… and wait.

Insert expected Inigo Montoya quote here.

I learned quite a few things in this first round. Mostly, that I take too long to write copy, and that it is a draining experience. But I also learned that I should have paced myself, maybe only posted 15 things a day, because the more I posted, the more money-anxious and body-anxious I got.

I also learned that I don’t mind selling these costumes half so much as I mind all the costumes I have lost along the way. Like everything that was in the Changeling office at Indiana University – my blue Irish dress from Faire, the green velvet 3/4 length cloak, my Breathless Mahoney dress, the Eisdrache and Sommerdrache cloaks, my competition kilt, Orion’s first dress, and a bunch of other things. That was quite a blow, losing all that stuff.

Then there’s other things I’ve lost over the years. My Sailor Moon costume and Anna’s King and I ballgown…

It made for a maudlin weekend. Not because I don’t have those costumes anymore, but because I don’t know where they went. Or maybe it’s just that this whole cleaning out process is harder than I expected.

In the meantime, I suppose I can post more embarrassing pics of Marie. That always cheers me up.

The pose in this one is particularly fun, because the whole hand thing came about because we couldn’t get the mask to sit right on her face. Not that Marie has a bumpy face. I just need to flatten the mask.

I should just blame Marie’s bumpy face. Except she has swords. Also, she can look scary. Case in point:

This costume might win the prize for most time/money spent as compared to least screen time. I wore this for all of 15 minutes as the emissary from the Empire of the Feathered Serpent at the Concordia I game.

Marie has this gift. We call it ‘stealth hotness’. See, most of the time she’s an attractive woman in jeans and no makeup and her hair in a braid, and I gawk at her ankles (because really, they are soooo pretty). And then she dresses up, and we all go ‘guh’. Also… I love the neckline on this dress.

If you ever wondered what she’d look like with short hair. Also, I usually don’t notice because of her hair, but she has a longer face than I realized.

I think she was getting a little tired at this point, but it’s a good place to leave things off.

Anyways, the main point of all this is, go check out my auctions!!

If you don’t want to buy anything, but still want to help:

Please, leave a contribution in the little box located on the front page of this blog.

(Note to self: never try to get work as a copy editor. You spend way too much time on the blurbs, and they come out sounding corny anyways).

You can visit my ebay store at http://stores.ebay.com/teleidoplexcostumeandvintage. Keep checking, as I’m going to be adding items all day, but here’s some highlights:

I’d like to take this moment to thank the lovely and patient Marie Brennan (author of the Onyx Court books and the forthcoming A Natural History of Dragons) for being my clothes-monkey. She’s got a great figure, of course, but what I really love about her is that she’s a dancer, so she knows how to stand without slouching, how to shape her feet and legs, and how to soften her limbs so they look pretty and elegant and don’t distract from the dress.

That being said, throughout the photoshoot we had an ongoing discussion about the various issues around representations of women on book covers and in other situations where they are ‘posed’, because the ‘most attractive’ and ‘feminine’ poses I asked Marie to take were invariably the ones where she was least steady on her feet and in most danger of falling over.

But enough about gender representations! I’m trying to make money here! The dress above is one of my favorites, a discontinued red vinyl mermaid dress by Lip Service. You can click here to go directly to the auction.

Next up, we have Marie’s feet.

Um… I’m a little obsessed with Marie’s feet (again… she’s a dancer). She has lovely arches and turnout and… anyways. I’m also in love with these shoes, which are custom Gallardo flamenco shoes that I got to wear all off three times before I moved away from my teacher. Pick them up for a steal here. You can also get the awesome red and black swirly skirt here.

On to fancier stuff that I’ve made myself, this next outfit is not historically accurate, but it would be great for anyone going to the Labyrinth of Jareth ball. Or… y’know… you could just wear it while kicking around the house.

If you’re interested (or just want to see more pictures), you can check out the auction here.

Finally, if you really just want a simple, easy, Halloween costume, consider this Sally the Ragdoll dress.

