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It's a BDSM novella called "Royal Treatment" which is a prequel to Telepaths Don't Need Safewords. (Telepaths is out of print but I will release my own ebook that includes it very soon now, for those who haven't read it already.) ROYAL TREATMENT will be out soon from Torquere Press in their "Highball" line.
Yes, that's meant to be Arshan on the cover. Looks like him, doesn't it? I got lucky and was able to point the cover designer at that image on a stock photography web site. Yes, I love it and am drooling. And yes, I know Arsh is a dom, but when you see what he goes through in this book... well, more on that when we have an actual book! I'll link as soon as its available for sale!
Larger size view: ( below the cut )
Well, I did that today and it powered itself off after just a few seconds. It was willing to make one or two more attempts at booting but now it's back in a bricked state. (But with +12V everywhere there should be!)
I hate computers.
In summary, these are some Short Trips worth taking.
View all my reviews >>
- Mood:
cheerful
I went down to switch on Dr Who thanks to
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
julesjones's alert and found, even without anything switched on, my cordless headphones were picking up Dr Who. Someone else nearby with RF headphones was tuned into BBC1. It was totally surreal. I left everything switched off and went back to the computer to settle in and listen. (Dr Who, like much good SF, is perfectly intelligable on sound-only.) But the interference was just too much. In the end I had to give in and go turn on the TV and digibox and once I had picture ... well, I was hooked. Excellent tv, excellent episode.
But boggling, all the same. It was a complete fluke as I was in the process of transferring my RF headphones from DVD player upstairs to the less-used TV downstairs. What a world we live in. :)
Today I have mostly been fixing shelves over my re-built bed ...
I prefer my sleeping area to take up as little space as possible, hence this platform bed is on legs that will fold into the wall, so the platform and mattress can be tipped on its side to take as little space as possible. This leaves more space for exercise equipment. I now have shelves to take laptop, alarm clock and glass of water at convenient heights above the bed.
... and reading fanfic. *hides* :)
- Mood:boggled
I like the whimsical nature of it, but I'm heavier, am wearing glasses, have my old hair color, and am holding a non-pro camera (not that many non-pros would likely figure out that last part). I was thinking of using this more recent photo instead:
Again, this would only be for the back of the card, alongside my contact information. The main photos I want to showcase are my concert photography shots, and those are unlikely to change soon as I have model releases for the ones currently featured on the card.
I have some additional thoughts about possibly doing some figure modeling (beyond what I've done already for close friends), but I'll save that for another post...
Do you knit? Do you know someone who knits? Are you planning to knit something for a loved one this holiday season? Then go, right now, to IAFAuctions and bid on this yarn. It is knittable and it is fancy and awesome. It must needs be knitted into something cool and I demand that people fight over it in the few hours it has left before bidding ends. This yarn is one of the most interstitial pieces of art I’ve ever, ever seen and it must go on to the next state of its evolution! Bid. Now. Shoo!
Watching their heads blow up might actually be better SFX than the movie itself.
It fits the story I'm working on so perfectly well, that I have it on near constant replay right now.
orichalcum's linking to a NYT article on "easy" holiday desserts that are not all that easy, I would like to present a genuinely easy holiday recipe: my mother's recipe for pumpkin cake. This recipe is not only easy, it is idiot proof. I know it's idiot proof, because the first time I made it, I used a 28 oz. can of pumpkin, instead of a 15 oz. can of pumpkin. The cake needed a little longer baking, and was *very* moist, but still delicious.
I usually leave out the raisins, because I'm usually baking for folks who are a bit dubious about little bits of fruit in their cake.
( the recipe )
- Mood: cheerful
Then In, at my parents' house in Wells, watching the weather get worse and hearing the Severe Weather Warnings for high winds and rain on the news and wondering how high the winds would have to be to cancel the carnival. Then Out, in Wells High Street getting gradually soaked, admiring the floats and the indefatigable performers and wondering how wet my camera could get before it stopped working.
Then In, in the warm, with hot dogs in my parents' conservatory, listening to the rain on the roof and catching up with old friends. Then Out, braving the smaller roads at first (at around midnight), wary for fallen branches and floods and then the A37 to Yeovil, hitting one flood across the road before I knew it was there - doing 50ish and never more grateful to be driving a diesel with no ignition electrics to succumb to a drenched engine compartment.
Then In, listening to the wind and rain during the night and hoping not to wake up to a sagging fence or dislodged roof tiles. And thankfully not doing so, but then ... while snug in my study this morning, hearing the loud crack as one of my neighbour's fence posts gave way and thus pulling on waterproofs and rushing Out to help support and dismantle the metal panels before they were blown away to cause damage elsewhere. Then In to warm up cold and muddy hands before noticing, yes, a sagging fence post of my own - one of the few not yet replaced - and rushing Out to brace with a metal pipe and secure with rope to a handy concrete slab.
