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June 14th, 2009
 | 08:54 am - Sale! "Shroud" to Nanoism
Here at Terra Plantation, we like to start small.
Largely thanks to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) xochiquetzl 's new rule that I must submit my work in order to attend Crit Group, I have sold a story. This is my first story sale. 139 characters, or 26 words, to Nanoism. It's a twitter story (140 characters or less) called "Shroud." This LJ post is longer than it is.
But Yay! my first sale! The story will be posted to Nanoism's site and twitter feed next Friday, June 19th.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://rarelytame.icons.ljtoys.org.uk/mi/dot.gif) happy
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March 17th, 2009
 | 09:51 pm
I haven't updated in ages because life was hitting me from every direction. But gradually I've begun digging myself out, and things in my life are smoothing out. In some cases, literally! I give you exhibit A:
Picture #1 Raider: This pic was taken 14 days ago, by my vet, who was out to give annual vaccinations and so forth. I got this image in the mail today on his Coggins test. [For non-horsey folk, all horses in Georgia and a good number of other states are required to have annual testing for Equine Infectious Anemia, and a Coggins is that test.] In past years, Coggins tests had no photos on them, only a place where you drew in markings on a line-drawing of a horse. This photo thing is new and fancy-dancy. New for me anyway. I wasn't expecting it or I might have at least given him a haircut first. In any case, this is Raider, fuzzy in his winter coat.
I took another pic today, after a hard workout. Only two weeks have passed, but slicked-down from the post-workout rinsing I gave him, he hardly looks like the same horse:
It's amazing how quickly and dramatically things can change when you work at making changes.
To be fair, the first picture is horrible quality, and Raider had the entire winter off to laze about in the pasture because of that aforementioned life interference--and because, for several years, I've been out of the habit of riding regularly. But life is getting better, and it takes a little effort to form any sort of exercise habit out of thin air. So, two weeks ago I forced myself to make time for a daily ride, and two weeks of regular riding and grooming has made a world of difference for us both. Tomorrow, I'm going to do my damnedest to make time for daily writing, too, and I'm thinking hard about trying to make regular posts again to track my progress.
Current Mood: accomplished
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January 7th, 2009
 | 09:57 am - Bookkeeping
I didn't have the time or energy to write comments about the books I read this year, but I did keep a list of most of them. Not included on the list: unpublished manuscripts (about a half a dozen this year, I think), non-fiction (though I see a few non-fiction titles did happen to slip onto the list), short fiction (but I do read quite a lot of it), and just about anything I read which didn't begin its publication history in print on paper (that is to say, I don't usually track books I've read published by any of the e-publishers. Though, occasionally they slip onto the list too.)
The books are listed loosely in the reverse order that I read them. Don't take a book's presence on the list as a recommendation. I routinely read books I don't like, for a variety of reasons. So, that isn't very helpful for someone looking for a recommendation, is it?
How about this? If you'd like to know my opinion on any particular title, feel free to ask me about it in the comments, and otherwise, I'll say that my top five favorite authors of the year are (in no particular order) Scott Lynch, Ellen Kushner, Naomi Novik, Elizabeth Bear, and... hmm.
Scott Westerfeld, I think, because I really loved his long digressions about parasites in his vampire novel, Peeps. I also particularly enjoyed Toby Barlow's book Sharp Teeth (which is really a novel length poem, but was incredibly entertaining once I grew used to the format.)
And The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein made me cry and cry, but that may have been because I happened (accidentally) to pick it up the very day I learned we would have to put to sleep our aging German Shepherd, Nip. I'll recommend it anyway, but with the caveat that it's a book about a dog, and you know how those kinds of books always end, so be warned. Also, the ending was a little too tidily wrapped up (with a big bow on top!) for my taste.
( Books I read in 2008 )
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October 1st, 2008
| 07:46 pm - Supreme Court Meme
From </a></b></a>jrelkins
Sarah Palin managed to get Roe v. Wade, but was stumped when asked to name any other Supreme Court decisions. In the spirit of remembering that there is more to law than that one case, I am participating in this meme.
The Rules: Post info about ONE Supreme Court decision, modern or historic to your lj. (Any decision, as long as it's not Roe v. Wade.) For those who see this on your f-list, take the meme to your OWN lj to spread the fun.
Mine is Brown v. Board of Education.
This unanimous Supreme Court decision helped end segregation in public schools.
More info here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education
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August 5th, 2008
| 07:15 am - A solicitation for advice from the cat people on my flist.
