The backyard

I haven't posted any pictures of the backyard lately. (Here's a before post for purposes of comparison). The mission was to encourage water to flow away from the house, and we've had a few hard rains with no wet floors downstairs, so I would have to call that mission accomplished. The cosmetic aspects are still very much a work in progress though (I still have no stairs from the back door to the patio, for instance).

Here's a shot of where the Bobcat tracks were last year. Can't even tell now, can you? The dirt pile is left over from the gardens. The plan is to cover it with rock and plant a few herbs to grow between the rock, but that won't be happening until next spring:

This doesn't look like much now that I pulled all the wildflowers out. It doesn't usually look so much like plain dirt, honest! The morning glories made it all the way to the top of the trellis for the first time this year. The Boston ivy has only just started climbing up after our excessively dry summer:

This is where the other half of the old patio covered. The open patch is dirt mixed with concrete, and it's at an angle to carry water away from the house. We had talked about what to cover it with, but when that moss started growing we decided that was cooler than anything we had planned, so we're leaving it (and hopefully it will spread more and thicken; that would be really cool):

This part has had the least work done so far (the rock the patio crew threw down for Bobcat traction is still there). A few plants have been put in, but the plan is for more ferns and shade plants to leave nothing but a little trail:

Last pic is the stump of the crabapple tree. Or it used to be the stump; it's now an enormous fungus. Oliver refuses to go into the backyard because it completely freaks him out. Thankfully the fact that he has a terrific view of it from his bedroom window hasn't been a problem. Or maybe that's what has him up in the middle of the night, nightmares of the fungus crawling in his window...

It's like a roasted bell pepper tart

One of my husband's favorite dishes is roasted bell pepper tart. I like eating it too, but making it is a minor headache. Not roasting the bell peppers or making the pastry; actually baking the tart, which you'd think would be the easy part. It's all gooey egg goodness; but how to tell when it's done? Our cheap oven can't hold a steady temperature even with a baking stone on the bottom rack. The fact that it's still supposed to be a little soupy when it's done because the recipe calls for five post-oven minutes to "set up" is what really messes with me. I have to look at this thing and decide if it will firm up in five sitting minutes or not. I'm not good at those kinds of judgement calls. (The anxiety I have about undercooking food also explains that while I am technically the carnivore of the family, I only eat meat that other people have prepared).

All of which is just to say that I'm calling this novel "done" in the hopes that it's going to set up now, or something. I foresee some rewriting when I hear back from my critique group, but hopefully nothing too extensive. I'm considering it done enough to print the whole thing out for my husband to read, and I promised when I started this thing he'd only have to read it once; that's probably the best indication of my sense of doneness.

So I have one short story to do a little tinkering on, another that is niggling to be written, and then it's on to the next WIP, which I'll lovingly refer to as "Untitled", the YA sci-fi that's been burning in my brain for months now.

I'm still working on stuff...

...so another short post here. I just wanted to share this rather long article over at Making Light about the UFO spotted by Barney and Betty Hill (any documentary you've ever seen about alien abductions starts with the Hills). I found it amusing that no one who's done a story on these two has ever gone up to the road they were on and looked around, not even the fellow who wrote the book (using travel brochures). I do more research than that guy for my fiction (although I haven't been to Greenland. I wish I could go. It's hard to get a sense of what it smells like from photos).

I've never put all of my research books together, but between general Greenland research, books on the Inuit, books on the Troth, books on Chinese magic, and books on Mars it's got to be over 50. Some of those were from the library, though, so I guess I physically can't stack them up now.

I only mention because Marie Brennan photographed the books she used for Midnight Never Come, which I can't wait to read. Plus, she actually went to London. (Have you read Marie Brennan? You really should).

I'm very busy writing stuff...

...but here's a link to keep you busy: the 25 biggest wusses of rock. The fact that I actually rather like 15 of them probably doesn't speak well of me, though. Forget I mentioned it. Click it just to find out which band is "like the Smiths but without all the macho posturing".

Sale #3!

I just sold my short story "Trifle" to Beyond Centauri (although I had actually submitted to Aoife's Kiss, so I got a letter that was both a rejection and an acceptance; a cool first). This was my first short story that came out actually short and not a mininovel, and I wrote it for the very first Backspace contest I ever entered. So I'm fond of it and glad it's found a home. On the other hand, it takes so long for me to find homes for things, everything I've sold so far has been at least two years old. I feel like I should put in my mini-bio "and I write much better now", but then I'd have to add "and in two years you'll find out!".

I still haven't really been sleeping, which makes me mood-swingy (can you tell?). I'm hopeful that after driving in for a meeting tonight I won't have to work again until Saturday (although I fully expect that day to suck, if this past weekend is any indication). I worked way too long yesterday and then stayed up later than I should have watching the last half of Avatar Season 2 now that we have the DVD. "One more episode and I'll go to bed... OK, one more episode and then I'll go to bed..." Which is sad, as I've seen them all before.

I am excited for the live action movies to come out. I mean, I was excited as soon as I heard M. Night Shyamalan was going to direct them, as I've loved everything he's done, even Lady in the Water. But they had a little interview with him as a bonus feature and when the two creators of the TV show asked him why he wanted to make Avatar when all of his previous movies have been his own stories, his answer without hesitation was "the martial arts". Yes!

What's so magical about 4 a.m.?

