Work Is Eating My Life

I'm chairing the hiring committee for the new assistant professor we're hiring in Creative Writing/Poetry, which is a lot of reading and evaluating of CVs, letters, and transcripts. As usual for my university, we're hiring at precisely the wrong point in the semesters. There is pretty much no way we can bring someone on campus for an in-person interview until after the end of Spring Semester, is what I'm saying.

But we're doing Zoom interviews this week, which should help us winnow down the candidate pool.

Also everyone's big papers (40 of these) and the finished scripts from the scriptwriting class (ten of these) are coming in this semester.

I haven't mentioned this, but I am retiring next spring, May of 2025. This past week has cemented my belief that that decision was the right one.

Review of My Clarkesworld Short Story

 It's a YouTube video review of the whole issue -- the review of my story starts at 34:47:

Spoilers: She likes it!

Reviews in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine

My reviews for the May/June 2024 issue are now live!

You can read them here.

Among other writers, I review Justin C. Key, and Martha Wells (her Witch King).

Also Aubrey Woods, Bang Bang Bodhisattva.

The Kid Comes to Visit

The kid and his fiancé are home for a short visit -- well, the fiancé is flying out today, to go to his brother's wedding, and the kid is visiting us while he's doing that.

I liked having a little kid, but honestly having a grown-up kid is better. 10/10 would recommend.

Autism is demonic, Just so You Know

It's not enough that they're demonizing trans kids, now these loving Christians are coming for autistic children. And, you know, any of the rest of us who don't swallow their particular splinter of Christianity.

“Let me repeat myself just so I am not quoted out of context: any philosophy, teaching, or program that teaches our precious children that their identity is found in anything other than Christ is idolatry and demonic. Period.”

So all those Christian nationalists who like to bray about how they're Americans, I guess they're demonic too. 

These people have serious issues and could use some therapy. But of course therapy is also demonic, so, well.

Eclipse Report

1:22 PM: The sun is about half covered and the light is noticeably dimmer, like when heavy cloud cover is over the sun, except there's still sunlight. It's like dark sunlight, if that makes sense.

I have viewing glasses, but I'm only taking tiny glimpses of the actual eclipse, because I'm paranoid about hurting my eyes.

No animals seem to be bothered -- my cats are snoozing, and birds are still singing.

Apparently some people are driving over to the 100% eclipse area:

Hwy 59 toward Barling, AR

1:36 PM: It's darker now, and the light looks so strange. It's sunny, but it's dark. And definitely cooler than it was -- temp has only dropped two degrees, but it feels like more. Sun is like a crescent with the moon covering most of it.

1:50 PM: Dark enough outside that the streetlights came on. The sun is very nearly entirely covered -- just a tiny chip at the top still shining. The birds are singing like they do at dawn, and the bees that live in my tree are very confused -- they're dipping and circling and buzzing loudly.

1: 53 PM: The sunlight is already beginning to return. The bees are still confused.

Eclipse shadows

2:00 PM: Much lighter now, though still the weird dark sunlight. The birds have calmed down.

2:10 PM: Except for the strange darkness of the light (I don't know how else to describe this light -- it's like sunny and dark at the same time), the world is back to normal. Even the bees seem okay now.

Eclipse

 It's clear right now and only going to be partly cloudy when the eclipse happens here (starts around 12:30). There's a big storm coming, but not until tonight. We may get to see the eclipse this time!

ETA: Apparently it's a thing in the Evangelical community that this eclipse will signal the coming of the Rapture. So good news, y'all, by this time tomorrow the world should be a better place!

(Thanks to Terry Bisson's The Left Left Behind for the joke.)

WOOOOOO!!

My kid's acceptance and funding for graduate school have officially been confirmed. He's in!

He's studying paleoecology with one of his favorite professors, so he's really looking forward to it.

ETA: My kid sends me this in response:

When I Said

When I said I had stopped reading conservative blogs and sites because they were so far from reality I couldn't even mock them anymore -- it's making fun of the impaired -- this is what I has in mind. 

The GOP in Tennessee and five other states are attempting to pass laws against chemtrails.

Chemtrails. The blue ribbon marker for tinfoil hat idiocy.

And they think they should get to make the laws the rest of us can be forced to obey. What the absolute fuck.

What's This?

My story is live at Clarkesworld?

 Well!

Things That Make It Rough to Keep on Keeping on

(Obviously these are besides the death of everyone in my family of origin over the past ten years except me and my little brother.)

(1) Spring is here, which means summer is soon to follow

(2) No seasonal fruits are available at the moment. If I want fruit, it has to be dried fruit or imported grapes or extremely expensive apples. 

(3) When did apples get so expensive?

(4) The weather has been both hot and damp over the past few days. If I wanted to live in a city that felt and smelled like an armpit, surely I could pick a better place than Arkansas.

(5) Insomnia

(6) None of my favorite writers are publishing books fast enough. I can only re-reading their older works so many times.

(7) Pollen.