I made this… a long time ago. How long? Let’s put it this way… the reason it’s movie accurate is because I went to see the film four times at the El Capitan theater and took my sketchpad along because I wanted to go as Sally for Halloween… but the movie wouldn’t be out on VHS in time.

Yeah. That long ago.

Check it out here.

And I’m going to stop embarrassing Marie now. Because she collects swords. And she knows Kung Fu. Go check out my auctions!

If you don’t want to buy anything, but still want to help:

Please, leave a contribution in the little box located on the front page of this blog.

I… have a lot of wigs.

I even have wigs I don’t remember ever buying. Okay, I have one wig I don’t remember buying. It’s very nice. I must have bought it for something. I just don’t remember what.

All my other wigs have stories. There’s my Orion wig, a super-long straight red wig that was a chore to untangle, and the various ‘Orion cut her hair and now it’s growing out’ wigs. There’s my short Columbia bob wig that I’ve had for… god… about 20 years now (and it still looks great!).  Eve’s wig, Cora’s wig, Elizabeth Hunt’s ‘I’m a curly-haired vampire sheep!’ wig (that was originally for my Breathless Mahoney costume). There’s the gorgeous blonde finger-wave wig I wore for my Lilith-as-played-by-Marlene-Dietrich. The black and purple wig I wore for Ghislaine du Fleur. And on, and on, and on.

So many wigs, so many characters, so many stories. I’m reminded of a story from The Magic House (a book of short tales from the 1930′s that nobody has ever heard of, I think. My parents used to read it to me when I was little). In it, Betty wakes up one night to a strange sound: Ka-chinkity, ka-chinkity, ka-chinkity. She crawls to the edge of her bed and overhears the buttons in her button collection telling the stories of the clothes they came from. There’s a button from Puss-in-Boots’ frock coat, and a button from Cinderella’s ballgown. There’s a button from the boot of Hansel and Gretel’s witch, and a button from Jack-in-the-Beanstalk’s trousers. Eventually, the buttons spot Betty spying on them, and they all scatter and run every-which-way, until they all fall down with a great big KA-CHINK!

I LOVED this story as a kid, even though the ka-chinkity noises my mom made totally scared me. I love that it was a story about stories. A story of the places where things had been. I look back now, and I can trace my love of folklore to this story. My love of archaeology, too, in that material culture has tales to tell for those who know how to listen.

When I go through my wigs and costumes and other artefacts of days past, they are more than just things. They’re wayfinders for past stories.

Why am I revisiting the tales of days gone by? Because I’m getting ready to sell them all! See, I got accepted to Clarion West 2012. This is a six-week writing workshop held annually in Seattle. The instructors change every year, but regularly include some of the biggest and best writers working in speculative fiction (the line-up this year is particularly awesome, and includes my personal favorite Connie Willis, and also George R.R. Martin, Chuck Palahniuk, Kelly Link, etc.) The alums of the workshop are part of an active and supportive writing community, and they include some of the current rising stars in SF/F.

But Clarion West is expensive, and I’m having to take an unpaid leave of absence from work, which adds to the expense (with the caveat that I love my job and my manager for allowing me to take so much time off work!) So I have decided to sell off a large chunk of my costume and wig collection to help defray costs. Old stories must make way for new stories, and what comes out of my Clarion West experience will (hopefully) be a distillation of all the theater and dance and gaming that has come before, and a launch point for a new set of artefacts.

I’m planning on posting the first round of items this Friday, so keep an eye out if you’re interested in picking something up, or if you just want to help me out.

And let the buttons scatter. Ka-chinkity!

If you don’t want to buy anything, but still want to help:

Please, leave a contribution in the little box located on the front page of this blog.

