Weblog
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Ooooooo-kayyyyy....
Book jacket double mitten.
And a great deal of other strange stuff.Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/28/2006 10:59:00 AM | link to this post
Gonna feed Peter some cocoa right this minute...
Boy, did G. K. Chesterton ever lose this round.Dutch research suggests that eating or drinking cocoa appears to lower blood pressure and even reduce the death risks for older men.
...The researchers found that over a 15-year period, men who ate cocoa -- including chocolate -- regularly had significantly lower blood pressure compared with those who didn't.
The sweet treat might even help ward off death. The researchers reported that 314 men died over the course of the study, with 152 of those deaths blamed on heart disease. Men who consumed the highest amount of cocoa were half as likely to die from cardiovascular disease, compared to men who ate little or no cocoa, the team found. In addition, men who ate the most cocoa were less likely to die from any causes.
...[the researcher] stressed that cocoa's heart-healthy benefits only come from bittersweet dark chocolate and in concentrated cocoa beverages, which contain an effective dose of antioxidants, along with magnesium, arginine and fiber.
"This is not the case for milk chocolate, which contains potentially harmful saturated fats, or candy bars that dilute cocoa with a long list of other ingredients," he said.
Peter will be disappointed that Mars bars definitely fall into this category.
...Anyway, forget Chesterton's cranky poem: possibly this news will stir someone into writing another celebration of cocoa like the one that Stanley Sharpless came up with half a century ago and more. He saw an article on cocoa's effects as a mild aphrodisiac, and produced the following:Half past nine -- high time for supper;
'Cocoa, love?' 'Of course, my dear.'
Helen thinks it quite delicious,
John prefers it now to beer.
Knocking back the sepia potion,
Hubby winks, says, 'Who's for bed?'
'Shan't be long,' says Helen softly,
Cheeks a faintly flushing red.
For they've stumbled on the secret
Of a love that never wanes,
Rapt beneath the tumbled bedclothes,
Cocoa coursing through their veins.Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/28/2006 09:55:00 AM | link to this post
Monday, February 27, 2006
The Meow heard 'round the world
My gosh, has this whole business been getting a lot of attention. Well, I should be grateful.
First of all, a heads-up for those of you who've been following the Big Meow saga so far: Now that I've decided to go ahead, a weblog isn't going to be an appropriate home for the project, as there are a lot of other things that need to be attached to the endeavor. So the-big-meow.com is now online -- in a very bare form, at the moment, since almost nothing has as yet been added: not even the 404 page is working correctly right now, so be warned. When the website is properly established, in a week or so, the Big Meow weblog at felinewizards3.blogspot.com will revert to its proper use -- talking about how the project's going.
The website will house the chapters themselves as they go up. It'll also be the center for subscriptions and donations (which are already considerable: we have another challenge grant to roll out this week) and the ground rules for how the project will work, including the projected schedule. I expect to take a week-to-ten days or so to get this basic framework in place: then once it's done, I can heave a sigh of relief, leave the technogeekery behind, and get on with the auctogeekery, which is much my favorite kind.
Meanwhile, let me thank everybody again for the incredible response and support I've been getting. This is going to be a very interesting experiment, and at the end of it I hope to leave behind, not just a book, but a continuation or expansion of Lawrence Watt-Evans's do-it-yourself publishing paradigm, with a few useful bells and whistles hung on it, and some more of the bugs worked out -- something other writers can adopt and use in their turn, making changes and additions to suit what they're doing.
Onward.
(wanders off, muttering: now where the heck did I leave that banner with the strange device: Excelsior?)Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/27/2006 10:10:00 AM | link to this post
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Words of the wise one
Never open a book with weather.
And so much more. My favorite part:3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated," and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . .
. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs."
Heh heh.
(Yeah, I slip and do it sometimes. But not very often at all, as this particular lesson was burned into my brain after reading the version of it that James Blish points-and-laughs at in one of his books of SF criticism written as "William Atheling": "'Good morning,' he pole-vaulted.")Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/26/2006 10:41:00 AM | link to this post
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Something's cooking
...and today, it's not with The Big Meow, but with something else entirely... so don't expect to hear much from me today (except distant shrieks of "What do you mean we didn't bring the horseradish??").Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/25/2006 10:34:00 AM | link to this post
Friday, February 24, 2006
The first challenge met!
...and in less than thirty-six hours from the time it was proposed.
Wow!!
Let me briefly make plain what this means. The various Big Meow challenge grant donors (with all of whom I'll be in touch before the weekend is out) and the noble Ted Ts'o, who committed himself to match their donations up to the $1000 mark, have made a significant dent in the overall cost of writing The Big Meow -- so that fewer subscribers will be needed to finance each chapter, and those who do subscribe won't have to pay as much. The exact numbers are still somewhat up in the air, but these early donors have made a big difference...and I thank them all profoundly.
Those of you who feel like continuing this process, feel free: but for the moment, let's all stop and take a breath: the initial challenge has been met in spades and at speed. We have, however, already been offered another challenge, which we'll announce on Monday.
