Kat Dancing

Blarg. I hate being ill.

I hate even more being inexplicably ill. I am running a high fever. There are no other symptoms, nothing to suggest *why* I'm running a fever, but nevertheless I am running enough of a fever to make things like, say, standing up, or going up the stairs, a great deal more arduous than might be expected.

It's better than yesterday anyway, when I couldn't use the computer because it gave me hellish headaches and I was essentially limited to laying on the couch marathon-watching the new Battlestar Galactica and letting Dan wait on me hand and foot. ("Don't get too used to this," he says periodically.)

Today the fever broke for a while, with the help of some magic Ibprofen, and I got some laundry folded and the like. It's back up now, but not as high, and I have hopes for tomorrow.

In the meantime this is about the extent of my mental capacity:

Interested Reader You have a Geek Lore rating of 65%

Your knowledge of the speculative fiction field, while far from encyclopedic, is still solidly above average. You probably have a healthy interest in the field rather than a driving obsession; either that, or your memory's just not what it's cracked up to be...

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 99% on Geek Lore

Link: The SF/F Opening Lines Test written by winternight2 on OkCupid Free Online Dating

Curse the Reaper, cowled in black
He's laughing at your failing
Pull that oar until it cracks
We're bound for better sailing
Bound for better sailing...

- Heather Dale, The Greyhound

Yes, we went to see Heather Dale in concert last night. And lo, it was good. If you happen to be into neo-Celtic, I highly, highly recommend that you lay hands upon her newest CD, The Road to Santiago. All of Heather's stuff is good, but this one's her best yet. I am listening to it now and rocking back and forth in my chair with the pure beauty of the thing.

And, hey, she's touring the UK soon. You Brits! Good stuff coming!

In other news, Dan and I officially Can Not Break Up. We've been having all the books - and now the CD - we've bought at events signed to both of us, and the acrimony involved in figuring out who the Preciouses really belong to would be planet-destroying.

After the concert we met up with cristalia and her man, who may or may not have a blog. Much, much good conversation was had, though the best of it got skipped because Dan invoked the "no discussing placenta during dinner" clause on my ass. Apparently normal people find that disgusting. Who knew?

Much kickass Chinese food was also had, though I have mislaid my ability to use chopsticks.

We caught the last subway out of Toronto and staggered home at 3 am, which means, yes, I am just getting up. But it was worth it.

Type-In Revisions: 50 pages (of 385)
Word Count, Original and Current: 118,040 / 119,600
Notes: Not much progress page-wise yesterday, but a lot of new scenage typed in. I am content.

More news from the war front, aka my family: they fired the part-time help. They'd already decided to do this when they came home for a trip and found she'd taken off a day early, leaving her cheesehouse work undone and her dairy chores for my brother to do. But she made it easy for them, apparently, by showing up an hour late for work on Monday. My mother also found out she'd been flat-out skipping on washing cheeses in the cooler; there's now several shelves in dire condition that will have to be babied back into sellable condition.

My mother's decided to stop cheesemaking until I'm home to help her, which is bad for the business, but frankly I'm glad. She'd kill herself otherwise.

My mother is bitter. I'm resigned. It seems ridiculous that you can't find people capable of doing manual labor competently, but really, you can't. It's not just us. Try hiring a construction crew to build your house and you'll see what I mean.

It's not the money (try paying a construction crew and you'll see what I mean.) Skilled workers may not have the potential for many-hundred-thousand a year income, but most of 'em are still making more than my college-degree friends, and they don't have student loans to pay off. It's not that there isn't demand for this kind of work. The professions that the Canadian Immigration site are listing as most likely to get you a speedy entry into the country are truck driver, auto mechanic, welder, and nurse (of course - everyone wants nurses), and I'm pretty sure the US is similar. It's not that the professions are inherently inferior.

It's the attitude towards the work, both on the part of society and the part of the workers.

I wish, I really wish, that we could hand a five-point list to everyone who comes on the farm. And make them believe it. It would go something like this:

You will need to learn. Skilled labor is exactly that: skilled. You will need to learn these skills. That you cannot learn these skills out of a book does not make them easy. There will not be a point at which you get to collect your certificate and stop learning. Those of us who've done it for decades are still learning. Get used to it.

You must think. If you think manual labor means you can turn off your brain, bad things will happen. If you're working with animals or heavy machinery, those bad things can potentially involve hospitals or morgues. No matter what you will be loosing us money. Contrary to popular opinion, people without college degrees think all the time, and a job that requires no degree does not free you from the inconvenience of the thought process.

