Will to Write

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012066.html

From the New Hampshire Homeland Security Emergency Management email list:

The NH HSEM Field Services <nhfs@hsem.nh.gov> has issued a Winter Storm Warning

To ALL Emergency Management Directors:

" There is a significant winter storm predicted for this weekend. According to the NWS in Gray, Me. - "this is a very unusual event . . . we have not seen one like this in 30 years." This will be an event that is expected to bring significant snow and wind for the entire state. Gusts of wind may be up to 50 mph.

There will be a smaller system moving into NH very late Thursday night / early Friday a.m. bringing 3-5" of snow. The main storm will be moving in Saturday afternoon and possibly last until Tuesday, with the storm stalling off the coast. The weather models are still somewhat confusing so actual amounts of snowfall (mostly dry snow) are difficult to predict and range anywhere from 6-14" to possible 20-40" further north. Predictability will be more certain tomorrow.

There is also great concern regarding possible coastal flooding.

We will continue to monitor the situation and keep you updated. HSEM would advise all communities to begin referring to their emergency plans and begin preparedness activities."

Emphases in the original.

This might be a good time for the good folks of Northern New England among the readership to review their own emergency management plans.

See also Arctic Blast From the Past, and follow links.

Tim Hart, founding member of Steeleye Span, has lost his battle with lung cancer at the too-damn-young age of 61.

A great one has been lost. *raises glass*

• 22:28 And... I have now completed my 5th novel of the year. A first draft, mind you, but still. Five books! Woot! (Must go collapse.) #

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Has anyone bought/used these DPNs from eBay?

I'd like to buy a set so I have everything available. Plus its much cheaper than the needles from Joann/Michaels.

Which length do you think is best? 5-7-8?


ETA: http://cgi.ebay.com/patina-Bamboo-Knitting-Needles-Double-Pointed-7-sz1-15_W0QQitemZ370311236470QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item5638450b76

Agh this is making me feel crazy and I have to rant. If anyone has any comforting information I would be so grateful. All I can concentrate on now is "just hire an attorney....just hire an attorney...."

I've been working on marriage to my English fiance here in the UK (I'm American) and our eventual goal is to move back to the states for a few years in about 2013 just to figure out where we want to settle before we have kids.

My understanding of MY visa process for staying in the UK goes like this:

Post grad visa
Certificate of Approval
Getting hitched
Spouse visa
Eventual indefinite leave to remain

All done! Only what like £1500 but cheap at the price.

In three years, when I want him to move back to Oregon with me, it looks like this:

Apply in London for I-130 petition
Somehow establish MY domicile in Oregon, while living in Edinburgh, while "domicile" is badly defined in the so-called "glossary"
Somehow proceed through an 8 step process requiring three or four separate fees and a medical exam, plus certificates from every police district he's ever lived in describing his "good conduct."
And extra stuff that I don't even understand. And tax returns!

And the language is so vague that I don't even understand if any of this results in a green card, or just the approval to apply for a green card.

I guess I am just ranting because I feel so frustrated by the obscurity of my governments processes. Is this where my tax dollars go? The writing of uselessly worded web pages and lists that mean nothing to an ordinary person? The processing of endless parades of dense paperwork? Or are they just funding the immigration attorneys because they have such a great lobby?

Yesterday, I revised "Fire in the Hole," the Dragon Precinct story I've written for the Dragon's Lure anthology and sent it off to damcphail in the hopes that she likes it enough to actually, y'know, include it in the anthology. (Assuming she does, it'll be out from Dark Quest Books in May, with the formal release at Balticon.)

I also looked over the lettering for Farscape: D'Argo's Quest #2 and got and incorporated Rockne O'Bannon's notes on Farscape #7.

Today, I began Chapter 2 of the urban fantasy, writing 2100 words of the thing all told.

(I have also been introduced to the joys of the British TV series Hustle, and also finally got 'round to watching Doctor Who's "The End of Time Part 1." I'm going to wait until Part 2 before writing up anything formal about the latter, as I've been burned by RTD's season-ending two-parters far far far far far too often to even consider posting any thoughts on the commencement until I've seen the denouement.)

I'm now going to watch Fanboys, a movie I've been dying to see since I saw the trailer over a year ago, and finally bought on DVD a few months ago, but still haven't gotten around to watching. Cha cha cha.

I've been busy with knitting for Christmas, and thought I'd share the fruits of my labours with you all. Clicking on the link below takes you to my journal, a few more Finished Objects and Ravelry links, if you wish them.

( Becca's Lace-Up Gloves )

Post from mobile portal m.livejournal.com

From Ravelry
Pattern: Parrotfish / Pomatomus hat by Kristy Pedersen
Yarn: Koigu Mori
After making the Pomatomus socks, I really wanted the hat too!
( Primeval Pomatomus Hat )

This took a bit of patience to knit, but it's finally done! At first it fit perfectly, but then I gave it a rinse and it grew! I'm a bit sad about that. At least I got one last project finished before the end of the year.

