shadesong: (Hearth)
Friday, November 6th, 2015 09:02 am
This is a shared post, in case that's insufficiently clear! Also I am deeply tempted by those mezuzot.

Originally posted by [livejournal.com profile] kythryne at ten years!
Hi, LJ! Anybody still out here, or have you all moved to Twitter and Facebook like me?



My friend Brooklyn took this photo recently, and I love it because it so perfectly sums up my job: I get to hold magic in my hands every day.

I wanted to write something eloquent and beautiful about art and faith and Wyrding Studios turning ten... but then I woke up last Friday with a respiratory infection that landed me in bed for a day and a half. I've been racing to catch up ever since, and there's a symmetry to that.

I don't actually know when I "officially" launched WS back in 2005. I know my last day at my old job was October 15th, and I know I planned to do a grand opening on November 1st, but I came down with the flu and ended up just unceremoniously putting a bunch of shinies on the website sometime in early November and I never looked back.

And for the past ten years, that's been my life. Unpredictable. Full of unplanned detours. Always running a little behind, always leaving something unfinished at the end of the day. never quite getting enough sleep.

But always, always, magic.

Writing something eloquent? It's not happening tonight, and I don't want to keep you waiting any longer. So instead, I'm just going to repeat something from last year's anniversary letter, because every word is still true.

This is my love letter to all of you. Some of you have been with me from the very start, some of you found me over the years, some of you have just stumbled across me today, or last week. You’ve shared your stories with me, trusted me with your secrets so that I could make them into art for you, sent me silly things in the mail, kept me company virtually when I’ve worked far too late into the night, bought my work, told your friends about it. You’ve helped keep a small business - and the woman behind it - going for nine ten years. A quarter of my life.

Thank you.  I write something like this every year, and every year I don’t really have the words to say how much it means. This year, more than any other year before, I don’t have the words. Just… thank you. And there is gratitude, and hope. Because I’m pretty sure I’m learning to fly on my way down.

Thank you. It's been a wonderful ten years. Let's keep going.

Okay, that's enough schmoop. It's getting too dusty in here. Let's get on to the details and the deals!


  • Lots of new shinies, including some from my personal collection that I've decided to send out into the world because I never wear them.

  • Coupon code TENYEARS takes $10 off any order of $45 or more, plus you'll get a free exclusive anniversary pendant that will never be available for purchase.

  • Spend $50 or more (after discounts are applied) and you'll automatically get free domestic shipping too!


Also, meet Jackdaw, the newest (and noisiest) resident of Magpie House. She turned up on my doorstep the day before Halloween, and when I realized she was declawed, I took her in. She's not microchipped and I haven't been able to turn up her owners, so... she's living in my studio until I can afford to get her to a vet for bloodwork so I can start socializing her with my other critters. And if anyone knows how to make my printer stop printing eleventy-three copies of the Amazon return label I printed the other day, please let me know, because no amount of clearing my print queue or turning it off and back on seems to undo whatever she did to it.
shadesong: (Everything hurts/Doesn't work)
Monday, October 12th, 2015 01:59 pm
I've been saying I need to get back to posting here, but life has been boring because I have had the Death Cold that's been going around. Which has turned into acute bronchitis + bronchospasm, because my lungs.

This happens often. My lungs getting colonized, turning what would have been a quick misery for a healthy person into a month-long ordeal for me. I was hanging in there all last week, but took a turn for the worse this weekend; managed to hold on until this morning, called my doctor - and found that he was out for Columbus Day. >.< So. Urgent Care.

It's been a really long time since I've had to go to Urgent Care or the ER for anything to do with my lungs; last time I went was because of the broken foot, and that was very clearly A Problem. I was concerned that I wouldn't be taken seriously about my symptoms, that they'd dismiss it as just a cold, that I'd be all tiny and frustrated and not-listened-to as I tried to explain that my lungs do this all the time and I'm really not in here over nothing. I'm really medically fragile, not Hysterical.

And then the doctor swooped in, looked at my brief medical history, and said "Oh, EDS! What type?" and I knew I would be okay. Because a doctor who knows about EDS knows that people with vEDS have fucked-up hollow organs. He knew that I was in there because sometimes when vEDS patients' lungs are unhappy, they'll just fucking collapse (which mine did when I was hospitalized for pneumonia twice as a kid).

My lungs are apparently super loud right now. Which made him chuckle, because he knows chronic pain patients - how we present as looking pretty okay and speaking in full sentences when in reality shit has gone very wrong in our bodies. I might be a little textbook there.

So I got a nebulizer treatment. And that helped a *little* bit, but not enough, so I got 60mg of prednisone right there and a prescription for more, plus Robitussin with codeine.

"Do not hesitate," he said, "to come back here if you have any more difficulty breathing, or if you start coughing up anything green. Seriously. Come right back." I should've come earlier. I'll do better next time.