I don't know, but for some reason I just have to be awake every morning at 4 a.m. and lie there for an hour and a half. The spiders are growing, although I don't really worry until they get the size of cats. But then again, when I was driving to the library the other night I kept seeing the wings and talons of a dragon in my rearview mirror, so perhaps the spiders are no longer my best clue that things have gotten bad.

No, I don't do sleep deprivation well at all. I did take next week off of work to try to get myself straightened out. Sort of. It's terribly inconvenient to people in two countries when I'm not there working, and the best I could do was an agreement that they would put me down as off but if they need me they'll call and I'll get on and work. There's a pretty big downside to being as fast as two normal people; it's impossible to get away guilt-free ever.

I had entertained the notion of getting some writing done if I did manage a work-free night or two, but at this point I'd settle for catching up on sleep. I do have plans for at least one night, though. As Aidan gleefully informed me, Avatar season 3 starts on Tuesday, and now that I won't be working next week I can watch it with them rather than recording the episode and catching up on it later. Wu ha! They just better not call me until 7:30 on Tuesday. Say it with me "I'm sorry; my husband must have been on the other line and didn't click over. I only just got your message." What? I need the break! Plus, it's Avatar season 3.

My August Book Report

So I'll start with the only book I read this month that wasn't written by Robert Heinlein, Eighth Grade Bites by Heather Brewer. It's some indication of how much I was looking forward to reading this that I interrupted my Heinlein marathon the day it came in the mail to read it right away (whereas Spook Country is waiting on the TBR stack until I'm done with the Heinlein, although I've been picking it up and paging through it; my willpower might break on that score too). EGB didn't disappoint. It's a YA vampire tale that manages to pay homage to all the vampire tales that have come before without being derivative itself. No mean feat, that. Vlad may be a vampire, but he's also a thoroughly modern boy and an outsider at his school. It reminded me a bit of Peter Parker in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movie; having superpowers isn't much help when you're the weird kid no one wants to talk to, and you're hopelessly crushing on the prettiest girl in school. I only wished it had been longer, but then there's always ninth grade (and tenth, and eleventh, and twelfth, and dare I say college?).

The rest of what I read this month was all Heinlein, as I mentioned. I've read a few of his later novels, but never the YA I've been told again and again I simply must read. Being anal, I always read in chronological order (one of the many handy uses for Wikipedia, it has such nice and complete lists).

The first two I read, Beyond This Horizon and For Us, The Living were both written in the 40s but not published until much later. BTH had some interesting ideas, but it seemed to start out being one story and ending as something else and it didn't really hang together. FUTL is not really a story at all, more a collection of Heinlein's ideas told in an almost Socratic way through dialogue. It sounds dry; I actually found it dead interesting. Everything that is quintessentially Heinlein is touched on in this book; it's amazing that he wrote it before all the others. It's probably not the Heinlein you'd want to start with, but I would recommend it to anyone who's read more than a few of his other novels. I would especially recommend it to writers who write primarily to put forth ideas. It makes an excellent study tool; observe how Heinlein already knew what he wanted to say, but set it aside to master straight-up storytelling first and then started slipping the ideas back in. I'm pretty sure that's why he was a Grandmaster.

The next two I didn't like as well: Rocketship Galileo and Space Cadet. The two shortest of his books, but they took me the longest to get through. After I finished RG I admitted to Quin that the little science lectures sprinkled throughout I mostly skimmed over, but Nazis on the moon were cool. Which was pretty much exactly the opposite of how he feels about that book (and I'm probably lucky he didn't throw something at me for being such a heathen). SC reminded me a lot of Old Man's War. I realize I have that exactly backwards, that Scalzi was modeling after Heinlein, but honestly I liked Scalzi better. (Perhaps because there were also women involved in his military.)

The last two I tackled in August I really liked, or my marathon would have come to a grinding halt (I'm not a masochist, after all; I prefer to read books I like). Red Planet I liked well enough to make a little space in Aidan's history book reading schedule for him to read it next. I may have a difference of opinion with Heinlein on the "we should all be naked" thing, but I'm right there with on the libertarian front, and this is a very libertarian book. Plus I loved Willis, who even though she has laid a nest of eggs still insists that "Willis is a good boy". (Of course the actual women in the novel contribute to the effort by making sandwiches and coffee. A boy becomes a man when he takes up a gun to defend his own, but a girl is a woman when she cooks.)

The last one I finished in August was The Sixth Column, which I also liked. I see little hints of Stranger in a Strange Land in it, with the way he portrays religion. (And here women contribute to the war effort by doing clerical work.) (And if you think I'm harping on the woman thing here, be glad you're not my husband. Actually, most of what he's had to endure has been on behalf of The Puppetmasters, but as I didn't finish that one until September you'll have to wait a month for me to lay into that one).

Didn't get a thing done last week

Not a word written. I'm late posting my August book report as well; perhaps I'll get to that tomorrow. It was a pretty crappy week, but this week should be better, right?