For example, Maxwell-Stuart discusses that in China during the development and flourescence of the practice of alchemy, there were female alchemists as well as male. He highlights the necessity of active women’s scholarly participation in alchemy (because it was a science of duality, where both yin and yang energies were necessary for success), and he mentions several well-known women alchemists. But in most cases, these alchemists are referred to as ‘the female lab assistants’ rather than as alchemists in their own right. I don’t necessarily blame Maxwell-Stuart, because it seems like he’s presenting them as they were veiwed at the time. But still, it’s wiggly language that reminds me that no matter how great or necessary their contribution, women have always been linguistically placed as secondary to men. And it rankles to read it over and over again.

But the really infuriating bit came in the next chapter, discussing the concurrent flourescence of alchemy in India. Maxwell-Stuart presents the following translated story that appears in many Rasayana texts from the 10th to the 14th centuries “as a reminder that female contribution to the Great Work, no matter how made, is essential to its success.”:

The Brahmin Vyali… was an ardent alchemist who tried to find the elixer of life. He spent his entire fortune in unsuccessful experiments with all sorts of expensive chemicals, and finally became so disgusted that he threw his formula book into the Ganges and left the place of his fruitless work as a beggar. But it happened when he came to another city further down the Ganges, a courtesan, who was taking a bath in the river, picked up the book and brought it to him. This revived his old passion, and he took up his work again, while the courtesan supplied him with the means of livelihood. But his experiments were as unsuccessful as before, until one day the courtesan, while preparing his food, by chance dropped the juice of some spice into the alchemist’s mixture — and lo! — what the learned Brahmin had not been able to achieve in fourteen years of hard work, had been accomplished by the hands of an ignorant, low-caste woman.

I… can’t even… just… fury. Rage. Burning, flaming, at the sides of my face, channelling Madeleine Kahn rage… I mean… he became her pimp! HER PIMP! I just… fuck this. Fuck everything about it. And this, when women get a mention at all, is usually what we get.

Well, okay. Fine. It’s a translation. And Maxwell-Stuart, in his own analysis of these texts, is clearly trying to highlight women’s contributions to the science of alchemy. Go him. Good historian.

But what really rankles is that I can think of lots fiction and fantasy that replicates this same set of perspectives. Hell, watch every biopic you’ve ever seen, and this is the story. THIS IS THE PLOT OF A BEAUTIFUL MIND, and that shit won an Oscar. The thing is… these stories aren’t HISTORY. They’re fictional constructs masquerading as historical (some better than others). And believe it or not, women have perspectives, too. We may not get a lot of historical documents presenting them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. And as fiction writers, we can choose to replicate and reinforce the absences of a problematic historical record, or we can choose to represent other perspectives.

For example, I started thinking about how this story played from the courtesan’s point of view… and it begins to soothe my rage.

Here’s my take on her tale:

The Shudra courtesan Jaya had done the best she could with the lot she’d been born to, selling the one thing of herself that the world seemed to value, and becoming a student of Tantra to turn necessity into an art of spiritual improvement. One day, as she was bathing in the Ganges and meditating on her art, she found a book of Rasayana formulae, with a little frontispiece that read: “This book belongs to: Brahmin Vyali”. Out of the goodness of her heart and respect for a fellow spiritual scholar, she sought out the Brahmin Vyali, who had lost his fortune and his spiritual way in his fruitless pursuit of alchemy. Through Tantra, she reawakened him to his desire to seek enlightenment, but as time passed, he became more and more dependent on her support, both economic and spiritual, as he continued banging his head against something he clearly sucked at. Finally, Jaya had enough of taking care of him and supporting him while he lounged about and promised “This time, baby. I’ll transmute this mercury into gold for sure.” She resorted to poisoning him because the deadbeat just couldn’t catch a clue. Unfortunately for Jaya, the poison she sprinkled in that asshole’s food turned out to be the final ingredient that led to his success, making her just a footnote in his glorious history.

It’s not a happier tale, but at least she has some goddamn agency.

I don’t usually blog because I have little to say that I think is worth sitting down to actually say. There are subject-matter experts out there who explore their areas much better than I ever could, and a whole lot of people who know just enough to think they are subject-matter experts who yammer on in ways that are not nearly as useful or meaningful as they would like to believe.

