Home of the Snarkmaiden

This morning I dreamed that a man came to my door, asking if he could take a look at some books that he had seen through my window. I told him that the books weren't really in my house, they only appeared to be there. They were visible when you looked in through the window, but not from inside the house. They were, I explained, due to a ghost -- various things around the house would appear to be there that really weren't. These were signs that the house was haunted. About as I said this, it occurred to me that the man at my door was the ghost. I also realized, in the way that you do in dreams, that he needed to find a way to get to those ghost books to get a crucial piece of information, and that I was going to have to help him. And then I woke up.

The afterimage of the dream feels like the kernel of a story to me. I wonder if I'll write it?

One of our junior-most faculty came into the office this morning to tell me that she had been laughing out loud on the bus to work while reading my minutes of the previous month's faculty meeting. It's always gratifying when someone notices. Most especially when it's my very favoritest of they junior faculty, which is a very hard won laurel, given what a charming, amiable, pleasant, and interesting bunch we currently have among the juniors. It gives a person hope for the future, it does. And today I made someone laugh out loud. That is a thing.

Also today, I noticed a thing about my native language for the first time. So, is it weird, or just culturally revealing, that Swedish has two completely different words that translate into English as "worse"? Yeah, I know värre and sämre are used in somewhat different contexts, but really, how many ways do you really need to be able to say that things are worse, especially when you only have one way to say they're "better"? Upbeat folks, my people.

And speaking of upbeat, today I also gave my first oral presentation of the quarter in my Mandarin class. It was on educational inequality and child poverty among ethnic minorities in Hong Kong. Yeah, it's possible I got a little too ambitious in my choice of topic. But I can tell you what the child poverty rate for Filipino immigrants in Hong Kong is. In Mandarin. And With PowerPoint, because we were strongly encouraged to use slides. I don't do PowerPoint. *ptui* *hairball*. And because for me there is no such thing as the final draft of anything, just the most recent before the deadline, naturally I went off script winging it at a couple of points. That did not go entirely well. But it is over. And hey, given the near fluent, been-to-China young things in my class, I may well be Cao 老师's worst Third Year Mandarin student, but I still am a Third Year Mandarin student, so that's still something.

And I trotted down to the student union to get in on the last day of on-campus flu vaccinations for the season so I don't have to remember to go in to the doctor or queue up at the pharmacy or whatever. Must see if there's a way to self-report flu shots to my medical group's web page, though, so the flu shot reminder goes away. On the plus side, the line for getting a shot was short and quick. On the minus(?) side, the vaccination clinic had been popular enough that they had run out of Starbucks cards. I signed up on the list for them to e-mail me one. Not sure how that will work. And of course I hadn't been thinking about immunizations when I got dressed this morning, and had thoughtlessly put on a long-sleeved merino mock turtle. Suboptimal for accessing a shoulder for the jab, at least in a public ballroom with various folks of all genders and sexes wandering about. The nurse advised me to pull aside the collar as the better choice.

"But don't do it until I'm ready," she said. "We don't like to have people strangling themselves."

"Yeah, I said, "That would kind of defeat the purpose. Dead people don't catch flu."

"We should make that our new slogan."

But no new pictures taken today -- it was gray and sullen all day, and the weekend windstorm blew off many of the pretty leaves. Also, Chinese ate my brain. Luckily I took a metric buttload of pictures last week when there was sun. I'm still in pursuit of a really good photo of how wonderful the view from my office windows is in October, and have failed for another year, but here's a placeholder until I get it right.

I got a little note from YouGov (I must stop calling them PollingPoint, they haven't used that name for a while) saying they would like to feature my essay on their website. So that's good, I reckon. What's interesting is that they asked me to review/rewrite the final sentence for clarity because they thought there must be a typo. As far as I can tell, they had trouble with "parrots" as a verb. We'll see if they like "repeats" better.

So many bits and bobs I think about and don't get around to writing. RSN a brief consideration of my thoughts on first reading Alan Garner's Weirstone of Brisingamen, but that is not yet. For now, a little bit of random meme-cruft for LJ is perhaps better than nothing at all. So here's a thing I picked up from mrissa:

1. Go to page 77 (or 7) of your current ms
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines – sentences or paragraphs – and post them as they’re written. No cheating.