Robots need not apply. We have little interest in people who show up, do the least they can, and go home. We aren't in farming for the money, we're in it for the love, and if you can't care at least a little about us and what we're doing then you will be doing a crappier job than the rest of us and creating us work.

You must do your job. This is not WalMart. If we tell you to do something, it's because it needs doing. If we tell you to do it in a specific way that takes longer, it's because the job requires it. It is not just to keep you busy or for some arcane corporate reason. If you do not do the job you are assigned when you're assigned it and in the way you are assigned it, one of us will have to. Do not act surprised when we're pissed about that.

And, finally, You are responsible for your actions. Not just to your employers, but to the universe. Yes, most of the time there is no way we can catch you doing a slipshod job or pretending to have done a job you haven't, but since we do not assign unimportant jobs (see above), "they'll never know" will not prevent the animal getting sick, the cheese going rotten, or the next person to use those stairs slipping and breaking their neck. If knowing that your job has an actual real-world effect is too much pressure for you, there are plenty of other places to seek employment.

... really, I haven't held any non-farming jobs, but I know this stuff has to be universal. There's no job on earth that's not going to require all of 'em to some degree. So why is nearly everyone who comes to work for us shocked by them, and why do we end up firing people because they're dysfunctional in most or all of them?

Oh, well. The world is going to hell in a handbasket, blah blah, et cetera. Ranting about it occasionally is good for the soul.

Type-In Revisions: 38 pages (of 385)
Word Count, Original and Current: 118,040 / 118,820
Notes: Mmm. Clean dialogue good.

Dammit, EV Nova is eating my brain again, and I have work to do.

I did pack up Dan's magazines yesterday, two boxes worth. I was allowed to chuck the PC Worlds but had to pack the 5 years' plus change MathNews. Survivors of UWaterloo will know what I'm talking about and be laughing. Still not caught up on email or comments, but I plan to deal with the raspberries and clean up the office today. Who knows? I may even get some packing done.

Oh, and:

Type-In Revisions: 18 pages (of 385)
Word Count, Original and Current: 118,040/118,910
Notes: My word count is growing. I knew it would. And it's going to keep growing for some time.

That's the problem with industry awareness. On the one hand I know it's much harder to market a book that's not in the magical 100K-120K zone. On the other, if I try and jam a book into the magic zone when it doesn't fit, it's going to be crap and thus even harder to market. My current solution to the problem is to angst about it, try to convince myself that all the cuts I make later in the book will even things out, and, finally, to stick my fingers in my ears and do the "la la, I can't hear you!" song. Because really, it's the book that matters.

But getting to sell the book would be so nice.

The hand revisions are done. I did the last 15 pages on the bus to Toronto Saturday. Where, incidentally, I had a fabulous time getting the new book by Karl Schroeder at the Bakka books signing and an equally lovely time chatting with Karl himself. I've met more authors this summer. Sometimes it really astonishes me.

From there we went to mycrazyhair's party, where I drank far too many raspberry chocolate martinis. But they tasted so good! I'm still not sure how many I had - somewhere in the vicinity of three - but it kept me very, very tipsy for a very long time. Luckily I am a harmless drunk. Some people drink too much and get maudlin or go out and do idiotic things with cars. I just talk a lot, mostly about books, and threaten people with my wild hand gestures.

Some people also get these hangover things. I don't, so that's all right.

Sunday we went to kourtneyshort's for dinner, where we discovered that we'd both made dessert. This was of course a terrible tragedy, but we faced up to it with fortitude, and ate them both. Much good financial advice also happened. Today we went for pizza in the park with fishsauce, and tomorrow we do movie night with halfwitted.

I am going to see everyone before I go if it kills me.

Okay, most everyone.

Also started the type-in half of the revision today. Full report tomorrow, but it doesn't look like this half will take two months.

Let's see:

Ten pints of raspberries in the fridge that need Dealing With (there were twelve, but I also have a Dan.)

Fifteen pages left on the Damned Book Revision before I can start typing stuff in.

At least three unresponded-to comments, probably more.

Eight days before I must be packed and out of this room. Eleven days before I leave the country.

Three parties and three events I plan on attending in that time.

And only twenty-four hours in every day.

... see? See? This is why I don't like counting things.


