Of This and Other Worlds

There has been a lot of bad news in my life lately (not for me personally, but for people I love and am close to -- serious health problems, impending operations, the sudden death of my uncle), so it was lovely to open my e-mail the other day and find out some really fantastic news for a change:

Ultraviolet has been nominated for the 2012 Andre Norton Award!

This is the YA division of the Nebula Awards, which are legendary in the SF&F genre, so even being considered for the award is a pretty big deal, let alone actually making the shortlist. I am thrilled and honoured.

Here's the full list of nominees as posted on the official SFWA site:

• Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor (Viking Juvenile)
• Chime, Franny Billingsley (Dial Books; Bloomsbury)
• Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Laini Taylor (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; Hodder & Stoughton)
• Everybody Sees the Ants, A.S. King (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
• The Boy at the End of the World, Greg van Eekhout (Bloomsbury Children’s Books)
• The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman (Big Mouth House)
• The Girl of Fire and Thorns, Rae Carson (Greenwillow Books)
• Ultraviolet, R.J. Anderson (Orchard Books; Carolrhoda Lab)

I have actually not yet read any of the other books on the list, but I've heard amazing things about all of them. I think I'm going to make it my business to read all the other nominated titles before the awards ceremony.

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For my fellow writers in the quasi-local area, I have more good news -- I'm going to be presenting a workshop on revision in Waterloo, ON at the end of March: 

( Poster with details under cut... )

So if you need a pep talk before launching into your own revisions or would appreciate some general tips on how to go about it, this may be the seminar for you! Or just come and say hi and hang out with me and some other writers. Whatever. :)

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And finally, a vid that has nothing to do with writing but I've been posting it everywhere since I discovered it last night, just because it is so INCREDIBLY CLEVER. And also broke my heart a little.

From the author's introduction at her journal: 

In the beginning, there was Sherlock Holmes. And Holmes brought forth the brilliant doctor House, embodied by the lovely Hugh Laurie. Who prior to that in Fortysomething played a slightly less brilliant doctor, Paul Slippery, who begat three sons, the eldest of whom was played by the equally-lovely-if-somewhat-peculiarly-named Benedict Cumberbatch. Who of course grew up to play Sherlock. ... And then my head exploded.

All I can say is, watch. Enjoy. Marvel at the parallels. Surely some of them had to be intentional?!

Seldom have I ever been so glad to have one of my predictions proven wrong.

On the other hand, the suspicion I had but didn't elaborate on here, as to the way this particular case would end? I was right about that part.

Just give RSL the Emmy already, people.

It has just occurred to me that I never reacted to the South Pole episode of House -- mostly because I somehow contrived to miss it when it first aired (so you can imagine my surprise at the beginning of the next episode when House confronted Wilson about dating you-know-who!). However, I've seen it now and WHOA.

Please tell me there is good House/Cate fic out there somewhere. Because it is totally my new OTP, and if there isn't any I fear I may have to write some myself.

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Speaking of fandom, I have just discovered Blake's 7. We're only three episodes into S1 so far, but my husband and I are already hooked big-time.

Unsurprisingly for a fan of Sherlock Holmes, Snape, Jack Bristow and Beltanno MacRannoch, I love Avon best (though I'm sure my interest will wane if he doesn't demonstrate a bit more humanity soon). But I'm also surprised by how much I like Blake. I've heard so little about him, I thought he must be kind of a bland and uninteresting character compared to Vila, Cally, and so on. I even had a vague suspicion that he might be a shadowy or absent figure a la Charlie of Charlie's Angels. But in fact he's not only right in the middle of the action, he's pretty cool. I like Jenna, too, and I don't remember hearing anything about her from the B7 fans on my list at all.

The special effects are as bad as anything in Classic Who, but I'm really impressed by the dialogue, scripts and acting so far (well, except for Brian Blessed in ep. 3 gnawing off enormous chunks of scenery and spitting them all over the screen, but that's Brian Blessed). I especially admire the way that B7 captures the banality of evil -- in the first two episodes at least the villains don't sit around cackling and rubbing their hands or being villainous to each other for dramatic effect, they behave and speak like ordinary people who have sunk into evil so gradually they don't even seem to realize it. It's very well done. MOAR PLS.
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I fail at the promised reviews, I know, I know. Coming soon.

Roundup time! I just keep finding links to amazing things so I have to share them with you all.

Firstly, lainitaylor has a gummi bear. She also has an entire chandelier made of them, if you go to the bottom of the post. But you should congratulate her on her personal gummi bear first, just to be nice. Oh, and she also finished a book.

Secondly, this may come as a surprise to certain people who think they know me (or at least think they know what Those Conservative Evangelical Christian Types are Like), but I am in complete and total agreement with the points that John Green makes in this awesome and funny (yet at the same time very not funny) vlog post about a group of people who are trying to prevent his book Looking For Alaska being taught in schools. A book which I have personally never read, but have decided I need to go out and buy RIGHT NOW, because it sounds awesome. Anyway, how about I just let him explain:



Thirdly, snickelish pointed to this brief essay by mrissa explaining something about introverts that many people just don't understand, and it is brilliant and so true that I think you should all read it. It's here.

Fourthly, uh... I've forgotten. Oh yeah! I just watched the new episode of House. Y HELO THAR PRODUCT PLACEMENT BY APPLE. Also, I kinda adore Kutner -- he's such a complete dork.

And now to bed! And now to bed!

