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Behold My Blocks, Ye Mighty, And Despair
Gareth gleefully declares: "You can build a strongest tower and it will still fall down!"

From The Department Of Good Problems To Have
Anybody out there know anything about OCR software?

A couple of Elder Statesmen of the Genre have offered reprints of stories they wrote back in the Age of Typewriters. They're offering to retype the stories, but surely there's a way to take that task off their hands without having to do it myself.

Would taking hard copy to Kinko's make this problem go away? Because it would be lovely to have the Good without the Problem.

Thank Goodness For Jane Austen, The Opiate Of The Masses
Asking people for things makes me twitchy.

That's not quite right.

In person, I can brazen it out just fine. In person, I can usually rely on my superpowers as the Vortex of Schmooze. It's when email and telephones are involved that I start twitching.

That's still not quite right.

Asking people who are higher up the totem pole than I am, especially when there are valid reasons for them to be up there, and even more so when I know they're busy, makes me twitchy.

Almost right. Try again.

To be more precise, sending out requests of this sort makes me panicky, for no good reason, because what's the worst that can happen? My emailed attempt at a charming request might be met by an email that says the busy person is too busy, or, if s/he's completely swamped, by no email at all.

I have half a dozen of these panic-inducing emails to send. Really, they should have gone out months ago. The only thing that makes it possible to click the send button is taking frequent breaks to read a page or two of Pride and Prejudice.

Fortunately, Jane Austen has much milder side effects than most opiates do. So far, the most persistent side effect is an even more frequent than usual inclination to kiss my spouse.

Sticks + Dirt = Literacy
Gareth was drawing in the dirt with a stick at the playground the day it occurred to me to write his name for him for the first time. I spend a lot of time at playgrounds, and usually Gareth has handed me at least one stick to keep for him. Frustrated writer that I am, I wrote for the audience I had handy. G A R E T H

The next couple of playground visits, he told me he was writing his name in the dirt. Random lines, of course, but it was cool that he was interested.

Today he wanted me to write his name, and mine, and Dan's, and to sound out all the letters. Then he wanted a letter A all by itself, and then an E. After considering this, crinkling his little eyebrows the way he does when he's thinking really hard, he said, "I will draw the sun for you," by which, of course, he meant to ask me to draw it for him. Still has the I/you problem. So there was the sun, in a rather cruder form than the Lascaux painters would have produced. "Write sun?" Still the crinkled eyebrows. "Moon?" He was especially puzzled by my attempt to explain the double O's, but then he started getting excited and proposed, "Anthony! Tiffany!" They're the longest names he knows.

I'm not sure whether he was thrilled to learn that his mommy can write even three-syllable words, or that three-syllable words can be written at all. Whatever it was, thrilling is not too strong a word for it.

I've read a lot of books about gender differences and brain development over the past two years, all of them for laypeople. Which is fine. Although I can read the original studies and follow them, I'm not sure I have the chops to tell a well-designed study from a bad one, so I might as well make do with the popularizers. Most of these people fret about boys' difficulties in learning to write--very young boys are slower to develop fine motor skills than girls are, have a harder time sitting still than girls do, suffer more than girls do from being cooped up indoors. Broken down into small enough pieces, the arguments sound plausible.

The alarmist tone of some of these books makes it sound like it's a miracle any boys at all become literate. It's tempting to write all these authors and say, When will there be a male Shakespeare? When will a boy grow up to be as great a writer as Yeats? After a couple of centuries of arguments that women were uneducable because there had never yet been a female Shakespeare, now we get arguments that schools should be made less girl-friendly because boys are innately less capable of literacy.

I'm persuaded that many boys have experienced frustration, which then their teachers and parents got to share, with the way the earliest writing skills are taught, but I'm not persuaded that the solution is to delay introducing reading and writing until age seven (though that delay seems to work just fine in Finland), or to slow girls down so boys won't conclude that literacy has girl cooties.

Who says first writing experiences have to happen on paper, with a pencil, indoors at a desk? Who says recess is the only time kids should be learning outdoors? Why not just let kids write big, gross-motor-skill-friendly letters outside, in dirt, with sticks? Surely that would be more fun and productive for kids generally, and not just boys. And surely lots of other people must have thought of it. I wonder why it's not showing up in the mainstream discussion as an option.

Six Impossible (Or At Least Improbable) Things Before Thanksgiving Dinner
It's an especially thankful time here in Averyland. Another round of chemo, another round of imaging, and it looks more and more like my brother-in-law may win his cancer fight. The main tumor's shrinking "spectacularly," according to Dr. Bigwig, and the metastases are starting to respond, too.

Cancer makes you thankful for the weirdest things. The chemo alone won't be enough to finish the job; there will have to be a big scary surgery for that. When we got word that Zach would get to have his scary surgery, with its 50% odds that he'd make it off the operating table alive, we cheered. He gets to enjoy the holidays with the kids before the day, and those 50% odds are better than any odds he's been quoted for anything since June.

Back in early June, the first doctor thought he might live five months, on the outside. He's already beating that.

Is it Lewis Carroll who talked about doing six impossible things before breakfast? How about just one improbable thing before Groundhog Day?

