I haven’t done a meme in quite a while, but Bri tagged me so I thought I’d give this one a go.

1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5-6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read the player’s blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

A Meme about Various Things

What were you doing ten years ago?
1998? We would have just recently moved to Santa Clara. I think in May I was temping at a Jaguar dealership.

What are five things on your to-do list for today (not in any particular order)?
Clean off my desk, straighten up dolls, clean out the inbox, buy a present, write something.

What are some snacks you enjoy?
chocolate, yogurt with granola, popcorn

What would you do if you were a billionaire?
Aside from paying off debts, assuring education funds for my children (it may take near a billion by the time they get there), and buying assorted cars and houses for my loved ones — I’d set up some sort of organization that would serve as a patron for writers, allowing them to write without being dependent on the whims of the market to make a living, and exploring new means of publication and distribution for the new age. Also, I’d probably do something a la Skotos, only with a stronger leaning towards collaborative fiction instead of gaming, and with more paid staff to make it work.

What are five places where you have lived?
Placentia, CA; West Lafayette, IN; Santa Clara, CA; Davis, CA; South Hadley, MA.

What are five jobs you have had?
Day Camp Supervisor, Ride Operator, Heraldic Salesperson (forsooth), Dry Cleaning press operator (I swear it’s true), Dishwasher

What were the last five books you read?
The Orphan’s Tale 1 & 2 (Catheryn M. Valente)
The Name of the Wind (Patrick Rothfuss)
Childe Morgan (Katherine Kurtz)
Passage (Lois McMaster Bujold)
Emissary (Fiona McIntosh)

What are five web sites you visit daily (in no particular order)?
Confessions of a Pioneer Woman
I Can Has Cheesburger?
Flogging the Quill
Endicott Studio blog
Fantasy Magazine
(cheated a bit here, as I actually read most of these through a feed aggregator: the only sites I literally visit everyday are Google Reader and LiveJournal)

I don’t usually tag people on these things, but I’m feeling capricious today, so…

Nin!
Annie!
Melodye!
Chris!
Melissa!

You’re up!

My daughter’s picked a lovely bouquet for me this morning, and delivered it with breakfast in bed. I share it here for all the mothers, mothers-to-be … and, well, anyone who ever had a mother to enjoy!

I was going to post the painting I did yesterday, but it is nearly all black, and would spoil the trend of colorful flowers here of late. So if you’re interested, you can go visit it at my DeviantArt account.

Have a great day!

A week or so ago, the editorial staff at work enjoyed a visit from several of our contributing artists, who wooed us with strawberry and cream croissants. During a lull in the conversation (we were all licking our fingers, I’m sure), my boss, Jenny Doh, asked us each to reveal our favorite words. I wish I could relate some of the other favorites, but I was too busy wracking my brain trying to figure out what my own favorite word is to make good mental notes.

Finally, though, when it came to my turn, I had to admit that I didn’t have a favorite. I still don’t. There are so many great words out there, distinguished by their meaning or their sound or both, that it’s impossible to choose among them. More than that, since every word is, at one time or another, the perfect word, how is it possible to start arranging them preferentially? My admiration of any word is fluid, depending upon the context, my mood, or the time of day.

And then, too, there’s the fact that even when my fancy is caught by a particular word, after a few hours or days it is buried under so many other words that I loose track of it. The sparkly gem is forgotten within a pile of other sparkly gems.

Jenny laughingly called me a Word Snob, but I suppose I am more of a Word Smith, recognizing the utilitarian value of any writer’s most basic tool. A carpenter does not value nails less because they lack the twisting elegance of a screw!

I probably would not be blogging about this, except that earlier today Annie posted her list of things that make her happy. I thought about it, and I thought about the elusive nature of “favorite” words, and realized I could make my own list and keep it here where I can update it so often as the words require. Won’t it be nice to have a be nice to have a record of all these sparkly gems, captivating, encapsulated wonders of sound and sense, all in once place? Then I will be able to go back over it whenever I want and, no matter the limits of my faulty memory, recall all the amazing words that have tickled my fancy at one time or another.

