| Twitter Fic |
[May. 7th, 2009|07:04 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  yay | ] |
My haiku is up over at Outshine.
Yay for micro-publications! |
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| Z-Hour goes live |
[Apr. 24th, 2009|11:34 pm] |
Eposic: The Book of Exodi is available for pre-order! "Z-Hour" is one of 19 other speculative stories under the mass-exodus theme. It gets to share the ToC with a Harry Turtledove piece "Next Year in Jerusalem". Kudos to the editor, Mike Eidson (who also did the cover art).
It should be hitting Amazon soon. |
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| Goodbye MikawaAnjo |
[Mar. 30th, 2009|10:38 pm] |
Last day of the work year. Beginning in April, my schedule does a major upheaval, but then settles into uniformity on Saturday for another year at Toyota City (yes, the city is named after the factory headquarters).
MikawaAnjo has been my Monday school. Mikawa-Anjo is what would happen if people built cities based on half-finished rounds of SimCity. Here we have a bullet train surrounded by business hotels and... that's pretty much it. Immediately around the station commercial-art structures stand at bland attention with the kind of pretension of a downtown core. Sprawling parking lots and hotel high rises.
But we're in the sticks out here. None of the express trains stops here (that is: express, limited express, special limited express, special-super-duper-OMG-express--all of which are color-coded). Nope: apart from the shinkansen we commuters are consigned to the plodding local train (code black). The school is on the second floor above a punctuation-challenged supermarket "La: Foods Core".
Two kids classes and a handful of adult class drop-ins. We made playdough ocean creatures and played balloon volleyball for our farewell lesson. (Yes, that would be with the kids.)
I'm gonna miss that wacky place. |
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| Whedonism |
[Mar. 15th, 2009|08:22 pm] |
Delivered in true Whedonesque fashion:
Loomis: Then you know I have plenty of faces to scan for people a lot more impressive than you.
Ballard: But not as charming.
Loomis: Was that flirting?
Ballard: I think so. It's been a while--Did I mention I was shot?
(If I close my eyes, I can almost hear Nathan Fillion deliver that line.)
Okay, okay, I'll hang on for the fabled sixth episode. |
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| um, lj? |
[Feb. 25th, 2009|12:37 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  confused | ] |
Is there a reason my default user pic got randomly swapped for a kid eating ice cream? |
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| in Nagoyaland |
[Feb. 13th, 2009|10:30 pm] |
I'm am silly in love with an underground walkway that runs about four blocks from Nagoya station to Lucent Tower, a skyscraper a block from our building. It's not Disney-magnificent or anything, not worth flying across the Pacific for, but, darnit, I just adore it.
The entire thing is done up in silhouettes, animal silhouettes along both walls and on the ceiling. It starts at subway level with shadows of the cityscape, recognizable sites from around Nagoya. Which ends when you come to the shadow of a cat. As if in stop-motion photography, the cat follows a small flight of stairs down as it leaps after a butterfly. Now you're in "The Tale of Stray Kittens" by minim++ (the media group commissioned by the skyscraper)
Each phase along the white-walled walkway is lit with different lighting. The first phase you follow your cat guide into is a yellow-lit meadow land with tall grasses, rabbits, grasshoppers. Next, you pass into forest, deep green illumination, some mocked up to cast the shadows of tree limbs on the ground. Grizzly bears, elk and wolves share the woods with an orangutan, hyenas, and some wimpy hippos. Then, the lights go red and you are mouse-sized, passing through a forest of footwear.
The center is sky blue with two sets of shadow birds flying into each other. Then, a seagull leads you to the deep blue of the sea. Then, there's the purple frog pond with violet hydrangea (the only silhouettes not black), frog shadows on the floor tiles where light effects throw ripples. The final phase before riding the escalator up to the lobby of Lucent Tower, is the ruddy desert oasis.
In the land where underground malls undermine the city streets like gopher burrows, it's the only underground passage that doesn't make me feel like a rodent. Yay, minim++ |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 12th, 2009|12:01 pm] |
You guys in North America getting Honey Orange Lattes? They are the yum.