Oh, House. You let me down so much last week, and then you turn around and deliver one of the best episodes ever.

*wipes away tear*

yahtzee63 remarked after seeing this week's Heroes ("Distractions") that "maybe I could love Hiro more if he actually crawled out of the TV screen and gave me money. That's about the only way." This is inarguably true.

After watching the same episode myself, I must add that ( by far my favorite two pairings on this show... )

Moving on to the new House ("Needle in a Haystack"), which I've also just seen -- definitely enjoyed this episode much more than last week's. ( Nice to see... ) Two thumbs up.

Needing something to cheer me up after the horrible train wreck of FBOFW these last few days (Lynn Johnson, you have two days to pull this storyline out of the toilet. I am not optimistic), I turned to my f-list. And superversive, bless him, came through:

I had already read (or watched) all the really seminal English-language fantasy works of [1977], except for The Sword of Shannara. I have therefore been plodding through that distinctive if not distinguished work. It is actually a very good sort of book to read while one is sick and depressed, because it reconciles one to the brevity of life and makes death a happier prospect than it seemed before. In Heaven there are no such books, and in Hell all books will burn.

He promises to write a more detailed review soon. I confess that after suffering through the first two Shannara books (otherwise known as Brooks Does Tolkien and Brooks Does Donaldson), I am rather looking forward to it.

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Yesterday I got my brand-new glasses -- lovely pink metallic frames that suit me better than any pair of glasses I've worn in the past ten years. Unfortunately, there was a pinwheel-like smudge in the centre of both lenses, which no amount of rubbing could remove. After suffering through a couple of hours of frustration and eyestrain, I ended up turning around and driving back to the optometrist's to return them. They confessed that they had made a mistake and offered to replace them, but now I have to wait another week to wear my bootiful new eyeglasses with the updated prescription again. Alas.

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Remember how a couple of weeks ago I mentioned getting migraine auras without the migraine? Well, on the weekend I got the migraine without the aura. My first migraine, and all I can say is OW. I really hope this is an isolated incident, because there's nothing like blinding pain and nausea to put the kibosh on your creative energies.

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In other news, I watched "Words and Deeds" (House) yesterday and actually quite liked it -- not that it didn't have its logistical flaws, and not that the behavior of all the characters was perfectly consistent with their behavior in the past, but I didn't think it was the Worst Episode Ever, or even close to it.

This is why I have come to the conclusion that I am happier out of fandom than in it. Not that I mind hearing what my closest friends think of the shows and books I enjoy, or discussing our opinions even when we disagree; but on the whole I prefer to make up my own mind about whether I like something or not, and not have it spoiled for me by people insisting that it stinks. I offer a belated bow to yahtzee63, who has long been wiser than I in such matters.

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Got an e-mail today from Agent #2, telling me she'd received my ms. Thanks to Canada Post's parcel tracking system I knew that already, but it was nice to get a personal note to that effect. She says she's hoping to get to the book by mid-March.

I have a feeling that March is going to be The Month for my writing career, in a lot of ways. Could be good, could be bad, but something is definitely going to happen around that time.

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And finally, I have tagged all my old entries up to June 2005. Go me!

Well, this was a nice surprise:



I didn't even realize hc_fanficawards existed until just now, but I'm very pleased and grateful to chmaresh for nominating Galatea in the "Long" category.

cesario, you've been nommed as well, in case you didn't know.

And the rest of you (or at least, those who don't run screaming in horror at the thought of House/Cameron in any form) can see the list of nominees and cast your ballot here if you're so inclined.

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* Not to be confused with the inevitable episode of House where Hugh Laurie's old friend Stephen puts in a guest appearance, which would be Ham and Fry, or the little Welsh town with all the bookshops, which is Hay-on-Wye.

Can you tell I've been watching the "Valley Girl" extras from the HOUSE S2 DVDs?

Anyway, look at the shiny pretty thing that is Writely! I've been wanting something like this for ages!

Other super-nifty things include the very exciting news, kindly mailed to me by Hottt Cheryl (do I have the right number of t's? I've lost track of how many she's earned, now), that naominovik's wonderful (wonderful, wonderful, and did I say, WONDERFUL?) Temeraire books have been optioned by Peter Jackson. In spite of the fact that I hated PJ's LotR, I am enough of an optimist to think he might do a good job with the project.

I was going to write a whole separate entry, maybe over on my otherwise useless Vox blog, reviewing His Majesty's Dragon and papersky's delightful Tooth and Claw, as they are both fantasy novels about dragons and both strongly influenced by nineteenth-century literature, and much could be said about either of them. However, I would rather give both books my endorsement now, however briefly, than wait for an opportunity to wax eloquent about them that may well never come. So here is my review:

I didn't think books about dragons could get any better than Tooth and Claw, but Temeraire a.k.a. His Majesty's Dragon in particular is the most delightful thing to happen to me in a literary sense since I read The Beekeeper's Apprentice (and we all know what came of that). Anyway, both Walton's book and Novik's are superb. If you haven't read them, GO NOW.

Two excellent posts on the pitfalls and triumphs of researching fiction, from tightropegirl:

How Research Leads to Nihilism (with spoilers for some recent House episodes and, to my delight, an old episode of Doctor Who), and Research, Part Two a.k.a. The Three Big Cheats. It's long (especially the first part), but all of it is worth reading, whether you're a writer doing research, a professional or academic who likes to nitpick shows and books based on your field, or simply an interested viewer who sometimes wonders where scriptwriters get all this stuff.