Knowing that I have a tendency to be a know-it-all, I try to avoid being in the latter group. The signal-to-noise ratio on the internet is high (or would that be low? Low signal; high noise.) I’m not really interesting in making it worse, so I tend to maintain radio-silence unless I have something that I feel is worth saying.

Otherwise, I write stories. Given a choice between writing stories or yammering in a blog post, I’ll pick writing the story. Stories are things that I can say, and that only I can say in the way that I would say it. That seems like a much better use of my time.

Last week, I finished a massive revision on one story: my first novel manuscript, The Adventures of Mr. Mystic and the Dragons of Heaven. I submitted it to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, and I sent it out to a bunch of friends and peers for beta-reading. Once I get comments back from people, I’ll give it a revision polish and send it out to the agent who said she’d take a look at a revised version. I’ll also revise my querying materials (especially the synopsis. Ugh.) and start querying agents and submitting to the slush piles.

The end of Dragons frees me up to move on to my next project: Chiaroscuro/The City of Light and Shadow. This is my Renaissance city fantasy that doesn’t really have a genre (I tend to call it Alchemy Realism, but only because that’s an anagram of my name.) I finished Part I (at 50k words) last November and set it aside to concentrate on the Dragons revision. This weekend, I re-read Part I of Chiaroscuro and compiled a list of character names and places (I already have more than 50 named characters, though most of them are only named in passing. Sigh). I made three ‘stacks’ of garbage-in media materials: research books, inspiration books, and visual media (movies and documentaries to get me in the mood). I listed everything I could think of that I want to do in Part II, made a story path and character paths/arcs for all the main PoV characters, and just generally got my plotting together.

Yesterday, I sat down to write. And I realized I’d been in Missy’s voice/head for so long that I’ve completely lost the voice for Chiaroscuro. This inspired a slight panic attack, because these days I sometimes feel like I’ve gotten worse as a writer. The more I learn about and practice writing techniques, the more I seem to lose the charm of my voice. The crap I wrote yesterday reads so mechanically, with none of the winsome appeal of the early parts of the book.

But I wrote, because if revising Dragons has made me realize one thing, it’s that I _can_ toss out and rewrite half a book. After that, 1k words doesn’t seem like much.

I am fretting over this writing voice thing, though. Especially since the bulk of my writing these days is RP-play where I don’t really push myself on plotting/structure/description/voice. But this morning I read an Ira Glass quote on Facebook that helped me recontextualize my anxiety:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” — Ira Glass

Back when I used to dance, I sometimes felt like delving into the nitty-gritty details of a dance – foot position, arm angles, the tiny things nobody but an expert (or a competition judge) would notice, actually made me a worse dancer. Like deconstructing the dance to perfect it ended up just leaving a shambles behind. But then I’d work on those details and get them right as the rest of the dance fell apart around me, walk away from the dance so I could internalize them, and come back later to a better over-all dance. Same thing with singing. And academics. Intense detail practice made me worse… until I got better. I gotta remember that this applies to writing, too.

I also need to retool my garbage-in process, which means reading things that inspire me at the language level. I’m going to hunt down some audiobooks of Dumas so I can listen to them during work, and I’ve added Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ to my list. Any suggestions for other media that invokes a lyrical/academic voice? Something… rich as honey drizzled over clockwork. And kinda goopy like that, too. Think… DaVinci Fairytale.

But apparently Mayor Bloomberg, with a team of legal scholars and advisors working for him, is less familiar with the First Amendment than I am.

In his prepared public statement regarding the recent eviction of Occupy Wall Street protesters from Liberty Plaza/Zuccotti Park, Bloomberg made the following statement:

“The First Amendment gives every New Yorker the right to speak out, but it does not give anyone the right to sleep in a park or otherwise take it over to the exclusion of others, nor does it permit anyone in our society to live outside the law. There is no ambiguity in the law here. The First Amendment protects speech. It does not protect the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over a public space.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bakdkvkBtw8 (starts at 4:22)

Now, here’s where the “I’m not a legal scholar, but…” part comes in. Because I’m pretty sure if Mayor Bloomberg had read a little further past the word ‘speech’, he would have run into this other word: Assembly.