I did finally get to watch the end of Salaam-e-Ishq (I mentioned watching the first half before). It's more of an inspired by Love Actually movie than a remake, which is cool. I've mentioned before how much I love reading the entries in Backspace contests (back in the day, when I had the time; I wish I still did). Seeing how different writers approach the same subject matter is one of my favorite things. There are a few corollaries between the two films but mostly they are very different stories. I mentioned before Salman Khan was in this, and I did enjoy his story line, but it was Govinda who ran away with the movie for me. He plays a taxi driver who speaks very little English who is helping a Canadian woman who speaks very little Hindi find her boyfriend before he gets married to an Indian girl. Now anyone who's read my fiction knows my fascination with how people communicate when they don't share a language, and in fact the Colin Firth story line was my favorite in Love Actually. But while Colin Firth and the Portuguese girl didn't understand each other at all, Govinda and Stephanie speak just enough of each other's language to almost, but not quite, have a conversation. Which for my money is much funnier.

My only gripe with the movie was that Govinda barely dances in it. Watching Govinda dance is like watching Steve Nash play basketball. He makes it look so effortless and fun, he always puts a grin on my face (even in the midst of a crappy, crappy week). He gets a few moments in the title song:

But that's it. Luckily I have a few more Govinda films in my waiting to be watched stack, so I have something to look forward to.

Quin had taken Friday off to give himself a four-day weekend, so we had an extra movie-watching time slot. We filled it with Don: The Chase Begins Again, which is completely Salman-free. It was really cool, sort of a James Bond/Mission Impossible feel to it. I've often said to Quin that watching ShahRukh Khan movies I sense the guy really wants to be making kung fu films, and this is a step in that direction. Although it gets a bit bloody for my taste in a few places, that gets counterbalanced by the singing and dancing, which never comes up in Bond films (plus, good songs). By a weird coincidence, both of these films also starred Priyanka Chopra. She was Salman's love interest in Salaam-e-Ishq and ShahRukh's in Don. Quin, still not a Salman fan, insists she's much better opposite ShahRukh. I liked her in both, but in Salaam-e-Ishq Salman not only sings and dances with her, he turns up on horseback and brings a marching band with him. It's rather hard to top that.

As it turns out, there are people who spend more time on YouTube than me...

Check this out: commercials made by celebrities before they were famous. The funny thing is I remember a lot of these, I just never realized that was Sarah Michelle Gellar (or Matt LeBlanc). "A young Keanu Reeves is stuck in a dead-end job, catering banquets for the leisure class. Only two things sustain him: His love of interpretive dance and how pissed those bourgeoisie cocksuckers will be when they find their caviar replaced with Corn Flakes." Plus Seth Green's really bad haircut. It's all good.

This and that

I just saw a call for submissions for an anthology I simply must be in: Paper Blossoms, Sharpened Steel. Stories from Japan, China, and Korea? Sweet! I've already written two Japanese short stories: one is still with WOTF and the other is awaiting the final word from Black Gate (wish me luck, all; I'd absolutely kill to be in Black Gate) (metaphorically, of course). I've been waiting for the perfect story idea to make it a triptych; this might be a nice opportunity to get to work on that. But there is also a little voice in the back of my head that points out that I've written stories set in Japan and stories set in China, but I've never written a story set in Korea. Of course I don't know much about Korea really; I'd have to submerse myself in Korean things to get a feel for it, and I'm still soaking in India at the moment. Well, I have until mid December to work out what I'm going to do, but I will be submitting something.

This week is vacation week from homeschooling, and I plan to spend it revising a certain short story with airships in it and trying another pass at the middle chapters of Tao of Troth. The beginning and end of that book I'm pretty much happy with, but the middle is seriously pissing me off.

I'm getting anxious to call it done and move on, though. After a month of Indian immersion the up-until-this-point-disparate elements of the story I'm planning to write next are starting to link up in really pleasing ways. It's gotten to the point where I'm ready to start committing words to paper (or Word document, I guess, since I gave up the notebooks). Did I mention that was what the Bollywood was all about? Novel research? You'll probably never be able to tell from reading the finished product, but there it is. It's always weird how that works. I had story problems solve themselves in my head while watching Veronica Mars, even though my solution did not in any way resemble what was going on in VM. I just play "what if?" in my head while watching movies and TV, changing the plot and characters in my head to how I would have written them differently. Not necessarily trying to improve things, just messing about and experimenting in my head, although on occasion I've gone back to watch something again and caught myself expecting a scene that never took place because it was one I was making up when I was watching it. Movies that almost work are my favorite for doing this to. By the fifth or sixth extension out of "what if... but then what if..." I suddenly realize I'm not really rewriting the show I'm watching anymore, I'm fixing that problem that's been stumping me in the WIP. And it always takes me by surprise, which is a bit silly, I suppose.

One last little thing, here's a cool quiz to find out what book you are. I'm not terribly surprised to find out what I am:

You're Ulysses!
by James Joyce
Most people are convinced that you don't make any sense, but compared to what else you could say, what you're saying now makes tons of sense. What people do understand about you is your vulgarity, which has convinced people that you are at once brilliant and repugnant. Meanwhile you are content to wander around aimlessly, taking in the sights and sounds of the city. What you see is vast, almost limitless, and brings you additional fame. When no one is looking, you dream of being a Greek folk hero.
Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Cool!

Typical Homeschooling Day

I still tend to think of myself as new to homeschooling, but just this morning I was counting back and realized this summer makes six years of doing formal school everyday. That kind of makes me an old hand at it now. Not only that, if we follow the plan and have Aidan take college classes for the last two years of high school, that means I'm halfway through with his schooling. Now that feels really weird. So, for those who wonder just what it is we actually do all day, here's a sort of amalgated "typical" day around here.

