And when you listen to yourself, does it feel like somebody else?
I am home from Readercon and I have fed the cats and I think Autolycus has even forgiven me for not being around the last few nights to provide a keyboard for him to walk on, since he just sprang up and left the comment "ggggggggggggggggggggggggggcfghhhhhhhhh" on Facebook. (It was surprisingly apt in context. More people have liked it than have liked the actual-words comment I'd left just above.) Hestia has rubbed her head all over my shirt in order to reclaim me as part of the household rather than a hotel that doesn't even smell like cat. I had a really good weekend.
I had five program items on Friday. The first was my reading, which I think went well; it was recorded by both Readercon and Jim Freund of Hour of the Wolf, so I'll link to either or both as they're made available. I read from my recently completed, as yet unpublished short story "The Face of the Waters" with new poetry on either side and wore glasses in public for the first time, which was less a cosmetic issue than a matter of figuring out how to negotiate eye contact with my audience without bifocals. Of the panels that followed, I don't think any of them were trainwrecks: "I Am Become Death . . . No, I Mean Literally" went off-script almost immediately, but in an abstract, ethnographic way that the audience as well as the panelists seem to have enjoyed, and "The Works of Tanith Lee" was as wide-ranging as the literature we were talking about. I feel bad about overstating the degree to which I believe Owen Davies is a parental fuck-up during "Classic YA Book Club: The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper," but I regret nothing about rhapsodically anti-recommending Kathleen Sky's Witchdame (1985) in "Terrible . . . but Great" because somebody turned to me abruptly in an elevator the next day and complimented me on my flailing. More seriously, someone else told me that they had scoured the dealer's room for Lee's work because of the way I talked about her on the panel and been rewarded by everything they had read so far. That was really nice to hear.
In the one non-programming group activity I managed all weekend, I joined![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks, ashnistrike, skygiants, and kate_nepveu for dinner at Taipei Cuisine, with dessert at Yocha afterward. There was sweet corn with salty egg yolk and chili-fried shrimp with peanuts and lotus root with mushrooms and sesame chicken and a couple of dishes that didn't work out but were worth ordering just to see what they were like, although "with bones in" is not how anybody was expecting the popcorn frog. I hope I can get a coconut smoothie with lychee jelly other places than Yocha, because it's a really nice dessert. I would not be the person to write it, but I hope someone does a serious critical survey of that phase of '80's fantasy when it was all idtastic, all the time.
I do not know if I can promise a Patreon review of it, but I nonetheless recommend "Level Seven" (1966), a formerly lost episode of Out of the Unknown (1965–71) adapted by J.B. Priestley from Mordecai Roshwald's 1959 pre-and-post-apocalyptic novel of the same name; it is more streamlined and more of a parable than its source material, but pulls no more punches when it comes to the likelihood of surviving MAD. Young David Collings turns out to remind me of Peter Cushing. I think it's the cheekbones and the breakdowns.
The rest of Friday night was terrible. Between four and five in the morning, I had some kind of severe allergic reaction to an unknown trigger. It was like anaphylaxis with violent nausea: I took Benadryl as soon as I realized that my throat and mouth were prickling and swelling and I had suddenly stopped being able to breathe through my nose and for all I know it saved my life, but did not prevent the rash all over my body or the wheezing when I breathed. Sleep was not so much a thing for the rest of the night. I took Benadryl conscientiously round the clock until this evening and the symptoms gradually subsided, but it took a full twelve hours for my mouth to stop being numb. I have no known food allergies; I am hoping I have not suddenly developed any. The best medical guess right now is either one bad shrimp or some kind of slow-building reaction to a medication I started a week and a half ago. I will be calling my doctors about it on Monday. It was scary.
I had one panel on Saturday at noon and I feel slightly as though I hallucinated my way through it, but I remember talking about Phyllis Gotlieb and Yoon Ha Lee and The Robots of Death (1977), because the panel was "Life, Love, and Robots," and then I drifted briefly through the dealers' room with my mother and ran intoaedifica for a very careful lunch (I dissected the chicken out of a chicken sandwich) and then I slept for the rest of the afternoon. I did not manage to have dinner with yhlee. I did not manage to have dinner at all. I did manage to spend portions of the evening hanging out with Yoon and choco_frosh and Rush-That-Speaks and Ashnistrike and nineweaving, cautiously drinking herbal tea and eating my way through the pocketful of ginger chews I stole from the green room. Instead of attending any of the con's numerous room parties, I went back upstairs and answered some e-mail and continued reading Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising (1973), which I had brought in hardcover to the previous day's panel. spatch came out after his evening show and stayed with me just in case I stopped breathing in the middle of the night. I didn't.
