The comments go into unnerving detail about removing arrows-- much detail about historical methods, and firm advice about letting professionals do it these days.

Read down, and you'll find details about medieval beliefs that the nobles and peasants needed different foods and medicines. Anyone know if this is something medieval people really believed?

Also, you can keep wolves away from mammoth meat by using yogurt.

The comic is good too, but this is one of the rare times when the comments are better.

ETA: More about arrow wounds, plus explaining why wooden cutting boards are more sanitary than plastic.

This entry was posted at http://nancylebov.dreamwidth.org/541966.html. Comments are welcome here or there. comments so far on that entry.

A quiet day to roar ahead on Second Draft. All the sub-plots of Mr. J Goes to Washington (working title) are coming together more clearly - in rough draft, I'm often still thinking things through, so there's a lot of obvious re-stating of things, and rambling conversations that don't go anywhere. (This is the reason people re-write!)

Since January sort of stumbles into the murder-mystery part while he's investigating (for pay) the disappearance of a mathematician, the story is basically two cases: body-snatching and secret codes on one side, and early baseball, slavery, and loving inappropriate people on the other. The trick for me is to make both cases very clear and un-confusing to follow.

A lot to do, since starting tomorrow I'll have a boatload of research-papers to read through, and finals after that. It's a time of gray mornings, when the red flowers outside the study window seem blazingly bright. MAJOR kitty drama continues, with yowling, hissing, cat-fights and harsh language.

I look forward to summer, when I get to clean up after the Easter luncheon.

Originally published at Peak Amygdala. You can comment here or there.

I finally bit the bullet this past week and started work on a bibliography page for the website.  It’s edifying and somewhat scary to look at a listing of one’s work and realize how much has (and hasn’t) been happening, especially in a writing career like mine which is punctuated by fits and starts.

Fact # 1: From 1992-1998, I wrote a lot of stuff.  Nonfiction stuff.  Most of it was unpaid, in little Portland political zines.  But I’d started writing things for a couple of paying markets except, unfortunately, in one case the editorial perspective changed and the market was no longer interested in a regular column about the Catholic internet.  And then life intervened, in a couple of different forms.  I started making money off the colored stone bead hobby and that started to suck up my serious marketing focus (when I wasn’t busy raising the son and dealing with the beginnings of the educational issues around his high functioning autism).

Jewelry went to pieces after 9/11 because my business was primarily mail-order and online.  Um.  Yeah.  And then, after that, I started intensifying a freelance clerical/bookkeeping business, then went to school to get a teaching certificate.

And all the stuff tied in with that.

Recent sales are primarily fiction, with the exception of four blog posts that, again, appear to have had some editorial changes going on (that combined with another bout of Real Life has put that aspect of writing on temporary hold).  It’s ironic that my first published piece of nonfiction was about my early adventures with the son in special education, dang near twenty years ago.  Gee, twenty years ago who’d have thunk that I’d now be a special ed teacher?

Going back and looking over what I wrote in that six year period, and now looking at what I’m doing now is eye-opening.  It reminds me that yes, I can produce good writing on a variety of subjects and that yes, I can write political stuff.  I’m thinking very hard about reprinting some of those early political articles in e-book form, because while some are dated, others most definitely are not.

Fascinating stuff.  All I need to add now are the Writers of the Future placements and the Anthology Builder contest placement.  And keep the dang thing updated.  I was in a panic because I thought I was going to have to key in all those articles from 1992-1998.  Well, fortunately, I had the document already together because at some point I thought it was a good idea.

Recordkeeping.  It’s not for sissies…and much better done when regularly updated.

Just another bit of writer blathering today.

What has happened to Cable?

Last I saw, he was dead. And Hope resurrected him and took away his techno-organic virus. And then everyone got word that the Phoenix Force was coming for Hope, and everyone got distracted fighting the Avengers...

So where is Cable and what is he doing now?

30 Days of Marvel: Day 25: Favorite couple/relationship (romantic)

Another easy one: Emma Frost and Scott Summers.



“When I was with Emma, it was like flying. I could say any outrageous thing. There was no pressure. She had no expectations. She just accepted everything about me...”
Scott Summers, New X-Men #142

He was the X-Men's teacher's pet. She was the slutty White Queen of the Hellfire Club. Who'd have guessed how well they'd fit together?

Now, back in the sixties and seventies, I was into the Scott/Jean thing. It was what we had. Even though I liked the character, Scott Summers wasn't the most interesting of the X-Men. He was the most reliable, the most dependable, the least likely to have a life - and the most likely to have an unexpected relative. Exciting? Not really.