(8) Dishes and laundry have to be done over and over and over. See also: making dinner.

(9) I can't just exercise one day and be done, oh, no, I must exercise every single day

(10) Major papers are coming in, plus drafts of complete scripts for my script writing class. I do love my students but there are 23 in each comp class and ten in the script writing class, and that's 1156 pages of work to read over the next week, and not just read but think about and comment on.

(11) The GOP. What is happening with these people? They have lost their fucking minds. They have left reality. It's gone beyond disturbing and into the realm of "don't they have loved ones who can get them some help?"

(12) There's nothing I really want to eat anymore, except coffee. Ugh.

Happy International Trans Day of Visibility!

Since 2009, March 31 has been the International Trans Day of Visibility.  In 2021, Biden appointed March 31 as the Trans Day of Visibility here in the USA. 

The day was created in 2009 to make the point that not everything that happened to trans people was tragic, and that trans people have an identity beyond being oppressed. This day exists to celebrate trans people and their accomplishments.

Not every trans person can be visible, even now, sadly enough. Too many have to hide their essential selves, at least for large portions of their life. 

This day exists, in part, to hope for the day when all our trans friends, colleagues, and loved ones can live visibly, without having to worry about backlash, bigotry, or violence.

My own kid is out to everyone in his life, but he's told me that he's glad he can pass as a cis man to strangers. Here's hoping a time will come, and soon, when such a sad commentary on our country and its communities will long be extinct.

Games I'm Playing

I used to play Wordle every morning, but now there are these games, which I'm finding more challenging.

Also Connections, which I find a little harder, since it requires you to think sideways. I've never been good at thinking sideways,

I also continue with French on Duolingo, which has gamified language learning.

I don't play games instead of writing; I do them while I'm writing. Somehow they help me think of the next bit I need to write, maybe by distracting my problem-solving mind so that my creative mind can fool around.

Sleep, Beautiful Sleep

I made a list of everything I had to do, dealing with my father's death, and everything I had to do, dealing with the new vehicle, and I am crossing them off, one by one. 

In related news, I slept a solid eight hours last night for the first time in I think two weeks? More of this, please.

However, I forgot this weekend is Easter and that because of the holiday the trash guys will not be picking up on Friday, and so bin night was last night instead of tomorrow. I woke to the screech of the trash truck brakes, coming down the steep hill by my house, which was too late to do anything about it. Ugh.

What I'm Reading Now

I kind of feel like the main character in Among Others, by Jo Walton, who decides against death because if she dies, she will miss all the novels not yet written, or at least not yet read by her.

I don't mean I'm suicidal -- I'm not -- but I'm not quite falling into despair, because there are so many good books to read.

Here's two good ones I read over the past few days:

Natasha Pulley, Mars House

I've seen comments on the web about how the science in this is not legitimate. That may be true, but honestly I didn't care. The book reads more as an extended metaphor to me in any case.

Climate change ravages Earth, and climate refugees are fleeing to Mars. There is already a settled population on Mars, seven generations of them, who are beginning to diverge, evolutionarily, linguistically, and culturally, from the population on Earth. Pulley has a great deal of fun with all these changes by putting one of the refugees, January, into an arranged political marriage with one of the rulers of Tharsis (the city on Mars), and then putting that arrangement, and Tharsis, under stress as a giant dust storm makes it likely that Tharsis will run out of  power, leaving everyone to freeze and die of thirst, unless a nuclear explosion kills them first.

At the same time, another huge population of refugees is heading toward Mars, and Gale, the politician January married, is opposed to allowing them to land -- they will outnumber the people already living on Mars, for one thing; and for another, their greater strength (compared to the "natural" citizens of Tharsis) make them potentially dangerous to the city's occupants. 

This is both like and unlike Natasha Pulley's other words, which have been historical fiction set in fantasy universes where people can see the future, or travel through time gates. It's more science fictiony, or maybe science-y fiction. 

But I liked it a lot. The cultures in collision sort of story is always fun to read, and while there is a romance sort of thing happening here, it doesn't have your usual romance tropes.

One reviewer I saw disliked it because Pulley isn't doing queer relationships right, apparently? I didn't notice that either, but then I'm a straight cis person, so maybe I wouldn't notice it.

Anyway, this is a great read, and if you're not reading Natasha Pulley yet, what are you waiting for?

Tana French, The Hunter

Also a great read. This is the sequel to French's The Searchers, and if you haven't read that one, you should start there. This is a sequel, and one that depends upon the first novel pretty heavily. Cal, an ex-Chicago police officer, has become a surrogate father to the disaffected young teen, Trey, from the first novel. When Trey's actual father shows up, Cal is worried his role (Cal's role) in Trey's life might cause some problems. It does, but not those that Cal was expecting.

French usually writes mystery novels; and there's a kind of mystery here, but it stays in the background, letting French explore characters and their life in this tiny Irish town. French is great at this kind of thing, so if you like that, you'll like these books.

This second one has not one but two very good dogs, and one slightly less good dog.