And In to have some lunch before noticing my rubble/garden waste bag drifting lazily through the air and rushing Out to weight it down with a large rock and In to sort through photos from yesterday and ... no, the empty kitchen waste bin can stay on its side where the wind's blown it since it's not going to go any further. *sigh*
( photos behind cut )
- Mood:cozy
I'll will confess to having spent a while running various recent corporate communications through the app (without sending any emails). Actually, it's confirmed what I already knew: Though somewhat plagued by people who write overly long sentences, my workplace is largely bull free. Despite a weakness for words like "enterprise" and "ecosystem".
- Mood: amused
Heh. Oh dear.
When I'm preparing for a trip, I pack my bag full of dense, beautiful books - all those novels I've been meaning to read. And I do read them...
... On the way out.
By the time I board my flight back, I am exhausted, braindead, and lazy, so cracking that book of florid short stories just feels like hiking uphill. I can't do it.
Fortunately, airport bookshops cater to the braindead. So I spend twenty bucks on some idiot pop "science" book like Freakonomics.
This time, however, I've outdone myself. In my lap now is " Rules of the Game" - the bestselling book on how guys can get with beautiful women. "Master the art of attraction!" it claims. And because I want to see what sort of advice seems good to very lonely men, I am going to read it.
I feel dumber already.
Posted via LiveJournal.app.
Over on Tor.com I’ve got a piece up priasing FOX for its decision to cancel Dollhouse. I know, a bunch of you will disagree. A whole bunch of you won’t, though! I hope you’ll join me in supporting FOX at this difficult time. I wonder if I should grab up the URL dontsavedollhouse.com? Because there are already campaigns to save it. For once, I think we need a strong anti-campain so FOX won’t start to second guess itself. Down with bad television!
Well... Oklahoma state representative Ed Cannady (rep'ing OK's 15 house district) has done what I wanted to do - recreate the poll with the same questions, using secondary school kids from his own district.
He found that they were quite a bit smarter than the Strategic Vision/OCPA poll lead us to believe. He polled all the seniors (inc. the special ed kids) in the 10 schools in his district (325 kids in all). The average score was 7.8 right out of 10, and 98% of them knew that Washington was the first President.
The lack of intellectual honesty on the part of Strategic Vision really gets me - did they just make up numbers? Seems like it. The way that Hannity and Friends just make up numbers about how many people show up for tea party demos. Or birthers just make up "facts" about the lack of documentation of Obama's birth certificate. OK, I'll stop there.
truepenny reports that she will now be writing as Katherine Addison instead of Sarah Monette, to fool bookstore computers. (If you're still confused about this after reading her entry, ask and people here can explain.)Which made me wonder: how many of us have a list of pen names we would use in this situation? I know I do. I skip the most obvious one, which is my actual legal name (Marissa Gritter), because I have a possibly weird personal bias about pen names, and this bias only applies to me: I am not Dutch. I don't want to use a Dutch name for my writing because I am not Dutch, not Dutch-American or Dutch-Michigander or any other thing that might tie to being Dutch. I am greatly fond of my Dutch-Michigander husband and in-laws and those of their Dutch-Michigander friends and associates I have met, but if it is true as they say in Grand Rapids that if y'ain't Dutch, y'ain't much, I am, in fact, not much. But I would write as a Fossback, because that was my Gran's name, or as a Haugan, because it would amuse me to go incognito as Ms. Norwegian Underhill, or as a few other things that are both ethnically appropriate to me and reasonably spellable.
(As I said, this does not apply to you lot. If you are Italian-American and you write as Julio Nguyen-Markowicz, I would not be the least put off by that. But the only exception for me personally that we've joked about is that if I start writing teen romance novels, I would do so as Melissa Glitter. The likelihood of this is well into the negative numbers--I can imagine writing in a lot of genres and categories, but none of them are romance.)
So. Do you know who you'd be to fool bookstore computers? And do you have a rationale? ("I like that name" is a rationale.)
Here in Boston I joked with a co-worker, P---, a Red Sox fan, that maybe I'll start wearing a jacket in the office - maybe a Yankees jacket. She threw a rubber ball at me.
Today, I had a brilliant idea on the way to work. I asked her if she'd be interested in the following bet:
If the Red Sox win the World Series next year, I will humiliate myself, drag myself to a store and buy myself a Red Sox baseball cap and wear it for a week. If the Yankees win, then she has to do the same - with a Yankees cap, of course.
She hemmed and hawwed - can we wait until spring training and see how they do? she asked. I said, Don't you believe in your team? Don't you think they can win? That's loser talk!
She still demured.
Then I asked R--- at work, also a fervent Sox fan. He also refused the bet.
Sox fans, where is your faith?
This is my non-short and non-silly post about the Interfictions auction.
For those of you kind of new to my blog, I’m a member of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting and encouraging art and artists that exist outside of or between borders. I’ve been a fairly active member for a while, mainly because I once expressed a bit of interest and Ellen Kushner pounced on me. I am forever within her paws, but that’s okay because she is one of the more fabulous human beings on the planet, as is her wife Delia Sherman. So it’s all good.
