Toronto, Day 175

My day counting app also informs me that it has been 696 days since Kelly and I left for Italy. Man, I want to go back! It has even been just shy of a year (321 days, to be precise) since our last real vacation, a family gathering in Reno.

It feels like a year since Christmas. It’s a bit cold today, and the forecast gives us a 1 in 3 chance of snow. But apparently Toronto is like Vancouver in that the closer you are to downtown and the water, the less likely it is to give forth with what K calls the space lice. Even so, Glenn Gould is setting his cap against the wind:

All Imported-371

A recent post by Snuffy about strategies for battling the blues (my phrase, not hers, and an oversimplification at that) heightened my awareness that there has been a lot of dull monastic virtue going on in the Dua household of late. We’re eating right and flossing and going to yoga. Early to bed, early to rise. With lots of work in between. I’ve gotten the copy-edits finished. I sent a story off yesterday. I’m about to embark on fifteen critiques for the current Novel I class.

This is the sort of lifestyle that leads to shit getting done but also sometimes, a general feelings of being unfabulous.

But tonight we’re going to partake, for good or ill, of Thor: The Dark World. Tomorrow there’s a Met in HD opera, Wednesday there’s the monthly ChiSeries reading, and next week we’re seeing Eddie Izzard.

Video reading: “Faces of Gemini,” in Super Stories of Heroes and Villains

SuperHeroes_BookpgeI have been shamefully lax about telling you all more a little about Super Stories of Heroes & Villains, which came out earlier this year. Claude Lalumiere edited this anthology for Tachyon Publications, and it’s got stories by George R.R. Martin, Camille Alexa, Paul Di Filippo, Gene Wolfe, Cory Doctorow, Carol Emshwiller, and so many others that it’s all I can do not to just cut and paste the table of contents at you. Including me–“Faces of Gemini” is in it.

Book blogger Tabitha the Pabkins of My Shelf Confessions is reading excerpts of a number of the super stories on Youtube. Here’s mine:

http://youtu.be/2SViXNf1f9s

Xander is Heroic! Hey, #Buffyrewatch, that’s not news…

slayerI have reached the end of Season 6 on the Buffy Rewatch, so this week’s write-up is all about Evil Veiny Willow versus her friends.

I am a few weeks ahead of these essays, which means I’ve just watched the third ep of S7, “Same Time, Same Place.” This means I’ve got something like 18 episodes left: eighteen weeks, which seems at once a very long and a very short period of time.

People have asked over at Tor, so I should say it here too: I have no plans to jump into an Angel rewatch, or to do the comic seasons that follow “Chosen.” In some ways I do find the idea appealing, but I didn’t love Angel enough to do it justice, and the people who regularly read and comment on the column have convinced me I’ll be happier with Buffy, as a story which I’ve consumed and loved, if I stay far far away from Seasons 7 and 8.

Feel free to go there and have a go at changing my mind–you’ve got four months! But if you know me, you probably also know that once I make a decision I cling to it like something very clingy. A barnacle?

Toronto, Day 171

I haven’t been posting much lately, and haven’t had the urge to post much, to be truthful. Some of that’s probably about Minnow’s having died; it’s the sort of thing that makes one turn inward, at least if that one is me. There’s also the fact that a few of the most dramatic things going on here are too personal to share, because of the other people involved. Or they’re work-related, and confidential as a result.

Having said that, it’s generally true that life is good and I am well. And I hope to just magically end up in a more communicative space soon, as time passes, things happen, and I get ’round to photodocumenting my every move once again.

In the meantime, here’s a picture from Nuit Blanche. Did I show you this already? I loved this installation, which was called Tanks, 2013:

Nuit Blanche Toronto 2013