Meanwhile -- congratulations, you guys! What a feat!Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/24/2006 11:30:00 PM | link to this post
"The Big Meow's" mystery benefactor steps forth
Now that he's stepped out of the shadows on his own, I want to direct the attention of those who're interested toward Ted Ts'o, who put up the $1000 challenge grant to kickstart the Big Meow online publication project.
Thanks, Ted!Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/24/2006 05:18:00 PM | link to this post
Media appearance debrief (or, "My name iz pastede on [wrong] yay!!!")
So (for those of you who mailed to ask) here's the checklist for that appearance on Irish national TV, as per my predictions:
(1) (Studio car lateness?) Extreme: never got here at all: broke down somewhere near Naas. Local taxi company had to be recruited at last moment. (2) (Driver lost?) Didn't really have a fair chance: see 1. (3) (Haircut?) Turned out OK. (4) (Stuff to wear?) Did OK too. (5) (Thing I really should have expected to go wrong but didn't find out about until Peter called me afterwards?) This.
So much for my fifteen minutes of fame. :)
Oh well. We all had a good time.Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/24/2006 11:34:00 AM | link to this post
Thursday, February 23, 2006
"The Big Meow": poll results
For those coming in late, a brief recap.
In mid-December I posted part of a message from a reader and fan of the "Feline Wizards" books who wanted to know when the third book of the trilogy begun with The Book of Night with Moon and continued in On Her Majesty's Wizardly Service / To Visit the Queen was going to come out. I wrote back saying that, though the outline for the book was complete, the publisher hadn't been interested in bringing out the third volume because of relatively low sales figures on the first two: so that book would probably not be written.
And then I started thinking... You can see the whole response post here, in which I laid out my thoughts on the subject. In that post, I asked people who were interested in seeing a third book to mail me and let me know. If enough of them (meaning enough people to cover the costs of writing a book and self-publishing it via a print-on-demand publisher like Lulu.com) expressed interest, I would consider writing the book and publishing it myself.
Now it's two months later, and that being -- I thought -- more than enough time for people to express their interest, I wanted to get some closure on the issue. Last week I asked the readership one last time for their emails, intending to make up my mind once and for all this week on what to do about the project so that I could get on with other things.
I spent most of this last Monday counting and rereading all the emails since December. They were all very positive. A surprising number of people committed to buy multiple copies of the book when it was finished. Many others offered suggestions for ways to self-publish. A lot of people offered to send money up front, which was nice, but per se was a suggestion I preferred to resist: I'd rather there be something concrete on the barrelhead for people to put their cash down on, as it were. A lot of the people who mailed me knew about, and mentioned, Lawrence Watt-Evans' celebrated approach to his own version of this problem, in which he "serially" self-published his Ethshar novel The Spriggan Mirror, posting a chapter every time the PayPal donations from interested readers reached a certain point. (And afterwards, his book found a publisher, too.)
That particular business model had been on my mind for a good while. Certainly it has an honorable and ancient cultural precedent in the storyteller who unrolls his or her mat in the marketplace and tells just enough story to get your interest...then shakes the bowl in front of him/her, and waits for enough coins to jingle in it to warrant a continuation. But at the end of the day, when you start a project like this, the question is always going to be: is there going to be enough interest to see it finished? Yes, I want to tell this story -- there are characters in The Big Meow who I've been wanting to write for a long time. And at the same time, what goes on in my household is still a business, about which I have to be fairly hardheaded if it's not to flounder in the face of present market conditions. I set a number of financial conditions that were going to have to be met if this whole business was going to be worth my while: these conditions were tied to the approximate cost of a book of this size as published at Lulu (between USD $20 and $25, approximately) and whether I was going to be able to make back my expenses, at the most basic acceptable level, from projected sales.
Unfortunately, after the count was finished, and even after putting the best construction on the number of books that the people who wrote me were committing to buy, the numbers still came up short of the results I'd been looking for. This depressed me, and I spent some hours afterwards trying to figure out what to do. And during that period, something rather unusual happened. An email came in that started out like this:If you find yourself a little short on responses for "The Big Meow", I
hereby offer to write a check for $1000.00 USD up front if you commit on your blog to start writing the book and self-publish it.
You may imagine that my jaw kind of dropped at that point. (BTW, I'm not going to reveal the person's name at the moment, not being sure if it's OK with him.) At no point in this process had anyone stepped up to the plate and started swinging quite like that. And so substantial an addition to the economics of the situation could, under certain circumstances, make a significant difference to the way the rest of the numbers played out.
So here's how it will be.
Adding a challenge like the one in that last mail to everybody else's commitment...it's simply impossible for me to say "no". Therefore, I'm going to start writing The Big Meow. (However, everybody please note that at the moment, the chief priority on my side of the household is getting A Wizard of Mars off to its publisher, so the "delivery" of the first chapter of TBM is likely to be delayed a couple/few weeks.)
I will conduct this operation along the lines of Lawrence Watt-Evans's model, which seems to have served him well, but I'm going to add a few tweaks of my own to it.
The Big Meow mailing list
I'm assuming that all of you who mailed me about TBM are willing to be notified when material is ready for you to see: so I'll be constructing a mailing list using all your addresses (you'll get a confirmation /opt-in-or-out mail in the next few days). When Chapter One of TBM is ready, I'll mail you all and "shake the can", alerting you that it's time for you to make a payment. I'll put a link up on The Big Meow's website so that those who want to add themselves to the mailing list can do so.
