Part-time prevaricator
She said, “Just a little more helium, if you please,” and then she slipped away into the sky. Two days later she touched down in Old Dan’s meadow, ankle-deep in wildflowers and foxtail. Something had turned her eyes from drab brown to silver, the colour of sun-kissed clouds, and for her nothing was ever the same again.
She was free now, and she damn well knew it.
______
So I changed my little blog header the other day, to read “Specializing in treckle lansing disputes”. This is, if you don’t know, a nod to Vernor Vinge’s novel A Fire Upon the Deep, wherein a posting to the Galactic Net (also known as the Net of a Million Lies) from Arbitration Arts Corporation at Firecloud Nebula contains the following:
Arbitration Arts specializes in treckle lansing disputes. As such, we
have few common business interests with natural races or Threats Group.
Now, three or four days later, when I do a Google search for “treckle lansing”, this blog is the first hit. Right above all the Russian copies of A Fire Upon the Deep hosted, one suspects illicitly, on the web.
Well, it amused me, anyways.
Update, June 2021: It’s still the top of the search listings. Weird.
So I’ve been having kind of mixed feelings about my online serial novel, Everything that never happened, which has been stalled since, oh, August or so. June, if I’m honest with myself. This week I decided to push it to the back burner, and work instead on Salyx, which is my 2006 Nano novel. I’ve had some good ideas recently for that story, and it’s been more and more in the forefront of my writing brain, so it only seemed natural I’d get to it.
But in the last two days, two of my friends (both named John, coincidentally) have inquired about the status of Everything etc. One has read to the first interlude; the other has made it to chapter 8 or so. And so I’ve started to think that maybe I should push through, and get a first draft completed (which, honestly, is what this particular online novel is).
So in the next little while I’m going to try and do both. I’ve decided to try using Spacejock’s yWriter software to work on Salyx; I may try using it for Everything as well. We’ll see how this goes.
If I find I really can’t handle two writing projects at once, I guess I’ll have to choose. At this point the choice looks like it would fall to Salyx’s favour, but who knows? Maybe getting in there, getting my hands dirty with those characters from the spooky, zombie-infested 17th century will rekindle my fervor for Everything.
I hope this post is of interest to someone other than me… but even if it ain’t, it’s something I wanted to say. Well, write. Well, type.
This novel arrived in the mail about a day before I headed west, after I’d waited the better part of two weeks for it (and even longer, if you factor in the fact that I pre-ordered it, but that’s a whole ‘nother story, as they say).
I started reading it on the train, and I finished it in the basement living room of my sister-in-law’s house. It’s an engrossing read; as I neared the end, I had to force myself to slow down, to not miss any of the fantastic* details hidden in very nearly every single sentence.
The novel’s set in the same industrial-faerie universe as The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, but it’s by no means a sequel. The story starts off with Will le Fey watching war dragons arc across the sky over his small village, bound for conflict in some unimaginable war. One is shot down, and drags itself, flightless, to Will’s village, where it declares itself ruler. It makes Will its lieutenant, in part because Will, unlike anyone else in town, is half-human.
Will partakes in the privileges and the awful responsibilities of his role, and in short order the entire village is set against him. When the dragon’s grip on the village is finally broken, Will is sent into exile.
He makes his way across a Faërie beset by the ravages of war, and winds up in a refugee camp. From there he travels to Babel itself, the great tower that stands high as Heaven, and joins in a confidence game that trades on the identity of the absentee King of Babel to make a lot of money. But there’s a twist; there’s always a twist…
This book is dense with information, and every sentence serves to nudge the plot forward. There’s a depth and a humanity to the characters, and we see people at their best and at their very worst, sometimes on the same page. Nothing is irrelevant; every detail has its place and its purpose. The world of Babel is rife with betrayals, disappointments, triumphs, and tragedies.
Michael Swanwick very much needs to be more well-known than he is. It’s a shame that hardly anyone will have heard of this book, much less read it.
______
* In every sense of the word.