Revision Progress: 370 pages (of 385) (so close!)
Changes: Line edits, some wonky transitions fixed. This last half of the book has moved like treacle revision-wise, which is odd, because it's been much easier and less thought-requiring than the early bits. Perhaps that's why it's moving like treacle. Or perhaps my subconcious is just going "bored now".

(I've heard it said that writing is letting loose your inner child onto the paper. This is largely true. Ever tried to make a kid do the dishes?)

Up Next: We're past the plot peak now and into the backwash. Also, I have a few hours of bus ride coming up. I will get these fifteen damned pages done this weekend or die trying.

My life now has a plan, which I will share with y'all. Backstory included as a bonus.

I had been planning to come back to Canada and live with Dan permanently since I left back in September. Everyone knew, everyone was planning on it, everything was cool.

Except that I found out I couldn't get a Skilled Worker permit like I was planning. And Dan didn't get a better job like he was hoping, or rather got a second and better job and then lost it through no fault of his own. And the family business suddenly got nationwide attention, which was of course fantastic but meant everyone's workloads were doubled.

But it was still cool. I was still coming to Canada.

And then, two weeks before I was supposed to leave, the girl we'd hired and I'd trained to replace me got an offer for her dream job and quit, leaving my parents with one half-trained, part-time, unreliable employee to do the three jobs I'd been doing.

I still went to Canada. But there was a lot more angst, and I spent a lot of time sitting around on my butt doing nothing and feeling guilty because my family needed me, doing delusitory job searches but not really applying myself to them because I was already sure they'd turn me down and because... well, because getting a job scared me, because it meant I'd stay in Canada. And my family needed me.

The workload at home increased. My mother's hints that they'd really like it if I came back degenerated into outright offers degenerated into begging. She and my father haven't had a day off work since I left. The single reliable employee is pulling seventy-hour workweeks. No one knows what the family's pulling: it's the first rule of self-employment - never count your hours, it will only depress you.

So I'm going home.

The very good news is that Dan is going with me. This makes me more happy than I can say. From a business standpoint it will be useful to have one person around who isn't terrified of phones; a fair bit of my mom's poor cash flow stems from her accounts only paying her if she calls up and nags them, and she won't call so she doesn't get paid. Not to mention the bills which aren't getting paid because no one has the time to do the accounting and the chaos-sinkhole which is the office that is getting gladly dumped on Dan's lap. From a personal standpoint... long-distance relationships are a strain. Living on phone calls was becoming increasingly stressful for me. If we'd had to seperate again it would have been hard on me. But we don't, and this is a happiness.

Of course, Dan, who has never lived anywhere smaller than Kitchener-Waterloo (combined population 400,000) and will now be living in Galax, Virginia (total population 7,000), so no one's pretending it's going to be an easy adjustment. Nor has anyone claimed that working for his girlfriend's parents will be anything but tricky. And it's a farm: long hours, shitty pay. The agreement is that we'll work through December and see how sane everyone is.

So the plan (remember there was a plan?) goes something like this:

In about two weeks, somewhere around the second of August, I take a flight home, where I'll be working, packing all my junk that didn't get packed before I left, and looking for a house for the two of us. Dan stays here and finishes out his employment contract with the University. If he's smart he will get some packing done too, but no one's betting on it.

Three weeks later, somewhere around the 22nd, I will fly back up here. I will help Dan finish (okay, let's get real here - start) packing and hopefully get to say goodbye to some people. We drive back to Galax early September. My car does not break down. (Yes, God, I'm looking at you.) There we do all the packing I didn't do (we are being realistic here) and move into the house I damned well better have found by then.

We work on the farm until the New Year.

By New Year's, we'll have stopped milking until March, which means we'll also have stopped making cheese. The Christmas rush will be over. At this point Dan and I will decide whether we can commit for another year or whether we want to move on. If we move on, that leaves two essentially quiet months in which my family can search for replacements and get them trained. I won't be leaving them in a bind this time. And, yes, that's important to me.

It's not much of a plan, but it'll do.


Revision Progress: 346 pages (of 385)
Changes: Line edits. Why is it all line edits? Is the book genuinely better towards the end, or am I just not revising properly? *angst*
Up Next: At a guess? More line edits.

Our Toronto Trek experience started off with a bang on Friday... "bang" being the noise made by my car engine as we were passing Mississauga on the 401. The bang was followed by several other bangs and scary noises, a loss of power to the engine, and a small but disconcerting amount of smoke coming from under the hood.

