Drowning Nor Waving

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.

I have eaten a whole wedge of pomegranate tonight, and will therefore not be able to leave downtown Toronto for the forseeable future.

I wrote this whole State of the Person entry just now, and it was just insufferably whiny. Trust me. You weren't missing anything. Wah wah wah I have first world problems.

(I will say it amuses me greatly to refer to things as my First World Problems.)

So here's the only part I'm actually posting:

I went to bed early last night, spent nine hours dreaming that I had committed a terrorist act in Seattle and waking up once an hour, and it was still the most restful night I've had all week.

(There was this scavenger hunt. One of the items was a statue, so we figured out how to get the statue out of its base and take it with us. This involved a boat, a rocket engine, a lot of steel cable, and a consulting appearance by Cory Doctorow. While this was wildly ingenious and we got our statue, I spent the rest of the night surfacing once an hour because Homeland Security was going to figure out what we did and come after me. And my protests that if Cory Doctorow started it, it must be okay! were going to mean nothing, because Homeland Security does not have a sense of humour of which it is aware.)

---

See, that part was fun.

No, Cory did not have a red cape.

I'm sure half of everyone dreams about being at conventions sometimes, but.

Do your convention dreams come with full masquerade, including a reenactment of a Tamora Pierce trilogy by acrobats, a horde of people in white cardboard hats spoofing March of the Penguins as a migration of used Chinese food containers*, and Yves Meynard dancing in formation and singing a fight song about bra strength with five of his closest friends?**

Yup. Sorry. Mine's cooler. *g*


*My comment at the time: "Are they the Klan?" To which sarcasm_hime replied "They're Cantonese (food)." And then I said "Oh. Klantonese," and took the picture.

**Explained after the sketch by one of the women as having originated at her sprinters' camp one summer, where she was the only athlete above a C cup. I am not sure I believe that Dream!Yves Meynard didn't have a bigger hand in that.***

***And really, it was the way he intoned it in that deep and serious voice that killed me.

1) It is thundering most beautifully outside my window right now. This is beautiful because today's high is 33 C, and I barely got any good sleep because of the humidity even though my air conditioner is going at full blast. While asleep, though, I did dream that tonight's class on Macbeth was cancelled for a karaoke dance party featuring The Gutter Twins and then I was retouring an apartment I wanted six years ago but couldn't afford, and then there was a scavenger hunt going on for Queen Elizabeth II's jewels, and Doug Holyday was tied up in this somehow.

Don't ask me. I just work here.

2) I am also working on my essay from before, and becoming more and more convinced that "The Fall of the House of Usher" is serious genderfuck. This is good, because that means I'm probably arguing it well enough for the professor and will not get B for Bullshit on the paper.

3) Spam infoms us that "Rooster-challenged guys are welcome!". I know I wouldn't date a man who didn't own at least one hardy rooster.

4) As wistling mentioned in comments when I did that housekeeping post (for housekeeping, please dial 2), poem "The Pack Rat's Manifesto" is in the current issue of On Spec along with a story of his and a story of mrissa's. It is probably the happiest poem I will ever wrote. Nobody dies or anything! See it there, because it ain't happening again!

5) I planted another bean in the windowbox on Thursday to compensate for the bean plants that I lost last month (long story, mostly of my own idiocy). It has grown in the days since to be almost as big as the beans I planted over a month ago. Moral: hot humid weather is good for beans. Or possibly: this is the magic bean that I can climb to find the guys with the roosters.

6) I have found a job I might really actually want to apply for and do and think I'm qualified for. This is severely exciting. Shall apply tonight.

7) Mmm. Cherries.


*drags self back to the paper-writing*

The reason I don't usually take naps is that if I'm tired enough to need one, I'm tired enough to sleep 15 hours straight through until 11am, which is then really 12pm because it's Daylight Savings Time day.

Which happened.

It was broken by one (1) nightmare, in which I woke up at 3:30 in my old bedroom to a shadowy man standing at my bedside, who asked me in a very flat serial killer voice if I thought his novel would work. It had this and that and this in it, and jack_yoniga had said it was probably unsaleable. Did I agree with Brett?

While I was trying to ungroggy myself enough to figure out why this person was in my room at 3am and something to say about his novel, he kept putting me off -- no, he had to sit down so we could properly talk about it -- and trying to sit on my bed. Which when he finally did, he swung his legs under the covers. At which point I knew where this was going. So I told him to get his ass off my bed. And when he did indeed try to attack me, I put a fist in his sweater and put him up against the wall while I called 911.

He fled, shadowlike, shortly afterwards, leaving a sweater and a pair of black pantyhose.

The cops never came. They called back, though, to say they were going to deal with the important calls first. :p

After which I woke up, and spent until 3:31 in real time in a brief and inexplicable terror that the shadow dude was going to show up and ask me to crit his novel idea, and that he wouldn't be so easy to lift in real life.

I suspect this is what happens when you take the nap you're not supposed to take really after doing your slush, your workshop support mail, and moderation-reading a synopsis focus group. However...Brett? D'you have any strange dreams last night? :p