Just last week it seemed that Balticon was months away. Time's a funny thing, no?

Just got my Balticon schedule, and for the first time I think I have nothing on the last programming slot of the last day of the event. ~grin~


R-21. Early Favorite Authors
Friday at 5:00 pm in Chase
Panelists discuss who their earliest favorite authors were, and where they think that affinity may had lead them in their literary preferences or in their own writing.
Moderator: Trisha J. Wooldridge
Speakers: Mark L. Van Name; Bernie Mojzes; Lyle Blake Smythers

R-66. Wisdom of The Plebes
Friday at 7:00 pm in Pimlico
A panel of new, up and coming authors. What have they learned in the last few years? How has being published changed their life? What has impacted upon them as authors? How does it feel to have fans?
Moderator: James Daniel Ross
Speakers: Nathan O. Lowell; Emilie P. Bush; Bernie Mojzes; Barbara Friend Ish

R-60. The Role of Anthologies -- Roundtable Discussion
Friday at 10:00 pm in Parlor 1041
As both a source of fiction and a means of promotion, what do anthologies have to offer? Fan and author panelists discuss.
Moderator: Danielle Ackley-McPhail
Speakers: Michael A. Ventrella; Joshua Bilmes; C.J .Henderson; Trisha J. Wooldridge; Bernie Mojzes; Pete Prellwitz; Jean Marie Ward

R-32. When does an alien or a magic-wielder become a god or a demon?
Saturday at 6:00 pm in Pimlico
What is the difference between Q and YahweH? Between Voldemort and Satan?
Moderator: Barbara Friend Ish
Speakers: Neal Levin; Justin R. Macumber; Bernie Mojzes; Joshua Palmatier/Benjamin Tate

P-12. Dragon Moon Press Presents Spells and Swashbucklers!
Saturday at 10:00 pm in
Ahoy, mateys! Join Dragon Moon Press as we launch the second anthology of pirates, magic and ne'er-do-wells, Spells and Swashbucklers! There will be readings from several of the authors, as well as cake and the chance to win your very own copy of both Spells and Swashbucklers and Rum and Runestones, the first book in the series. Come, bring your best pirate outfit, and your sense of danger! (Also listed as BL-6. in Literary: Book Launch Program).
Speakers: Bernie Mojzes; Gail Z. Martin; Danielle Ackley-McPhail; Danny Birt; Robert E Waters

BL-6. Dragon Moon Press Presents Spells and Swashbucklers!
Saturday at 10:00 pm in Salon A
Ahoy, mateys! Join Dragon Moon Press as we launch the second anthology of pirates, magic and ne'er-do-wells, Spells and Swashbucklers! There will be readings from several of the authors, as well as cake and the chance to win your very own copy of both Spells and Swashbucklers and Rum and Runestones, the first book in the series. Come, bring your best pirate outfit, and your sense of danger!
Moderator: Val Griswold-Ford
Speakers: Bernie Mojzes; Gail Z. Martin; Danielle Ackley-McPhail; Danny Birt; Robert E Waters

R-10. The Technology of Steampunk -- A Round Table Discussion
Sunday at 9:00 am in Parlor 1041
What does and doesn't fit into a steampunk world? How does the setting shape technology and how people relate to it?
Moderator: Emilie P. Bush
Speakers: Elektra Hammond; Rebecca K. Davis; Danielle Ackley-McPhail; Bernie Mojzes; C.J. Henderson; Andrew Fox

W-7. Editors Looking For Submissions
Sunday at 10:00 am in Belmont
Meet editors who are actively looking for writing and/or artwork for their publications. Get tips on what they like and dislike. Find out what kind of work they need right now.
Moderator: Vonnie Winslow Crist
Speakers: Bernie Mojzes; Brian Koscienski; Michael A. Ventrella; Kate Kaynak

R-61. The Hot Seat
Sunday at 3:00 pm in Salon B
Panelists give fans and aspiring writers a chance to ask any questions whatsoever about writing, motivation, character building, selling your work, agents, et cetera.
Moderator: Bill Fawcett
Speakers: Hildy Silverman; David Sherman; Bernie Mojzes; D.H. Aire