Here’s what the First Amendment says:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

My high school cheat sheet just said: Freedom of Religion, Speech, Press, Assembly, and Petition. Not bad, as cheat sheets go.

Now, I’m being disingenuous here. I’m certain Mayor Bloomberg does know about the Assembly bit, just as I’m sure he knows that these protections have been judicially extended to the state and city level (and don’t just apply to Congressional laws anymore). This means he purposely ignored the inclusion of Assembly in order to make a news-byte bon mot: the line about the tents. For me, that was Bloomberg’s ‘If they cannot eat bread, let them eat cake’ moment, where his power and privilege and position to disregard the Constitution and the people’s rights showed through like a dirty pair of knickers. (and yes, I realize Marie Antoinette’s quote is apocryphal. Mayor Bloomberg’s is not. Check it! There’s video.)

Here’s the thing. Tents and sleeping bags and merely inhabiting a public space and being cooperative about health and safety risks… none of these strike me as violent things, which means to me that the Occupiers are enacting their right to peaceably assemble. The First Amendment doesn’t say how long they’re allowed to assemble, or that they aren’t allowed to bring along items for their own comfort while they do so. In fact, it could be argued (and should be argued) that any tactics or laws designed to discourage assembly are unconstitutional, because they are state-sponsored ways of trying to legally infringe on that right.

This puts the eviction and other police actions in a new light. The bulk of violence that has occurred at the Occupy sites has been state-sponsored violence and intimidation tactics used against the Occupiers. Every raid, every removal, even the general use of police as intimidation, the arrests, the kettling, the whole debacle at the bridge back at the beginning of this, they all seem to be to be violations of that bit in the First Amendment that doesn’t get waved around as often as Speech, Press, and Religion.

The right of Assembly (and its little brother, Petition). We has it.

Okay, bring on the legal scholars and judicial cases. Tell me how I’m wrong, or how there is more nuance to this issue than that (I’m certain there is.) Use small words so that I’ll be sure to understand. Westley-style.

[Edit: Just letting people know that I've turned on comment moderation, not because I actually want to monitor people's comments, but because you would not believe the amount of spam I'm getting on WordPress. LiveJournal was never this bad! If anyone has advice on how to block it better, please let me know]

I work for the digital content side of a textbook publisher. This morning while I chatted with our Environmental Science content developer (Eliza) and one of my fellow content coordinators (Claire), Eliza mentioned she needed to build an invasive species question for the textbook she’s working on. I suggested doing one on mermaids and selkies, under the premise that due to global climate change, the gulf stream that runs up past Ireland has warmed the waters enough to allow mermaids to move into ecozones traditionally populated by selkies.

We proceeded to go through a list to see if mermaids have the characteristics to make them a successful invasive species in this environment:

Is there a lack of checks to mermaid population in the new environment (predators, diseases, etc.)?

• Mermaids: Yes. Mermaids are top tier predators themselves. The main check to their population is depleted food sources (i.e., lack of sailors willing to jump overboard when hearing their alluring songs). As there are lots of unsuspecting sailors off the west coast of Ireland, and also many tourists who won’t really be missed, this is prime territory for mermaid expansion.

• Selkies: No. Because selkies are shore breeders, humans are their main threat alongside loss of habitat. And dogs. Apparently, dogs are always getting up in selkie business. Selkies are also vulnerable to sharks, killer whales, and polar bears. Not that there are any polar bears in Ireland. Just saying. On the whole, mermaids win this one.

Do they produce offspring at a greater or more successful rate than native species?

• Mermaids: Unknown. Mermaids appear to be solitary or at best small-group predators, and little is known about their procreative habits. They seem to be a mono-gendered species, although the appearance of femininity is likely a hunting adaptation, with males and females being indistinguishable.  Claire pointed out that in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the mermaids hunted in large packs, displayed additional dentition, and ‘angry face lines’. We agreed this needed further research to see if it was a regional adaptation or a widespread one.