I'm really more of a dog person--we have a herd of Cavalier King Charles Spaniels and also a mixed breed pound puppy--but we have a cat, too. Hugger came to us as a feral kitten. We tried to tame him and make him a house kitty, but his time in the wilds of the parking lot where he was rescued was too ingrained in him. He remained skittish, but more disappointingly, he was never able to befriend the kitty litter box, no matter what we tried. Thus he was banished first to the garage, and then later to the outside. (Please no lectures about our responsibilities at keeping our cat safe indoors, etc... We've done the best we can for him, and he's happy outside. We're all happier with him outside.)
Several years have elapsed. Hugger has grown quite tame, for us, though he's still terrified of strangers. We spend time with him on our front porch, where we feed him. We don't leave food out all the time, but feed him twice--sometimes three times--a day, then put the food away, because we live reasonably close to woods and creeks of a Corps of Engineers Wildlife Management Area and we don't want to draw critters.
Unfortunately, in recent months, something has changed in our neighborhood. We aren't the only folks who keep outdoor cats, but we don't feed strays (been there, done that, it has never worked out to the best for either the cats or myself.)
Suddenly, despite the fact that we don't feed them, we're being overrun by strays. Totally feral strays that will not allow me to come withing thirty feet of them. Hugger is neutered, but they don't appear to be. (Most of them appear to be very, very male.) They are beating the shit out of him on a very regular basis, and I'm really at a loss about what to do. We installed a small cat-flap, so he can come in and out of our garage and be protected from any large stray dogs, and so forth (though we rarely see stray dogs) and these feral strays will even follow him into our garage to fight and chase him off his own territory.
What the hell is going on here? Why are they bothering him now, when for the last four or five years he's been left alone? What can I do? He can't come inside, not unless I were to keep him locked in a small bathroom all the time, which I think would make him--and us--miserable.
Current Mood: distressed
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July 26th, 2008
| 08:37 am - Bailing water from a sinking ship... Paddle faster, or let it sink?
Bailing water from a sinking ship... Paddle faster, or let it sink?
This is a panel I'd like to see on the writer's track at a convention.
It's not a great metaphor, but my experience of conventions is limited to Dragon*Con and Chattacon, and quick walk through the dealer's room at GenCon when I was too young to do anything but gape and take free pamphlets from every table. I can't really speak for other cons, but Dragon*Con's panels often have these funky/awkward names or descriptions.
My panel would be composed of several newly published authors, a couple more with several decades of experience, an editor or two, and maybe a literary agent, if it were possible.
The extended description: When your boat won't float. [A travesty, but a corny title for a panel inevitably carries into the extended description.] Every author has a novel or two locked away, never to see the light of day, but these embarrassing rejected or unfinished works didn't emerge fully formed at the bottom of the trunk or drawer. How did they get there? Why? Industry professionals discuss broken and badly written novels. When to push a project forward despite problems, when to abandon your work, and how to know the difference between a salvageable story and a stinker.
---
So. I don't see this panel in my future, but perhaps writers around here might have an opinion? Do you have trunk novels? Finished or unfinished? What flaws in the book put them there?
Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: A Perfect Circle - Orestes
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June 25th, 2008
| 07:18 pm - Baaaaah.
I stole this from about a million people on my flist.
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them
Current Mood: blah
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June 13th, 2008
| 02:26 pm - I dare you to tell me to walk through fire.
Our damned air conditioner has frozen up again. Again. The tech just "fixed" this two days ago. And it's miserable hot here in Atlanta. Bad timing for a broken AC unit, too.
Maybe it wouldn't be such a problem, but the smell! The sweet prince and I can kill zombies like nobody's business, but the dismembered body parts are piling up. The odor of fetid zombie is threatening to drive us to hole up with our guns in the local movie theater.
Maybe we can learn a few more zombie defense tactics by watching Kung Fu Panda. That is, if the zombies haven't torn their way through all the movie screens yet.
Wish us luck.
Current Mood: hot
Current Music: Shinedown - Us and Them
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May 21st, 2008
| 01:35 pm - Power is back
Our power is back now, and we have someone contracted to begin removing all of the fallen trees. More later. Thanks to everyone for the good wishes.
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| 07:08 am - We're okay.
For anyone who may have caught the news about the North Georgia storm last night:
We're okay. We have no power (but we have a laptop battery), and no phone cable or internet (hurrah for cellular wireless cards). The storm ripped many of the utility lines off the back of our house.
We've also lost almost all the trees in our front yard, huge and magnificent old trees, pushed over like they weren't even rooted into the ground. (Sob.) Luckily, they went into the street and not into our house.
It must be bad all over the area because they closed my son's elementary school to use it as an emergency center, and helicopters are flying over almost every ten minutes--presumably to get newscast shots of the damage. When we went to bed last night, the police weren't letting anyone in or out of our neighborhood (which has only a single access road) because there were down power lines. Residents were forced to park next door at the the local stable and walk through backyards to get to their homes.