Sadly, I fall just a bit shy of having a page 77 so I'll try page 7 instead:

Something felt wrong in my brain: jangly, disjoint, and wrong.

Something felt wrong in the room, too. The air was too still. Late night city sounds filtered up from the street, but nearby I could only hear the sudden hammering of my own heart filling my ears. A dark premonition drew cold fingers down the nape of my neck.

Anxiously, I rolled over, reaching out for Min across the disheveled bed. He was there. My questing fingers found the warm, swelling curve of his shoulder as he lay with his back to me.

Hmm. Okay, I didn't cheat. But my blue-pencil finger is twitching: that needs cleaning up. Instead, repeat with me, "Crappy first draft," and we move on.

Earlier today I spotted this post over on James Nicoll's LJ. All unknowing whose birthday (or more correctly, baptismal date) it was, I answered that if I could resurrect any author at the height of their powers knowing they would be brains-craving zombies, I would choose William Shakespeare. Well, then Abi over at Making Light started a sonnet thread in honor of Shakespeare's birthday, and silliness came bubbling forth. Ergo, in honor of National Poetry Month and my favorite English playwright, I give you:

Sonnet for Zombie Bill, on the Anniversary of His Baptism

Behold, what soul would I a zombie make
What long-dead penman to this life renew?
For whose gilt words would brains forsake…
…well, not my own, if giving yours would do…

The puzzle posed, its answer must contain:
No English language poet can compare
If giving up one’s living mind’s in train,
No lesser author’s work is worth the dare.

So Bill-the-Bard we bow our heads to thee,
And hope to live to see your next Act III.

Pretty much how my writing brain works: I have a major revelation. About the metaphysics of vampires. And how they relate to demons, angels, and gods. And how all of this is just an instantiation of Thomist metaphysics, and accounts for the problem of vampire souls and disappearing gods in my story.

Inevitably, this occurs in a location where I am totally out of contact with the means to write stuff down as I think of it. Sometimes I'm in the shower. Sometimes I'm on an elevator. Or a very bumpy bus ride. This time, I was on the toilet. Okay, I guess there was paper. But no.

I would start carrying pen and paper everywhere I go, but my fear is, then I would stop having ideas altogether.

Another for-my-reference writerstuff post.

Jo Walton explains her rather handy-and-powerful-seeming name-system generating algorithm here.

Also, a census-data-powered contemporary American name generator (with adjustable name-obscurity) can be found here.

This post paid for and approved by your local Gratuitous Hyphen Propagation Council.

I hereby denounce the New Eclectics as a bunch of non-serious, impure mongrel revisionists of Ulm. I do this because Movement SF is dumb, and I want no part of it. Also, I have a dire fear of briarpatches. Go forth, my minions, and make holy war on Charlie. Or, you know, not.

On the other hand, writing a type of Genre Stuff you would normally not be seen dead with is a very interesting prompt. I guess it's Guntoting Libertarians in Space for me.

So John Scalzi has a post up on the continuing appeal of Robert Heinlein, in which John claims that the blurb from Publisher's Weekly on the cover of Old Man's War, a blurb which anoints Scalzi as The New Heinlein, plays a significant role in how well Mr. Scalzi's book sells. It's perfectly possible that this is true. But if it is, I wonder how Scalzi knows it. How much do book blurbs really influence consumer behavior? How measurable is that influence? Do publishers do bookstore exit polls? Does anyone actually fill out marketing surveys on book purchasing choices? Are the reasons why any particular book sells actually known, actually knowable, or just an article of faith inside publishing? I dunno. I have not much other than my usual over-abundance of skepticism.

The preponderance of responses to this post in NYT Opinion, by Stephen J. Dubner, do seem to be running against the idea of people buying books because of blurbs most of the time. On the other hand, as Howard Moskowitz found (here ably explained by Malcolm Gladwell, in the course of his fabulous TED talk, or in print form here at gladwell.com), consumers often can't informatively access or articulate their own desires, reasons, or consumer processes anyhow.

So who the heck knows. Anybody happen to have Marshall McLuhan in their vest pocket?