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May 2012

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May. 14th, 2012

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When someone attacks you with a raspberry

I just realized I've been spelling "zrbt" wrong.

As far as I know, this word was coined for The Cosby Show in the 1980s. It refers to blowing a "raspberry" against somebody else's skin, usually the belly or the arm. It can be used as a noun or a verb.

On television, the characters pronounced it "zerbit," and for years, I've been thinking it was just a nonsense word, and spelling it the same way. I'm not alone in this. Apparently, urbandictionary.com gives the primary spelling as "zerbet," with variations "zerbit" and "zurbet," but offers no definition for "zrbt." But the correct spelling becomes immediately apparent as soon as you realize that "zrbt" is not a nonsense word, but has a clear and very precise etymology. That is, it is an instance of onomatopeia, referring to the sound one makes when one gives a zrbt. 

Of course, the child actors added vowels in, as kids (and often adults) will do when faced with a new word--the same reason people often mispronounce my last name as "Skylar" or "Skalar," because they're just not used to the phoneme "skl." And indeed, I would be hard pressed to come up with a dozen words that use those three letters together.

The correct spelling is confirmed by my favorite method of determining the most common spelling of neologisms that haven't reached the dictionary yet--i.e., by doing a Google search with different spellings and seeing which one gets more hits. An imprecise method, because often it turns up results that are totally unrelated, such as the history of the Zerbet family

Oh, and for those who may have missed it, the "Ask the Editor" feature at merriam-webster.com says that "raspberry" may be derived from rhyming slang, the same way that "whistle and flute," meaning "suit," is shortened to "whistle," or "plates of meat," for feet, becomes simply "plates." This isn't known for certain, but they believe "raspberry" is short for "raspberry tart."

In other news, my 3-year-old daughter has learned how to return a zrbt--if you do one on her belly, she will respond with one on your arm. This is not so much a new development as something cyclical that's coming around again. I vaguely recall a time last summer when she was sitting in my mother's lap and giving her zrbt after zrbt as a way of putting off bedtime. Ultimately, I responded with, "RELEASE THE TODDLER!!! Which, of course, is what you do when someone attacks you with a raspberry."

Yes, I come from a family of geeks, and I have every intention of passing it on.

Apr. 26th, 2012

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(no subject)

Yesterday I got the galleys back for "Inheritance," a story I wrote in 2003 that is being republished in Ocean Stories from Elektrik Milk Bath Press. I hadn't looked at it in a while, and I hope it's not arrogant to be impressed with the work of my younger self.

Self-indulgent authorwank continues below the break.

Read more... )

The history was, this was a rare venture into fiction when I was primarily writing poetry. I submitted it to Realms of Fantasy and got a rejection letter that (to me at the time) felt so soul-crushing that I never sent the story out again, until Deena Fisher of Drollerie Press asked for stories for her webzine Membra Disjecta. I offered her a choice of two stories, and this was the one she picked--and she was kind of surprised at how down on this story I seemed to be, because I just hadn't let go of how the rejection felt when I sent it to ROF. Later, I saw a call for submissions for Ocean Stories, and I sent them this. They told me a few times that they were being very selective in their previously published stories, but nonetheless this one made the cut.

Of course there remains the possibility that I only like it because the story is well suited to my tastes. But one of the things I like about it is the ways it's different from the stuff I'm doing now. Granted, there are times when I find a turn of phrase that's less sophisticated, and a little more clunky. And it showed more of the tendency I've learned since to correct, to write really long, grammatically accurate but way too elaborate sentences. But there's also an earnestness that's refreshing o see, that I'm not sure I've managed to retain in quite the same way.

Back when I was reading more Holly Black and Peter S. Beagle, and hadn't yet heard of Kelly Link or Catherynne M. Valente--it made for a simpler, heartfelt story that was kind of refreshing to read.

Of course,now I have to worry that someone will read this and think I'm saying Beagle and Black are unsophisticated (which they're not) or that Link and Valente write soulless prose (which couldn't be farther from the truth). But it's kind of intriguing to go back and see what I was writing then, what elements seemed important to me in a story I'd almost forgotten.

So how about you? If you're a reader, do you ever find unexpected surprises when rereading the early works of an author you like? Or one you dislike? If you're a writer (or other artist), do you ever find this sort of surprise in your own early work?

Apr. 23rd, 2012

surreal

Does this impress Ed Asner?

dreamed I was on site at a client, about to plug in a laptop, when the power strip started leaking water. The power strip was plugged into another power strip, plugged into the wall. I carefully unplugged both, and, confirming that the one plugged into the wall was also waterlogged, went off to find someplace to throw them away, with the second one still dripping water like a lawn sprinkler.

I found a coffin-sized object (perhaps an isolation tank, or an aquamassage unit) filled with soda cans. I was about to put the dripping power strips in when Lou Grant* came into the room and laughed.




*For any Gen Y'ers reading, Lou Grant was the boss on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, played by Ed Asner. He eventually got his own spinoff show, which I heard of as a kid before I realized he'd been on the MTM Show.

Apr. 20th, 2012

peepshi

Yeah, I'm a creativity-crushing parent...

My 3-year-old puts together two long triangular Magnetiles and starts moving them side by side as if flapping wings.