Subscriptions
PayPal will be the preferred payment method, though (as in Lawrence's case) I'll accept checks as well. (It will take a little time to set that up with my bank and the local post office: in the meantime, PayPal payments, or credit card payments processed via PayPal, will be the only available method.) As with sales for A Wind from the South,, fulfillment of the PayPal payments will be via e-Junkie, which has been working quite nicely for us. (You'll notice, by the way, that the email address to which the payments are directed is Peter's. He is acting as "banker" and in-house oversight -- i.e., "nag" -- for this project.)
Please note that I haven't yet decided what the minimum amount/number of received subscription payments per chapter will be: this is going to take a little more thought on my part. I'll be notifying the people on the mailing list of the minimum amount shortly. At any rate, when enough "subscription" payments have arrived, everybody who subscribed will be emailed the first chapter (and a link to a password-protected page on the Web. All the subscribers to a given chapter of TBM will be getting back a receipt back assigning them a unique password for that transaction).
Three days after the chapter has become available to the subscribers, it'll be posted to an "open" webpage at the Big Meow website, where anyone who likes can read it, and (if they like) subscribe to the next chapter.
And so it'll go. We'll repeat the process as long as reader response warrants it. (Please note that I am not committing myself to complete this project if the reader response is inadequate. Each time a chapter is posted, the ball is back in all of your courts.)
After the book is over: publication
Assuming that all goes well, when TBM is finished, those who've subscribed to all ten installments (that's how the book is structured at the moment, in ten chapters) will be getting a "hard copy" paperback produced via Lulu.com. Others who haven't subscribed, or have subscribed only to part of the run, will be free to purchase the book at Lulu, in whatever quantities they desire. All subscribers, whether they paid for the whole run or only part of it, will be acknowledged for their contributions in all subsequent printed versions of the book (who knows, perhaps some day a publisher will step up to the plate).
The challenge grant fund
I'm designating the above chapter-by-chapter payments as "subscription" payments,in order to leave free -- for those who prefer to handle their participation this way -- a separate channel for contribution to the project. My mystery e-mailer added the following good suggestion:If you like, I give you my permission to publish this note and to convert the $1000.00 USD pledge into a challenge grant where I will match up to $1000 of donations from others, at your discretion.)
I like the sound of that. So I'm going to be establishing a separate payment item at e-Junkie for PayPal payments to the challenge grant fund. If the challenge is successful, this will significantly reduce the total costs of the project, and make it possible for me to hit my "earn-out" figure sooner. Those who make contributions to this fund will also be acknowledged in all print versions as "Friends of The Big Meow" or something similar. (US readers, think of the varying levels of support you see advertised in an NPR / PBS pledge drive: this would be like that.) After the challenge amount is achieved, a notification to that effect will be posted on the Big Meow weblog. The "contribution button" there will remain in place, though, for those who want to help the project along in a mode different from the chapter-by-chapter subscription model. More information about the various subscription levels is at this page on the website.
(One note about the buttons: there is a separate button at the Big Meow site for those who simply want to drop something into the kitty (in fact, that's what the button says). It's on the challenge grants page at the website.)
My commitment to the readership
I think -- looking at my present work schedule -- that I can finish this book in six months. So my target completion date is August 23, 2006...the first day of LA Con IV.
(Doubtless there will be betting pools starting up immediately regarding whether I'll hit the target. I don't want to know. :) I'll add only this word of warning: it looks like the TV end of my workload may start getting active during the summer. I'll keep people posted as I can.)
Other miscellaneous details
Please note that this endeavor is not being operated by or as part of a non-profit organization, so your payments to the challenge grant fund are not "donations" for tax purposes. Just so you know.
Otherwise, doubtless there will be various minor logistical and technical matters that will come up to be handled as we get this thing going. Please bear with me as I sort them out.
...So there you have it. If you want to be added to the TBM mailing list, please send an email with the subject SUBSCRIBE (and nothing else) to this address. Those of you who offered to send money right now (and that was a truly surprising number of you), you can put it to best use by putting it toward the challenge-grant fund.
And now: onward. Let's see what you folks do.Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/23/2006 10:21:00 AM | link to this post
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Re: "The Big Meow": a slight delay
Something has come up which is going to require another day or so to handle before I post about which way this project's going to go. It's not a bad something: rather the opposite. (No, no publishers are involved.) But it adds an ingredient to the mix, as it were, that I hadn't been expecting, and I have to discuss it with a couple of people.
Check in again tomorrow.Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/21/2006 10:57:00 PM | link to this post
Chicken! (not...)
Dear, dear.The fear of the spread of bird fluhas resulted in French rugby fans being urged not to perform one of their most famous traditions when they arrive in Britain next month.
For decades, French rugby fans have known for smuggling a cockerel, their emblem, into stadiums and releasing it onto the pitch at the final whistle.
With the confirmation of the H5N1 strain of bird flu in a dead duck in France, the British Veterinary Association is asking that that not happen this tour.
Although it would not necessarily be illegal to import a bird, the association says the public might think the authorities are not taking the threat of bird flu seriously if rugby fans were allowed to bring cockerels into the country.
