The world began with a shattering of glass

1. So it turns out I have a sinus infection. I've probably had it since November; I just wrote it off as more background radiation pain until I started feeling short of breath this last week and woke up this morning with the alarm-clock clarity of pain I remember from the first few years after the sinus infection that ended my grad-student career. My doctor is a very dry-spoken person; he shone a penlight up my nose and commented, "That looks pretty nasty," which is always what you want to hear about the inside of your head. I have antibiotics. With any luck, they'll kick in before Arisia and won't flatten me in the process. That reminds me: I should post my Arisia schedule tomorrow.

2. My short story "When Can a Broken Glass Mend?" has been accepted by Not One of Us. It's a kinky Jewish demon love story. When I wrote "Larva" in 2012, it came with a footnote:

I find it interesting that Ashmedai has become a recurring figure in my personal mythos, when the first time I wrote him he was tormenting Cain from a mirror in 1938 Berlin. (That story never got off the ground. I suck at historical fiction. It was probably just as well.) I think it is almost completely because of his association with Lilith, the two of them the demonic rulers of di yene velt, the Other World of Jewish folklore—she leaves Adam because he will not lie under her in sex and on the shores of the Red Sea she finds Ashmedai, who being a demon is presumably immune to human notions of normative sexuality and does just fine with a dominant woman, and together they have about a zillion demon-children that die at a ferocious rate and cause every sort of problem from bedhead to sudden death and in the meantime everyone features in stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. I wrote a poem about it. Quite a lot of people have. But if you find something to identify with in Lilith who chose God's judgment rather than conform, then Ashmedai becomes the partner who doesn't ask you to, there in exile on the wrong side of the mirror with you. I seem to have written him both ways: a Singeresque demon in "Sheydim-tants," Lilith's husband laughing in "Madonna of the Cave." I feel as though I got a formative image of him from Phyllis Gotlieb's A Judgment of Dragons (1980), where of course he's not the demon-king but a terrified nineteenth-century rabbi's only way of comprehending a time-traveling, shape-changing alien from seven hundred and fifty years in his future; the impression stuck nonetheless. I expect he will turn up again. It's a thing di yenike do.

Ashmedai himself hasn't yet, but Lilith according to this interpretation was invoked in "After the Red Sea." Neither of them appear directly in this story, but they are its presiding spirits. The title comes from "The Ten Faces of G-d" in Frank London's A Night in the Old Marketplace (2007); it is a Kabbalistic reference.

3. handful_ofdust sent me an anatomically accurate sphinx. It's wonderful.

Today's moment of pop-cultural collision: I first heard Mark Lambert, who guest-stars memorably in the fourth episode of The Fantastic Journey (1977) as the harsh, conflicted leader of a militaristic society of children,* as the nebbishy and frustrated Henrik Egerman in the original cast recording of A Little Night Music (1973). Also, the internet tells me, he dubbed the film version of Cabaret's "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" that I find absolutely terrifying. Without knowing to listen for it, I would not have connected those three performances even by voice. Hey, chameleon.

* This plays out much less stupidly than it sounds. They are the youth of a society that nearly exterminated itself in war, leaving only its children and a few abusive adults who were later driven off by Lambert's self-titled Alpha, the oldest, quickest, and toughest of the children at the time, who took charge of the survivors after that. Wanting to build a life in opposition to the strictness of the hated "Elders," he succeeded only in following in the mold of the brutal culture that shaped him; his attempts to infuse his new society with a classical Greek sensibility—the only positive influence of his childhood—resulted in something more like a Spartan stereotype instead. It's an unstable culture, created within living memory of eleven-year-olds. The travelers are the catalysts for its collapse, but not the reasons it can't go on as it is. The ending comes down to a lot of shouted platitudes, but it's really not dreadful worldbuilding.