But yeah, I won the Urgent Care lottery. Seriously. This never happens.

I hate Robitussin.

[livejournal.com profile] gizmometer is also sick, and was talking about taking Dimetapp and liking it, and I full-body shuddered, because Dimetapp is the flavor of my childhood. My respiratory system has been screwy since I was four, and I used to have to take Dimetapp every night. I hated it. I remember bargaining with my mom - if I took my Dimetapp, I got five pretzel sticks. No, ten. No, fifteen.

(Childhood with fucked-up lungs: Dimetapp, Ventolin pills, leaning over a sink full of hot water with a towel over my head to keep the steam in, oxygen tent in the hospital, the hideous shock of pneumothorax.)

I took my damn Robitussin, because I don't think the bronchitis has ever been quite this bad, and I have to take it seriously. Or maybe this is basic bronchitis and I'm just nervous because of the vEDS diagnosis, because I know more ways in which this can hurt me.

(Different people treat me different ways, when they grok that my body is not a healthy body. I like Matthew's response: he tucks the knowledge away and treats me no differently. Pity frustrates and annoys me; it accomplishes nothing. Trust that I'm taking care of myself and will let you know if there's a problem or if I need an accommodation, and give me days where I can go without thinking about it.)

So that's where I am right now. No spoons. Steroids. Rest and hydration.

When I was talking about how I needed to get back to posting here, I asked [livejournal.com profile] melebeth what I should post about; she said zombies. I have already written my final word on zombies! So here it is: "Becca at the End of the World".
shadesong: (Hearth)
Monday, September 21st, 2015 08:42 am
FortuneTellers_Auspice_Web_800px

("Auspice (The Feather Reader)" by Caitlyn Kurilich)


Liminality: A Magazine of Speculative Poetry


Issue #5


Autumn 2015


Editorial - Shira Lipkin and Mattie Joiner


Baba Yaga Has Tea with Kostchai the Deathless”  -  Jane Yolen


An Unexpected Guest” - Lev Mirov


Between the Lines” - Stephanie Niu


Litany; Dust”  -  A.E. Ash


The Garden Wild”  -  Lynette Mejía


The Night Before an Interstellar Journey” -   Jennifer Linnaea


Origami Crane / Light-Defying Spaceship”  -  Naru Dames Sundar


The Start of the Past”  -  Catriona Cameron


Splinter Song”   -  Romie Stott


Tasseography of English Breakfast Tea at 30,000 Feet”  -  Amy Fant


shadesong: (Hearth)
Wednesday, September 16th, 2015 08:21 am
Got any Arisia literature track panel ideas? Drop 'em here! Erik and I could use a little help filling out our track, given the lack of usable suggestions in the forums. Please give us an idea and a description - title and precis would be perfect!
shadesong: (Hearth)
Wednesday, September 9th, 2015 03:06 pm
Again, never time to write anything substantive on here!

* Aimee had job interviews yesterday and today, so I had some scraps of writing time. "The Hollow" continues apace. Once again, I'm choosing to do things I've never done before...

* Life is busy! Adam and I are going to Ghost Quartet tonight, and we're all going to Best of Sirlesque 2 on Friday (Aimee and I are stage kittening). Also there are dates. Also houseguests.

* Redyed my hair pink and purple with some teal bits. Need to take pictures.

* Once I've had a little more time in this air conditioning, I need to venture back to the dining room and decide which of the poems we bought this cycle will be in the next issue of Liminality, and which we'll be holding for the winter issue!

* Consider subscribing or sponsoring Liminality! I deliberately planned sustainability into our business model so we'd never be dependent on the endless cycle of Kickstarters and Indiegogos. But more money = more poems. :)

* Elayna is back at college! She's enjoying her semester so far. We had her at home for just the right amount of time, the tail end of this summer.

* Nicky had his followup echocardiogram, and it looks like his meds are working! Yay Nicky! (EDIT: Just realized I never posted here about this! At his annual checkup, they discovered a heart murmur; they had me bring him back in June, and it had gotten worse, so he had his first echo. Heart disease. :( But the meds and early cardiac diet are working! We are committed to keeping this pup happy and healthy for as long as possible! Echos are expensive, though, man.) Also, I bought him his Halloween costume; he's going to be a dragon. :)

* Arisia scheduling is happening. Got any literature panel ideas? Give 'em here!

* I'm looking at my calendar to figure out what else to update people on. I go to a bunch of shows, I have a bunch of dates, I have been going to a lot of parties! I'm looking forward to autumn.

And now I must go do more work! But ask me for updates on stuff in comments, if you're curious.
shadesong: (MLP: Pinkie bounce)
Saturday, August 29th, 2015 04:16 pm
Because at, I think, the last three parties, it's come up, and it makes me smile: How Matthew and I got together. :)

Last March, I went to a party. And there was this guy there who had amazing bouncy-puppy energy, who I was instantly drawn to. Not just because he's very attractive. :) But because he's silly, funny, smart. We had a great conversation, and I friended him on Facebook when I got home and, some days later, sent him a link to an interesting news story that had some bearing on a topic we'd talked about.

