Der Feuervogel aufersteht.

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.

I bought an e-copy of RB Lemberg's The Four Profound Weaves, and I had a chance to read it last night. It's about an old man and an old woman who go on a journey - a quest, even - to find the old woman's aunt, from whom the old man wants to receive a name and the old woman wants to learn the final Profound Weave: to weave a cloth from death.

It's part of their Birdverse series, which includes these three stories, which I am too lazy to mark up the html for.

http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/geometries-of-belonging/
http://uncannymagazine.com/article/the-desert-glassmaker-and-the-jeweler-of-berevyar/
http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/grandmother-nai-leylits-cloth-of-winds/

And it is related to the third of these. The nameless old man was a protagonist there.

This story/book is about so much more than the plot. It is, at its root, a profoundly trans and queer story. Both protagonists are trans (spoiler, I guess?), and the nameless man spends time thinking about what it means to be a man and his people's traditions of masculinity and femininity. Among the nameless man's home culture, it is the norm for groups of women (3 seems common, but I don't know if that's a requirement) to form an oreg, a group of lovers who go on trading journeys together. Men remain inside a separate, locked quarter, where they are scholars and artificers.

It's sad, in many ways, and angry, but also incredibly hopeful. The final chapter hit me right in the feels, in a very similar way that The Song of Achilles did: that queer place, where there is hope and anger and sadness, lost family and found.

Lemberg's writing style is poetic without being impenetrably dense, and it reminds me of Ursula Le Guin's prose at its finest. (I'm sure RB would be pleased with that comparison! I know that "Stone Telling" is meaningful to them.)

I highly recommend this book. You can find it at all the usual suspects.
kobo
bezosland
bookshop.org

I don't have a theme for today. I worked on prep for my NaNo project. I've got the story written out, so now I just need to break it into a scene-by-scene thing with Feelings and that type of stuff. I have the feeling that this is going to be one of those things that I have to just write and let it come out and then figure out what it means. I hope not, because revising that kind of work is a royal PITA. Though I'll probably have to figure out some structural elements as I write through it, or in revisions.

So over the next couple weeks, around my column writing, agent-list making, and book writing, I'll be hammering at least a rough shape of this out.

Ooops, I got distracted by the NaNoWriMo page and thought I posted this.

I mentioned that I've been reading a lot this year, and I've been keeping track in the back of my planner, where I wanted to record the games I officiated this past season, but ... well, you know.

I've been interested in radical retellings of ancient stories since I read The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley last year, which is the story of Beowulf told from the perspective of Grendel's mother. Grendel, you may recall, is the monster who kills the Danes in their mead-hall, Heorot, and Beowulf is the one who comes to rescue them and slay the monster (and nails his arm above the door). Mom, who never gets a name in the text, gets revenge and kills Beowulf as he kills her.

The Mere Wife reimagines it in a modern-day setting. Heorot Hall is a gated suburban community in a forested area beside a mountain. Grendel's mother is an Iraq War vet with PTSD, and she takes Grendel up to the cave where her ancestors came from, which is linked to the town through history. Beowulf is a cop.

About a month ago, Headley published a new translation of Beowulf that uses modern idiom (which would make many purists cringe) but keeps a lot of the old Germanic elements: alliteration, kennings (whale-road for sea, for example), verse form. I bought it the day it came out and truly enjoyed it (and got a friend to buy the audiobook on the strength of my recommendation).

A week or so after the publication, Headley was on a discussion about radical translations with Emily Wilson, whose translation of the Odyssey made waves a few years ago, and Madeline Miller, a classicist who writes retellings of the classics from minor characters' perspective. In this discussion, several titles were recommended.

Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, which is probably more a novella than a novel, tells the Odyssey from Odysseus' wife's perspective, with the 12 servant girls who were hanged serving as the Greek chorus. Odysseus is not the most reliable narrator, and Atwood includes rumors that he's off at a brothel, and other things, from the bards. The part that sticks out most strongly in my memory is in one of the Chorus sections that's set up as a trial (I think it was in this part, anyway) is Iphigenia, Agamemnon's daughter, rage-crying "They told me I was going to my wedding. I was fourteen."

Miller's Song of Achilles was something I'd heard of, probably via tumblr, but never really thought about, but she was so interesting on this panel, and the attendees raved about it, so I borrowed an ebook copy from my new local library. It's the legend of Achilles, as it says on the tin, told by Patroclus, his closest companion and best beloved. Patroclus doesn't appear much in the Iliad, himself, except at the end, when Hector kills him and Achilles makes the river run red with Trojan blood and then kills Hector and drags his body around the city repeatedly.

Scholars (mostly male, of course) have traditionally interpreted this as "friendship" and "very close friends." More recently, scholars (younger, female, queer) have raised a collective eyebrow at this "just bros being pals" interpretation, because, well, you don't get super-mega revenge for your ~friend~, but you will for your lover.

So, anyway, Miller's novel focuses on the special relationship between the two boys, who grow into men, and the way she writes Patroclus and his emotions about Achilles is achingly beautiful. And knowing, as we do, how their story ends makes so many things devastatingly heartbreaking. I highly recommend it!

My absentee ballot arrived on Monday, and I filled it out today. It'll go out in the mail tomorrow. Kinda sad I don't get a peach sticker this year.