FTV-7. Philip K. Dick -- Hollywood's Favorite Author
Sunday at 5:00 pm in Parlor 3041
A LOT of Phillip K. Dick's work has ended up on the silver screen. Panelists discuss what makes his work so Hollywood-sympatico and talk about the ones that were great, not so great and, well, blaghhh!
Moderator: D. Douglas Fratz
Speakers: Michael D. Pederson; Billy Flynn; Andrew Fox; Bernie Mojzes; Daniel M. Kimmel; Marty Gear; Richard Allen Leider

BL-5. The Eternal Launch Party
Sunday at 7:00 pm in Garden Room
The Dark Quest Books release of Danielle Ackley-McPhail's Eternal Cycle Series of urban fantasy novels, including Yesterday's Dreams, Tomorrow's Memories, and the newly released Today's Promise, as well as other 2012 titles, to be announced. Be sure to stick around long enough to hear the music of SJ Tucker and Jonah Knight!
Moderator: Danielle Ackley-McPhail
Speakers: Jonah Knight; Mike McPhail; C.J .Henderson; Jeff Lyman; Neal Levin; Elektra Hammond; Keith R. A. DeCandido; John Hemry (Jack Campbell); Patrick Thomas; James Daniel Ross; Charles Edward Gannon; Bernie Mojzes; S.J. (Sooj) Tucker


The two other places I'm likely to be is 1) in the dealers room (come, buy books, etc.) and 2) the bar, staring at the weird glowing mushrooms.

See you there, hopefully.

A great Kid Night last night, which I'll come back to in a moment. And it's a beautiful, sunny, warm, green day out there (wide carnivorous sky or no), and I'm sitting here – we'll come back to that in a moment. I woke this morning at 8:30, after getting to sleep at 3 ayem. I dozed off watching Rodan (1956) on the iPad. And then I woke from a very strange dream, and I knew immediately I wouldn't be getting back to sleep, never mind I'd only managed five and a half hours (lately seven has been the norm). I left the bedroom so as not to wake Spooky, and sat in the middle parlor reading until she got up at 10:30.

Being up alone for two hours afforded far too much time for quiet reflection. I am fairly convinced most humans manage to avoid that these says, even those, like me, who understand its importance. But when I do stop and look, too often I don't like what I see looking back at me. How did I become this? Is this really me? Where does personality and artifice begin and end? I've spent so many years building up various personas, erecting alter egos, tearing them down, rebuilding, and I have to wonder if I'm still in there. Worse still, I have to wonder if I ever was in there? Yeah, getting all existential and shit, but I'm serious. I consider myself with any (inherently doomed attempt) at objectivity, and, more often than not, I'm entirely perplexed at the person I see. Do I even like this woman? Would anyone? Am I far too hard on myself? Am I failing to factor in all the most important known variables? Am I falling into a hundred different winnowing traps created by generations Y and Z, the Echo Boomers and the iGeneration? Am I not everything that is anathema to this new world of obsessive virtual socializing, freely relinquished privacy, and unwarranted optimism? Writing this, it's taking on aspects of a grotesque sort of apparent self parody. Silly Ol' Aunt Beast, that unfeeling, sharp-tongued windbag. Just a sad little goat girl lost in time and space, loony as a fruitcake, tumbling down the abyss of her own navel. Okay – hahahahahah – but enough of this.

I've been told again and again that no one reads long paragraphs if they appear online (actually, I was being told that about print in 1985, when I worked for the college paper). If this is so, I don't have to erase anything I've just said. If it's not...

---

Today is Andre the Giant's Birthday. He has a posse, and likely always shall.

---

Yesterday, I spent many hours rebuilding Alabaster: Wolves #5. And it's done, except for one logistical problem, which I only solved an hour after I was done with the last page (I'll fix that today or tomorrow). It's a much darker ending than the original one. It's also vastly less convoluted. I'll send it to my editor on Monday.

Oh, and my comp copy of David Hartwell and Jacob Weisman's The Sword and Sorcery Anthology (Tachyon Press), which reprints my S&S story, "The Sea Troll's Daughter," arrived yesterday. Which I maintain is one of my most underrated and, possibly, misunderstood tales. I am the stealth feminist, gender criminal incognito, she who shatters "genre" conventions well out of sight! Oh, also, Hartwell and Weisman's book is not to be confused with L. Sprague De Camp's 1963 anthology of the same name. It helps avoid confusion that Hartwell and Weisman actually include female authors (well, 4 women to 19 men). Anyway, yes, "The Sea Troll's Daughter," plus Rachel Pollack, Joanna Russ, Jane Yolen, and a bunch of dudes. I'm going to shut up about this book now, before I allow as how there's really no excuse for having included so few female writers. In the early 1960s, De Camp might possibly have fairly made that argument; no one today can.

