swan_tower: (Default)
There is a simple but deep pleasure in finding the right object for your needs.

I've been thinking for a while that I really ought to get rid of a bunch of my jewelry, because I almost never wear it except when out in Performing Author Mode, and then it tends to be a limited set of possibilities. But a few weeks ago I suddenly lost all patience with the assortment of boxes I was storing my jewelry in -- especially my earrings, which were crammed eight to a compartment and I could barely pull a pair out without spilling others everywhere. I went online, discovered the stackable jewelry box layers I'd seen before were now all but impossible to get in the types I wanted and matching colors, got annoyed, browsed some more, found another possibility, ordered it.

Something like two days after it arrived, I ordered a second, because YES THANK YOU I had found the correct jewelry box for the purpose.

And guess what? I'm wearing my jewelry again, even when I'm not leaving the house. Because in transplanting everything from its crowded, insufficient quarters to its new home, I kept going "oh, I forgot about that!" and being delighted to see old friends. (Also getting rid of some stuff that I was deeply unexcited to see.) Now, with everything sorted into different layers so each pair of earrings has its own compartment and so do the pendants and the necklaces are no longer crammed onto three hooks and hey have I ever even worn that bracelet, I can actually see what I have. And get to it easily. Sure, I've got a spare lid because I had to order two stackable sets to get enough space for everything -- you wouldn't believe it to look at me in daily life, but I own a lot of jewelry -- but it's worth that slight overshot to make this big of an improvement.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go make tea in the Best Mug and then take some more research notes with the Best Fountain Pen. I've had a few great instances lately of finding the right object for my needs, and I treasure every one.
swan_tower: (Default)
When my parents moved out of my childhood home two years ago, I made my goodbyes to the neighborhood thinking there was no reason I would ever go back there.

Then I realized the path of totality this spring would pass right over my old house.

My best friend's father still lives here, so we got lodgings for the price of some batted eyelashes, a few chores done around the house, me talking to a granddaughter who apparently idolizes the Memoirs of Lady Trent, and some jam and brownies made by my husband. Plane tickets were still expensive, of course (especially since we were uhhhh not on the ball about buying them), but last week we flew down to Dallas in the hopes of seeing the eclipse.

Despite some dire uncertainty, the skies cooperated. Clouds started to drift through around the time the eclipse began and thickened as we approached totality, but just as that phase began, a clear patch opened up, and we saw the eclipse in its full glory.

. . . yeah. In the words of a recent xkcd comic, "A partial eclipse is like a cool sunset. A total eclipse is like somebody broke the sky."

The light doesn't noticeably start to dim until about 50%, and up to maybe 97% or 98%, it still only looks like a thunderstorm is about to roll in. Then there's a sudden and -- if you were an ancient person who didn't know why this was happening -- catastrophic downward slide into darkness, your only illumination coming from the ghostly flare of the corona around the black hole that has eaten the sun. The sky becomes an alien place, twilight hovering overhead while the fringes of the horizon turn to ink. For a few minutes you can look directly upward, no protective glasses needed, watching the wisps of corona dance across distances our brains can't even fathom.

Then a diamond-bright flare piercing the heavens as the sun breaks around the trailing edge of the moon. Within a minute, you're back to a kind of cloudy-seeming day -- an astonishing demonstration of how bright the sun truly is, that even a tiny sliver of it can light our way.

Pictures of an eclipse don't really do it justice. Most of them are close-ups of the sun and moon, which fail to capture the overall effect. The way the world sinks into night for a few minutes out of the ordinary, the sky inverts and the air goes cold and the light becomes otherworldly. A close-up picture doesn't convey why ancient people had so many myths around what was happening, so many fears about why the gods had chosen to take the light away and what must be done to bring it back. Even knowing the orbital mechanics involved, even having a precise measurement of how long it would be before normalcy returned, it was an eerie experience.

I am really, really glad my friend's father took us in, the clouds held off, and I had a chance to witness this.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/P3Buns)
swan_tower: (Default)
I wish you all a happy New Year, with all ten of my fingers!

. . . that's not as much of a non sequitur as it sounds like.

Late last October, I jammed the index finger of my right hand really really hard. Since the joints of that finger already hyperextend rather significantly, I did a serious number on myself -- enough so that, after a week or two in which it didn't seem to be getting better (and may in fact have been made worse, since I kept catching it on things and hurting it every time), I decided to splint it and give it some time to recover. After two weeks or so of it obstinately refusing to do so, I went to the orthopedist; one MRI later, I was officially diagnosed as being one degree of injury short of needing surgery to fix it. The doctor told me to leave it splinted through the end of the year, and so, shortly after midnight, I let my finger out of jail for the first significant amount of time since early November.

I've been able to type during that period -- the first question I've gotten from basically every writer who's seen me in person since then -- but not well; I've been very prone to typos and also winding up in wrist contortions that aren't the best idea, ergonomically speaking. After a mid-December week of crunch time that required me to type quite a lot, I finally set up an auto-responder on my work email telling people not to expect to hear from me until the New Year unless it was urgent. So now I get to dig my way out from under that pile, while simultaneously being careful about not overdoing it. Right now my range of motion in those joints is laughably small, and my first order of business is to gently re-learn how to make a fist. I want that milestone now, but I know better than to lunge for it too fast.

But: I get to at least start on making progress. And that, in its own way, is a good start to 2024. May this year bring us all better things than its predecessor did.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2024/01/01/happy-new-year-2/)
swan_tower: (Default)
For the first time in my life, I had to report for jury duty recently.

Up until I was twenty-eight, I was excused on account of being a student. After that, I lucked out: on the occasions when I was sent a summons, I wound up not having to report in. But this year, the bullet I've been dodging for fifteen years finally hit me.

And oh, was it very nearly a doozy.