8:30 a.m.: Aidan, the pathological clockwatcher, wakes me up, then wakes his brother up and the two of them get their own breakfast. I wonder out to the computer and read blogs, consume something caffeinated, and don't officially wake up until about 9 a.m. (Not because I'm lazy, I should point out; I work til midnight and take at least an hour to wind down after that before I can sleep. I need 8 1/2 hours of sleep to function properly, which I'm hoping I'll be able to get again in about ten years...)

9:00 a.m.: Mom's awake; time for the fifth grade class to get going. (Grade level is pretty meaningless when you're homeschooling. "Fifth grade" here only means we're following that level of curriculum in Well-Trained Mind, so he's doing biology for science all year, and he's starting logic. He's not quite ten so he's considered a fourth grader this year on the forms we send to the public school. He's doing Saxon 6/5 this year, which is for normal 6th graders or fast 5th graders, but in other subject areas like spelling he's doing fourth grade work. I would guess it averages out to fifth grade, but again pretty meaningless.) Aidan gets a sheet with all assignments to be done during the week every Monday morning, and he has until 6 p.m. Friday to get it all done. He picks what order he does things in and how much he does each day. We had a few very stressful Fridays at first, but he's worked out how to pace himself now, mostly. Logic stage history has a lot more reading than he's used to, he's constantly reading one novel or another about King Arthur, Robin Hood, or some other Middle Ages story.

10:00 a.m.: Time for the first graders to get started (again, the grade is a bit meaningless; Oliver is 6 so for reporting on public school forms he's still a kindergardener, but he's already halfway through first grade math). First graders and fifth graders don't mix well; if you try to put them in the same room they'll kick each other under the table. Worse, the first grader is the class clown and lives to distract the fifth grader from his work. Life has been much easier since the first grade relocated to the little table in the living room. Today, he's brought a stuffed octopus in a plastic tote to class. He says her name is "Octopussy". Not that he's seen any James Bond yet, apparently he came up with that on his own. He senses there is something about that word, though; you can tell, as he keeps watching for a reaction everytime he says it. Keep your game face on.

Aidan is studying the middle ages for history (we fell off the WTM schedule fairly early on so he never made a complete circuit of history for the grammar stage. On the plus side, he knows ancient history pretty well). For science they are both doing biology, and specifically studying animals at the moment. We have a tank with eight African lion frog tadpoles swimming in it. (The kit from Insect Lore insists that most or all of these will die before they make it to frogs, but we've yet to lose one. It would be just my luck to end up with eight full-grown frogs that have to stay in captivity since African frogs don't belong in Minnesota.) He also does math, writing, spelling, logic, and Latin. He's already looking forward to finishing Latin, as he gets to pick which language he learns next and he has his heart set on Hindi (I wonder why?). He's only halfway through the first of two levels of Latin, so he has plenty of time to change his mind a million times on what he does next (hopefully to something Mom already knows a little of, although with Hindi at least we know a native speaker he can chat with).

Oliver does math, writing, science (also animals; he already watched his caterpillars turn into butterflies and released them in our garden), and history (ancient history for him). He reads at night with his dad rather than with me, which gives me a little more time with Aidan during the day. We've been studying Egypt for a while now, as Oliver is mad for Egypt. He has a death fixation (Quin has taken to referring to him as "Tim Burton" lately because of his decidedly morbid leanings) and is also taken with the idea of having lots of different gods, so it's just his sort of thing.

10:00-12:00: I hope you didn't think you were going to sit down. Give the first grader his math drill sheet so he can practice addition, then go see how the fifth graders are doing. The fifth graders are out of their seats again, watching the tadpoles eat. Shoo them back into their chairs and get them going on something from their assignment sheet. Go back to the first grade room. Octopussy was getting stuffy in the tote, so she's now wrapped around his neck. Unfortunately he's having a tough time seeing the math sheet with the octopus in the way. Get that sorted out and head back to the kitchen in time to stop the fifth grader from shutting all the windows because he's cold. The fact that he's only dressed in underpants didn't occur to him as possibly being the source of this problem. Send him downstairs to get dressed.

Dhol Baaje just come up on the Party Shuffle. Everyone get up and leap and spin around the house! (Um, recess?) While it's generally understood that the Party Shuffle randomly plays songs (and it runs all day most days; we like music to think by), what's not commonly known is that the teacher can tell it to play something specific next. Don't spoil the secret! (What we do for "recess" changes a lot. Sometimes it's going outside and running around the house, sometimes it's running up and down the stairs. Mostly it's an excuse to get out of chairs and move around, which I think is particularly important for boys, and especially particularly important for my boys. Aidan is calm now, but when he was 4-6 I got asked a lot by "well meaning" types if he was ADD. Nope, just a normal boy with lots of energy). Sometimes, to everyone's surprise, Dhol Baaje comes up twice or three times because it's just that kind of day.

12:00: Time to make lunch while giving the fifth graders their spelling test and checking their memory work (he knows all the kings of England, all the US presidents, and all the dynasties of China plus a bunch of poems. We're working on the time periods of Japan now). Consider once again putting your school on bag lunch, but then you remember you'd still be the one packing the lunch. (I love teaching school; I hate making lunch).

12:30-2:00 p.m.: The first graders have wrapped up their work (although they're still carrying Octopussy around in that plastic tote, and she keeps farting through the plastic in the direction of the fifth graders. Have the first graders sit down and watch Crocodile Hunter. We're going to call that a science supplement, OK?).

