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joycemocha
joycemocha
19 May 2012 @ 02:41 pm
Boosting the signal  
My friend [info]green_knight is going through some financial challenges. She's an excellent editor and translator who is looking for immediate freelance work to raise funds to keep her home. I've worked with her on The Netwalk Sequence and highly recommend her.

Details here:
http://green-knight.livejournal.com/975480.html

Anything you can do will help.
 
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Sherwood Smith
sartorias
19 May 2012 @ 12:34 pm
Signal boost  
People in need--unfortunately, those seem to be on the increase. [info]green_knight wants work, as she's getting freelance biz off the ground. Here's the post. I personally recommend her translation skills from English into German. She also scanned three of my novels and converted them to text files for me to work with.
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joycemocha
joycemocha
19 May 2012 @ 11:46 am
My Miscon 26 schedule  

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

 

MisCon 26 | May 25 - 28, 2012 | Missoula, Montana

So here’s what I’m doing at Miscon 26 (Missoula, Montana) this coming Memorial Day weekend:

  • Fri 4:00 – 4:50 PM, Writers’ Workshop Meet and Greet, Great Hall (Upstairs)
  • Fri 5:00 – 5:50 PM, The X Files: Does it Still Hold Up?, Throne Room (Hotel Lobby of Doom)
  • Break Fri 5:50 – Fri 8:00
  • Fri 8:00 – 8:50 PM, The Effect of Setting on Story, Throne Room (Hotel Lobby of Doom)
  • Break Fri 8:50 – Sat 11:00
  • Sat 11:00 – 12:50 PM, Writers’ Workshop Great Hall, Great Hall (Upstairs)
  • Break Sat 12:50 – Sat 2:00
  • Sat 2:00 – 2:50 PM, Psychology of Evil, Upstairs Programming 1 (259)
  • Break Sat 2:50 – Sat 5:00
  • Sat 5:00 – 5:50 PM, Reading: Joyce Reynolds Ward, Upstairs Programming 3 (261)
  • Break Sat 5:50 – Sun 11:00
  • Sun 11:00 – 11:50 AM, Psychological Issues in Deep Space, Upstairs Programming 1 (259)

I’m looking forward to this.  Besides the writer’s workshop, which has some interesting stories (and I’m finding that I enjoy doing the workshops), I really like my panels.  Add in that I’ve decided that I want to prepare a education/child development/psychological proposal for the 2012 100 Year Starship Symposium call for papers…and I have some panelage that will hopefully give me some food for thought while I develop my proposal.

Now….what to read?  From Gears & Levers or Zombiefied (both anthologies from Montana’s Sky Warrior Press).  Or from River?

Grin.

 

 

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shadowhelm
shadowhelm
19 May 2012 @ 12:00 pm
My tweets  
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nancykress
19 May 2012 @ 03:51 pm
Semi-Satified At The Movies  

http://nancykress.blogspot.com/2012/05/semi-satified-at-movies.html

If I were going to use BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL as a teaching aid on how to structure fiction, it would fall neatly into two parts: the first seventy-five minutes and the last fifteen.
The movie concerns the fates of a group of elderly Brits who all move to a new hotel in India, where their retirement money will go much further.  The hotel, which is barely surviving, is ineptly run by Dev Patel (from SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE).  This sounds like a really stupid premise for a movie full of cheap laughs.  There are a few of those, but in the main, the movie is interested in the difficulties:  -- romantic, financial, existential -- of its aged cast.  And, amazingly, it treats these with dignity and respect.  The romances are not filmed in the sneering manner of "Oh, how cute, old people acting like teenagers!"  These people's failures to connect, as well as their successes at that, are serious to them, and the movie makes them matter to us.  This is helped by a wonderful cast: Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton. 


Where the movie fails is in the wrap-up.  After setting up a number of difficulties for the characters to cope with, they are all solved in the last fifteen minutes by having three -- three!  count 'em! -- obstructive characters abruptly change into supportive and giving characters.  Only one of these changes, Maggie Smith's, is foreshadowed or made even remotely plausible.  It's too bad, because the movie could have kept its "villains" true to themselves and still created a positive, if more defiant, ending.