No response.

Okay, I thought, he doesn't want to pursue this. That's okay. Not everyone has to be into me! And I went about my life.

In June, there was another party. We chatted again, it was fun, I was still totally interested in him. About a week after that party, I did the same thing: "Great to see you again! Here is more info about X!"

Nothing.

Okay. *shrug* *kicks can* At this point I had a couple other things going on in my love life, no big deal, and if all I have with Matthew is fun conversations at parties, that's okay, because fun conversations are still good!

Halloween party. He's the Big Bad Wolf and not wearing much. I'm in my corset, leather vest, and elaborate headdress with seed pods and feathers. At some point in the party, we drift into conversation, sprawled on the floor in one of the social rooms, and then our thighs are pressed together, and then his hand is on mine...

...and at some point when we part, I'm laughing: "I thought you weren't interested!"

"What?"

The thing is that he is never on Facebook! (I checked while writing this; the last time he posted was in February. The time before that? Over a year ago.) And doesn't get notifications of FB messages. He had no clue. :)

So this time, I got his e-mail address. :)

When we met up for our first date, he cautioned me that he doesn't usually date. He does casual stuff, but if I was looking for a boyfriend, he was not where to look; his bond with his wife is so strong that he tends to just not form other bonds, and he's a homebody, and a date-every-week thing wasn't likely to happen. I told him, quite honestly, that that was fine. :) And we took up with each other. Casually.

Until we had a few weeks in a row when we didn't see each other and fell into each other's arms like long-lost lovers when we saw each other again.

Until someone at a party said "Wait, he actually leaves the house for you? He's never..."

Until he paused before leaving my house one date-day, and had this look when he looked back.

Until, finally, his amused/exasperated wife said "You can't stop talking about the gin Shira had you try, or the TV show she had you watch... Matthew. I think you might have a girlfriend."

He told me this while he was in the shower, through a frosted pane of glass, ending with "...would you be okay with that? Us actually being boyfriend and girlfriend?"

I slid the shower door open to grin at him. "Honey, you have a dedicated towel and toothbrush here. And I smile every time I walk past them."

So. Matthew, who doesn't date anyone, is dating me, and I am dating him, and together we have the kind of energy that makes random strangers grin at us on the street or when we greet each other at a restaurant. He is, above all else, playful. And adorable and adoring. When I had my bout of depression in April, one of the only things that consistently lifted me out of that flatline space was time with him.

He shines. I shine with him.

He is good for me. <3

I had a gathering recently that I'd had a bit of anxiety about, and he accompanied me, and we had a great time, and when he dropped me off home that night, he stopped me and kissed me again, and said "I'm so glad you pursued me, my Shira."

And he's on his way over right now, to accompany me to a night full of parties, and sleep over on the new bed he helped me build. I should go get ready. <3

EDIT: ...also he looks like Chris Evans as Captain America, but with dark hair and glasses, which make any person 20% hotter. But that kind of build. Also he volunteers with homeless kids and gives me amazing massages on bad pain days and he's just really nifty okay? okay.
shadesong: (Illyana/soulsword)
Saturday, August 29th, 2015 03:50 pm
On Thursday, I went to court to get the restraining order against my rapist renewed.

This time, he showed up.

I figured he would; he and his lawyer were aggressive during discussions re: the lawsuit about getting me to drop the restraining order. Which my lawyer told him I would not do. And since, he's been RSVPing to every publicly-viewable local Facebook event that I'm RSVPed to starting the day after the order was set to expire. Which sends a message.

So I went to court. He entered after me and, in an almost-empty courthouse, sat behind me. Directly behind me.

They eventually called our docket number, and we rose.

And I had to stand next to my rapist. Shaking, dry-mouthed. And the judge had me start from the beginning: what happened?

Your honor, he raped me. Two days later, he violently assaulted me. The police arrived at the end of that assault and took us to the courthouse, where he confessed, in detail, and that's when the restraining order against him was first put in place.

I'm tired of telling this story. Standing next to my unrepentant rapist while I told it was a new twist, certainly. But dear gods, I am tired of telling this story. Of saying it again and again to judges, to lawyers, to people who ask about it.

It's been two years. I have other stories now. Better stories. Stories that have nothing to do with him.

But while he continues to be unrepentant and vicious, to stalk and harass, I have to keep telling this story. And yeah. It's a way he gets to keep revictimizing me.

(He told the judge he was tired of looking over his shoulder. He's tired. Oh.)

My restraining order is renewed for another year.

Comments are closed on this post because I have nothing else to say about it. And I am going to immediately write a post about a story I like to tell. One without him in it.
shadesong: (Illyana/soulsword)
Wednesday, August 5th, 2015 09:11 am
And no longer waiting; obviously there's a lot of stuff I can neither confirm nor deny, but: I had goals. All of them were achieved.

