Oh, everyone just go read my Friends Page, so you can learn about the job opportunities at Fantasy Magazine from ktempest and a meditation on class & narration in YA from shakennstirred, check out larbalestier's new site design, let quirkybird introduce you to a cool new comic, mock my frequent use of CAPS along with libba_bray, whose favorite T-shirt slogans include

EVERY TIME YOU POST WITH CAP LOCKS ON,
ee cummings kills a kitten.

. . . and properly adore squidflakes at last as the author of the immortal My Darling's Buttocks are Pleasingly Round (known to the Vulgar as "Milady Got Back").

My work here is done.

If you’ve got nothing else going on, swing down to the KGB bar at 85 E. 4th Street at 7:00 tonight to hear short stories read by Matt McHugh, M. M. De Voe and me.

Here’s a teaser of the one I’ll be reading tonight, which appears in the new anthology, The Best of The First Line: Editors’ Picks 2002-2006.

I was born Rosa Carlotta Silvana Grisanti, but in the mid-Eighties, I legally changed my name to Eve. As you have guessed in your letter, after the shocking affair of the Dutch steamship Friesland, my dear friends Dr. Watson and Mr. Sherlock Holmes suggested that my safest course of action would be to distance myself from my family.

But I get ahead of my story; I have not Dr. Watson’s gift for explaining Mr. Holmes’s methods, and I fear your wish that I relay the particulars of this strange case may be met with inadequate measures.

On the twelfth of October, 1887, I was being taken by the steamship Friesland from our home on the Venetian isle of Murano to Africa; there to meet my betrothed, Hans Boerwinkle, a man several years my senior with whom my father had very recently made arrangements. Living as we do now, in the nineteen-twenties, it is difficult to remember what a sheltered life we girls led forty years ago, but at the time it seemed natural that my brother, Orazio Rinaldo Paride Grisanti, escorted me as chaperone.

Did I mention it’s a bar? Fiction and drinks, can you ask for a better combo?

Comments? -- Link

Stop showing ads for American Apparel on feminist blogs.

thank you.

And I appreciated it

"The breeding properties of M&Ms"

Batman the Animated Series. After we went to see The Dark Knight, we got to talking about the episode of BtAS called "Almost Got Him," in which the Joker, Two-Face, the Penguin, Poison Ivy, and Killer Croc all talk about how they almost killed Batman at one time or another. The part that came up which is STILL my absolute favorite.

Two-Face finishes telling a long story about almost squishing Batman under a giant penny.
Joker: So, who's next?
Croc: (bangs fist on table) ME! So, there I was in the sewer, Batman coming at me. He was getting closer, closer...
Poison Ivy: ...and?!
Croc: I threw a rock at him!
::PAUSE::
Poison Ivy: So, Harvey, whatever became of the giant penny?
Two-Face: They actually let him keep it!
Croc: (petulantly) It was a big rock.

I almost died laughing. I also watched, while I was at it, "The Man Who Killed Batman" and "Trial." Interesting thing about "Trial" is that it, incorrectly to my mind, postulates that the crazies of Arkham created Batman, not the other way around. Tim Burton's Batman suggested the same thing--"I made you; you made me first." So odd that two Batman adaptations that otherwise borrow so heavily from Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns would run contrary to his major thesis in it--namely, that Batman brings out the freaks, and without him, they fade away. It's just so odd to think of how easily I agreed with the Burton/BtAS view without thinking about it for so long. When it comes down to it, though, I agree with Miller. (And Nolan, seeing how much he borrows from Miller's Year One and The Dark Knight Returns.)

I interviewed Ekaterina Sedia for Fantasy Magazine. Technically it's about her new book, The Alchemy of Stone, but really it was my excuse to ply her with questions about what people wear and why she insists on being so mean to me with her writing.

(In reality, it was a chance to talk to an author I really admire; such intelligent, thoughtful, well-spoken people are rare, and with the exception of being so mean to me, she seems nice in general.)

Your humble narrator...

• 09:32 only got 2 hours of sleep last night (if that), and thus feels a bit off. #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

In the busyness of the past few days, I neglected to mention that Rick Bowes and I went to see Laurie Anderson's new show Homeland at the Rose Theater, Tuesday night.