The case in question was a murder trial, and projected to run for seven weeks -- from now into early December. The judge kept optimistically saying they hoped to conclude it more quickly, but given that they also projected testimony to start today and in fact were still wrestling with jury selection when that date rolled around, I wouldn't put a lot of stock in that hope.

So yeah: on Tuesday I reported in, sat around for a while, got sent up to a courtroom, filled out a form, and went home, for two and a half hours total. Thursday I was back in the afternoon for the start of voir dire, as the judge began questioning the initial pack of potential jurors. We didn't even get as far as the bit where the prosecuting and defending attorneys asked their questions until Friday, which was an all-day affair that saw eleven of the initial twenty-two dismissed and replaced by a new set who then had to go through the whole process again. Late this morning they finally swore in twelve seated jurors and then started on the alternates . . . and mine was the first name called.

Five minutes later, I was out the door.

Why? Because of my sleep schedule. Since I started writing full time, I've been free to shift to my natural schedule, which has me going to bed circa 3 a.m. and waking up at 11. I've been on that schedule for fifteen years now. If I want to go to sleep earlier, I have to drug myself, and then when I get up I am definitely not firing on all cylinders: if I have a morning flight and I'm trying to stay awake in the boarding area, I might have to read a paragraph several times before the words actually stick in my brain. I didn't even have to get to the part where I was planning to say "if I were on trial for murder, I would not want someone like me for a juror" before the judge dismissed me for reasons of hardship.

I honestly expected I'd meet with more resistance than that. It is entirely possible I am diagnosable with delayed sleep phase disorder, but since I haven't actually been diagnosed, I didn't know how much sympathy I'd get from the judge. And if I were empaneled, I would certainly have done my best -- god knows I am in other respects ideally suited to being stuck in a trial for seven weeks, because I have a life that can accommodate that kind of disruption. But a scenario where I have to sit quietly and pay attention to something, with no ability to talk or move around or be out in the sun or anything else that helps keep me alert when I'm up at a bad hour . . . yeah. I would not have felt great about my ability to pay attention to and evaluate evidence about whether the defendant murdered someone.

There's a tiny part of me that regrets this. In the future I'll know that I can at least attempt to claim hardship on Day One -- I didn't try because the judge didn't list "you work a night shift" as a valid reason -- but while I wasn't super glad to spend multiple days in the courthouse listening to other prospective jurors be questioned, this was my first look at the actual process of selection and voir dire. Partly to keep myself awake, I took copious notes on procedure and what sorts of questions jurors were asked, and a part of me would have been fascinated to see a real-life murder trial (as opposed to the . . . less than accurate depictions we get from TV and movies).

But that fascination would not have been able to keep me focused for the first couple hours of testimony. And so, to the relief of all involved, I will not be spending the next seven weeks as Alternate Juror #1.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/q8Sptx)
swan_tower: (Default)
Forty-one years, two months, and fifteen days ago, my parents moved into a newly built house in Dallas.

Now I'm here to say goodbye.

The house has been sold, though they won't be moving out for a while yet (giving them time to finish divesting of stuff they won't be bringing with them). After this, unless I attend a convention in Dallas, it's entirely possible I'll never revisit the city I still think of as "home," even though where I live in California is also home.

It helps a bit that my parents have kind of Ship of Theseus-d this place over the years. It isn't a time capsule of my childhood; many things have been updated along the way. The cheaper, more busted furniture got replaced by nicer stuff once my brother and I were old enough not to wreck it. Ditto the carpet. The linoleum in the kitchen gave way to much classier tile, the formica countertops to granite. After both kids were out of the house, my parents turned my brother's old room into an office, while the former office-cum-guest room became a dedicated guest room; along with that, they ditched my daybed with its elevating trundle and put in its place a proper bed for me and my husband (which necessitated rearranging the bedroom around it). The most recent bout of renovations replaced the living room carpet and the kitchen tiles with hardwood, along with painting over all the wood paneling in the grey color that is unfortunately in style right now. I wasn't a fan when I saw it two Christmases ago: between that and the new LED lights on the tree, the warm glow of my childhood memories was replaced by a room that felt like it could refrigerate meat.

But there haven't been any structural additions, nor any walls ripped out to change the layout of the house. And in the public rooms, everything is still where it's always been: the furniture may be newer, but each piece sits exactly where its predecessor did. I used to joke that if I were struck suddenly blind, I would come home while I learned to cope, because I could walk through this house in the dark and not hit anything. My parents have lived in this house since before I was born; I've never known them to live anywhere else. Them moving is a bigger earthquake than any I've experienced in California.

(Contrary to my subject line, though, the house will not be replaced by a convenience store. I just couldn't resist the Grosse Pointe Blank reference.)

Most people I know moved at least once in childhood, often more than once; lots of Americans these days are peripatetic enough that living in the same place for over forty years has become pretty rare. Severing this connection feels a bit like losing a taproot. It's necessary, though -- and it was always going to be inevitable. Even if my parents had chosen to stay here, I wasn't going to move in when they passed away. Better to have the shift happen now, by choice.

Saying goodbye is going to be hard, though.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/8enLR9)
swan_tower: (*writing)
Years ago I wrote an essay for my site called "Writer's Block(s)," wherein I said I don't find the term "writer's block" to be helpful.

I stand by that, even though I've now gone through a period where, if I were inclined to use that term, that's what I would have called it.

In 2020 I was hugely productive. Some writers found it very difficult to write last year, but I was in the camp that took refuge from the world by escaping into ones of my own creation. I wrote two novels (The Liar's Knot with Alyc, and Night Parade on my own), plus ten short stories, three flash, one fanfic, one short story for L5R, various short adventures for Sea of Legends, and my ongoing Patreon essays.