SBs over here runs some interesting drinks. Last month it was Lavender Earl Grey latte (another yum, but too much space was taken up by the tea bags to stretch that sucker through a four-hour editing marathon). |
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| A Keeper |
[Jan. 11th, 2009|10:02 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | food, vegan | ] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Nagoya | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  Yummmm | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Blade Runner soundtrack | ] |
Gotta get this down before I forget:
Cut eggplant length-wise, salt and let stand 15min.
Roast eggplant with garlic slivers in olive oil/salt/pepper/basil. Remove.
Roast red pepper with onions and some chopped garlic (can never have too much garlic) and same mixture, plus oregano, rosemary, cayenne, nutmeg. Remove red peppers once seared.
Add diced tomato, green onions, sugar, lemon juice, red peppers (now chopped), shitake mushrooms, spinach, chopped roasted eggplant & garlic (and any oozings they produced while waiting their turn to join the party in the pan). Lastly, add tomato sauce once all the fresh stuff is happily commingling.
Udon noodles work fine as pasta (the dried ones--they come out like fettucini). Nutritional yeast for parmesan (and B12).
Serve with Shiraz (at least two years old). |
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| Review Scooby Snacks |
[Jan. 6th, 2009|11:11 am] |
My short "Exiles" from Lilith Unbound got a favorable review from Mrs. Giggles:
"I especially like Nancy Schmidt's Exiles, where she transforms Cain, Eve, Lilith, and Adam into Native American folks. In this story, Cain is exiled from his tribe for killing his brother. He encounters Lilith, who helps him with some pointers on surviving on his own - just like the way she has survived on her own. This story also depicts an unlikely bond between Lilith and Eve. This story humanizes all the main characters involved in the story and as a result, I enjoy reading this story tremendously."
Sweet! It's my first out-of-workshop review, nice that it's a positive one. I didn't really have Native Americans in mind, but I can see how that might be read into it.
Thank you, Mrs. Giggles. |
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| Chapter 1 and 2009 |
[Jan. 2nd, 2009|08:43 pm] |
Okay, so the middle draft for chapter one of my space operatic Hercules tale is done enough to go up on the writer's workshop. I reworked the entire last third where I'd missed out on a lot of plot opportunities in favor of NaNo expediency (the "meh" of last post when I realized sentence-level edits were not enough).
I'm tooling each task/chapter as a stand-alone story that also works well when read collectively (the way I imagine the labors of Hercules ran).
It's a bit of a bear at 9300 words, but there are a few markets out there that make their cut off at 10k. I'm hoping some of the workshop feedback will highlight other spots ripe for the cutting (8k opens up several more markets).
In other news, M & I ventured forth to experience New Year in Japan (TM) at the shrine just west of Nagoya castle. We pulled our omikuji's--Marcel got "sho-kuji" (a little luck) and I got "tsue-kuji" (sorry, chickie, eat dust). We tied them to the white-strip purification string that is supposed to neutralize not-so-fortunate fortunes and make sure the good fortunes come to fruition. Don't mess with that string. That's the Bruce Lee of strings.
While warming our hands at one of several of the open-pit fires, we got waved over by a beaming woman in a nun's robe. She dished us out some sweet rice gruel to warm our insides. We took the obligatory photos in front of the stylized Year of the Ox placard and headed off to the only open place in town: Starbucks. We would have taken in a couple more temples if 1) we weren't all templed-out from our Kyoto trip, and 2) Siberian winds weren't piercing our layers like a saber through toilet paper.
2009--I love it already. |
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| Editing woe |
[Dec. 30th, 2008|09:15 pm] |
Hrm, I hate my manuscript today. It's gotta be alchemical because I go through this with most of my writing projects. The blush of creation is over, and the editor emerges in that tight-bunned matronly way and raps my knuckles over and over with her yardstick, and what are you doing with this foul mess?
I think I need to recast my internal editor as a dominatrix in thigh boots. We'd probably get along much better.
Oh, and because Greg hasn't got around to it: Sexual practices of the cephalopodic kind |
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| The Gift of Time |
[Dec. 26th, 2008|11:58 am] |
I decided to spoil myself by closing my WoW account. My druid hit 80 and I just don't have it in me to raid-grind again to epic out. Been there, done that.
It would be fine if I could do an hour here, an hour there, but the game is not really designed that way and so has become the biggest time munch. When I took the month of November off from it (for NaNo and to see if I could go without it for a month), I realized how much I could get done when it wasn't vying for my free time.