The good news was that I was passing an exit at the time and was able to get myself off the road with minimal trouble and danger. The bad news was that I didn't know anywhere to go but Canadian Tire, who overcharged me royally. I won't say how much I paid, but let's just say that it was 4 times as much for labor as it was for parts and I happen to know the job only took 3 hours. Mr.Credit Card is bleeding.

The other good news is that the car was fixable - never guarunteed since my car is a 1989 model with a lot of miles. Apparently some sort of gasket thing blew, getting oil all over the engine (thus, the smoke) and the ignition wires, which then had to be replaced. Expensive, but repairable. And everyone I've talked to has said that Canadian Tire does a good job even if they charge out the ass, so at least I'm not looking at paying more money to have my mechanic go back and do the job right.

This is my third highwayside breakdown this year. Maybe the Motor Gods are trying to tell me something.

After the shaky start, though, things went better. Nothing daunted by misfortune (well, Dan was nothing daunted; I was daunted and whiny), we abandoned the car to the car doctors and took public transport the rest of the way to the con, arriving a mere 4 hours late, and immediately harrassed-looking Con people swooped down upon Dan, declared him Staff, and took him away to join the ranks of the harrassed. I was lucky. I got to eat first.

The rest of the con can be summed up by volunteering-panels-volunteering-panels-room parties-SLEEP. Repeat.

I had a grand time. I got to hang out a lot with cristalia, which was a pleasure, and my panels were pretty much all good this year, though I think the first (We Don't Need No Stinking Elves!) was the best. Everyone was fresh and energetic, we had a good crowd, and Dan did an exceptionally good job moderating. The crowds at the panels were overall larger than last year, which was also nice. We didn't get to meet up with eeyore42 and labelleizzy, but considering the Plane Nightmare that the latter had it was understandable.

Volunteering was also fun. It's neat to get to see the backside of the con and how it's run (and perks like running into Denise Crosby, the actress who played Tasha Yar on TNG, are another plus) and you get to hang out with a lot of cool people and have fun. Of course, the volunteering thing is a slippery slope: it appears I'm being co-opted for Staff next year, and Dan may be moving up to ConCom. Joy. Oh well, you get a nifty t-shirt.

Sleep was slim to none, but I was expecting that.

And now it's time to deal with all that work I was putting off until "after TT". Damn. Every silver lining has its cloud, I guess....

My Toronto Trek schedule is as follows:

Friday, 8 pm
We Don't Need No Stinking Elves!
Location: Mississauga B
Program Description: Elves, Dwarves, and other Nordic and Celtic creatures have long been staples of the fantasy genre, typified by the Lord of the Rings. But the Lord of the Rings was published in the 1950s, and authors such as Michael Moorcock, David Gemmell, Tad Williams, and George R.R. Martin have gone far afield of Middle-earth. A team of panelists discusses the merits of the old archetypes, and how fantasy can move beyond them while retaining its appeal.
Panelists: Dan Zlotnikov, Kat Feete, Leah Bobet, Wayne Borean


Saturday, 11 am
SF: Recommended Reading
Location: Mississauga A
Program Description: Space Opera, Hard SF, Military, Cyberpunk, Time Travel, Tomorrow fiction, Fantasy, etc.... Come hear what's good and new (or, at least, new to you) in SF books.
Panelists: Leah Bobet, Kat Feete, Scott Tilson, Paul Kuypers

Saturday, 5 pm
SF vs. Shakespeare
Location: Hamilton
Program Description: Is science fiction literature? How does it stack up to the classics in "real" writing?
Panelists: Arlene Marks, Debby Ruh, Robert B. Marks, Peter Halasz, Kat Feete

Sunday noon
Got a "Bug" in Your "Eye"?
LocationMississauga A
Program Description: Surveillance has become ultra-hip as depicted in TV, and is now everywhere. Many of the most visible signs we are being watched in everyday life are mostly ignored by the masses. Do you look up and smile at the cameras in your local store, or just pass them by as a part of life? There are movements in the world of surveillance for "sousveillance" and the right for an individual to be able to "watch the watchers." From the Vatican to the local GAP, we will discuss infiltration techniques and figure out who is watching whom?
Panelists: David G. Stephenson (M), Karl Schroeder, Dan Zlotnikov, Kat Feete, Lorne Kates



If you're going to be at TT, and any of the panels interest you, feel free to stop by. I'm gonna feel awfully stupid talking to that empty room otherwise.