Given that, it wasn't surprising that after I rounded the corner into 2021, things slacked off. I'd been working really hard, after all, and you can't do that nonstop forever. I'd already decided to slow my roll on short fiction because I was writing it faster than I could sell it, so taking a break from that wasn't a problem. Besides, I had The Mask of Mirrors out in January and Night Parade two weeks later, so there was a stretch of literal months where I was doing promotional events every week, usually two or three of them. That eats brain and energy and I know it, so giving myself time off from producing something new was good self-care.

But.

Round about late February, I realized my ability to brain creatively was not regenerating. I'd taken two months off and I still had no more energy for writing than I had before; if anything, I had less. I'd written my final L5R story and a couple of pieces of flash, but for the former I had the benefit of all the existing story momentum and the latter were . . . not impressive. More importantly, I had a story due to an anthology, and I was having the worst time getting it done.

Well, there could be multiple reasons for that. And I knew perfectly well that I had a plot problem in the story which I hadn't yet solved -- so naturally I couldn't move forward on it. I made myself sit down and I figured out a way around that problem, which let me write a little more . . . but then I ran into a new problem, which slammed me into a second wall.

And then I reached a point where even trying to make myself think about the problem induced a flinch reaction in my brain: god, no, please don't make me.

This was . . . not good.

If you saw the day in mid-March where I asked on Twitter for cute cat pics and the like, that was the day I realized I wasn't simply tired, and I wasn't simply stuck on a bit of plot and everything would be fine once I sorted that out. Something had gone wrong in my head, that merely sitting back and waiting wasn't going to fix.

But the gist of that original essay is that calling the issue "writer's block" accomplishes nothing. It's a description of symptoms, not a diagnosis of cause, much less a cure. I had to figure out why my head had gone wrong, on a global level that went well beyond being in a plot corner with a single story.

I mean, pandemic. That was a pretty obvious culprit. But "pandemic" wasn't really an answer, either, because there was a pandemic before and I still wrote, and also what exactly about the pandemic was the bit stabbed into my brain? There's been discussions about the lack of novelty involved in being locked down, which can be particularly deadly to creative work; that seemed like a good angle to investigate. My first-line response was to spend a whole day doing things like working on a jigsaw puzzle, playing piano, and otherwise engaging in activities I hadn't done in ages, which definitely helped to lift my immediate mood, even if it didn't fix everything.

What about environmental factors? I figured winter had something to do with it -- I've known for decades that I don't respond well to a lack of sunlight -- but merely rounding the corner into daylight saving time hadn't brought the improvement I hoped for, so I got more aggressive about seeking out light. We recently got a swing for our back patio, and the weather was nice enough for me to sit out there, so I started making a point of doing that every day (light + a new place to sit, i.e. novelty). In fact, the trainer I see has a list of elements that play into good health -- things like nutrition, sleep, and so forth -- and sunlight is on that list, so my "homework" from him for a while was not to lift weights or anything like that, but to get at least twenty minutes on the patio each day.

I also started taking a vitamin D supplement, on the theory that a deficiency in that nutrient has caused sluggishness in multiple people of my acquaintance, and overdosing on the stuff basically requires you to down a whole bottle in one go, so why not supplement for a while and see if that helped.

And that story I was stuck on? Well, I had a deadline, so I did have to push through, rather than just shelving it until I felt better. But I talked to Alyc, who not only helped me work out the problem I'd been stuck on, but made a suggestion for another detail that wound up fixing a problem I hadn't even gotten to yet. Which unclogged the brain ducts enough for me to get the story done, with a small extension from the editor that gave me time enough away to revise the draft as it needed. So yes, "fix the story" was part of the solution, along with other things. (Full disclosure: I held off on making this post until I heard back from the editor with revisions, because a part of me was afraid that I'd turned in something visibly sub-par. But he's delighted with it, so I feel much more comfortable publicly discussing the problems I had along the way.)

So here we are, roughly two months after I started trying to figure out what was off in my head and how to fix it. How are things going? Well, in April I finally rewrote a story I'd drafted in 2019 and had meant to redo ever since then (the idea was solid, but the execution was meh at best). And I also popped out a piece of flash I'm quite pleased with. And I started revising another story whose polishing I've been putting off. More pertinently, one evening recently I decided I'd done plenty of work during the day and sat down to read . . . only to wind up scribbling notes and even writing material for a side project I've got going on. In other words, I was excited enough about that project to spontaneously generate ideas for it when I wasn't trying to extract them.

That's what my brain looks like when it's working right.

Now, I will be the first in line to say that I'm lucky: this problem wound up being relatively quick to resolve. I do not appear to have developed major depressive disorder or anything else that would require medical intervention to fix. My home remedies sufficed, at least for now, and they sufficed in a fairly short time -- call it a few weeks before I started feeling like I was on my way out of the pit, and a bit over a month before I felt like I was back on my feet. Not everybody has that easy a time of it.

But I stand by what I said before. If I were to rewrite "Writer's Block(s)" today (which I may do), it would be to change the presentation of the points there, not the points themselves. I had to dig past the surface of "I'm having trouble writing" and even the surface of "well, pandemic" to get to the potential causes and the changes that might help mitigate them. My first attempted solution (taking time off) didn't work; okay, what should I try next? If it isn't just low-grade burnout, if it isn't all the promotional stuff taking my time and energy, then what is it? What path might get me back to where I want to be?

We have to ask ourselves these questions. Simply waiting and hoping the problem will go away on its own will only fix a minor subset of the possible causes; some of the others may get worse, as the failure to produce exacerbates the stress. Sometimes you need to crack the whip over your own head, and sometimes that will only drive you deeper into the hole. Sometimes you won't know what works and what doesn't until you try.

But you can try, and eventually -- hopefully -- find your way back out again.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/E1Yarp)
swan_tower: (*writing)
Last week some of you may have seen me losing my mind on Twitter, because after nineteen years of trying, I finally sold a story to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF).

I did not actually set out to buy myself a present to celebrate this. But quite separately, I had managed to irritate myself by flushing out the fountain pen I use most frequently and then re-filling it with ink before it had dried out, resulting in extremely watery ink for a while. I commented to my sister that I should get a second one, and then I could just swap to the other one while the first dried off.

