HSU IT Department

Our local zoo does occasional special fund-raising events focused on a particular animal. You pays your money and you get to come to the zoo in the evening, have drinks and hors d'oeuvres, the keepers give a little talk about the species (both in general and specifically about the ones at our zoo), and then you get to do some kind of special behind-the-scenes activity. We've done several of them: for the lions, we got to get up close near their cage (you could feel them eying you, thinking "Hm, they look tasty..."), for the primates we got to watch a training session, etc. So Mr Psmith and I went to one on Thursday about penguins and the special thing was...we got to actually pet a baby penguin!!! It was so amazing, so soft and warm since it still had all its downy grey baby feathers. Very sweet.

The zoo is also doing major construction work, and as we were leaving we saw they had posted this on the chain-link fence surrounding the construction area, which we giggled over and thought rawther clever esp. the bit about "loud vocalizations lol :)

The Western black rhino was declared extinct today, and the top story on Yahoo News was Suri Cruise's new haircut.

[Edit: The link above was to an old news item, sorry, and now I can't find the correct one. Curse you, interwebz! However, in trying to find it, I did learn that they've found footprints of the Sumatran rhino someplace where they thought it was extinct, so the news isn't all bad. Still...]

Humanity, I weep for you. And yes, that's a poem, so it counts as one of my 100 Things. *sigh*

Well, I did not get accepted to Clarion West. It was a very complimentary and encouraging rejection ("very competitive group...our readers were impressed with your work...please apply again..blah blah blah") which of course I immediately think, "Oh, that's what they tell everyone."

How could they not recognize my genius? How??! Grrrr.

However, this means that Mr Psmith and I can once again do season tickets to our local Ren Fest, which is a Nice Thing. A chance to ponce about in hoop skirts and a tight bodice while drinking ale and singing bawdy traditional folk songs is not to be sneezed at.

Things have been mad busy on other fronts, between trying to finish a freelance job which has been postponed twice (by the client, not by yrs truly) but is now nearing completion (which means yay, I can soon get paid), Mr. Psmith's birthday yesterday (which required baking the family-tradition Grandma's Dark Chocolate Buttermilk Cake with Boiled White Icing, a terrifically sticky endeavor with a profoundly delicious conclusion), a two-week guest lecturing stint for a graduate-level course, the need to assist in the testing phase of a standards revision, and of course the usual work stuff.

Plus I'm in the middle of re-reading Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy, which is soooooo good I can hardly put the book down. I nearly came to an untimely end yesterday as I had my nose buried in the second volume while walking from the parking garage to work and tripped merrily off the curb into traffic. Good thing that lady in the green Kia had had her morning coffee.

Phew. No wonder I'm tired.

A man has died of rabies from a kidney transplant. After seventeen months. Yay, now we can worry about long-incubation period rabies! The lesson here I guess is take good care of your kidneys so you don't need a new one.

So, The Infinity Concerto. I loved Greg Bear's Blood Music, and the title, summary, and about the first third of this book intrigued me very much, which made me all the more disappointed when it all went flat. Bear incorporates some excellent fantasy elements -- Lamia, the Crane Women, humans confined to a sort of ghetto in the realm of the Sidhe, the mystical power of music -- but he never seems to effectively meld the components into a coherent whole.

The most obvious example is music: the title has the word "concerto" in it, Michael's translation into the Realm is instigated by a composer, nearly all of the humans in the Realm are there because they experienced a mystical response to music (either playing or listening), no musical instruments are allowed in the Sidhe realm and it's mentioned more than once that the Sidhe dislike human music, etc. But in the end, all of that is completely irrelevant. Music plays no part whatsoever in the central conflict of the book, either in its unfolding or resolution. That was a major "WTF?" for me.

Another example of apparently important but ultimately unincorporated story elements is Eleuth: she loves Michael to the point that she dies for him but in the end her death means nothing, since he learns nothing from it and it has no effect on his quest, his training, his knowledge, or even his emotions! Many of the other characters such as Nikolai, Lin Piao, Savarin, the Sidhe horse, even Lamia suffer from this same lack of integration into the plot. As a reader, if I spend time getting invested in characters -- learning not only their names but little things about them -- I expect that investment to be returned somehow. The ROI on 95% of the characters in this book is about zero.

It wasn't just characters that floated about unattached. Since the main character is initially completely at a loss about what's going on, so is the reader. This is not a problem if the main character slowly begins to piece together the puzzle, carrying the reader with him or her. That didn't happen here, at least not for me. The back-story about Mages battling each other and turning each other into Earth(?) animals was intriguing but I had a lot of trouble following how it was connected to the Michael's story, what with the muddle of humans, Sidhe, gods and Mages who are, or pretend to be, each other, or something else. There also seemed to be a lot of extraneous information that wasn't integrated into the story (interstellar Sidhe travel, for example, and the weird brass cylinder floating in the Maelstrom).

This is at bottom a quest tale, which by definition means that the main character undertakes a journey, with a goal, and he changes along the way. Here again, Michael's journey and growth seemed to be largely unconnected to the climax of the story. His goal was never clear even to himself; his training consists of a lot of running, learning to generate heat so he doesn't need a fire, and throwing shadows to distract attackers. The "power" he uses at the end to defeat the Isomage is that he's a poet - but he was a poet from the beginning, so nothing about his journey has anything to do with it.