S: Flap, flap, flap.
Me: Is that a Pteranodon?
S: No.
Me: Is it a bat?
S: No.
Me: Is it a bird?
S: No.
Me: What is it?
S: Airplane.
Me: Um...airplanes don't flap their wings, sweetie.
S: Oh...

A little while later:
S: Flap, flap, flap.
Me: Is that an airplane?
S: Bird.

Have I crushed my child's creativity?
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Apr. 15th, 2012

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Marmalade Odyssey Part VI: Last day of the Kickstarter campaign

26 hours to go on the Kickstarter campaign for Scheherazade's Facade. While it's already passed the $5,000 mark, it's just shy of $6K, and I'd like to see it do better. Especially because a $10K showing would guarantee a second volume will come in the future. And mean that our editor gets paid more than the cost of aspirin and a Happy Meal. And it might be a little more money in my pocket, too; I'm not sure. 

But in one last call for donations, I'm sharing the Wordle for my story "Lady Marmalade's Special Place in Hell"--perhaps the only word cloud I've done that really says something about the story:


        



And if you pledge $10 you get a copy of the e-book. Pledge $25, and you get a print edition. If you're near me, I'll sign it for you. If you're not near me, I just might put the wordle onto a book plate and sign that for you, if you ask me nicely.

C'mon. You know you wanna.

Apr. 6th, 2012

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Recent adventures in cookiemancy

My daughter, at 3 years old, likes fortune cookies but isn't into the divination aspect, so she opened hers without asking a question. My wife picked up the fortune and read aloud, " 'With a little more hard work, your creativity takes you to great heights.' Well, that would be good for anyone in this family."

"Damn," I said, "I want that fortune. Can I have her fortune?"

My wife, who also didn't ask a question, got something about meetings and chance encounters in the future (her fortune seems to have been misplaced, so I don't have the exact wording here).

My six-year-old appears to have been getting into the whole cookiemancy thing, because he said, "I have two questions. Can I have two cookies?"

I explained that it doesn't work that way--that with omens and auguries, you never ask for more than you need.

"I'm not," he answered. "I have two questions, so I need two cookies."

"Sorry," I told him. "You have to choose one." I didn't explain to him about Moses and the water from the rock.

So he asked his cookie if there is a game called Plants vs. Zombies 2. Hey, I can't control what he asks. And he got:

"You have a great ability to make new friends."

"Well that doesn't go with what I asked at all," he said.

"Well  sure it does," I said. "You're not supposed to read it literally; you have to interpret creatively. That's the whole idea. It could mean that you'll make new friends and get into the games they like, or that your new friends will be the people who create the game, or the demand that leads to the sequel. Or you could interpret it very literally, and you could make new friends by reanimating old bodies."

He laughed at that. Then he asked his second question (about another video game he likes) to my fortune cookie at the same time I was asking mine (about what project I should focus on next). Which I suspect made it default to the original question I'd posited ("Can I have her fortune?"). Because I got:

"Nobody can be exactly like you."

"Well," I said, "that too could apply to any of us."

Apr. 5th, 2012

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Writer's Block: One Captain to Rule Them all

Um...the drunk guy in First Contact?

Apparently I missed this question when it first came up. I'm going with Picard. Sisco comes in second--he had great charisma. But Patrick Stewart brought eloquence and gravitas to Star Trek, which I didn't know was possible.

Kirk was fun but cheesy (as was all of classic Trek); Janeway sort of pulled it off, but mostly by pretending to be Kate Hepburn. Archer was OK, but kind of unremarkable. Of course, Janeway and Archer were handicapped by being stuck in kind of dreadful spinoffs.

Ready, set, engage -- who gets your vote for the best Star Trek captain? What is it about them that puts them at the top of the list?

View 120 Answers

Apr. 4th, 2012

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Conversations with wildlife

Well, I haven't yet gotten away from the topic of literature, but I can at least take a moment to hype someone else's work instead. Thanks to [info]dr_pretentious for this link to the amazing poem "How to Build an Owl" by Kathleen Lynch, in celebration of National Poetry Month.

After reading that magnificent poem, I subscribed to the feed, and this morning I picked up another pointer on dealing with wildlife, from a few years back: Ionna Warwick's "What to Say to a Bear."

Enjoy!

Apr. 3rd, 2012

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An airy concrete poem

And, continuing the theme of all writing news all the time, I can now announce that my poem "Sky Fishing" will be published in a future issue of Ladybug. If you subscribed to the marvelous children's magazine Cricket, which I loved when I was a kid, well, this is a part of that franchise. I've actually been sitting on this news for over a year, because this one seems like a big deal to me, and the conventional wisdom says not to announce until the contract signed. And it may yet be a year or more before it appears in print--apparently they have a long backlog. But I found out about this just as I was getting ready to leave for Arisia in January of 2011, and I am excited to finally be able to declare the news.

There will eventually be another post, announcing some other stories and poems that have been accepted for publication since the start of this year. And maybe a post about my kids, or my cats, or something, so it's not all about th 

Apr. 1st, 2012

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New fiction sale!

At long last, I am able to announce that I've sold a three-part series on the tracking of mythical beasts to Field & Stream. I can announce that today, because...well, because it's April Fool's Day. But I did make a legitimate fiction sale. Dagan Books has accepted "The Philosopher's Nectar" for their Bibliotecha Fantastica collection. And if this is an April Fool's joke on their part, then it's a damn' elaborate one, as it came complete with a signed contract the same day.

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