(Dammit, I am so not prepared for that surveillance panel. Time to raid the BoingBoing archives or something.)


Revision Progress: 341 pages (of 385)
Changes: Blocked out an interview with the alien ambassador to replace the trashed news scene, then made it most of the way through the And Here We Explain Nine-Tenths of the Mystery in One Long Multi-Person Conversation scene. It isn't nearly as crap as I remember it being. Joey still reads like a over-caffinated monkey on crack, but this seems somehow to work.
Up Next: Finish the Long Multi-Person Conversation scene and hope it continues to not be crap.

I've been making bread since I was ten; one of my early memories is my mother smacking my hand because I was squeezing the dough through my fingers rather than kneading it properly. I like cooking - okay, really like cooking - but I love making bread. There's just something about it - the way dough feels when it's right and you should stop adding flour, the way it smells when it's done rising - that makes me feel happy.

But bread is, at the end of the day, bread. I'd gotten used to having people say, "mmm, nice", and then going on to lavish praise on my brother the dessert-maker. People just don't get that excited about bread, I told myself. Live with it.

Imagine my surprise when I got not one, but two lavish and excited bits of praise over the same bread, within the same week, and realized that all these years I've been feeding the wrong ethnic group.

I should have been giving bread to Russians.

Russians - Eastern Europeans, I should say - appreciate bread, it appears. First it was Dan practically begging me to make a specific bread and then making soul-satisfying noises when he consumed it. And then a Ukrainian friend of his that he'd apparently shared bread with stopped me in the halls to tell me what good bread I made, and that he hadn't had bread like that since he left home. He expanded voluably on the subject of how you couldn't get good bread in this country (the hand gestures explaining just how much store bread one had to eat to get full are something I won't forget in a hurry) and proceeded to ask, rather plantively, if I could make him a loaf of his own?

All this adds credence to a theory of mine, namely, that people in the English-speaking, British-settled countries have a below average appreciation for food. Having lived in Britain - where I watched in horror as, day after day, my hostess mercilessly boiled innocent potatoes, vegetables, and meat until they expired horribly or, as she put it, "were done" - I can understand. We are just not culturally programmed to enjoy food. We consume it, but we don't think about it or consider it worthwhile to expend time or - God forbid - money to get good food. We respond only to the strongest of flavors: really hot food, really salty food, really sweet food. Staple foods and subtle flavors pass us by, barely registering on our palate because we're trained to think of them as "just food."

I think that's a shame. Not just because I'm a cook and like having my work appreciated, and not just because my mother makes homestead cheese and I'd like her work to sell, and not just because my country is sadly obese and a lot of it comes from not paying attention to what it puts in its mouth. But because I like food. I really do. Eating good food is a pleasure and a joy, one I'd like to share with more people.

Really. You guys don't know what you're missing.


Revision Progress: 326 pages (of 385)
Changes: I'm finding a pattern to these "burst of inspiration" pages. They are, plotwise, characterwise, bookwise, very good; I don't have to make any big sweeping changes. It's technically that they suck. I seem to forget, in the throes, that writing one word is better than writing three, that repeating myself is bad, and that adjectives and adverbs are the sugar of the English language and must be used sparingly lest they overwhelm the writing. And don't even get me started on how bad the transitions are. So loads of little changes but no big ones.
Up Next: The news spot leading into the next chapter sucks; it's got "hmm, not sure what to do here, let's write something stupid and move on" all over it. It Must Go.

For somebody who's unemployed, I sure do seem to be busy these days.

Friday I went on a strawberry raid with halfwitted and Dan. Originally I think the plan was for me to drive halfwitted around in the country until we found a stand to rob, but Dan pointed out that it was much cheaper to do pick-your-own, and I backed him up on the basis that it would be more fun and I was itching to do something productive with my hands. Halfwitted was underwhelmed by the idea but eventually agreed.

The end result was a 9 am excursion of Dan (testy), halfwitted (groggy), and me (chipper. I like mornings. The other two hated me) to the country, where we picked 21 litres of strawberries and bought a further 9. I then ran around getting everyone to their shopping-and-work related destinations (I am She With Wheels) and spent the rest of the afternoon making or attempting to make strawberry ice cream. They weren't kidding about needing to refreeze the cartridge between batches. Who knew?