• Selkies, on the other hand, appear to depend on the human population for reproduction and the raising of offspring (see above re: shore breeders). Anecdotally, male selkies will mate with human women, who raise the selkie offspring through childhood. The grown children will then return to the sea at around age 7 after humans have expended time and resources to raise them during their most vulnerable years, protecting them from dogs and polar bears. Tales of female selkies mating with human men are less common, and often involve some sort of entrapment of the female selkie rather than choice. The moment she gets her seal-skin back, she’s out of there. It’s a crapshoot whether she takes the kids.

This devolved into a long discussion of the genetics of selkies, and questions of how they could mate with humans and not with each other. I pointed out that while there are no documented cases of selkies mating with each other, it doesn’t mean they can’t. They are a very private species, and little is known about them. We agreed that more research was needed to make a credible model of selkie reproduction and genetics.

At that point, we broke into individual research pods, but agreed to reconvene later to further discuss this issue and see if it was a suitable case to build a problem set around.

I love my job. Did I say that already?

What I’ve discovered is that there are so many cool people in the world. Like genre-breaking slipstream writers who tell medusa-as-metaphor stories, and anthro-geek essayists who are working on retellings of obscure Grimm tales — she had me at Jorinda and Joringel! (Story Boyle, you have got to meet my friend S.L. Knapp. She’s a Miami-based fantasist with a background in anthropology. You two have so much in common). Or awesome people who work for Powell’s and are Hermes-affiliated (and quote Camus).

Building a good writing community isn’t like building a dance community or a theater community or a gaming community. There isn’t the same geographical commons for everyone to use as a gathering place to sort out their sub-tribes. I meet so many writers who are good, but who don’t write the kind of stuff that really speaks to me.

I think our stories and writings and essays _are_ our Commons. They are how we find each other and know each other and speak to each other. Henry Glassie once gave a class lecture on art where he defined it as an act of communication. It doesn’t necessarily exist in the creation process or in the reception or in the work itself, but rather in the moment of communion when something that the artist puts out clicks with something the receiver sees/hears/feels. This definition resonates with me because it means that many acts and products that are marginalized by other definitions can be included and considered through the lens of this one. It’s a very… folkloric definition.

Sensation, by Nick Mamatas. This sounds like a fun, weird one, about hyperintelligent spiders who control human development like the Illuminati to save themselves (and us) from their enemies, the wasps. It’s not actually schwag, but he did a reading of this at LitQuake a few weeks ago, and it was the only reading at the Sci-Fi panel that interested me.

The Gray Wolf Throne, by Cinda Williams Chima. This is the third book in an epic fantasy series, but it looks like it might have some interesting romantic elements, so I’m going to give it a shot.

Rock Paper Tiger, by Lisa Brackman. A mystery about an Iraq war vet and MMO hackers in Beijing. Also not technically schwag; I picked this up at the Mysterious Galaxy event because… dude… China and MMO hackers.

Mayan December, by Brenda Cooper. Time travel, a Mayan archaeoastronomer, and a 2012 story that doesn’t look stupid. Also, I’m always up for supporting non-eurocentric fantasy.

Real Unreal: Best American Fantasy, vol. 3. by Kevin Brockmeier. Just a bunch of stories by a bunch of awesome writers.

Amercian Gods, Author’s Preferred Text, by Neil Gaiman. Already owned and read, but I’m sort of curious about the ‘preferred text’ aspect.

The God Stalker Chronicles, by P.C. Hodgell. This is an epic fantasy duology in one book. The fantasy names are weird enough to have turned me off, and the flap copy is uninteresting, but it’s got good blurbs from Locus, Publisher’s Weekly, etc, so I’m not going to hold bad marketing and cover design against her.

