Every Stone a Story

thistleburr asked me 11 questions. Leave a comment and I will ask YOU 11 questions too!

1. What is the significance of your octopus default-icon?
When I first went to Wiscon, I was charmed by the Octopus Car Wash locations I saw around Madison. My icon is from a photo of their mascot -- a statue of an octopus with its arms full of cleaning supplies. I adopted the icon for cleaning and housework and generally being busy, and used it here because I was doing a lot of work cleaning out my life, selling off books, and trying to cut down to essentials. I have done a lot but still have a fair bit to get through.

2. What are you reading currently?
Dearie, a biography of Julia Child. A fascinating story, but the writer is annoyingly sloppy with language. (No matter how hungry she and Paul were, they did not eat "a myriad of meals" in the space of two months.) Renee L. Bergland's The National Uncanny, about how Indians appear as ghosts in US literature. Dense lit crit but full of insights. Also, Paula Guran's The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2010. Some truly great stories. I'm reading slowly to savor.

3. Night owl or morning person?
Night owl. Or sometimes morning person. IMO afternoons are for napping.

4. Do you prefer to travel by plane, travel by train, or travel by some other means?
Depends on how far I'm going. If I'm visiting my family back east, it pretty much has to be an airplane -- and I do love the rush of takeoff almost enough to make up for the TSA, the crowding, the dry air, the airports. OK, it's my least favorite form of travel, but it works for cross-country trips. For commuting and shorter journeys, I am happy with trains. Much more legroom, and I can read, nap, or just look out the windows. I like driving when the roads are relatively quiet -- I'm a speed demon and prefer that nothing get in my way. And I love to walk around in a city or in the country.

5. Please share some of your own thoughts on nonviolence?
Nonviolence works, but it requires time, patience, honesty, self-awareness, and genuine concern for the other. None of these will get anybody rich, so our government will go on making war -- so profitable! But I've seen too much violence (and lived with the effects of it) to believe that violence can ever be anything but a partial and temporary solution, carrying the seeds of destruction for tomorrow.

6. Forest or ocean?
Oddly enough, I had a chance to test my knee-jerk answer about ten days ago. I drove alone down to Santa Cruz and then north along California Rte. 1 -- a spectacular road along the ocean. Then I went inland through the towering redwood forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains, where I lived when I first moved west. The ocean was beautiful. The forest, the mountains -- they are home. I belong to them.

7. Dog or cat person?
Cats, and not just because I am allergic to dogs.

8. E-book or paper book? And why?
I'm in transition. I love paper books. The batteries don't fail, Amazon can't repossess them, my friends can borrow them, and they're always a topic of conversation. I own thousands, and my housemates own thousands. We're thinking of moving, to a smaller place, and that means letting go of a lot of them. But it's so much easier to carry a lot of books on an airplane if most of them are digital. I use an iPod Touch as an ereader, so I can literally have a library in my pocket. Also, the iPod lets me read under the covers at night without a flashlight. However, some books are not yet digitized and aren't likely to be. So I'll provavly go on owning (and preferring) many paper books but also reading on the iPod.

9. Favorite impressionist artist and/or artwork?
That's a toughie. Using the strict definition of Impressionist, I'd have to say Cezanne. Something about his landscapes in ochre and olive has always touched me -- then I came to California and saw landscapes like them, and was hooked. For an inidividual artwork, the Monet oak. Taking the definition a lot more loosely -- (19th century French painters), I like Courbet's lush landscapes and lusher nudes.

10. Best live musical performance you've ever been to?
Hmmmm. Eric Clapton? The Talking Heads? Joni Mitchell? The Grateful Dead? Richard Shindell? No, probably an outdoor summer concert of the Philadelphia Orchestra, where I heard Beethoven's Seventh Symphony for the first time.

11. If you could visit any country that you've never been to before, where would you go?
My foreign travel has been limited. I've only been abroad once: England -- for 10 days, 2 of them travel days, on my honeymoon in 1985. Because my allergies have become so severe, I can't go anywhere that they don't speak English. I'd like to see British Vancouver someday. I'd love to go back and see much much more of Great Britain.

You comment, I give you an age (please tell me how old you are, or risk having to time-travel to find out the answers) and you respond to the meme questions with what applied to you back then, and what's true now.

elainegrey gave me 39. I turned 39 in August 1998. I recently did 45.

( TW for lots of things. I swear not every year is a traumatic nightmare. )

How this works:
You comment, I give you an age (please tell me how old you currently are - I don't know all of your ages unfortunately) and you fill out the meme questions with what applied to you back then, and now.

belleweather gave me 45.