And I finally bought a new bed, after these long two years. It's a canopy bed. We're going to adorn it with fairy lights and various accoutrements.

We're having a yardwork day on Saturday; rototilling and clearing out the back yard entirely, in preparation for doing intentional planting. We consulted a landscape design person to pick native, easy-care plants, and we're planning a few garden beds, an herb spiral, wildflowers, and a lot of berry bushes - currant, elderberry, blueberry, blackberry. And we've reserved room for a seating area. This will finally be usable space and not a source of stress!

But first, the tilling and the hauling, and if you want to/can help, you are welcome to! And if you happen to have bricks or stone lying around that we can use for the herb spiral, let us know!

And my audition for The Thing is Sunday. Meep!

But today's mission: synopsis. I have queried all the agents I think would be great fits who *don't* require one, and now I have this big list of great agents who *do*, and... I gotta get it done.

Writing a novel is easy. Writing a synopsis is hard.

But I must do it today, so I can then focus on my audition material for Sunday, the story that I started last week, and, hell, everything else.
shadesong: (Hearth)
Sunday, July 26th, 2015 09:35 am
I am still waiting.

But I dyed the tips of my hair a bright, vivid pink (that is fading, but we'll bring it back) and highlighted the rest of it. I have started the reclamation of my backyard; it's going to have berry bushes and a seating area and a raised bed and an herb spiral. I have, with my boyfriend's input, picked out my future new bed.

Readercon was; the ongoing waiting made it difficult, as it makes many things difficult. But I talked about a book that changed my life (Dhalgren) on a panel, and the man who wrote it (Samuel R. Delany) thanked me, genuinely, for my reading and appreciation of it. That was a big, big moment. And I read from the novel, and everyone really liked it and picked up on stuff I was doing and thought I was doing it really well.

Friday night, I went to a barbecue at the house of a friend who is new-ish, since The Incident. There's a before and after, you know. There are people who've only really known me since. He greeted me with a hug and told me there were kofta on the grill, the same recipe that another friend(/occasional lover) had brought to my Pig Cotillion, and I liked that there was just this ecosystem of parties. Aimee's realizing that, as she lives here, this very very large group of wonderful people that just form and reform in various configurations every weekend, sometimes with the transmission of recipes. I am happy to be here.

And then we went to a burlesque/comedy/variety show, where I saw some of my favorite performers, and the people who knew about the Intimidating Thing I'm attempting (more on that after my audition!) (no, it is not dancing!) were so enthusiastic about me attempting it and so happy that I just felt... tremendously supported.

And seen.

(Witness me!)

I am excited about the New Horizons mission to Pluto. I'm reading a lot. I'm knitting a lot. I will, this week, have my first writing time since March, and I have a story demanding to get out. Before that writing time, I have a date-day with my boyfriend, who is sort of miraculously my boyfriend. He decided he didn't need a code name, and then the potential code names started emerging: Golden Retriever Boyfriend, Farmboy, etc. Matthew. He's Matthew, and one of the things about him is that he is joyful. I have to write about him more, and other people I'm on various paths with. I haven't been writing here because it feels like I have to have Large Things to say and I have the one background Large Thing and then I have smaller things. I should talk about the smaller things more.

It's been a busy and active weekend, and today I'll be resting, because tonight I'm going to a show, and tomorrow is Matthew, and on Tuesday I'll start writing "The Hollow" and will hope it doesn't insist on being a novel. (Everything wants to be a novel know that I know that I can write a novel.)

Wearing: The tank top and underpants I slept in.
Reading: On the Move by Oliver Sacks
Writing: "The Hollow", soon
Knitting: Dewberry in hot pink for Elayna; just finished a Through the Loops MKAL.
Planning: A week of writing. An Intimidating Thing. Buying my new bed, hopefully soon.
shadesong: (Creating Yourself)
Thursday, July 9th, 2015 01:56 pm
Copy/pasting this directly from my pro blog.

...this one is personal.

I saw a call for stories dealing with the concept of institutions. The call was deliberately loosely defined; a story about the institution of marriage, say, would have fit. But my brain kept cycling back to something and saying "maybe it's time." And would not let it go.

I grew up in the 80s. Toward the middle and end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s, there was a horrific trend. If your child did not conform, and you had good health insurance, you could put them into an adolescent treatment center.

Junior loony bin, we called it on the inside.

There's a song about it, even.



I have so much more to write, about that and things like it. This is just a glimpse. Some of my stories are pretty autobiographical. This one? I don't have any ink. But.

And I shan't tell you more; go read.

"Never Chose This Way" was published in Apex Magazine in July 2015.
shadesong: (Hearth)
Monday, June 29th, 2015 09:07 am
Readercon is July 9-12!