I watched all three seasons of Primeval while doing this hat...hence the name. It is now funny to hear people speak w/o a British accent. I don't fault Madonna any more for her faux accent...I suddenly want to start saying stuff with an accent...

Caricaturist David Levine has died at the age of 83 from prostate cancer.

I've always loved his work. He will be missed....

Missed DGM, missed Good News Tuesday, and no Hump Day Questions, either. I'm in "finish the damned book already" mode, people. Have one more day to finish writing, then a few days to edit the beast. Please forgive the radio silence from Rancho Doghair until the book is done.

Although since I'm posting this, everyone could post your good news of the week!

I normally do a year-end performance review of myself, but all the decade in review columns I'm seeing have reminded me that it's the end of a decade, as well -- at least for non-pedantic folks (I think, technically, the decade starts with the 1 year, but there's something satisfying about that odometer turnover).

I don't have a lot to say about this year. It was there. No major highs or huge successes, but nothing really awful. I think, in retrospect from further into the future, this year will be like the middle book of a trilogy or that episode just before the season finale two-parter. It's a bridging, a time for pulling together threads of things that have already been set up and then putting everything into place for the explosive finale. There's no room in all that set-up work for a standalone plot, or if there is one, it's pretty thin. How that episode or book rates is ultimately dependent on what comes after it. If the set up pays off in the finale, then the arc that includes the bridge is a success. On its own, that episode or book isn't much, and you'd probably never revisit it on its own again.

And I think that's what this year has been for me. There's been a lot of setting up for things that could possibly happen in the future. If those things do end up happening, then this year will have been a big success. If not, the year will have been a washout, professionally, at least. I wrote a book that hasn't yet gone out on the market, I've started writing a book that I think could be really good, and I got and started researching an idea that gave me the same "oooh, this is it" tingle I got when I came up with the concept for Enchanted, Inc. None of that came to fruition this year, but 2010 better look out.

As for the decade, at this time in 1999 I'd already bought this house, and most of it hasn't changed, although I did switch my bedroom and office in 2001, moving the bedroom to the downstairs room that felt like a cave (which is nice in a bedroom, not so great in an office) and the office to the upstairs room with a wall of windows and a skylight. I was working full-time at a PR agency then, but contemplating quitting my job to write. I'd saved the amount of money I'd considered my threshold for making the leap, I had an agent (a different one than I have now) and had a book rejected with favorable comments and a mention that they'd like to see something else from me. But I hadn't had a chance to write something else because I was working crazy hours and was doing trade show media relations, so I'd spent the fall of 1999 mostly on the road, hitting such lovely spots as New Orleans, New York and Las Vegas (actually, the first two are nice, though the convention centers aren't so much). And I was doing some media training, which meant a quick trip to Minneapolis in December. My grand plan was to take an hourly wage part-time job so I could leave work behind at the end of my shift and only work the hours I was being paid for. It turned out that my boss wouldn't let me quit and instead worked out an arrangement to work part-time and telecommute, so I stayed for two more years (and was happy enough in that time that I ended up not getting much writing done).

I do have a new car and an entirely new set of friends that reminds me of the crowd I hung around with in college (and some of them know some of the people I hung around with in college, so it's a small world). I did a lot of travel in the first two years of the decade, for both work and fun (I was a gold-level frequent flier those years). I've traveled a little less since then, since the absence of a steady salary does trim the travel budget, but I've still made a bunch of trips to New York, several to Chicago, one to Denver, one to Atlanta, one to Reno, one to Philadelphia and then that crazy whirlwind trip to LA for a movie premiere (we'll hope that one repeats this decade, but for my movie and maybe involving more sleep).

As for work, the numbers make me feel like a bit of a slacker. In the decade, I wrote nine books, four of which have been published. I've known people who wrote and published that many in one year. Of the unpublished ones, one was widely rejected and will probably never see the light of day, though I think I'm unconsciously scavenging the worthwhile elements and using them elsewhere. One I think was a good concept that I wasn't a good enough writer at the time to pull off and may get revived in a total rewrite, but the market for that kind of story is weak at the moment. One made the publishing rounds, but I don't think it was the right time for that book and I may revisit it. One was last year's NaNo book and needs a rewrite, but my brain isn't there. And one is the book I've been working on lately that I hope to see published.

I've also written about a dozen proposals and partial books. Some were rejected, some were things I wrote and then changed my mind about. I did two complete re-workings of previously rewritten books to adapt them (unsuccessfully) for a different market, so that might up my writing count.

