Have a Geeky Holiday!

I love my library.

Definitely for the books, where would I be without them? But also for all of the awesome events and programs that the library organizes to make me feel more connected with my community.

Right now the library is decorated with about thirty Christmas trees, all sponsored by community organizations. These organizations decorate the tree with club-themed ornaments and have informational displays and brochures by their tree. It makes the whole library feel festive, safe, and warm.

All of the trees are lovely, but there's one that is my favorite.

This is the tree sponsored by my local chapter of Starfleet - the USS Wernher von Braun. I took one of the brochures home, and it made me smile for the rest of the day. I'm going to their meeting in January to see what the club is all about, and just to meet new people who like to talk Trek. 

Here's a closer look at some of the ornaments:

Kirk overwhelmed with tribbles!

Astronaut outside the shuttle bay doors

Rocket launch, complete with fire and dust cloud at takeoff

Aren't these awesome? I'm so glad my local Star Trek group has a tree at the library, so that I can daydream about having my own geek tree someday. 

Here's hoping your holiday is full of the people you love and all of the geekery your heart desires!

Looking Back on a Year of Writing

The VerisimiliToad eager to start writing on the first day of Clarion West 2011.

This has been a great personal year of writing. A large part of this is due to attending Clarion West this past summer. The workshop gave me energy, insight, and friendship with 17 of the most talented writers I have ever met.

As for publications and acceptances, I had one short story accepted at a small literary journal. I'm very excited, because this short story is one I worked very hard to complete. My mentor, Gerri Brightwell, guided me through the revision process, continually asking questions that made me dig deeper into my character and his motivations. I've written many pages in my life, but I consider "In Miniature" to be my first real short story, where the characters, the plot, and all of those other little pieces came together to make a whole. It will be published in 2012 in the River Oak Review.

My friends from Clarion West have had a great year, full of professional sales and prestigious awards. I'm continually learning from them, and also just having a wonderful time reading their stories.

Here's to a great year of learning, making friends, and writing! I know 2012 will be just as grand. :)

Corinne Duyvis

• "The Applause of Others." Fish. Dagan Books. 2012. 
• "Eight." Strange Horizons. 14 November 2011. 
• "Rule of Threes." Crossed Genres. 2011. 
• Interviewed by QueryTracker.net: "An Interview with Corinne Duyvis: A QueryTracker Success Story." 

S.L. Gilbow

• "Alarms." Lightspeed Magazine. 2012. 
• "The Old Terrologist's Tale." The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. May/ June 2011. 

Sarah Hirsch

• "A Dancer for Aonou." Kaleidotrope. 2012. 
• "The Nightmare Eater." The Colored Lens. December 2011. 

Cassie Krahe

• "20+ Inches of Gorgeous Virgin Blonde Hair." Little Village. December 2011. Issue #109. [Non-fiction article about selling her hair to raise money for Clarion West.]

Jei D. Marcade

• Interviewed by Nisi Shawl about "The Anarchist's Wife", Jei's submission story to Clarion West, in "The Steampunk That Dare Not Speak Its Name." Tor.com. October 5, 2011. 

Jenni Moody

• "In Miniature." River Oak Review. 2012. 

Jack Nicholls

• Katherine Susannah Prichard Speculative Fiction Award, 2011.

Mark Pantoja

• "Houses." Lightspeed. Issue #18. November 2011. 
• Will also appear in the anthology Robots: The Recent A.I. Eds. Rich Horton & Sean Wallace. Prime Books. 2012. 
• Author Spotlight in Lightspeed
• Mark's blog post about his process for writing this story. 

David Rees-Thomas

• Reads "Kavar the Rat" by Thomas Owens, Pseudopod, Episode #249
• Reads "Still Small Voice" by Ben Burgis, Podcastle, Episode #181

Maria Romasco-Moore

• "Fisheye." Fish. Dagan Books. 2012.

Jeremy Sim

• Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship, 2011. 

Anne Toole

• "The Red Bandit." The Digital Wall. 2012. 
• Reprint of "Night in the Library". Originally published in Crossed Genres, February 2009. Issue #3. 
• "Accidents Happen" and "The Voices" for Me2. 2011. 

