“Cai and Her Ten Thousand Husbands” has been accepted for publication by Apex Magazine. Which is online, so I’ll be able to link it from here when it ends up in print pixels! I’m quite pleased to have found a home for this one.
Category: PERSONAL
General Stuffings
Been blindingly sick, but only off-and-on, for a few weeks, which explains why I have posted so very little here. But it has not been a slow few weeks, at all: I am finished with the albatross. No, Ringo and Paul, I did not declare, “I am the albatross” — I am no more albatross than I am walrus — I declared that I am finished with the albatross. The albatross being a project I should never have talked anyone else into, but I did, and thank heaven it’s over, and no, it was not worth it. In any sense. …
Best Morning Music
Manu Dibango, Wakafrica. 1994 album, but it feels like 1973. Which, in music anyway, can be a glorious thing! Wakafrica – Manu Dibango
Asus Eee, Ubuntu’d
Lime and I decided to get ourselves a couple of Asus Eee PCs. The way the won is doing, the prices are comparable enough that we stopped hesitating, especially since Lime needs something for studying and I need someone I can haul to class or to my office. (I got tired of carrying my HP Pavilion laptop in one back, and the class stuff in the other; this way, it all goes into one shoulder bag.) Mine is green, Lime’s is white. It took me a few hours to research how to install Ubuntu on it — someone’s remixed Ubuntu …
False Alarm
My last post involved muttering grumbles about proofreading. Well, good news and bad news: the bad news is that it wasn’t even for a project I’m connected to — it was for something else altogether, and nobody made that clear. It was just, “We need you to do X, we’ll renumerate as Y, the [ridiculous] deadline is Z.” Or at least, that was what I gathered from the phone call (in Korean) and the follow-up email (in English). I guess someone forgot to actually ask me if I had time/was willing to take on an extra proofreading gig. The good …
Grrr.
Note to all proofreaders: One sometimes must just say no. One such time is when all the begging, money offers, and other wiles are, you are fully aware, not going to incline you to once again drop all your bloody weekend plans at the last minute, without any warning, and fix typos and gunk that you’ve already marked as needing revision three times before. Because if you politely point out that the time constraints are just impossible, then what you’ll get is a promise that the thing will be sent to you Friday afternoon, and not Friday night. And no, …
Photo ID?
I was just getting my papers together to send off for my Criminal Record Check and I came across a ton of expired old ID cards. My student/faculty cards from undergrad and grad school (I was issued a student card and then, as a TA, soon after got a faculty card at Concordia); my old S.I.N. card (Social Insurance Number, for you non-Canadians); my Quebec Health Insurance card; and a few more odd cards. Not among them was my long-ago destroyed learner’s license, which even after it expired was useful for ID for a while, and as soon as it …
Some news…
My friend Maura alerted me to the fact that my story “The Country of the Young” (in the current issue of Interzone, ie. issue 219) got a really positive review from Ziv Wities over at The Fix. I’m very happy to hear it, and more than ever I’m looking forward to getting my hands on a copy of the issue. For those of you in the UK, it should be in shops. For the rest of the world, I don’t know whether a Fictionwise edition is forthcoming (Interzone 218 doesn’t seem to have been posted at Fictionwise yet either), but …
Who Do You Think You Are?
Continuing on the Great Depression theme from yesterday’s post: the current episode of This American Life, #368 which was titled, “Who Do You Think You Are?” is outstanding, featuring old interviews of people who’d survived the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression, the horrors of the Second World War, and all the chaos that followed on that time. Parts are very moving. And then there’s a discussion of what it’s like to see a black president from the point of view of a man who remembers explicit segregation and unrepentantly open racism against him as a black American — as a …
What’s New?
Recent stuff you might have missed, or want to check out, in case you don’t notice it over in the sidebar: For those of you in the UK, the December 2008 issue of InterZone, containing my story “Country of the Young,” is now on shelves in the UK. It’s the first in a projected series of tales set in a future North Korea. The best future North Korea I can imagine, in fact. This one’s a train wreck of love, ideology, immigration, and biotech. It’s not available online, but it’s mentioned very positively in this review at The Fix. StarShipSofa …