2:00 p.m.: Technically the school day is done. This is "nap time" when everyone goes to separate rooms and does their own thing. This is supposed to be your writing time, but you haven't gotten on the treadmill yet, Aidan has left you a stack of reports to proofread, and the house is a mess. Don't be surprised if it takes you until 4 p.m. to get this all sorted out.

4:00 p.m.: Nap time is done, time for doing math homework, correcting the math homework, starting dinner, and checking work e-mail before everyone in the office goes home for the day.

4:30 p.m.: The boys sit down and watch their favorite show, Arthur, and fantasize about what public school is like (no lie; they are completely fascinated by this show. It's like anthropology for them).

5:00 p.m.: Get Aidan settled in with the computer and Teach Me Piano. A human teacher would be nice, but expensive, and just when are you going to take him to lessons? Luckily he likes the program and it doesn't take any time from you. Although the first graders and Octopussy are still lingering in the living room looking for trouble. You can usually lure them into the kitchen if the music is good, although his interest in food preparation waxes and wanes.

5:30-6:00 p.m.: Dinner with the family. This is also the only 30 minute time in the day you spend with your husband, and you'll be lucky to get a word in edgewise. This is the downside to homeschooling and working both. He'll sneak down to your office later to steel your gum out of your drawer, no worries.

6:00 p.m. to god knows when: Slaving for the man. Although you like your job; there is always a cool new word you have to hit the books to check the spelling of, and even the old words are just fun to say. Crista galli. Diastometamyelia. Astrocytoma.

Now you can probably see why I prefer books that lend themselves to being read in 5 or 10 minute chunks, held in one hand while you stir something or unload the dishwasher. Still, I wouldn't trade it for anything. I love spending every day with my boys.

Watch me try to tie this into Heinlein

So I've decided to go ahead and tackle those Heinlein novels. I've read some of his later stuff, but now I'm going through it all in chronological order. My husband is a big Heinlein fan. Back when we were just friends ("just friends" here means only one of us was crushing badly over the other. The other was bragging to his friends how cool it was to be platonic friends with a girl. I only occasionally rub his nose in that), we used to trade books to read. To start, I had him read The Power of Myth, and he gave me Stranger in a Strange Land. So that was the first Heinlein I read. We've discussed Heinlein's open relationships and lack of sexual jealousy back when we were "just friends" and again when we were married (we never really did date properly), and more recently as it came up again when I was reading For Us, The Living. I think it's a nice enough idea but totally unworkable for most humans, and the idea that people who are "more evolved" can handle it I find a bit repulsive. (And don't even get me started on the idea that everyone should be nude all the time. I have a prudish streak embedded in my DNA, this is true, but just speaking purely physiologically, I could not be naked all the time. 'nuff said).

My husband will say he is more in line with Heinlein's thinking than I am, but between you and me he really isn't. He did admit when I first read the book and came back to talk to him about it that on his first time through when he was a teenager, when he reached the scene with Michael and Jill and the circus performer he actually threw the book away. He didn't read it all the way through until he had left home (and more thoroughly discarded his fundamentalist upbringing). But it is his favorite book of all-time, and his cat is named Valentine for Valentine Michael Smith.

But he's not as "evolved" as these Heinlein characters. Now, it's entirely possible I've been having a bit too much fun at his expense of late. He caught me watching the movie No Entry while in my office the other day. I wasn't really watching it, it was on in the background for noise, but I saw his jaw drop in mid sentence and glanced over at the screen. It was this scene, with Salman Khan comes up out of the water, shirtless natch. Now, for my money he's much hotter when he gets out of the car at the hotel, wearing a shirt and a jacket, but Quin was so appalled I just had to rib him a little.

"I know, it's like looking directly into the sun, isn't it?" I said.

"That's so not what I was thinking. Good god, those are tiny shorts," he said. You should've seen his face.

So that night we sat down to watch Salaam-e-Ishq, which I was supposed to wait to watch with him because it has Govinda in it. It's an ensemble modeled after Love Actually (only it's nearly four hours long). We were about 30 minutes into it before Salman Khan turned up, and Quin actually pegged me in the head with a papertowel.

"You didn't tell me he was in this!"

"Yes, I did! Look, he's on the box and everything."

Then the DVD glitched halfway through (ironically enough just when Salman had taken his shirt off) and I have to wait for my replacement copy to get here before I can see how it all ends. Now we're watching Baadshah instead, a Shah Rukh Khan movie. He's fun too. He reminds Quin of Jerry Lewis from the old Martin and Lewis days. I get more of a Michael Jackson feel from him, but maybe that's just because he likes to sing and dance while he's chasing women down the street.

So you'd think that would be the end of it, but no. I woke up this morning and my desktop had been changed from this:

To this:

I haven't said a word. I did sneak over to his side of the computer and change his picture of airplanes to this:
Only because I couldn't find one where she was showing off her butt. I was looking to change mine anyway. I like darker colors on a desktop. This shouldn't offend, I don't think:

Writing colorblind

I'm piggy-backing on a very interesting conversation that's been happening on Scalzi's blog here, as it got me thinking about my own writing. "Writing colorblind" means the writer does not give any racial identifiers to any of their characters; it's up to the reader to fill them in themselves. The argument against this is that for nearly all readers, the default is all-white. Which leads to the debate: who's the racist, the writer or the reader?