It's amazing how an event like this can impact a neighborhood. In ten years, we'd met only a few of our neighbors, but we had beer, and they had chainsaws, and we had trees blocking the street, and suddenly our yard became The Place to Be. We've been invited to a variety of backyard bbq's parties and so forth for the coming weekend.
Anyway, I probably ought to be conserving battery life, since this and the cell phone are our only means of communication to the outside world at the moment. I'll post pics of the damage sometime after the power comes back.
Love to all,
Terra
Current Mood: okay
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May 11th, 2008
| 02:40 pm - Happy Mother's Day.
Happy Mother's Day.
Now let me recommend you go and read msagara's post about how being a mother is like being a writer. It's very good, and it rang very true to me.
Current Mood: calm
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April 20th, 2008
| 09:21 am - Typo
Best typo this week: "Scryscraper"
I like it so much that I've filed it away in my idea folder for future (intentional) use.
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April 15th, 2008
 | 08:46 am - Anyone else heard about Dark Wisdom?
News from my corner:
- My taxes are filed. Yay!
- My laptop is still at Sony's repair center. Their website repair status information is woefully inadequate. (Your laptop is currently with a technician...) I am currently writing longhand.
- I received a letter from Dark Wisdom. Effective April of 2008 the quarterly print publication is being discontinued. Sometime toward the end of the year it will be restructured and relaunched as a webzine.
This is a SFWA Professional level short fiction market. (One of a short and growing shorter number of these pro-paying short fiction venues.) I wonder why news of this change isn't appearing on my flist.
ETA: The letter from Dark Wisdom offers subscribers a refund or a store credit for the remainder of their subscription. I probably should have mentioned that right away. Sorry 'bout that.
Current Mood: busy
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January 24th, 2008
 | 11:49 am - 2008: Book Reports 1 - 10
I read a bit over 200 books in 2007, if you count ebooks and unpublished manuscripts. Which, I don't, actually. I have no idea exactly how many ebooks and unpublished manuscripts I read in 2007, other than a lot. And this year, I'm hoping to do less of that. I didn't find many of the ebooks very satisfying, and if I ever take another position that involves reading slush, someone please shoot me.
In any case, I stopped posting my opinions about books after I received a smackdown for... well, basically for being an aspiring author with a reader's opinion. I received some very kind and supportive comments from folks here, but the truth is that I don't like hurting people, and I don't like making enemies if I can avoid it. So I haven't been commenting here on any of the books I've been reading, and I locked all my prior posts. Sad, really, because I've read some amazing books in the last several months. For fear of making enemies of authors whose books I didn't love, I haven't even posted about those books I did love.
In light of that, I've decided to start back with the book reports. Word of mouth is an author's best friend, and I hate it that I've let one unpleasant comment turn me away from posting on my own livejournal.
I have, however, learned my lesson and set LJ to screen anonymous comments. Does anyone know if there's a way to disable anonymous comments altogether?
Book Reports 2008:
01. The Fall of The Kings by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman. I thoroughly enjoyed Swordspoint, which I discovered just before the New Year, and so I rushed out and bought this and Privilege of the Sword. Of the three, this book was my favorite, probably because I like to read and write about complicated personal relationships, especially unhealthy romantic relationships, and almost right away, it was clear that Basil and Theron had a dysfunctional romance going on. Kushner and Sherman explored the nuances of that dysfunction in a thoroughly satisfying way, and I was left at the end of the novel wishing that they might one day write a sequel to this book. When I have some money for buying new books, I intend to hunt down something by Delia Sherman alone, and I'm happy to take recommendations.
02. Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner. Also very good. This book, the third of the Riverside books published, is actually set before The Fall of The Kings. I loved them all. I love how Kushner (and Sherman) deftly hint at a backstory so rich with details that you find yourself almost believing that there are, in fact, six books, or ten, and the others simply haven't been released to the public.
03. The Road by Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy's vision of what a post-apocalyptic world might be like lines up more closely with what I would imagine than any other post-apocalyptic novel I've ever read. This book has the honor of being the first novel of 2008 to make me cry. Beautiful and tragic.
04. Tempted by Megan Hart. I've learned the hard way that, even though I love a good romantic subplot (with or without smut), I don't often enjoy Romance as a genre. Usually, I find myself wishing for more plot. If you feel the same, you might try Megan Hart. Her books are marketed as erotica--or is it erotic romance?--so be prepared for graphic depictions of sex acts on the page, but her characters are alive with complexity, and thus she's never bored me. Tempted was good. Broken was better.
05. Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder.
