Der Feuervogel aufersteht.

One of the things I find most distressing about Being An Old is how quickly time passes. You look up, and suddenly it's the end of December, when you're sure it was just spring five minutes ago. I don't like it.

But I guess I should write one of those yearly wrap-up posts, huh? Probably good for my mental health or something, putting all the things I accomplished into one place.

The year started out fine, I guess. I participated in the annual Weekend Warrior writing contest on Codex and got two usable stories (out of five) after revisions, which I've been submitting since March or April. Two of the stories are something I could do more with, and the last was an experiment that didn't land for the readers.

Then in March, Bear City Roller Derby announced that they were starting a newbie course, and I signed up, even though I'm not a newbie. It felt like a safer, more organized way for me to join the league, since there were going to be a bunch more people. So I'm now a skating official for Bear City, and that's rad. I've refereed 3 BCRD games and 2 for Starlight Excess, another league in town. I went to Hamburg to ref once, and I went to Dresden for a workshop weekend with a handful of BCRD newbies and a handful of folks from Starlight, where I refereed a rookie scrimmage.

The big-deal thing I did was go to Malmö, Sweden, for the EuroCup 2022, where I was a non-skating official (scorekeeper). My skating skills aren't up to snuff for European top 10 play, so I applied to NSO. I got to meet a bunch of officials from around Europe, which was one of my big goals when I started here. Back in Georgia, I was really well networked with officials in the southeast, and I travelled all over the place. It's different here, because I only know BCRD folks, and I'm working to change that.

I got covid in the middle of June, which sucked. I tested positive for about 10 days (I only bothered every other day) and was sick as a dog for the first 5 or so. Naturally it was the two-week period when it was over 90 degrees here (30+ C), and I couldn't even go out to the lake to cool off. I also had to keep my bedroom door shut to keep the germs in (fair enough, really), and ex-flatmate's belief that drafts make you sick meant that even when she was out of the apartment, I couldn't open it up for a crossbreeze, so it was 27 degrees and up in my room for over 2 weeks. Stuffy when I closed the window because outside was warmer (I used the fan she forbade me from using), too hot to sleep at night with the window open.

I recovered in time to go back to the US for most of July. I sorted through and reorganized the things I didn't have room to take with me when I left. I visited my sister, aunt, aunt & uncle, and family. We all went out to Olive Garden with Grandma so we could visit. That was nice.

I'm glad we did, because a few weeks later, Grandma was in the hospital with a hernia, got pneumonia, all sorts of terrible medical things. (She's 93. She was previously in excellent health for someone who's 93. She also lost two of her four children within a year (my mom in March 2021, my uncle last new year's), so emotionally she wasn't doing great.) My uncle texted & emailed us all with updates, and she's currently content, back in her assisted living room, I think, and looking forward to getting gussied up for a holiday dinner with her assisted living neighbors tomorrow. (She has macular degeneration and is blind now.)

After I got back, my dissatisfaction with my old apartment, mostly because of my old flatmate, hit a peak, and I started looking seriously for a new place to live. I'd been casually looking before, in an if-something-comes-up mode, because I hate Charlottenburg because it's so fucking bougie, but when I felt relaxed because she was out of the country for two straight weeks, I took it as a clear sign. I signed up for premium at the biggest apartment finding site and expected to spend the next six months or more looking for a place. Maybe even apply for a certificate that grants me access to a rent-controlled place (WBS). The rental market here is at least as competitive as the short fiction publication market.

And then I was talking after practice a few days later about how badly I needed to get out of my living situation, and my new flatmate said, "I have an open room. Do you want to come see it?" And now I live in a better room in a borough of Berlin that I like better, because it's more of the things I like about this city. I'm in Treptow, right across from the park. It's former East Berlin, so most of the buildings have that Soviet charm, but I'm not far from either Kreuzberg or Neukölln, which is extraordinarily convenient for going to roller derby practice in Kreuzberg. (Formerly 45 minutes by U-Bahn, now 20 minutes by bike or bus.)

