west of the moon

closer!

I haven't integrated my conclusion chapter into the full manuscript file, because it isn't finished yet.  And I know that I have some work to do on the fourth chapter, and I'm sure the people on my committee will have a lot of revision suggestions, and I know that the next few weeks are going to continue to be crazy-busy.

That said.  I have a nearly-final manuscript draft!   Whoo!  240 pages for the core of the text, before I add front matter and reference lists and the appendices and, well, the conclusion.  Spell-checking it caused Word to choke and die, but not before I had a chance to compile this list of words in my dissertation that the spellchecker did not recognize:

Adamless
aesthesiometers
beermaker
commenters
Comtean
connexion
decedence
Hebartian
introspector
Jamesian
monera
midsemester
multiplicability
multipurposed
nonbelief
normalite
normals
orang-outang
paedogogical
pedagogics
precollegiate
programmes
professionalization
propaedeutic
psychologic
psychophysic
recapitulationism
recapitulationist
retitled
semicivilized
structuralist
subdiscipline
tachistoscope
underqualified
unpractised

This list excludes proper names and foreign words, but it does include archaic spellings that are kicking around as a result of my using hundred-year-old source materials.

sigh.

There are days when everything works, when all the little clockwork cogs and gears of the daily routine come together in perfect rhythm.

And then there are days when somewhere around one in the afternoon you realize that you're spacy and you have a splitting headache, and then shortly after you realize that all you've eaten today is three cups of coffee and two Hershey's miniatures. 

Ow.

looking forward.

Every year I have the same experience with WisCon programming.  I read through the options, I sign up for things, and then when I find out what panels I'm on, I have a vague befuddled feeling.  Something on the lines of "huh, really?  I signed up for this?"  (This is not a critique of the process--I love the WisCon programming process.  The failure here lies not in their system but in my memory.)  It's okay, though, because they're always panels that sound interesting.  This year, I'm scheduled for two panels, both of which sound good except for the fact that I'm not quite sure what they're about.

The Changing Language of Communication, Saturday 10-11:15am.  What's this one?  My first guess was that it has something to do with weblogs, except that it's in the "Writing SF&F: The Craft" programming track, so that's probably not it.  Projecting future ideas about communication, either language or technology?  That sounds very cool, so maybe that's it?   My co-panelists here are Lauren McLaughlin, Bill Humphries, Kat Beyer, and Brendan Baber; I know and like three of the four, always a good sign.

Feminist Fiction Is So Five Minutes Ago, Saturday 2:30-3:45.   Another great set of co-panelists here (Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Lyda Morehouse, Rebecca Maines, and Kameron Hurley), but again I'm not entirely sure what we're talking about.  If you just threw me this phrase and told me to give an impromtu five-minute talk about it, I could do that.  (The talk would center around all of the 1970s feminist fiction I've read, including things like The Women's Room and Fear of Flying and The Female Man and The Kin of Ata Are Waiting For You and Woman on the Edge of Time, and the kind of split-consciousness effect of being a woman born in 1976 and first reading these books twenty or thirty years after they were published. It's an echo kind of feeling, because these books are so raw and so angry, and the things they're angry about are at the same time very familiar and very alien.)  What I would love, and what I can't seem to find, is the longer program description that must have been available to me when I signed up for this in the first place.

So that's what's coming.  I think it's fair to say that I haven't fully comprehended the fact that WisCon is so soon, because it comes so close on the heels of graduation.  Graduation (and my filing deadline) is soon; everything else happens somewhere Beyond. 

weekend.

I continue to be a little disoriented by the fact that I'm almost done.  I've got a dissertation checklist, a list of discrete tasks that need to be completed, some of them between now and the first of May, some of them between the first and nineteenth.  (1 May is when I'm giving a full draft to my committee members, although actually I'm shooting for 28 April there, and 19 May is the actual filing deadline.)  And for the first time in three-plus years, the dissertation checklist tasks are things like "fix footnote formatting in chapter three" and "expand conclusion to chapter one" rather than, I don't know, "write chapter four" or "travel the Midwest in a rented minivan." 

It feels sometimes like I've been in graduate school since the dawn of time, but in just over a month, that will be over.  I'm not sure what to do with that.

In any event, I've been so completely buried in the dissertation for so long (and using magazine-related work for study breaks) that I was starting to get squirrelly.  (More than usual.)  So I took the weekend off.  Like, completely off.  No working, no thinking about work, just a weekend.  I did a little bit of cleaning, I started a major new crafts project, I went out for dinner with my charming boyfriend, I played some computer games, I watched a lot of television, I read some magazines.  I slept in.  And it was really, really lovely. 

And now it's Monday, and I'm back to work.  (If I were a true patriot, I would take the day off in remembrance of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, but alas I am only a pretender.)

rain rain go away...