Now, I already have more than one fountain pen. There's a Waterman I think was a birthday present decades ago, and a Padrino I bought myself in Rome on my honeymoon. There are also two random cheapo things whose brand nor origin can be discerned, and one probably not at all cheapo Jinhao that likewise seems to have materialized out of nowhere -- seriously, we don't have the faintest clue where this one came from. It's very pretty, and also quite heavy, which is why I don't use it often; the Padrino has the problem of a screw-top cap and no grip, so I wind up holding it where the thread screws are, and naturally that's uncomfortable. The Waterman is fine, but I've never liked it as much as the pen I use more often.

The selling point of that pen -- a Platinum Plaisir -- is that it doesn't dry out nearly as fast as any of my other pens. Some of them, I swear you come back the next day and the ink is already a bit stuttery. This one? I haven't tested the theory that I could leave it in a drawer for a month and it would still write just fine, but it certainly feels that way. So I thought, okay: I will get myself a second Plaisir.

But I don't actually find the Plaisir all that attractive. It isn't ugly, but I already got the color that appealed most to me (a satin-brushed metallic green); when I was browsing the other options, the only one that stood out at all, a gunmetal gray, was out of stock. But in looking to see if I could find it elsewhere, I wound up reading a review of the Plaisir that said something interesting:

Its style of cap, which does such a nice job of keeping the ink wet, is apparently common across all of Platinum's pens.

This is how I wound up on the Goulet Pens website at two thirty in the morning, browsing fountain pens, and coming across something which I told myself I wasn't allowed to buy until the following morning, because one should generally not make expensive impulse buys late at night:

a Platinum Kanazawa fountain pen

I . . . swear I'm not becoming one of those writers, the ones who obsess over fountain pens. But that one was still so damn pretty when I woke up the next morning, and I'd just sold a story to F&SF the other day, and I decided I deserved a present to myself. It is as pretty in person as it was online, and it's remarkably lightweight, and the nib is finer than my Plaisir, which as someone with default tiny handwriting I appreciate. The ink I put in it apparently does not play well with the paper of my Rook and Rose notebook, because I am too much of a fountain pen noob to understand the subtle nuances of ink-paper interaction, but writing with it pleased me a great deal anyway. We'll see if it fares as well in the drying-out department as the Plaisir, but even if it doesn't, I am very glad to have it.
swan_tower: (natural history)

I am resurfacing to let you know that “From the Editorial Page of the Falchester Weekly Reviewfinally has an audio version! Brought to you by the lovely folks at Cast of Wonders, including the inestimable Alasdair Stuart, who does a splendid turn as Mr. Benjamin Talbot, F.P.C.

In the meanwhile . . . yeah, it’s been dead around here, hasn’t it? In early February I went to Seattle to teach a one-day workshop at Clarion West on writing fight scenes, and while I was there I seem to have picked up a cold that knocked me flat for a solid week. When I picked myself up from that, I found out a hacker had apparently compromised my laptop, necessitating a complete re-OS for security. I’m still in the process of getting everything set up again after that. And then — because February was a month, let me tell you — somebody attempted to steal the catalytic converter out of our Prius while my husband and I were at the dojo. They didn’t succeed, possibly because they got scared off . . . but they sawed through a hose and partway through the exhaust pipe. So now we’re waiting to hear from insurance whether the repair bill would be high enough to warrant just totaling the car.

Yeah.

Now, I should make it clear that this is not an apocalyptic problem for us. We’re annoyed, because the Prius has been trundling along pretty well for going on thirteen years now; it’s long since paid off, and life without making regular car payments has been nice. We can afford to make new car payments, though, and I think my husband’s irritation is tempered by the possibility that we might go from having a hybrid to a fully electric car (something he’s been keeping his eye on for a while, though we weren’t intending to buy any time soon). Still — it isn’t fun.

And my February was really not as full of productivity as it probably needed to be. So if you’ll excuse me, I need to go attempt to make March better on that count.

swan_tower: (summer)

The other day I was driving up to San Francisco in the rain + early stages of rush hour. But instead of getting frustrated and impatient the way I normally do, I found myself being much more agreeable about the whole thing, and feeling much more charitable toward my fellow drivers.

Because I was listening to Christmas music.

Which led me to think, “heh, I should listen to this all year round!” Except . . . that wouldn’t work. I have other music that sounds pleasant or cheerful, whose lyrics urge (not necessarily in these words) peace and goodwill toward my fellow humans, and it doesn’t usually produce this reaction. Because repetition has dulled its edge. It’s precisely because I don’t listen to Christmas music all year round that it can affect my behavior.

Slacktivist (the blogger Fred Clark) has talked about the irony of “but it’s Christmas!” as an argument for why somebody shouldn’t be a dick. In theory, we should not be dicks to each other at any time. It’s easy to let that slide, though, as the stresses and aggravations of daily life accumulate; Christmas — and other holidays in other faiths — are a reminder to step back and try to see the people around you as people, to reconsider whether you’re being as patient and charitable as you could be. Training wheels for the rest of the year.

But not in the way retailers want. They start trying to push that “special holiday spirit” on you earlier and earlier every year — but theirs is the spirit of commercialism, not peace. They may talk about opening your heart, but it’s actually your wallet they want to see open. Buy, buy, buy. The problem is, by using these signifiers of the season to sell that message, they dull the edge. They rob the “special things” of their power to move us.

I can avoid it somewhat, thanks to the structure of my life. I don’t remember the last time I went to the mall, and I don’t even go into individual retail stores (apart from the grocery store) often enough to get fully inundated with Christmas carols in October. I don’t watch broadcast TV, so I’m not being deluged with commercials about Black Friday deals in mid-November. I can easily delete the emails that hit my inbox, and they don’t blare music at me. I can keep the special things special. Not everybody can, though.

