1. We’ve had a hummingbird feeder up on our deck for months. Chris finally had me convinced that we’d never actually get any hummingbirds considering where we live, and so far, we hadn’t. I’ve been meaning to take it down for the past month or so, but am too lazy/busy/keep forgetting. Today, I was smoking a cigarette on the porch, freezing my ass off (it’s about 20 degrees out) and what comes buzzing over and sets itself down on the feeder? A hummingbird. Amazing! But it broke my heart because I’m pretty sure that the hummingbird nectar inside is frozen solid. It buzzed away pretty quickly. I yelled after it for it to come back, that’d I’m warm up the nectar for it, but I don’t think it heard me.*
2. Dear “Heroes,”
Now that the plot point about the formula is more or less done with as far as you are concerned, I have only one thing to say: really? No one ever thought to, you know, make a Xerox copy of the formula? Or memorize it? Yeah, it looked “complicated,” but aside from the fact that I’m sure someone could have a photographic memory superpower, there are regular folks who do. In fact, there are folks without photographic memories that memorize pi out to like a thousand decimal places just for the hell of it. So, really? Really?
And thanks to comments I’ve gotten on recent posts, I know I’m not alone. Shape up, plz.
Annoyingly yours,
Caren
3. My good pal Carlton Mellick III has one of his stories** in Vice magazine this issue. Vice has not only made the story available for preview, you can also hear it read by none other than Madelyn Burgess, who is apparently the nice lady whose voice you hear over the PA at Whole Foods. Freaking perfect.
4. My last post about why and how Angel gnaws at me (while I am simultaneously now addicted) had spurned a wide discussion among my friends, made me some new friends, and stirred up debate here at the homestead. The end result is interesting. One, I think I have finally figured out what my subgenre is within SFF. I’m not fantasy. I’m not soft SF. I’m not slipstream. I am science fantasy***, for which I swipe a quote from Rod Serling: “Science fiction makes the implausible possible, while science fantasy makes the impossible plausible.”  Sounds about accurate.
The other result is that I am apparently writing a vampire story myself, trying to use possible science to explain vampires and all those mythos (without resorting to the Erythropoietic porphyria hypothesis, which remains, still pretty interesting). But no, I’m going a different way–leaning heavily on the pivotal word possible in possible science—it’s going to be hella speculative. But there shall be rules and logic, one freaking way or another.
5. It’s very interesting, now having 2 days jobs in which I work for myself and do not seem to get paid (heh). I’m working harder than ever, 16, 18 hour days fueled only by faith and a sense of complete and utter desperation.
Status on job one: every finished story I have is out making the round somewhere or another and I have not heard news.
Status on job two: 4Emphasis has its first client, and we are 75% complete on her project (yay!). I have become some sort of half crazed marketing cougar, cruising the internet looking for places to advertise or trade links or find work. So far, that’s like 12 hours work for less than a 1% return. But I am learning a LOT about marketing and SEO and crosslinking and how much freaking noisy garbage there is all over the web. To change that, I’ve decided that our front page will always contain some useful content for folks, even if they don’t hire us. If they make the trip over to our site, I will at least offer us some value.

 
*UPDATE: OMG he came back! He drank the new nectar. WTF are hummingbirds doing, though, flying around Seattle in December?
**I am especially please to say that not only do I freaking love the story they chose, but that it was one of Carlton’s Clarion West stories that I’ve seen from draft to completeness. It created a cultural mini-revolution in the CW dorm—read it and see if you can stop saying “lay-daaaaays” now.
***What’s fallen arbitrarily, as all these subgenre genre categories are as arbitrary as things can get, into science fantasy includes some big old shoes to fill. We’ll see how that goes. If nothing else, at least I have some answer for when I am at a con or CW party and someone asks, “So, what kind of SFF do you write?”