Emma changed all that. Emma changed him, and all for the better, as far as I'm concerned. The good-boy X-Man discovered his edge, discovered his intelligence, developed his leadership, turned into a hard-assed arrogant son of a bitch who didn't let anyone push him around.

Except for Emma. Sometimes. But only sometimes.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/22/the-big-idea-kim-stanley-robinson/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18645

Kim Stanley Robinson has created such amazing futures in his Mars books and others that it’s sometimes difficult to believe he doesn’t have a direct line to what comes next — a crystal broadband line, rather than a crystal ball. But as Robinson explains in this Big Idea, today’s present changes the future even for him, and for his latest and in many ways most ambitious novel, 2312.

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON:

My new novel 2312 began with an idea for a romance between a mercurial person and a saturnine person. Matching these two character types would make for quite an odd couple, I thought, and since all couples are odd, it seemed like the story might have wide appeal. That the two people should actually come from Mercury and Saturn is my kind of joke, in other words lame, but I like both those planets, and recent robotic space missions have given us a lot of new information about both of them.

However, having people call Mercury and Saturn their home requires some kind of solar system-spanning civilization. Thus the three-century time scale. This also put the story somewhere beyond the end of my Mars trilogy, and allowed me to return, not to that particular future history, but to that general story space: Humanity In the Solar System In the Next Few Centuries! I love that story space, one of the most exciting in all science fiction, so it was a pleasure to get back to it.

But so much about the future has changed since I last visited it. So much that I never believed possible is looking like it might happen anyway.But always in ways that to me seemed very unlike what all the other stories have been saying. I had a different vision of most of these startling new possibilities, and I found on reflection that I needed or wanted to retell the whole Matter of the Solar System.

That was fine, but also problematic. The big stories are hard to tell; you need special tricks, often lifted directly from Sir Walter Scott. I was forced to use the Kitchen Sink Theory of Novel Construction—again, of course—indeed, more than ever—but it was necessary, because the future is going to be a wild place, a recombinant multiplicity of clashing elements, a real mess. To do justice to realism these days, the kitchen sink is really nowhere near the end of what needs to get tossed into the mix.

So: terraforming (on purpose or not); living in space; genetic modifications in all living things; brain implants; artificial intelligences; gender manipulations; space travel; longevity treatments; big sea level rise on a hot sad old Earth; new forms of economics and governance. Sex, politics, art, revolution; and always, no matter what, human subjectivity. Our streams of consciousness. Because we read fiction to experience telepathy; we want to get inside other minds, and hear how other people think.

So my original two characters still carry this story, they struggle in their strange new world, making their way as best they can. In their travels they see the solar system from the Vulcanoids to Pluto; they body-surf the rings of Saturn, deal with some desperate moments on Mercury’s brightside, and cope with the icy dangers of frozen Venus. The plots they are caught up in are an important part of the history of their time, and just as messy and dangerous as history always is. And the romance’s end has a (spoiler alert!) surprise setting.

Writing 2312 was great fun. I got a lot of gentle but electrifying help from my editor, Tim Holman. His combination of stimulus and aid made a huge difference to the book, in both conception and execution, and I am grateful to him. Thanks Tim! And it’s been a pleasure watching his whole team at Orbit produce and promote the book, I’m happy to be part of such a high-powered team. I’m also grateful to all the people who helped me with various aspects of the book, from Chris McKay and his colleagues at NASA/Ames, to Pamela Mellon and all my other friends at UC San Diego, and all the rest who helped me (see acknowledgments at the back of the book).

I was also inspired by the performance art of Marina Abramovic, the landscape art of Andy Goldsworthy, and the novel technique of John Dos Passos. Goldsworthy and Abramovic have become simply genres in my future world, their names common nouns for what lots of artists do. I think that will happen. And it took the model of Dos Passos’ great USA trilogy to suggest to me the best form that could be used to portray a complicated culture in a novel. John Brunner used Dos Passos’ format for his Stand On Zanzibar quartet, and now I can see why; it’s not only useful, it’s lively. I hope readers will feel that way about 2312, and if so I will be happy, and grateful, because it’s the readers of a book who bring it to life.

—-

2312: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound

Read an excerpt. Visit the book’s site.

11:40pm and the marking is done. Done, I tell you, done!

God, though, my hand hates me. And I will barely be functional in time for teaching tomorrow.

I'll be attending Balticon this coming Memorial Day weekend and I have what I think is my schedule. This comes from scanning through the schedule posted online, so I may have missed something. But this is what I saw. If anyone catches something I missed, let me know. I'll be there Friday-Sunday (not there on Monday), so catch me if you can. There will be a release party for The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity on Saturday night starting at 7pm for an hour featuring me and Jean Marie Ward, one of the contributors to the anthology. Swing by and say hi! We'll have copies of the book (and our other books) there for sale as well. The book launch will be in Parlor 1041.

