Dira Sudis

So brewsternorth posted a request for a Lewis crossed over with Connie Willis's Oxford Time Travel, over at the prompt meme on lewis_hathaway.

I think the only surprising part of what happened next is that I managed to get the resulting story in (just, literally, within a few characters after I had eliminated all double-spaces after periods) under the Dreamwidth comment size limit. I think you can probably read this knowing only one half of the source; feel free to ask questions if you try it and then have no idea what just happened. *g*

Many thanks to iulia and missmollyetc for cheering this along.

Gen, probably. James Hathaway, Robbie Lewis, Ned Henry, Verity Kindle, Kivrin Engle. 2700 words.
"This is worse than maths, Sergeant," Lewis said darkly. "This is history."

Alibi

This morning I added my birthday books from helaaspindakaas (A Paradise Built in Hell: the Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster and Debt: the First 5,000 Years) to my home library catalog, bringing my total of Non-Fiction books owned up to 152. (Arranged by Dewey Decimal call number. Naturally. It's a small collection, not oriented to heavy research.) (Cataloging for Fiction and A/V materials remains shamefully incomplete.)

After doing the necessary shifting to fit them on the bookshelves, it occurred to me to wonder where this put me along my quest toward an Old English Bryant or one of the subdivisions thereof (it being fairly obvious that on the metric scale this put me at .152 Bryants, or a little over one and a half Decibryants).

When I looked up the old scale, though, I was terribly charmed to realize that I have about six and a half Wallshels, as the shifting did in fact start the Non-Fiction collection onto its seventh shelf.




(Which means, I suppose, that my Ikea Flarkes are more or less Bryant-compliant.)

22 – Have you ever participated in a fest or a Big Bang? If so, write about your favorite experience in relation to one. If not, are there any you've thought about doing? And if not, why not?

Fest - as narrowly defined - no. I tend to find fests confusing and overwhelming, so I steer clear.

Big Bang - yes! For the first time this year, I actually managed to align a long story I was writing with the submission window for a Big Bang. It felt a little bit like cheating, since Jigsaw had been in progress for a long, long time when I realized I could get it into stargate_summer, but it was a really fun experience having other writers to commiserate with, to say nothing of getting omg awesome art for my story!

But my ongoing favorite fest-y (festive, if you will) challenge-y thing is, of course, Yuletide! I've done Yuletide nearly every year since its beginning (2003-2006, 2008-2010), and I adore everything about it--secret-giftyness, terrifying deadline, obscure fandoms, my Christmas-Eve-night and Christmas-morning ritual of sneaking as many stories as I can between site slowdowns and my family wanting to actually celebrate together. This past year, 2010, was my favorite so far, possibly just because it's the most recent and I have more fun with it every year. I wound up writing three stories this year, my assignment (Not Alone in the Dark, which as far as I know is one of the only two stories on the internet for Susan R. Matthews' Under Jurisdiction series) plus a couple of Yuletide Treats (The Most Important Meal and Sex on a Frozen River Mayhem, which could not be more different while both being more or less linear narratives in English). I do not know how on earth this year's Yuletide will top the awesomeness of slashing Jack Harkness and Mayhem, but I have faith in the Yuletide magic. And I am already working on my list of offers/requests.


( All 30 questions under the cut )

So, one of the ways in which I am a ginormous nerd is that in the last couple of years, since I started keeping track of what I read, I have started assigning myself goals for the books I read--not just a number of books, but within that a number of non-fiction books, a number of books of poetry, a number of books published in the current year, and so on.

One of my assignments for this year is to read five past award-winning SF/F books, and to keep myself from getting totally overwhelmed I decided to target books from years ending in 1. The first four books I read for the assignment were the Hugo winners I hadn't read before (1981 - Joan D Vinge's The Snow Queen, 1971 - Larry Niven's Ringworld, 1961 - Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, and the 1951 Retro Hugo - Robert A. Heinlein's A Farmer in the Sky) and that leaves me without an obvious choice for my fifth book.

So, obviously time for a poll! My selections are taken mostly from truepenny's list of SF/F/H award-winners, 1953-2009, plus the Wikipedia entries for the winners of the Lambda Literary Award and the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, minus books I've read before, already know I don't want to read, or can't get through my local library system. That still leaves thirteen books I know very little about except that they've won some sort of award in a year ending in 1, so feel free to give your opinions in the comments if your feelings are not sufficiently expressed by clicking a radio button!

Sooooo I was in a car accident tonight. Silver lining: don't have to figure out which story to work on tonight! Also, I guess that cracked side mirror/cracked bumper/whatever was going on with my transmission is no longer a concern, because I totally fucking caved in the front of my car. (Guy pulled out in front of me, perpindicular to me, I couldn't brake in time; I T-boned him. The cop who responded to the accident assigned no fault to anyone, though I guess we'll see what the insurance people call it.)

I'm fine! He's fine! He kept apologizing to me and went and got ice for my (SPECTACULARLY bruised) knee (Iulia says that is what I get for sitting so close to the steering wheel when I drive) and let me use his phone after mine died to call Iulia and tell her exactly where I was, so she could come collect me off the side of the road within about five minutes of my car finally being towed away. And then we went to the ER, and everything went very quickly and smoothly, and I got an assortment of x-rays, and they concluded that, dang, I had a lot of bruises and I should take some acetaminophen & ibuprofen for that.