I got the news about Jodie Whittaker's Thirteenth Doctor right before arriving for "Disturbed by Her Song: Gender, Queerness, and Sexuality in the Works of Tanith Lee," so Rush-That-Speaks and Steve Berman and I talked about Doctor Who for the first five minutes and I maintain gender-changing, self-reinventing immortals are totally on point for a discussion of Tanith Lee anyway. It was an enormously fun panel and may have repercussions.
This was a good year for books. I came away from the convention with Michael Thomas Ford's Lily (2016), L.A. Fields' Homo Superiors (2016), John Maddox Roberts' The Seven Hills (2005), Michael Cisco's The Wretch of the Sun (2016), Yevgeny Zamyatin's The Dragon (ed. and trans. Mirra Ginsburg, 1967), and five pulp novels by Fredric Brown all courtesy ofalexxkay: The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947), The Dead Ringer (1948), The Bloody Moonlight (1949), The Screaming Mimi (1949), and Compliments of a Fiend (1950). I could not afford the first edition of Nicholas Stuart Gray's The Apple-Stone (1965) on display at Somewhere in Time Books, but I am going to look for it in libraries because either I've read the Nesbit-like scene in which the children bring a Bonfire Night guy to life and it takes its face and voice from all of them by turns or someone once described it to me and either way it gave me the same jolt of half-recognition as Eleanor Farjeon's The Silver Curlew (1953), so I need to figure out what happened there. This was not a good year for seeing people, but I am glad to have caught the people I did, like lesser_celery and Gillian Daniels and briefly rosefox, and especially pleased that I managed to snag a conversation with Michael Cisco and Farah Rose Smith on Friday before my corporeal manifestation blew up. I did not take notes on any programming, but Kate Nepveu did.
(Can Martin Landau have played one of the first queer characters I ever saw in a movie? We can argue about the positive representation of "Call it my woman's intuition, if you will" Leonard in North by Northwest (1959), but he's not even subtext: I always read him and James Mason and Eva Marie Saint as a triangle. I found out he had died as soon as I got home; I had already seen the same about George Romero and Maryam Mirzakhani. Jeez, Sunday.)
Either to sum up or really bury the lede, I can now announce that Steve Berman of Lethe Press will be publishing a collection of my short fiction in 2018. Details are yet to be determined, but it will be my first fiction collection since Singing Innocence and Experience in 2005 and I am incredibly happy about it. I will share the details as soon as they exist.
My plans for the immediate future involve sleep.
I had five program items on Friday. The first was my reading, which I think went well; it was recorded by both Readercon and Jim Freund of Hour of the Wolf, so I'll link to either or both as they're made available. I read from my recently completed, as yet unpublished short story "The Face of the Waters" with new poetry on either side and wore glasses in public for the first time, which was less a cosmetic issue than a matter of figuring out how to negotiate eye contact with my audience without bifocals. Of the panels that followed, I don't think any of them were trainwrecks: "I Am Become Death . . . No, I Mean Literally" went off-script almost immediately, but in an abstract, ethnographic way that the audience as well as the panelists seem to have enjoyed, and "The Works of Tanith Lee" was as wide-ranging as the literature we were talking about. I feel bad about overstating the degree to which I believe Owen Davies is a parental fuck-up during "Classic YA Book Club: The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper," but I regret nothing about rhapsodically anti-recommending Kathleen Sky's Witchdame (1985) in "Terrible . . . but Great" because somebody turned to me abruptly in an elevator the next day and complimented me on my flailing. More seriously, someone else told me that they had scoured the dealer's room for Lee's work because of the way I talked about her on the panel and been rewarded by everything they had read so far. That was really nice to hear.
In the one non-programming group activity I managed all weekend, I joined
rushthatspeaks, ashnistrike, skygiants, and kate_nepveu for dinner at Taipei Cuisine, with dessert at Yocha afterward. There was sweet corn with salty egg yolk and chili-fried shrimp with peanuts and lotus root with mushrooms and sesame chicken and a couple of dishes that didn't work out but were worth ordering just to see what they were like, although "with bones in" is not how anybody was expecting the popcorn frog. I hope I can get a coconut smoothie with lychee jelly other places than Yocha, because it's a really nice dessert. I would not be the person to write it, but I hope someone does a serious critical survey of that phase of '80's fantasy when it was all idtastic, all the time.I do not know if I can promise a Patreon review of it, but I nonetheless recommend "Level Seven" (1966), a formerly lost episode of Out of the Unknown (1965–71) adapted by J.B. Priestley from Mordecai Roshwald's 1959 pre-and-post-apocalyptic novel of the same name; it is more streamlined and more of a parable than its source material, but pulls no more punches when it comes to the likelihood of surviving MAD. Young David Collings turns out to remind me of Peter Cushing. I think it's the cheekbones and the breakdowns.