Rick and I haven't talked about it so I don't know if he liked it but I always love whatever she does--I just wish she did more of it more often. I believe I've seen most of her works including the epic United States. She did a benefit right after 9/1l and it's possible that the most recent performance was The End of the Moon in 2004, inspired while she was the first artist-in residence at NASA.

For those who aren't familiar with her work, she's a "performance/multimedia artist," although her work has used fewer props over the past decade. It's always political and to me always entertaining. She sings in her own voice and speaks sometimes in her own voice and sometimes in an artificially created male voice. She plays an electric violin. She tells stories. Stories about America and its place in the world. During this 1 1/2 hour (no intermission) performance she had two female back up singers and four musicians, all excellent. The music ranges from electronic to middle eastern infused, smooth as silk or scratchy strings, eclectic percussion and keyboard. Also an accordion, although I didn't hear it separate from the rest of the music.

Lou Reed joined her and the band for one piece and although he seemed a little uncomfortable, it was nice to see them working together.

C'mon Laurie--I want to see more!

We’re looking for people in two areas.  Web Interns and Review Managers.  Interns first:

Web-Savvy Intern for Online Magazine

Fantasy Magazine, an online genre entertainment publication, is looking for interns to work primary in Web Production with some crossover into editorial and multimedia development.

Interns will learn or hone their skills in web design and production, content management, and email marketing. There will also be opportunities to help us develop new content, from non-fiction features to podcasts and video.

We’re looking for candidates with the following qualifications:

• Strong HTML skills. Ability to hand-code AND work with WYSIWYG editors.
• Knowledge of CSS.
• Experience with blogging software. Wordpress a big plus. Also relevant: Blogger, Moveable Type/Typepad, LiveJournal, and similar.
• Experience with social media and social networking.
• Comfortable working exclusively in an online environment.
• Interest in or experience with podcasting and video blogging a big plus.
• Ability to learn quickly and complete tasks with little supervision.

The position will require 10 - 15 hours per week (from mid-August to mid-December), very flexible, with some weekend work and online meetings required. We’re open to candidates from any location as long as you are available during some part of American east coast business hours. We do offer college credit. The position is unpaid.

To apply, please send a resume and cover letter to this gmail address: fantastictempest. Please put your cover letter in the body of the email and attach your resume in rtf, doc, or pdf format. A link to an online resume is also acceptable. If applicable, please include links to web projects you’ve worked on.

We will only contact candidates if we intend to interview them.

---

Seeking Review Manager

Fantasy Magazine is looking for one or two people to join our existing review manager in keeping track of and overseeing reviewers and review material plus seeking out and vetting new reviewers. We’re looking for candidates with the following qualifications:

• Highly organized and able to take initiative.
• Willing to manage reviewers and, if need be, stay on them to turn in assignments.
• Comfortable working in an online environment.
• Experience with GoogleDocs, Wordpress, or similar programs.
• Comfortable communicating with editors, authors, and publicity personnel to request and coordinate review materials.

The position will require 5 - 10 hours per week, very flexible, with some weekend work and online meetings required. We’re open to candidates from any location as long as you are available during some part of American east coast business hours. The position is currently unpaid but by 2009 will have a small monthly stipend.

To apply, please send a letter of interest with a summary of qualifications to this gmail address: fantastictempest. We will only contact candidates if we intend to interview them.

---

If you know someone interested in either of these opportunities, please send them here or forward the text. Thanks!

Comments | Permalink

I was wrestling crocodiles in my dream to keep them from eating my friends. For some reason I remembered a (possibly totally false) bit of data about crocs - they have enormous strength to close their jaws, but can't open them as easily, so you can keep the jaws shut with human-type strength.

(23)

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

When I first started with computers, it was on a Mac, with a grand total of 64K, and I stuck with Macintosh for a long time, until I came to work for Microsoft and ended up switching over to Windows, since I needed a machine I could run Visual Studio on. And now, I'm back on a Mac, and enjoying poking around the new OS and finding all the nifty little niceties that Apple builds in.

