a++ would smuggle into space again

Delux puts out a call for people of color/non-white SF/F fans. Six nine TEN pages so far. :)

I had a funny day yesterday. Do you want to know how? I went in to Books Inc to pick up Silver Phoenix, by cindy_pon, and it had sold out because there'd been a signing on Friday (which I was very sad to miss.) Having gone in to pick up a SF/F book by an author of color, by God I was going to come out with one, and I um blazed through American Born Chinese while sitting in the store Gene Yang I swear I will buy a print or something to make up for it but anyway. I go over to the SF/F section. I take a long hard look and I noticed two things about Books Inc's absolutely typical, tiny section. One of them was: Books Inc had no one of color on the entire shelf. That's possibly an exaggeration as I didn't recognize all the names but I didn't see any of the names that I do know. Including Delany, which I ended up asking about -- turns out that, shockingly, he doesn't sell very well, but that they're due to order a new shipment.

The other thing was: there were all the names from RaceFail. You have to understand that most of these people were not people I had ever heard of before the fail kicked off -- Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette (well ... kind of), Will Shetterly, etc. Bujold I knew of but had not read. I'd read War of the Oaks but didn't connect that with Emma Bull until well into the conversation. Charles Stross. Judith Tarr. They were not people who mattered to my definition of science fiction, to my self-definition as a fan, but holy crap, looking at that wall of books ... here is what sold: science fiction and fantasy that was bleached. I got a little sick. I don't begrudge these people sales, I don't think they should Never Publish Again, I do not believe that my standards for what a good or ethical or moral book is should be imposed on anyone but those I am teaching or guiding, but I do not want to walk into a bookstore that I love and see Territory and not Zahrah the Windseeker, A Companion to Wolves and not Wild Seed, or even Old Man's War and Anansi Boys instead of Jemisin and Lee and Mohanraj and Bradford and Hopkinson and ... It isn't an and. I don't mind an and, I encourage an and, I wanted to buy Mein Kampf to read on the airplane flight into Israel, I believe in free speech. It's not the and anyone's objecting to. It is the goddamn instead of.

I'm sorry I'm so upset but this is the first time it was real for me in the sense of Not In My Goddamned Genre (it was already real for me in the sense of Please Don't Hurt My Goddamned Friends) and I got very upset in the store. I'm glad I'd just read American Born Chinese because otherwise I would probably have been much more mean to the cashier about Delany.

I went over to the YA section and I found The Shadow Speaker, which I'm halfway through. It's very good, though I started rereading the Dragon of the Lost Sea books last night and I've had my standards a bit ruined for YA. Even more cheering was the copy I found of Mama Says, which has text in Cherokee (is the alphabet also called Tsalagi?) and Amharic script in prominent places, and I'm like 75% sure the Jews in it were Sephardim. It really, really can be done.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, try naraht.

Mayor Gavin Newsom's office wasn't so sure. Although the mayor supports medical marijuana, Newsom has said he does not favor efforts to legalize pot, and his office was noncommittal about the proposal for the city to sell it.

"The mayor will have to hash this out with public health officials," press secretary Nathan Ballard said. "It's the mayor's job to weed out bad legislation. And to be blunt, this sounds pretty bad."

This is a real quote, for those who haven't seen it yet. How's your 4/20 going?

One more week and I am back at home -- which in many ways is sad because you bet your ass none of my Chicago friends are even going to be close to California this summer -- but is mostly a source for me to praise the good Lord, because: AIR. YOU. CAN. BREATHE. I would like to clarify here for those of you who have not traveled between the coasts. I am distinguishing between air you can breathe, and air you have to drink. I would give you the current humidity, but that is a number that means nothing to me and that I have never before considered significant. I certainly haven't had to worry about walking outside in a mildly overcast steam bath, turning the corner, walking through warm rain, and then bolting inside because if my computer gets hit by lightning that will probably bring it to life and I don't want to give anything named Tony sentience. (He does so well without it.)

In San Francisco, it is considered impolite to try to suffocate the members of your climate. I am looking forward to this sense of propriety very, very much.

ETA: I FORGOT THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THIS POST. billet-doux, by fryadvocate: the newest eyai story. Fahye's was a romance, Ji's was a revolution, this is a creation myth. Go read it.

This morning was chiefly amusing for the five minutes I spent behind this one guy in line while he tried to decide what to buy, eventually settled on a bagel, and then agonised about whether or not the bagel was really suitable to his needs. The ten second pause before he whispered, "Onion," was particularly poignant.

Also: paying with a credit card for a five dollar transaction! Comedy gold.

Um, in what passes for other news, school is about to start. Yay, friction and my own inability to do it.

Walking home from school was rather fun. It's about three times the walk that it used to be, which sounds horrific until you know that the walk home used to be fifteen minutes' brisk walk. Not that the walk was ever brisk -- it always took me half an hour to get home. It cheered me up, then, that this new walk took me about an hour. Rock! My walking-fu is strong!

