Decant Circles

Still haven't gotten my copy of The Willows. Not worried yet, but starting to miss it.

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Spent most of yesterday reading up on quantum physics. I feel like the last panel of that Calvin and Hobbes strip; the one where Calvin's dad has explained that a point on the outside of the record completes the same number of revolutions as one closer to the center, but is actually moving much faster. And Calvin is just lying there, little icons of bafflement floating around his head.

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Apparently the local magazine store won't be carrying Weird Tales (couldn't meet the distributor's minimum order); neither will my preferred comic book shop. A subscription is in order. (Probably the one that gets me H.P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror.)

(Jesus, was *everyplace* I'm moderately interested in mentioning the Dances of Vice festival? Some other year.)

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Finished Old Man's War by John Scalzi (the fourth book (not counting one magazine) I've finished since the move; the commute to work is proving to have unexpected advantages). Very fast read, well-written. I can definitely see the Heinlein influence, although honestly I keep thinking more of Haldeman's The Forever War (given that I preferred that to Starship Troopers, this probably constitutes a compliment). Expect to read the sequel.

There's either a long short story or a short novella, set in the Mythos (at least, I was sure it was set in the mythos when I read it) that I read a while ago.

The title is something within spitting distance of "A Happening An Incident at Coldcreek Farm". It concerns a protagonist who has rented a room at the farm to get some work done far from meddling distractions. The couple who owns the farm seem perfectly normal at first, although I have an impression that the wife cooked notably good food. And then there are terrible huge pale moths, and dead bodies animated by some strange alien intelligence--fairly standard stuff, you know. It was okay, it's just that I've gotten a sudden craving to read it and if I own it then I *know* it's packed right now, and I can't exactly go looking for the anthology to get out of the library without having the story title.

Help?

EDIT: Found! "The Events at Poroth Farm".

I spent just over four hours running a game session. Had dinner, came back, and then spent just under five hours at a Storyteller meeting for the LARP.

I think that, in future, I may try to avoid putting nine hours of storyteller work into one day.

(Also, can you believe that Wikipedia's entry on literary references to blue roses involved neither Peter Straub's Blue Rose Trilogy nor his short story "Bunny is for Bread"? The oversight has been corrected.)

Perfect Books, down on Elgin, has the trade paperback of World War Z as their featured book this month. Means it's going for $18.50, 20% off.

Should you be at all moved to pick up this excellent book--and I cannot figure who would *not* want a well-written, smart, neatly thought-out epistolary history of the zombie apocalypse that neatly avoids both schmaltz and schlock--now is a good time to do it.

(1) commodorified bought me a copy of Eats, Shoots & Leaves. No, I didn't already have one. Yes, I love it. :)

(2) {Local} The public library[1] has a copy of James Lovegrove's Days. This is good, as all my efforts to lay hands upon a copy for lending out to people have failed. I will continue to scour the used bookstores. Meantime, I *really* recommend this one.

(3) Picked up a book at the library called My Work Is Not Yet Done, attracted by the screamy-face on the spine. (SF/F and mystery have their own categories for hardbacks. Horror does not. Horror paperbacks are shelved waaaayyyy over in the corner on a shelf marked "Horror/Western", a label which always makes me smile.) Dustjacket had no information (beyond the author's name, Thomas Ligotti--yes, I have heard of him). Frontispiece, on the other hand, had the subtitle "Three Tales of Corporate Horror".[2]

This will suit my mood, I think. Work has gotten a little odd lately.
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[1] Where I have recently renewed my card, see (3).
[2] Also, the information that the book was published by Mythos Books, LLC, which got me to look up the entity in question. Looks potentially interesting, if not as easy to work through as Subterranean Press.

'kay. I have finished 13 Bullets. (Honestly, with the tagline "There are only thirteen bullets between the world you know and the world they rule", and the dramatic final fight scene, I am getting the impression that this was an expanded short story.)

The idea of how vampirism is transmitted is new and really damn smart. Once you're infected by vampirism in potentia--which depending on the power of the vampire can be done in a variety of ways; the particularly old or strong ones can apparently do it at will by making eye contact--then you become a vampire *if you kill yourself.* And the vampire having its hooks in your brain may hurry this process along; they can inflict horrible dream sequences which start to make suicide and vampirism seem very appealing. Ties into the old suicide legends; maintains the concept of infection; gets rid of the "doesn't everyone a vampire kills become a vampire" thing, which incidentally is probably a useful thing as the vampire in question are really horribly brutal.