Then it was roleplaying until Too Late At Night and up early the next morning for another, more successful, attempt at ice cream, and a far less successful attempt at catching the bus to Toronto. Good thing I have a car. I survived the waking nightmare that is the 401 and made it to Elizabeth Bear's signing at Bakka on time and only somewhat shellshocked. The signing was great; Bear (aka matociquala) was very funny and very nice, and I spent far too much time talking shop with her and cristalia and Sarah, where talking shop is defined as "saying things which come into my head, some of which have something to do with writing." It was the first time I'd talked writing with people who didn't glaze over after the first fifteen minutes or so. I babbled. A lot. No one seemed to mind, so perhaps it wasn't as much as it felt.

Then home again (late) to dress and get to halfwitted's party, which was strawberry-full and very, very fun. I got to see people I haven't seen since last year, which was good, and I drank a lot of strawberry daquiris and talked to a lot of people and generally had a grand time until I passed out quietly on the couch at around 2 am.

Now I'm drifting around the house feeling the effects, and my body is reminding me what I forgot to do in those hectic few days. Namely, eat. Aside from a lamb chop at the party, a hastily-gulped sandwich in Toronto, and an unquantifiable number of strawberries, there hasn't been much food in my life of late. Which may explain the driftiness.

And tomorrow we're going to Toronto again for another signing and a play, and next weekend is Toronto Trek. Dear. God.

*hides*

Revision Progress: 321 pages (of 385)
Changes: Added a bit of conversation that makes Joey's commander look less like an idiot and more like someone backed into a corner. Made several similar adjustments; clarifying people's motives seems to be the bit I forgot in this section.
Up Next: More of the same, but I won't get to it today. Or tomorrow. Damn you, social life.

Holy crap. Someone bombed the London Underground.

*hands pressed over mouth*

Shit. Shit shit shit. I've got friends in London.

Nobody seems to know what's happening or what's going on.

Shit. Anybody know if BBC has a net feed?

Book news:

Finished Revelation Space. The glaciers were worth it. Interesting to see how he turned a science fiction trope on its head, and the end was very satisfying in other respects as well, though I dislike it when a book ends at, y'know, the end, rather than giving us a couple dozen pages to see what the New World Order looks like and come down from the book high. Neal Stephenson has this habit too. Annoying.

And then, for something completely different, I read Anne Bishop's Daughter of the Blood. Hrm.

Technically, the book drove me batshit. POV characters multiplied like rabbits throughout; at the midpoint I counted ten, and after that I lost count. It wasn't until that midpoint that I was able to narrow the potential main characters down to two, and not till the end was I sure of them. The time compression was rather starling; a scene break might indicate a change of POV, or the vanishing of a few months, or both. Sometimes a scene started with the same character a few hours, or minutes, after the last scene, sometimes days or weeks, but mostly it wasn't specified and you had to guess. I found myself in a state of disorientation throughout the book, unable to guess at which head I'd be in next or how much time had passed, utterly bereft of any anchors.

The other thing that threw me out of the book was the sex. It is a book about sex. I don't mean that there are a lot of explicit sex scenes, although there are some. I mean that I can count the number of relationships in the book that aren't sexualized in some way on the fingers of one hand. (Including the relationships with the twelve-year-old girl. Eww.) Since sex plays a small, fun, but ultimately minor part in my own life, this left me yawning through much of the book that I wasn't going "eww" through. It was so... predictable. Everybody either has or wants to have sex with everyone else, with levels of eww-ness and respective positions depending on how much the author wants us to sympathize with the character. Ho hum.

There are some good parts as well, though. It's set up early on that this is a messed up society waiting for a savior, and much of the book is setup for that savior, which does necessitate some eww-ness. The characters are pretty good when they're not obsessively having/contemplating sex. There is gender balance: the book is neither feminist or mysogenist, either of which would have killed it for me, but rather a wholehearted condemnation of sex-as-power for either gender. And the savior herself is simply perfect for the setting. There's also a lot of raw humor involved in giving a twelve-year-old girl more magical power than anyone else in the world... and a certain amount of potential pathos, which Bishop handles with a light but sure touch.

All and all, it was an enjoyable bit of light reading, and the exasperating problems were balanced out by the redeeming humor and the hope that things will at some point get better. I compliment Bishop on setting up a world that is quite real and that I can look forward to seeing ripped down. Here's hoping that the next few books in the series have more of the good and less of the bad.