Yeah, I don't write colorblind at all. Quite the opposite. There are a couple of reasons for that. I have very clear ideas in my head what all my characters look like, for one. In order to write characters with no tip-offs as to their race, you'd have to leave out any mention of their appearance, wouldn't you? I couldn't do it.

But mostly it's because the culture my characters come from is so integral to who they are I couldn't possibly leave it out or try to be oblique and let the reader guess what background I'm referring to.

I think this is one of the ways that fantasy is different from science fiction. To have people in separate cultural groups in a fantasy novel is the default setting. But science fiction looks to the future, and the majority opinion seems to be that in the future we'll all be mixed. No one will be Asian, European, or African anymore; we'll all be sort of tan and not really have any cultural identifiers at all. We'll all eat the same food, wear the same clothes, and of course no one observes any religion.

I find that vision of the future really dull, frankly. Give me Tobias Buckell's Caribbeans, or Ian McDonald's India of the near future.

This is going to have to be a half-formed thought for now, as school beckons. I'll just close by saying one of the things I find really cool about YouTube is watching how other places around the world reflect American culture back at us. Take, for instance, hip-hop and in particular the "pimp walk". When you take it to Taiwan:



Or to India:



What you get back does not look to me like a melting together into one meta-culture. It's an exchange of ideas where what you get back is a thoroughly Chinese take on it, or a thoroughly Indian one. Cool.

Jaan-E-Mann

I remember the first time I saw Moulin Rouge very well. It was the very night it came out on DVD. Not a good night for Oliver, who was single-digit-months-old at the time; I watched the whole movie on foot walking back and forth across the room because he refused to be laid down until well after midnight. I also saw all of The Mummy on foot walking back and forth with a single-digit-months-old Aidan, but it was at a drive-in, so I couldn't even hear it. Which is fun in it's own way, but we gave up and went home five minutes into The Matrix. You kinda have to hear that one. But I digress, I was reminiscing about Moulin Rouge. Hot, sticky night. Cranky baby. Husband in the "I'm in indulging you watching this with you. I'd rather be watching the Discovery Channel" mode.

Then the line came up. "Suddenly an unconscious Argentinean fell through my roof. He was quickly joined by a dwarf dressed as a nun." I turned to my husband and said "This is the best movie ever." And that line is in the first five minutes of the movie, before any of the musical numbers. But I already knew. And yes, I re-watched it a lot in the following weeks, so much so that Aidan, not quite 4 at the time, took to singing "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" when we were shopping at Target.

I really hoped that more musicals would follow. I love old musicals, but I crave the new. Sadly, that never happened. Unless you count "Once More With Feeling", the musical Buffy episode, which I've also rewatched about a million times (I'm counting it).

I've finally found a movie that not only is a musical but has the same kind of surreal, silly, whatever humor that lends itself to lines like "Suddenly an unconscious Argentinean fell through my roof. He was quickly joined by a dwarf dressed as a nun." It's almost metafiction: the characters in it are well aware that they are in a musical. The back of the set morphs into a huge stage with colored lights, and the MC tells his uncle it would be easier just to show him his flashback than to explain everything. And the present day characters walk in and out of flashbacks, look at younger versions of themselves. When two of them are about to sing the cabinet in the living room rattles until they open the doors and let the band out so they can set up, because you can't sing without a band. And dancing girls. And dwarves in brightly colored costumes.

Now, this is a Bollywood movie, so this means 1) it's in Hindi (although you'd be surprised how many English loan words and slang phrases are used in Hindi films) and 2) it's three hours long. I had to watch it in two segments because I just don't have 3 hours of TV time all lined up like that. The first half, which is very much a Cyrano de Bergerac story with the cool guy helping the mega-geek score with the woman he's adored since college, had me laughing my ass off (all alone; my husband didn't watch this one. It's possible he's Bollywooded out, so we've been watching the BBC episodes of the The Office together). The second half nearly had me sobbing (of course with all this extra stress I've been carrying around lately, that doesn't take much. But it's nice to have the release. And watching The Office, about a company where everyone may or may not be about to lose their jobs, helps as well).

The director does so many cool things with digital effects, the angles of the camera; it's a gorgeous movie just to look at. It has a little Singing in the Rain homage. It has an Irish step dance complete with bagpipes (in a Bollywood movie - so cool). It's also written incredibly well. It circles around the same events from the past, but everytime it revisits them, it adds a layer that changes the context from the last time you saw it. Then there is a huge reveal which was such a complete surprise. It made me appreciate how cool it is to see a movie I've never read reviews of, or seen trailers for, or heard people talking about. I haven't felt that level of surprise since the first time I saw The Sixth Sense.

(I've not just been watching movies, honest! I wrote a short story in two days, which is tremendously productive since it's a school week. I hope to have it all nice and polished by tomorrow for my critique group to have at it with the mallets and hacksaws. I might have to settle for semi-polished. I think it came out pretty well though, so we'll see.)

"The End" but not really

I typed those words yesterday, but I don't feel like I've finished yet. Some things are still bugging me, but in a vague way I can't quite pin down. I'll see if next week brings any enlightenment. I hope so; I'm kind of looking forward to starting the next thing.

I was watching another one of those Bollywood movies last night (yes, we call this obsession; this is the way I do everything), where Salman Khan plays a half-Italian who goes to India to learn singing from a master. After the teacher accepts him as his student, he tells him the difference between a false singer and a true singer. A hungry singer is a false singer, because he sings from his stomach; a true singer always sings from his heart.