I lived in:
Deepest south San Jose with gramina and her husband and housepet, plus various cats. Gabriel, of course. Little Bit was still alive then. Simon may have been alive still. And then there was a kitten nicknamed the Microcat, a tiny black fuzzball smaller than a bow tie who used to sleep under my chin. These days he’s grown into his name, which is Bear. He’s 15 pounds of purr and muscle and iridescent black fur.

I drove:
A battered red Ford Ranger truck

I was in a relationship with:
pokershaman and gramina. Same as now.

I feared:
Sleep (lots of nightmares), losing my family (horrible car accident)

I worked at:
Finding a job (which I did that year)

I wanted to be:
A mother

Don’t talk to yourself in such a way that if you did so to a friend, it would end your friendship.

If you had a friend dealing with the same things, you wouldn’t berate that person, say, ‘You’re not working hard enough,’ ‘You suck,’ or ‘You’re not as good as [whomever].’ You’d offer your friend encouragement, you’d try to point out all the things your friend did right, and how much progress your friend had made.

You should do no less for yourself.

Be very careful how you talk to yourself. Because *you are listening.*

--Pat Cadigan

• What are you currently reading?

Nonfiction: My bedtime books these days are about baking, notably Rose Levy Berenbaum's Bread Bible and Peter Hamelman's epic Bread (second edition) both of which I recommend unreservedly. I'm finding Peter Reinhart's books (The Bread Baker's Apprentice, Whole Grain Breads) much too focused on how wonderful and famous he is and not sufficiently focused on the dough. The Hamelman book is telling me exactly what I need to know -- not just recipes, but how the underlying physical and chemical processes determine bread quality. Holiday gift from the estimable wild_irises, who also gave me Cheryl Strayed's wise, heartbreaking collection of advice columns, Tiny Beautiful Things.

Also oursin mentioned Alex Comfort's 1967 book, The Anxiety Makers, about the ways in which the medical profession has encouraged weird fears (sexual, fecal) so I ordered it from interlibrary loan. Delightfully snarky and also a bit scary, since we're going through another wave of everything-is-poisonous food anxieties.

Also Ian Pickford's book, Antique Silver; I do not have the money or desire to collect silver but I wanted to understand the development of flatware for the nineteenth-century novel I'm working on. (Obsessive? Me?) Seriously, the dinner table changed enormously during that remarkable century. Mostly it had to acquire much stronger weight-bearing members, because the simple flatware of 1812 multiplied into a monstrous array of luncheon forks, dinner forks, salad forks, lemon forks, oyster forks, pickle forks, fruit knives, fish knives, salad knives, meat knives, round-bowled spoons for clear soups, oval-bowled spoons for cream soups, tiny spoons for demitasse, medium spoons for tea, large spoons for dessert, small knives for dessert, and pierced spoons for berries and absinthe. Also multiple special serving tools for various types of food and carving forks with a kickstand. No, really.

• What did you recently finish reading?
Nonfiction: Cynthia B. Herrup, A house in gross disorder, which casts a completely different light on the infamous prosecution of the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven for rape and sodomy. Highly recommended.

Stephen Trombley, The execution protocol, a somewhat outdated yet vividly horrifying look at the execution industry in the US.

Jennifer Reese's delightful Make the bread, buy the butter. She spent several years testing which things are better homemade (home-grown), which can better be bought at a supermarket. Lots of recipes and some rueful anecdotes. The difference between her and Reinhart has a great deal to do with self-deprecation versus self-aggrandizement.

The full run of the Aubrey/Maturin novels -- second read for them all. Delightful but occasionally too painful to read.

The earliest and latest of P.D. James, which show both her great talent and her serious flaws. "Cover Her Face" is viciously classist. It reads like a defense for the killer. Also, I find it creepy that Adam Dalgleish picks up women at crime scenes. Isn't that unprofessional? Also, given that he was 40ish in 1963, when A Mind to Murder was published, he probably shouldn't be all excited about fathering another child 45 years later. Anyway, he dislikes children. OTOH, it was quite amusing to read Death Comes to Pemberly, her Pride and Prejudice fanfic, which reads like the hero is Adam Darcy or Fitzwilliam Dalgleish but makes a number of errors in Regency culture, Jane Austen lore, and basic storybuilding.

This sounds like I dislike P. D. James. I don't. I just find the great novels of her middle period (Shroud for a Nightingale, Death of an Expert Witness, and so on) far superior to her earliest and most recent work.


• What do you think you’ll read next?
The Compleat Boucher (SF and horror stories) and a compendium of four of his mystery novels. He's Ghost of Honor at FOGcon this year. Also, I adore his work. Looking forward to rereading some lovely old friends and discovering stories I've never read before.