---

Pizza from Fellini's on Wickenden Street last night, then two Kid Night movies. Both of which we saw last year in theaters, but both of which I've been wanting to see at least a second time. We started with Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.'s The Thing (prequel to Carpenter's 1982 film, which was a remake of Christian Nyby and Howard Hawk's 1951 The Thing from Another World, the first of three film adaptations of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s 1938 short story, "Who Goes There"). All in all, there really is a lot to like about this film, but, on the other hand, I think, in the end, if falls flat, and I hate saying that. It makes an enormous blunder right off, by eschewing the unrelenting claustrophobia and sense of isolation, that are two of the elements that made Carpenter's film so powerful, by leaving Antarctica and inserting an unnecessary scene at Columbia University. The director and screenwriter could easily have gotten Dr. Sander Halvorson from New York to Antarctica without dragging the viewer away from the Norwegian camp. For starters, if they'd have done their homework, they'd known that, in 1982, there were paleontologists working on Seymour Island on the Antarctic Peninsula, and the whole Columbia University digression wasn't even necessary. Anyway...I likely had more praise for this film when I saw it in the theater. And, like I said, there's a lot to like...the creature design, for example. But there's just not enough to like...

Our second feature was the extended version of Jon Favreau's Cowboys and Aliens. I loved it the first time I saw it, and I love it even more now. The tide of critical opinion be damned. It's a wonderful, fun, and surprisingly poignant film. Ford, Craig, Clancy Brown, Olivia Wilde, and Keith Carradine all deliver fine performances in a "genre" mashup someone should have done this well long before. The design of the spacecraft and its mining technology is better than the creature design, but both are quite good. I'm pretty sure the studio, distributors, theaters, and filmgoers simply had no idea what to make of this film. It straddles categories and really fits nowhere convenient and marketable. Which is a point in its favor. Like this year's John Carter, it might have been a box-office bomb, but that doesn't get in the way of it being a hell of a lot of fun.

So...I think I'm taking today off. It's warm and green. The sun is shining in the sky. There's not a cloud in sight...

Yeah, Quoting ELO (I'm Old, Okay?),
Aunt Beast

Just to be perverse, this was the birthday cake I requested. Too bad it was my father in law who ordered it and I didn't get to see the look on the clerk's face.

About four years ago here on the blog, I mentioned the concept of "giraffe rules" [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]. As I said at the time:

“Please don’t eat the giraffe” rules […] are the kinds of rules any society has which no one ever thinks to spell out in so many words, until someone comes along who tries to eat the giraffe. If you’re a parent, you’re pretty familiar with these rules, because kids are always finding some giraffe to eat. If you hang out with writers, many of whom are the beneficiaries of what at the kindest could be called quirky socialization, you run into some of these same rules. (And of course, there are places in the world where “Please don’t eat the giraffe” may well be a needed social rule.)

So a while ago, the_child commented that she thought that Mother of the Child and I weren't very good parents.

"Why?" I asked her, quite curious about this utterance.

"Because you don't give me very many rules."

"Well," I pointed out, "You don't need a lot rules. You pretty much behave yourself. Parents make rules when kids do things they shouldn't."

Such as trying to eat the giraffe.

There are so many unwritten rules in society. Not just unwritten, but even unconscious. A favorite example of mine is the priority of seating in an automobile. With the partial exception of a socially flat group of peers (such as high school kids of the same gender and clique in the same year-class), we almost always know who's going to sit where in a car without having to ask. If you begin to pick at how that works, it's a pretty complex hierarchy with a lot of exception management. Who owns the vehicle? Who has the keys? Who is dating or married to whom? Who's infirm or elderly? Who's exceptionally tall or short? What's the gender mix? What's the age mix? And even for peers, there's a protocol. Calling "shotgun", for example.

Yet no one ever sits down and explains this to people. We all just know, by some magic osmosis. We'll call these shotgun rules.