Last night, talking to Matt about some detail related to my graduation ceremony, I had to pause and point out the obvious. "This is all assuming that California hasn't washed into the sea by then."

It's been raining for, I don't know, eight thousand years.  Or at least since January.  Some days it's sunny for a few hours, but it rains later.  If it isn't raining when I leave the house, it starts raining ten minutes later.  The construction site around the corner is now a three-foot-deep mud puddle, and the soccer field across the street has been blocked off with a tall chainlink fence.  There are ants in the house again, not a lot of them, not enough that I can see the trail and figure out how they're getting in, but I imagine that they're just trying not to drown.  It's greener than usual, the plants in the neighborhood are thriving, so I suppose that's good, but the ants.  I hate ants. 

It's not just me and the ants and my thwarted plan to clear my head by going for walks in the afternoon, though.  This is a serious thing.  They're having mudslides all through nearby counties, houses falling off of hillsides, and a man died in Mill Valley this week when the waterlogged side of a hill fell on him.  Schools are closed in rural Marin because the schoolbuses can't travel the roads.  Highway 1 south of San Francisco is shut down entirely (and indefinitely).  There have been power outages throughout huge sections of the Bay Area, and based on the round-the-clock work crews at the electrical substation next door, I'm guessing that ongoing electricity transmission is an iffy proposition right now.  The newspaper says that the rain should start to let up sometime next week, but I'm not sure I believe them.  It might just rain forever.

the fun part, and the not so fun part.

The Fun Part

Last week, I took care of one of my all-time favorite editorial tasks at Strange Horizons.  I finished tabulating the results of the Readers' Choice Awards and notified all the winners.  (I also wrote out all of their prize checks in shiny purple ink, thinking that it would add an extra festive touch to the whole affair, but in retrospect I think that just made me look like a fourth grader.  Live and learn!) 

The full list of winners is now available, so go check it out!  I like pretty much everything we publish, so it's easy for me to be pleased with the results, but some of the department editors noticed a few interesting things about the list.  First, noted without comment, that all of the winning fiction pieces were by women.  Second, that the three pieces that placed highest in the Reviews department were reviews of a movie, a video game, and a short story collection.  I've already said (possibly over and over and over again) how happy I am with the diversity of material we've been covering in Reviews, and it looks like our readers like it as well.  (That said, we're still having trouble getting comic book and video game reviews in.  Anyone?)

In any event, congratulations to all the winners!

The Not So Fun Part

One big drawback to being a donor-funded nonprofit is that you occasionally have to go ask for that donor funding.  Oh yes, it's spring fund drive time!  Yay spring fund drive!  If you read Strange Horizons, regularly or irregularly, please consider donating.  (Or, I suppose, even if you don't read the magazine but want to help support our experiment in quality web publishing.)  We welcome donations of any amount, so if you've only got five or ten dollars to spare, we'd really appreciate it.  Larger donations make you eligible for special gifts, though, like a collection of small-press zines and chapbooks, or a portable tea party kit, or even a hand-knit scarf! 

I know that fund drives are annoying, and trust me, none of us at the magazine like shilling for money.  But I think we're really doing something special here, something exciting, and we can't do it without help.  So please, if you can manage it, help us out?  Thanks.

swan dive to standing forward bend.

When I started taking yoga classes at Berkeley (far from my first foray into yoga, but the first to hold my attention for more than a month or two), my friend Ellen came with me.  Twice a week we'd meet at the Rec Sports Facility in the morning, go to the morning Beginner Yoga session, then go get coffee on Lower Sproul and just talk for a while.  Ellen stopped going to yoga after a couple of months--partly, she said, because her "innate Yankee prudishness" made it hard for her to be comfortable doing things like cobbler's pose in public, but mostly because the metaphorical yoga anatomy grated on her nerves.  Sending your tailbone into the ground, breathing through your spine, brushing the far walls with your fingertips.  That kind of thing.  It's not that it's meaningless, it's that it isn't literal.  Reaching my hip-bones down into my heels mostly just means thinking about that particular axis of alignment. 

Anyway.  I was thinking about it again this morning.  I've started doing vinyasa yoga again, in the living room with a DVD.  The living room is really far too small for this, but if I place the mat just right then I can go through most of my routine without hitting anything, and if I occasionally end up with my hand resting on Matt's old Nintendo console during a reclining stretch, it's not the end of the world.  And it's amazing how much better I feel already, after a week of doing this daily, metaphorical anatomy and all.

(I didn't mean to be so long without writing--I'm just so busy, so busy.  I've been doing some freelance work in addition to the end-stage disseration push, and it's been raining and grey out here for so long, and and and.  You all know how it goes.)