I invite you to join me in this enterprise by sharing your own favorite words in the comments (and for this, my LiveJournal friends, I must ask that you come to the actual Artifacts site to comment). I will put a link to this post in the sidebar, and you can come and add a word at any time in the future you feel so inspired. Let’s see what sort of catalog of wonderful words we can assemble together!

To start off, here’s a few that have caught my attention today:

elixir
astute
elusive
shiny

What’s yours?

P.S. I apologize for the carpenter metaphor!

I skipped out on my weekly writer’s group meeting last night to attend a signing by Lois McMaster Bujold at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego. I debated about going for a few days, because San Diego is a long way, gas is not cheap, and it was a school night. But when I didn’t manage to talk myself out of wanting to go, I decided to make the trip, and am very glad I did.

Ms. Bujold was a very engaging speaker and answered a lot of questions from what I feel was a very enlightened audience. I’ve been to a lot of signings where the audience asked a lot of questions about the content of the books — why did this happen, what about that character, etc — but this group were more interested in her process and experience as a writer. Very interesting stuff, from this writer’s point of view. It was recorded for a podcast, so within a few weeks you can hear it yourself if you like.

There’s one point in particular that I’m glad she brought up, which had caught my attention while reading an interview with her last week:

I have come to believe that if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF are fantasies of political agency. (Of which the stereotypical “male teen power fantasy” is again merely an especially gaudy and visible subset.) (Source: Fantasy Book Critic

I think it’s an interesting observation, but I am not sure I entirely agree. Or maybe it’s that I disagree that fantasy should be that way, though it certainly seems to be the case with the bulk of modern popular fantasy. I’m currently preoccupied with the labels we apply to the different genres. Typically, we classify them according to their dressing — this one is fantasy because it has magic, elves and dragons, that one is SF because it has spaceships, time travel and alien viruses. But with all the cross-over and blending, this way only leads to madness and an eternally growing list of sub-genres. Maybe we need to start labeling stories according to the kind of story they tell, instead … but that’s a topic for another post, when I have a better grasp on what it is I actually want to say.

After the signing (I had my ARC of Passage signed, along with my copy of Paladin of Souls and a second copy of Passage that will be a gift for my eldest sister) I got to enjoy a long Girl Geek Gab. I paused on the way out to tell Sam, who works at the store and who is also the co-host of the afore mentioned podcast, Adventures in SciFi Publishing, that I was a fan of the show — this is a very out-of-the-box action for me, since it is not always easy to get my introverted self to initiate conversation, but it really paid off.

We were joined by two other attendees (whom I had conversed with previously while in line to get my books signed) and spent the next hour talking about just about every major SF&F fan topic that you can think of, with topics ranging from whether it was Eowyn or Merry who killed the Witch King, why it was probably a good thing that The Golden Compass didn’t do well at the box office, and a comparison of the relative sizes of particular body parts of certain Jedi knights (”May the Schwartz be with you.”) It was GREAT!

I don’t often get the opportunity to converse about this sort of stuff anymore. My co-workers are great, but none of them are into the SF world (except for the owner of the company, who surprised me by being a Firefly fan) and only look at me strangely when I burst out in defense of Star Wars at a company luncheon. Oh, they all have their own fannish pleasures, so they understand, but their different fandoms so we can’t really share them. My social contacts outside of the office are very slim to none (I’m such a houserat). How rare a treat to be able to say, “Have you seen Viggo’s photography?” and have them know exactly what I’m talking about!

So it was a good night, and not too late (I was home by 11), and hopefully Lost was taped properly so I can watch it over the weekend without having to download it. Next week it will be back to the writer’s group (another group of people I enjoy talking with, but also not into SF-dom) and maybe, just maybe, I’ll have something to share for critique.

I find it amusing to have a Google Alert set up for my last name. For those of you not in the know, what that means is that every time Google’s spiders (is that even what they call them these days?) run across a new occurrence of my name on the Web, I get an e-mailed notification of the location. Because I have a unusual name — nearly unique — it is almost always a direct reference to myself, with one or another of my sisters popping up from time to time, too.

The two most surprising notifications in recent months have led me to the New York Times website. The first is this reference to my Filmography. Exciting, no? No, not really — it seems that they’ve only gotten around to putting names up there, and haven’t added my actual film credit. Yes, singular. My internship with a small production company one summer while I was in college was pretty short, and I only worked on the one film. If you’re interested, you can read more about it on Yahoo! TV, but I promise you it’s nothing you’ve ever heard of before.

