Author Archives: Autumn

Meer, Meer, Meer

I just spent half an hour moaning for various reasons at Ceri, who gave me pats and made me laugh. She also gave me the thumbs-up for my interview when I asked her to read it, having reached the unrewarding poking-at-it-with-a-sharp-stick stage where I couldn’t see if it was making sense or not. So now it’s off to the editor of the e-zine.

And Ceri just logged back in on her way out to lunch (which I am missing, meer meer meer) to send me over to this LOLcatz poetry thread over at Making Light. Do not miss the Pride & Prejudice summary, or the Iliad, or the text-based Inferno (and the sequel).

Friday

I’m currently polishing the interview to send it out by noon. I have been industrious this morning – the dishwasher has been loaded and turned on, I’ve done a load of laundry, and I finished cleaning out the mp3 doubles on my hard drive. It’s lunch out day, and there are a couple of milestones among the lunch crowd to celebrate as well as books and CDs to pass along/back. But my system’s been collywobbly for the past two days; I’m still not better this morning and I can’t think of a single lunch spot in that area that would be kind to me. It’s been a hard week in a variety of ways, starting with the headaches and anxiety attacks on Monday (the latter making a comeback after a long absence and rooted, I think, in the fact that for the first time in months, I am free to sit down and write fiction again, but have no idea which project of the five in progress to focus on) and not exactly going downhill from there, but certainly not getting any better. At least I’ve had decent sleep the past two nights, which is a refreshing change.

Construction has hit not only my neighbourhood, but every single main artery I take to various places.

I forgot to say “white rabbits” this morning.

And one month till the annual chamber orchestra Canada Day concert!

What I Read This May

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling (reread)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling (reread)
Megatokyo vols 1-3 by Fred Gallagher et al
Someplace to be Flying by Charles de Lint (reread)
Ironside by Holly Black
The Book of Dreams by O.R. Melling
Nodame Cantabile vol. 1 by Tomoko Ninomiya
The Tomb of the Golden Bird by Elizabeth Peters
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy Sayers
Proven Guilty by Jim Butcher
Deep Magic by Diane Duane
The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler

Working Hard…

(… as you can see:)

I Can Has Cheezburger now has an lolwl!

Also:

Literecy Cat amuseth me.

And my newest installation of Firefox has a nifty dotted red line underlining words that it doesn’t recognise, which means it catches the letter juxtapositions that occur when I type too fast and never seem to see when I skim the text before posting. Of course it also underlines every UK spelling, which is mildly sigh-inducing.

Right. Back to finishing the interview. (It’s been a long day, okay? I needed some LOLcats.)

It Never Gets Any Easier

Today I’m working on a set of interview questions, and as always when I do something like this I’m staring at the screen and wondering what on earth to say in response to questions I’ve answered elsewhere, or how to encapsulate huge philosophical rambles in a paragraph or two. And to my amusement I just found this in an online horoscope today:

You may feel as if you are right, but explaining your point of view can be quite a challenge. It’s not that you are an ineffective communicator; it’s just that your feelings are outside the normal sphere of language. There just aren’t any words to describe the subtlety of your emotions. Talking about them can actually alter your mood and change the direction of your day. Act on what you know now, but don’t try to justify yourself until after the Full Moon tomorrow night.

The deadline is Friday, which is after the full moon. How convenient.

Interviews make me fret, because they represent a very narrow and static slice of an author’s philosophy. I’m never sure when I sound grounded and confident, and when I sound mildly delusional or out of touch.

LATER: There, four pages of first draft: all questions except one answered (one of those only in point form, but the outline is there) and the missing question is one that needs research in the form of going back to one of my books and checking to see what I said the first time so as not to completely repeat myself. Now, off to see a movie with HRH.

Sparky Update

He grows every single night. We swear.

New words: “Arctic tern”, “Pacific salmon,” “eels”, and he attempts “garden warblers”.

The “k” sound in “milk” and “Mark” has finally caught up and is now on board with the rest of whatever word he’s saying.

His comprehension of language has taken a leap recently. It’s like his vocabulary folded over on itself and made hundreds of new connections overnight, and now he uses short sentences all the time. “Juice now.” “All done, down please.” “Tractor outside?” “Birds eating.” “Liam hug Maggie.” “Mama drawing now.” “Read more?” And I can see him struggling to make sentences out of abstract concepts, too, not just concrete things. “Liam happy; hug Dada.” Verbs are now active pretty much all the time — running, talking, reading, flying, and so forth — unless it’s a command, and I find it really interesting that he can discriminate between the present participle and imperative forms. “Liam dancing — Mama dance,” he says when he wants me to join him as he dances.

When he wants to talk about the alphabet he calls it “E F.” Trust our kid to buck the popular catch-all term and come up with his own.

He has figured out that when we make certain lines on a piece of paper, his name is involved. “Liam,” he’ll say, pushing a crayon and his drawing book at us. So we print out his name while he watches closely, and when we are done he runs his fingertips over the letters and says, “Liam.” He’s asked us to write out other words and names, too.

There is more, but there are so many new things every day that quite honestly, we’ve forgotten them by the time night rolls around.