I also adopted a cat. She's been here 6 days now. I just turned my head to check on her and caught her whiskers dream twitching <3 https://feuervogel.tumblr.com/post/704511174044254208/i-adopted-a-cat-from-dvor-nyashkam-shelter-in

The only fiction sale I got this year was a reprint in an anthology. I'm still chugging away on the DS9 coffeeshop AU even though I still have no idea what I'm actually writing. I set myself a deadline of Jan 31 for a finished first draft, because I need to send it out to a crit group by April 1. That means I can take February off and come back to it in March with fresh eyes.

I really like reading about Politics and Intrigue and Backstabbing, but I can't write it to save my life. (My brain isn't coily enough; I'm too basically honest.)

The novel I started pre-grad-school is good, or at least crit feedback has been positive, but I batted 0 on my agent search and a couple small press submissions. It's complicated, with politics and that sort of thing, and I love it so much. But I set it aside for now, because I feel like I can make it better in the future.

(My self-indulgent NaNoWriMo 2020 project is its own variety of hell, and I haven't queried it very much. I think I want to do something completely different with its concept.)

At some point, either late last year or earlier this year, I decided "well, what if I take my existing capitalist hell world and write about something with lower stakes?" One of my vague ideas was "It's DS9 but set entirely at Quark's. And there are lesbians, of course."

Which led me to today, where I realized, 25k into this project, that I'm basically writing a coffee shop AU of DS9. Uh, fun? At least it's catchy enough for a twitter pitch contest, I guess.

Since I moved here, I've been half-heartedly trying to join practices with Bear City Roller Derby (partly because dues are expensive, because you also have to join the club they're part of, SV Lurich 02, which has its own dues structure, partly because I'm terrified of strangers). But they opened a newbie course at the end of March, and that felt like a safer way to join.

Obviously I already know how to skate and have experience, so I don't need the newbie class, but there's never any harm in brushing up on the basics, especially when you've been off skates for 2 years because of the panini. Plus I'd be one among many new skaters, so it's less terrifying. But at the end of the first day, the trainers invited me to join regular league practices, because I was skilled enough.

So 2 days later, I went to the league training all by myself and did some of the contact drills but bowed out of the ones that were more scrimmage-like and returned to my natural habitat: the referee lane. I went to both league training and newbie class for all of April, because I like the other newbies. Then the school where we practice closed our room to replace the floor, so we've been outside the last few weeks. They had to restructure a bit and semi-cancelled the newbie class, because the rental gear is stored in the sport hall, and a lot of newbies don't have their own gear yet. (It's expensive!) The newbies can come to league training Tuesdays and scrimmage on Saturdays, where they have their own stuff to work on. I float between the groups, wherever I'm more useful. Saturdays I do more ref stuff, Tuesdays I help the newbies out.

Roller derby outside is not exactly ideal, as you may imagine! Tuesdays we skate on a basketball court, and Saturdays we go to Tempelhof park, where there's a spot of smooth-enough asphalt. It's much grippier than polished wood, gym floor, or the usual skating surfaces. It's about the same as a particularly grippy vinyl floor, but it's rough. It's *asphalt.* There are periodically rocks or other bits of debris. So it's difficult to do a lot of things that are easy on normal floors. Also, it can tear up your wheels and your toe stops, and lord help your knee pads and laces if you fall. (Which reminds me that I really need to order new laces to replace the one I mangled in October when I decided to skate the entire perimeter of Tempelhof, which is something like 3 miles.)

Tempelhof used to be an airport, but they closed it after reunification, because there were 3 airports. (Now there's only 1, and it's a nightmare.) Those of you who are familiar with Cold War history might recognize the name from the Berlin airlift in 1948-49, when the American army organized an airlift of food and other supplies after the Soviet army closed off the land routes to the city from the west. Planes landed at Tempelhof every 3 minutes for nearly a year.