One of the benefits of the switchover has been a chance to try out the writing software Scrivener, which I'd heard people rave about in the past. It has a 30 day free trial, so I downloaded it yesterday, ran through the tutorial, and then imported the latest copy of the novel. The import was painless. It arrived as one big doc, so I split that up into chapters, which was simple to do by high-lighting each chapter title and selecting the "Split with selected as heading" option.

Things that I really like about the software:

• It can show me all the chapters as index cards pinned to a corkboard that I can move around easily. Since a problem that people have been pointing to in the current version is the chronology, I used that to rearrange a lot of scenes and move the sections of "The Narrative of a Beast's Life" eariler into the book.
• I can label sections with a color. I assigned each POV a different color and then used that to make sure that the POVs alternate, rather than getting clumped together, using the corkboard view, which shows each index card tagged with the label color, to do so.
• I can tag chapters with keywords, and then view all the chapters tagged with a specific keyword as one long section. I tagged the Teo, Bella, and Skilto chapters so I can read through each POV as a whole.
• Easy to add notes, including pictures, URLs, audio/video clips to chapters.
• It lets me take snapshots of the work so I could take one and then go to town re-arranging index cards, knowing that I could always revert to the old version as needed.

Seriously swell. If you're a Mac user, check out the 30 day free trial.

papersky and zorinth are home safe and sound; the apartment was de-encavified before their return, which seems to have worked. Surprisingly, they were fed on their flight such that they did not actually want to go out for dinner with me, so I went out and had sushi by myself last night afterwards.

This morning I got a slice of salmon feuillette in the patisserie, which turned out, on consumption, to contain a layer of salmon, a layer of rice, and a thin layer of either non-crisped seaweed or spinach. This was a bit odd, basically worked but was a bit on the dry side; and of course when trying to eat it the loose rice gets everywhere. It does if you are me, anyway.

No major movement on work stuff today, but we do have rather a lot of Exotic British Chocolate. Go us.

In DFW, loitering near Gate C17. Flight down was uneventful. I did find some lunatic fringe Christian spam in comments on jlake.com, which I deleted. Not sure that was quite the right move, because it wasn’t technically spam so much as rant, but I don’t have time right now for pointless rhetorical combat with someone who confuses faith with facts.

Given my recent adaptation to a toilet-based lifestyle, I’m spending a lot more time in airport men’s room stalls. (Yes, this is almost over — the antibiotic course is working well. But it’s not over yet.) I’ve been ranting about the lack of outlets in airport lounges for a long time. Here’s a thought: why are stalls designed as if no one ever carries luggage? Have you tried maneuvering a roller bag and a computer satchel into one of those things. Rant, rant, rant. It’s like the good old days on this blog! I must have woken up feisty.

Just now loaned my cell phone to a Marine sergeant passing through on his mid-tour home leave from Iraq. He needed to call some of his family and was messing with some nearby payphones. I have a very strong negative view of the war, but I don’t for a moment confuse corrupt and venal Republican policymaking with the dedicated service of the men and women in uniform. (That was one of the great errors of the Left during Vietnam — inhumane, inhuman, and simply mistaken.)

Off to forage for food shortly.

Originally published at jlake.com. You can comment here or there.

Readercon/trip report forthcoming, but first it's time to Ante Up:

1.  Laundry day.  (18 July 2008, 9 am.)

2.  Convention hotel.  (18 July 2008, 2 pm.)

3.  View from the audience.  (18 July 2008, 5 pm.)

4.  Remains of the dinner.  (18 July 2008, 7 pm.)

5.  Hallway. (18 July 2008, 10 pm.)

(My Week in the Life photo postings got derailed by Readercon–first I couldn’t get internet at the hotel, to post the pictures from Friday, and then I got distracted by the convention and forgot to keep taking pictures, and then I couldn’t figure out where I’d packed the transfer cable for the camera.  I have both internet and cable now, but am ending the week-in-pictures a day early and posting the last day almost a week late, alas.  This was a great experiment, and one I’ll probably repeat at some point in the future, but it’s actually kind of exhausting, trying to remember to take six to eight pictures every single day.)

Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there.