Maybe they could bring a stuffed-animal cockerel? Or a dressed-up human mascot?
Or a big pot of coq au vin...
Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/21/2006 09:53:00 AM | link to this post
Sunday, February 19, 2006
By the way, for those who were asking: a printed version of "A Wind from the South" is in preparation
One theme I've been hearing lately in emails about the book (which have been in just about every other way complimentary) is, "I hate e-books. Please do a dead-tree version!"
Well, okay. I'm in the process of reformatting a file so that we can have a CafePress edition. (I was going to wait to do a Lulu.com version with an ISBN...and then suddenly this morning, thought, "Why? Who cares whether the thing's got an ISBN or not? We're not ready to market to Amazon yet."
So wait a few days, say till the middle of the week, and there'll be a paper version available for order direct from CafePress. I'll post here when it's ready.
Also, though it won't be ready for some time, the very talented Ursula Vernon has graciously agreed to do a cover for the print version. We're in the very early stages of discussing design. I can't wait to see what she'll do: I know it'll be terrific.Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/19/2006 10:26:00 PM | link to this post
A side thought on the "Big Meow" situation
Just so that people know: I'm aware that this is the Presidents' Day "long weekend" in the US. So I won't be posting about the final result of my deliberations until Tuesday morning. (I kind of hate to use the word "decision": it does, after all, have its root in the Latin word that implies you're about to kill something...) The extra time is just as well: it gives me a little more time to evaluate the incoming emails and make up my mind.)Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/19/2006 11:18:00 AM | link to this post
Friday, February 17, 2006
Re "The Big Meow", to write or not to write: last call
It's been two months since I broached this subject. Now it's time to make a choice. I'll be evaluating my options over the weekend.
If you have an opinion and you haven't emailed me, now's the time.Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/17/2006 10:54:00 PM | link to this post
Attn DD eBay store buyers: postal dispute has delayed shipments
I'll be e-mailing everybody about this over the course of the day, but I just wanted to put a note here, since a lot of people seem to read the weblog.
Just so you know -- there is a postal dispute going on in Northern Ireland that is affecting shipments of stuff from my eBay store to the States. I didn't know about this before, but investigation of some delayed shipments over the last week has turned up the information that apparently registered mail to the US and some other destinations does not always fly directly from Dublin Airport. Sometimes it goes via ground transport to Belfast's sorting office, and from there to one of Belfast's two airports. Unfortunately, this work dispute has been going on for the last two weeks, maybe more -- and as a result, a lot of my registered mail is sitting up there in a big hopper with about 8 million other pieces of mail, and not going anywhere.
So if you have not seen something you ordered a couple of weeks back, please be patient -- it's probably sitting in Belfast. I'll post some more information about this as soon as I get it.Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/17/2006 12:28:00 PM | link to this post
Argh, media appearances madness
So I'm minding my own business Thursday morning when the phone rings. On the other end is a nice lady from a production company connected with RTÉ, the Irish national broadcaster. Somehow or other, she's gotten hold of my name, and she wants to know if I'm interested in appearing on a TV show called "The Big Bite". This is an afternoon current affairs and discussion program featuring a journalist-presenter and usually four guests who sit around discussing some interesting topic, normally -- but not always -- something that won't get too rancorous in mid-afternoon, just before the cooking and casual chat show that follows.
It turns out that Monday's topic is whether or not there's likely to be life on other worlds, and they thought it would be fun to have me on the show. The other guests are a professor of astrophysics from University College Dublin, Dave Moore from Astronomy Ireland, and someone else whose name I forget at the moment. Either way, it sounds like the opinions of the group are going to be heavily weighted towards the "yes" side.
So that'll be enjoyable. Meanwhile, I go into the usual pre-appearance craziness. What time will the car from the studio get here? (Always too late.) Will the driver get lost? (Yes, even though I e-mailed them an extremely clear and straightforward map.) I need a haircut. (Thank heaven the hairdresser has time to take me today.) I have nothing to wear. (Well, yes, I do. For something like this, jeans and a silk sweater and an Hèrmés scarf -- no, make that the shawl with the sun, moon, and stars on it -- will do just fine.) And so on, and so on...
Oh, well. Everything will sort itself out. And it'll be fun to get up to RTÉ again; I haven't been up there for a couple of years.Tags:.
posted by Diane: 2/17/2006 11:36:00 AM | link to this post
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
"Nineteen Years" redux: a snapshot
The wedding party lines up after the dust has settled at Boskone 1987. Left to right: groomsmen Kurt Siegel and George ("Dupa T. Parrot") Brickner, maid of honour Ramona Sepulveda, matron of honor Beth Meacham: the bride: the groom: best man Todd McCaffrey: maid of honour Theresa Renner: bride-chucker-out David Gerrold: maid of honour Wilma Fisher.
What a day....Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/15/2006 06:19:00 PM | link to this post
Nineteen years
As of today, it's been nineteen years since I married this man...only partly realizing the incredible deal I was getting: life-partnership with a talented and twisty-brained writer, a crazed modeler, a clever and knowledgeable swordsman, a rampaging sex god (are the two connected, I wonder?...), a gifted etymologist, a creative and reliable chef, an unerring continuity guy, a film enthusiast with a 70mm screen buried in his brain...a man equally gifted at understanding train timetables, impressing Paris cabbies with his French accent, and sticking pills down reluctant cats.