You might know, on an intellectual level, that airports are big. Even if the terminal isn't absurd, like O'Hare or Atlanta, runways and taxiways take a lot of space. You don't really get a gut-level feeling for it until you take a runway on foot.

Anyway, roller derby is back, and I'm stoked.

For whatever that's worth. I guess I can do a round-up post of 2021.

I went to several cons and a couple conferences online (Boskone, Balticon, the Nebulas (where a friend won best short story), LingComm, and GLAC). I started a YouTube channel for videos about SFF linguistics, which I've been terrible about keeping up the last few months, but the upload speed here is TERRIBLE.

I moved to Berlin and got a 3-year residence permit to work as a freelance writer/editor. I made a new friend here, who's another American in the city, and I've been going to a meetup group for queer women (which is how I met my new friend), though since the weather turned, I haven't been going as much. Even with a vaccine mandate in place, I'm not very keen on indoors, low ventilation, and crowds. Plus, a LOT of the gals are young, in their 20s, so it's not quite my scene.

I got to hang out with kriski and dirtyzucchini one time in September or October. We took their dog for a walk in one of the local parks. Someday we'll be able to hang out again, probably when the weather turns again and being outside isn't quite as miserable.

I made it to 3 Christmas markets this year, all on the same day. None of them was particularly busy, but it was midafternoon on a weekday. Alexanderplatz was fine; they had a bunch of little huts with food, cookies, carved things, paper stars, and Glühwein. Potsdamer Platz was very small and a bit pathetic, although they had a sledding hill you could pay to go down. The best of the three was at Breitscheidplatz/Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche. If you remember the news from a few years ago, that's the one where a guy drove a stolen truck into the crowd. But there are bollers in place (they're called something like "Truck Stop") even outside festival season. Anyway, that one had a lot of stands, lots of lights, and felt very festive.

I submitted my novel to an open call (rejection) and another one (closes in a couple weeks). I submitted a proposal for my nonfic project to 2 agents and my indulgent novel to a handful of agents.

My mom died suddenly in March, and there's been a lot of drama about that (resolved, I hope), and now I guess I wait for my uncle to file her taxes/the estate's taxes and get my half eventually. Her brother was admitted to the hospital a few days before Christmas with abdominal pain, and he's got a mass on his pancreas (biopsy to follow). So my grandma is having a hard time with that.
UPDATE: I just talked to my sister, and she got a call from our other uncle that he collapsed last night and died. The other uncle is taking the news to grandma personally.

My dad was apparently in the hospital for two weeks with covid and according to my cousin was touch and go there for a bit. It was his idea not to tell me or my sister until he was out of the hospital. :eyeroll: He isn't vaccinated; he's in the loony conspiracy land of horse dewormer and malaria pills.

I don't have big plans or goals for this year. I have a list of writing targets (submit nonfic to 10 more agents, draft a novel, write and submit at least one short story, that sort of thing).

Happy new year, etc.

In theaters:

The Green Knight (English w/German subtitles): Very pretty, very lush, very much did not care if the viewer understood it. Recommend.

The Father (English w/German subtitles): Very well made, deserving of its Oscars, extremely disorienting on purpose. Recommend with a hanky.

Dune: Big splosions go boom. I don't like big bushy beard on Oscar Isaac. I thought Timothee would have a French accent, lol. Some people hate his face; I have no opinion. I thought he pulled off "carelessly arrogant and haughty" with aplomb. My previous knowledge of Dune can be summarized as follows: What's in the box? Pain. Fear is the mind-killer. The spice must flow. The 80s version had Sting in a silver speedo. There's a space empire, the Harkonnens are evil, Paul Atreides is special. This movie made enough sense to me. Recommend.

I might see the new James Bond next week. I would like to see Venom 2, because I liked the first romcom.

On streaming:

Hotel Artemis: Not terribly coherent as a story, though each individual thread was fine and the individual actors did fine.