So then Iulia bought me acetaminophen and cold packs and ice cream, and know I am home elevating stuff and trying to talk myself into going to bed now that everyone has told me that it will all hurt SO MUCH MORE when I wake up. :|

But, you know. COULD HAVE BEEN MUCH WORSE.

Except I missed the book group meeting where we were supposed to discuss To Say Nothing of the Dog, due to totaling my car on the way there. So, please feel free to fill up the comments with your thinky thoughts and/or squee about that one, because Ned! Verity! Cyril! ♥

I'm not actually finished with DEADLINE but I have, crucially, read past page 338 and I need to squee NOW oh my GOD.

(That is DEADLINE, by Mira Grant (aka Campbell-award winner seanan_mcguire), sequel to the Hugo-nominated FEED--if you haven't read them I will soon be doing a pimping post because oh my god this is so on my Yuletide list! There's a pretty nifty book trailer for the books, although a) I don't think Shaun's voice really sounds like that and b) pfft, like the zombies are actually the point.)

( HAVE YOU READ PAST PAGE 338 OF DEADLINE? WOULD YOU LIKE TO SQUEE WITH ME FOREVER AND POSSIBLY ALSO WRITE YULETIDE FIC? OR REQUEST SOME SO I CAN WRITE IT FOR YOU? GINORMOUS SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST 1.5 BOOKS OF THE NEWSFLESH TRILOGY BEHIND THE CUT. ALSO ALL THE SQUEE. )

From rubynye, a meme about characters and a meme about songs: ( under the cut. )

Swiped from toft

The book I am reading: I am between books right at this second, but as soon as I finish posting this and put some shoes on, I will be off to buy Seanan McGuire's Late Eclipses and Patrick Rothfuss's The Wise Man's Fear. I still need to reread The Name of the Wind, but I just read the first three Toby books in the last week or so, so I am all set for Late Eclipses. I expect to finish it before I go to sleep tonight. Maybe THIS is the book where Toby finally makes out with Tybalt and/or the Luidaeg! Maybe this is the book where the pronunciation key finally makes some kind of sense! ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN.

The book I am writing: Hey, yes. That book. I have about 28,000 words of gay Catholic vampire teen romance thing, which is about 5,000 more words than I had a week ago, so after a long hiatus this fall and winter we're back to chugging along. (While also chugging along on fic! I have developed a custody-sharing arrangement for my brain that seems to work, at least in these first two weeks. Fingers crossed for the future.)

The book I love most: With the caveat that I am pretty sure this question is mean or meaningless or both (one book? one book?) I'll give my traditional default answer, which is probably the book I have read the most times in my life, and certainly deeply and dearly beloved: Good Night, Mr. Tom by Michelle Magorian.

The last book I received as a gift: helaaspindakaas gave me The Psychology of Happiness: A Good Human Life for Christmas (from my wish list, not because he thought I especially needed to be more psychologically happy, as far as I know). I really liked it, although there was considerably more Aristotle than I was expecting--especially weird after reading Mary Renault's Fire from Heaven and The Persian Boy not long before, both of which featured Aristotle as a character. *g*

The last book I gave as a gift: Do magazines count? I gave iulia a copy of People for her birthday. Otherwise, I gave helaaspindakaas a Carl Sagan variety pack for Christmas--The Demon-Haunted World, Cosmos, and ... something else that I don't remember off the top of my head. I think the recent book-gift I was most excited about (my and H's mutual crush on Carl Sagan notwithstanding) was finally being able to give my nephew the first Owly book for Christmas. I had only been waiting since 2007 for him to be old enough. :)

The nearest book on my desk: Assuming we mean my coffee table, which is my desk-like center of operations at home, it's The Stepsister Scheme by jimhines, waiting on the top of my littlest TBR stack. Iulia assures me I will love these books, and Jim is my favorite pro author for non-failiness and general awesomeness in the SF/F blogosphere, so I am looking forward to reading this whole series in time to catch the fourth one when it comes out in the summer.

Every so often I remember the thing in Gaudy Night where Peter gives Harriet a dog collar. And she wears it.*

And then I am like "...that cannot possibly have really happened in the book."

And then I Google a bit and am assured, no, that really happened in the book.

And then I am free to return to playing spider solitaire and wondering vaguely about those relationship dynamics.






* All for perfectly sensible self-defensive purposes. Obviously.

Five Emotions Invented by the Internet

The third one is ... very familiar. Yes.

Speaking of which, I should go write something instead of refreshing all my tabs 600 more times and then giving up and going to bed, shouldn't I?

Oh, also: come and tell me which Mary Renault book to read next, I am halfway through The Persian Boy, and I suspect Funeral Games would just make me sad.


P. S. I have finally seen Lawrence of Arabia for the first time except I think I ... missed some things, due to not having the attention span for a four-hour movie when my laptop is right next to me. Also I was kind of confused, because I had already seen Ralph Fiennes and Alexander Siddig in Lawrence After Arabia, so I was all like, Yes! Lawrence and Prince Feisal! THEY ARE BOYFRIENDS! And that was not it at all. *g*

Anyway, the upshot is that I think I need to see Lawrence of Arabia again sometime, with more fangirls and fewer available distractions.