"I am the ghost of Christmas Future Perfect Subjunctive: I will show you what would have happened were you not to have changed your ways!"

Heeeee...

I am nearly caught up on mini_fest, planning to work my way through sshg_giftfest over the weekend (some lovely stories over there, go see!), and eagerly anticipating the opening of hoggywartyxmas in just a few days.

This weekend I hope to also get books shipped out to everyone who claimed one in the Great Book Giveaway of 2014. Still a few left for you last-minute shoppers!

I am embarking on a nice, leisurely reread of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rgins Rings ('rgins' heh heh) as my holiday read. It's been a few years since I did this, and I can feel that it's time again. "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit..."

Since mini_fest is posting and hoggywartyxmas is coming up soon, this seems appropriate:

"JK Rowling To Write Malfoy Story And Other New Harry Potter Content For
Christmas. The Yule Ball is of course a chance for us all to — er — let our hair
down..." Read more ==>

Do you suppose she'll finally admit that Harry and Draco are meant for each other lol?!

A tachyonic antitelephone is a thing.

Reading fanfic can teach you valuable life skills.

Rush Limbaugh really is a complete and utter ass. (OK, that one I pretty much suspected already.)

Zombie migration patterns can be mathematically predicted.

I have to make this. SOON.

nursedarry sent me the coolest wine EVER. reH tlhIngan wo' taHjaj!!

(click to embiggen)


Also, there are still some free books left!

Yes, it's time again for the Annual Weeding of the Psmith Bookshelves, and the subsequent search to get them adopted into good and loving homes. It's a long list this year (I was very firm with myself), but the rules haven't changed: if you want one or two or six or ten, just comment to this post listing which ones you want. I'll box them up and ship them.

You don't need to do anything in return, but if you want to, please give to one of the following excellent causes: Planned Parenthood (people), the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (animals), or the Kansas Rural Center (sustainable agriculture).

Format (hardcover hc or pb) is given in the list. Unless otherwise noted, all are in very good condition. If you want to know more about any of them, just ask :)

( Fiction )

( Nonfiction )

I also have about 30 back issues of Piecework, the wonderful craft magazine published by Interweave Press. Packed with lush illustrations, gorgeous photos, ideas for beading, sewing, felting, quilting, lacemaking, etc etc etc. You can see sample issues on the Piecework website.

So, Thanksgiving was awesome this year. We hosted it, as we have for the past six or seven years, so the house was full of food, family, yummy smells, conversation, etc. Ten people, with three of them age nine or younger and one older one hard of hearing, made for a rather high volume, but a good time was had by all. And I'm getting better and better at doing things ahead of time -- this year I was actually able to sit down and watch some of the Macy's parade, go me!

We had a bit of drama over the turkey, though. Mr Psmith had suggested we get a heritage turkey this year, having read wonderful things about them, so we ordered one in early November. It was supposed to arrive Tuesday via Fed Ex. Late Tuesday morning we get a call from the turkey people saying that our turkey had flown the coop: Fed Ex couldn't find it. So they were sending out another one that would arrive on Wednesday, but that it might be a little bigger since they were out of the size we ordered.

So all day Wednesday while I'm cooking, I'm alternating between Nightmare A, in which the replacement turkey never arrives and I have to venture out and scrounge a stunt turkey, and Nightmare B, in which the replacement arrives and is a 30-lb monstrosity that won't fit in my oven and will take six hours to cook.

Happily, Fed Ex rang our doorbell at 2:47 pm with a 17.6-lb bird, so tragedy was averted. Interestingly, it was a noticeably different shape, lacking the enormous breasts of the standard Broad-Breasted White (what most stores carry) and with much larger thighs. The more equal white-to-dark-meat ratio means it cooks slightly faster and more evenly. And WOW did it turn out amazing! They recommend a very simple preparation since heritage turkeys are very juicy and flavorful, so I rubbed butter and herbs under the skin which I've never tried before (this video was very helpful). The meat-eaters in the group voted it highly tasty, and I got FOUR CUPS of juice out of it for gravy. Normally I get one, if I'm lucky.