What are you reading?

Wherever you are, whatever you celebrate, may the turning of the year bring you renewed joy.

Toward the Winter Solstice

by Timothy Steele

Although the roof is just a story high,
It dizzies me a little to look down.
I lariat-twirl the cord of Christmas lights
And cast it to the weeping birch’s crown;
A dowel into which I’ve screwed a hook
Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine
The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs
Will accent the tree’s elegant design.

Friends, passing home from work or shopping, pause
And call up commendations or critiques.
I make adjustments. Though a potpourri
Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs,
We all are conscious of the time of year;
We all enjoy its colorful displays
And keep some festival that mitigates
The dwindling warmth and compass of the days.

Some say that L.A. doesn’t suit the Yule,
But UPS vans now like magi make
Their present-laden rounds, while fallen leaves
Are gaily resurrected in their wake;
The desert lifts a full moon from the east
And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze,
And valets at chic restaurants will soon
Be tending flocks of cars and SUVs.

And as the neighborhoods sink into dusk
The fan palms scattered all across town stand
More calmly prominent, and this place seems
A vast oasis in the Holy Land.
This house might be a caravansary,
The tree a kind of cordial fountainhead
Of welcome, looped and decked with necklaces
And ceintures of green, yellow, blue, and red.

Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem
Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed;
It’s comforting to look up from this roof
And feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost,
To recollect that in antiquity
The winter solstice fell in Capricorn
And that, in the Orion Nebula,
From swirling gas, new stars are being born.


"Toward the Winter Solstice" from Toward the Winter Solstice (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2006, www.ohioswallow.com).

Yes, I am still a writer. My alter ego has filled this out on her blog, too.


1) What is the working title of your next book?
Spinsters.

2) Where did the idea for the book come from?
Massachusetts.

3) What genre(s) does your book fall under?
Literary fiction, historical fiction, crime fiction.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
All the gingers in Hollywood, plus Kathy Bates.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
A historical Gothic mystery Tarot deck.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
I'll send it to my agent.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
I've been working on this book off and on for a decade, and I still don't have a completed first draft.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Michael Cunningham's The Hours may come closest, or The Dictionary of the Khazars.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?
A lonely beleaguered orphan who loved animals.

10) What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?
In addition to reading the book, you can tell fortunes with it.

So what are you writing these days?

Life is very, very good right now.

When I started this post, a week or more ago, I was sitting in a hotel somewhere near Los Angeles, while pokershaman was off doing his 52-card magic. I'd been listening to all kinds of good music -- from Vivaldi guitar concertos to Laura Nyro. I'd done some useful work. Dinner would be homemade chili: as I wrote, I was caramelizing purple Spanish onions. (Brought my own Calphalon everyday pan -- the pots and pans in these extended-stay places are flimsy.) Then the chili simmered to blend its flavors: onions and garlic, red and yellow peppers, cinnamon and chipotle, beef and beans. It was excellent, and the leftovers made great tortillas.

Lately I've been getting my kitchen mojo back: not just the courage and desire to cook anything other than ramen (and sometimes not even that), but the ability to taste a new recipe in my mind, to cook on the fly, to put together a week's worth of menus, to run a kitchen. Those are skills I learned when I was a child, and I never thought I'd lose them. Then for a long time I never thought I'd get them back. I'd broken where I was strongest.

Now I have a batch of whole-wheat challah in the oven for Thanksgiving dinner. In the morning I'll make stuffing, while housepet prepares the turkey and mashed potatoes. gramina already made mashed squash and cranberries in port. I'll probably make the green beans as well -- steamed or sauteed, probably. Maybe with slivered almonds.

The ability just to do something -- to have an effect in the world -- makes me rejoice. I haven't always felt that power, been able to exert that will. I'm so grateful I've found that again despite all the difficulties of this past year or two: ( cut for sorrows and horrors )

The election news is also a cause for rejoicing. I feel like I can breathe now. I was pretty badly triggered by the GOP war on women. It's one thing to have reasoned political disagreements or even impassioned political disagreements. ( cut for politics of rape )

Now that the electorate has rejected those policies, I can breathe a lot more freely.

So I am thankful that 53% of the country isn't as insanely conservative as most members of my family. Thankful that I have friends and chosen family, as well as my blood kin. Thankful that I'm coming out of this long dark tunnel. Thankful for love, life, challah dough.

Now let's get to work.

To all my East Coast US friends and family: stock up, stay safe, have fun. Yes, I am feeling a little left out. OTOH, the Giants just won the World Series, so I don't have too much to complain about.

How would you prepare/are you preparing for a huge blizzard and a week with no electricity?