What's Up With Harlequin
I'm in no danger of writing a romance novel, and you may not be, either, but everyone who cares about books has a stake stopping the nasty stunt Harlequin hopes to get away with.

annathepiper offers this very helpful overview and collection of links.

Antidote To Nickelodeon
And boy did I need one!

It wasn't so bad when Gareth was satisfied with The Backyardigans. Run the "Samurai Pie" and "Mission to Mars" episodes on infinite repeat, and I can live with that. But then he discovered Kai-Lan, which is written right at his level, with no layer of anything that engages adults. We don't watch a lot of tv in our house, but it doesn't take much Kai-Lan to make a grown-up twitch.

Thank goodness for Li'l Cthulhu. What every parent needs to counterbalance all the blasted cuteness of kid-focused marketing is a heavy, if much-sweetened, dose of vintage horror.

Rapid Fire Reading At Philcon Saturday
This weekend I'll be at Philcon to schmooze, flog the e-books, and disseminate the call for submissions for the anthologies.

You can find me on Saturday at 11am at the Broad Universe group reading.

NaNoStalgia
November blusters in. My pockets and house are full of the fallen leaves my child collects. My email inbox and livejournal friends list are full of other people's cheery National Novel Writing Month progress reports. Congratulations on your massive word counts to those of you who have them, and much encouragement to those of you who've fallen behind. Maybe next year I'll be in on that great, insane endeavor again.

NaNoWriMo was tremendous fun, and stress, and fun (and did I mention the stress?) the two years I tried it. I never did reach "The End," but I did rack up 100,000 words on the Stisele book. As October waned, it was hard to resist the pull of my recurrent November project. I came very close to committing the month to Stisele, but I had promises to keep, and miles to go, etc.

Instead, in keeping with one of my Wiccan denomination's customs, I took a vow at Samhain that I'll be following until Beltane. I've returned to a daily writing discipline. Over the past year, I'd fallen a long way from writing every day. Six months of a couple hundred words a day may not get me a higher word count than one month of just under 2000 words a day, but it is likelier to get the Rugosa Coven print volume finished, as in actually finished.

A friend who's from France brought her daughters over for a playdate today, and while she was at it, she brought a spectacular quiche. After she left, Dan declared that she must have "studied Julia Childs's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the original Klingon."

I wish there were any way to convey the depth of that compliment to her, but I'm not sure it can be translated it out of Geek.

Lascaux
You're probably not a spelunker. Goodness knows I'm not. Even the anthropologists on my friends list don't have the right specialties to see the paintings at Lascaux in person. Considering the delicate condition of the paintings (which is deteriorating in new ways recently, perhaps due to global warming), it's a good thing the caves are closed now to everybody but researchers doing specific, relevant projects. But sometimes I wish I'd gone, back when the caves were still open to tourists.

Fortunately, the consolation prize doesn't require a hard hat.

Thanks to

anghara for the link.

Kicked Two Geese Today
But that's not the punchline. Here's how it happened:

For his birthday, Gareth wanted to visit a new playground. Most of the parks in our area have the usual no-longer-migratory flocks of Canada geese and mallard ducks, but this park has a clique of cormorants and a flock of snowy white geese whose ancestors must only recently have made their escape from a nearby backyard coop. They're farm geese gone feral.

As long as Gareth and I were playing on the slides, the geese were content to keep us under surveillance from a distance of about forty feet. The instant they realized we were heading for our car without having fed them, they rushed us. I thought at first they'd back off when they saw we didn't have any food, but that only made them more aggressive. Gareth grabbed my leg and started making worried noises, so I scooped him up, and then I didn't have my arms free. Usually I can fend off over-curious geese by honking at them. Honking at these geese provoked unanimous goose body-language, and I realized I would have to model violence against animals in front of my toddler. Not my preference, dammit. Stupid geese.

The lead goose grabbed the hem of my sweater in its beak, and it flapped its wings in reverse so hard, it seemed like the damn thing was trying to drag me into the pond. I'm not sure what else it could have been trying to accomplish. The goose behind it started flapping and darting its beak at Gareth, so that was the goose I kicked first.

Not wanting to do serious damage, I just bumped it in the chest with my shin, hard enough to lift the bird off its webby feet. Bumped the other goose the same way, and it let go of my sweater. The flock paused a moment in what looked like surprise.

It was a very short pause. Fortunately, I'd already taken off up the hill toward my car when the geese charged after us. The strangest part of the whole encounter was that the flock stopped exactly at the boundary of the park. Gareth and I were only ten feet away from them while I fussed with my car keys, but the geese came no closer. There they stood, honking and flapping in the international, interspecies signal for Come back here this instant so we can bite you some more! Perhaps their farm-dwelling forebears had been cross-bred with terriers.

As I bundled Gareth into his car seat, he looked back over my shoulder, beamed, and shouted, "Again!"