06. Kitty and the Midnight Hour by Carrie Vaughn. I met Ms. Vaughn at Dragoncon last year, and she gave lots of wonderful and helpful advice on her panels, so I bought her book while I was there and she kindly inscribed it for me. It's taken me some time to get to it though, as I've been growing frustrated with the repetitiousness of urban fantasy. This novel didn't break any new ground, either, but it was a quick read, and I thought her handling of wolf behavior within a pack was quite a bit better and more realistic seeming than that in many other werewolf urban fantasy novels I've read.
07. Temeraire 1: His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik. I am by nature a promiscuous reader, and often read five, six, even ten novels, at a time. I rarely make it through a novel from start to finish without interrupting my read at some point to read another novel. I post these novels once I've finished reading the book, and I don't take any consideration of how long ago I started the novel. In fact, I think I was working at finishing 05. on this list for at least nine months. Maybe a year. So, let me just list the rest of the books I read for this report before I comment.
08. Temeraire 2: Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik.
09. Temeraire 3: Black Powder War by Naomi Novik.
10. Temeraire 4: Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik. I cannot say enough about how much I have enjoyed these books. I've heard a lot about them, but to be honest, I really thought I couldn't abide another dragon and his companion novel. I bought the first though, to give the author a chance, and I'm so glad I did. Temeraire is so thoroughly developed as a character in his own right that he overshadows my memory of every other dragon character that I've ever read. I've heard many other readers comment on Novik's use of history, and how much they enjoyed the setting and world-building, but for me the books were all about Temeraire and his relationship with Laurence. In so many novels about a character and his (or her) fantasy animal companion, the animal is really little more than an extension of the character's personality. Not so with Temeraire. I would recommend these novels to almost any fantasy readers, and certainly to any reader who enjoys dragon tales.
Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Snow Patrol - Shut Your Eyes
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April 19th, 2007
| 10:51 am - I didn't even really like eggs...
Another "You know you're a writer when..." moment, brought to you by today's chat transcript.
allichaton: *blinks* Is "Brit" slang? or is it the actual term for someone from Britain?
rarelytame: I think it's slang. I think...
allichaton: what's the non-slang form? do you know?
rarelytame: I'm not 100% sure. A British person? A Britain? Hell, I have no idea.
allichaton: hehe
allichaton: I'll go with British person, I guess. Thanks. :)
rarelytame: I dunno. Y'know, I want to say Chicago Manual has an entry on that. *checks*
rarelytame:
Ethnic, Socioeconomic, or Other Groups
section 8.41
the British; a British person or, colloquially a Britisher, a Brit
allichaton: Okay. :)
allichaton: Man, I'd be even more leery of using Britisher in an essay than I would Brit XD
rarelytame: Yeah
allichaton: Oh! And I'm onto the third page.
allichaton: Man, I love image analysis.
allichaton: I'm good at it. And it's an excuse to be really verbose.
rarelytame: Heee.
rarelytame: Man! Damn it. You know you're a writer when you can get sucked into the Chicago Manual of Style by accident because an intriguing entry on the appropriate use of three-dot vs. four-dot ellipses caught your eye.
rarelytame: I don't even have any ellipses on this page of my revision.
rarelytame: ... Ooh. But I could look up the intricacies of the em-dash.
rarelytame: *resists the urge*
allichaton: LOL
Current Location: A Perfect Circle - Vanishing
Current Mood: amused
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April 16th, 2007
| 08:34 am - Oh, God. I could go mad. Please.
I wrote this in reply to domynoe's comment on my last post, in which she said: "Girl, can you spare me some of your gift with words? I really suck now. :P"
I only meant to give her a little encouragement, but my reply turned long, and a little ranty, so I decided to give it a post of its very own.
Domy, this isn't meant as a rant at you. So far as I can tell, you write tons and are constantly supportive of others by reading, critting, and encouraging. I'm just spilling my thoughts in general. The only part I meant toward you was the first line, which I'll emphasize for you by sticking it in blue.
Anyone else: This probably isn't about you either. But if you feel the need to think it IS about you, then I can't stop you. I've learned my lesson on that, but I'm not going to self-censor my thoughts on my own LJ just because a few individuals are dead set on thinking I'm targeting them when that was, in fact, never ever my intention. If someone doesn't like what I have to say or want to hear what I have to say, they can defriend my LJ. They wouldn't be the first.
And with all that said, I've put most of this under the cut because it's a bit long.
What's more, it isn't really THAT ranty (I hope), and I don't think it's inflammatory. At least I didn't intend it that way.
---
For Domy: A writer is rarely objective enough to judge their own work. So don't. You don't suck. In any case, I'm happy to share my graphomania with you. XD
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Tori Amos - Humpty Dumpty
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