I picked up the half dozen things IKEA had from the order I placed 9/21 (and cancelled yesterday because they were taking too long to deliver, even though they only had about half the things I wanted in the store), so now I have a cart with wire baskets for my clothes (a Jonaxel, if you're playing at home). And I feel a bit more settled in here. Most of my things are in boxes, totes, or suitcases (which may suggest that I don't actually need them - but I definitely enjoy having a winter wardrobe and blankets, and most of my things in storage are books, anyway), but I'm ok with that. I also have a matching soap dispenser and tumbler set and a suction cup basket for the shower.

Tonight is the VP debate (and I hope Kamala doesn't get covid from probable plague-bearer Pence and that inadequate af plexi barricade). I'm going to watch with a group chat with roller derby people in another window, because that was the only thing that made the 1st presidential debate tolerable.

I have a bunch of friends who are really into fountain pens. If you also have fountain-pen-loving friends, you know how enthusiastic they are about their hobby. Their frequently expensive hobby.

20+ years ago, when I was a junior in college studying in Germany, I picked up a Lamy Safari (yellow) because everybody in Germany uses fountain pens and I wanted to fit in. I never really got the hang of it, or never used it often enough - the ink always dried out. American notebook paper is too thin for fountain pen ink; it bleeds straight through.

In 2014, when I was doing a job observation thing in Mannheim, I picked up a Lamy AL-Star (the official color is purple, but it's a lovely deep burgundy) and a package of ink cartridges. All of this sat mostly unused for a while ... until my stupid, evil friends enabled me to get ink samples. And also because Goulet was doing BOGO on the Jinhao Shark for Shark Week. (They're $4 pens to begin with. I have 4 or 5. I like them for testing ink samples.)

So, anyway, I bought myself a Monteverde Rodeo Drive in October, and I like the heft of it, but the nib is very dry, and reviewers said that dipping it in water helped, so I'll fill that pen up and see if that works for me. When I bought it, Goulet was doing a free bottle of Monteverde ink with Monteverde pen purchase, so I got a bottle of Mandarin orange, and it's a really lovely autumn orange.

I also have a bottle of Colorverse Delicious Sleep (purple) and a small bottle of Colorverse Antimatter (greyish silver with a shimmer) that came as a freebie with the Delicious sleep. Then there's the Lamy Violet, Kaweco Summer Purple, and Monteverde Black in cartridges. I tested Diamine Syrah, Oxblood, and Sherwood Forest, and I liked the Syrah better as a red, and the green was beautifully perfect.

Serious Fountain Pen Nerds like to match their pens to the inks they put in them (the Syrah matches my AL-Star perfectly, but Lamy uses stupid proprietary cartridges and I don't wanna buy a bottle because I'm lazy, whine.) You don't have to; I assume even the biggest nerds don't do it all the time. But it's fun to try to find the perfect pen for the ink (or perfect ink for the pen, lol).

Honestly, Lamy is probably my favorite brand of pen. The Safari is a very basic resin pen, and the AL-Star is its slightly fancier aluminum brother. There are Very Expensive Lamy pens, too, of course - a friend of mine has a 2000 and says it's the best pen he's ever used, always flows perfectly - but a $25 Safari or $35 AL-Star will get you a lot of value for the money. You just have to either buy their stupid proprietary cartridges in limited colors or buy a converter or two and fill them from bottled ink. (Which honestly isn't that bad, I just like to complain, because it's harder to travel with a bottle than with a pack of cartridges.)

Lamy is a German brand, and, unsurprisingly, it's extremely popular over there. The Safari is babby's first fountain pen for middle school, and it seems like a lot of people stick with that one or go up a step. It's just a great workhorse pen! So if you want to try the fountain pen lifestyle, it's a great place to start.

I don't quite understand the point of $3000+ pens (they exist, seriously); they can't write 100 times better than my Lamy. At that point, it's like wine, I guess: the prestige/collector value. Yeah, that pen is very pretty, and I've heard good things about Pineider's quality, but, like. I just ... can't. (Then there's these, which are extremely pretty, and the least expensive is $200, which is about the highest price I can personally justify spending on a pen, but I get balky about $75. I've never spent more than $50 or so on a pen. I also can't swear that I'll never buy a fancy-ass pen if I miraculously become rich. This one, to be specific. Or this one.)

So, anyway, fountain pens. They're pretty fuckin cool.

I've used this pandemic to catch up on an extensive backlog of reading, mostly fiction, that I amassed during grad school. I read a lot of things through the Athens library's ebook lending service (the entire Witcher series, for one) and bought some others (Network Effect, because I love Murderbot). The PG County library has a much larger selection, which I look forward to taking advantage of.

At the moment, I'm re-reading CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series and focusing on the linguistic aspects so I can write about it for Tor. I'm re-buying the whole mess (all 21 fucking books) digitally, because I let the paperbacks of 1-18 go in the process of packing for the divorce.

I also need to (re)read a bunch of sociolinguistics articles that are saved on my computer, so I can use that information in the book I'm writing for Patreon. The problem is that I have a LOT of them, some of which I never actually read, just downloaded because they sounded interesting. Others would be a re-read, because I read them for a class or a paper.