I was lucky enough to have a story picked for the first Interfictions anthology. Then about a year later I organized an auction of jewelry based on the stories in Interfictions. It went so well that we immediately began brainstorming ideas for how we’d run the auction for the next volume of Interfictions. This time we opened it up to all manner of art, as long as it was wearable, portable, or at least easily mailable. The call went out, some free stories were distributed, a little over 40 artists took on the challenge and now we have just over 30 pieces of art to show for it.
The auction has been going on for a couple of weeks now. Sorry I have not posted about it before this. Like I said yesterday: awesome, but busy job. The pieces that are no longer available were beautiful and amazing, but there is definitely still time to bid on some awesome pieces.
You should go take a look at this gallery with images of everything, but I am going to walk you through my favorites.
Shatterglass Datakey is ending today (in about an hour, actually) and I wanted it then Ellen Kushner tried to take it from me then my friend Charlotte came along and tried to pretend like she was going to win it. I’m going to be evil and bid at the last minute. If you are evil, maybe you should as well. It’s a pendant that is a key that is wrapped in wire and beads that have writing on them and, people, it is awesomeness squared.
Everybody Knows is a hunk of handmade yard that incorporates bits of paper with the story it’s based on (Valentines by Shira Lipkin) printed on it. You need to just click here and read the artist’s statement, as I cannot do it justice. I really like this piece, but I kept wondering if it would be possible to actually DO something with that yarn. Like knit it into a scarf or something. So I asked the artist, the faboo Emily Wagner, and she said:
You can TOTALLY knit with it. I mean, the paper is going to be falling out, but the yarn itself should be pretty structurally sound. I soaked it and stretched it on my swift when I was done skeining it up, which took FOREVER, BTW. :) I think it would be a really cool textural scarf, with lots of dropped stitches to show it off.
And here’s the thing: whatever anyone makes from this yarn, it will also be interstitial art. And the fact that the bits of paper will fall away adds this layer of transience to it. Like, no matter what, the Valentines will continue to fall away, until all that’s left is the memory within the yarn itself, in the person who made the yarn, and in the person who knitted it. There are just so many layers of meaning inherent in this art — layers that reveal themselves over time — that I can’t believe more people are not bidding on this. If you knit, you must bid. Then you must show us all what you knit. I’ll post about it on the IAF’s blog myself.
The Animometer is a piece everyone always gasps over when they see it. I have an affinity for art made from the bones of objects, and who doesn’t love an antique pocket watch?
The Child Empress of Mars (doll). When I first opened the box this came in I was both entranced by its beauty and shocked by its alienness. As I’ve said elsewhere, this is probably the most evocative and striking piece in the auction. It’s visceral and perfectly embodied the story and beautiful but also makes you want to run away screaming. Can you imagine having this in your living room in a place where everyone who comes in would see it? That would be so awesome. I have no hope of owning it, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
Untitled is just a beautiful picture depicting a really, really strange scene. I love the colors, the way the brain is glowing but entrapped by and connected to all of those branches. It’s going up in a few days and is definitely on my want list.
I will post more favorites next week. In the meantime, you should go check out the auctions and this preview of all the pieces. There’s clothing and jewelry and funky barely classifiable items of amazingness. Also, if you have not already, you should check out the Interfictions 2 anthology. I’m lucky enough to have read all of the stories and can tell you that this antho is just as good as the first. My homie Alaya Dawn Johnson has a fantastic story within and my other homie Genevieve Valentine has a story in the online annex to the anthology. Eight stories that were so good that Delia and Chris (the editors) couldn’t bear to not buy them, so they published them online. You can read them for free.
Next week I will also probably post something about comparisons between pieces of art based on the same stories. It’s always cool to see different interpretations and which parts of the story speak to each artist.
Page Summary
- ceciliatan : New ebook cover! Yum! [+2]
- markgritter : Bah [+0]
- wshaffer : Review: Short Trips - The Quality of Leadership [+1]
- charlieallery : Life in the modern age [+2]
- funcrunch : Nipplegate follow-up [+12]
- ktempest : Dearest Readers, Do You Knit? [+0]
- theferrett : 2012: A Review [+21]
- zellandyne : Blind Boys and Gamblers [+0]
- wshaffer : Pumpkin cake, or a genuinely easy holiday dessert [+1]
- charlieallery : In and Out ... and In ... and Out .... [+6]
- vvvexation : Writer's Block: Chemistry test [+0]
- vvvexation : Writer's Block: If these walls could talk [+9]
- wshaffer : A literal bullshit detector [+2]
- mrissa : Force, object. Or possibly pot, kettle. [+37]
- theferrett : They'll Do It Every Time [+43]
- ktempest : A Cold Day In Hell: I’m Actually On FOX’s Side For Once [+0]
- frankwu : Oklahoman kids are smart after all [+0]
- mrissa : She's very sneaky, and you might be, too. [+96]
- frankwu : Rivalry [+7]
- ktempest : Interfictions 2 Auction: My Favorites [+0]