Lakeshore

A reader reacts to Green [ Powell's | Amazon | Kindle | Barnes & Noble | Borders ] — Rather badly. Mixed in with a number of capsule reviews. My favorite line of the review is the closer.

Incredible Astronomical Clocks — Fans of the Mainspring series, and readers of Escapement in particular, will enjoy this Dark Roasted Blend feature.

Project BLT — Making your own BLT. Literally. (Via Freakonomics.)

I do not know much about rivers. — The Edge of the American West on homoeroticism and race in American literature.

12 Insane Elevated Eco-Parks & Dizzying Outdoor Overlooks — (Thanks to willyumtx.)

Darwin Blogs the Beagle Voyage — Now there's a cool idea.

A Startup That Builds Biological Parts — Ginkgo BioWorks aims to push synthetic biology to the factory level.

?otD: When you look down from the jet, don't you get that magic feeling?

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10/2/2009
Body movement: n/a (traveling)
Hours slept: 5.0 (sick bounce)
This morning's weigh-in: n/a (traveling)
Currently reading: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman

Your Friday moment of zen.



Photographed by me in New Mexico. © 2006, 2009 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr.



This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

October, where is thy sting? It's the second, and I'm flying back to Portland from Omaha this morning. My calendar, as always, is complex. Here's the current plans, subject to change.

October 8th, I fly to San Francisco to see calendula_witch. On the 12th, I fly to either Phoenix, Los Angeles or back to Portland, depending on the scheduling of an upcoming business meeting for the Day jobbe.

October 17th I'm off to the Washington Coast to help my Dad celebrate his birthday with others in my family.

October 21st, calendula_witch returns to Portland (yay!) because of my cancer scans on the 22nd. That's a PET/CT, to see if the suspect masses in my liver and lungs have grown significantly.

October 23rd, she and I are off to SteamCon.

October 26th, I have my oncology followup to have the scans read and establish next steps. This may trigger another three month scan and hold (most likely), may trigger chemo, or may trigger some unexpected other outcome. Then calendula_witch heads home.

October 28th, I'm down to San Jose for World Fantasy Convention. There through Monday the 2nd.

November 2nd, I'm off to Phoenix for four days for a trade show. Will probably try to lay on an open dinner while I'm there. Watch this space for details.

November 9th, I'm off to Omaha for my usual week there.

November 13th, I'm back to San Francisco for a few days.

calendula_witch is coming back to Portland for Thanksgiving and Orycon, which we'll be attending November 27th through November 29th.

Whew. That's a lot.

calendula_witch and I don't usually talk about our relationship here in the blogosphere, as such. Mostly such things are of interest primarily to the principals. However, she's just sold a story, "The Hippie Monster of Eel River", to the Apex Book Company's Close Encounters of the Urban Kind anthology, edited by jennifer_brozek.

Thing is, I got rejected from that anthology. Now, I don't generally blog about rejections, other than to occasionally note their accumulation. And I still get rejected roughly three times for every sale I make. (Though that statistic decomposes in a more complex fashion than is intuitively obvious — the current terrain of my writing career is a topic for another time.)

But here is an intersection. We are two writers in a passionate relationship, working together ("Rolling Steel", Our Lady of the Islands, etc.) as well as separately. And my career is far longer established than hers, by simple dint of publication history.

So for calendula_witch to skunk me at a market is a milestone, one which I think deserves to be celebrated. It's a reminder to both of us of something we already believe down to our bones — that we are equals, partners, working on a par. It's exciting for me to see her succeed outside of the context of our joint work, and it's important for her. Best of all, it's a solid external validation of a truth we've long held between us.

This requires a modest amount of explanation. I offered a custom-written flash story as a prize in the Strange Horizons fund drive. Jennifer Hudock won the story, gave me the title "Starflower's Crossing" as a prompt, and has now recorded the resulting story for podcast. It can be heard at her Web site, This Week in Awesome, and is wonderfully executed.

Go check it out!