Everybody happy as the dead come home

The first item on this post should have gone up yesterday, but yesterday was hectic.

1. The annual Strange Horizons Fund Drive has begun! Read the details and donate here; read the bonus issue as it's funded here. Content this year includes short fiction by Alex Dally MacFarlane and Ann Leckie and poetry by Arkady Martine, Rose Lemberg, and Emily Jiang. There are also prizes.

2. Did I mention that Mythic Delirium the anthology is now available? There are lots of things I like in that ToC.

3. The worst insomnia since 2006 continues. The only apparent benefit so far is that last night I finally had dreams I remember and it was like getting a week's worth all at once. Recollected to the best of my ability, figures from last night's dreams included:

A trans woman serving as a sergeant in something like the British Army in World War I, although nothing else about the dream looked like '14–'18. She was short and wide-shouldered, middle-aged and wore her dark greying hair parted and rolled in some complicated hairstyle whose name I don't know; it fit under her forage cap. I don't know where all the monumental architecture in my dreams comes from, but it's been there for years. I watched her drilling soldiers in a courtyard like a marble amphitheater, sea-white under a sea-grey sky.

A wet black rock covered with seaweed that rolled up out of the sea and took human form, a bony, fair-haired man in a black peacoat that was always running with water. He had patches of green and rust-red algae on his jaw where another man might have beard stubble; we went out for má là hot pot and I watched him crack and eat clams and shrimp in their shells. We talked about Little Women and the character of Professor Bhaer, whom I first saw played by Gabriel Byrne and later by Paul Lukas. He was staying in a room that looked like a remainder from the '70's, all paneling and carpet; he didn't leave footprints where he walked, but a wet sliding mark like something dragged. (I know what he was doing. He's a reminder to me to finish a story I started in September that stalled when stress ate my life; he is not one of its characters, but he comes out of the same ocean.) Everything was overcast, evening-like; wet slates, muted light. The sea was dark every time I looked at it, like a black-and-white film.

A disembodied, slightly decomposing hand that was sentient and lived in a paper bag. I was working for a family with fabulous, disorderly archives of books and art that had been lying around the basement of their estate forever, like the yard sale of Charles Foster Kane; the hand turned up in an overflowing box of Magic cards and helped me catalogue the endless valuable junk once I realized what it was. It had been a person's hand once; the edges of its wrist were bruised and ragged, its nails decaying blue. I don't remember ever being afraid of it, or able to learn who it had once belonged to. At some point it named itself Louisa by spidering around on the backs of books that contained the name. It was good at finding identifying information on paintings.

4. The Post-Meridian Radio Players' Tomes of Terror: Nevermore opens next Friday! Buy tickets! Or buy a membership to the Library and you won't have to worry about tickets for a full year. You might have to worry about spectral archivists and things that read in the night. Then again, you might not. It doesn't happen to everyone. I'm quite sure they wouldn't sell memberships if it wasn't safe.

5. Courtesy of handful_ofdust: I know this figure is not Ištar, but she keeps looking like it to me. I think it's the similarities to the Burney Relief.

I have a minor fever and a major sore throat and should do something that does not involve very much brain.