Friday
1:30 PM Reading: Shira Lipkin. Shira Lipkin reads a forthcoming short story.

4:00 PM Dhalgren at 40. Jim Freund, Max Gladstone, Elizabeth Hand (leader), Shira Lipkin, John Stevens.
Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren was first published in 1975. It is now widely considered a classic, yet there is also the perception that it is a "difficult" book. How much has it influenced other authors and works? Does its dream-city serve as a predecessor for more recent fantastical places such as Ambergris or New Crobuzon? How have its experiments with the form of the narrative inspired more recent works? And how might a reader approach it for the first time from the vantage point of 2015?

7:00 PM Kaffeeklatsch. Yoon Lee, Shira Lipkin.


Saturday
10:00 AM Successfully Writing About Horrible Things. Mike Allen, Catt Kingsgrave, Shira Lipkin, Kate Nepveu (leader), Patty Templeton.
If you're not writing horror but your plot calls for something horrific to happen to a character, how do you handle it? You might go overboard and be detailed to the point of undermining or derailing the narrative, or might be so vague that the horrific event has little effect on the reader or the story. A reader who's been through a similar experience might be offended or distressed by a description of awfulness that's lurid, gratuitous, clichéd, or bland. What strategies can writers use to help readers empathize with the characters' suffering and build stories that respectfully handle the consequences of terrible events, without falling into these traps?

1:00 PM In Memoriam YA Fiction Book Club: Hat Full of Sky. Stacie Hanes, Victoria Janssen, Shira Lipkin, Rachel Steiger-Meister, Emily Wagner. The second book in the Tiffany Aching series sees Pratchett's young heroine ready to begin her magical apprenticeship, which goes nothing like she expects and leads to trouble, especially with other young witches-in-training. What she doesn't know is that something insidious is coming after her, and none of the other witches can help. We wanted to do something to mark the death of genre giant Pratchett, and while any of his books would be worth talking about, the Tiffany Aching series is some of his most thoughtful work. The adventures of a young girl learning what it means to be a witch speak deeply to readers, as she demystifies some aspects of witchery and finds deeper mysteries of life and magic in others, all while learning to be clever, kind, and brave. Readers of all ages are welcome to join the conversation.


Yay for a light schedule, and yay for this being the last con I have to do this year. (Didn't do Boskone or Vericon, and won't be doing PiCon; consciously cutting back.) As usual, if you do nothing else, please come to the reading and/or kaffeeklatsch!
shadesong: (Illyana/soulsword)
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2015 06:27 am
This is an interesting thing about batterer's intervention programs in the state of Massachusetts. I recommend that you check it out! Of particular interest, though not mentioned on the Mass.Gov site, is the fact that in order to begin a batterer's intervention program, the perpetrator must confess to the abuse. Not just "my partner/ex claims I did X," but "I did X, Y, and Z to my partner/ex." Treatment only works when the perpetrator is actually working on it. It's not a process one can lie their way through. Which is why the success rate is high (see study info on that site). And which is also why, if a perpetrator is attending a program of this sort, they might take measures to keep their victim from stating that they're doing so: it is an admission of guilt. Obviously this is the second-most-desirable outcome in an intimate partner violence/sexual violence case - the most desirable, of course, being jail time, but a) that's a different system, criminal rather than civil, and b) only 6% of rapists ever go to jail, and that statistic includes *all* rapists; it's much lower for rapists who were in a relationship with their victims, who only rarely even get arrested, let alone tried and convicted.

Obviously, as someone who's been speaking about sexual violence on The Internets since 2002 and who's been volunteering at their local rape crisis center since '08 - go BARCC! - this is stuff that is of interest to me. People who've known me for a while will also recall that I've been planning to write a book about how to dismantle rape culture in your free time. That's mutated a bit, and will now be more about intimate partner violence; I feel like that's a useful place to focus, given its prevalence in the number of incidents of sexual violence and its shockingly low rate of prosecution. That'll be my summer/fall nonfiction writing project. I might post a few things like this here and there as my research continues. I look forward to telling you lot more about it in January.

(Comments closed for now because my parents, sister, and niece are in town and monopolizing my time; I only get ~5 minutes at a computer every day, and thus cannot moderate.)
shadesong: (Hearth)
Thursday, June 11th, 2015 05:34 pm
Last night, I went to a Buffy-themed burlesque show.

I've been going to a lot of burlesque shows! It is awesome fun in a way I'll write about elsetime. And since Aimee moved in a few weeks ago, I've been dressing up for them more and more. (That move, by the way? Totally awesome. Best housemate.) Last night, I wore the big pink ballgown Adam got for me on Freecycle and went as prom!Buffy with Aimee's Faith and Adam's Oz (with the "GOD" nametag - Adam's first dress-up!).