Mr Psmith's youngest brother brought his girlfriend E. who is a vegetarian, so there were two of us at the table this year. Since I'm a vegetarian, everything in the meal except for the turkey itself and Mr Psmith's Grandma N's giblet stuffing is meat-free, and E. kept saying how nice it was to have so much she could eat :) Also, she shares my aversion to an empty wine glass which makes her a girl after my own heart. She's been around for a year now and we have hopes that she may be a keeper!

Here is a partial transcript of my five-year-old nephew's conversation:

11:33am: "Can we have pie now?"
11:52am: "Where's the pie?"
12:10pm: "Is it time for pie yet?"
12:30pm: "Pie?"
12:36pm (as I'm taking the turkey out of the oven): "Wow, that's a really big chicken!!"

He also got hold of a pack of post-its and amused himself writing notes and sticking them on his chest: PINCH ME, POKE ME, KICK ME. My favorite was HUG ME.

There were some tough moments, since it was the first big holiday for us without Mr Psmith's brother, and sister-in-law A cried a bit, but it was good to all be together.

On another traditional note: I'll be doing my Christmas bookshelf-weeding and giveaway again this year. I'm compiling the list now and will post it probably this weekend. I do enjoy doing this -- it's such fun to send books to good homes :)

I got this from ladyoneill and it's...a little creepy how good it is. Is it harvesting my LJ tags? No, because some of the words aren't my tags. Is it sucking in the text of all my entries and digesting them? Trolling my goodreads shelves? Reading my mind? Number 5 in particular kind of weirds me out. But yeah, this is all TOTALLY me :)

Except for the fact that it mentions only FOUR BOOKS. That's just wrong.

I've been AWOL lately due to being occupied co-writing a fic with someone. This is something I've never done before, and I found it peculiarly satisfying. Partly that was because the other person mapped out the plot and all I had to do was write scenes for it (o lazy me!) but also partly because it was so much fun to see the pieces coming together, to craft the transitions so it read seamlessly (or at least so we hope), and to get immediate feedback on chunks of writing before it was anywhere near finished. I'm quite proud of the end product, which turned out to be by far the longest fic I've ever worked on, and look forward to eventually being able to cop to my role in it when the fest reveals go up.

Refinery29 has compiled a millennials' reading list entitled The Book Bucket List: Books to Tackle Before You're Thirty. I've read fourteen of them, which I guess makes me 28% of a millennial? I'm not sure what criteria they used, since Harry Potter is the first one the list, which is nice but I'm not sure what's particularly millennial about it. Quite a few more are on my ever-growing to-read list, though, so perhaps I'll get to them eventually. Maybe before I turn sixty.

In more book-related news, I recently finished Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, which I absolutely adored. (Is it a coincidence that her name is the same as my favorite sushi item?) Not only are the characters three-dimensional and interesting, they're dealing with serious issues (bipolar disorder, binge drinking, etc.) yet in the end its a heart-warming story about family and friendship, and remembering what really matters in our lives. And its treatment of fandom and fanfic is a delight -- what joy to read a story that treats fic writing with the respect it deserves, and recognized the important place it fills in so many of our hearts!

Finally, I have to share this: Ursula Le Guin's acceptance speech at the recent National Book Awards. I have no words for how very cool this is. Not only is Le Guin an amazing writer, she's also thoughtful and passionate about our craft.


"...the moment that turned attendees' heads...belonged to Ursula K. Le Guin. In
accepting an award for distinguished contribution to American letters, Le Guin
delivered an impassioned defense of science fiction — and of writers in general..."
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(transcript available here)

H/D fans, Western Michigan University alum Adam Pasen has written a play that may just be for you. In Badfic Love, fan author Michelle has written a fic about Harry and Draco, parts of which get acted out as part of the play. But she's not a very good writer. Kyle, who belongs to a club whose goal is to protect the public from bad fan fiction (ha, if only there were such a thing!), is so entertained by the story's awfulness that he doesn't want to report her to the other club members. Hijinks ensue.