There's also the non-fiction stuff, with eight published essays and a couple of magazine articles, as well as the five one-minute radio scripts I've written every week of the entire decade. For the first couple of years after I went freelance, I wrote and edited a ton of marketing materials and other documentation.

The thing I can't let myself forget, though, is that this was the decade in which I realized my dream. I've worked for myself through most of the decade and for about half the decade have supported myself mostly through my work as a novelist. I've had a series published in multiple countries and had a book optioned for film. This is the kind of life I've wanted since I was about twelve years old, and while it may not be quite as lucrative and glamorous as I imagined then, I've managed to do it. So it's been a good decade.

I ended up giving a lot of knitted gifts for Christmas this year, and now that they're all safely in the hands of the recipients, and there's no chance of ruining a surprise, I thought I would share!

( Hats, gloves, scarves, and more! )

I'm currently working on the Hemlock Ring Blanket, and so far it's going really well (knock on wood!) and I'm loving it.

Thanks for reading! I'm "eccisne" on Ravelry, if anyone is interested.

hi, I'm Ava from New York and I'm going to be going to Oxford to visit my English boyfriend in June.

Problem is, he doesn't have a drivers license, only a motorbike license. When I go over he wants to be able to take me to nice places (he has a cottage in Devon that he wants to show me, wants to take me to Scotland, etc), but I refuse to ride on a motorbike and he doesn't have a car that I can drive. I would rent one but a) it is expensive b) I'm 18 so I can't rent a car, he can't rent one for me cause he doesn't have a license and c) I only know how to drive an automatic. There's always the option of buses and trains, but he says that it would be a huge hassle to go that way because of time and money.

So, it is my hope that by presenting you wise ones with the obstacles I'm facing that someone will see a solution that I have yet to realize. Thank you all so much in advance!

Long-time readers of this journal know that I'm not much for year-end wrap-ups, nor do I do Resolutions as such. Long-time friends will also attest to the fact that, while I am always on time, my sense of the greater Time is fluid, and I'm far more likely to forget what month it is than to tick off the passing of a specific yet arbitrary date.

And yet, I love New Year's Eve/First Night. No matter how you observe -- surrounded by casual friends or thousands of strangers or gathered with only your nearest-and-dearest -- it's a powerful, simple celebration of change and survival and contemplation and anticipation.

Many people have decried 2009 as the worst year ever, and I won't deny there were a lot of downsides... but there were also moments of great joy and hope and pleasures. New friends and new experiences, old friends revisited, great things accomplished, and dreams realized and revised. I danced more this year than I did last, and if I cried, I cried on the shoulders of dear friends, and was there in turn when they needed my shoulder.

Occasionally I hear people say "Next year has to be better!" No, it doesn't. It doesn't have to be worse, either. It's just another 12 months to do things in. Go, do.


May the best of the past year
be the very worst you encounter in the new year
filled with the dreams you dared not hope for
and the songs you didn't know how to sing
And if you are still searching
may 2010 bring you at last
to the shores of where you need to be.


And happy birthday to matticrafts and ellen_datlow!

I would really like to see the New years eve fireworks tomorrow in London in person. Has anyone done this before or plan to go tomorrow? How has their experience been like? It's my first year in London... my first time in a big city like this, and well I just thought it would be fun to see it  live in person. Is it worth the hassle? How early should I go and stand in the cold in order to have a nice view? 

Sorry if this has been posted already. Thank you very much!

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2009_12.php#015542

This week's Guardian Digested Read: A Fair Maiden by Joyce Carol Oates.

The old man laughed throatily. "I'm Marcus Kidder, long-term Bayhead resident, though it may turn out that the real Kidder is Joycie-Baby for churning out this quasi-feminist Lolita crap."

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2009_12.php#015541

From the London Review of Books archive: Betsy Blair, who died this year, explains what you get when the FBI releases its file on you.

I was a blacklisted Hollywood fellow-traveller, a champagne socialist, a Pinko. Not that I wasn’t serious about my ideas and ideals. I was as serious as a 17-year-old arriving on the Coast, newly and ecstatically married to the about-to-be movie star Gene Kelly, could possibly have been. That is to say, I was easily and happily serious, feeling good about myself, rebellious and righteous and pure. I was also being spied on by the FBI.

http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/index.php/weblog/comments/interview-with-laura-clawson-daily-kos-contributing-editor/

After seeing Laura Clawson‘s article about romance novels on Daily Kos, “Romance Reader, Unashamed” (and seeing the most awesome comment thread ever in terms of knowledge and enthusiasm) I had to get all nosy and beg Ms. Clawson for an interview. Behold!

Laura’s a contributing editor at Daily Kos, and a senior writer at Working America. Even better, she’s a romance fan - wait until you see her favorites list.

