Rainy Day Cleaning

This afternoon has been all sleeping in late (I dreamed I was Paul McCartney and it was something like 1972; we were in a diner in the central US where my ex-girlfriend from Manchester had somehow shown up, drinking cup after cup of sour orange pekoe tea with milk, and John Lennon was being a decided asshole) and then pajamas and leftover pizza and reading stories for Ideomancer while it pours and pours and pours rain outside. It's raining so hard you can't see the individual trails, just this haze of rain, and has been for a couple hours now. I have written two detailed editorial letters and rejected a handful more stories and discussed some quasi-solicits with those who solicited them, and tidied up my coffee table a bit between the desk and going to the bathroom to refill my water mug (bathroom tap is always colder than the kitchen). Now I have to respond to two rewrites and give some notes on a review, and I am done with magazine work and need to wash my sheets, wash my dishes, straighten up papers and such. There is Bloc Party on the stereo, and rain.

It is this kind of day.

Part of the cleaning is cleaning out stuff from my inboxes, so here are two more Clockwork Phoenix 2 reviews:

Charles Tan at Bibliophile Stalker doesn't like it as much as the first, but seems to like it enough.

Now that I look, the second is actually of the first Clockwork Phoenix. starlady38 read it after reading the second, and while liking the second better than the first, is overall positive. The part most important to my great and terrible ego is:

"Bell, Book and Candle" by Leah Bobet (cristalia) may be my single favorite story in the book; it gives a new twist to a ritual, somewhat antique phrase, and is rich with sumptuous detail. I feel like saying more would give the game away, but it's a great story, and reminded me of New Orleans, or perhaps of somewhere in the Caribbean?

And now I can file those e-mails, and it's back to work.

Evil Crochet (TM)

Okay, kids. Let me tell you a story.

One day last summer ksumnersmith and I were strolling through Kensington Market, past Lettuce Knit (a very nice yarn store, and worthy of your consideration) and I saw a sign in the window that said Crochet Friendly. I remarked on this sign, and what I felt to be the redundancy of it -- I mean, it's a yarn store, are they crochet-unfriendly? -- and Karina, who does crochet, told me that no, actually, they can be. Crochet is, in a lot of fiber arts circles, thought of as some cheap knockoff non-craft, and knitters used to or maybe still do scorn it, and yarn stores would sometimes not sell nice yarn to crocheters because they'd "just be wasting it".

There was a knitter-versus-crocheter slapfight. Seriously.

I think I burst into tears I laughed so hard.

Why? Because 99.9% of the people in the world cannot tell the difference between knitting and crocheting. And they don't give a shit. It's totally inconsequential to them. And that?

That is every slapfight ever.

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I tell you this story so that, tonight and in future, when I point to something, howling with laughter that I can't even keep in by slapping both hands over my mouth, and yelling Evil Crochet! Evil Crochet! you know exactly what I'm saying about the issue. Because I am on the whole an advocate of people being passionate about the things they are passionate about, and letting one's freak flag fly, and am on the whole opposed to pointing and laughing at people for being passionate, which is the founding principle of Fandom Wank. Not down with that.

But y'know? A shot of perspective is good for the soul.

We should never get so narrow that we can't step back and laugh at our damn fool selves being big damn fools.