But it will happen in its own strange way

My short story "The True Alchemist" (Not One of Us #51) has been accepted for reprint by GlitterShip. Thanks to rose_lemberg for recommending the market and ashlyme for inspiring the story in the first place. I've never had any fiction of mine podcast before. I'm really looking forward to the results!

The last few days have been pleasingly, rather than exhaustingly, social. Yesterday was spent with gaudior, rushthatspeaks, faerieboots, zombie_dog, jinian, sandrylene, and someone whose LJ-handle I don't know (help!), constructing many, many boxes and packing the first round of Kickstarter rewards for Sassafrass' Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok (2015). There was pizza and a surprising frequency of blood sacrifice. It was one thing when Sandry, Dog, and I had all cut our fingers on various edges of cardboard or packing implements (I reached into a drawer looking for a tape dispenser; I can't prove that it bit me rather than one of the other lurking sharp objects, but something in there had teeth). Gaudior spontaneously beginning to bleed from the nose was just overkill. Saturday, kraada came to visit for the first time in this apartment, bringing skotodes, salmonpi, and their nine-month-old daughter, whom I had only met in pictures online. They brought almond macaroons and much-missed conversation. Hestia fled upstairs and hid with derspatchel, but Autolycus made himself charming and slightly moochy.

I have seen a number of movies since mid-December that I have not written about, partly because there was that chunk of time around the solstice when Bertie Owen was dead. (Man, I do have a year-king computer.) Maybe I will just do a very brief movie review post, like I do with the 'Thon.

A white squirrel is sitting on the garage behind the house, fanning its tail like a peacock in the cold sunshine. For the last few nights, I've been experiencing vivid, plot-heavy dreams, but almost nothing of them has been staying with me—I'm waking too late and bolting into consciousnes, trying not to lose the entire day. All I can remember of last night, for example, is the preparation of an elaborate meal at an outdoor table, a broad open space like a fairground with stalls and bleachers, and a reproduction of a broadside with a long, smearily legible paragraph photocopied on the back. It has to be read out in one breath, because it's an invocation to a demon (the kind that used to be an angel, or a spirit that people took for one or the other, split the difference) and either it won't work if halted even briefly or it will work partly in the horrible way that means it's better not to have started it at all. I am reading it aloud, because I have the breath control to do it and I do not care what the process is going to exact from me; someone has hurt me dreadfully and there is no better recourse. What I can't remember is what happened afterward. Everything was faintly eighteenth-century, with molecular gastronomy and smartphones. I hope the spirit came. I wanted it badly enough.