The Witcher: Curse of the Wolf (or something like that): it was entertaining. It sets up Vesemir's backstory. People on twitter complained about killing your gays. Eh. It's the Witcher; people damn die.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway (Netflix co-production): clearly part 1 of X. Sets up the principal protag-antag conflict and stops. It's part of the UC continuity, some 10 years after Char's Counterattack, and some things would probably be more meaningful if I'd ever watched that. But if you know who Bright Noa is and why Hathaway Noa would thus be a famous person in that universe, you should be fine. That's about the level of knowledge I went in with. (Even if not, they drop background info throughout.)

I feel like I've watched more than that, but I guess a lot of it was series, not movies.

( I read a lot this year )
I was able to catch up on a lot of my reading backlog this year, thanks to the availability of e-books from the library. Some of these I bought, but most of them came from the library.

I liked doing this every day this past month. I know I won't be able to keep up daily posting without motivation, but I would like to keep writing at least once a week. But November is NaNoWriMo, and I still have both of these contracts, so I'm going to be a pretty busy girl.

I went skating on a trail today. It went fine (I hate skating outdoors) because the part I skated on is mostly flat. I didn't reckon on the path being covered in leaves though I should have, and I forgot about the rickety-ass boardwalk you have to go over to get onto the trail from the parking lot. So I didn't skate as much as I wanted to, but I had a good time. And plan to do it again sometime in the future, when it's been less rainy so the leaves might blow away or something. Or take a broom with me, lol.

I was hoping I could do some transcription today, because it's fun, but I need to sign in again and I don't know my password. I had google generate a strong one and assumed it would be saved, but the IT-managed G-Suite account (or whatever they're calling it these days) has "save passwords" turned off. So I emailed the people I've been in contact with so far and asked for a reset last night, hoping I'd have a reply this morning. Alas, no.

So I spent a bit over 5 hours on the other project today, and I can work another hour and a bit tomorrow before I hit 20 hours this week. And I can do other things! Like call all my doctors' offices in Georgia and find out how they want to handle record transfer up here, which I've had on my to-do list for a week already but this "get it done asap" project ate my life.

The weather is icky; it rained all day, and it got dark early. So I had oatmeal for breakfast and soup for lunch. Nice fall foods.

Today wasn't very exciting. I'm trying to get myself moving faster in the morning, and it sort of worked today. I set my alarm for 6:45, dozed until about 7, then farted around on my phone until 8. This is an improvement over having my alarm set to 7:15, dozing until 8, then farting around on my phone until 9. It's also getting me to bed sooner, because 6:45 is 7 hours after 11:45, so I need to be lights out by 11:30.

I'm reading a book by a VP cousin (not sure what year she was, though; after me), Karen Osborne, called Architects of Memory. It was recommended to me by my housemate because her corporate dystopian future hellscape is comparable to mine, so I could use it as a comp title in my queries. It's definitely engaging, and definitely similarly corporate-ly dystopic. Her scale is much larger than mine - there are colonies at multiple stars, aliens, wars, that sort of thing. Mine's more of a cozy corporate dystopia. Small scale.

As popular as books with corporate hellscapes are right now, you'd think my little book would garner some interest, but not so far. 3 of the 8 queries I sent got form rejections, and the other 5 are awaiting responses. (Except the one where no response means no, so after 6 weeks when I don't hear from them, they go into the rejection stack.) Two "didn't fall in love" and one "didn't connect with the characters" so far. I guess when I have 4/8 back, I'll start round 2.

Seriously, though: The Expanse and the Murderbot Chronicles are wildly popular. My crit group said it had Murderbot vibes, so it wasn't just me. And, honestly, in the year of our hellscape 2020, who doesn't want to read about a bi woman with a prosthetic arm leading strikes against the corporate bosses and winning? And also getting the girl!

(I know what the icon says. I don't seem to have uploaded the "invisible queer" icon I had over on LJ.)

I'm asexual. Now you're aware.
( tmi? )

I finished the long transcription; it took 10 hours, which is apparently within their expectations (20:1). I have another one, but that should be much easier.