Which is a much more poetic way of saying what I was trying to say earlier this week about my writing.

My July Book Report

I didn't get much read this past month, and what I did read were all new arrivals, so nothing came off my To Be Read stack. At least what I did read was all cool.

Of course I started off by rereading the first six Harry Potters. Two of them fell apart on this go-round; the spines split and the pages now come in a few discrete chunks. (They still look better than my first copy of An Elegant Universe, which is held together by a rubber band, but I have to keep it because that's the copy with all my notes in it. Yes, I'm the evil kind of person who writes in books). But I finished off the rereading a few days before Book 7 was due so I plunged into Lois McMaster Bujold's Legacy, which is the second half of The Sharing Knife two part series. I liked it better than Beguilement, the first half; she took her world-building to some interesting places. She is trying to do something different here than with her Vorkosigan books or even her other fantasies, so you can't really compare them, but even so I felt like these were just slighter stories than what she usually does. A pleasant way to spend an afternoon or two, but I didn't get that buzz in my brain reading Bujold usually gives me.

I was still only two-thirds of the way through with Legacy when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows turned up (I had ordered it from Amazon.com; I don't know why. I had the day off work just to read it, I certainly could have started the day with a trip to the grocery store to pick up a copy. Force of habit, I guess). It took almost exactly 12 hours to read it. On the one hand, she did lots of things I liked (not the least of which was not killing off Harry), but mostly I prefer that other version of Book 7. You know, the one I was writing in my head since I finished Book 6. My version took place at Hogwarts, went deeper into the history of the place, and had a lot more of Snape, Neville, and Ginny. I think when all is said and done, I'd rank Deathly Hallows after Order of the Phoenix for sure, that one's still my fave. It might be second or third after The Half-Blood Prince. I don't know; I'll let you know in a year when I've read it for the third time.

The next book I read this month was another one I plowed through in a day, The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler, otherwise known as Lemony Snicket. I had no idea he had written other novels under his own name until Andrew Wheeler mentioned this one on his blog (and if you're like me and are on the look out for new things to read, his blog is the bomb. I could never read that many books, but Wheeler's tastes are a lot like mine (SF and fantasy but also mainstream and literary novels and even comics) and I've found him a pretty good guide to what's cool). You know, I have lots of writers I admire for one thing or another; Handler is one of the very few that makes me outright jealous. I wish I were half so clever with the word play. This book isn't for kids; it's about some kids in their last year of high school. It has elements of Heathers and Fight Club in it, but mostly it's Handler and well worth a look.

The only other book I read is actually a 3-in-1 of Justine Larbalestier's Magic or Madness books called The Magic of Reason. If there is one thing that bugs me about Harry Potter, it's that the magic has no rules or cost. If it's convenient to the plot, anything can happen because she doesn't really have a magical system she has to fit it into ("The wand chooses the wizard" might be considered a rule, but it's so lightly used it's really inconsequential. The fact that it becomes a major hinge point for the plot of book 7 is another reason why I prefered the one in my head. I don't get this business with the wand). At any rate, Larbalestier's books are the opposite of that. Her magical system is very clearly thought out, and it rocks. Different characters have different ways of perceiving magic (the MC Reason sees it as math, most of which went over my head in the most delightful way. I love a writer who doesn't feel she has to talk down to me just because I never made it farther than pre-calc). Even cooler than the clearly defined way magic works is the cost: the characters give up years of their life every time they use magic, but if they don't use magic at all they will go insane. So these 15-year-olds are constantly weighing the costs of any action they take: will they take a step closer to dying before they're even 20, or a step closer to madness? And just to show how suggestible I am by other people's use of language, when I was writing the other day one of my characters was in zero G and chundered. Delete, delete, delete; my characters are Greenlanders, not Aussies; they don't chunder. (The book actually has an index for all the Aussie-speak used).

Well, that's a brief wrap-up, but I'm hoping to get another 2000 words in today before I have to go to that picnic thing. I'm off!

I wrote 3700 words yesterday...

...and looking them over this morning they mostly don't suck, so that's good. I celebrated with lots of dancing. Since it's been so unremittently hot I've given up treading the mill for the last few weeks, but what with all the dancing I've actually dropped a few more pounds (well, that and the lack of appetite I always get when it's just too hot). Oliver likes to dance with me, but Aidan finds it distracts him from reading the subtitles. He's trying to work out which Hindi words mean what in English. I guess he must be my kid after all.

You know, George Lucas has talked about watching Akira Kurosawa films before making Star Wars, and how he loved all the little rituals and things that a Japanese viewer wouldn't need explained, but as an American you don't know what it means but it surely means something. He was going for that effect in his first three films, that sense that this or that gesture meant something specific but didn't feel like he needed to explain it all. (Two problems with the second trilogy: he lost the sense of fun and he started explaining stuff instead of going for that sense of it all being foreign and cool. Mitichlorians, anyone?).

I only mention this because Salman Khan is in a Hollywood movie about Bollywood movies coming out next Friday called Marigold, and while I'll surely go see it, it looks from the preview that they missed that crucial fun element. It looks like it's going to be all explainy about what makes Bollywood great instead of just being a great Bollywood movie. (Like Moulin Rouge, which was essentially an English language Bollywood movie, and tons of fun. Baz Luhrman, where did you go?) Plus the MC seems like she really belongs in the movie Braatz. Personally, I'd rather see the new one he's doing with Govinda called Partner that just came out in India, but it'll probably be a year before it makes it to DVD here. Sigh. At least there's always You Tube.