From the front matter of Steven Brust’s Firefly fan-fic(ish) novel (found via Scalzi’s Whatever):
For people who care about such things, the book was written in emacs on a box running Mandrake Linux, then I used OpenOffice to format it for printing. The final layout for online publication was created with Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat. People who care about such things need to get a life.
I got to the last sentence and thought, Aw, that’s me.
(Of course, when I read the first sentence, I thought, Good heavens, man, there’s One True text editor, and that’s vi. Go go gadget :%s/]*>//gi .
It would seem that I’m a nerd.)
One of my recent ficlets, one that I’m particularly proud of:
The Trick
“You want to see a trick?”
Her eyes narrowed. “What kind?”
“Like nothing you’ve ever seen,” he said, and took a swig straight from the bottle. Red wine stained his teeth. “Promise.”
“All right.” She leaned back in the chair as he stood up, crossed to the centre of the room, and did some kind of odd shoulder-shrugging warmup dance. He’d left the bottle on the table, and she took it, wrapped her lips around it, and chugged what remained of the wine. She had a buzz going and wasn’t about to lose it.
Without prelude, without screaming, without any warning whatsoever, he burst into flames. In perfect silence he burned, staring into her soul with those intense grey eyes he had.
She dropped the bottle. It shattered, green shards everywhere. She wanted to scream but couldn’t. She stared as he was consumed.
There was a pile of ash and a black spot on the hardwood, and no other evidence he’d ever existed.
#
The door opened and he walked in. She leapt from the recliner, embraced him, and said, “How’d you do it?”
It’s not always easy, fitting a complete story into 1024 characters, but this time it just sort of happened.
We went away last week, on the train to Edmonton. Here’s some of the stuff we did:
Celebrated K’s birthday
Visited some friends
…and their menagerie (one dog, three cats, a great huge tortoise, a bunch of turtles, and some hermit crabs)
Continue reading “Westering, 2008”
My first stop-motion video:
Mmmm, trifle…
Update!
Because Doug demanded it, here’s the recipe.
You’ll want to do this in a trifle bowl, a tall, wide, cylindrical bowl, usually on a stand. I found mine at Wal-Mart for about $8.
Bottom layer: Take an angel food cake and tear it into bits. Put it into the trifle bowl. Cover with about one or two cans’ worth of mandarin segments. Mix up some red Jell‑O (I use strawberry) and pour slowly over all. You don’t want everything to float to the top, which is what I find happens if you pour too quickly. Put in the fridge till the Jell‑O sets.
Middle layer: Mix up some Bird’s custard according to the package directions for custard dessert (not custard sauce). Let it cool to about room temp (you’ll want to put plastic wrap on it so it doesn’t form a skin). Pour onto the Jell‑O layer. Refrigerate till the custard is cool.
Top layer: Whipped cream. Garnish with fruit (I used left-over mandarin segments; my grandma always uses Maraschino cherries; sliced strawberries would probably be good too).
Enjoy!
Sure, it looks pretty.
You’ll get no argument from me.
But the night before, driving down the Trans-Canada Highway in fog dense enough that I couldn’t see the lights of Brandon from one kilometer away, I wasn’t thinking of the beauty of hoarfrost. I was thinking, praying really, “Just let us get home.”
Also: The rugelach (or Jewish Pastry) turned out just fine.
Every year at Christmas, one of the family treats is a sweet li’l treat that we’ve always known simply as “Jewish pastry”. This year I decided I’d like to take a crack at making it, and faced my first obstacle: How do you google a treat that you know by such a generic (and certainly incorrect) name?
So I punched “jewish pastry” into Google’s helpful little box, and got however many thousands of returns. Canny critter that I am, I had a look at the image search results. Turns out the proper name for “Jewish pastry” is rugelach.
Armed with that knowledge, I tried hunting for rugelach in Google. And discovered that there are as many recipes for rugelach as there are Jewish grandmothers. Hmmm.
So I emailed my mom, and got our iteration of the recipe from her. It came from my great-aunt Olga, who is on the Ukrainian side of the family.
Right now the dough’s chilling in the fridge. Soon I’ll be dabbing strawberry jam onto triangles of dough and rolling them up and baking them. Hopefully it turns out.
Wish me luck!