As a minor nit, I totally stopped caring about Biri when it's revealed that the first task he's assigned on joining the Sidhe version of the priesthood is to kill his horse, and he does. Maybe it's Bear's shorthand for demonstrating that the Sidhe are irredeemable bastards, but I think there are more sensible ways to demonstrate it. Besides, it doesn't really jibe with their other characteristics, such as nature magic and becoming trees after death.

This is a lot to say about a book that I didn't much like, but I think it's because it had so much potential and it vexes me that the potential was unrealized. (By comparison, Andre Norton's Dread Companion is a similar story about a human being translated to the Faerie Realm, but it does a much better job (maybe because it doesn't try so hard). I re-read that one on a regular basis.)

pearle9240 has created icons for a number of stories from this year's sshg_exchange, and she created these two beautiful ones based on my story Bide, Lady, Bide. Aren't they little jewels? I love the detail, the colors, the way they highlight key pieces of the story. Lucky me, I can't wait to use them on things :)

sshg_exchange has posted the reveal -- and with 180 items, it is a freakin' HUGE reveal! The quality of writing and art that comes out of SSHG never ceases to amaze me.

I have squee'd in no uncertain terms about the gifts I received, but now I know who my bestower of loveliness is and I'm thrilled to be able to properly thank sixpence_jones for my two phenomenal gifts, For Love and Loss (art) and All Shadows Pass Away (fic). I treasure both of them. ♥ ♥ ♥ to you, my dear!!

And on the flip side, I can now claim authorship of "Bide, Lady, Bide," a combination of the folk song "The Twa Magicians" and a very manipulative Lucius who very nearly gets caught in his own net, which I wrote for owlbait. So many people were kind enough to leave praise and comments; I am both thrilled and humbled.

Title: Bide, Lady, Bide (on LJ) (on AO3)
Recipient: owlbait
Rating: Suggestive
Warnings: None
Genre: Romance
Summary: Lucius has a cunning plan. What will he do when it backfires?
Word Count: 8,521
Original Prompt: (Possible spoilers) Of the three prompts given, I've combined #2 and #3: (2) "Something inspired by "The Twa Magicians" - Childe Ballad verses here and Steeleye Span's spiffy version here. (3) "The Marriage Law Oopsie: With the war over, Wizarding Britain is worried about the rise in Squibs. In typical Slytherin fashion, Lucius connives to get his friend the girl of his dreams. He moves behind the scenes to get a Marriage Law passed requiring all Muggle-born witches to marry Purebloods. Lucius, recently widowed/divorced, petitions for Hermione. He engineers out all other escape routes in order to send her fleeing to Severus's offer. Finally, with time getting down to the wire for Hermione to accept another proposal or have to marry him, Lucius gets fed up and tells Snape to offer for Hermione, already. It seems our Sev has kept some things to himself. "What do you *mean* you aren't a pureblood?"

I finally had a chance to sit down and dig into Clockwork Angels, which I got for Christmas and which I'd been eagerly anticipating. I'm a huge fan of Rush and have been since high school; largely thanks to Neil Peart, who's incredibly widely-read, many of their songs and albums are strongly story-oriented (think Fountain of Lamneth, or Red Barchetta, or all of 2112), so a collaborative book/album project sounded intriguing. In the end I enjoyed this book very much as far as it went, but was left wanting a lot more.

The steampunk-y world-building had many lovely little details: the Clockwork Angels of the title, the invented names of alchemical stones and minerals, the news office of Barrel Arbor and its announcement of the daily predictions, the personal letters the Watchmaker sends to every citizen on important occasions, the brief glimpses of other people and continents beyond the kingdom of the Watchmaker, and lots more. Taken as a whole, though, the story reads like a parable because in the end that's all we're given: little details and glimpses. The characters -- except for Owen Hardy -- are ultimately one-dimensional, and even the Watchmaker and the Anarchist are in the end nothing but symbols of the two extremes between which Owen Hardy is pulled, the Watchmaker's total predictability and the Anarchist's total unpredictability.

I was happy for Owen that he eventually found a happy medium, but I wish he'd spent a lot longer exploring. I had a nagging sense that I was missing out on lots of exciting things just out of sight; I felt like I was constantly craning my neck out the back window or trying to sneak off down alleyways to see things for myself and getting brought up short.

Those of you with a mathy turn of mind will be interested to know that it's actually command gold that loses the highest percentage of its wearers, not the stereotypical expendable red shirts. But sciences and engineering are still the safest. Go Spock!

And since we're in a Star Trek moment, please enjoy the ten most awesome things that happened during ST:TNG's 25th reunion. (TWENTY FIVE. Wow do I feel old. So imagine how Jonathan Frakes feels!!)

Also, Patrick Stewart has made the NRA's enemy list (and is apparently quite proud of it). He's also been attacked by some sort of squid/fruit hybrid, but I'm sure there's no connection.

Oh, and Mississippi finally banned slavery.

That is all.