So what made you write this article about romance, sexual politics, discrimination and misogynist myths about romance?

Laura: I think that when the second Twilight movie came out I’d seen a resurgence of discussion of those books, with a lot of glancing comparisons to romance of the kind we’re all familiar with. There wasn’t one big moment where I said “I have to write about this,” but as I saw all these little slams I got progressively annoyed and it started marinating in my head to write something. It might almost be worse that people don’t feel like they have to go into detail about what’s wrong with romance, that the word alone can be used to discredit.

On Sundays at Daily Kos we step away from the news cycle a little bit for longer pieces that can broaden the ways we usually approach politics. Among other things it’s our place for more personal pieces, for trying to draw connections that might take more elaboration and a different type of discussion.  I’m always on the lookout for good topics for that, I’ve been encouraged to write more about culture there, and this was a natural fit. 

It was also pretty easy to write because this is a topic I’ve thought so much about.  In fact, my senior honors thesis at Wesleyan was about romance and sci-fi, and how academics tended to treat sci-fi as literature and romances as a cultural phenomenon to be explained. You know, there were actual academic journals of articles about sci-fi, and people writing about how they used it in teaching political science courses, and meanwhile the books about romances were basically wondering why do women read this crap, oh, maybe it’s an escape valve from their miserable lives, etc. Whereas to me, the books just didn’t seem that different.

I continued writing about romances in grad school. We had to write a quantitative research paper and my initial idea was that I was going to look at the shelf space bookstores give to different genres, because I’ve mostly lived in college towns where there are these wonderful independent bookstores with knowledgeable staff and interesting books…and no romance section. So I wanted to take aim that that, but luckily my teachers convinced me that driving around New Jersey with a tape measure comparing the shelf footage given to romances vs. mysteries and so on was probably a recipe for disaster, and instead I brought in my interest in religion and did a comparison of gender roles in Christian and secular series romance. The upshot is that this is one of those topics where it doesn’t take much to set me to talking or writing kind of indefinitely.

What romances are your absolute favorites, the ones that shall not leave your house without a tracking device?

Laura: I have a core of a couple dozen books that I just reread and reread. They include a lot of Mary Jo Putney—most recently I’ve reread The Bargain and The China Bride.  Jude Deveraux was probably my first big favorite, and of hers I particularly love Sweet Liar and A Knight in Shining Armor. Amanda Quick, Reckless and Ravished in particular. I reread Kathleen Gilles Seidel’s Summer’s End practically every time there’s a lot of figure skating on tv.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips, This Heart of Mine in particular. Joan Wolf, The Pretenders and The Gamble. Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me and Fast Women—I actually started cooking chicken marsala regularly after reading Bet Me. Two that aren’t genre romance but that fit my view that we need to try to pull down some of the walls between the genre and “literary” fiction are Elinor Lipman’s The Inn at Lake Devine and The Way Men Act.

I’m probably forgetting a lot, because I do so much rereading—I can’t really bring a book I’m reading for the first time to bed with me or I’ll never go to sleep, so I pretty much always have something going that I’ve read multiple times. That’s why this list is heavily books several years old, because I don’t yet know what are going to be the more recent ones that stick with me through this process.

Which was the first, or earliest that you remember reading? (I have a theory that most of us romance readers can recall our first romance that we read.)

Laura: Ah, I was afraid you’d ask that. I mean, I read a lot of Victoria Holt in junior high, and in grade school I’d read those Sunfire teen romances—the ones titled with a woman’s name and on the cover she’d be standing in the foreground with the two men she had to choose from in the background. I think Susannah was the first of those I read, but Amanda and Joanna were my favorites.

That said, I stopped reading anything much resembling romance at a certain point in my teens, and I do remember the book that was kind of my conversion moment as a college student. I just wish it had been something else—it was The Nightingale Legacy, by Catherine Coulter, and I no longer read her books for a number of reasons. I do kind of want to dig that one up and reread it, though, out of nostalgia if nothing else.

---

Thank you, Laura, for taking the time to answer my nosy questions! I love that her reading list of favorite romances makes me nod my head and shimmy.

Am I alone in wanting to read her senior thesis?

Also: did you guys know that the cover for each Sunfire book was a spoiler? I think I may have mentioned this before: whichever guy the heroine is pictured with is the one she does NOT end up with. So match the description, check out the mini clinch going on in the background, and behold: Not The Hero. Once I figured that out, massive bummer.

A friend has just posted about the error in the Daily Local News story "Eastern Universtiry demolishes nearly century-old cabin".

The second paragraph reads:

"School officials say the long-abandoned structure was unsafe, the logs were incest-infested and the price of renovation too high for the institution to afford."

Sigh.

My new nephew made an early appearance a week before Christmas, so I had to hurry up and finish his stuffed elephant!

( Check this out )