Anyway, today we hung the garlands (which I’ve been meaning to do for a week), and our decorations are set up in their usual places. We don’t have a tree yet because it’s been raining near-constantly, but we hope to fix that in the next few days. Our house is getting dressed up in its fancy holiday clothes. The lights will remind me of hope in a time of darkness. And as much as I’ll hate taking all of that down after Christmas, leaving behind the dull, workaday appearance my surroundings have the rest of the year, I know the reason this makes me happy right now is because it isn’t constantly there. It’s only here briefly, and because of that, it has more power.

swan_tower: (Default)

Quince is one of those things I’d seen referenced in historical literature, but had never encountered in person. Although Wikipedia tells me it’s eaten fairly regularly in some parts of Europe, and there’s absolutely nothing preventing it being grown in the U.S., you’re not going to find it at your average supermarket here.

I suspect that’s in part because you mostly can’t snack on it raw, the way you can with apples and pears and oranges and bananas and all the other things commonly found in the produce section. You either have to cook it, or you have to wait for it to blet — that is, to go overripe and sort of (but not exactly) rotten. The same is true of medlars, another fruit we’ve largely forgotten. Also some varieties of persimmons; I suspect the one time I tried to eat ripe persimmon I may have been eating the wrong kind, as I found it unpleasantly astringent. But those I’m seeing around more these days — though still not at the supermarket. Persimmon trees aren’t uncommon in northern California, so not only the farmers’ market but possibly one’s neighbors may have their fruit on offer.

But if waiting for fruit to sort of but not exactly rot isn’t your idea of an appetizing approach, there’s always cooking. Which is why quince has come into my life: one stall at our farmers’ market sells it, and last year my husband (who makes jam) ventured to make quince paste. It’s very strong-tasting stuff — but if you pair it with manchego cheese (itself quite strong-tasting), a strange alchemy happens and you wind up with something amazing.

All well and good. But this year he wound up with a few extra quinces, not quite enough to make another batch of paste. So instead he decided to make quince-and-apple pie for Thanksgiving. It’s quite nice! Quinces are related to apples anyway, and they combine well. Which is good when your husband decides he’s got too much quince for one pie, but enough apple to fill it out and make two pies.

. . . during the Thanksgiving when your sister-in-law already has a store-bought apple pie and a small cherry pie, and is making a pumpkin pie. O_O Five pies (well, four and a half) for nine people. Um.

There are, of course, other things one can do with quince. Like poach them in sugar water with some spices. One might possibly suggest to one’s husband that this would have been more sensible than making a second quince-and-apple pie. One might not quite buy one’s husband’s argument that you really want larger chunks of quince for that, and he’d already sliced it all thin, so there was nothing to be done but make a second pie.

But hey. There’s always next year. And maybe I’ll find some medlars for him to poach instead.

swan_tower: (music)

(Really it should have begun about six months ago, but best intentions, etc. etc.)

The Harvard Band has a long tradition of crusties — former band members — coming back for certain events. Every five years, there is a formal reunion.

Next month is the 100th.

So naturally I’m going. And when I filled out the questionnaire, I checked the boxes that said yes, I intend to march, and yes, I would like to play while I do so . . . in the full awareness that I haven’t played horn since, uh, 2002. Seventeen years is more than enough time to lose one’s embouchure.

Which is why there’s now a small silver mouthpiece sitting on my desk. While I read things online, or otherwise dink around doing things that don’t require me to be typing, I’m tootling away with the mouthpiece, reminding myself of exactly how fast those tiny little muscles in your lips can tire out. The goal is to be able to at least vaguely acquit myself as something resembling a former musician by the time of the reunion in the middle of next month. I’m hoping that remembered skill will mean I do at least slightly better than I did after a month and a half of practice the first time I picked up a French horn. I probably won’t have anything resembling a high range anymore, nor much in the way of breath control, but I’m successfully producing arpeggios in a variety of different keys, so that’s a good sign, right?

This is absurd. And I know it. But I’m doing it anyway.

swan_tower: (summer)

I’ve spent the last two days holed up in our den, which the lowest part of our split-level house and rather cavelike — therefore the coolest room we’ve got. Our thermostat caps out at 84 degrees Fahrenheit, so I can’t say for sure what temperature it’s been in our dining room, but whatever the answer is, the top floor — which holds both my office and the bedroom — was hotter. Much hotter.

I grew up in Dallas. Highs in the high 90s were a totally normal feature of my childhood summers. But that was a place where nearly everybody has air conditioning. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area? Not so much. And living in a house without A/C means that when our temperatures spike, the experience is very, very different.

The extent of that difference got hammered home to me yesterday, when I’d been at the (air-conditioned) chiropractor’s office. When I walked outside in the late afternoon, it felt . . . not nice, exactly. But familiar. And pleasant enough. Yes, it was very warm, but my subconscious said “that’s okay.” Which was very different from how I’d felt leaving my house an hour and a half earlier; then I was going from a sweltering indoors to a sweltering outdoors, barely any contrast at all, and vastly more unpleasant. I know I’ve lost soem of my heat tolerance (I used to do marching band in Texas, navy blue wool uniform and all), but a lot of it is also just the artificial environment. Give me A/C, and I still don’t mind the heat all that much. Without it, though . . .

Let’s just say I’ve learned a lot about low-tech measures against the heat, from keeping blinds closed that we normally open for light (and angling them upwards to reduce the amount of direct sunlight that enters the room), to occupying myself with books instead of heat-emitting laptops, to the dance of opening windows and turning on fans once the temperature outside drops below the temperature inside.

On Tea

Feb. 1st, 2018 12:11 pm
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I've never been much of a tea drinker.

. . . but I'm getting there.

