Sunburst Photo Shoot

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Every now and then I will be at a wine event with kelly-yoyoKelly and someone will look down to the region below my chin, and say, “I know you, don’t I?” Or, perhaps, in a sort of questioning voice, they’ll go: “I’ve seen those, um, spots… before?”

To which I reply, “Oh, yes, they’ve been the guest cleavage on the Full Bodied Wine Blog a few times.” Because by they, you understand, the other party doesn’t actually mean the spots.

Anyway. My Sunburst Award arrived in the mail on Friday, to much excitement. I promptly threw on a nice top and went out on the deck for a photo shoot. Here’s me, unpacking the beautiful medallion with my usual ladylike delicacy, and then posing with it and the spots, in a more SFnal and less wine-soaked context.

And the agony of Dee Cineloathing

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I put Appaloosa on the Ziplist for two reasons:

First, it’s a Western featuring Viggo Mortensen, who can sometimes act and always ride, two things I approve of.

Second: One of my all time favorite movies is Silverado, and I’m always looking for something that has that same kind of goodness.

This is perhaps futile, given the bravura ensemble cast of Silverado–Danny Glover, Kevin Kline, John Cleese, Linda Hunt, and (in defiance of his usual tendency to fall into the worst script ever) Scott Glenn–and the awsome direction of Lawrence Kasdan.

The quest for another good Western Love has led to some dark moments in Dua filmwatching: Hidalgo might be as good as it’s gotten. We watched The Quick & The Dead with Sharon Stone, though I should admit that I did howl with glee at the sheer tackiness of its ending. We watched all of 3:10 to Yuma, Chaos knows why. And we made it to the dust dull what the hell end of Appaloosa too. We came away with a bad case of cineloathing and a realization: perhaps it’s the Silverado effect, but we don’t turn bad Westerns off. We turn off bad other stuff–dramas, comedies, SF–even when we like the artists involved. But not Westerns. What is that all about? I don’t know, but it’s on the To Learn list now.

What can’t you turn off?


Spiders

Finally, Thursday THE RAIN GARDEN words: 927, for a total of 31441.
Friday: 1044, total 32485
Saturday: 1134, total 33619. I am happy with this rate of progress. All my characters are in free-fall now… I expect to have good momentum until they hit bottom.

The thrill of Tee Victory

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The cop show Blue Bloods is the new thing we are picking up this season: it tells the story of one Irish-Catholic family in New York who are all in the justice biz. Tom Selleck is the widower patriarch of the clan; he’s also the police commissioner. Donnie Wahlberg is his loose-cannon eldest, and has made detective. Actors I don’t know by name or sight fill out the roles of A.D.A. Daughter and uniformed Rookie. There’s a martyred son in the mix, Donnie’s married with kids, and a cranky Grandpa too.

Two weeks in, the verdict is… promising. There are a lot of undercurrents: old fights and new ones, family love and loyalty and work obligations clashing, and of course, a crime of the week. Also, the pilot had some nicely stylish direction and camera work.

It ain’t Boomtown, but I can’t keep holding that against new crime TV forever, now can I?

Anyone make a great new discovery this season?

In other news: Wednesday’s THE RAIN GARDEN words: 813

Scattered blogging, with a high chance of gratitude

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A few announcements: First, I have tried to thank each and every person who wrote, commented, or DMed me to say congratulations on the Sunburst Award. If I missed you somehow, sorry, and thank you! Word is continuing to ripple out… I especially liked Megabest characterizing it as a “suburban thriller“. The Quill and Quire chose to note the presence of Robert Charles Wilson, Cory Doctorow and several other ‘name authors’ on the ballot. I get what they mean, but Hey, QQDudes! Not only do I have a name, it’s so long it doesn’t fit in the Revenue Canada computers. (Seriously. The full moniker is Alyxandra Margaret and it’s one character too long for their name fields. I have been filed as Dellamonic for years.)

Speaking of names, I also have been remiss in congratulating the brilliant Hiromi Goto, who got the Sunburst in the Young Adult category for Half World, as well as those other amazing folks on the short list: Cory, Robert, Charles de Lint, and Karl Schroeder, all, curiously enough, for books published by TOR. And, finally, the Sunburst jury itself: thank you, so much!

Moving on, I have one slot left in my next UCLA class, “Creating Universes, Building Worlds,” which focuses on short fiction in any of the fantastic genres. The syllabus is online, and previous students are, as always, welcome to join us again.

Work on The Rain Garden proceeds apace, pace being somewhere between 900-1200 words a day. I write longhand and transcribe as it’s convenient, and it hasn’t been for a couple days; when it is, I’ll catch you up. In the meantime, posting word counts in this fashion keeps me chugging along… so once again, I thank you.

And a warning: I posted a spider shot a couple days ago and there will be more. kelly-yoyoKelly and I have taken up our autumn practice of noting all the orb weaver webs along our morning route–we don’t formally count them all that often, just admire. But we call it the Spidercount, we began really looking this morning, and they are huge, well fed and ambitious. By Halloween the 2010 spidery biomass bids fair to be immense. So, if you are in East Van and can deal with spiders at all, I recommend a stroll down the Central Valley Greenway. They are wonders of nature and the webs are amazing to behold.

But today I give you a pigeon who’s really got somewhere to be:
Seawall