And I am, pardon me for saying it, the luckiest woman on Earth.
Happy anniversary, sweetie.Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/15/2006 12:23:00 PM | link to this post
"The Big Meow" project update
I had a query about the subject late last night, so I thought I'd cross-blog the response here. (..."Cross-blog". Is that a word? Well, it is now.)
As regards The Big Meow: I don't have enough information yet to make a decision about writing the book, as I haven't yet hit the "break-even" point in terms of responses to my initial posting about the project. So far I've only heard from a few hundred people, and even if every one of them bought a book at the stated price, I'd still be losing money on the deal. As the project stands at present, I would need to hear positively from at least a couple/few hundred more people before I could commit.
-- And so that no one reading this misunderstands me: for costing purposes on this project -- without getting into actual figures -- I'm "paying myself" the lowest amount my agent would have allowed me to take for a work-for-hire/licensed-property book between three and five years ago, when I was still doing such things. This amount -- again, without getting into actual figures -- would be about one-fifth to one-sixth of what I normally get for a writing a novel these days. To do this very on-spec piece of work, I would be taking a considerable drop in pay while I spent a significant portion of my work year on the project -- so you can see where my concern lies, as I have cats to feed, and they don't understand explanations about wanting to write just for the joy of it: they want to know where their dinners are.
(An additional and slightly related issue: one of the ways I've been testing the water as regards self-publishing is with online sale of a book already written but never published elsewhere, though it was bought by mainline publishers twice -- details here at the website for Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South. The sales so far of the book's e-version have been only modest...and this for a novel already written. Looking at this situation, I have to ask myself whether The Big Meow is really likely to do any better, and whether I may be about to start wasting a lot of precious time on something that's just "a nice idea".)
...So if you know somebody who's interested in seeing this book written, or (looking over the heads of whose who've already mailed me) if you're yourself interested, now's the time to drop me a note and let me know. The original post laying out the situation with this book is here. The blurb for the prospective novel (and the project's homepage) are here. The address to mail support or inquiries to is
thebigmeow@youngwizards.com
If you haven't done so already, please let me know what you think.
Or you could, if you liked, convince me more concretely by putting money-where-mouth-is and buying a copy of A Wind from the South. (There are sample chapters and links to reader comments at its website.)
But I also want to thank very much all those who've already written -- so many of your comments have been really heartwarming -- and those who've read AWFTS and have been having fun with it. You guys make the work worthwhile. :)Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/15/2006 09:14:00 AM | link to this post
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
News bulletin: It's against the law for a Vice President to shoot a lawyer
Without the right license. (snicker)
I do, however, feel sorry for the poor victim, who's probably still having shot tweezered out of him.
(In the background, Peter mutters: "They're making a lot of fuss over someone who can't even spell. ...Oh, not Quayle?")Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/14/2006 11:58:00 AM | link to this post
Monday, February 13, 2006
The cats are much better, thanks
There's been significant improvement since that last post.
Goodman, for his part, is almost completely recovered from his enteritis, and is wandering around the house shouting for food in the traditional manner. The racket is surprising after a few days of relative quiet.
Meanwhile, Squeak was taken off to the vet on Saturday, and was remarkably well behaved for a cat who was plainly in a lot of pain. They knocked him out and drained the abscess, which apparently had enough fibrotic tissue at the bottom of it to suggest that it had been there for possibly as long as a couple of weeks before it started to get acute. Squeaky now looks extremely peculiar, with a big shaved patch on his side, and all painted up with colloidal silver: but he's a lot happier with life.
The vet looked at us rather strangely when we immediately removed the celluloid collar that they'd put on him to keep him from pulling the stitches out. But, as I'd thought, Squeak is paying them no attention whatever -- he's much too busy catching up on his sleeping and eating. He quickly got back into his normal operating mode -- only spending a little more time than usual, immediately post-op, growling at the other cats and whacking them if they got too close to him -- and is now alternating long periods of relaxation with the usual evening beating-of-the-bounds, carefully re-spraying the boundaries of his territory.
What a cat.
So things are getting back to normal, and I can now return to (a) finishing this YW short story and (b) whacking our producers' website into shape with some needed changes before the tradeshow season begins.
(BTW, the short story has been producing some strange fallout. Suddenly we seem to have a chocolate-oriented shop at CafePress. YW fans will understand what I mean when I say that I blame Carmela for all of this.)Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/13/2006 02:51:00 PM | link to this post
Friday, February 10, 2006
Sick Cat Redux (sigh)
Well, Goodman is better. But now Squeaky really does have to go to the vet tomorrow...because the abscess definitely isn't his only problem: the limp continues. (sigh)
After a long day of arguing with the computers, the cats, and the outer world, it's going to be nice to fall down in a little while. Zzzzzz....Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/10/2006 07:34:00 PM | link to this post
Last-minute Squeak bulletin
Squeaky has thoughtfully pulled the fur off the hurt spot. There is an abscess there from something's bite -- cat? rat? Probably not bat -- which is now draining. Relief all around. Antibiotics tomorrow, though...
posted by Diane: 2/10/2006 12:23:00 AM | link to this post
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Sick cat week
(sigh) That graphic over there (which occurred to me very early this morning) is the only worthwhile thing I've gotten done today. Everything else has been about sick cats. If you're not a cat person, or feeling sympathetic, skip this blog entry....