It started with my sister introducing me to what she calls "tea of life" -- more properly known as Kirin's Gogo no Kocha Lemon Flavor. It's a cold bottled black tea sweetened and flavored with lemon, and lemme tell you, on a hot day, it's glorious. Then I started drinking Oi Ocha, which out here in California is mainstream enough that you can buy it at CostCo, because on the whole I tended to like green tea better than black. From there I branched out into a few others -- genmai cha, Ayataka, mugi cha (which isn't actually tea if you're pedantic, but I'm going to lump herbal infusions in under that term for the purposes of this post, so just deal with it) -- which all shared one thing in common.

Well, two, but the Japanese part isn't that significant. No, what they had in common was that I was drinking them all cold and pre-bottled.

Read more... )
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I've lost my ability to concentrate.

I think a lot of us have. We live with countless electronic devices that are constantly demanding our attention, beeping alerts and notifications and even without that there's a little niggling part of our minds that wonders if we have any new email or anybody has posted something to that forum or surely we ought to take a look at Twitter, don't pay attention to that thing, pay attention to me. But only in bite-size doses, because there are a hundred other things you could be checking and probably should.

Even without that, we've got a society that encourages multi-tasking -- despite the mounting pile of evidence that it isn't good. Multi-tasking does not, contrary to what we've been told, make us more productive. It makes us less so, because we're devoting less of our attention to each thing, and we pay a cognitive cost every time we switch our focus. And part of that cognitive cost is that not switching gets harder, even as it drains us.

(True fact: just now, my phone rang a soft little alert. It's taking effort not to look and see what that was for.)

I can tell this is taking a toll on me because I can feel it in my work. Writing is not, in its ideal conditions, something you do for five minutes here and ten minutes there. It benefits from sustained attention, from getting myself into the state psychologists refer to as "flow," where I stop thinking about the world around me and instead sink into the zone for an extended period of time. I can't get there if I'm tabbing over to look at my email every time I pause to consider my next sentence, if I'm keeping a portion of my mind attached to the discussion I'm having on a forum or whatever and breaking away to update that. It's an exaggeration to say I've lost my ability to concentrate . . . but I know it has declined, and substantially so.

That's why I'm taking steps to fix it.

My steps are twofold, at least so far. The first is to get back to meditating: I got into the habit of doing that for a while in 2015 (true fact again: I made myself just drop some square brackets there and check the year after I finished typing this post, because I needed to check my email to find out which year it was, and that threatened to distract me from this), but I fell out of it after a while, and now I'm working to make it regular practice again. Meditation, mindfulness, learning to let go of all the little dancing monkey thoughts that want my attention NOW NOW NOW -- that helps.

The other, weirdly, is to watch TV.

TV as a tool of concentration? Yes -- when you put it in the context of what I was doing before. See, I've gotten into the bad habit of only really listening to TV, while I play solitaire or sudoku or something on my tablet. The result is that I only give the show maybe half my attention.

But when I started watching the Chinese drama Nirvana in Fire, the combination of subtitles + intricate politics meant I couldn't get away with that. If I tried to focus on something else at the same time, glancing up to catch the subtitles as they skittered past, I wound up not even knowing who half the people were and what was going on. The only way to understand that show, let alone appreciate it, was to put things down and devote my full attention to the screen.

Subtitled shows are great for this, but I'm managing to extend that habit to English-language TV, as well. And you know what?

I'm enjoying it more.

And it's getting easier to leave the tablet closed.

What other tricks do you all have for encouraging yourself to pay attention to one thing at a time? What helps you keep your ability to concentrate? I know some people shut down their internet connection entirely while writing, and there are lots of programs out there which exist to block other programs so you can work, but I'm also interested in the non-technological tricks -- the things that are just about structuring your life in ways that help you focus.
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This weekend I went to an exhibit of art at the Walt Disney Family Museum up in the Presidio, on the art of Evyind Earle -- a man most of you have probably never heard of (I hadn't), but who did the backgrounds for the 1959 Sleeping Beauty. I had no idea what I would think of the rest of his art, but I figured, hey: if nothing else, I'll get to see some of his work from that movie, which I knew was lovely.

The rest of his art is gorgeous.

He worked in a number of different media, ranging from black-and-white scratchboards to oils. As with so much physical art, reproductions don't do it justice; the tiny images on that website don't even do it a tiny fraction of a shred of a shadow of justice. His oils and serigraphs often use very intense color, coupled with a strong chiaroscuro effect, and he had a fascinating knack for combining clean, geometric shapes with fine detailing that makes some of the images almost seem to glitter in person. One of the signboards had a quote from when he was working on Sleeping Beauty that really summed up both his approach and why it appeals to me so immensely:

"I wanted stylized, simplified Gothic. Straight, tall, perpendicular lines like Gothic cathedrals . . . I used one-point perspective. I rearranged the bushes and trees in geometrical patterns. I made a medieval tapestry out of the surface wherever possible. All my foregrounds were tapestry designs of decorative weeds and flowers and grasses. And since it is obvious that the Gothic style and detail evolved from the Arabic influence acquired during the Crusades, I found it perfectly permissible to use all the wonderful patterns and details found in Persian miniatures. And since Persian miniatures had a lot in common with Chinese and Japanese art, I felt it was OK for me to inject quite a bit of Japanese art, especially in the close-up of leaves and overhanging branches."


Mashing all those influences together explains the balance of simplicity and detail that runs through so much of his work, not just the material for Sleeping Beauty (which I liked, but wound up being eclipsed by his independent work, at least for me). We liked it so much that when we'd gone through the whole gallery, we went back to a few of the rooms just to look at our favorite paintings again -- and then I went straight to the shop and dropped fifty dollars on an art book of his ouevre, because I wanted to be able to look at it again. I would have bought prints if they'd been selling any, apart from a couple of framed images priced at a thousand bucks apiece. I wish his estate was selling anything in the price range of normal mortals, but they don't appear to be. (The guy at the museum shop admitted it was their mistake not to sell the concept art of Prince Philip facing off against Maleficent in sizes larger than schoolchild: how did they not realize that was a thing adults would throw money at???)