Aimee and I won the costume contest, but this isn't about that, it's about an interaction I had after the show. A woman said to me "I got turned around coming out of the T station and didn't know how to get to the venue, but then I saw you and thought 'Well, I'll just follow Buffy!'" And I loved that, and I've been thinking about why I loved that.

It ties in to how I went full ludicrous with my clothes at times at Wiscon. If you didn't see on Facebook: I got an ankle-length silver sequined coat thing at the clothing swap, and a velvet dress slit up to THERE, and a black faux fur cape, and I combined all of that with the mesh-sleeved shirt and the vinyl/lace/chained/studded bolero I brought with me. I was told that I spent the con moving through stages of David Bowie. :) And I wore that ballgown to an 80s prom at Legoland the day before Wiscon, and did 70s key party realness for a theme party the Saturday after Readercon. I bought a feather collar/cape. I have The Mermaid Dress, which I'll be wearing to a faerie-themed party on Saturday.

I had a date with Ten today, which was absolutely wonderful in so many ways. One of those ways: my schedule has been jam-packed, too much gogogogogo, and I slow down when I'm with Ten. I get grounded. We have the spaces between the notes.

But also, we have great conversations, and we were talking about many things today, an intersection of which was him saying "that's why people are drawn to you - because if the music is good, you're on the floor. You don't need anyone else to get there first to make it okay for you. You make it okay for them."

My not-fully-formed tipsy thought on Facebook last night was "I will be the outlandishly dressed person who lights the path." And: yes. I have not always been that. I have had that shyness, that difficulty stepping out, being first. But now that I know - I have been learning for a while now - how wonderful it feels to step out and beckon to others, to give them permission to be a little silly by being a lot silly... (EDIT: As an example: At Legoland's 80s prom, Ten and I did a spontaneous interpretive dance to "Total Eclipse of the Heart". FULL DRAMA.)

I'm happy with it.

I'm happy.

I've been quiet here because the case against Judah has been grinding me to paste. He and his lawyer have been doing a lot of stuff that's retraumatized me. April, in particular, was a nightmare of situational depression. I had a lot of days when I did not feel capable of living. I had to tell myself "okay, you need to do two things today: you need to walk the dog when he needs walking, and you need to eat three meals. If that's all you can do today, that's okay. But you have to do those things." I knew this was temporary. I knew that it would end. I just had to be patient and not be angry at myself and my brain and body for having this reaction to horrific stress. And many days in April, that really was all I got done in any day. Walking the dog, and eating three meals. But I did it. Every day. And I emerged.

I emerged angry, due to particularly heinous Judah shenanigans. And I emerged into a horrendously busy month, a Red Queen's race, where I had weeks like "Wednesday: Elayna moves into her new apartment. Friday: Aimee moves in." And then, days later, Wiscon, and I have been running.

I have been determined.

I may be quiet about Judah stuff for a little while. This post is your warrant canary. If I am, know that you can ask Adam. Or Aimee. Or anyone, really. If I am, know that it's because it's the best route to achieve my goals. And know that I will eventually tell you everything.

But that is the one thorn in my life right now. I look forward to its removal.

I'm sipping sweet tea with mint today. Aimee made it, using leftover mint from a bunch a lovely friend brought over to our Pig Cotillion on Saturday - our biggest and best party ever. Eight hours of barbecue and the perfect coconut layer cake, mint juleps and Sazeracs, people from all over our social circles having a blast. I won that Buffy costume contest with Aimee, and I won a Sparkle Spelling Bee with Toby last week. (The day before that, I was actually onstage for a dancer-friend's burlesque routine, but that's a different story.) Aimee is fitting perfectly into our household - she and Adam could geek out together about horror movies for hours. I had an amazing date with Ten. I'm going to a party on Saturday night at Matthew's house. Matthew, who said he doesn't tend to date, but who now looks at me in absolute delight and wonder sometimes and says half to himself, "You're my girlfriend!" I am seeing so many of my favorite people; Ten said today that he was excited to meet Mink on Saturday, because he knows she's one of my Important People. And all of my Important People have such affection for each other...

My tiny dog is sprawled next to me, and it's a quiet June afternoon, and my wonderful husband will be home soon.

This is what I've been up to. Running. Fighting. Living. Glittering all over the place. Loving. Being the first person on the dance floor. Reaching out my hand - join me.

Hi.
shadesong: (Hearth)
Wednesday, May 6th, 2015 09:27 am
As usual, I'll be staffing the Interstitial Arts Foundation's "Coffee, Tea, and Subversion" table during the Gathering! Come say hi! Other than that...

Friday, 4:00pm: Imaginary Book Club
Five panelists discuss books that don't exist, improvising critiques and responses. This year might include: Ann Leckie's Star Trek tie-in book Ancillary Enterprise; N.K. Jemisin's run writing Wonder Womanfor DC; and the new reissue of Neal Stephenson's previously out-of-print vampire romance, BIETME.