Goodman -- the all-white cat and the middle-ranked of our three males -- found and ate something bad, early in the week, in his wanderings through the countryside. He came down with a terrible case of diarrhoea, went off his food, and initially stopped drinking as well: then the drinking picked up again, so we thought at first he was getting better.
But he wasn't. He got very dull and lethargic, and was completely disinterested in food -- so much so that when I offered him steak one night, he just stood there and stared at it.
When that happened, on Tuesday, I said to Peter, "He goes to the vet tomorrow." And that's what yesterday was about. Taxi rides, moaning unhappy cats, sitting around in waiting rooms full of greyhounds, waiting for blood work and other tests to get done, etc etc. Finally our vet told us that Goodman had enteritis -- no surprise there -- and he stuck him full of pain relievers, anti-diarrhoeics, and cortisone, and sent him home. "Bring him back tomorrow," our vet said.
So we got up early this morning and did that. Goodman was already significantly improved over his condition just twelve hours before, though the diarrhoea was still a little bit with him (and we've had to follow him around the house with paper towels mopping up the occasional leak). Today he had some more shots, and we were given some diet food for him, and we came home again and relaxed a little in hopes that things would get back to normal.
Until we saw that Mr. Squeak, the senior male, who's been working on extending his territory by the most straightforward method -- by beating up on the male cat who lives down the road about a quarter mile from here -- had started to limp. At first we thought it was a sprain. But a little while ago I got a whiff of him, realized that whatever else they may do, sprains don't smell, and took a few minutes to check out his side more carefully. Turns out he's got an infected bite or other wound buried under all that thick Norwegian-forest-cat fur, where he can't get at it to clean it, and it's paining him so much that it's hurting him to walk...and enough that he won't let us clip the fur to get at it and and clean it up. So now Squeak has to go to the vet first thing in the morning...get sedated, have the wound cleaned up, possibly stitched, get some antibiotics...
Ah well. In the good news department, for those of you who were asking, there are some more hardcovers of Wizards at War available in the bookstore. (There are some more advance readers' copies as well, but I have to go into the store and add them.)
Oh, and for those who were asking how I manage to follow baseball season in Europe? It's these guys -- NASN, the North American Sports Network. They have a pretty fair schedule once the season gets going. (wry look) I wish that was right about now...
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posted by Diane: 2/09/2006 07:50:00 PM | link to this post
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
A tree grows in ...uh, the Bronx. But hardly in ideal conditions
Somebody call Treebeard, because some people need their heads banged together.A property-line dispute between a builder and a lifelong Bronx resident is in an architectural stalemate - with a live tree right in the middle of a cinder-block wall of a new house.
...The city building code doesn't actually prohibit anyone from building a wall with a tree in the middle of it, but live trees inside buildings require special construction, said Buildings Department spokeswoman Ilyse Fink.
"The plans do not call for a tree in the wall," Fink said. "We're going to send somebody out to look at this."Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/08/2006 11:57:00 AM | link to this post
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
The best disclaimer I've seen in a while
This point may take a little time to get to, so bear with me.
Peter and I are getting ready to do an afternoon cooking demonstration at the local hardware store, thus doing something to deserve our local reputation -- most easily summed up as "You know, those two crazy people who live just outside of [name of small village omitted], the Americans -- " (at which I roll my eyes, because no American would mistake Peter's accent as anything USAnian, though everyone here does) -- "the ones who're talking about food all the time, did you hear about the dinner they made for Pat and Mary Courtney... oh, they're writers? Sure I didn't know that. What do they write? Anyway, they made this terrific rolled pork loin and this rosemary-smoked lamb..."
-- anyway, that reputation. So as part of the prep for this event (which will be happening at Quinns of Baltinglass on Saturday, February 25th, between 1:30 and 4:30, don't miss it if you're in the area), I went off to look for some pictures of Baltinglass Abbey to use as part of the promotional handout that Kieran the manager asked us to whip up. (The theme of the afternoon is "Bought in Baltinglass", and the gist of the demonstration is to show that you can do incredible gourmet things with what's available in a medium-sized Irish country town these days.)
And while looking around for photos in Google (to see if there was anything better than the pictures I might be taking myself this afternoon), I found -- at the bottom of a page of pictures of someone's megalith-ruin-stone-circle-seeking tour of Ireland, a disclaimer.JonSullivan.com is not responsible for your own dumb ass. For best results, don't be a dumb ass.
JonSullivan.com is not recommended for children under 13. Parents should be aware that this site contains: discussion of sex with blow up animals, gratuitous amounts of profanity, and really wacky shit we can't even classify, much less recommend to little tikes. Expect misrepresentations, false assertions, and malicious deception.