(The book runs with an alternate history--one in which vampires have always been known to exist, but were beaten back. They're currently thought to be extinct in the wild--the book suggests a setting where one pops up somewhere in the world perhaps once every decade or two.)

There are also half-deads--zombie bodies, coherent minds--that have been fed vampire blood and are loyal to the vampire, right up until they fall apart. (There's an implication that vampires don't have to create half-deads out of the living; at one point Scapegrace[1] quickens (awakens, enlivens) a newborn's skull and hands it to someone, simply so he doesn't have to watch them closely--if they don't cradle it in both hands, it will start screaming. However, that might've been something rather slightly different. I don't mind not getting a catalog power listing.)

However. The book presents vampires as being tougher in direct proportion to how much blood they've drunk--I believe the phrase "so full of blood a bazooka couldn't hurt him" is applied to a vampire who's gorged on four or five people at one point. Similarly, the climactic fight scene involves a vampire who's fed so well that she's completely ignoring bullets fired at her heart from point-blank range. ( Know your own rules. )

Given how hard that fight was played up, I felt rather cheated.
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[1] Have I mentioned how much I love this name? It's not Gabriel Grey, but it's damn good.

*Was* feeling better.

After not getting to sleep until at least 2:00, woke up at 5:30 with screamingly sore throat. Drank heated Gatorade and took painkillers. Fell asleep until 9:00, when I needed to be woken up twice. Stuffed head, tender scrapey non-functional throat, intermittent coughing up of muck, breaking a sweat at the insupportable exertion of walking three blocks...

Went to work. No, I don't know either. Mostly kept thinking that *I* was thinking it was worse than it was, due to the lack of sleep and me hating being sick. (Note: I might be describing it as worse than it was. Yay, unreliable narrator.)

Got doctor's appointment. Was prescribed two different types of inhaler, since am apparently one of those people who occasionally gets asthma-like symptoms from a cold. For the rest of it: painkillers and hydration.

Finished day at work. I'd left a document partway through formatting when I headed out for the appointment, you see. It was just sitting there. Waiting. I *had* to go back.

Went home. Lay down on couch. Pizza and entertainment magically appeared in my vicinity. (I married a magician.) Garlic is great when you're sick. You can actually *taste* it, and eating becomes interesting again.

I'm sure I did something useful today outside of work... Sewing advice! Right. I found useful sewing advice to give to a newbie. And... I... *cudgels brain* ...read stuff. Discovered at 1:00 a.m. this morning that I don't actually have much to read when tired, drinking chamomile tea, and trying to fall asleep.[1] Eventually resorted to 1000 Wild Little Weird Tales, which worked relatively well.
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[1] I have learned to *not* use the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies for this purpose. Also, no Tiptree. In fact, I think I have a moratorium on ever casually reading Tiptree. Sheldon. Whoever. Wonderful work. Not to be taken lightly. This is a tangent.

Alex felt that she could persuade the corpse, woman to woman, to yield up her genetic secrets.

Which seems like a really weird way of looking at it, especially in a straight modern-setting thriller, but, you know, okay. My main question was why is there curly shoulder-length hair flowing loose in a forensic lab?

Three things worth taking a quick look at:

365_tomorrows has a short and pleasant story on the possible consequences of a society which recognizes and legislates protection for the pre-pregnant.

Phil Foglio's Girl Genius: the 101 Class (early stories) have caught up to the Advanced Class (later stories), so you can now read the whole thing through--it's not *over*, but there are no gaps left. The first eighty pages are black and white; colour starts here and handily recaps the (engaging) situation in the first three pages. Comedy begins on the fourth.

Lea Hernandez's Texas Steampunk I: Cathedral Child is online here. It's an entirely different feel from what I usually think of as steampunk; more polished, more golden, adobe walls and open plains with a kind of slow dreaming machine intelligence.

	Frances?
	Yes, Frances?
	You know how you came home from work and fell over and still haven't quite woken up all the way yet and are in that weird almost-punchy dazed mode?
	Yes, Frances. I thought I'd sit down and read some of the new books I bought. Reading is generally a quiet self-involved thing, and not a problem in this state.
	That's a good idea, Frances. However, Frances...?
	Yes, Frances?
	Perhaps not the James Tiptree Jr. short story?

...heh, I need separate icons for conversations with myself.

(It might not be as effective as "The Screwfly Solution". It might simply be a "Painwise". I just don't feel like checking right now.)