In one sense, India is the real star of the movie.  It serves as the catalyst for the characters' last chance to confront their life-long issues and change -- or not.  Here the poverty of India is mostly downplayed, although not ignored.  This India is a swirl of color and vitality, calling up the vitality some of these old people still possess.


I recommend the movie.  Rewrite the ending in your own mind.  I did.
 
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desperance
desperance
19 May 2012 @ 09:47 am
The American way of food  
Really I'm only writing this up so that I can do it again on demand, if demanded.

I made blueberry buttermilk scones for breakfast. How American is that?

British people, look away now; I have no equivalents for you. Ceci n'est pas un recipe.

Put two cups of all-purpose flour in a bowl, and add three tablespoons of granulated sugar; also two heaped teaspoonfuls of baking powder. Grate in almost a full stick of salted frozen butter, sparing only that little bit that otherwise you'd grate your fingers. Mix it up. Add a thing of fresh blueberries.

Beat an egg with half a cup of buttermilk and a dash of vanilla extract. Working quickly and casually, mix that into the dry stuff, then tip it all out and knead it briefly into a rough dough. As soon as it holds together, shape it into a round and cut into wedgie scone-shapes.

Lay them on parchment paper or a Silpat silicon sheet on a baking tray, brush with buttermilk and scatter with sugar.

Bake at 375 degrees for twenty-five minutes or so, until golden brown and yummy.

Let cool a little if you can, before eating.
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Ramblin_Phyl
ramblin_phyl
19 May 2012 @ 08:45 am
P.S.  
I dug deep and figured out how to disable the track pad. The command was not where I was told it would be, or where I expected it to be. But I kept digging and found it. I expect to have less stutter and strange commands from now on.
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Ramblin_Phyl
ramblin_phyl
19 May 2012 @ 08:44 am
Finding Harmony  


I really needed help from this guy yesterday to resettle my day. I have a love/hate relationship with my netbook. First off, I love it for its portability and its little teeny keyboard that is less trying on my arthritic fingers that don't want to stretch. On the other hand, it has a super sensitive track pad mouse. If so much as a hair is resting on it, it acts as a control key. I hit delete to go back one character and lost an entire document. That track pad overrode the safety prompt of asking me if I wanted to save the document.

I lost over 1000 words. Half the day's work. I tried every restore from backup and go back to previous version I could think of. I could only go back as far as the last MANUAL save. The autosave every 5 minutes was gone as well.

So I closed it all down. Walked down to the grocery store. By the time I'd loaded apples, eggs, and walnuts into my green bag and walked home I knew I had to fix this that day or I'd kick myself all night and not sleep and thus ruin any attempt to salvage the missing scene. Back in my front yard I communed with my greenman and he reminded me that all was not lost. I still had the missing scene in my head.

Time for a rare glass of wine (my 3rd this year when I normally only get 2). Then I applied butt to chair and hands to keyboard and rewrote 1000 words. I may have missed an interesting phrase or two but I got the essence back.

And you know what? It's better. And I know what to write today.
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beth_bernobich
beth_bernobich
19 May 2012 @ 11:43 am
today in hashtags  
#amwriting #loveanddeath #thankyoufred
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C.L.Holland
xanthalanari
19 May 2012 @ 01:31 pm
My tweets  
  • Fri, 16:28: Weekend! There will be writing, there will be computer games, there will be jewellery-making, and most importantly there will be ice cream.
  • Sat, 11:26: RT @stevepoling: RT @VaVeros: Why is it that crime genre has conventions a writer follows yet for romance this is called formula and sne ...
  • Sat, 11:32: RT @SamuraiKnitter: RT: @BBW1984: Q. Why is Facebook going public? A. Because they couldn’t figure out the privacy settings either.
  • Sat, 11:37: RT @HatfieldMelanie: Updates to Amazon's Book Ranking Algorithms: The Death of 99-Cent Ebooks? An End to KDP Select Perks? @GoblinWriter ...
  • Sat, 11:38: I would say good morning Twitterverse, but it's actually lunch time.
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