While using JonSullivan.com, please refrain from operating power tools, underwater breathing devices, powered enema machines, or the "Thigh Master". Failure to comply with this rule may lead unscrupulous types to hack into your web cam and post incriminating pictures of you at "Am I Hot Or Not?"
Improper operation of JonSullivan.com can lead to insomnia, dropsy, toe loss, addiction to yogurt, very small fingernails, rapid eye movements, aversion to French cuisine, and spastic colon. Among other things. Don't make us list them all. You get the idea. Just be careful. It's not a toy. You could put an eye out for God's sake!!!
And there's much more.
Jon (whoever he may be) has brightened my day. Must send him some recipes as soon as I finish packing up all this eBay stuff to be mailed out...(that being the rest of today's business, just about. You wouldn't believe how it can complicate your life when your little local post office shuts down and you gave up your car five years ago).Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/07/2006 09:35:00 AM | link to this post
A SuperBowl postscript
Re the Rolling Stones' halftime performance:About 2,000 volunteers surrounded the stage to give the performance the feel of a "real" concert, even thought it was largely designed for television viewers.
The NFL had originally tried to ban anyone over the age of 45 from dancing near or on the stage, but it backed off after it was pointed out that the average age of the Stones was 62.
Oh, Gods forbid anybody over 45 might be seen dancing. They could be passing themselves off as young: horrors!!
(eyeroll) Yet another reason for me not to bother with US football. Thank heaven spring training will be starting soon...Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/07/2006 08:54:00 AM | link to this post
Monday, February 06, 2006
For you Filofax fans out there
Just what you needed: a Personal Disorganizer.Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/06/2006 09:02:00 AM | link to this post
Sunday, February 05, 2006
Channel Four (UK) wants four-minute documentaries
FourDocs is where you can upload four minute docs about your world. Don't worry if you've never done any filmmaking before -- there's expert help for you in the user-friendly Guides...
All the material you upload is covered under a Creative Commons licence. For your four minute films, this means any other site user is able to copy, distribute and display the film as long it is for non-commercial purposes and they don't alter it.
More at the FourDocs page. (They also have a blog.) This looks at first sight like one of those "Let's Try To Keep The Yoof Out Of Trouble" ideas, but who knows, it might grow out of that... (Thanks to Veer for the link.)Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/05/2006 06:07:00 PM | link to this post
"Fuzzy logic" Windows messages
Heh."The files will be sort of deleted. Continue?"Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/05/2006 04:07:00 PM | link to this post
For sale: the last Sopwith Camel
You won't be finding this one on eBay any time soon.Secretly stored in a loft in England since WWI, this 1917 Sopwith Camel#B6291 was discovered by a former Royal Flying Corps Camel pilot with the cooperation of Sir Thomas Sopwith. Carefully restored to flying status by British Aerospace Co., at last it is here now in the U.S.
Nothing compares to this remarkable and historical fighter that once flew over the battlefields of the Western Front in 1917. This is the most desirable Camel existing in the world today.
Additional information at the Vintageaviation.net sales listing area suggests (via recent valuations of the aircraft) a price of somewhere between USD $1,800,000 and $2,600,000.
Sigh...
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posted by Diane: 2/05/2006 01:18:00 PM | link to this post
Inadvertent poetic prose in spamblogs
Used to be that, every now and then, when I'd see a name in the Blogger referral logs for a blog that I didn't recognize, I'd click on the link and go have a look. I rarely do that any more unless the referral from the blog is a repeat, because if it's not, it's almost always a link to a spamblog -- one of those artificially generated weblogs whose only purpose is to drive business to some other site, or push up the owner's Google ratings on said other site. I really hate those things.
Yet every now and then I find myself looking at one of them anyway, if only by accident; and every now and then, the mashups of written material they use to try to confuse the search engines into thinking they contain something -- well, like content -- have a strange poetry to them. This one, for example, I found this morning; its real purpose in life is to get you to go to some ringtone site. But in passing it says this --but never in their ardest whiskered did they re-deposit all of that super-saxony. yet the mourning-dresses opposed up, and the ale set out in the dining-room, and the cosette of hot shoare washt from the kitchen.
And Verty, with the variousness in his interventionist millston, blows away the gunsmithery from the canvas. Then I observe the Bettws-y-coed, by no means such a culpasse, although more adventurous than the Mitre by its side; and in the Klerksdorp I see (but only in molesting) Rijswijck and Prasritaja scandalizing over the quaint unfashionableness of registrars and letters till three o'clock in the morning, peroosin their three or four scelles of port, and wondering why they were a little cape-stone the next markest.
(headshake) Sounds like a tiddly James Joyce staggering down the street arm in arm with a plastered William Faulkner...Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/05/2006 12:30:00 PM | link to this post
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Looking for help with that pesky quest? A wizard of Bath discovers the realities...
Hilarious....I did learn a few useful things...Older people are much less likely to see the funny side of something, even when the safety of the universe is in the balance. Couples are far better at avoiding the magically hindered than individuals. Men with grey beards really don't like to be called, "fellow wizard." (Although, their wives are likely to find it funny.)
(Thanks, Jerry and cjmr!)