It's All True
Those things the big-name editors at the big New York publishers say about their slush piles seem to be true even of tiny editors like us, with our much smaller slush piles. I stop reading the very second I'm sure I don't want to buy a story, and sometimes that second comes on the first page. In most cases,* cover letters don't matter much: I don't care where or whether an author has published anything else--all I care about is whether I like the story that's been submitted to me. I root for every story to win me over, and it bums me out when a story with some promise falls apart. There really aren't enough hours in the day for personalized letters, even acceptance letters, let alone rejections. And several of the stories we're rejecting are stories we actually like, but that, honest and truly, just don't fit the anthology theme. We can imagine other projects they'd work for, but they don't meet our needs at this time.

If you've been going to conferences and you've stopped bothering to take notes at the editor and agent panels because they all sound the same to you, it turns out there's a reason for that. The slush experience is as universal as the coming of age narrative and the hero's journey. If a lost Joseph Campbell manuscript were discovered, and it were called The Editor with a Thousand Submissions, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.

*Except in the rare case of reprints. If the story under consideration has been previously published elsewhere, it does have a better chance if it's from an author with name recognition. That said, most of the slush so far has been previously unpublished.

Ornithomathematics
Gareth sat at his giant abacus, his plush cardinal bird in his hands, sliding the abacus beads across the bar with the cardinal's beak. He'd had enough of trying to count in English, so he tried counting in Chirp instead.

Happy Imaging Day!
Contrary to all the standard writing advice about cutting adverbs, I am especially pleased with two adverbs today, which I would not cut for anything: "significantly" and "conclusively." As in:

The main tumor is conclusively, significantly smaller.

The scans don't allow a precise measurement of how much smaller, but there's no question that the chemotherapy is working. The metastatic bits have stopped growing, too. The doctors are thrilled. Zach is doing better than they had imagined possible. Dr. Bigwig began delivering the news by delivering a bear hug. When Pru and Zach tried to thank him, he said, "This is not something I did. This is about the biology of the tumor, the biology of your body, your will to live, your support network, and God." Whether you've ever met my brother-in-law or not, you've been part of that support network, and if you've wished him well, maybe you've taken part in the last item on that list, too, if we define it broadly enough. Thank you.

Anyhow, to make the eventual surgery less risky, there'll be at least one more round of chemo before anything gets removed. Through the end of the holidays, chemotherapy becomes the new normal, now with added vindication for all that optimism we've been working up.

It's Imaging Eve
And tomorrow is Imaging Day. If the images show that Zach's tumor has stopped growing, there'll be a risky surgery (not yet scheduled) and a chance of long-term recovery. If the images show that the tumor has kept growing despite the chemo, there'll be no risky surgery, and no long-term chance.

I keep proposing to the universe that Zach make a complete recovery. My proposals are pretty insistent. We'll find out soon what the universe says to that.

The suspense is taking up most of my mental bandwidth. Maybe tomorrow I can aspire to being clever or entertaining or something. Today, I'm passing along Zach's request for prayer support, and my whole family's thanks to those of you who have felt moved to hold him in your thoughts.

Return Of Bride Of Blog Tour
You can find my post in praise of my splendid spouse at Angela Korra'ti's website, or, if you prefer to check it out on lj, you can see it here, where my kind host blogs as

annathepiper. (For those keeping score at home, Anna's touring guest-post for this month is over here, at

norafleischer's blog.)

(Why do I feel like I'm in an Abbott and Costello routine?)

Bride Of Blog Tour
On the Drollerie Press authors listserv, we liked two of the themes proposed for October so much, we decided not to decide. For a writer, "the sweetest day" and "thank someone who helped you with your writing" turn out to be closely related themes, anyway. I'll put up the link to my own post as soon as it appears on my host's blog. Naturally, I ended up writing about Dan, hence this month's choice of B movie title.

Today I'm hosting Heather S. Ingemar, author of Collecting Dreams, among other things. A longtime admirer of Poe, Heather's carrying on the Gothic tradition, so October is a fine time for checking out her fiction.

Here and now, you can check out the story of how her first writing mentor helped her get serious. And for any writer, what could be sweeter than that?

( The Sweetest Day )

How The Food Chain Works?
Now that the ghost tour story is up at Baen's Universe, I'm querying new agents about the Big Book again. It turns out one good way of coping with slush pile anxiety is to have a slush pile of one's own.

Maybe next incarnation I'll be a better person. Meanwhile, as far short of bodhisattvahood as I am, I admit to indulging in schadenfreude. No matter what the agents think of my query, I bet I've got a couple of manuscripts in my own slush pile that appeal to me less.

I'd like to imagine I've targeted the queries correctly this time. One of the agents is specifically looking for sprawling, Dickensian books. Sprawl is one thing the Big Book has covered.

E-Books For The Thrifty, The Gluttonous, And The Tech-Shy
Drollerie Press is having a big sale, with all books $1.99 or less. You can try a lot of new authors, fill up the new electronic device in your life, and save a big chunk of change. People who've been curious about e-books but haven't wanted to plunk down ten dollars per title for mainstream bestsellers can experiment where the stakes are low and the quality is high. If you like my books, you'll probably enjoy Faerie Blood by Angela Korra'ti (

annathepiper), and Shadow of the Antlered Bird by David Sklar (

thunderpigeon). Rush forth in a buying frenzy!