The rest of Friday night was terrible. Between four and five in the morning, I had some kind of severe allergic reaction to an unknown trigger. It was like anaphylaxis with violent nausea: I took Benadryl as soon as I realized that my throat and mouth were prickling and swelling and I had suddenly stopped being able to breathe through my nose and for all I know it saved my life, but did not prevent the rash all over my body or the wheezing when I breathed. Sleep was not so much a thing for the rest of the night. I took Benadryl conscientiously round the clock until this evening and the symptoms gradually subsided, but it took a full twelve hours for my mouth to stop being numb. I have no known food allergies; I am hoping I have not suddenly developed any. The best medical guess right now is either one bad shrimp or some kind of slow-building reaction to a medication I started a week and a half ago. I will be calling my doctors about it on Monday. It was scary.
I had one panel on Saturday at noon and I feel slightly as though I hallucinated my way through it, but I remember talking about Phyllis Gotlieb and Yoon Ha Lee and The Robots of Death (1977), because the panel was "Life, Love, and Robots," and then I drifted briefly through the dealers' room with my mother and ran into
aedifica for a very careful lunch (I dissected the chicken out of a chicken sandwich) and then I slept for the rest of the afternoon. I did not manage to have dinner with yhlee. I did not manage to have dinner at all. I did manage to spend portions of the evening hanging out with Yoon and choco_frosh and Rush-That-Speaks and Ashnistrike and nineweaving, cautiously drinking herbal tea and eating my way through the pocketful of ginger chews I stole from the green room. Instead of attending any of the con's numerous room parties, I went back upstairs and answered some e-mail and continued reading Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising (1973), which I had brought in hardcover to the previous day's panel. spatch came out after his evening show and stayed with me just in case I stopped breathing in the middle of the night. I didn't.I got the news about Jodie Whittaker's Thirteenth Doctor right before arriving for "Disturbed by Her Song: Gender, Queerness, and Sexuality in the Works of Tanith Lee," so Rush-That-Speaks and Steve Berman and I talked about Doctor Who for the first five minutes and I maintain gender-changing, self-reinventing immortals are totally on point for a discussion of Tanith Lee anyway. It was an enormously fun panel and may have repercussions.
This was a good year for books. I came away from the convention with Michael Thomas Ford's Lily (2016), L.A. Fields' Homo Superiors (2016), John Maddox Roberts' The Seven Hills (2005), Michael Cisco's The Wretch of the Sun (2016), Yevgeny Zamyatin's The Dragon (ed. and trans. Mirra Ginsburg, 1967), and five pulp novels by Fredric Brown all courtesy of
alexxkay: The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947), The Dead Ringer (1948), The Bloody Moonlight (1949), The Screaming Mimi (1949), and Compliments of a Fiend (1950). I could not afford the first edition of Nicholas Stuart Gray's The Apple-Stone (1965) on display at Somewhere in Time Books, but I am going to look for it in libraries because either I've read the Nesbit-like scene in which the children bring a Bonfire Night guy to life and it takes its face and voice from all of them by turns or someone once described it to me and either way it gave me the same jolt of half-recognition as Eleanor Farjeon's The Silver Curlew (1953), so I need to figure out what happened there. This was not a good year for seeing people, but I am glad to have caught the people I did, like lesser_celery and Gillian Daniels and briefly rosefox, and especially pleased that I managed to snag a conversation with Michael Cisco and Farah Rose Smith on Friday before my corporeal manifestation blew up. I did not take notes on any programming, but Kate Nepveu did.(Can Martin Landau have played one of the first queer characters I ever saw in a movie? We can argue about the positive representation of "Call it my woman's intuition, if you will" Leonard in North by Northwest (1959), but he's not even subtext: I always read him and James Mason and Eva Marie Saint as a triangle. I found out he had died as soon as I got home; I had already seen the same about George Romero and Maryam Mirzakhani. Jeez, Sunday.)
