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Jul. 30th, 2009 04:17 pmMy big news of the day isn't here at all. You need to go to another site. I'm in alt, not just because of the announcement (I knew the news already, oddly enough) but because Kaaron Warren has been saying nice things about Life through Cellophane. It means a great deal when an author one admires so very much likes your book. It means even more when the detail of what she says means she's seen the book as I intended it.
I need words to celebrate my inner joy,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
themusecalliope just happens to have given me five more words to play with. Let's see if they fit the bill.
foodways
I'm a food addict. It's a sad thing. Every day I eat food. Tonight's dinner was tabbouli and Lebanese sausages.
I'm also addicted to learning about food and understanding foodways. That's why I do a bit of culinary history and that's why I have my Food History blog. It's why I teach food history and work on the Conflux banquet (of which there will be none next year - this year's Southern barbecue is going to be something to remember, though).
Foodways are why I frequent markets and specialist shops and strange internet sites and bookstores. Speaking of foodways, Alma Alexander is guest blogging for me on my other blog. Guess what she's talking about?
magnet
I think this is a hint. I've noticed that every time I do a new magnet for my Food History blog,themusecalliope wants one. There are only four people in the world (apart from me) who have a complete collection of my magnets, and she is one. Right now my life is all about books emerging into the world of readers, both my books and others. When this is past (maybe Novemberish) I might issue another food history magnet. For people who can't wait till then, there are always the new Conflux postcards with a cake recipe on the back. Mind you, the only ones of them available right now are the warped ones, pre-proofing and to get them you need to comment either on a post I wrote a few days ago on this blog or on the equivalent post on my food history blog.
Why is my mind wandering around Conflux topics right now? It's as if everything comes back to Conflux. As if something significant was going to happen there.
Dalek
themusecalliope and I share a Dr Who addiction. In fact, much of my family share this affliction, and some of my relatives have it worse than me. This doesn't stop me yearning after a pair of tiny remote controlled daleks that I can use in case of an ant plague. I have visions of them zapping ants while I press the button that has them say 'Exterminate.'
It also doesn't stop me recalling the time the Melbourne University Science Fiction Association was informed by the Student Union that it had to dispose of its full-sized fully-functional (as long as there was someone inside) model dalek. I came home so excited.
"It's a dalek, Mum. We can have our own dalek!"
I was informed that daleks were not domesticated.
I moved to Sydney soon after.
Feast
See foodways. Think of the Confux banquet. 1883 Lake Charles, a lovely town on Contraband Bayou. I need to do a post on that, soon. Just so's Jo knows what she's missing out on, by missing Conflux yet again.
Book
I often joke that my life isn't about one book. I don't have a single favourite.
This year, not even my publishing life is about one book. It's a bit crazy, because I didn't even get a short story into print last year (I didn't try that hard) and this year there was Masques and there is a short story of my very own hidden inside In Bad Dreams 2 (to be launched on the same day as the Conflux banquet, which is rather funny when you think about it, because the story is set in Louisiana and so is the banquet) and there is Life Through Cellophane and there is The Art of Effective Dreaming. Because everything is happening at once, sometimes it all slows down, but it is most definitely happening. All my books now have covers and both novels are up to final adjustings. I'm totally happy about it and totally scared. My short stories aren't really like my novels, and my novels are mostly not really like each other, either. Life Through Cellophane mostly happens in a loungeroom. The Art of Effective Dreaming happens somewhere quite extraordinary. Both of them are set in Canberra and they're as near to each other in nature as anything I've written. What I'm working on now is political and full of the end-of-things, but these two finished books are intimate and inward. The jokes are better in them. So's the geography, because I just can't work out my scales for my peninsular country. The rocks are fine, but the distances are profoundly awry. Thinking about it, though, the geography in The Art of Effective Dreaming is very odd. Accurate and precise, but shifts underfoot.
Now you know why it's never just one book for reading, for writing, for dreaming, for discussing, for publishing. My mind likes visiting a lot of different places a day. And that's what books are for: exploration.
I need words to celebrate my inner joy,
themusecalliope just happens to have given me five more words to play with. Let's see if they fit the bill.foodways
I'm a food addict. It's a sad thing. Every day I eat food. Tonight's dinner was tabbouli and Lebanese sausages.
I'm also addicted to learning about food and understanding foodways. That's why I do a bit of culinary history and that's why I have my Food History blog. It's why I teach food history and work on the Conflux banquet (of which there will be none next year - this year's Southern barbecue is going to be something to remember, though).
Foodways are why I frequent markets and specialist shops and strange internet sites and bookstores. Speaking of foodways, Alma Alexander is guest blogging for me on my other blog. Guess what she's talking about?
magnet
I think this is a hint. I've noticed that every time I do a new magnet for my Food History blog,
themusecalliope wants one. There are only four people in the world (apart from me) who have a complete collection of my magnets, and she is one. Right now my life is all about books emerging into the world of readers, both my books and others. When this is past (maybe Novemberish) I might issue another food history magnet. For people who can't wait till then, there are always the new Conflux postcards with a cake recipe on the back. Mind you, the only ones of them available right now are the warped ones, pre-proofing and to get them you need to comment either on a post I wrote a few days ago on this blog or on the equivalent post on my food history blog. Why is my mind wandering around Conflux topics right now? It's as if everything comes back to Conflux. As if something significant was going to happen there.
Dalek
themusecalliope and I share a Dr Who addiction. In fact, much of my family share this affliction, and some of my relatives have it worse than me. This doesn't stop me yearning after a pair of tiny remote controlled daleks that I can use in case of an ant plague. I have visions of them zapping ants while I press the button that has them say 'Exterminate.' It also doesn't stop me recalling the time the Melbourne University Science Fiction Association was informed by the Student Union that it had to dispose of its full-sized fully-functional (as long as there was someone inside) model dalek. I came home so excited.
"It's a dalek, Mum. We can have our own dalek!"
I was informed that daleks were not domesticated.
I moved to Sydney soon after.
Feast
See foodways. Think of the Confux banquet. 1883 Lake Charles, a lovely town on Contraband Bayou. I need to do a post on that, soon. Just so's Jo knows what she's missing out on, by missing Conflux yet again.
Book
I often joke that my life isn't about one book. I don't have a single favourite.
This year, not even my publishing life is about one book. It's a bit crazy, because I didn't even get a short story into print last year (I didn't try that hard) and this year there was Masques and there is a short story of my very own hidden inside In Bad Dreams 2 (to be launched on the same day as the Conflux banquet, which is rather funny when you think about it, because the story is set in Louisiana and so is the banquet) and there is Life Through Cellophane and there is The Art of Effective Dreaming. Because everything is happening at once, sometimes it all slows down, but it is most definitely happening. All my books now have covers and both novels are up to final adjustings. I'm totally happy about it and totally scared. My short stories aren't really like my novels, and my novels are mostly not really like each other, either. Life Through Cellophane mostly happens in a loungeroom. The Art of Effective Dreaming happens somewhere quite extraordinary. Both of them are set in Canberra and they're as near to each other in nature as anything I've written. What I'm working on now is political and full of the end-of-things, but these two finished books are intimate and inward. The jokes are better in them. So's the geography, because I just can't work out my scales for my peninsular country. The rocks are fine, but the distances are profoundly awry. Thinking about it, though, the geography in The Art of Effective Dreaming is very odd. Accurate and precise, but shifts underfoot.
Now you know why it's never just one book for reading, for writing, for dreaming, for discussing, for publishing. My mind likes visiting a lot of different places a day. And that's what books are for: exploration.