My phone has decided to stop alerting me to new emails, and I don't know why. I checked all the settings, and they're all set properly. I googled the problem and tried the solution given there (make sure "sync gmail" is checked). It was already checked, of course. I unchecked it and re-checked it, at which point it alerted me to an unread email in my inbox. So maybe that will fix the problem. Or not, idk.

I don't feel like I accomplished much today. I exercised. I reviewed my first batch of annotations before submitting them, which took 2.25 hours. I went to the GYN. I came back and did another 45 minutes of audio annotations.

I feel like I should be doing more, but tonight I'll just read more tween adventures because I can.

I got another annotation contract gig today, on top of the one I was already doing, so I'm splitting my time between them. They use very different parts of my brain, and the new one is easier, but more tedious. I can manage about an hour at a time on each type before nothing looks like language or grammar anymore, at which point I'm useless, so I take a break.

I went for another walk in the park today. There were fewer people, unsurprisingly for a Monday afternoon. I also went to Lidl for the first time. It's another German discount grocery store, so it's basically like Aldi: limited selection of brands, lots of house brand stuff, off-brand German chocolates. One thing Lidl has that Aldi doesn't, however, is fresh German bread. I heard about this bakery from a student, and I decided I'd check it out.

It was pretty amazing. I went for bread, and I returned with FOUR KINDS of bread: cheese rolls, pretzel rolls, Bauernbrot (yes, *real* Bauernbrot, I had some for dinner and it was wonderful), and bagels. Being me, I also left with chocolate, hummus, pasta sauce, sweet potato chips, and blackberries.

The one thing I had hoped for finding but didn't were Amerikaner, which are the German take on black and white cookies. (I've had American-made B&Ws, and I didn't like them as much. The glaze was different? And maybe the dough was too dry? I was expecting cakier.)

Lidl also seemed to have some rebranded Trader Joe's products, that or convergent evolution. Not that I'm complaining! Lidl is <10 minutes' drive; TJ's is at least 30.

I tried to get some work done on the annotation project, but I only managed about half an hour before I stopped. And I got maybe 90 seconds annotated on a first pass.

In March or April, I requested Margaret Atwood's sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments (2019), from the Athens library. I placed a hold on an e-copy, and I was 17th in line. As far as I know, that hold never came through. But the PG County library has about a dozen e-copies, and many were available, so I checked it out there.

It's a fitting sequel, told once again through found documentation. In 2020, reading about a secret plan to overthrow a terrible Christo-fascist government that succeeds is heartening, even if it seems woefully optimistic.

3 weeks to election day. Have you voted or made a plan to vote? Our lives depend on it.

Today I intended to go for that walk, but I still didn't manage. I set 3 pm as a target, but I was still working on things at 3, so I couldn't go then. And then a little later, the sun was low and I didn't want to go.

But I got the outline for my NaNo project written and one of my friends is giving it a read-over for sense and stuff.

This week would have been Viable Paradise (24 I think), but they wisely cancelled it for the pandemic back in March or April. One of the staff members, who was in my year, organized a zoom call for one of the Thursday night traditions, and that just let out. It was fun and a little bittersweet, remembering my week on the island 7 years ago. My class is still mostly in touch through a group slack (it's VP 17 and some of our friends), and we had a con earlier this year, which was basically a dozen or so of us hanging out on zoom and talking about stuff. I got to talk about etymology and roller derby.

I won't say I didn't learn anything at VP - the instructors were good, and it helped solidify some of the things I know instinctively from being a reader for 40 years - but the biggest thing I got out of it was a couple dozen new writing peers, many of whom have become friends (and one of whom is letting me live in her guest room). There's also the very large community of VP alumni, though a lot of the early years people are off doing their own things because there was much less internet-community-stuff back then.

For people like me, who are terrified of introducing themselves to strangers, being able to go to a VP meetup at a con (when those exist again) makes it less terrifying. Especially because you know some people who know a lot of people and will introduce you.