But I might be catching, so don't touch

I am so much more amused by this meme (thanks, weirdquark) than I should be . . .

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Sovay!

1. Sovay is actually a mammal, not a fish!


2. The international dialling code for Sovay is 672!


3. The average human spends about 30 days during their life in Sovay.


4. Czar Paul I banished Sovay to Siberia for marching out of step.


5. Sovay can only be destroyed by intense heat, and is impermeable even to acid.


6. The ace of spades in a playing card deck symbolizes Sovay.


7. The fingerprints of Sovay are virtually indistinguishable from those of humans, so much so that they could be confused at a crime scene.


8. India tested its first nuclear Sovay in 1974!


9. Sovay is 1500 years older than the pyramids.


10. Until the 1960s, Sovay was not allowed to enter Disneyland.

I am interested in - do tell me about
herhimitthem

And always in our ears was the sound of the ocean

Well, I'm totally unable to sleep now.

Singing Innocence and Experience has been reviewed by the Washington Post:

As we might expect from the Blakean title, Sonya Taafe's debut collection, Singing Innocence and Experience (Prime; paperback, $17.95), is the output of a hardcore romantic—but not particularly in the mold of William B. There are no arcane allegories here, nor attempts at mythic subcreation, nor rants against dark satanic mills. Rather, Taafe—and her characters—are Keatsian to the core: half in love with easeful death; prone to see mermaids in the surf (the sea resounds through nearly every story here) and demon lovers in the hedgerows; and fearful of betraying their art and the cause of beauty in the face of the world's harsh demands.

In "Shade and Shadow," the female protagonist's habit of self-mutilation through "cutting" opens her up to a world of ghosts. "Featherweight" finds a woman with a sutured, empty chest desperately searching for a replacement heart. Another mystery woman, her skin dotted with freckled constellations, breaks the heart of her astronomer lover in "Constellations, Conjunctions." Taafe's cosmos of love gone wrong, of lovers fated to miscommunicate, of incompatible worlds colliding, is a mosaic of such incidents, heightened beyond mere soap opera by their eerie supernatural aspects.

Yet a balancing humor crops up. The title story finds a woman embarrassingly saddled with a unicorn in human form, while "Return on the Downward Road" postulates a school for evil wizards: Harry Potter gone bad.

Taafe likes to crash right into the chaos and confusion of her stories, often plunging us into the depths of her characters' passions before gradually revealing their back-stories. This tactic demands patience from readers used to more linear fantasies. Taafe's language also requires slow perusal. Like Samuel R. Delany, she assembles her sentences out of startling imagery and poetic juxtapositions. For instance, one character's words do not cause her interlocutor to shut up; rather, "Her trust stoppered his mouth." Reading these stories at one go, we discover certain recurring patterns and symbols, sometimes to the point of obsessiveness—including people whose anxieties and shocks manifest themselves as breath stoppages or throat occlusions. But the heartfelt, keenly rendered, ingenious tales these characters live through are often quite breathtaking.

I don't have a good expression of how I feel about this review except to say that, if it weren't half past three in the morning, I would probably be singing. I am extremely, seriously pleased. All the criticisms are fair—he's got me dead to rights on the sea and the demon lovers. The comparison to Samuel R. Delany is an unexpected honor. One point of copyediting only: my last name has been misspelled. (It's Taaffe; Welsh doubled letters all the way.) Also, I actually hate Keats. But with all of that, still—squee!

I need more people to be awake so I can grin at them.