The scenery is nice, too; it's a part of the city I hadn't ever explored, and there are these lovely lamps along Hugo Street. I keep imagining Victor Hugo going "Non! My street must have fake Parisian streetlamps! None of these American travesties of concrete!" One window was festooned with absolutely the most lovely fabric I have ever seen. Sari fabric, I think, in dark rich blue, bordered with a thick bar of gold which was itself interwoven and bordered with red. I sketched the way it fell but I really didn't do it justice.

School pretends to be in session, but really we're just planning freshman picnics and writing college essays. I wrote mine about NaNoWriMo, which is ... um ... an interesting choice, considering I've given up two years in a row. If I make it a triumphant sort of hero's loss, says the college counselor, that might be okay, but I have to stop using compound complex sentences.

I like compound complex sentences.

I'm listening to Metric right now and remembering the first time I bought a Metric song, the end of freshman year. I had Combat Baby because it was free on iTunes one day, and I loved it, but I hadn't listened to anything else because the little snatches of their CD didn't appeal to me at all. Finally I bought The List on a kind of off-chance. It was the first time I realised that non-classical music could be a cohesive whole -- that you would have to listen to a whole song to like it, or make musical sense of it. Previously everything I had was either pop or jazz, both of which you can pretty instantly tell if you're going to like or not. They're like sonnets -- repetitive forms with a lot of freedom -- so if you don't like the opening quatrain, you're probably not going to think, what a great sonnet! There's always the chance the couplet will grab you, but not always. But suddenly there was all this free verse around me (read: indie music.) Stuff you had to give a chance to grow on you.

... Actually, not coincidentally, the end of freshman year was when I really started liking free verse, too. My metaphor is more literal than I meant it to be.

I don't know why it took me to the end of freshman year to figure out something quite that simple, but it's one of the revelatory moments I remember most clearly.

*sings along to Ruddigore* My eyes are fully open to my awful situation! I shall go at once to Roderick and make him an oration -- I shall tell him I've recovered my forgotten moral senses and I don't care tuppence ha'penny for any consequences... (I needs the ha'penny!)

( musings on the past week or two )

For the Storycircle, Radmyr dies! For the Femgenficathon, Antigone and Iphigenia die (to be rewritten so it doesn't suck as much!)

For Harrowdown, not written by me in any way, just heavily fangirled: Paul not-slash Ian, That Caleb In Drag Drabble. Therefore two-thirds of my soul goes to Heidi and the other third to Sares.

Earthquake!

First one big enough to wake me up in ages. Anyone else feel it?

So I just got off a red-eye home. A four hour flight, dropping me off in San Francisco neatly at six in the morning. I haven't slept, and it's raining. It's a very long cab ride home with a very heavy suitcase. The cab pulls into the driveway, the suitcase is hauled up the stairs, my dad goes 'round to the back to get the keys, and I?

I start singing The Complete Singing In The Rain Medley, especially "Good morning, good morning, to you."

I'm crazy, but I'm home, and I'm very, very happy.

Hello, sunshines. How was your week? Do tell. It's not like I'm going to sleep now.

I wake up to the soft sound of rain on my windows. It’s always sounded like a drain—pooling in the gutters and puddling away—paired with the rattling of the glass. I’ve confused wind with rain before. The plumbing with rain before. I look out the windows, and it is, really, rain.

The fog’s pulled in around the buildings and everything is grey.

Winter’s here.

I went for a walk today in the fog. It's grey and featureless, at first, but if you look up at just the right time you can see the sun hitting the almost nonexistent edges of it. Where I live, whenever the fog's come in it's already come in, so there are no sneaking tendrils of it through the streets; you have to go down to the sea for that, or up to the bridge, where it spills over the edges of the mountains like dye in water. Here it's a presence more than everything else; although I know it's moving, you can't see it unless you really, really stare at a patch of the sky for a long time until you can see the differences in colour. Otherwise it just looks flatly grey, like everything beyond a certain radius is just gone. It's not a gradual fade; there are levels of invisibility. One block will be completely clear, the next will be mostly clear, and then there will be this wall. It's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen, this city, and this fog.

The new babysitter for my little brother is from Los Angeles. She likes fog fine, but she comes from Los Angeles, and not seeing the sun for a few weeks has started to get to her. It's August, I know she's thinking, what the hell is the city doing being cold?

Is it a human impulse to search for beauty, or just an artist's? I realise almost everyone on my friendslist is an artist of some sort, but I'm still wondering, even if I won't get an answer. I saw the curve of a support beam for a roof on a Victorian house today; one of those that's designed to look like a grapevine and succeeds, in a strange way. A step onward and there were flowers hanging down from a tree in bunches, like berries. And my head was framing them, thinking, is this a more beautiful image for a sketch? A song? Could that curve be someone's neck? That color the starting point of a story?

Do everybody's eyes think about dirt patches as shading experiments? Does everybody try to notice the different patterns on the roofs of otherwise identical houses?

Incoherent babbling on the nature of beauty and art completed for the day. More tomorrow.