I’m not totally recovered from my back pains, but things are much better now. Those who are paying attention to my sidebar might have noticed I’ve been doing a tremendous amount of reading in the last week, at least compared to usual. I’m caught up on my subscriptions to F&SF and InterZone, with one issue of Fantasy left to go, and I’ve also finished several whole books in the last week, too. This is a good thing, even if it took a strained muscle in my back to remind me that I can and should read a lot, and that …
Month: May 2007
Ow Ow Ow
Back pain. Doing better. Not writing or posting much. That’s why. Reading a lot, though, while stuck on my back doing stretches and resting my weary back muscles. I’ll update on recent readings when I am feeling better… as well as launch into revisions of “Lester Young”, post long-overdue crits to friends, and start in on a new short story somewhere between Lovecraftian horror and War On Terror ™. Also, realized I’d started my story “Jing the Quae” way too early in the timeline… the real story happens months after the end of the period of time I drafted as …
Question Popped
No date set, but she did say yes, and this time, since she’s wearing a ring, it really actually officially counts. I asked a couple of days ago (on Wednesday), but we were waiting till I could call my mom on mother’s day to let her know about it. Yay! PS: Yes, for those curious, it’s an aquamarine. It seemed like the best choice between all of her and my possible birthstones, an older tradition we decided to go with because we like it better.
Trimmed Down, Baby!
I spent a LOT of time today trimming a story down. It’s my little bloody Christmas story, “Solvjaynghi’s Christmas Wish,” and while I didn’t get it as slim as I wanted — I was vaguely hoping I could compress it into 4000 words and give it a try at Clarkesworld — I did get it down to 5000 words. I regard that as a considerable feat since the original was 8200 words, and since I managed to lose not so very much of the story. And yeah, for the curious, I started it with the reindeer thing. Caroline, I guess …
Facebook/Nonstandard
It seems to me that Facebook is a rather amazing little bit of social software. It allows one to find one’s links to others across all kinds of boundaries — having lost touch, having dropped out of contact, having moved to a new place. However, the biggest limitation for a piece of software like this is that it’s monolingual. That means that many of my friends from Montreal, such as my francophone co-workers, are unlikely to enter into this particular social networking system. Those ex-students with whom I’m still in contact in Korea are also unlikely to do so, since, …