely knew I had something, was a particularly bad day for allergies… Maybe if I got myself a hookworm infection to get rid of allergies, I’d know for sure…

Yeah, I’m going to lean towards cold for the time being. All I do know is, I have a runny nose, watery eyes, and a persistent cough, and none of it’s very much fun. I’m not horribly sick or anything — I still have an appetite, mostly, and I did go to work — but I’m ready to feel not sick at all, thank you very much.

Is it any wonder that the rest of my day seems so uneventful?

The reading I went to on Tuesday night got a little bad press, causing a very minor kerfuffle online among genre (and specifically Neil Gaiman) fans. My feeling is, the article in question was very poorly reasoned, riddled with cliche and few factual errors, and not really representative of what I saw there at Columbia. Maybe it’s just that I’m naturally attracted to geeky women, but I don’t remember a crowd of only “balding Goths, girls with jutting chins and faux punks.” I do remember wishing, offhandedly, that the evening hadn’t been framed as “Neil Gaiman Returns to Columbia University,” since it was primarily a discussion of the new Stories book and focused equally on the other panel members. I do think some people came thinking it was going to be all Gaiman and nothing but and adopted maybe too worshipful an attitude towards him. But that was a minor not-even-quibble in what was a really excellent night.

This night has been quite as excellent, but at least tomorrow’s Friday.

And then what happened…?

This evening, I took the subway uptown to attend a reading and panel discussion at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College to promote the brand new Neil Gaiman/Al Sarrantonio-edited collection Stories. In attendance were several of the writers from the collection, namely Gaiman himself, Lawrence Block, Walter Mosley, Kat Howard, Joe Hill, Kurt Andersen, and Jeffery Ford. They each talked a bit about their work and genre and storytelling, and they each (with the exception of Mosley) read a section of their individual stories. They were really quite good, and I look forward to reading the book in its entirety. I bought an autographed copy there, from which I read Howard’s story (her first ever sale!) before the panel took the stage and then Andersen’s on the train ride home.

Before the show, I had dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant about a block from the auditorium, which was okay but not exactly my favorite. (I wasn’t in love with the spongy and mildly sour injera, though overall the food was okay.) And then, walking home from the train station, I stumbled into a scene of about half a dozen police cars and an ambulance outside the local plastics manufacturer. I still have no idea what happened — the cops were getting into their cars and the ambulance was pulling away as I approached — but it was an interesting end to an exciting evening.

Thursday various

  • Yesterday, when I was posting links to stories about babies, I neglected to mention Ardi Rizal a two-year-old Sumatran baby who smokes some forty cigarettes a day. I think, mostly, because I wanted to pretend he doesn’t. [via]

  • Meanwhile, this is just heartbreaking [via]:

    A German biologist says that efforts to clean oil-drenched birds in the Gulf of Mexico are in vain. For the birds’ sake, it would be faster and less painful if animal-rescue workers put them under, she says. Studies and other experts back her up.

  • Whereas this is just…fingerprinting to take out a library book? Seriously? The huge privacy issues aside, how does this improve the system for the library or the patron? [via]

  • A couple of periodic tables:
    • The Periodic Table of Superpowers — I shall henceforth refer to Superman always as OAFSISpVxVhSn. [via]

    • And Periodic Table of Women in SF — There is, of course, a meme going around for this, where you bold the names you’ve read and star the ones you’ve never heard of, but if I were to do it, I think it would just reflect how unread I am. If nothing else, this is a good place to start a reading list. [via]

  • But finally, speaking of women I don’t want to spend any more time with, A.O. Scott’s review of Sex and the City 2:

    Yes, it’s supposed to be fun. And over the years audiences have had the kind of fun that comes from easy immersion in someone else’s career, someone else’s sex life, someone else’s clothes. But “Sex and the City 2” is about someone else’s boredom, someone else’s vacation and ultimately someone else’s desire to exploit that vicarious pleasure for profit. Which isn’t much fun at all.

June 8th

All I know is, today was Tuesday.

I didn’t sleep so great last night, waking up sometime after 3 am and finding that I was, amazingly, wide awake and unable to get back to sleep for at least another half an hour. That I didn’t oversleep this morning is, in itself, a minor miracle.

Beyond that, it was a pretty boring day. This evening, after a longer short story stalled out on me, I brushed off a shorter piece that had been rejected back in late March and sent it out again. We’ll see what comes of that.

Onward, now, to Wednesday.

Tuesday various

  • I don’t imagine this is going to end well — FlashForward fans plan to fall over and act unconscious:

    According to Variety, fans of the show will assemble in front of ABC network and affilate offices in New York, L.A., Chicago, Detroit and Atlanta on June 10 and for 2 minutes and 17 seconds are going to pretend to be passed out—just like the 2-minute-17-second blackouts on FlashForward.

  • Am I the only one who thinks “celebrate originality” is maybe a weird tagline to an ad that basically just repurposes the Star Wars cantina scene?

  • I’m not sure I agree with everything Christopher Miller suggests on how to write a rejection slip, but I am amused by his contention that “rejection slips are the most widely and attentively read short literary genre.” [via]

  • Warren Ellis suggests asking these important questions when writing:

    1) What does that character WANT?

    2) What does that character need to do to GET what they want?

    3) What are they prepared to DO to get what they want?

  • And finally, a fascinating profile of Haim Saban, still perhaps best known as the man who (curse him) brought us Mighty Morphin Power Rangers [via]:

    At twenty, while he was serving in the Israeli Defense Forces, Saban made his entry into show business. He told the owner of a swimming pool where a band played that he was a member of a far better band. Saban didn’t really play an instrument, and he didn’t know a band. But he found one, and took the businessman to a club to hear it, claiming that he wasn’t playing because he had hurt his arm. He named a price that was double what he had learned the band was making, and then approached the band members with his offer and his condition: let him join. “They said, ‘For double the money, we’ll figure the whole thing out.’ ” He eventually learned to play the bass guitar a little, but occasionally during the first few months he performed with both his speaker and his microphone turned off.