The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle. Classic. And he signed it, while I fan-gushed all over him. I don’t usually care about author signatures, but… Peter S. Beagle. Dude.

A Fine & Private Place, by Peter S. Beagle. Never read this one, but Connie Willis said it was her favorite, and you can’t beat a rec like that. It looks like it’s about ghosts and death and love and choices.

Ash, by Malinda Lo. This sounds like so many kinds of awesome. It’s a YA queer Cinderella retelling where the heroine chooses the huntress rather than the prince. Boo-yah, grandma.

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, by Catherynne M. Valente. The title… kind of says it all? This wasn’t schwag, but it’s something I’ve been meaning to pick up for a while. Also, Cat sold me her ticket to WFC when she decided not to go, so it seemed fitting to pick this up.

Palimpsest, by Catherynne M. Valente. Also not really schwag, but Allison Moon got this for me last week as a thank-you for working on her book, so it goes into the schwag-affiliated pile.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N.K. Jemisin. This _is_ schwag. It was also one of the nominees for the World Fantasy Award this year. Didn’t win, but I’m totally excited about reading it. It’s a city fantasy. I love those things.

The Cloud Roads, by Martha Wells. This is a secondary world fantasy from Nightshade books, and supposedly the world-building is pretty good.

The Devil’s Diadem, by Sara Douglass. I’ve never read Sara Douglass, not for any particular reason, just never got around to it. This one sounds like it’s 12th century war in heaven, so that’s promising.

Unplugged: The Web’s Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy, 2008, edited by Rich Horton. Another edited volume of awesome authors.

Eon, by Alison Goodman. Chinese-based fantasy about a girl masquerading as a boy to learn to kick ass. What is not to love?

Guardian of the Dead, by Karen Healey. Maori faeries and YA. Double wow.

The Hammer, by K.J. Parker. Another fantasy, possibly greek?, that turned me off with the names, but it had a great opening, so I kept it.

The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, by Tim Pratt. A pulp western fantasy, so of course I’m interested. I actually picked this one up (not schwag) because Tim Pratt sat down and we chatted, and I was like, ‘he seems cool’. And then I went to the dealer room and saw he wrote pulp fantasy with a female MC, and I was all ‘SOLD’!

Den of Thieves, by David Chandler. Looks like a pretty typical thieves-guild gaming fantasy, but that’s cool. They can’t all be high-concept.

A Darkness Forged in Fire, by Chris Evans. Epic fantasy in the WoW vein, seems like, but it has ‘Iron Elves’. See above about they can’t all be high-concept.

Symir: The Drowning City, by Amanda Downum. This was on my wishlist because of great reviews. It’s a vaguely Turkish/Near Eastern city fantasy with assassins and necromancy and thieves. Sometimes, they’re better when they’re not high concept.

Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st Century Writer, by Jeff Vandermeer. Not schwag, but something I thought could be helpful to navigate the business elements of writing that still baffle me.

See, I want to write blog posts, but I can’t imagine anyone being interested in the minutiae of my daily life… including me. Most blogs on writing seem a little omphaloskeptic to me, and besides, I’d rather spend my writing energy actually writing rather than writing about writing. Lastly, a re-read of LeGuin’s “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” has reminded me that if I sink too deeply into political or academic ranting, it will occupy my entire being for days with impotent rage. So… that nixes the three things I’m most qualified to write about.

World Fantasy has inspired me, though. I got SO MUCH SCHWAG! I will be listing said schwag tomorrow, and then I figure I can go through and review the schwag, which will give me a reason to read all the schwag, not just the ones that directly appeal to my interests. Contrary to what a co-worker accused me of – (It’s always gender stuff with you, Alyc) – I will try to focus on other elements than gender representation. We’ll see how long that resolution lasts.

In the meantime, I have a story to approve for Daily Science Fiction, a proposal to put together for ICFA, a special Halloween Milk & Cookies tonight, a manuscript and five short stories to revise and send out, and a list of schwag to compile.

Pretty sure I’m missing something. Guess it’ll have to wait.