Hell and Fireflies

1. Been without blog access for a few months now. Long story, and my apologies to anyone who’s been awaiting my next installment with bated breath.
2. In a perfect world, I’m a guest at Dragon Con at this very moment, reading from my next novel, hanging out with every quirky* Irish musician in town, seeing old friends, and dodging Batmen, Crows, Heroes, Iron Men, stormtroopers, Jedi, Sith, and ninja.
3. This is not a perfect world, and I’m 99.9% certain my guest application was caught in the great Guest Application Fortean Event of 2008. I’ve had my fingers crossed, but my name was not added to the site, I haven’t heard from Guest Services since early July, and I’m not in the guest list in the program, though I am listed as a panelist on the Tolkien track with my good friend Susan Nease.
4. Susan and I have both been moving this summer—house, in my case, and brick-and-mortar yarn shop in hers. (She’s still in business, though, and I’ll update this later with a link to her online store.)
5. Susan and I have been planning this panel (which was going to be simply killer—the Dark Side of Tolkien, discussed from the Mythic Journeys perspective by Susan, from the horror-writing perspective by myself) for a whole year, but could not get together for the final session or two to firm up talking points, references, etc. (Besides which, my Tolkien books were lost in a cardboard box until Wednesday of this week.)
6. The panel, alas, is canceled, since neither of us was prepared to get behind those microphones, er, unprepared. I’ll be stopping by the room we were scheduled for at about that time, just in case folks were counting on seeing me there. Autographs, you know (cough, cough)…or tar and feathers, for canceling on you.

—Kathy

P.S. If you see me, check out my T-shirt. Like, my T-shirt, ’cause I drew it and designed it. I need to write a post about that, actually. I need to write a lot of posts.

* “Quirky” meaning, “strange and geeky enough to want to play Dragon Con as a gig and enjoy it, warts and all.”

So, I’m terrible at my own publicity—should have mentioned this months ago, I suppose, but better late than never.

I’ll be appearing at Fanime 2008 in San Francisco. Don’t know how many of the attendees will have an interest in a gaming author; my closest approaches to anime and Japanese fiction were writing the Hengeyokai supplement for Werewolf: The Apocalypse and typesetting The Road to Science Fiction, Volume 6: Around the World, but that’s entirely beside the point. I’m going to Fanime in my capacity as the kimono-wearing, kitsuke-learning, traditional-Japanese-clothing-studying, obi-weaving, junior moderator on the Immortal Geisha forums. Look for me on the Yukata Interactive panel at 4:00 p.m. on Friday, the Casual Kimono Interactive panel at 8:00 p.m. on Friday, and a panel on How to Dress as a Geisha at 11:00 a.m. Saturday. Also, we’ll be doing a kimono fashion show at 2:00 p.m. Sunday—that should be a hard one to miss, since we’ll have a stage and a hall and everything.

Photos to come…

Last year, during a frenzy of sewing kimono, I became 100% fed up with my tomato pincushion. It was never where I needed it, my red glass pins were hard to see against it, and it tended to roll away if set in any really useful position (such as resting on my knee). I had bought some old shirts to use as patches on a noragi (a working kimono jacket, often frugally patched until the original fabric is hard to identify). I had cut off all the parts I didn’t need—anything with seams in—and I used them to make a pincushion on the spot.

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It’s been a busy, bleary, and weary March—one flat tire, two kinds of “check engine” lights, 10 days of flu, and a jury duty summons in a pear tree. But in cleaning up from the flu and some things that made the month worthwhile (a weavers’ guild meeting and a road trip to see very old, very good friends), I stumbled across a pile of folders that went missing in the great post-Thanksgiving clear-out of 2007. Inside the best of them lay all my hand-written notes for posts-yet-to-be, including the Dragon Con wrap-up and public thanks to all concerned. I mean, everybody. All the business cards and e-mail addresses written on paper napkins or bits of pocket program were in there, too. I’ve been carrying around the guilt of not writing about or to any of the people in the folder, and I’m hoping to settle up with my conscience before the weekend (and March) are out.

Whew.

I spent lunch today on Wikipedia, reading about the 14 March, 2008 tornado here in Atlanta. (I was watching a DVD instead of cable TV at the time, and none of my radios are Specific Area Message Encoding receivers, so I was clueless until the next day, but safe nonetheless.)

And as always with me and Wikipedia, one link led to another and another—Tornado Myths was particularly interesting–and I stumbled across something worth getting the word out about. It’s a National Weather Service presentation on highway overpasses as tornado shelters—specifically, on how bad they are as tornado shelters, how taking ’shelter’ under one is likely to reduce your chances of surviving a tornado, and how you may endanger other people by trying to do it. Even better, the slideshow offers advice on what to actually do if you’re caught out on a highway and see or suspect that a tornado is coming toward you.

I needed to know this, and you do, too. Go read it.

If you don’t have the time to read it, possibly because you’re hearing that freight train sound right now, remember that you want to be as low to the ground as possible, and that you want as much stuff (house foundation, walls, plumbing, bathtub sides, blankets) between you and the hurtling debris as possible. Imagine the tornado is the biggest sandblaster you’ve ever seen, and the grains of sand are gravel, bricks, and shards of glass.

Oh, and happy St. Patrick’s Day. Sorry for the sobering post.

Once upon a time, after my long-running stint as a typesetting monkey and design serf on the game books at White Wolf, I was hired on to the fiction side of the business. (As a typesetting monkey and design serf, oddly enough.) I’ve been reading science fiction (the hard type, with just one impossible assumption, and the social variety, where the “What If?” derives from a change in the structure of society, and more than a few utterly implausible but entertaining, rip-roarin’ space operas) since I was 6 or 7, so the opportunity to work with/for some truly fantastic authors, particularly Harlan Ellison, was amazing. (”I Have No Mouth, but I Must Scream” is pretty intense stuff in second grade; Harlan was the first author who ever scared the bejazus out of me.)
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Bit of news, fairly exciting for me. I’ve joined the moderation team over at my favorite hangout for things Japanese, the Immortal Geisha forums. Naomi (the owner of the site) made it official in an announcement on Wednesday. If you haven’t visited there, check it out. It’s worth a look purely for the site design. Thanks to some (occasionally stringent) rules regarding avatar and signature sizes, it completely avoids the peculiar problem of most bulletin boards—a one-sentence post winding up fifty lines long. It’s also a truly fantastic resource for modern and vintage kimono information, and chock-full of talented folks with feverish curiosity and the research skills to satisfy it.

By request…

A messy koshihimo* in need of folding.

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For the schoolteacher whom I met at the kimono fundraiser:

“Look, I’m a professional lecturer and in the question-and-answer section I watch out for possible troublemakers and don’t call on them. Any time I miscalculate and some undersized runt with sharp features and a boy-soprano voice asks a particularly embarrassing question, I say, ‘You’re twelve years old, I take it’ and they always answer ‘Yes, how did you know?’”
….
“Before they’re twelve, they haven’t accumulated enough irritating knowledge. After they’re twelve, they’ve had some sense and judgment knocked into them. At twelve, they’re unbearable. Listen, I was once an unbearable twelve-year-old myself.”

Taken from “Twelve Years Old,” one of the short stories in The Union Club Mysteries. I think I was twelve when I first read it.

Luckily for Dr. Asimov, I didn’t meet him until I was fourteen.

Hope that’s a good thing. Check me out at The White Wolf Wiki. Keep your fingers crossed I don’t get deleted for lack of notability.