…just as they did in LiveJournal, back in the late Cretaceous.
I have a cold or minor flu that is leaving me easily tired, and yet life marches forward whether I am healthy or not. I have thoughts about this, but for right now, here’s some miscellania that is on my mind: announcements and thoughts jumbled together.
It’s always very pleasant when a publisher contacts me to ask whether I have anything for them. These folks are interested in obscure reprints of short stories, and oh my god, I have those! Sent two; we’ll see if they are interested.
The book blog Speculative Chic is reading my 1999 novel The Fox Woman for their March book club. This really delights me: while I would make different decisions now than I did then, I worked hard on Fox Woman and Fudoki and I am proud of them. It’s exciting to know the book will be read. If you’re interested, check out the book club.
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For the last few weeks, Kansas has been the new Minnesota: snow, then five days later more snow, rinse and repeat; and nights so cold that the air hisses, just at the edge of hearing. My twenties were mostly spent in Minnesota, but since then I have lived places where winter — real winter — was an event, not a season, contained in a few days or a single snowstorm. I had forgotten how much I love cold and snow: boots melting on the back hall tiles; the perfect joy of shoveling a walkway down to the concrete; watching moonlight turn the snowy world to something eerie.
That said, today is brilliantly sunny, and that is nice, too, a chance for all that snow to melt away, and the squirrels to clean off the patio, which looks ankle-deep in half-eaten peanuts by now.
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Over the weekend, I saw How to Train Your Dragon III, which I loved down to my toes. I didn’t fall in love with HTTYD until the second movie — in fact, I didn’t even bother to see the first one until I decided to see the second, entirely due to this trailer. As it happened, I loved the second one, even as I had some problems with it; but I was worried about the third. Could they retrieve it after the untidy second half of II, the problematic antagonist? Could they resolve the story in a way that didn’t betray the watcher or the original book? I was so afraid they would blow the landing and spoil the entire series for me. But they pulled it off: fixed or retrieved or moved past the things that bothered me and offered a truly satisfying, mature conclusion. Did anyone else see it? What did you think?
I was going to be done after the second HTTYD, but Joe went to go see number 3 and he has raved about it. I guess I’ll be seeing it after all.
I had some reservations about #2, even as I loved certain parts of it totally. If they had blown #3, I wouldn’t have been able to watch the earlier ones, earlier. But they nailed it.