Home of the Snarkmaiden

Well, it's been a glorious October here in Seattle, with dry weather, clear sunny skies, and a particularly spectacular fall display around campus. It's been so dry that I actually got to wear my red suede coat for much of the month without fear of ruination. And I've been keeping my little Lumix in my coat pocket and taking quite a few pictures as I walk to and from work and class. I also keep thinking about nattering about it here, but, well, Chinese class, therefore bizy. Also, after Randy Byers asked about it, I made the mistake of starting a little post about my trip to California to clear out my parents' Mariposa place, and that post turned into this massive, ever-growing travel journal about the entire drive down and all my little detailed observations along the way, and side trips into recent fan visitors and outings, plus fannish participants in my Big Estate Sale Adventure, and basically the thing snowballed into a fanzine article that is currently 8 pages long and not yet done, but overdue. Go, me.

I'll probably post it here eventually, too, once it's actually finished, because lately the things I send off to fanzines seem to fall into a dark gravity well of egobooless obscurity and despair from which no comment hooks can ever emerge and I do like to have at least *some* sense that other people read what I wrot.

Anyway, for the longest time I had that post saved only as a draft in LJ and so I kept feeling like I couldn't post other things until I got it finished with it. And when it comes to trip reports I seem unable to let go of recording every picayune detail for my own recollection and amusement, and this is why I have thirty thousand words of TAFF report down and no immediate hope of getting it edited down to a readable finished work.

But for now I have that post saved as a Word .doc, and a clean slate here. And so here, before it's too late, a post for October. It's been a grand month.

So one of the things I did for my birthday was go off and try the whole storefront paint-your-own-pottery thing, at a place called Paint the Town in University Village. I had a very good time doing it -- hey, doodling and doin' crafty stuff in a social setting where someone else cleans up the mess, what's not to like? -- and today, after my Chinese 203 class final exam was in my rearview mirror, I went to collect the fired result. I'm happy to report that I am Not Displeased with the result. Not ecstatic, mind, 'cause the glaze/paint behaves in ways I did not fully expect or plan for, but within the paradigm of a first try, it's not bad at all:



I will try this again, I think. Especially now that I know that Paint the Town carries garden markers among the stock of bisqueware. Doodling in public, yay.

Good God. Darcy Burner's house burned down yesterday. (I just found out about it reading Digby's blog.) For those of you not following Washington politics, Darcy is the Democratic challenger to Republican Dave Reichert. She's a netroots candidate: tech savvy, anti-war, anti-FISA immunity, pro-Constitution, and that kind of good stuff. We think Darcy rocks, and not just because she sometimes reads Hal's LJ.

So. Fire. The humans are all okay (though the cat didn't make it) but with the house a total loss, the family will be busy putting their lives back on course in the aftermath of a major personal disaster. Meanwhile the Reichert campaign will be churning right along, raising funds and doing what active political campaigns do. It would be nice if Darcy's campaign fund-raising didn't have to suffer because of her personal set-back. Nice for all of us, I mean, for all those who want more and better Democrats in Congress, anyway.

So, if you're the sort of person who is looking forward to a more progressive America in 2009, could you maybe kick a few bucks Darcy's way?

If you'd like to, you can make a donation at this Act Blue page.

Note to self: Apartment Therapy post on restoring wood furniture finishes suggests Howard Restor-a-Finish is well worth trying out. Also, more ideas on freshening up wood furniture and filling scratches in this post.

The helicopters are circling again. Here in Seattle, where you seldom hear helicopters at all, their massed, fluttering rumble feels oppressive. If you look at KOMO or KING 5, you'll see endless live footage of the buildings of UW from the air. It's not that informative.

The good news -- for me anyway -- is that I was not shot this morning.

This seems more relevant to mention than most mornings because two people were in fact shot on the UW campus less than three hours ago, over in Gould Hall. The breaking news now seems to indicate a murder/suicide, and that possibly this was the culmination of a stalker episode, which is all horrible enough, but when we first heard about it here, the rumors were flying that the shooter(s) were still at large.

Possibly the weirdest aspect of a weird and unsettling incident was the amazing speed and reach of rumors in an age of text-messaging. I think that's something the University (and other authorities) are going to have to be more aware of in handling breaking news. The Campus Police did not send out any kind of blanket e-mail to let the campus know that the situation was under control and no lock down was necessary (though that is what they told us verbally when we called them), but since the rumors were flying well ahead of their response, I think a lot of micro-panics could have been forestalled if they simply had a policy of notifying the campus when something like this happens. We're going to find out anyway, the question is what's going to be our source and how reliable.

And so it's been a morning of tiny, incremental improvements in the information we have. Typical, when dealing with breaking news. Annoying, when you're this close to the epicenter of it. If it was a stalker that probably blows my expectation of yet another disgruntled employee on a spree. Still, I will continue to keep my employees gruntled.

Or not.

(Hey, who knew "edit" was a backformation of "editor"? I sure didn't.)

In case you don't already read the blog, I wanted to note that Teresa over at Making Light points to an excellent essay [NB: pdf format] of advice on writing -- it's aimed specifically at critiquing novels in progress, but it has lots of sound advice which applies to writing at any length. Mary Kay and Mris will presumably hate this piece of advice: "If you're not naturally a visual thinker, learn to be one." But for me as a reader, this is dead on. On the other hand, "Some new writers love to withhold information so they can give the reader a surprise later. This [...] might [...] mean you’re relying too much on the idea of surprising the reader later instead of entertaining the reader now," hits close enough to the bone to be an owie.

Also hitting home for me at the moment: "Good writing does more than one thing at a time," -- the insight here being that if you have a scene or paragraph that does only X (scene setting, character, plotting, whatever) and the feedback you get is that it has "too much" X, it may be that it isn't really too much X, but rather that there's not enough of anything else.

A number of the observations by various vetted pros in the comments section are good stuff on process,too. Though you may want to skip over the back and forth about Why People Hate .pdf Format. (I did.) I was particularly interested when Elizabeth Bear weighed in on revising process, possibly because I suspect my process mirrors hers, and I love to be validated by writers I admire.

Edit: The HTML version of the piece is now available here. [Scroll down past the giant, irksome YouTube screen]