Either to sum up or really bury the lede, I can now announce that Steve Berman of Lethe Press will be publishing a collection of my short fiction in 2018. Details are yet to be determined, but it will be my first fiction collection since Singing Innocence and Experience in 2005 and I am incredibly happy about it. I will share the details as soon as they exist.
My plans for the immediate future involve sleep.
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***\o/***
I AM GOING TO BUY THIS AND TREASURE IT. =D *flails*
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Thank you! I'm really looking forward.
long-winded correction....
ETA: Oh wait--I TOTALLY MISSED THAT THIS WAS *SOVAY'S* story collection! Apologies
And then I didn't read your comment carefully,
SO: YHLEE: I STILL THINK YOUR STORIES ARE EXCELLENT AND UNIQUE BUT SOVAY, I AM DELIGHTED TO HEAR ABOUT THIS COLLECTION OF **YOUR** STORIES.
Which are, without a shadow of a doubt, also excellent and unique.
Re: long-winded correction....
Re: long-winded correction....
Thank you!
(Reading comprehension happens sometimes.)
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Yay, forthcoming collection! I look forward to it.
Sleep well!
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That's good to know. I can still probably see a barrage of allergy tests in my future.
Yay, forthcoming collection! I look forward to it.
Thank you!
Sleep well!
I got distracted by one of my new books, but I'm going to try!
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I am SO glad. Seriously.:))))
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Thank you. I'm really, really happy.
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Thank you!
And now I need to get around to reading your poetry collection (intimidating, because you have clearly kept up your Greek and I have…not).
I mean, the poems are still in English.
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Let me greet this new with the same delighted squawk I gave to Jodie Whittaker. You may need those earplugs.
YAAAAAAWWWWWWWPPPPP!
That's it. Well done. :D
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This is the seal of approval.
That's it. Well done.
Hee. Thank you!
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Thank you!
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I hadn't heard about Martin Landau dying--I enjoyed him in Space 1999 as a character.
More seriously, someone else told me that they had scoured the dealer's room for Lee's work because of the way I talked about her on the panel and been rewarded by everything they had read so far. That was really nice to hear. --Indeed! I'd say it's an example of fulfilling a destiny, you know? Or a kind of evangelism--you've brought another soul to an author they'll enjoy.
before my corporeal manifestation blew up --I like the phrase, plus, maybe your next en-corporation will be as a time lord.
he just sprang up and left the comment "ggggggggggggggggggggggggggcfghhhhhhhhh" on Facebook. (It was surprisingly apt in context. More people have liked it than have liked the actual-words comment I'd left just above.) --Cats have a way of expressing things. Even you, who are probably the most breathtakingly articulate person I know, can't compete with the wisdom and on-target-ness of "ggggggggggggggggggggggggggcfghhhhhhhhh"
Hope sleep embraces you like slashy Achilles.
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It was frightening and no fun at all. I am hoping I can figure out what caused it and never go through it again.
I hadn't heard about Martin Landau dying--I enjoyed him in Space 1999 as a character.
I never saw Space 1999, but I've been realizing from reading reactions online that it was formative and beloved for a lot of people. I associate him first with North by Northwest, then Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994), then a bunch of random TV roles. (I'm aware of Mission: Impossible, but never watched that much of it myself.) What was he like on the show?
--I like the phrase, plus, maybe your next en-corporation will be as a time lord.
I could probably get used to that.
Even you, who are probably the most breathtakingly articulate person I know, can't compete with the wisdom and on-target-ness of "ggggggggggggggggggggggggggcfghhhhhhhhh"
I know! Really, there's cats, and then there's the rest of us.
Hope sleep embraces you like slashy Achilles.
Thank you. I think sleep was not quite as adroit as Achilles, but I had some weird dreams about seaside aquaria and huge sea creatures that don't exist in waking reality (some grouper-like, some eel-like, some saurian—always a nice thing to imagine), and I didn't wake up until late in the afternoon, so it did all right.
Martin Landau on Space 1999
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Thank you! I woke up at three in the afternoon today, so I think I'm doing something right.
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The allergy episode must have been horrible. Many years ago my husband and I were in Seattle on a vacation and spending the night with a friend of his, and apparently I was allergic to something on the new (unwashed) sheets his friend had put on the guest bed, because shortly after getting into bed I got the body rash and airway closure etc of anaphylaxis, and a benadryl did not solve things so we had to wake up the friend and find out where the nearest hospital was (this was pre-smartphones and pre-Google) and I ended up spending the night in the emergency room with an epinephrine IV drip. Never happened again, but when I read your post I felt my own throat close up in sympathetic terror.