Nick Tramdack

•  "The Smile", Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Issue #21.
• "In the Zone." Eschatology. August 17, 2011. 
• "Tale from a Save Point." Schlock Magazine. June 11, 2011. 

Making a Journal Your Own

I'm fickle with my journals. 

I'll buy them, write in them for a day or two, and then buy a new notebook that has a nicer cover, better pages, a spine that falls open more easily. Once I've got three or four half-written in journals around the house, I'll finally settle down into making one of them more approachable. 

Blank pages are terrifying. So are slick, mass produced covers. 

My best-used journal to date is one I accidentally spilled diet coke on. The bottom of most of the pages have a light brown shadow cascading across. Once the pages had that small stain, they weren't as terrifying. I wrote in that journal for all of my years taking classes at UAF, going to readings, discussions with friends about books we'd read,  and that stained journal became my common-place book for my graduate studies. 

So making your journal less pristine helps. But if you aren't willing to go that route, you might also try giving your journal a new cover. 

This is a cover I made for my new journal this weekend. Knowing that it won't be mistaken for someone else's, that there isn't another one like it anywhere, gives the journal a wonderful feeling of discovery. The kind that you feel as a kid when you find a secret hiding place. I want to write in it, and I'm not afraid of marking on the pages. Because let's face it - this journal is totally my friend now. 

I started out with a journal I bought for $10 at Target. This is what the cover looked like. I loved the nice binding on the side, like an old library-edition book. 

Also of super-importance: the pages were lined, and not too busy with extraneous illustrations taking up the corners. I also liked that the spine fell open easily. It makes writing in cars, and anytime you have the journal propped on your lap, much easier. 

I had picked up two free books months ago at the Friends of the Library used bookstore. There's this little box right by the door, and usually it's just full of AAA Road Maps and tiny New Testaments. But on that day there were these awesome books. 

I dug these out of my "someday I'll make an awesome craft out of this" bin, and read through the pages with my Exacto blade ready to cut the illustrations free.

Once I'd decided on the ones I liked, and on their placement on the cover, I trimmed their edges to match the side-binding and glued them down with purple glue. Then I covered the pages with clear packaging tape, to protect them from wear and tear. 

And hooray! New journal. One that I'm not afraid to write in. 

Plus, these images from two different books are beginning to speak to each other.  I'm starting to think up a story about this shady guy, 

what the rats are saying to each other, 

and what message the riders bring. 

Show Me Something Interesting

This weekend I went to the North East Alabama Craftsman Association (NEACA) craft show with my mom and boyfriend. I've been going to this craft show for several years, and I see many of the same vendors there year after year. 

Some of the vendors are wonderful. They make crafts with heart and wit and skill. 

My favorite lady at the NEACA craft shows is one who makes old-style holiday themed dolls and such. I can't tell you her name, because she doesn't have a business card or any tags sewn into her work. 

This is a snowlady that my mother bought for me last year at the craft show. 

I love her. She has so much character and charm. It is a little hard to see in this photograph, but she has eyelids over her button eyes. Her dress isn't brand new, the lace is crumpled and the satin looks like it has been worn for centuries. Her little mouse friend has wooden stick-arms, and his fabric body has been dipped in wax and baked. Everything in this artist's booth looks as if it has come out of an old chidren's book, where adults were mean and cold and you weren't sure the story would end happily. 

When my mother bought the snowlady, I told the artist how much I loved her work. Her husband was standing behind the booth, and he overheard me. 

"She's got pieces of these things all around the house, baking in the oven, drying in the bathroom." He said. 

I love the image of art being in pieces all around a person's home, and of her bringing all of those pieces together to make a piece of art, a craft, that is singular and delightful.

Yet there are other booths at the craft fair that we pass by and whisper, "I could do that." We hear ourselves echoed in other people, "I know how to do that." 

A canvas bag with an iron-on image of Pooh Bear traced in gold puff-paint. 

A plastic glass with a monogrammed initial stuck to the outside.

A bag of marshmallows labeled as "Snowman Poop" with a rhyming poem attached.

I do not know if my snowlady is made with the best stitching, if the techniques for aging her clothes and rat companion came out the way they were meant. But she makes me smile each Winter when I pull her out of storage and set her in my living room.

She holds together. She's interesting. She has Story. 

And that's all it takes to make me come back to the snowlady maker's booth each time, excited to see what's new.