Brief Notes

So this week is our homeschool vacation week, the only time I get these days to write. I'm not making any goals to finish anything, though. I'm standing on shifting sands employment-wise, which is making me panicky. Quin's career is taking off now, but it's not the meteoric rise we'd need to get by on one income, and it would be hard for me to find another work-from-home nights and weekends thing which is necessary for the homeschooling, especially as Quin sometimes has to go out of town overnight with almost no notice. I couldn't really do the overnight shift at the Red Cross again unless I was constantly calling in sick or something. I might have to work my way through less and less savory transcription employment (working for services, ugh, and just until they outsource out of country or replace humans with computers). I hope to milk out another six years. Ten would be nice. I could always go back to being a lab tech, although at this point it would be a huge drop in pay. I've gotten spoiled on this pay for productivity thing; it's easy to forget that most jobs you can't get more cash just by working harder and faster.

It's hard not to have the "what if I did this for a living?" fantasy about the writing, but I don't really find that to be a healthy influence; in fact the quality of the work suffers when I'm in any way thinking of who would ever want to buy it when I'm done. It's just not good for the writing to be looking at the WIP like it's a potential Powerball ticket where I can skew the odds if I just write really, really well. Because nothing can ever be brilliant enough for that, and it's leaving me quite dejected. So I've had to get my head straight and just focus on the craft again and not worry about whether or not it will sell. I haven't written any actual words for it in over a month, but I've come up with back stories on secondary characters I need to add to the second half, and also a sense of some other things which are missing. I'm focused to work now, but I'm not quite as joyful as I usually am when I write. Maybe I'll find the joy when I get in the zone.

On a totally unrelated note, Quin's company picnic is this Wednesday, and he's very excited for me to go. I don't go to any of my work's functions; since I work from home the only people I actually know are the other transcriptionists, with whom I have almost nothing in common, so there's very little point (plus, I just hate parties). Since Quin works for an engineering firm, his coworkers are all just like the guys I hung out with in high school, so that's cool for me (it's still a party, but a tolerable party). Quin is particularly anxious for me to go this time since he can dump me with his Indian coworker who has been lending me all of her Bollywood movies (almost all of which I went on to buy my own copies; those movies have an insanely high rewatch factor. I've had Hum Aapke Hain Koun on in the background while I've been working or doing whatever. I've only had it for two weeks but I've played it about 20 times. It's my favorite). Quin's not only been carrying these movies back and forth, but I have him ask her questions about what this or that means, or what other movies with the same actors are good. Then this became "Ask her which one she likes better, Aamir Khan or Salman Khan?" She says Aamir Khan, because Salman Khan has pictures taken with his shirt off and that's just so inappropriate in India. "Well, inappropriate photos aside, I like him in the movies. He's got this dorky-funny thing going on. He reminds me of a Hayao Miyizaki character, that big-hearted, opposite-of-cool vibe is just so... cool." Well, she says you may like Salman Khan now, but that's just because you've never seen Shah Ruh Khan. She doesn't have any of his, but here's a list of titles (none of which are here yet, so I still haven't seen Shah Ruh Khan). I don't know why he wants to get out of the middle of this fascinating conversation. I can't imagine a bunch of engineers giving him crap for discussing which actor is the cutest in this or that musical. Oh, wait...

Squirrels

They're so cute when they're helping themselves to your stale pita bread...



But then they do this to your (admittedly cheap) patio furniture...

I think there's a man-eating squirrel lurking just out of sight in my backyard.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the movie)

So I saw this last night (and just managed to squeak in reading the book for the third time before I went). I suppose I was bound to be disappointed; it is far and away my fave of the series (I'll let you know on Saturday night whether that is still true). This is the first installment by a director whose work I've not seen previously. He had an amazing visual sense; the Ministery of Magic looked fantastic, Harry's dreams/visions and the dementors were genuinely creepy, and the wizard fight at the end was phenomenonly good. In some ways the movie actually tops the book (what the director did at the end is so much cooler than statues coming to life to shield Harry, and having the Room of Requirement provide the mistletoe just when it was required was a stroke of genius). The screenwriter deserves some praise for masterfully condensing the longest book into what I'm pretty sure is the shortest movie.

Alas, in the end it didn't quite do it for me. The scenes without visual effects just really fell flat. They were staged funny, the actors didn't seem to know where to stand or which way to look (particularly Emma Watson, who never seemed to know what to do with her arms). It all felt so wooden; none of the emotional resonance carried over. None of the anger was angry enough. Harry should've been much more sarcasic in Umbridge's class, and the scene when Trelawney is fired really needed more, and should've been on the stairs. I have to blame the director here because I know these actors can act. Somewhere out there I imagine they're moaning "that's the take he kept? That one?" My favorite scene from the book didn't make it into the movie (when Neville's mother gives him the gum wrapper), but it's just as well. A bad rendition would have completely ruined it for me.

My boys didn't see it. From what I heard I thought it might be a bit much, and as they hadn't seen the Transformers yet they went to that one without me. They enjoyed it very much. Quin says that Oliver was on the edge of his seat, grinning, practically vibrating with excitement. I'll have to catch that one on DVD (probably about a million times...)