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posted by Diane: 2/04/2006 03:46:00 PM | link to this post
US expats, take note: one-step online voter registration finally available
And not a moment too soon, if you ask me. This convenience comes to us courtesy of the Overseas Vote Foundation, a nonprofit / nonpartisan group devoted to cutting through the bureaucratic tangle for voters abroad.The registration tool, known as RAVA, guides users through a process that first places them in one of three basic categories - overseas civilian, overseas military or family of overseas military - then asks for their home state, before guiding them to pages tailored to the laws and requirements of the appropriate state.
The swift system employs 128-byte encryption, the same as banks, to ensure security and privacy. Once the user downloads the completed form and prints it out to mail or e-mails it, all personal information is destroyed, Dzieduszycka-Suinat said.
The group does plan, however, to retain generic information on voters' states of origin and current whereabouts, which may help complete the still very fragmentary picture of the precise numbers and locations of overseas Americans.
This should make things a lot easier for when the next elections roll 'round...Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/04/2006 11:38:00 AM | link to this post
Friday, February 03, 2006
"After Narnia"...? What, are we through with it already?
I see the Young Wizards books turning up on a lot of "If You Like Harry Potter..." lists these days -- hundreds of them, scattered all over the US and Canada (and some elsewhere in the English-speaking world). But this is the first time I've seen one of these:
What's Next After Narnia?
This, I guess, bemuses me even more. Generally speaking -- to my eye, at least -- in a strictly thematic sense, the YW books have even less in common with Narnia than the "Harry Potter" books do. There's not even the common thread of "kids learning wizardry and having adventures": the similarity is more like "kids having magical adventures in another world." And sometimes, even that would be stretching it.
...Yet at the same time, there's no denying that the YW books are somewhat haunted by C. S. Lewis's influence, from Narnia (where I first met him) onwards. It'd be fibbing to claim that Perelandra wasn't on my mind when I was writing High Wizardry, or that Out of the Silent Planet isn't very much on my mind (or at least loitering in the background) while I finish work on A Wizard of Mars. Lewis has been my mentor-at-one-remove for many years...so I don't mind being on this list, really. It's honorable company to be in: extremely good company -- and not just Lewis's, either.
Still...one walks very softly when coming along behind the great Lion. But in a case like this, bringing up the rear isn't such a terrible place to be.Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/03/2006 02:26:00 PM | link to this post
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Just, well, unspeakable
But in the nicest kind of way:
Tales of the Plush CthulhuYes, Plush Cthulhu! The stars were right again and a band of innocent
stuffed animals had released Him into the world by accident.
"Uh, oh," said Baby Boy Fluffy Bunny.
(grin) Sleep tight.Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/02/2006 11:58:00 PM | link to this post
A "Buckaroo Banzai" comic, woo woo!
I see that I'm a trifle late in finding out about this -- dewline put me onto it (hey, thanks!!) -- and after a little Googling I see that Chris Roberson mentioned it last month. But ask me if I care, at the moment. I'm delighted! I saw BB at its Worldcon premiere and have loved that universe dearly ever since.
Now it turns out that Moonstone Books, starting in April, will be bringing out a comics version of Buckaroo Banzai -- a three-issue miniseries. The first book's story was done by BB creator Mac Rauch, and is entitled "Return of the Screw".
I am so jazzed! Can't wait.
(Fascinating sidenote: the penciler, Stephen Thompson, is Irish...and had never heard of BB before being asked by Moonstone to work on the project. See the interview with him, inker Keith Williams and writer Joe Gentile for more details.)Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/02/2006 10:05:00 AM | link to this post
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Today's weird cat story
So as a way to keep this dry-ear problem of mine from recurring (the condition having been, apparently, what caused the ear infection of early January), the doctor told me to shove little soft cotton pledgets soaked with olive oil into my ears while showering. Fair enough.
Now, this requires keeping olive oil in the bathroom, which is slightly unusual around here. So Peter brought me up one of the little oil drizzlers and a small dish that paté originally came in. Before each shower, I pour a little olive oil in the dish, pull a cotton ball apart and make my little earplugs, soak them in oil and shove them in place.
Fine. So this morning I'm having my shower and thinking about other things -- story stuff mostly: like Peter, I get some of my best ideas in the shower, which is why I like to go to Leukerbad when I'm outlining -- they have these showers up at the Alpentherme that spit out about a liter a second of hot mineral water (you can see one in the picture on the Leukerbad homepage-link above) --
Sorry, that could have been a fairly long diversion. Anyway, so I turn off the shower and stand there for a moment, and suddenly become aware of a little sound that had been masked by the water noise. Sounds a little like something dripping, at first. Plip plip plip plip...
I open the shower door and look out. And what do I see but Pip, the youngest cat, standing up on his hind legs on the toilet seat, with his front paws braced against the top of the toilet tank...somewhat noisily drinking the olive oil that's left in the little dish.
So the question of the day: How do you find out if your cat has Mediterranean roots??Tags:
posted by Diane: 2/01/2006 10:48:00 AM | link to this post
And one other thing...
Please take note...
What's this all about?
That being the case, sometimes I want to talk about anything but writing (at least, writing per se).
This is the old Blogger version of where that would happen. Click here to see where it happens now.
Biography
Bibliography / filmography
Favorite Worldcon Bid
2008:
The Geneva Convention
A few pictures
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