Saturday, 10:00am: Parenting Beyond the Binary
Progressive parents are aware that gender is far more than a simple spectrum, but schools and peer groups of one's children may not have that same knowledge. In a society that seems fascinated with shoving ever-narrower expectations of gender upon the current crop of under-10s, what can those of us who lived through the gender-bending 1980s do in our parenting to nurture a healthy attitude in the kidlings under our care?

Saturday, 1:00pm: Spindles and Spitfire: A Reading
Join us for sinister whimsy, folkloric sensibilities, dark humor, and SNACKS! Gwynne Garfinkle is a red headed hellion who will capture your heart and put it in a jar above her writing desk. Nicole Kornher-Stace will drag you to bridges made of the dead, and you'll thank her for it. Shira Lipkin has returned from the castle beyond the goblin city. She brought you a present. Patty Templeton misses the ghosts that used to keep her up at night.

Sunday, 1:00pm: Intersections of Class and Disability
While they can play out differently, many of the assumptions faced by people with disabilities are similar to the assumptions regarding working class and poorer families: that our problems are our own fault, that we are simply lazy, that we just do not know how to eat right or take care of ourselves, that we are less fit to parent children, and so on. What happens in the spaces where these two categories overlap? How do race and class intersect with disability issues like accessibility and access to medical care and accurate diagnoses?

Sunday, 2:30pm: Intersectional Body-Positivity
Body positivity comes in many forms, but some mainstream attempts at defining or championing it end up pissing on one group even as they attempt to make another feel better. Body-positivity is not only about fat acceptance, it's also about accepting yourself at any size. It's about acceptance of all trans people with gender-nontypical bodies, and their right to identify in ways "contradicted" by their physicality. How can we support all people in finding their embodiment awesome? What does that look like?


I am, as always, totally going to Geekeoke and the Floomp. I don't have my meals scheduled yet, so if you want to do lunch or dinner (or breakfast, so long as it's at Short Stack Cafe, which has GF pancakes and cheesy grits!), let me know!
shadesong: (Hearth)
Monday, May 4th, 2015 08:03 am
Originally posted by [livejournal.com profile] time_shark at The CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 5 Kickstarter is alive

Last week I launched a new Kickstarter campaign to fund Clockwork Phoenix 5, which I hope will be the next installment in our critically-acclaimed, award-nominated flagship anthology series.

 

With the costs of shipping and printing having risen, and the professional standard payment for fiction also having risen, my funding goal for this new book is pretty epic, $11,000. But we’re six days in and more than 1/5 of the way to the goal, so we’re off to a promising start!

 

CP5_cover_mockup_smallThis campaign has been in the works for months; I haven’t made a secret of it. I hope folks can forgive the social media barrage that I now need to generate to properly promote this project. But man, I sure to want to get this project secured so I can put together a book worthy of Paula Arwen Owen’s amazing cover.

 

So as of this writing we have 24 days to go and we’re 23% of the way to our goal. I have stretch goals I’m hoping to deploy but first we gotta get past the long haul to fully funded — and by the way, as soon as we reach that goal, I will open the book to submissions, even if the campaign still has time left.

 

I hope you’ll check out the cool rewards we have to offer; there’s a lot, and I’m going to be adding even more as we proceed.

 

I’m also going to be holding giveaways as we go along to add additional grease to the machine. You gotta be a backer to be entered. These are what I’ve got planned so far:

 



And that won’t be all. Stay tuned!

 

In the meantime, I hope you’ll check out our Kickstarter page and consider pledging. And I also hope you’ll spread the word, as we need all the help we can get, heh.

 

#SFWApro

 


Originally published at Mythic Delirium Books. You can comment here or there.

shadesong: (Hearth)
Friday, April 3rd, 2015 02:08 pm
As proof of "still alive, just busy life":

Yesterday:
* Right after posting, got a request for the full manuscript from an OMG dream agent. Ran around in circles, babbled incoherently to people on Gchat, sent manuscript when I could be coherent. :)
* Got an e-mail I'd been waiting for for a long time that I'll be able to talk about soon, but it is large.
* Date afternoon with Ten! <3
* I'm trying to step out of my comfort zone with regard to going to things alone, so I went to this; it was super great, and I got to talk more to people I know from other shows and make new friends. :)

Today was errand day because it is warm enough out!
* Post office to mail packages to Elayna and [livejournal.com profile] ashlyme
* CVS to pick up two of my three prescriptions
* Library, where apparently the librarians recognize me on sight. We might check out a lot of books.

And now I'm home, where next I'll wrap Adam's birthday gifts, shower, and make something for the Texas BBQ seder I'm going to tonight!
shadesong: (Hearth)
Thursday, April 2nd, 2015 09:44 am
Not dead yet, I promise. :)

So on Monday, I sent out query letters.

I finished the book late last year, finished revising it this January? February?, sent it to beta readers and got feedback - and the feedback was mostly "this is ready now", with a few individual questions and two typos noted. (Individual questions are okay - what I was looking for was "do a bunch of readers not understand how we get from A to B? because if that is the case, I failed to make it clear and need to fix it.")