And then we had lunch followed by an exhibit at the De Young on Teotihuacan followed by Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle followed by dinner. It was a busy day. Jumanji was even better than I hoped it would be, and I have to give massive kudos to the big-name actors for channeling the mannerisms of their young counterparts; Jack Black in particular committed 110% to playing a self-absorbed teenage girl in the body of, well, Jack Black. Karen Gillan did an American accent well enough that I didn't even think until after the movie about the fact that she's not American, and I cannot imagine anyone other than the Rock in the lead role, because the number of actors who can pull off both the over-the-top machismo of a video game character named Dr. Smolder Bravestone and the neurotic twitchiness of a weedy teenaged nerd is fairly small. I recommend it to anybody who could use a few hours of laughing their ass off right now.
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I’ll be having surgery on my wrist tomorrow, which means I won’t be typing large quantities for a little while — not sure how long. I’ve got a couple of posts scheduled already, but apart from that, I may be scarce around here until I’m able to use that hand again.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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In the time since we’ve moved into our new house, I’ve seen a little black-and-white cat around a few times. Being a very cat-friendly person, of course I immediately set out to make friends with her — which wasn’t too hard; she’s skittish in the “can’t sit still” sense, but didn’t seem to be very afraid of people. According to her collar, her name is Tiana.

So yesterday evening I go into the backyard and see her at the far end. She makes an immediate beeline for me, which I take as a gratifying sign that Operation Befriend Tiana has been a rousing success. I pet her for a while, go fetch the thing I intended to fetch, pet her some more, and go inside. This last is a bit of an enterprise, because Tiana seems exceedingly curious about what’s in my house, and I have to time my escape so she won’t follow me in (my husband is allergic). But okay, that’s fine.

That was at 6 o’clock.

A little bit later, I notice she’s still hanging out at my back door, peering in through the blinds. This is a little odd, so I shut the blinds . . . which doesn’t shut out the sound of her meowing plaintively to be let in.

When I leave for the dojo at 7:15, she’s still out there.

I come home, have dinner, go downstairs — and at 10:30 she’s still out there, now up on the roof, behaving as if she’s not sure how to get down. My sister and I go out with a stepladder and try to lift her down, in case she’s stuck; she’s having none of it, roving back and forth with the same nonstop restlessness she’s been showing this whole time. We finally get her to jump down to the fence and then, with much encouragement, to the ground; her body language strongly implied she was nervous about making that last jump. But okay, cat off roof, mission accomplished. I go inside (she tries to follow me again), blinds shut, and do my best to ignore the cat yowling outside my door and literally scratching at it to be let in.

At 1:30 in the morning, SHE’S STILL THERE.

I read once that cats meow at the same frequency as a crying baby, which is probably an adaptation to make us want to take care of them. After three hours of Tiana outside my door, I believe it, because each tragic sound makes me feel like a terrible person. She’s got a collar and is well-fed and well-groomed enough that I don’t think she’s a stray, but this isn’t like her previous behavior, which makes me wonder if she’s gotten lost or been abandoned or something. So finally — after much debate with myself — I let her in, scoop her up and close her into the bathroom, with everything she might trash safely removed and food, water, a towel to sleep on, and some makeshift kitty litter.

Now, in the light of day it turned out that there were phone numbers on her collar, engraved so small that I when I looked the previous night I didn’t even realize they were numbers. So I called them and discovered she belongs to our neighbors a few doors down, and to make a long story short (too late), she isn’t lost or abandoned; she’s just Tiana, the Neurotic Stalker Cat. Her owner told me she was a feral adoptee, and has on one previous occasion decided that a person is her NEW BEST FRIEND and tried to move in — so her behavior, while odd, is not unprecedented. By bringing her inside, I’ve probably just encouraged her. But I couldn’t listen to that for hours on end, wondering if something was wrong, and not at least try to make her more comfortable. In the future . . . well, the last person she latched onto apparently resorted to squirting her with a water bottle to make her stop begging. It remains to be seen whether I’ll do the same. I love cats and am delighted to make friends with them, but having a crying-baby imitator outside my door gets really hard on the nerves.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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A while back the artist Robin Scott, a friend of mine, released a project called The Urban Tarot.

Box cover for The Urban Tarot by Robin Scott

I want to talk about how awesome this deck is — and I especially want to address those of you for whom the “tarot” part isn’t much of an attraction, but the “urban” part might be. Let’s start by quoting from Robin’s introduction in the guidebook:

Too often we are told that magic and wisdom belong only to the forgotten forests, the places untouched by human hands, and to ages long lost to memory.

I reject this idea. I look around my world, and I see the beauty, the wonder, the magic in the metropolis, the power under the pavement.

“The metropolis” there isn’t generic. It’s New York City, where Robin lives — and that’s exactly what draws me to the Urban Tarot. I’ve been meaning to make a post about the way urban fantasy has the potential to inscribe the landscape around you with an additional layer of meaning: it’s something I tried to do in the Changeling game I ran, and it showed up in the Onyx Court books, too, which were inspired by that game. The urban fantasy novels I like often do this kind of thing, not just taking place in Generica City or the Hollywood version of San Francisco or wherever, but making use of place on a more detailed, meaningful level. It isn’t just an urban fantasy thing — it isn’t even a new thing; Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places talks about the link between Western Apache folklore and the landscape around their communities — but it works especially well there because the world the story describes is ours, or at least closely adjacent enough to ours that we can feel the resonance.

