Category: blog

News and reviews

Catching up on word-spreading…

If you’re in the Seattle area, please join me and Nicola on May 8 at a reading of Lambda Literary Award finalists at Elliott Bay Books. Nicola will be MC’ing the event, and we’re looking forward to an evening of great fiction and poetry, and a chance to spend time with readers and writers. It’ll be fun!

It’s been three months since Small Beer Press re-published Solitaire, and I’ve been thrilled by the response. When the book first came out in 2002, blogging wasn’t as widespread as it is now, and bloggers certainly weren’t as influential in building buzz. I adore bloggers. Adore. And I’m most grateful to everyone who has taken time to read the book, think about it, and talk about it online.

Here’s an interview at The Daily Monocle, which I very much enjoyed doing — it includes a question I’ve never been asked before!

Edited to add, in the spirit of completeness: you can also find recent interviews at The Big Idea and Lambda Literary.

Enjoy your day.

In which the editor sits in the sun

It has been winter, my most silent season.

I am not a fan of cold weather, my four years in New Hampshire and five in Chicago notwithstanding. Winter is the time of short dark days and old hard anniversaries, the time when it seems people are more likely to turn in and turn away. Being cold is such a functional metaphor for me: I am more likely to freeze in place, to become frosty in a moment, to hunker down and pull the blankets over my head, to breathe more shallowly.

Cold is a meta-metaphor! Oh my, and see what happens? Spring arrives and I get punchy.

And in fact, yesterday, spring sprung. Of course we have sunny days in winter, but they’re, you know, cold… And then came yesterday, and the well of sun on our kitchen deck filled with light warm enough to sit in for a half hour. And so I did. I edited my current Sterling Editing project (*waves at client — it’s all going fine!*) and drank a lovely cup of tea and listened to birdsong in the ravine.


 

 
Blankets off. My internet door is open. I hope all is well with you whether you are coming or going from winter to summer, and that you enjoy your day at whatever temperature you may find it.

Interview at LambdaLiterary.org

Many thanks to Diana Denza and LambdaLiterary.org for the chance to do this interview about Solitaire. I enjoyed it. If you like it, please feel free to leave a comment over at Lambda Literary.

    And if you read the interview and came here to find out more about me, welcome! Help yourself to free fiction here on the site:

  • The first chapter of Solitaire

Enjoy.

Today’s random internet gift

I am super busy, the kind of busy where I’m pretty much riding the 50-foot wave by sheer dint of staying cheerful, playing lots of 80’s and/or dance music, and just hanging ten. Strong toes, me! But every once in a while I look around to see what the internet is doing, and look what it brought me just now!

Friends, I give you the Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator.

I am a Gladwell fan, and I find this site almost unbearably funny. Perhaps that’s only because sleep isn’t really a big part of my life right now, or maybe it’s just because it’s hysterical. The story is that a comedian/copywriter named Cory Bortnicker built it in 3 days (hah, I’ll bet he knows a thing or two about the 50-foot wave…)

Do enjoy. I’ll be back soon!

My hands would speak music

I studied ASL and Deaf culture for three years with Deaf instructors and my kick-ass interpreter friend Pam. I don’t have many Deaf friends anymore, and I am losing the language, both of which I find distressing. But I am glad to have studied so intensively, and learned so much — not just language and grammar, but also culture and perspective. I don’t know if I would have made a good interpreter: I like to think I would, but it’s huge work to do, and I wonder if I would have been able to stretch myself to meet it.

Still, in an alternate lifestream, I went on from my studies to work with Pam as my mentor to become a performance interpreter. In that lifestream, I am standing on the floor of Key Arena interpreting David Bowie or U2, or in the intimate space of the Triple Door (lovely club here in Seattle) with Suzanne Vega or… well, but that’s another lifetime.

Still, you may imagine my glee at finding this: a woman’s final exam for a college ASL course.

Totally NSFW. Totally fun. I love my life, but things like this make me imagine lives not lived, and smile at how cool they would have been.
 

 
Enjoy your day.

It’s all right when you’re with friends

I can’t post the video here because Warner Music is being particularly high-handed (and, should I add, stoooopid — let the music spread, dudes, people will buy more), but if you follow the link you’ll find The Traveling Wilburys singing End of the Line. Great song, great video.

I am thinking about journeys. I hope I will always have people I love to ride the rails with me.

Happy trails to my friend Zack.

Hacked

To the Russian hackers who think it’s fun to redirect someone’s website with hundreds of .htaccess files buried in every single goddamn subdirectory, all of them updatable and executable remotely so that missing even one means that the whole thing can reproprogate the next time you wander by? Fuck you.

I’ll be taking it up with my site host, of course, but in the meantime I have spent hours on this, twice, and I am not a happy camper. I don’t understand this kind of random, superficial malice, and I think the people who go on this kind of spree are childish, because it is the way of children to hurt things that can’t fight back. Work out your issues, dude, and leave my site alone.

My apologies to all who came by and found no one home. I’m here, really! I’m five hours behind, but I’m here.