While the relationship between Michelle and Kyle is flawed, Harry and Draco played by Nick Petrelli and Joey Urreta are very much in love.

Daniel Radcliffe appeared on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me podcast, where he revealed that he apparently has a sizable collection of homemade Harry Potter dolls (now that we've seen talesofsnape's latest Lucuis Big Bang entry, I have my suspicions as to where they might have come from...)

Finally, in another amusing note, the upcoming 200th episode of Supernatural will be a musical -- and the title is "Fan Fiction." I'm giggling already.

I'm badly behind on posting book reviews, but here's one I really want to pass on because it was so good:

You have known all along that something in this story wasn't right...Perhaps, even now, you will feign ignorance, attempt to deny your complicity in the construction of this lie...

Indeed. Well played, Buehlman. Well played. ::cries a little::

When I was a kid, maybe ten or eleven, I saw one of the old black-and-white Dracula movies, probably a Hammer Films production. I have no idea which one it was, but the last scene was of Dracula, alone in this Victorian library or parlor, his head slumped over the shaft of the spear through his chest that's pinned him to the wall, the early morning sun streaming in through these huge double-height windows. That scene haunts me to this day, its sense of desolation and melancholy and sadness and, yes, horror (though perhaps not the kind the filmmakers intended).

Something similar washed over me when I closed The Lesser Dead by Christopher Buehlman this morning. This is so much more than a vampire book that it's hard to know how to talk about it.

Here is one thing I can say: Normally I'm one of those rabid page-turners (what's next what's next WHAT'S NEXT WHAT'S NEXT!!) but I found myself consciously drawing out the reading of this book because although I very much wanted to know what happened next, I could sense that something bad was coming. Something I didn't want to see, or know. I was right -- but not at all in the way I expected. Whatever happened next was going to happen by the platform in Union Station, out in the open, under the lights. With an audience...

Which leads me to another thing I can say: This is an excellent piece of storytelling. It's difficult to end a story in a way that is both utterly unexpected and yet still fits all the events that have preceded it, but that's what happens here. Even more challenging is to pull off an ending that makes the reader go back and re-assess everything they just read. That also happens here. Finally, there's a certain level of "meta" as well, since the ideas of narrator, of story, of reader expectations -- not to mention the relationship between narrator and reader -- are played with and questioned in interesting ways.

So...yeah, go read this. Then think about it. Then maybe read it again, knowing what's coming.

(P.S. Stats for the animal lovers in the audience: dogs that die=0, cats that die=1, bird that doesn't die and is well taken care of=1, derogatory mention of insects=many.)

The reveals are up at minerva_fest so I can now admit to being the author of "Memento Vitae," which I very much enjoyed writing and which a lot of people apparently enjoyed reading -- yay! As always, this was an excellent fest with many top-notch stories; if you haven't yet checked them out, take time to do so. You will not be disappointed!

Title: Memento Vitae (on LJ) (on AO3)
Prompt #70: Retirement approaches, and Minerva clears out her office at Hogwarts. There are a few objects ('five' is such a traditional fanfic number, but have less or more if you prefer) that hold very, very special memories. While she packs, she remembers those times.
Rating: G
Word Count: 3700
Characters and/or Pairings: Minerva, with memories of many others
Summary: There are things we carry in our hearts that no one else can fully understand. On her last afternoon as Headmistress, Minerva remembers some of hers.
Warnings: None
Author's Notes: I very much enjoyed this stroll down Minerva's memory lane; I hope you do too.

"Spock, I have breasts."
"Captain...so do I."
Heeeeeee.


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