I... had very little to fix. Which was disconcerting.

Scrabbled about and agonized over a title, because the working title is good as a shorthand but terrible as a title for a book in stores. Found one that works. Agonized over a query letter.

The thing is that I use humor as a way to defuse stressful things, so I could not get past a wacky jocular tone for it. Which would be fine if it was a funny book. It is not, in fact, a funny book, although it has some funny bits in it.

So Adam, who'd been researching How To Write a Query Letter right alongside me, turned to me and said "Do you want me to-" and I said "I WAS JUST GOING TO ASK YOU." Because that way he could get the tone right, and I could go over it and see what was omg Adam no wrong and what else really needed to be in there. Altogether, we turned out what I hope is the perfect query letter in not much time.

And I sent it out. With personalized bits for the agents in question and excerpts of the requested length et cetera et cetera and now? Now the entire process is out of my hands.

So that's where that is.

I have a lot of other stuff going on! But every time I think about what to write, I find that thing X bleeds into thing Y which affects thing Z and it's not all coalesced yet. I am having a lot of thoughts, basically. And a lot of them tie into the book and why I've been procrastinating over it quite so much! But I wanted to post something. :)

Not dead. Quite busy. Deep in thought.

EDIT: And just got a request for the full manuscript from a freaking dream agent. *hyperventilates*
shadesong: (Hearth)
Monday, March 23rd, 2015 09:39 am
It is here! *throws confetti* For your reading pleasure.



“Musicide” – E. H. Brogan

“Blood and Honey” – Andrew Watson

“The Animals, Who Are In Your Mouth” – Vajra Chandrasekera

“Drowned City” – Ruth Jenkins

“Bones” – Amy Fant

“Among the Dead” – Lev Mirov

“The Occupation of Millers Creek” – Robyn Groth

“On the Tree” – Alexandra Seidel

“Myth of the Mother Snake” – Carrie Cuinn

“Merlusine” – Nin Harris
shadesong: (MLP: Pinkie So Excited)
Monday, March 2nd, 2015 07:14 am
Hallo! It is my birthday! *throws glitter confetti*

What do I want for my birthday? I want you to sponsor me in the BARCC Walk for Change! Help BARCC help survivors!

You can also sign up to walk with me and Adam on Team Venture!

I went up to Burlington, VT for pre-birthday shenanigans... a birthday party, [livejournal.com profile] gizmometer's show, a brunch, Dobra Tea, many friends and lovers old and new. <3 Low-key day today because yesterday was travel, but I have fun planned for the rest of the week and another party Saturday. <3 It's a good life.
shadesong: (Nicodemus!)
Tuesday, February 24th, 2015 09:48 am
Just scrolled back to see if I'd talked about the current group of pets in any depth, and I really haven't. Last year had lots of things in it!

I know I've talked about Nicky. Adopting him continues to have been one of my best decisions ever. <3 He's snoring delicately in my lap right now. Sweetest boy! He's grown more and more comfortable with new people... the guy who doesn't have a code name yet (EDIT: Matthew has decided he doesn't require a code name, although the disambiguation promises to be hilarious - not Ashlyme, not Mangosteen, the other Matthew!) immediately joined the exclusive club of people that Nicky instantly adores. Flopping over on his lap begging for pets. Adorable. Nick's a happy boy. <3

Bash is still a Murder Cat. And an expensive one - we spent over a thousand dollars on his cornea late last year! >.< He's better now, and he'd better stay that way. We've had him almost two years now. The belly is only sometimes a trap.

We got Whisper on Mother's Day last year, a long-distance gift from my parents. After years of maintaining a three-cat household, having just two pets felt weird! Whisper was Elayna's choice... I wanted a feistier cat or a lap cat, but the shelter wasn't sure about giving a feisty one to a household that had a 13-year-old cat. Bash is feisty! *pout* But Whisper utterly charmed Elayna, and gradually but definitely became her cat. I have told her that when she moves into her first apartment after college and takes Whisper, she owes me a cat. Whisper is given to surprise episodes of lap-catting and very firm head-butts from behind.

And then there's Charlotte, the baby of the bunch at ~2 1/2. Friends in NYC had to rehome her because she needed more constant companionship than they could give her. She's happy here; she often perches on my file cabinet when I'm in here working, and on the mantel when I'm in the living room. She is *not* a lap cat, but she *is* a snuggler when one is horizontal. She is soft and pretty and deeply uncertain about hugs, and peeps wonderfully. She and Whisper do not love each other. :/ We were looking into rehoming her because of all the fighting, but thankfully they dialed that back. Now they just choose to not be on the same floor of the house as each other.

And that is the current makeup of our household! Plus me and Adam and, soon, [livejournal.com profile] fairylogic.