Revision Progress: 299 pages (of 385) (three-quarters done! Yes!)
Changes: Largely line edits and clarifications.
Up Next: Big crashing plot scene. Gotta check for believability, which means must... read... slower!

Gaarh. Blurg. Still recovering from the free "raise awareness of world poverty" concert (Live 8) I attended yesterday along with Dan, fish_sauce, my landlord, angelfire, her roomate, and the roomate's boyfriend. Cool people. Cool concert.

It's about the cause, not the music. But the music's pretty darn amazing too! It's like a bonus!"

-- Ed Robertson of Bare Naked Ladies, comment from the stage

Things about the concert:

1) I'm sorry, I've seen them twice, and I still don't get what the big deal is about the Tragically Hip. First off, they seem to have some long-running technical problem; both times I've seen them the band has consistantly been drowning out the lyrics. Second, their frontman is clearly an egomanic under the delusion that he and his antics are much more attractive and entertaining than they actually are. But finally - and most importantly - I can't feel any heart in them. The music is nice enough, very smooth, very professional, and what I could hear of the lyrics seemed clever, and the frontman's voice was fine, but there was no energy. Not for me. It all felt very lukewarm. Like, hey, I don't mind listening to this, it's nice background music, but....

Meh. Several people have told me that the Hip are a quintessentially Canadian band. All surface, no heart? I sure hope that's not the "real" Canada.

2) One of the cool things about this sort of concert, on the other hand, is getting to hear something really good that you'd never have heard otherwise. For me, this was Dobacaracol. Singing percussionist chicks. Dude. They were incredible. I'm a rhythm junkie, so this was a real high point of the show for me, and I jumped around like a maniac. It's a measure of the sheer energy that these guys brought to the stage that, in spite of the fact they were singing in French and I couldn't understand a word, I more than once caught myself mouthing nonsense syllables just because I wanted to sing along so badly. I'm going to try and track down a CD, though I have the sneaking suspicion that these might be one of those "at their best live" bands.

3) Bryan Adams did not play "Summer of '69". Thank you, Bryan.

4) My first thought on seeing some of the performers was "Dude. He's old." (Deep Purple, for example. I didn't know these guys were still alive, much less performing.) But it was damned interesting to see what those older performers could do with a crowd.Gordon Lightfoot walked on stage with nothing but a guitar and never moved a finger he didn't have to, and he had a crowd of 40,000 in complete, rapt attention. This opposed to the rap group DMC who, despite their bounding around the stage, shouting and pointing at the crowd, employing a young lady whose only function was to bounce up and down in a bikini, and bringing on a member of Aerosmith, never managed to get the crowd's full attention.

Of course, acts like Lightfoot and Deep Purple and Neil Young have been on stage for decades - they're bound to be good at it by now. And the divide wasn't that clear: the distinctly aging Motley Crue were among those who got a lukewarm crowd response, and Great Big Sea - a handful of guys and one boudran - had people chanting for them straight through Celione Dion's televised act. But still - you have to wonder if some of the younger acts, brought up on MTV and music videos and produced tracks and the choreographed shock-value road to fame, aren't missing a little something when they face the crowd one-on-one. They certainly were for me.

(On a side note, you know you were raised by hippie parents when you say "Motley who?" but know exactly who Gordon Lightfoot is, can sing along to every one of the Deep Purple songs, get terribly confused at the opening notes of one televised song because the Beatles are dead but that's definately a Beatle singing before you remember that Paul is still alive, and make a complete idiot of yourself jumping up and down in excitement when the Who appear on the television screen. And then bore everyone in your party explaining that they're still pretty good but were better before Keith Moon died. "Child of the sixties" isn't an age descriptor, it's a state of mind.)

5) The response of the crowd to the televised broadcasts was... interesting. More on that later, when I've had more time to think it through.

6) Sunburn sucks.

7) And, finally... I admit I was skeptical about the benefit concert aspect of the whole thing. I couldn't see how holding a free concert for a few hundred thousand people over the world raised money or did any good for a cause. I mean, I consider myself fairly socially aware, and I wasn't going for anything but the free music.

That changed when I got to the concert and realized that what they'd done was bribed us with free music to come and be a captive audience for their "Make Poverty History " campaign. This was at least a welcome change from the last big concert that I attended, where we were a captive audience for a "Buy things! Cars! Coke! Naked women! Buy anything!" advertising campaign, and we paid a great deal of money for the privilege.