The Urban Tarot does this beautifully. It ties the cards in with the landscape and the people and events of New York City — the public library, Coney Island, the Brooklyn Bridge during Hurricane Sandy — and it pushes back against the idea that cities aren’t magic, that the kind of meaning we read into the world around us back when that world was rural can’t be retained in the modern day. It rethinks the old archetypes of the tarot into a context you and I can recognize: the Empress is feeding a baby in a high chair, the Eight of Wands shows a cyclist delivering a pizza, the Prince of Swords is a hacker. Even if you don’t have any interest in the tarot as such, you could do worse than to feed your urban fantasy brain with these cards and their associated writeups.

Card image of The Princess of Swords, by Robin Scott

And the artwork is, in my opinion, gorgeous. Each card is built out of a kind of textural collage, abstracting the image without losing its recognizable form. I have the Princess of Swords (aka The Activist) on my wall. I liked the art enough that when I backed the Kickstarter, I chose to go for the level where I could model for one of the cards — no, I’m not telling you which; you’ll have to find out for yourself. 😉 Robin and I struck a deal wherein I wrote a piece of flash fiction for the guidebook, riffing off a location in the city she wasn’t able to work into the deck; that’s how much I wanted to support this project.

You can buy the Urban Tarot itself, or prints of any of the cards. I strongly encourage you all to at least go take a look, and appreciate what Robin has put together.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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Mary Robinette Kowal recently had nasal surgery to correct a medical problem. Being who she is (a writer, and therefore professionally interested in just about everything under the sun), she’s been posting pictures of her recovery.

She also posted this.

Here’s the thing. Remember when I fell down the stairs? (It was just three days ago; surely you haven’t forgotten.) Afterward, several friends of ours made similar jokes, about my husband pushing me down the stairs.

Why is it that, any time we hear about or see a woman injured, our minds go immediately to domestic abuse?

And why is it funny?

As Mary says, part (maybe all) of the humor comes from the absurdity of the idea: my husband would never push me down the stairs; her husband would never hit her. Anybody who knows us knows this. But at the same time . . . is it really that absurd? How many instances are there of women being abused by their husbands, when all the friends and neighbors would never dream of him doing such a thing?

It isn’t funny, because it isn’t absurd. Not nearly as much as it should be. It’s reality for far too many women. And making jokes about it — that normalizes the idea. Used to be that you got cartoons about drunk driving, the bartender pouring his customer into his car when he’s had a few too many and waving him off homeward with a cheery grin. Because that was normal. You don’t see those cartoons anymore, do you? We don’t think it’s normal to drive when you’re sauced, and we don’t think it’s funny.

We need the same to be true of domestic abuse.

By all means, joke about me falling down the stairs. Remind me that I can’t fly. Say that however much I don’t want to carry boxes, I should stop at hurling them to the bottom, and not hurl myself with them. That’s fine by me; humor is a good way to deal with a really annoying and painful situation.

But don’t joke about my husband pushing me, or Mary’s husband hitting her.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

swan_tower: (Default)

So as many of you know, my husband had ankle surgery recently. He’s on crutches, putting no weight on the affected foot . . . for 8-10 weeks.

That’s a long time.

And while I can’t rightly compare my own difficulties to his, it’s going to be a long time for both of us. All of a sudden, I’m carrying most of the household on my own shoulders, because he can’t. Many tasks that I’m used to sharing with him (laundry, taking out the trash, etc) are now mine alone. Things that didn’t use to be tasks suddenly are: I have to be available when he goes to bed, because while it’s possible for him to drag his crutches and the pillow we’re using for his leg up the stairs as he slides up them — they’re too narrow for him to crutch up — it’s a pain in the neck, and much easier if I carry those for him. Some tasks that I would normally let slide for a little while now have to be kept 100% up-to-date; the ant infestation plaguing this entire city isn’t related to his surgery, but that doesn’t change the fact that I have to wash the dishes right away or risk finding a conga line of ants making their way across our kitchen to whatever I left out, and I have to keep the living room constantly tidy or he won’t be able to cross it safely on crutches.

But. My friends, I had a stroke of genius, and it already promises to do wonders for my sanity.

We’ve been making extensive use of stools and folding chairs in various places so he can kneel on them(1) while he showers or washes his hands or whatever. I found myself wondering whether it would help to put one of those in the kitchen, too — and then I thought, no. What we want in the kitchen is one of these.

It arrived this afternoon. Today, for the first time since his surgery, my husband scrubbed some dishes. He loaded the dishwasher and emptied it, too; he put dinner into the oven and took it out again. He can’t do everything; kneeling for too long is uncomfortable, and he has to be careful that it doesn’t roll out from under him and drop him into an unexpected split. But he can function. He can probably manage to bake some brownies if he wants to — and if you know my husband, you know how much that means to him.

And me? I was giddy with delight. The sheer fact of knowing that I don’t have to do everything kitchen-related is a relief all out of proportion to its actual size. Sure, I’m still facing another two months of having to carry his plate to him and then carry it back when he’s done, because you can’t really do that on crutches and the stool doesn’t transition well to carpet. But he can make his own sandwich for lunch without having to balance on one foot while he does it, even if I’m the one who carries it to the couch. He can wash dishes, which is a task that normally falls about 70-80% in his bailiwick instead of mine. He can prepare simple dinners. All of these are things I expected to have to do myself for weeks to come and now . . . now I know that he can help.

I’m well aware that the situation I have with him is business as usual for a lot of people. If you’re a single mother with a toddler, you’ve got to carry every bit as much weight, without the compensation of a charge who continually thanks you and can at least accomplish tasks that don’t require standing. And they don’t sell products on Amazon that will magically turn your toddler into more of a functioning adult. But if you ever find yourself dealing with a similar situation, remember the merits of a simple, flat-topped, caster-mounted stool. It can work wonders.

(1) Some of you will now be thinking of those kneeling scooters you’ve been seeing around lately. We rented one, but they don’t corner well at all, and our place is too small for him to easily navigate indoors on that thing. It’s useful only for when he leaves the house; the rest of the time, it’s crutches, which are far more maneuverable.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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