mariness

This week's usual Tor.com post, about Madeleine L'Engle's A Winter's Love, just popped up here.

This leaves me with either one or two more L'Engle posts to go -- one, about The Joys of Love, is pretty definite. (Mostly because Macmillan actually sent that one to me.) That will probably pop up next week.

And then -- well, I did mention at one point that I was planning to review A Live Coal in the Sea. But that was at the beginning of this reread, when I was a happy and optimistic rereader, and now I have grave doubts about my willingness to write it up. It's not speculative fiction, I hate it, and I only mentioned it because it is technically the sequel to Camilla, which I did cover previously. So chances are good that after this, I'm moving directly on to the Freddy the Pig books. Which feature a talking pig trying to become Sherlock Holmes. Among other things. This should be entertaining.

1. The latest Madeleine L'Engle reread, about Many Waters, is up at Tor.com. Bonus! No inappropriate sex, homophobia or racism issues in this post or the comments. Yet.

2. Speaking of this sort of thing and Tor.com, since I know none of you are popping back to look at my old posts, I thought I'd alert you to a comment left by a publisher on my post about The Silver Princess in Oz, to let me know that they are reprinting Silver Princess with the racist content removed.

I haven't taken a look at this revised Silver Princess, although it's available in ebook format for the Nook and iPad, largely because my ongoing response to Silver Princess is that I never need to read it again. I am also dubious about the value of changing texts: true, I hated, but hated, the ending of Silver Princess and I wish it had never been written, but I do think there's some value in remembering that publishers once found it completely acceptable to print stuff like that.

But that disclaimer aside, there's another bit, the bit of me that loves Oz and loves the way that 38 of the 40 Oz books welcomed and accepted everyone, no matter how different or strange, that wants other Oz readers to be able to experience that warm welcome in every Oz book, including this one. So part of me welcomes this change.

3. In completely unrelated news, I have just discovered that the only two things I planned to do in March -- The Arnold Palmer Invitational, which I have tickets for (birthday gift), and the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, which I've already signed up for, are taking place on the same days. Grr.

I'm not really sure how I'm going to be working this out. My initial thought of going to the Arnold Palmer on Sunday probably won't work since I've promised to meet with an old college friend on Sunday, who last I heard wasn't a golf fan, and since I want to give the extra ticket to my brother. More probably, I'll see if I can work something out with him where we go to the Invite on either Wednesday or Thursday (preferably Thursday) during the day, I collapse for a bit, and then show up at IAFA in the evening. I'll check and see when registration is open.

4. Finally, apologies for the lack of blog posts recently; I have been unbelievably exhausted. Which is one worry about the combined IAFA/Arnold Palmer thing.

My post about Madeleine L'Engle's A Severed Wasp just went live.

Since this is a book dealing with both Nazis and bisexuals and forgiveness, with a touch of child abuse thrown in, I found it very difficult to write a balanced review here. If you're not happy about reading about any of this, can I mention again that Tongueless, loosely based on a Greek myth of revenge, is up at Strange Horizons today?

At last, the post you have been waiting for! (Maybe.) My half-rant, half post about A Swiftly Tilting Planet is up at Tor.com. Two comments so far are iffy about my post, thrilled with the poetry in the book. Feel free to join in :)

On a somewhat related note, Tor.com alerted me to the existence of The Bottle of Wits: Princess Bride Wine. Have fun using it to storm the castle!

Overdoing things for the last two days has left me really wonky today; I was more or less out of this morning and then really out of it later, and I sense this is going to be a fairly unproductive day all around.

However, it's Thursday, which means it's time for the next Madeleine L'Engle book, Dragons in the Waters.

As I noted previously, responses to these posts are tending to trickle in -- chatter about The Young Unicorns, for instance, continued all the way into this week, although it seems to have mutated into a conversation about English versus French horns. We'll see if this trend continues through the rest of the reread.

Sigh. Feeling a bit better after yesterday's wave of vertigo/fatigue, but still zonked, which does not bode well for procuring cat food today and running other errands today. On the other hand, not procuring cat food will lead to the inevitable Dance of the Kitty Paws which does not bode well for sleep. I sense doom either way.

Meanwhile, while I was out of it, my post about The Young Unicorns went up yesterday. And speaking of Tor.com, they are also running something else this week of interest to at least a couple of you: A David Bowie week.

(And their annual Reader's Choice thingy, where you can nominate your favorite novels, short fiction, and so on, if you are so inclined, and currently take a look at the way a couple of independent novelists are leveraging this opportunity to garner some increased attention for their books.)

Going in and out of dizziness/vertigo today, which is both depressing and making it difficult to focus on much, but a couple of other things going on today:

1. The Madeleine L'Engle reread continues with A Wrinkle in Time. Much thanks to Catherynne Valente (catvalente) for insights with this one.

2. In related news, Tor.com is giving away A Wrinkle in Time Tote Bags -- all you have to do is comment on that post, and you're entered to win.

3. It will surprise nobody that so far, more people have commented on the tote bag than on the actual A Wrinkle in Time post. But this may change - as I noted last time, the comments on the L'Engle posts are more the slowly trickling in kind.

4. In other publishing news, my copy of Future Lovecraft, containing my poem "Do Not Imagine," finally arrived today and instantly attempted to attack a cat. No, really. (Though to be fair that was partly me being dizzy.) This is just in time for tonight's Future Lovecraft chat on Twitter. I'm not entirely sure what's happening here, but apparently it starts at 9 PM EST, 6 PM Pacific.

Future Lovecraft is available here, for Kindle here, here and for the Nook here, and through independent (yay!) bookstore Powells here. (It looks as if Powells is also selling an Adobe Digital Edition which works with the Nook.) Whew.

And with that I need to lie down for a bit to be ready for this chat. I'll also be answering comments on the Wrinkle in Time post later this evening.