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Thank you!
apparently I was allergic to something on the new (unwashed) sheets his friend had put on the guest bed, because shortly after getting into bed I got the body rash and airway closure etc of anaphylaxis, and a benadryl did not solve things so we had to wake up the friend and find out where the nearest hospital was (this was pre-smartphones and pre-Google) and I ended up spending the night in the emergency room with an epinephrine IV drip.
That sounds terrifying. I'm glad you came through it all right!
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Ye fishes and little gods, that sounds *terrifying*.
I am glad it was not worse,
and beyond glad that you are calling your doctors.
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Thank you. I've left messages. I don't want this ever happening again!
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"If we took the bones out it wouldn't be crunchy would it?"
I meant to give you 2 books, not 5, but I only had The Fabulous Clipjoint in an omnibus. Not that the other three are *bad*, just not as excellent. Hope you enjoy!
Sorry about the illness, and to have not gotten a chance to chat at the con.
Yay new collection!
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It's just supposed to be a sketch!
I meant to give you 2 books, not 5, but I only had The Fabulous Clipjoint in an omnibus.
I really don't think you need to apologize for giving me extra pulp fiction! I'm halfway through The Screaming Mimi and really enjoying it.
Sorry about the illness, and to have not gotten a chance to chat at the con.
I'm sorry to have missed you. I got some of
Yay new collection!
Thank you!
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I came to see your Robots panel. :-) You sounded more coherent than, perhaps, you felt.
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Thank you!
You sounded more coherent than, perhaps, you felt.
That's good to know! I felt pretty fried. I'm sorry for missing you afterward—I hope you had a good time at the rest of the convention. Did your panels go well? [edit] I just saw your Readercon report. I'm really glad!
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The allergic reaction, on the other hand... I hope you are able to track it to its lair and eradicate it.
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Thank you. I'm really happy.
The allergic reaction, on the other hand... I hope you are able to track it to its lair and eradicate it.
Much appreciated. I don't like scratch tests, but I really don't like feeling unsafe just going about my daily life.
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Thank you, thank you, and tell me where.
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I like this plan! Maybe even before the next season starts.
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The allergy attack sounds like an absolute nightmare, OTOH; I hope you/your doctors can figure out what caused it. *shudders*
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Thank you!
The allergy attack sounds like an absolute nightmare, OTOH; I hope you/your doctors can figure out what caused it.
I appreciate it. I've got an appointment later this week.
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That thing--anaphylaxis with emesis? sheesh--sounds deeply distressing and unpleasant. I devoutly hope it doesn't signal a new allergy.
Be well.
Nine
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Thank you! (I don't suppose you got pictures?) I'm really happy about it.
I devoutly hope it doesn't signal a new allergy.
Much appreciated. Fortunately, there was no actual vomiting on the night, just racking, freezing nausea of the kind that felt that at any second it might turn into it. I foresee scratch tests in my future.
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OMG YAY!!! This is such excellent news.
That allergic reaction sounds very scary. I'm glad you had Benadryl on hand.
It was good to see you. I really enjoyed your reading and the panels on Tanith Lee and robots. I want to read that Phyllis Gotlieb story with the Jewish robots you talked about.
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Thank you! It makes me really happy.
That allergic reaction sounds very scary. I'm glad you had Benadryl on hand.
It was frightening. I am hoping it will turn out to have an easily identifiable trigger (which is not any of the foods that are emotionally important to me as well as delicious) and then I can never, ever have to deal with it again.
I want to read that Phyllis Gotlieb story with the Jewish robots you talked about.
It's "Tauf Aleph." It was published originally in Jack Dann's More Wandering Stars (1981) and appears in both of her collections Son of the Morning and Other Stories (1983) and Blue Apes (1995). It's one of the great pieces of Jewish science fiction in my book. ("Son of the Morning" is one of the others, so you could do worse than to read it, too, either in the collection which bears its name or as part of the mosaic novel A Judgment of Dragons (1980). The latter was a huge influence on me from childhood and as such is probably visible from space.)
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Readercon sounds lovely, apart from your allergic reaction; hope you get some answers on that.
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Thank you!
Readercon sounds lovely, apart from your allergic reaction; hope you get some answers on that.
It was (Mrs. Lincoln) a really good time. I met with an allergist this afternoon; by the beginning of next week, I should have a better idea.
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Congrats! (She said, belatedly, having fallen very behind on her blog-reading)
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Thank you! (These things happen.)
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That is excellent news.
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Thank you! I am very happy about it.