The second link — and I hesitate to show this to you because it’s a little bit embarrassing, but it’s also sort of cool — also dates back to my college years. I barely remember getting interviewed for this, and I don’t think I ever saw the article in print. I wonder if I would have agreed to be interviewed if I knew it would be so publicly accessible nearly 20 years later. Hooray for the Internet? So anyway, I give you … The Lunar Howling Society. Oh, just to clarify, the reporter got my major confused with that of the also-quoted Susan (who was my roommate, and who will get a kick out of this when she reads this) — I was the Medieval Studies major, while she was in American Studies. My faith in the reliability of the American Press is shattered! (/sarcasm).

So, there you go. Have you ever found yourself popping up in unexpected places online? Share!

ETA: PS: My sister has started a blog. Go give her some love!

The problem with eating lunch in the park is that it makes me what to blog when I come back to the office.

Absolute frustration. That’s what I’ve been feeling since about 7 pm Friday evening, along with a good dose of self-recrimination. Okay, not really — a glass of wine with dinner last night and a few hours playing Lego Star Wars on the Wii really helped release a lot of the bad feelings go away. It’s not good to hang on to that kind of toxic grunge, anyway.

As I said in my last post, I intended to print out a pristine copy of my story “Caribou House” Friday night, package it up, and send it off to the first publication on my list (it’s only a mental list, but it’s still a list). But as I sat down at the computer that evening … I could not find the file! Not the edited one, at any rate. Oh, there were a couple with versions from 2006, but nothing that had all the edits I’d made to the manuscript back around Christmas, all those tweaks and twitches that elevated it from a decent story to something really top-notch. Gone.

How? I can’t help wondering myself. It’s not my recollection that all those edits (not to mention proper submission formatting) were made in a single sitting, but even if they were, would I have done something so … so n00bish as to close the file without saving it? I’ve been writing on computers for over 20 years, surely clicking “save” is instinctual by now? I checked every folder. I ran an exhaustive search on this machine. I scoured Gmail and Google docs in hopes that I’d stored it online for some reason. I even drove in to work on Saturday morning to check my computer there.

Nothing.

My only saving grace at this point is that I printed out one, single copy of that final manuscript, which I gave to a colleague of mine (a fellow editor) for proofreading purposes (which is, as it happens, the reason the MS hasn’t gone out already; I’ve been waiting for her to finish it). She told me early this week that she had finished it and not found any typographical errors (she liked the story though). She did not, however, return the copy I gave her. Hopefully — HOPEFULLY — she still has that document and will be able to return it to me next week. I don’t relish having to transcribe the whole thing, but it’s a better option than having to try and redo all the edits. I won’t know till tomorrow, of course, which has made this a very long weekend.

So, keep your fingers crossed for me. As for me, I’m going to have a long talk with my sub-conscious to figure out why it wanted to sabotage me like that …

Right before I woke up this morning, I dreamt that — for some reason — I’d gotten an interview with author Neil Gaiman. Why, I’m not sure. For what venue, I have no idea. But it was cool nonetheless.

Because I am not just an SFF geek but also an art geek, I received an altered book from him some months prior to the interview. It was a large leather-bound album, with aged pages and engraved metal tabs, with a few of the types of tags and embellishments that bump it up from “scrapbook” to “artwork”, all very tastefully done. It was, I think, a collection of research, ephemera and general notes related to his current work-in-progress (I didn’t actually read the book — I have trouble reading in dreams, because I whatever it is I’m “reading” I’m subconsciously writing, and then my inner editor starts to get all anxious and perturbed about having it make sense, which is just something you shouldn’t worry about when dreaming). At any rate, I clearly remember being told that Mr. Gaiman was intending to read from the album during our interview, because he didn’t want to read any of the chapters from his current work-in-progress until he was finished with it.

To top it all off, the last page of the book had a photo of Johnny Depp on it! My impression was that Depp was going to star in the movie based on the book — how great would that be? Well, we can all keep our fingers crossed and if it comes true then I’m going to start paying closer attention to my dreams, in hopes of more prophetic hints!