So there are giraffe rules, which are so obvious they aren't normally stated at all, then there are the shotgun rules which are the opposite of obvious, maybe even vanishingly subtle, but they aren't normally stated either. And believe me, being a parent brings both sets of rules to consciousness, especially if you have a kid like mine, who spends a lot of time analyzing other people's behavior. Or likewise if your kid's on the autism spectrum, you spend a lot of time explaining these rules.

What are your favorite examples of giraffe rules? What are your favorite examples of shotgun rules?

Today is the second full day of Paradise Lost, the writing conference I'm at in San Antonio. We've got a good crew here, including fellow pro mentors John Joseph Adams and Steven Brust, as well as organizer Sean Kelley, my good friends @dratz and Mrs. @dratz, and ton of other fun, interesting people, including a guest appearance from creed_of_hubris yesterday evening, and a guest appearance from my cousin the park ranger this coming evening.

So far we've eaten way too much food, hot tubbed, drank, engaged in deeply inappropriate conversation, played several games of Bang!, drank, critiqued, discussed submittals and editorial etiquette, drank, eaten way too much food, talked a lot about writing, and drank.

Why the hell do I come to these things anyway? Oh, the food. And drinking. (Though in truth, very little of that for me and my liver.)

It's a fun group having a fun time being writers together. I like this part of the writing life, a lot.

Meanwhile, I have a lecture to go be a part of shortly.

Your Saturday moment of zen.



Flower. © 2006, 2012, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

The current photo series is from my 'favorites' file, hence the dates jumping about



This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Study: Organic food turns people into jerks — Heh. Who knew? (Snurched from @jackwilliambell.)

Hybrid: 1910 — A somewhat peculiar piece of railroading history.

How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit

Bugs Help Measure Impact of New Transoceanic Highway on Amazon

Australasia has hottest 60 years in a millennium, scientists find — Study of tree rings, corals and ice cores finds unnatural spike in temperatures that lines up with manmade climate change. Amazing how the liberals even manage to get tree rings and coral reefs onto the climate change conspiracy. Good thing we have the GOP to remind us that the truth isn't before our lying eyes.

Legal Experts: Sodomy Is a Civil Right — Unfortunately, so is bigotry. And hypocrisy. (Via danjite.)

Gay Marriage: The Republican Love Affair With the Past — In 2005 the Supreme Court made sodomy legal in all 50 states and since then there have been absolutely no reports of anyone turning into a pillar of salt. To be fair to the conservative viewpoint, we've all seen how places like Canada and Massachusetts have collapsed into apocalyptic Socialist hells since the advent of gay marriage. I mean, just look at the divorce rates in Massachusetts compared to the good, American gay-hating Red states. Oh, wait, never mind.

?otd: How many MC's must get dissed?

---

5/19/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (WRPA, not to mention a full day of conferencing and critique)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.5 (solid)
Weight: n/a
Currently reading: Light Breaker by Mark Teppo

http://www.jonathancarroll.com/blog1/2012/05/carrollblog_519_3.html

A Few Words on The Soul
by Wislawa Szymborska

We have a soul at times.

No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It’s picky:
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.

It won’t say where it comes from
or when it’s taking off again,
though it’s clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.

We are very pleased to announce that Mari Ness and J.M. McDermott both had stories included on the Million Writers' Award 2011 Notable Stories list!  Love in the Absence of Mosquitoes, and Arachne, appeared in Issue 1 of the Journal of Unlikely Entomology. If you haven't read them yet, I urge you to do so: http://www.grumpsjournal.com/jue1/jue1-index.html

Not only that, but the Journal of Unlikely Entomology snagged a runner-up nod for best new online magazine of the year! We are humbled and thrilled! Congratulations Mari and J.M., and thank you to all our authors and artists for making our first year a noteworthy one!

The full list of notable stories is available here: http://www.storysouth.com/millionwriters/millionwritersnotable_2011.html

This is me last July, trying to hide my stomach from the camera:



This is me now:



I was almost embarrassed and still debating whether to post it in public. Then The Redhead put it on Facebook, and everyone was all omg HAWT. I was surprised and delighted at the response.

( So, if my body isn't a bad one, why do I piss and moan about my weight?  )