Friday:

7pm: Fantasy Title Chain: Panelists and members of the audience come up with plot synopses for book titles provided by the audience! Should be uproarious fun.

Saturday:

10am: Editors Roundtable: Editors talk about working with authors and publishers and creating those books and anthologies you see there on the shelf.

3pm: A Literary World Without Borders: Panelists talk about how the publishing world is changing with the death of brick and mortar bookstores and the shift toward electonic books.

4:30pm: Sequels and Prequels: Writers talk about the different aspects of writing sequels and prequels.

6pm: When Does that Alien or Mage Become a God or Demon?: Panelists talk about the fine line between when characters with magical powers or significant differences become that world's gods and demons.

7pm: PARTY!!!!!: Book launch for The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity with editor (me) and contributor Jean Marie Ward.

Sunday:

Noon: Liars' Panel: Panelists respond to 10 questions, lying for 3 of the 10. Audience members must wager on whether the panelists are lying or not. This is fundraiser panel, so audience members should bring lots of $1 bills in order to bet on when the author is lying or not. All cash goes into a booty for the charity. I'm actually an alternate panelist on this one, so may not be participating if everyone else shows up.

The first time I read one of Ann (A. C.) Crispin’s books was during my Star Trek phase, back when I was about 11 years old. Back then, it was actually possible to collect and keep up with all of the Trek books. I had almost all of them, and I remember Yesterday’s Son standing out as one of my favorites. I snatched up the sequel, Time for Yesterday, a few years later.

The premise was that, during the Star Trek episode All Our Yesterdays, when Spock and McCoy are trapped in Sarpeidon’s ice age, Spock gets his pon farr on with Zarabeth, who becomes pregnant. When Spock discovers he had a son, he uses the Guardian of Forever to go back in time… I loved them.

I discovered Crispin’s Starbridge series next. Starbridge was a story of first contact, one which captured the wonder and danger and excitement of discovering alien life. (I still remember loving “Doctor Blanket.”) The books were YA-friendly, and while there was plenty of conflict, the overall feeling was one of hope and optimism.

Crispin is also part of Writer Beware, an invaluable source of information on writing scams. Along with Victoria Strauss and Richard White, Crispin has devoted herself to helping new writers avoid various pitfalls, and to exposing the scammers. There’s no payment for any of this. Writer Beware is an all-volunteer effort.

Last week, Crispin shared that she’s fighting a nasty and aggressive cancer.

Her post hit me hard. I’ve not met Ann Crispin in person, but she and I have corresponded a bit online, and her books have been a part of my life since I was a child. When I set out to be a writer, her work with Writer Beware was one of the most important resources I found.

Cancer and treatment have taken up a great deal of her time and energy. She notes that her only source of income this year will be from the Starbridge novels.

I loved these books as a teenager, and can happily recommend them. You can find out more on Crispin’s website or go directly to Amazon, B&N, or Ridan Publishing.

There’s a quick shoutout to Ann in Libriomancer, because she and her work have been important to me, both as a reader and an author. I’d like to publicly thank her for everything she does, and I encourage you to check out her stuff.

Get well soon, Ann.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

(Life is skittles and life is beer!)
Spring has finally come to Denmark with a vengence! Last week we were still coping with around 10C, this week we're suddenly in the twenties! I love it :D Now I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that it'll last over the Whitsun weekend :) I love being a girl in the summer :D. I don't mean to be sexist by saying that, but we have quite a strict dresscode at work, and girls can get around that by wearing nice skirts or dresses, whereas guys have to stick to their suits and long-sleeved shirts.

I'm really getting back into the knitting groove :) Funny how it comes in phases, but spring seems to be a time for knitting for me. This year's annual WWKIP Day is June 10th - I really hope I'll be able to make it, because I had such a blast last time. I wonder why I tend to turn to knitting in spring rather than autumn or winter though.

But I really, really, REALLY need to learn how to knit and read at the same time. I put aside my knitting to pick up a book and put aside my reading to pick up my knitting - resenting both situations. I know that's what audiobooks are made for, but it seems ever so slightly more antisocial to listen to an audiobook when Lars is home, than to sit with a 'regular' book ;)

Lars, Henni, two of our mutual friends and I are going to see Men in Black 3 on Sunday - I can't wait! :D I've loved the two others and have great hopes for this next one... at least the previews seem promising :)