I realized last night that the reason I haven’t been writing much here lately is because much of what I would be writing about if I were writing is about work, which has pretty much taken up all my energy and mindspace for a while now. It’s always twitchy writing about work, even when you don’t have anything to complain about, which I don’t.

Part of it is that I am simply not interested in relating what I’ve done on a day-by-day or even a week-by-week basis. Once it’s done, it’s done. I don’t feel the need to record and share it. On the whole, what I do every day is pretty routine, and it’s hard to muster momentum to write about routine, even if it is a very pleasing routine.

I’m also mildly uncomfortable with the semi-public nature of my job. I worry that if I share here a cool blog or amazing artist that I’ve found in the course of putting together my magazines that other artists I’m working with might feel slighted because I didn’t mention them too. Which is really silly when you think about, because I doubt that very few (if any) of those artists bother to read this blog. Though they might, if I were talking about them. You see the potential dilemma?

Not to mention that I don’t know how my employers would feel about my sharing more intimate details of what goes on around here, even if I don’t have anything bad to say.

It’s just twitchy.

And then there are the things that I definitely want to share, but am almost afraid to because they are huge and wonderful and terrifying all at the same time, and writing about them, sharing them, makes them somehow more real then they already are. Like the fact that the company has decided to launch a literary magazine next year and have asked me to lead the publication. Do you like the way I’ve buried that in the middle of the paragraph, so that maybe you won’t notice? Tricky, aren’t I?

“Well, Stace,” you are no doubt saying, “surely there are many other things you could blog about.”

Yes, yes. That should be true. Only I would have to have more time and energy to actually accomplish other things about which I could then blog. Writing, for instance. My illness in December (combined with busy work time and holiday furor) hijacked my efforts to get a particular story polished and submitted, and I haven’t yet gotten back on that horse (aside from a few stolen moments while waiting on a mechanic). And the novel? The novel I’m supposed to have finished by next November? Hah. I can’t even keep my mind on that for more than a few moments before I’m diverted by various work issues (which is a good thing when I’m actually at work, but not so good when I am elsewhere). I am certainly not abandoning it, nosiree, but rather need a good swift kick in the pants to get the gears moving again. Actually, making a better effort to blog will help, I think — while blogging is a distraction itself, it does help to train the mind from only thinking about one’s job all the time. And maybe, just maybe, some of you will help encourage me by nagging me to keep on track, as far as that’s concerned.

I’m still attending my writing group, too, which I love. Great group. And I will keep going Thursday nights, even though it’s going to mean missing Lost when it starts up again next week… (hey, when you only watch two shows regularly (aside from kid shows like Hannah Montana and Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends and Pokemon which you seem to watch constantly) you really make an effort to see them when they air).

And of course, I could always blog about all the joys and traumas that go along with life, such as:

• Lucy’s going to be playing a violin solo at their upcoming performance
• Anna has two loose teeth. Not very loose yet, at least they weren’t when she came in and woke me up Sunday morning to share…
• I bought a new car! Well, not brand new — a 2006 Nissan Sentra, but it’s the newest car I have ever owned myself. It’s also the first car I’ve ever purchased myself, having always inherited them from relatives and the like. The whole last week is rather a blur of car-buying-induced stress, starting from the moment the ‘94 Buick I was driving died on the way to work. But I came out of the whole thing with a shiny gold car, and let the girls convince me to adorn her with leopard print floor mats and steering wheel cover. We’re calling her “Kitty.”
  

My trip into Colorstrology reminded me of a story told to me by my high school government teacher.

It seems, as a kindergartner, he was called into the principal’s office for a meeting with his mother. With serious, concerned expressions on their adult faces, they asked the youngster, “Why do you draw all your pictures with black crayon?”

Imagine their worry, that such a young lad was so consumed with dark imagery! What could have happened to drive him into such depression?

But my teacher had less emotional baggage then they feared.

“It’s the only color nobody else ever wants to use.”

So he wasn’t necessarily a sociopath in the making … but I’d guess he had some issues with sharing.

I’m curious now if black turns up as the personal color for any of the birthdays over on the Colorstrology site. And if so, what sort of positive meaning do they draw from it?