Besides, now that I've kicked into editing mode, I need every free moment I can get (damn perfectionist tendencies). |
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| Lemmings, maybe, but sunny mold-less lemmings. |
[Dec. 15th, 2008|12:38 pm] |
We should have known last April that come winter, theCave would become unacceptable. It's obvious that our cold-like symptoms that refuse to go away are coming from the spores that make the under the bathtub a nightmare in bleach to clean and that give a fuzzy green-grey rim to the windowsills. You can tell what direction your facing by the layer of green on our windows. We leave the apartment and suddenly the drawn-out hack-attacks diminish (though the runny nose continues as our poor overworked systems struggle to expel the concentration of goo.
Well, we're leaving the Cave and headed for gaijin central. I think the new place has about 80% foreigners there, but it also has... southwest exposure! We're looking at a spacious, airy corner unit that overlooks the Nagoya station tracks. The noise will bug us for awhile, but the sunlight will more than make up for it.
They make it so easy to move: they provide the van, the movers, they get you hooked up to internet, AND it's 2000yen cheaper--it's just too inviting for the gaijin that we are.
So we're leaping. |
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| So it begins... |
[Nov. 30th, 2008|06:28 pm] |
Editing chapter one. At 10k, it took most of my writing time just to read over it.
I've been playing with pronouns to account for the gender variations (or lack of them) of some of the other species. So far I have male, female, combinant, intersexual, asexual, and odd interdimensional things that no one knows what to make of. |
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| Finish line! |
[Nov. 24th, 2008|08:18 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | chimera, nano, writing | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | complete | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | American Doll Posse--Tori | ] |
After a marathon day of over 8k, I crossed the 50k NaNoWriMo-defined line.
That puts the total for the Chimera tales at over 130k. Tasks are definitely going to have to be broken up into sub-chapters. I had each labor a chapter, but that makes for some crazily unwieldy chapters (11th labor, I'm looking at you).
2009 is promising to be the Year of the Great Edit. |
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| Nano--Mid month |
[Nov. 15th, 2008|07:05 pm] |
Didn't get a lot done in the way of word count this week, but, man, I'm having all kinds of fun with this story. It doesn't need more than 50k. In fact, come editing time in December, I expect to shave off a good deal otherwise it's going to be a beast at over 125k.
It's been mostly fill-in the gaps I'd skipped over from last year, which means the 2007-me saved all the tricky parts to let the 2008-me labor through. |
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| NaNo--day7 |
[Nov. 7th, 2008|10:05 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | chimera, nano, writing | ] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Nagoya | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  creative | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Depeche Mode-Exciter | ] |
I was half-hoping to hit 20k today and I'm realizing how much easier the first 50k are than the last 50k. When it's a perfectly new project, there's this open meadow and you can run around anywhere, with your eyes closed even. The second half of the story has trees all over the place that you have to maneuver around.
Task 5 is a bit of a bear. I have to figure out how to infect nanites with a biological virus. |
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| Happy... and reserved |
[Nov. 6th, 2008|08:25 am] |
The U.S. is done with the Republican experiment, and good on it.
But I'm saddened by the slight majority of California's voters who thought it a good idea to attack the constitution, to strip away rights for a minority because...?
Most cherry-pick cite religious reasons, pointing to a Bible which has more to say about divorce than homosexual partnerships. I wonder how folks claiming to have Jesus in their hearts have so much space for intolerance. What? Do they shove Jesus in the glove compartment while they let hatred do the driving?
On a more optimistic note: the gap between those supporting that nasty little piece of legislation (and its ilk, 22) is closing. And millions of Utah dollars couldn't pry it open. |
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| Another plea for sanity... |
[Nov. 5th, 2008|01:35 pm] |
Some amazing expression comes out of brilliant, thoughtful people when they're defending something that matters.
I can't let this response to 8 fall through the cracks.
Thank you, Rach.
Namaste, indeed. |
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| Because this deserves to have a few more eyes on it... |
[Nov. 4th, 2008|09:52 pm] |
A friend of mine posted a succinct, frank note as to why Prop. 8 needs to slither back into the bilious cesspool of bigotry and fear it originally oozed from...
It closes with: Don't like gay marriage? Don't have one. And hands off my fucking Constitution. |
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anpumaat's journal
nostalgic
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