And in my case it worked. I went home and signed the various online petitions we'd been asked to sign (they're on the Live 8 site. Go sign), and I went home with a far greater grasp on the magnitude of the poverty problem than I'd had. I didn't give money, because I'm broke, and I probably won't do more than what I've done because I'm lazy... but of the 40,000 people at the Canadian concert, I'm guessing more than half will make the kind of token efforts I have. A significant percentange may be inspired to do more. And that's just here; according to the Live 8 website, between the concerts and the various broadcasts of the concerts, they believe they've reached 3 billion people with their message.

Yup. That's a real effect.

This concert was, in its way, a part of history. I'm proud to have been a part of it.

Albeit a rather small, sunburnt part.




Revision Progress: 284 pages (of 385)
Changes: Cut the dead-plot-thread scene and spliced the bits before and after into what I hope is a viable stand-alone scene, with a bit of information about Big Bad Organization thrown in to fill it out. In the middle of line edits for the next scene, realized it required an earlier scene covering more of Joey's war history to make sense, so found a place for that and jotted some notes on what I needed there.
Up Next: A rather complicated plot-full scene, and I wrote it all at once, so only the vaguest idea what I'll find in there.

For the past week or so I've been reading Alistair Reynold's Revelation Space. The jury is still out on whether I'm enjoying it or not.

Reynolds is part of a small wave of speculative fiction writers coming out of Britain; others I've read are China Mieville, Charlie Stross, and Ken MacLeod, and I feel like I've read enough to make some tentative pronouncements on what this wave is about.

One thing the writers all seem to have in common is a distinct socialist bent, refreshing after the liberatarian-dominated American sf. (Not that I've anything in particular against liberatarians, although I find them sadly naive on certain points. It's just nice to read something different.) The more important distinction, though, is that they are all very setting-focused... and more than that, they concentrate on making the setting as alien and distinctive as they can. At the same time, they're still filtering the setting through people, and it is the people on which they're focusing. None of it is what I'd call hard sf, that is, technology-focused. It's far closer to social sf, but not quite. The overall intent seems to be to cram people into the weirdest, most contorted molds that can be thought of and see which bits still look human.

Mieville does it best, in my opinion. I buy his books for the lush imagery and the sense of brain-melting, but I keep reading because his characters are real to me and I'm desperate to find out what horrible fate is in store for them. (This is, after all, Mieville. It's always a horrible fate.) MacLeod was the least successful - in fact, I must admit that the one book of his I tried to read (Cassini Division) I never finished. Despite the fact that it was written in first person, the main character was never real to me; she was too blatantly an observer-narrator, too clearly a vehicle for conveying all the weird and nifty ideas of the book through. And they were very weird and very nifty ideas. I am, I confess, a very shallow reader. I read to be entertained, and I don't find explore-the-theme-park "ideas" books entertaining enough.

Reynolds is somewhere in between. He writes what I think of as skeleton characters; they aren't two-dimensional by any means, and I find their motivations and actions perfectly believable, but they've clearly been given just the amount of attention and care that allows the writer to hang a story on them without breaking them. More to the point, they haven't nerves. I am interested in such characters, I care what happens to them, I am willing to read about them - but when they bleed, I am but an interested and mildly pitying bystander. I do not bleed with them, as I do with Mieville's characters. They do not make me feel what they feel. They are believable, but not compelling.

That's one of the reasons I'm moving so slowly through Reynolds's book. The other is that watching his plot happen is like watching glaciers mate: the scenery's good, and you get the feeling that the end result will be both spectacular and unique, but do bring a packed lunch. I am 304 pages into this 545 page book and I am only just beginning to sense the shape of where this thing is going and what is driving it and how all these bloody characters are going to meet up. The lapse in book-time between chapters is frequently months or years, the events sometimes dramatic in their own right but frequently very tiny in the overall plot sense, little infintesmal moves towards a distantly seen, vaguely conceived ending. It's lovely, but not for the impatient.

The general result has been that I read a chapter, leave the book for a day or two, read another chapter, forget the book, read a few more chapters... I do keep drifting back; the characters are just good enough, the plot just interesting enough to make me wonder what's going to happen. But a grabbing story this one's not.

Perhaps I'll change my mind in a few weeks when I finish it.


Revision Progress: 269 pages (of 380)
Changes: Less than I thought there would be. Added some description and chopped a dead plotline: the rest was just line edits.
Up Next: A scene that largely consists of floundering and dead plotlines but needs to be there for timing purposes. I'll come up with something.